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Revision as of 18:46, 17 August 2011
, 18:46, 17 August 2011→6.46. Looking Ahead: + raw text
===6.46. Looking Ahead===
===6.46. Looking Ahead===
<pre>
On the whole throughout this project, the "meta" issue that has been raised here will be treated at three different levels of sophistication.
1. The way I have chosen to deal with this issue in the present case is not by interjecting more features of the informal discussion into the dialogue of A and B, but by trying to imagine how agents like A and B might be enabled to reflect on these aspects of their own discussion.
2. In the series of examples that I will use to develop further aspects of the A and B dialogue, several different ways of extending the sign relations for A and B will be explored. The most pressing task is to capture facts of the following sort:
A knows that B uses "i" to denote B and "u" to denote A.
B knows that A uses "i" to denote A and "u" to denote B.
Toward this aim, I will present a variety of constructions for motivating "indexed", "situated", or "extended" sign relations, all designed to meet the following requirements:
To incorporate higher components of "meta-knowledge" about language use as it works in a community of interpreters, in reality the most basic ingredients of pragmatic competence.
To amalgamate the fragmentary sign relations of individual interpreters into "broader-minded" sign relations, in the use and understanding of which a plurality of agents can share.
Work at this level of concrete investigation will proceed in an incremental fashion, augmenting the discussion of A and B with features of increasing interest and relevance to inquiry. The plan for this series of developments is as follows:
a. I start by gathering materials and staking out intermediate goals for investigation. This involves making a tentative foray into ways that dimensions of directed change and motivated value can be added to the sign relations initially given for A and B.
b. With this preparation, I return to the dialogue of A and B and pursue ways of integrating their independent selections of information into a unified SOI.
i. First, I employ the sign relations A and B to illustrate two basic kinds of set theoretic merges, the ordinary or "simple" union and the indexed or "situated" union of extensional relations. On review, both forms of combination are observed to fall short of what is needed to constitute the desired characteristics of a shared sign relation.
ii. Next, I present two other ways of extending the sign relations A and B into a common SOI. These extensions succeed in capturing further aspects of what interpreters know about their shared language use. Although motivated on different grounds, the alternative constructions that develop coincide in exactly the same abstract structure.
3. As this project begins to take on sign relations that are complex enough to convey the impression of genuine inquiry processes, a fuller explication of this issue will become mandatory. Eventually, this will demand a concept of "higher order sign relations", whose objects, signs, and interpretants can all be complete sign relations in their own rights.
In principle, the successive grades of complexity enumerated above could be ascended in a straightforward way, if only the steps did not go straight up the cliffs of abstraction. As always, the kinds of intentional objects that are the toughest to face are those whose realization is so distant that even the gear needed to approach their construction is not yet in existence.
</pre>
===6.47. Mutually Intelligible Codes===
===6.47. Mutually Intelligible Codes===
