I settled on the acronym BIOS to suggest the vital elements of life in society, a life in association with others, and not just any association but one whose flickers of life are sustained for more than a few vicissitudes of history. Sustainability in that life requires democracy, a society based on a distinctive form of social compact.
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Ontolog Forum
cc: FB | Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
Re: Gene V Glass • Why I Am No Longer a Measurement Specialist
When I was learning research statistics, the standard cautionary tale on construct validity featured the foibles of Phrenology, the onetime pseudoscience that sought to psych out a person’s aptitude and character by measuring the bumps on his or her head to the last decimal place.
It appears that Phrenology never dies, it just fads away in ever new fashions.
When I taught undergrad math, I told my students that tests were simply a means of communication between student and teacher designed to guide the instruction process, that it was a matter of some inconvenience that third parties had taken it on themselves to intrude on that two-way dialogue — but that was just the way the world was and we had to deal with it as best we could without losing sight of the main purpose of what we were about.
As things have turned out in today’s inverted world, corporations and corporate owned politicians have totally perverted the natural student-teacher relationship beyond all hope of recognition.
And it has to stop.
Or the nation really will be at risk …
Re: Peirce List
I still have in mind trying to show how the principle I dubbed the Zeroth Law Of Semiotics can help us see what is really going on with a number of old puzzles like the Liar Paradox, but the discussion that ensued ranged far more widely than I had anticipated, so give me a while to collect my thoughts and I’ll return to the subject another day.
For anyone else who may have gotten lost along the way, here are the blog posts that I used to chart the discussion in my own mind, patched together from my half of the conversation:
Re: Peirce List
By way of orientation to the task at hand, we are investigating a type of slippage that occurs in the gap between natural language, with the natural assumptions it has evolved to take for granted, rightly or wrongly, and the discipline of logic as normative semiotics.
Just to be clear about my own take on the task, I am not trying to set forth any universal conclusions about self-reference — prior to beginning a thorough analysis I would probably guess that some forms of real or apparent self-reference do make sense while others are more problematic.
One of the things we have our pragmatism for is to clear up conceptual confusions — here I am taking a single example of one such confusion, the so-called liar paradox, to illustrate how setting a communicational problem within the frame of a triadic sign relation and applying the tools of pragmatic analysis (for starters, the pragmatic maxim) can serve to clarify the problematic situation, even to the point of a full resolution.
Re: Peirce List
It may be a day or two before I can get back to the zeroth law of semiotics and how grasping it cures a strain of ills that language and some fashions of logic are heir to, but on the subject of nominalism I found a summary of a previous discussion that may say some things better than I have this time around.
Re: Peirce List • Sungchul Ji
General terms are terms like man, woman, child, etc., each of which applies to many individuals, in other words, has a general denotation or a plural extension. Generally speaking, a general term is treated as bearing an accessory reference, indirect denotation, or other form of association to a general property like man-ness, woman-ness, child-ness, etc. and to a set of individuals like men, women, children, etc. But a strict nominalist would hold that we have no need of these properties or sets, that all we need are the individual terms that denote individuals individually together with the general terms that denote individuals in a general way.
Re: Peirce List • Tom Wyrick
Nominalism takes its name from the idea that “generals are only names” and it goes by the maxims “Do not take a general name for the name of a general” and “Do not multiply entities beyond necessity”. That is, we should not mistake a general term, one applying to many individuals, for a term denoting a general entity, property, or universal, as those are dispensable in favor of individual entities.
It would be a mistake to think pragmatism is diametrically opposed to all such principles. As far as the advice against confounding signs with objects, the caution against confusing different types and uses of signs with one another, and the care to economize our budgets of entities to a reasonable degree, if not to extremes of absolute austerity, pragmatism goes a long way with that. The fork in the road comes with the degree to which general entities can be eliminated, wholly or not so wholly.
cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog Forum • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
cc: FB | Semeiotics • Laws of Form (1) (2) • Peirce List (1) (2) (3)
A statement 
The statement 
When I endeavored some years ago to examine the so-called “liar paradox” from what I take to be a pragmatic, semiotic, sign relational standpoint, I arrived at a way of understanding it that dispelled, for me, every air of paradox about it. I wrote out an outline of that analysis under the same title I’m using here and shared it in several discussion groups. The couplet above is a bare bones rendering of that analysis.
The more rambling version can be found at the following locations.
A statement
The statement
Inquiry Into Inquiry 