Sense and Obliviscence

In taking up a study of signs from a pragmatic point of view we naturally follow the advice of the pragmatic maxim on a way to make the relationship between our concepts and their objects as clear as necessary.  When it comes to our concept of the objects called signs we expand our conception of signs to a conception of their practical effects, conceiving the manifold of experiments and experiences involved in the use of signs.

In forming that expansion we bring to light many kinds of signs glossed over in the more conventional focus on words spoken and words written, that is, language in the strictest sense.  Signs in pragmatic perspective encompass all the data of the senses (dots) we take as informing us about inner and outer worlds, along with the concepts and terms we use to reason about everything from worlds of being to fields of action.

Ironically enough, we have just arrived at one of the junctures where it is tempting to try collapsing the triadic sign relation into a dyadic relation.  For if sense data were so closely identified with objects that we could scarcely imagine how they might be discrepant then we might imagine one role of beings could be eliminated from our picture of the world.

If that were true then the only things we’d need to bother informing ourselves about, via the inspection of sense data, would be yet more sense data, past, present, or prospective, nothing but sense data.  And that is the special form to which we frequently find the idea of an information channel being reduced, namely, to a source with nothing more to inform us about than its own conceivable conducts or its own potential issues.

cc: FB | Semeiotics • Laws of Form • Ma^thstodon • Ontolog • Academia.edu
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science