Metapattern > interdisciplinary foundations > pioneers of variety paradigm
A wider perspective may […] be gained from researching work by earlier thinkers, reconstructing their conceptualizations and adopting what is still relevant for present purposes. A practical obstacle is that sources may be difficult to recognize. ‘Information’ hasn't become the key term until recently.
in: Victoria Welby's significs meets the semiotic ennead
[S]ome thinkers already developed rich conceptual frameworks, say, ontologies, catering to a variety that is now generally impossible to deny.
With a heritage[,] dating back at least to fourth century thinkers and reinforced from the seventeenth century on, semiotics abstracts from IT.
in: Semiotics of identity management
Generic technical solutions have of course been developed and made available as infrastructure. Being an informational infrastructure, however, it should include provisions for conceptual variety. Metapattern, as a method for information modeling, supplies the perspective from which to recognize how requisite variety for the conceptual aspect of information is still lacking from current informational infrastructure. Metapattern also allows to recognize work from earlier epochs, i.e. when the practical problems of managing informational interconnectivity were unheard of.
Contrary to what Buchler states, […] it [is] possible to map the variety exemplified by natural complexes at their multiplicity of ordinal locations. In fact, that is precisely the method required for the information variety at Internet scale (where all information sets may be interconnected, raising the problem of controlling differential meanings).
in: On metapattern and other themes in information management
Welby deserves lasting recognition as a pioneer in information management by her insistence, more than anything else, on a method for variety control in expression.
in: Victoria Welby's significs meets the semiotic ennead
Mannoury always returns to include foundation in design as his principle of graduality demands.
in: Mannoury's significs, or a philosophy of communal individualism
So-called meaning varies from both individual participant to individual participant and situation to situation. That's why I refer to my theory as subjective situationism. Only after I had made it explicit for myself could I apparently recognize that it wasn't really 'my theory' in a completely original sense, after all, but that such a principle had been thought out and even — if not all that clearly — articulated earlier. Perhaps, all that I have added is an even more radical emphasis. And through an extended formalism of so-called semiosis, the ennead, I hope to make it productive for information science. Anyway, I now recognize significs as an earlier 'version' of what I call subjective situationism.
in: Notes on Metapattern and enneadic semiosis, part 1
Mannoury […] acknowledges necessary and sufficient differences, prominently figuring speaker and hearer and also distinguishing between circumstances in which they find themselves.
in: Mannoury's significs, or a philosophy of communal individualism
Situational differentiation of behavior certainly is not an original idea. The decisive contribution through Metapattern, though, is making the concepts of situation, object, and behavior relative.
in: Open conceptual modeling with Metapattern
Is light both wave-like and particle-like? Rather than continuing to try to reconcile such differences in order to arrive at a single explanation, Niels Bohr suggested a change of perspective. What we cannot change, he argued, is that light appears as either wave-like or particle-like. That is, a single, universally valid explanation simply is an illusion, period. With so-called complementarity, ambiguity dissolves; what it ‘is’ that we ‘see’ have become matters of different, mutually exclusive phenomena.
in: Metapattern for complementarity modeling
What neither Dewey nor Bohr seems to have spent efforts on, is developing a formal method from the principle, let alone developing a language for applying such a method. In hindsight, this is what Metapattern provides.
in: Metapattern for complementarity modeling
Schopenhauer (1788-1860) already took the world for will, and — as I would say, not representation as the translation into English of the German word Vorstellung, but — sign. Combining Schopenhauer’s orientation with Peirce’s (1839-1914) on triadic semiosis, I have also developed what Pepper no doubt would have called a world hypothesis: subjective situationism. Its metamodel is the semiotic ennead[.]
in: Contextualism means selectivity
There is no behavior except situational (as Dewey already argued).
in: note 53.14
I find it most gratifying to discover how my ideas concur with previous work in other fields. For the less original my work appears, perhaps, one day, such concurrence is recognised as an argument for change. And where in fact I succeed in bridging previously separate fields or disciplines, I hope to make some contribution to whatever other field I’ve investigated for basic agreement.
in: note 53.42
If anything, when talking about Peirce, I would say that all I have done is emphasizing his work as even more relevant by most careful extension.
in: note 56.8
I can only confirm the genius of Peirce. I feel we do him most honour, not by short-sightedly guarding his legacy, but by critically developing his productive ideas, acknowledging his ‘ground’ work.
in: note 56.17
[R]egarding — my use of the term — ennead, how I arrived at it is rather down-to-earth. Peirce mentions a triad. As the Greek word indicates, it involves three elements. Actually, including ground — recognition of which is already clearly present with Aristotle — the Peircean count of elements in semiosis stands at four. I subsequently extended his triad-plus-ground to a configuration of nine elements (and that is how I left it). Turning to the Greek language for a name, too, there it is, ennead.
in: note 56.25
The three enneadic dimensions are derived from Peirce’s triadic elements. He must have struggled with the choice between — the philosophies — of realism (simplified: about objects) versus idealism (simplified: about concepts or, as Peirce called those, interpretants). His stroke of genius, I find, was to decline to choose. What he did was to mount an element mediating. He put sign between object and interpretant. All I have done, really, is to suggest corresponding structures for each of the Peircean triadic elements. Doing so, I believe I have taken Peirce’s qualification with ground more seriously than he himself did. At the time, there was of course no problem that needed to be solved by moving beyond taking one grounded whatever at a time. […] Anyway, I credit Peirce for founding a semiotics allowing us to manoeuver between the otherwise irreconcilable opposites of realism and idealism. We can, and should, move on, though.
in: note 71.10
What Metapattern from its principle of contextualized disjunction (!) does not assist a modeler with, is setting up a conceptual structure that might be used for — logical — inferences. […] Anyway, I believe it cannot be done, period. It is not how language functions, let alone separate nouns. Ludwig Wittgenstein was already on to this by arguing that, as he called them, family resemblances are such that no property is shared by all family members.
in: note 71.21
Peirce kept more or less deaf to Welby’s proposal for her semiotics-called-significs, falling back as it were on, and limiting himself to, explaining his take on logic (which I find isn’t even triadic, let alone enneadic as grounding a logic of interdependence, with the latter a direction I find […] Welby anticipated but Peirce missed). Do you agree that assuming interdependence makes truth an increasingly elusive concept? Why, from a more radically developed pragmatic-inspired-by-semiotics perspective, still bother?
in: note 80.5