Inquiry Into Inquiry

Re: C.S. Peirce, Spencer Brown, and Me • 11
Re: Ontolog Forum • Michael DeBellis

MDB:

I’ve just started taking Peirce seriously in the last year or so and some of his more complex ideas still aren’t completely clear to me but here goes:  Has anyone come up with an OWL upper model (i.e., something like the upper models in Cyc and BFO) based on Peirce’s work?  I’ve come to appreciate Peirce as a major figure in the history of logic, information theory, semiotics, etc. but I’ve never quite been able to map his ideas into a logical model in OWL.  I’m not sure if this is because trying to do so isn’t consistent with what Peirce is trying to do or just that I still haven’t grasped his ideas completely.  Or perhaps the subset of FOL that OWL supports isn’t powerful enough to map to Peirce.  At an initial reading it seems like there should be a good fit because (at least as I understand it) one of Peirce’s core ideas of symbols (as opposed to icons or indexes) seems like a perfect fit to the triple model (Subject Predicate Object) that is the foundation (RDF/RDFS) for OWL.  Would like to know your opinions on this.

Dear Michael,

Google still reminds me I spent some time on the RDF-Logic List back around the turn of the millennium (January 2001).  I was especially intrigued by the prospect of using triples as a fundamental data structure.  Now the (subject, verb, object) triples of RDF and the (object, sign, interpretant) triples of Peirce’s semiotics are ostensibly different data types in their concrete descriptions but that may not obstruct integration too much if the triples are defined abstractly enough and implemented polymorphically enough.  As far as I can remember, though, the concrete connotations tended to get in the way of cross-cultural or trans-silo communication at that time.

That is not, however, the largest obstacle to harmonizing the logic of Peirce with the ways of FOL as she is spoke today.  I’ll take that up when I next get a chance …

Regards,

Jon

cc: Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Ontolog Forum • Structural Modeling • Systems Science

Re: C.S. Peirce, Spencer Brown, and Me • 11
Re: Laws of Form • Dirk Baecker

DB:

Watzlawick’s request for a pragmatic calculus of communication up to now was never appropriately answered.  W. Barnett Pearce and Vernon E. Cronen (Communication, Action, and Meaning : The Creation of Social Realities, 1980) did important studies on this as did Anthony Wilden (System and Structure : Essays in Communication and Exchange, 1972), but we still lack it.

Dear Dirk,

Watzlawick’s request for a pragmatic calculus of communication recalls McCulloch’s earlier question whether the human capacity for insightful learning and reasoning demands a grasp of trans-dyadic relations, or not.

The way I see things today, my motto would be Context Precedes Calculus if I had to sum it up as briefly as possible.  In other words, the first order of business is finding the right context for understanding the phenomena and problems at hand.  As far as the human capacity for conversing with nature and our fellows goes, pragmatic thinkers informed by Peirce would no doubt point to the context of triadic sign relations and declare, “Eureka!  This Must Be The Place.” 

References

• McCulloch, Warren S. (1961), “What Is a Number that a Man May Know It, and a Man, that He May Know a Number?”, Ninth Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, General Semantics Bulletin, Numbers 26 and 27, pp. 7–18, Institute of General Semantics, Lakeville, CT.  Reprinted in Embodiments of Mind, pp. 1–18.  Online (1) (2).
• McCulloch, Warren S. (1965), Embodiments of Mind, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

cc: Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Ontolog Forum • Structural Modeling • Systems Science

Re: Laws of Form • Dirk Baecker

DB:

I guess you know Fernando Zalamea’s work on Peirce.  He thinks that all of GSB’s important ideas are already in Peirce’s Existential Graphs.

I think he may be right, but then there is the issue of elegance, beauty, and clarity, and here, GSB leads the field.

Dear Dirk,

As you may have gleaned from the bio-graphical narrative I’ve been salvaging from the old LoF group, I started down the intertwining Logical Graph / Laws of Form road sometime in the late 60s, all of which took me pretty far along my own eigenvectors before I hit on the work of Zalamea and others of that persuasion in the present millennium.

In most of the things I’ve written in the past about the relative contributions of Peirce and those who came after, Spencer Brown in particular, I tended to give Peirce a lot of credit for anticipating the developments others clarified or brought to fruition.  More lately I’ve observed just how bewildered the untutored reader can become when faced with Peirce’s writings on logical graphs and logic generally, so I’ve been rethinking my apportionment of credit.  At any rate, I commented on what I thought was added by whom all through my bio essay and I will continue doing that as I go.

Regards,

Jon

cc: Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Ontolog • Peirce • Structural Modeling • Systems Science

Re: Laws of Form • Dirk Baecker

DB:

Thanks to James Bowery for inviting me to this group.  Maybe it is not exactly what I am looking for, since I am interested in a sociological reading of LoF.  Which means that I am searching for a mathematics more akin to semantics than to physics.  I am still not sure whether in this respect LoF is a wonderful metaphor to understand basic features of an oscillating communication or whether chapter 11 opens up possibilities to compute semantic values starting with imaginary states.

Dear Dirk,

Thanks for this comment and all the links.  I’ve been working along the lines of Peirce’s logical graphs and Spencer Brown’s calculus of indications in parallel since those heady early days of the late 60s and Peirce’s semiotics or theory of triadic sign relations is very much a piece of how I understand both.  In that light I’ll feel encouraged to share bits of that along with my work on LoF — and now everyone knows who to blame!  😉

Regards,

Jon

cc: Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Ontolog • Peirce • Structural Modeling • Systems Science

There’s a new Laws of Form group in town.  James Bowery et al. have just revived the earlier group on a new platform and everything looks pretty handy so far.  There’s an honest-to-goodness 60s vibe about it for me since it’s well-known to those in the know how Spencer Brown’s work builds on Peirce’s, not just because his calculus of indications resurrects aspects of Peirce’s alpha level logical graphs but because the broader scope of his interests touched on inductive reasoning and the whole welter of knotty tangles in the pragmatics of communication, computation, concept formation which Arbib, Ashby, Bateson, Korzybski, R.D. Laing, McCulloch, Peirce, Polanyi, Watzlawick, and others probed in the matrix of quasi-paradoxes and games people play with symbols.

All of which inspires me to revise and extend the series of posts I shared with the old group a few years back, fixing in passing the large number of now broken links.

cc: Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Ontolog • Peirce • Structural Modeling • Systems Science