Online research in philosophy

This paper is a commentary on some topics discussed by Thomas Short in his recent book Peirce's Theory of Signs: Peirce's distinction between iconic and indexical signs, the objects of propositions, and different ways of interpreting the distinction between the immediate and dynamic objects of signs. Peirce's distinction between immediate and dynamic objects is in certain respects analogous to Alexius Meinong's distinction between the "auxiliary objects" and the "ultimate objects" ("target objects") of mental representations. It is suggested that the models of a theory can be regarded as its immediate objects, and the real systems represented by the models are the dynamic objects of the theory.

Semiotics, the theory of sign and meaning, may help physicians complement the project of interpreting signs and symptoms into diagnoses. A sign stands for something. We communicate indirectly through signs, and make sense of our world by interpreting signs into meaning. Thus, through association and inference, we transform flowers into love, Othello into jealousy, and chest pain into heart attack. Medical semiotics is part of general semiotics, which means the study of life of signs within society. With special reference to a case story, elements from general semiotics, together with two theoreticians of equal importance, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American logician Charles Sanders Peirce, are presented. Two different modes of understanding clinical medicine are contrasted to illustrate the external link between what we believe or suggest, on the one hand, and the external reality on the other hand.

I will argue that understanding language is simply another form of sensory perception of the world. I have already argued that perception is a way of understanding natural signs or, better, of translating natural signs into intentional signs. So this will help pave the way to the view that understanding language is very much like understanding natural signs. A sign of a world affair that in turn signs a second world affair is itself a sign of that second affair (Chapter Four). Similarly, if the second sign is a sign of a third --and so forth. And there is always a direct semantic mapping function from the first sign to the last affair signified. A certain sound may signify that the dehumidifier has come on when heard from our bedroom at home, and this in turn may signify that the local power failure is over (a frequently recurrent sign in the rural area where we live). In our summer cabin an indistinguishable sound may signify that the refrigerator has come on, in turn signifying that we are not yet out of propane. To interpret these signs, you must be sensitive to the sign domains they inhabit. But in this case, the domain in which the sound signals the dehumidifier and the domain in which the dehumidifier signals the power are the same. Likewise, the domain in which the sound signifies the refrigerator and the refrigerator signals a non-empty propane tank are the same. A child then might simply hear the dehumidifier sound as the sound of electric power coming on, not being aware that it is the dehumidifier that produces what she reads as a sound of electric power, or the child might hear the sound of the refrigerator directly as a sign of propane hence that we won't have to go to town today for gas. Similarly, suppose that certain patterns on the rabbit's retina are natural signs signifying presence of a fox and these patterns mediate between the fox and the rabbit's awareness of the fox. It will not be necessary that the rabbit possess an intentional representation of the retinal patterns in order to recognize the fox..

How the various things that are said to have meaning—purpose, natural signs, linguistic signs, perceptions, and thoughts—are related to one another.

Cognitive science has been dominated by the computational conception that cognition is computation across representations. To the extent to which cognition as computation across representations is supposed to be a purposive, meaningful, algorithmic, problem-solving activity, however, computers appear to be incapable of cognition. They are devices that can facilitate computations on the basis of semantic grounding relations as special kinds of signs. Even their algorithmic, problem-solving character arises from their interpretation by human users. Strictly speaking, computers as such — apart from human users — are not only incapable of cognition, but even incapable of computation, properly construed. If we want to understand the nature of thought, then we have to study thinking, not computing, because they are not the same thing.

I want now to argue that just as no intentional representations of retinal images intervene between physical objects and the seeing of those objects, no representations of speaker intentions in speaking need intervene between world affairs spoken of by speakers and hearers' understandings of those words.1 When conventional signs are true or satisfied and when this has come about in the normal way, conventional signs are locally recurrent natural signs. True, tokens of the same conventional sign may have diverse etiologies, through different people's perceptual systems and cognitive systems. They differ from more ordinary recurrent natural signs in that there will usually be numerous different kinds of causal paths to their production, depending on the ways that different speakers have managed to translate diverse prior natural signs into a uniform medium of thought and expression. But there are reasons why the same linguistic form continues to coincide with the same kind of represented affair over a certain domain --it is no accident-- and we have decided to take that as the primary criterion for a locally recurrent sign (Chapter Six). Assuming that this step in the production of a conventional sign has been accomplished through normal mechanisms --the speaker is not confused, does not lie, and so forth-- then reading a conventional sign is mainly a matter of tracking its natural domain, that is, determining what reproducing family it has been copied from. Compare tracking the..

Foundations of the theory of signs.--Signs, language, and behavior.--Five semiotical studies.

For Millikan, purpose pervades the biological order, including the genes and genetically encoded traits of every living thing, the unconditioned reflexes and conditioned behavior of every animal, artifacts produced by humans or non-humans. There are also the conscious, explicit purposes and intentions of human beings. These are purposes in “a quite univocal sense,” Millikan insists. “In all cases,” she says, “the thing’s purpose is … what it was selected for doing.” Moreover, “…the purposes we attribute to whole persons … are composed of no more than the purposes of [their] parts and aspects, and of the ways these have been designed to work together.” (13) The chain of purposes forms a double helix with another great chain -- the great chain of signs. At the bottom of the great chain, sit locally recurrent natural signs. These are wholly natural occurrences or states of affairs that carry “local information.” Locally recurrent natural signs are not yet intentional signs but they are the ground on which intentionality ultimately rests. Local natural signs are “basic” representations in the following sense: … when the systems that produce and/or use intentional representations perform the tasks they were designed to perform and perform these tasks by means of their normal mechanism … then the intentional representations are basic representations. (69) When an intentional sign producing/consuming system is functioning “normally” its intentional signs will just be local natural signs. Systems don’t always function normally; So we can’t quite say that intentional signs are built out of locally recurrent natural signs. Still, without such signs subsisting at the ground level, there apparently could not be intentional signs. But it is far from clear whether locally recurrent natural sign can really carry the load Millikan needs them to carry. Locality seems designed to exorcise the ghost of disjunction that haunts many correlational theories of content..

On Reading Signs; Some Differences between Us and The Others If there are certain kinds of signs that an animal cannot learn to interpret, that might be for any of a number of reasons. It might be, first, because the animal cannot discriminate the signs from one another. For example, although human babies learn to discriminate human speech sounds according to the phonological structures of their native languages very easily, it may be that few if any other animals are capable of fully grasping the phonological structures of human languages. If an animal cannot learn to interpret certain signs it might be, second, because the decoding is too difficult for it. It could be, for example, that some animals are incapable of decoding signs that exhibit syntactic embedding, or signs that are spread out over time as opposed to over space. Problems of these various kinds might be solved by using another sign system, say, gestures rather than noises, or visual icons laid out in spatial order, or by separating out embedded propositions and presenting each separately. But a more interesting reason that an animal might be incapable of understanding a sign would be that it lacked mental representations of the necessary kind. It might be incapable of representing mentally what the sign conveys. When discussing what signs animals can understand or..