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From a semiotic point of view, the implications of Kurt Gödel’s proof can in a roundabout way be construed as suggesting freedom and limitations within everyday living, from concrete experience and pragmatic everyday coming and going to invariably incomplete knowing and the formal affairs of science, logic, and mathematics. Brief discussion of the relevance of these implications to certain aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought leaves us with a note of vagueness, ambiguity, and indefinite closure, especially given Wittgenstein’s criticism of Gödel’s theorems. But after all, this is to be expected, since the very ideas of incompleteness, inconsistency, contradictory complementary coalescence, and the undesirability of closure, have been proposed throughout this essay, as the final two chapters will bear out further.
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John Archibald Wheeler always pushed into the future, re-visiting past ideas in an attempt to clarify what troubled him in the present. He offered many of his ideas through down-to-earth stories, two of which are adapted to the present inquiry. A striking case of Wheeler’s two tales is presented in the 2009 swine flu buildup in Mexico and its consequences. Qualification of such concrete illustrations calls for a few words regarding what Peirce termed ‘objective idealism’, a philosophical posture further exemplified in that make-shift ideal in the history of science, ‘phlogiston’, which was later replaced by ‘oxygen’. These examples serve further to qualify interdependent, interactive interrelatedness through complementary coalescence, and to elucidate the process illustrated in Figure 6.
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This somewhat confessionary introduction compels me to offer some general assumptions underlying the pages that follow, instead of boring you with the customary chapter-by-chapter summary. So: (1) presymbolic (pre- or extra-linguistic) modes of feeling and sensing and experiencing and portraying ourselves, others, and our mental and physical ‘world-versions’, entail the process of consciousness-becoming; (2) linguistic signs are the culmination of this consciousness-becoming; and (3) consciousness-becoming is always in the process of nonlinearly becoming something other than what it was becoming; thus (4) symbolic (linguistic) signs are never complete and consistent, for they are always drawing from the fountainhead of more basic (pre- or extra-linguistic, iconic and indexical) semiosic processes. That much written, I continue with a set of questions appropriate for an inquiry into the nature of processing meaning, creatively.
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After contemplating James Carse’s apparent dichotomy between infinite playing and finite gaming, it becomes more satisfying to construe them as complementary. Infinitude is the range of all possible possibilities, the ‘emptiness’, that gives rise to the possible emergence of one, two, three, and many, toward the end of the nonlinear semiosic stream; but it can never arrive at its destination in this finite world. The two terms, infinitude and finitude, are mutually exclusive, and yet they resist categorization as binary opposites, for they need one another; they are intertwined; they interdepend, interrelate and interact with one another. A variation of the Figure 6 lattice serves to illustrate this by way of Peirce’s notion of musement, free play with possible ideas about one’s self, one’s others, and one’s physical world.
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Co-participatory mediation of signs and their respective others and their makers and takers in the creation of meaning reaches a rapid-fire pitch in this chapter. If indeed all that is, is interconnectedly processual, and if everything interdependently interactive with everything else, then it is, complementarily coalescent. Complementarity, in light of Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum theory, allows for ambiguity and multiple perspectives that, when considered in terms of possibilities, reveal vagueness and ambiguity – which is also the implication of Peirce’s concept of the sign. The Peircean processual flow of sign-making and -taking as complementary coalescence is illustrated by way of split-second decision-making in sports, when athletes – the examples are chiefly from baseball and soccer – have no time to think and then act on their thinking. Their decisions must be made in the blink of an eye, and they must be spontaneously acted on. This involves semiotic transition from feeling to sensing to interpreting all in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, the process is customarily considered as though it were product, not process.
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Availing himself of Humpty Dumpty and Mrs. Malaprop – the original author of that rhetorical device, the malapropism – Donald Davidson suggests that on occasion we are apparently masters of our words. But we don’t really know it, because we do what we do on tacit as well as conscious levels. Davidson’s ‘triangulation’ model accounting for our way with words brings to mind what Peirce calls the ‘pragmatic maxim’, which also involves both tacitness and consciousness, since one’s feeling, sensing, imagining, conjecturing, experiencing and conceiving develop along multiply nonlinear paths, from signs to physical and imaginary worlds and their interpretations. This process entails interdependent, interactive interrelatedness. An effort to pattern the process takes us through (1) key aspects of Buddhist thought, (2) certain aspects of mathematics and geometry, (3) the creation of world-versions, and (4) their interpretation by means of (5) our co-participatory role with respect to our signs, other semiotic agents, and our physical world.
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Further meditation on the Tetralemma by way of the Necker cube brings ambiguity to a screaming pitch of uncertainty, especially in light of complementarity and its implications. A few words on Borges’s ‘Aleph’ serve as illustration of the One-Many paradox behind any and all world-versions. Yet, upon reviving the theme from Chapters Eleven and Twelve, we, as human navigators within the universe’s becoming, and in spite of our better judgment, cannot but ‘objectivize’ as we go along. Notwithstanding our obsession with ‘objectivization’, the coveted subject/object barrier doesn’t exist: they are coalescently one. Consequently, what is left for the subject is musement, briefly discussed in Chapter Thirteen. The importance of interdependent, interrelated interaction comes through, full force. Schrödinger has some timely words in this regard, giving further support to the idea that everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming.
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Wittgenstein’s notorious paradox involving rule following comes to the fore. There is the need to bring up this paradox, since it bears on the idea of process. This idea in turn evokes variation on the transition from possible possibility to the merely possible to actual signness to signs becoming other signs as they cascade along the ever changing semiosic stream. Given such change, homogeny, virtual indistinctness within the range of possibilities, gives way to hierogeny – hierarchical distinctiveness, and hence hegemony never ceases to threaten – and the process moves along heterogenous differentiations that render differences more subtle as they become finer and finer, toward that hoary dream of a globalizing homogenous social world. However, the road to that dream veers off toward infinity: hence it is an impossible dream. In this vein, the very notion of infinity merits a further look – to be taken up in Chapter Eight.
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Various takes on the Necker cube reveal our penchant for objectivizing. But what if objectivation contains, at its roots, the implication of consciousness becoming, which, by its very nature, cannot be reduced to objectivizing – linearly bivalent – principles? This question provokes the Tetralemma’s emergence, once again, for further contemplation.
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In this chapter the complementary coalescence of the lattice repeatedly under discussion enjoys more formal qualification than it has been endowed with thus far. Such qualification comes by way of ‘logical multiplication’ and ‘addition’ of the lattice’s terms according to a nonlinear, context dependent, complementary featured alteration of customary bivalent principles. This brings about interplay between ambiguity and complementarity to highlight semiotic uncertainty, thus illustrating the perils of holding dear to bivalent thinking. Wheeler’s variation of 20 Questions once again enters the mix, affording a sense of the incompleteness and/or inconsistency of our coming and going, our thinking, and our knowing – suggested by the lattice, that stretches upward and downward without end. Finally, a three-way Yin-Yang sort of image gives a sense of our self-perpetuating living within our culture world.
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What Wittgenstein calls forms of life entails human ways of concrete living within timespace contexts according to the general world-version held by a human community. It also includes what I have alluded to as playacting, which takes up a generous part of one’s waking life. Given the assumptions underlying this essay, to understand a form of life is to get a feel for the process of human interdependent, interrelated interaction. Our interacting with our other selves, others within our community, and with our physical world by way of our world-version implies our taking for granted certain processes within our form of life. This taking-for-granted in turn implies a degree of certainty. When we do what we do we just do it, often unthinkingly, as though it were as natural as could be and as though we knew exactly what we were doing.
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As implied in previous chapters, when just doing what we do, we by and large follow rules and regulations and customs and norms, without our mind having consciously to take them all into account. Mind just leaves body – or better, bodymind – to do what it does by way of Polanyi’s tacit knowing, which is in part the produce of implicit learning, in part perhaps learned by explicit instruction, and in part a matter of entrenched experience and practice – the case of ‘degenerate’ signs. Tacit knowing includes both focal attention and subsidiary attention on conscious and nonconscious levels, and their coalescence, which involves the five senses plus kinesthetic, proprioceptive, somatic behavior. Peirce’s fluctuating, flowing categories guiding everyday living and his basic sign types are germane to this process. But then,… something seems lacking, something that calls for further words on rule following, to be discussed Chapter Seven.
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Attention returns to soccer. Rule following regarding soccer, and other competitive and ordinary everyday activities, abide by some form of ‘logic’, for sure, but not of the ‘classical’ sort; it is a loose, limber and flexible ‘logic’. It follows that rules of thumb created by this ‘logic’ cannot be unambiguous and precise, given the flowing, fluctuating nature of particularcircumstances, situations and contexts; they are always to a greater or lesser extent vague; they are more tacitly than consciously enacted; they are always becoming something other. In an effort to resolve this age-old conflict between general terms and their particular manifestations, Nāgārjuna saunters once more onto the scene. His Tetralemma entails the middle way, and reveals the enaction of rapid-fire decisions of which only feeling and sensing and tacitly acting and reacting body is capable, for mind – logical, reasoning mind – has no time for such split-second action and reaction.
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IV Suvekooli orgkomitee teeb ettepaneku selle aasta arutluste keskpunkti panna kultuuri ühtsuse probleem. Seda küsimust võib käsitleda mitmeti.
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1.0.0. In the study of culture the initial premise is that all human activity concerned with the processing, exchange, and storage of information possesses a certain unity. Individual sign systems, though they presuppose immanently organized structures, function only in unity, supported by one another. None of the sign systems possesses a mechanism which would enable it to function in isolation. Hence it follows that, together with an approach which permits us to construct a series of relatively autonomous sciences of the semiotic cycle, we shall also admit another approach, according to which all of them examine particular aspects of the semiotics of culture, of the study of the functional correlation of different sign systems. From this point of view particular importance is attached to questions of the hierarchical structure of the languages of culture, of the distribution of spheres among them, of cases in which these spheres intersect or merely border upon each other.
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Оргкомитет IV Летней школы по вторичным моделирующим системам пред- лагает поставить в центр занятий этого года проблему единства культуры. Вопрос этот предполагает рассмотрение с нескольких сторон:
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A systematic history of semiotics of culture is yet to be written, which is why broaching the subject makes it is necessary to delineate its historical development. The publication of the Theses on the semiotic study of cultures (Ivanov et al. 1973; Uspenskij et al. 1973) marked both the emergence of the Tartu–Moscow School (TMS) on the international scene and the birth of semiotics of culture as a discipline. International handbooks use alternately three terms: the Moscow– Tartu, the Tartu–Moscow, and the Tartu School. The first one is correct chronologically: the first conference in semiotics in the Soviet Union took place in Moscow in 1962, to be followed by a Summer School near Tartu in 1964. The second term is correct from an organizational point of view: the School, forming a kind of invisible college, was led by Professor Juri Lotman of the University of Tartu, and the department of Russian literature at the same university became central to the School.
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1.0.0. При изучении культуры исходной является предпосылка, что вся дея- тельность человека по выработке, обмену и хранению информации обладает известным единством. Отдельные знаковые системы, хотя и предполагают имманентно организованные структуры, функционируют лишь в единстве, опираясь друг на друга. Ни одна из знаковых систем не обладает механиз- мом, который обеспечивал бы ей изолированное функционирование. Из этого вытекает, что наряду с подходом, который позволяет построить серию относительно автономных наук семиотического цикла, допустим и другой, с точки зрения которого все они рассматривают частные аспекты семиотики культуры, науки о функциональной соотнесенности различных знаковых систем. С этой точки зрения особый смысл получают вопросы об иерархи- ческом построении языков культуры, распределении сфер между ними, о слу- чаях, когда эти сферы перекрещиваются или только граничат.
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A landmark of Tartu semiotics for nearly half of a century now is the semiotics of culture. The semiotic study of cultures was at the centre of interest in Juri Lotman’s group, and in the Tartu-Moscow semiotics school in general. In 1973, the collective manifesto Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures was written under the leadership of Juri Lotman together with his Moscow colleagues Vjacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Aleksandr Pjatigorskij, and Boris Uspenskij. This marked the real birth of the research field called the semiotics of culture. The intensive work of the 1960s on the semiotic approach to the study of texts, at first literary texts and later other kinds of cultural texts, and the discussions at the Tartu Semiotics Summer Schools in Kääriku (Salupere 2012), led to the formation of an understanding of the possibility for an integral approach to culture from the semiotic point of view. It is marked by the use of the term semiotics of culture that came into use since 1970.
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