Various discussions in sundry places led me by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the environs of old notes I gathered on the topics of Definition and Determination, that being on the occasion of a return to graduate school in a system engineering program where I needed to start thinking of semiotics and sign relations in the light of cybernetics and systems theory.

That required me to convert from understanding a sign relation as a relation among three sets, the Object, Sign, and Interpretant domains, to thinking of a sign relation as involving three active systems, Object, Sign, and Interpretant systems, respectively.

It will take a few posts to recover my notes from the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine), after which I’ll present the excerpts in a more digestible fashion and discuss more fully their implications.  Just for starters, a link-repaired version of the anchor post for this series is copied below.

Definition and Determination • 1

It looks like we might be due for one of our recurring reviews on the closely related subjects of definition and determination, with special reference to what Peirce himself wrote on the topics.

Arisbe List Archive

Here is a collection of excerpts on the subject of determination, mostly from Peirce but with a sampling of thoughts from other thinkers before and after him, on account of the larger questions of determinacy I was pursuing at the time

• Excerpts on Determination • May 2001 • Aug 2001

Collection Of Source Materials

One naturally looks to the Baldwin and Century dictionaries for Peirce-connected definitions of definition but I’d like to start with a series of texts I think are closer to Peirce’s own thoughts on definition, where he is not duty-bound to give a compendious account of every significant thinker’s point of view.  It may be a while before I get all the excerpts copied out.

• Excerpts on Definition
• Excerpts on Determination

cc: Inquiry List • Peirce List (1) (2) (3) (4)
cc: Cybernetics (1) (2) • Ontolog Forum • Structural Modeling (1) (2) • Systems Science
cc: FB | Inquiry Driven Systems • Laws of Form