SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 108
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Matthew,
I hope you know that I would not be troubling you
with such elaborate Table settings if there were
not a host of reasons that justify the expense.
Let me now try to enumerate the host.
Looking at the situation in the context of a suitable sign relation
helps to see what's at issue and what's not at issue in many of the
most troubled questions that have historically surrounded the topic
of abstract objects.
For instants, claritea is served in turbulent cases by always going back
to the abstract term in question, and remembering that it may be nothing
more than a form of words, a spot of bits that got spilled into spelling
out some potentially meaningful spattern in spacetime, and that there is
no fixed requirement that it mean anything at all in either of the noted
dimensions of meaning that we have been discussing of late. It's a good
idea to keep that in mind at all times.
And there is the nominal idea that nominal thinkers nominally think will
excuse them from the necessiteas of having to think in real ideas at all.
They imagine that they can avoid the need to commit themselves, speaking
ontologically, not institutionally, of course, to the existence of ideas
above and beyond the "ideal of the atom" (IOTA), the isolated individual,
that really forms no idea at all, that they desire most of all to escape.
But if you look at the orders of sign relations that are implicitly
invoked in actual linguistic practice, which we may think of as the
geneatrices and matrices that generate the requisite language games
for every speaker, thinker, or writer, no matter if nominal or real,
then it is manifest just what it takes to maintain the needed forms
of circumlocution that are in turn needed to keep the language game
of nominal thinking from being rained out. Regarding the game from
the standspunt of the appropriate sign relation, it is an immediate
corollary, an instant porism of the right perspective, that nominal
thinkers jump from the cup of abstract objects, like the POTIC, but
to land in the saucers of higher order sign relational abstractions,
for example, various brands of "equivalence relations" on the signs.
By way of a very simple object example of what I am talking about here,
we may observe that the sign relation given above has the structure of
an equivalence relation in its 2-adic projection on the plane of Signs
and Interpretants, S x I, also known as the "connotative" or "semiotic"
component of the sign relation L c O x S x I.
Table 2. Sample of a Sign Relation
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| Object | Sign | Interpretant |
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| POTIC | "Price Of Tea In China" | "Price Of Tea In China" |
| POTIC | "Price Of Tea In China" | "POTIC" |
| POTIC | "POTIC" | "Price Of Tea In China" |
| POTIC | "POTIC" | "POTIC" |
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Nota Bene. In making up this Table, I have taken the liberty afforded
by the casual language status of the Object column to shorten the form.
Jon Awbrey
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