Re: Vedr.: semiotics

At 08:53 PM 05/06/02, you wrote:
>Dear John
>
>I am sorry to answer so late. I have been away.
>
>Your suggestion seems to imply that the basic building blocs of reality
>are signs. If so how can they then be triadic?
>
>Cheers

Well, they are under idealist accounts of reality, ranging from Berkeley's
objective idealism to Puntam's internal realism. They just swallow the idea
that meaning goes all the way down. Implicit in this is that there is some
unifying "guarantor" (I borrow the term from Wes Churchman) that gives the
real and irreducible relations among the apparent components. It is the
relation net that is at the bottom, not the parts. For Berkeley, the
guarantor is God. For Putnam it is the ideal limit of all of our
methodological principles having been satisfied. So we have a big network
of signs, presumably each with its interpretant in terms of the larger network.

Personally, I find this view distasteful for a number of reasons, but it
does have some advantages. For one, it ensures that everything is
meaningful in a strong sense, so there is no restriction on the application
of information theory because of qualms about information implying meaning.
This is just an aspect of its monolithic and holistic metaphysics. There is
also no mind-body problem in the traditional sense. Most importantly for
many of the proponents of idealism of this sort is that there is a truth to
be found, and we can find everything that is true (God willing).

Personally I think it is romantic hogwash, but it is hard to refute on
logical grounds.

John

----------
Dr John Collier john.collier@kla.univie.ac.at
Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research
Adolf Lorenz Gasse 2 +432-242-32390-19
A-3422 Altenberg Austria Fax: 242-32390-4
http://www.kli.ac.at/research.html?personal/collier
Received on Wed Jun 5 23:18:55 2002