What We Have Here Is A Problem In Communication

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What we have here, in the discussions that I have been e-avesdropping on,
is information about an "apparent, prospective, tentative object" (APTO).
I call it an "object" because, whatever else it may be or not, it is the
object of "discussion and thought" (DAT), and I adjoin the rest of those
adjectival qualifiers in order to hedge our bets about the circumstance
that there may be nothing atoll that we are talking about, in the end,
if and when it comes to that.

I am breaking from my other diathreads in order to give you some hint
that the "pragmatic theory of signs" (PTOS) might just have something
new and potentially useful to say about this kind of a discursive and,
quite frequently, if not ultimately periodically, recursive situation,
since I think that finding the "formal and computational" (FAC) means
to resolve it is very important to the future of communication in our
new medium, and because, even without being able to follow all of the
little details of your local and particular languages yet, I overhear
what sounds like not a few lines that I have heard before and I fancy
that I can recognize at least a few aspects of a story, if just a bit
scattered across the spectrum of indefinities between the disjunctive
unaverse of the "general or vague" (GOV) and the conjunctive universe
of the "vague and general" (VAG), that is slightly familiar to myself.

If you sampled any of the readings that I passed on to you with regard
to the "pragmatic theory of signs" (PTOS), about the formally concrete
objects that are called "sign relations" and their related "complexes",
then you know that a sign relation can be regarded as little more than
a relational data-base -- not indexed, of course, that would be deemed
to be cheating the aims of the whole enterprise -- and so, accordingly,
the easiest and the quickest way to pin this PTOS to the ornery orders
of problems that are presently affecting your several abilities to get
off the ground here -- let me catch my breath! -- is to treat each one
of them as we would the familiar, all too familiar cases that arise in
dealing with the true nitty-gritty and cantankerous natures of genuine
data bases, "the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks" that real
data is heir to, to wit, the issues of "data integrity", including the
specialized problematics of "in/coherent reference" and "missing data".

In taking this view, I am suggesting that the nature of the calculi,
the languages, the software, and all of the rest of the motley crew
of data management devices and systems that we customarily bring to
bear on the task, are probably tangential to the nature of the data
domain itself, and even moreso with respect to the "pragma", namely,
the "object" domain or the "objective" realm that it is the utility
of this "data", from the days when it was just a bootstrapling tyke,
familiarly nichenamed the "data of the senses" (DOTS), to delineate.

I now return you to the program already in progress ...

Back In The Box,

Cool Hand Jon

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Received on Sunday, 21 January 2001 10:33:07 UTC