Semiosis & Sign Exchange

design for a subjective situationism, including conceptual grounds of business information modeling

Pieter Wisse

prelude 7

After the extensive groundwork of Part i, a now relatively simple task remains. What follows from those grounds when individual sign users exchange signs? That is, emphasizing a structural view, what is subjective situationism’s anatomy of meaning?

It only takes Chapters 7 and 8 to develop this anatomy. The other four chapters of Part ii are all critical; you do not miss anything important in a constructive way by skipping them.

The first four paragraphs of Chapter 7 mainly serve to introduce widening the scope from a single sign user to sign exchanges between sign users. Several aspects of communication are reviewed, and other interpretations are suggested, from the perspective created in Part i.

A traditional linguistic approach to meaning is often constrained at the semantic level (see Chapter 5). From there, theorists try to explain meaning from a given sign outwards. First and foremost, they consider a sign as a, say, self-contained system. It is believed to naively represent reality through one-to-one correspondences between its elements and real objects.

It is however impossible to label such an approach simplistic. As its core assumptions still leave many aspects of meaning unexplained, subsequently, intricate elaborations are usually added. Highly complex theories result.

Schopenhauer also provides inspiration to refrain from explaining meaning from an unnecessarily limited linguistic perspective. He argues for three modes of causality. One mode entails causes of which the effects are motivationally induced.

Chapter 7 suggests that labels of (a) motivation-oriented causes and (b) signs with constituting semiosis are actually synonymous. Even with this assumption – introducing causation as a ground for sign exchange! – the last paragraph of Chapter 7 does not detract from the principle of a sign’s representational nature. It is the sign’s object that comes out differently, though. In general, its object is the sign engineer’s will. For a particular sign, it is a collection of particular motives or interests. The metapattern is applied as a modeling technique (see Chapter 4) to indicate in more detail what a sign stands for.

In terms of cause and effect, a motive encompasses the process-as-planned from cause to effect. The sign engineer therefore accounts for the sign observer(s) in his sign annex cause. For it is the observer who is addressed to exhibit the effect as desired by the engineer.

The sign-is-cause view augments traditional concepts of language. For every sign now turns out vastly more intricately structured. The ontology of subjective situationism suggests that it is an insurmountable reduction to factor a sign into discrete elements while claiming that each element provides just a single contribution to the sign’s overall meaning. Instead, a sign is better viewed as a convolution – of which a model representing objects with situationally distinctive behavior can be designed with the metapattern – much like a chromosome. As a potential cause, a sign reflects (also read: represents) its engineer in all his multiplicity. It therefore seems reasonable to posit that as far as representation goes, one and the same sign element – which already is a reduction, of course – serves in a multitude of configurations. Its contributions will of course vary with the configurations (also read: situations). A sign, then, is like a tight bundle that can be unwrapped in many ways. It is offered in exchange by the sign engineer. He aims it at one or more sign observers.

The ennead explains how a multitude of focus shifts along the ideal dimension, with the result of each interpretative step added to the body’s (cognitive) mass, can generate a large variety in effect from a seemingly compact cause. By the way, this hypothesis only adds to the evolutionary advantage of sign exchange at this level of intricacy.

Chapter 8 is an immediate continuation from Chapter 7. Corresponding to the difference between cause and effect, what a sign represents is different for its engineer and observer, respectively. The metapattern is applied for showing their essential differences.

 

 

2002, web edition 2005 © Pieter Wisse

 

 

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