#semiotics — Public Fediverse posts

The REAL reason women used to SLUT SHAME:

Information = Comprehension × Extension • Preamble 1
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2026/06/16/information-comprehension-x-extension-preamble-a/

Perhaps the best perspective from which to bring the connection between the theory of signs and the theory of inquiry into its proper focus is Peirce's own Theory of Information, which he began setting forth in lectures at Harvard and the Lowell Institute in 1865 and 1866. Peirce encapsulates the elements of his theory in the following formula.

• Information = Comprehension × Extension

In the Resources below I link to my study of Peirce's 1865–1866 Lectures on the Logic of Science, with selections from the lectures and my commentary on them.

Ten summers ago I hit on what struck me as a new insight into one of the most recalcitrant problems in Peirce's semiotics and logic of science, namely, the relation between “the manner in which different representations stand for their objects” and the way in which different inferences transform states of information. I roughed out a sketch of my epiphany in a series of blog posts then set it aside for the cool of later reflection. Now looks to be a choice moment for taking another look.

#Peirce #Logic #Inference #Inquiry #Abduction #Induction #Deduction #LogicOfScience
#Information #Comprehension #Extension #InformationEqualsComprehensionTimesExtension
#Semiotics #SignRelations #Icon #Index #Symbol #PragmaticSemioticInformation

Философия языка | Philosophy of language
Філософія мови, Filosofia del linguaggio, язык, познание, семиотика, мышление, сознание, language, cognition, semiotics, thinking, consciousness
https://t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/1034

Аналитическая философия | Analytical philosophy
Аналітична філософія, Analytische Philosophie, американский прагматизм, британский неореализм
https://t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/1035

#philosophy #books #книги #философия #semiotics

Semiotics - why an LLM doesn't

Saussure, Peirce and Derrida as the key to understanding LLMs. Why a model is not a mind, but a mach...

https://gruszka.dev/en/semiotics-and-llm.html
#llm #ai #semiotics #signs #linguistics #languagemodels #saussure #peirce #derrida

New article: Where is Meaning? (Part One)

A few years back, while waiting on the kettle to boil, I was staring at a can of Diet Coke. I was a bit zoned out and a question popped into my head. The Diet Coke logo clearly "meant" something to me, but where was that meaning? This moment started me down a multi-year rabbit hole into meaning that I'm writing up as a series of articles.

https://jameshorsley.me/articles/where-is-meaning-part-one

#meaning #semantics #pragmatics #ai #philosophy #linguistics #semiotics

Just a FYI for those interested, only liberal clowns care if you call us “Indians”. We don’t mind

The best way to refer to us collectively is by our nation.

99% of us never gave any thought to the Redskins, and all my friends thought changing the name was the bigger slap in the face.

We don’t care if hot White/Adian/Hispanic chicks dress up as NDNs1. Just so long as they’re hot.

We don’t really care if you call us Chief, but Tonto will probably earn you a punch.

We remain the demographic that enlists in the military more than any other, but rates of domestic violence and other crimes on the reservations continue to be a major problem, indicating that maybe it’s not the best way to go.

NDNs like Whites, Asians and Hispanics. We’re not as relaxed around Blacks and we generally really hate [dot] Indians.

Sometimes in film and TV shows you’ll see NDNs wearing what may seem like a strange mix of western and classically Native attire.

This isn’t a mistake. Around the time that the first Yellowstone prequel was set, the majority of Comanche wore “mixed” White/Hispanic and Native clothing.

Interestingly, at the same time, the bulk of the Navajo were stubbornly clinging to buckskins and furs.

Just some trivia for you.

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1. NDN is short text for Indian ↩︎

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Semiotic proprioception in dreams and waking

Proprioception means “one’s own” or “ones’ individual” (Latin proprius) “perception.”

We normally use this word to refer to our physical position in the world—whether we are standing or sitting, how we are moving, and how much energy we are using.

When we dream, our capacity for physical movement, with rare exceptions, is paralyzed. But we still do a sort of proprioception in dreams—a semiotic proprioception, or proprioception within the semiology of the dream.

In dreams, we grope through semiotic associations and respond, gropingly, to them. People and things often look smaller in dreams, or distorted, because we do not have either the need or the capacity to calibrate our physical proprioception as we do in waking life.

Dreams move from one semiotic proprioception to another via our individual four-dimensional (3D plus time) groping/associative function. In one short segment of a dream we are at home, then we go through a door only to find ourselves on a boat in the ocean. Our 4D semiotic proprioception within dreams readily accepts groping, associative shifts like this.

Much of what we perceive when we are awake is memory. We glance at a room we know well and call up our memory of it rather than actually look closely at the room.

I am fairly sure that the memories we call up to aid perception while we are awake are much the same as the groping proprioception we experience in dreams. A major difference is when we are awake we can and do check our waking proprioception with the people and objects around us, while in dreams the associative function has a much freer range.

Notice how dreams move from scene to scene rather slowly. Things can go quickly, but normally dreams grope somewhat slowly along the 4D path of semiotic proprioception.

In waking life, our dreamy use of memory and association to aid perception of the world happens constantly.

When we speak with another person, we use this function to make groping associations concerning what we think they are saying. We grope and respond to them as in a dream while at the same time searching for clues that indicate we are both in the same dream.

These clues that two people may sort of “agree on” while speaking are normally standard public semiotics that belong to whatever culture(s) they share. By “agreeing” on them, we form a sort of agreeable camaraderie with whomever we are speaking, and this can be satisfying, but if we only get this, it can also become deeply unsatisfying.

The four dimensional groping/dreamy function of our mind is far richer than any standard collection of public semiotics. In our public lives—professional, commercial, based on organizations, etc.—we have, at present, little recourse but to accept normal public semiotics, to agree with them and manifest agreement.

We can express some deviation from them and sometimes make jokes about them, but we are generally fairly bound to the semiotics of the culture or organization that generates the context of our speaking. Consider how people in the same church or school are bound by the semiotics of those institutions.

In our intimate relations, however, we do have recourse to investigate and understand how our groping, 4D semiotic proprioception works. This is what FIML does. It allows partners to observe, analyze, and understand the semiotic proprioceptions of their minds as they are actually functioning during interpersonal communication.

If you constantly avoid FIML types of investigations, you will be stuck with a mix of dimly shared public/private semiotics that will tend to become highly ambiguous, even volatile, or very shallow.

Semiotics - why an LLM doesn't

Saussure, Peirce and Derrida as the key to understanding LLMs. Why a model is not a mind, but a mach...

https://gruszka.dev/en/semiotics-and-llm.html
#llm #ai #semiotics #signs #linguistics #languagemodels #saussure #peirce #derrida

Why was, and still is, wikipedia doubted as a qualified source and AI is invited to pest through all institutions of knowledge and information? Semiotic inversion feels like an universal law. Money stops representing value. Now, what is worth money, is deemed valuable. Same with user generated media: good content should propagate well, but it is the other way around. What performs well on platforms is deemed good content. And it is similar with AI slop. We all know by now what an excellent source Wikipedia is for both: journalism and science. But it is still a struggle to qualify it as such. Meanwhile, schools, universities and politics wonder how they can implement wonderful AI slop in education and production. This is not a story of its success, this all happened after AI slop already was a market asset. The answer always is capitalism, I don't make the rules. #Semiotics #Sociology #Capitalism

State terrorism

She even swore at him. Called him a ‘dick’ and ‘get in the fucking car’. This is trained state terrorism. It is an act of totalitarian mind-control of both her and her victim. It was not a mistake. The danger of today is precisely this kind of official behavior becoming much worse, which will happen before it gets better,. ABN

This is the Pulitzer Prize winning photo that perfectly embodies our current state — Leonarda Jonie

The black woman, unlike Iryna, was perfectly safe surrounded by men of another race.

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Happy July 4th — Celebrate USA!

Development Blog - Three Ways of Knowing
Building a Murder Mystery Game on Peircean Semiotics

#Peirce
#Game
#Design
#Semiotics
https://ko-fi.com/post/Development-Blog--Three-Ways-of-Knowing-U5O022HSIQ

Development Blog - Three Ways of Knowing
Building a Murder Mystery Game on Peircean Semiotics

#Peirce
#Game
#Design
#Semiotics

ko-fi.com/post/Develop...

Psychophysics gains a new law of sensory perception that also sheds light on subjective perception

First we have to understand Weber’s Law:

Weber’s law, also called Weber-Fechner law, historically important psychological law quantifying the perception of change in a given stimulus. The law states that the change in a stimulus that will be just noticeable is a constant ratio of the original stimulus. It has been shown not to hold for extremes of stimulation. (Weber’s Law)

Hang in with this, it’s interesting.

About 200 years ago, the German physician Ernst Heinrich Weber made a seemingly innocuous observation which led to the birth of the discipline of Psychophysics – the science relating physical stimuli in the world and the sensations they evoke in the mind of a subject. Weber asked subjects to say which of two slightly different weights was heavier. From these experiments , he discovered that the probability that a subject will make the right choice only depends on the ratio between the weights.

For instance, if a subject is correct 75% of the time when comparing a weight of 1 Kg and a weight of 1.1 Kg, then she will also be correct 75% of the time when comparing two weights of 2 and 2.2 Kg – or, in general, any pair of weights where one is 10% heavier than the other. This simple but precise rule opened the door to the quantification of behavior in terms of mathematical ‘laws’. (NEUROSCIENTISTS MAKE MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH IN 200-YEAR-OLD PUZZLE)

What’s new today is Time–Intensity Equivalence in Discrimination (TIED):

We investigated Weber’s law by training rats to discriminate the relative intensity of sounds at the two ears at various absolute levels. These experiments revealed the existence of a psychophysical regularity, which we term time–intensity equivalence in discrimination (TIED), describing how reaction times change as a function of absolute level. (The mechanistic foundation of Weber’s law)

Simply stated TIED says that the intensity of the stimulus determines the time it takes to “just notice” a change in it and that that scales linearaly as intensity changes up or down. For example, changes in louder sounds are noticed quicker than proportionally equal changes in quieter sounds and this can be scaled mathematically.

TIED is a new theory and needs more research, but whether it works out perfectly or not, I think it shows something very important about our individual and shared subjective perceptions of words, gestures, meanings, intentions, implications, and so on including all semiotics.

At present, we do not have machines that can measure our subjective perceptions, but we can surely feel them. And with training, we can also decently calibrate them.

Most of us can already vaguely talk about our subjective perceptions of each other, but few of us know how to do that with the precision of Weber’s Law or TIED. This is because we are all unique and we all react uniquely to each other. On top of that, few are able to employ language efficiently enough to capture significant detail when describing subjective responses or impressions.

FIML provides a very useful method for isolating and calibrating individual, idiosyncratic subjective perceptions.

Consistent, repeated use of FIML gradually recalibrates and reorganizes the entire psychologies of both partners.

FIML has virtually no content.. FIML is a method, and as such it allows partners to gradually identify, isolate, measure, and reorganize their entire body of psychological data, however they construe it.

I know this post is about politics and not architecture but it still makes me sad that this Norman Foster slash Renzo Piano aesthetic is the what people use to symbolize utopia. Too slick, too sterile, too much glass, not enough people, too many cars, and not enough diversity in the greenery.

https://bsky.app/profile/louisevans.bsky.social/post/3mpbqf45tmk26

#Semiotics #Utopia #Architecture

Muslims are left drenched in blood as they cut themselves with knives to mark Islamic festival

Muslims were pictured drenched in blood as they slashed, whipped and cut themselves with sharp blades to mark an Islamic festival. 

The holiday, known as the holy Day of Ashura, is celebrated by Shi’ite Muslims, and mourns the death of Imam Hussein on the battlefield in the seventh century.

The gory ceremony, which sees males of all ages cut themselves across the scalp or whip themselves with blades attached to chains, is meant to commemorate Imam Hussein’s violent end. 

In Iraq, pilgrims converged on the holy city of Karbala, which was the site of the battle and is home to a shrine to Hussein, and were pictured wearing white clothes stained by bright red patches of blood from their wounds.

In Baghdad, thousands marched through the streets, including some who slashed their heads with razors and performed other forms of self-flagellation in a show of grief to mark the occasion.

Muslims also gathered in Iran, Lebanon and other parts of the world for the annual commemoration. 

Shi’ite men bleed from self-inflicted wounds after cutting their heads with swords during a procession to mark festival of Ashoura, on the tenth day of Muharram, in Basra, Iraq, June 26 

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I was up for hours this morning chatting with Claude about the meaning of Meaning, and I lived to tell the tale.

https://brywillis634737.substack.com/p/capital-letters-trade-marks-and-other?r=pvxh5

#philosophy #ontology #truth #meaning #semantics #semiotics #orthography #language #metaphysics #orthography #deconstruction #typography #blog #substack #podcast #video

This article is less about what philosophy is about and more about why we can't particularly know some things, and why not.

👉 https://open.substack.com/pub/brywillis634737/p/what-is-philosophy?r=pvxh5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=masto&showWelcomeOnShare=true

#blog #substack #philosophy #language #ontology #semantics #semiotics #epistemology #etymology #communication #Heidegger #Derrida #Foucault #Wittgenstein #Nietzsche #Gadamer #Peirce #Gallie #McGilchrist #languageinsufficiency

Triggers and microaggression

I greatly dislike the way these two words—trigger and microaggression—are currently being used.

Trigger implies that something inevitable will follow while microaggression outright claims that the other person is at fault.

I much prefer my own neutral term for those small stimuli that might cause emotional discomfort.

My term is psychological morpheme, which is defined as:

The smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.

I strongly believe psychological morphemes exist and that they arise at distinct moments and that these moments can be perceived by the owner of them and that that owner of these moments can and must learn to control them, analyze them, learn from them.

It is a huge mistake to automatically blame another person for our own psychological morphemes. From a FIML point of view, there is almost nothing worse.

The reason this is a really bad thing to do is you are very likely wrong.

Even if you are wrong only one out of twenty times, the consequences of your mistake can be very large. I guarantee you are wrong much more often than that.

I say this after doing years of FIML practice during which I have discovered in myself and my partner hundreds of wrong psychological morphemes, most of which were connected to subjective networks that had grown large over many years.

Most psychological morphemes arise due to habits of subjective interpretation.

Rather than let these subjective interpretations have their way, a far more profitable and much wiser course of action is to stop that process at the initiating morpheme. Stop it before it gets going and fills your mind.

If you can stop it at the psychological morpheme and analyze it with the help of your FIML partner, those morphemes will not become mindless triggers that you wrongly interpret as microaggression, but rather opportunities to see and understand how your brain is actually functioning in real-time.

Psychological morphemes are also commonly misinterpreted as signs that reside in the other person of boredom, anger, contempt, arrogance, insecurity, optimism, happiness, pleasure, and so on including as many states as you can imagine.

Nerding out on a Sunday. I am preparing for my MA-course on #theory in #anthropology, covering #semiotics #structuralism and #Lacan #psychoanalysis 😍

‘Cat Bin Lady’ Mary Bale was reviled around the globe when she threw Lola the moggie in a wheelie bin

In the dawning days of social media it was one of the first clips of its kind to go globally viral – and has since been viewed many millions of times.

A very ordinary woman is seen walking down a very ordinary street when she comes upon a cat. The cat, apparently friendly and seeking attention, jumps up from the pavement to a garden wall to get closer.

The woman strokes the cat a couple of times while glancing around then suddenly grabs it by the scruff of the neck and then, with surprising dexterity, flips open the lid of an adjacent wheelie bin, throws the cat inside, shuts the bin, and continues walking as if nothing has happened….Initially, she was unrepentant, saying she did ‘not deserve to be hated’ for her moment of madness and claimed people were overreacting.

‘I really don’t see what everyone is getting so excited about. It’s just a cat,’ she said. ‘I was walking home from work and saw this cat wander out in front of me. I was playing with it, stroking it and listening to it purr as it stood on a garden wall. It was very friendly.

‘I don’t know what came over me, but I suddenly thought it would be funny to put it in the wheelie bin, which was right beside me. I did it as a joke because I thought it would be funny. I never thought it would be trapped. I expected it to wriggle out of the bin.’

Bale added: ‘People are reading too much into things. I’ve no feelings about cats one way or the other. I don’t keep pets myself, but I have no problem with people who do.

‘To think this video is being seen around the world is unbelievable. I’m a very private person and don’t want to upset any members of my family. I don’t know what my relatives will think, but to be honest I think everyone’s overreacting a bit.

‘OK, I shouldn’t have done it, but it’s just a cat at the end of the day. I don’t think I deserve to be hated by people all over the world, it was just a split second of madness.’

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__________

When life turns on a dime and the punishment don’t fit the crime. Compare to Epstein files ABN

Trump's second-term portrait — stern, with furrowed brow, reminiscent of his mug shot — has been used on National Park passes, a commemorative passport and now, possibly, a $250 bill. @huffingtonpost's Katherine Speller looks into its significance, reframing and monetizing Trump's arrest, and communicating his status to both supporters and critics.

https://flip.it/oa-_TT

#TrumpAdministration #Photography #Semiotics

In this essay, I investigate the ideas of Stuart Hall in light of my own. Hall and I have many commonalities in the operation of language, but my enterprise is broader and deeper, as his was ostensibly limited to media.

https://open.substack.com/pub/brywillis634737/p/the-floor-beneath-hall?r=pvxh5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

#philosophy #language #substack #blog #podcast #grammar #ontology #agency #Gramsci #semiotics #encoding #ideology #architecture #encounter #languageinsufficiency #response #agentic #media

The limits of general semiotic analyses as applied to human psychology

Much of the work done in human semiotics involves analyses of semiotic codes.

Semiotics and semiotic codes are often treated like language or languages for which a grammar can be found.

One obvious problem with this sort of approach is semiotics indicates a set that is much broader than language. Stated another way, language is a subset of semiotics.

Human semiotics also include music, imagery, gesture, facial expression, emotion, and anything else that can communicate either within one mind or between two or more minds.

It is very helpful to analyze semiotic codes and it is very helpful to try to figure out how cultures, groups, and individuals use them. We can compare the semiotics of heroism in Chinese culture to that of French culture. Or the semiotics of gift-giving in American culture to that of Mexican culture. We can analyze movies, literature, science, and even engineering based on semiotic codes we have abstracted out of them.

We can do something similar for human psychology.

Analyses of this type are, in my view, general in that they involve schema or paradigms or grammars that say general things about how semiotic systems work or how individuals (or semiotic signs themselves) fit into those systems.

This is all good and general analyses of this sort can be indispensable aids to understanding.

General semiotic analyses are limited, however, in their application to human psychology because such analyses cannot effectively grasp the semiotic codes of the individual. Indeed general analyses are liable to conceal individual codes and interpretations more than usefully reveal them.

This is so because all individuals are always complex repositories of many general semiotic codes as well as many individual ones. And these codes are always changing, responding, being conditioned by new circumstances and many kinds of feedback.

Individuals as repositories of many codes, both external and internal, are complex and always changing and there is no general analysis that will ever fully capture that complexity.

For somewhat similar reasons, no individual acting alone can possibly perform a self-analysis that captures the full complexity of the many and always-changing semiotic codes that exist within them.

Self-analysis is far too subject to selection bias, memory, and even delusion to be considered accurate or objective. The individual is also far too complex for the individual to grasp alone. How can an individual possibly stand outside itself and see itself as it is? Where would the extra brain-space come from?

How can a system of complex semiotic codes use yet another code to successfully analyze itself?

Clearly, no individual human semiotic system can ever fully know itself.

To recap, 1) there is no general semiotic analysis that will ever capture the complexity of individual psychology, and 2) no individual acting alone can ever capture the complexity of the semiotic codes that exist within them.

Concerning point two, we could just as well say that no individual acting alone can ever capture the complexity of their own psychology.

We are thus prevented from finding a complex analysis of human psychology through a general analysis of semiotics and also through an individual’s self-analysis when acting alone.

This suggests, however, that two individuals acting together might be able to glimpse, if not grasp, how their complex semiotic codes are actually functioning when they interact with each other. If two individuals working together can honestly observe and discuss moments of dynamic real-time semiotic interaction between them, they should be able to begin to understand how their immensely complex and always-changing psycho-semiotic codes are actually functioning.

An approach of this type ought to work better for psychological understanding of the individuals involved than any mix of general semiotic analyses applied to them. Indeed, prefabricated, general semiotic analyses will tend to conceal the actual functioning of the idiosyncratic semiotics and semiotic codes used by those individuals.

The FIML method does not apply a general semiotic analysis to human psychology. Rather it uses a method or technique to allow two individuals working together to see and understand how their semiotics and semiotic codes are actually functioning. ABN

How Greek imagery and art influenced Buddhism and Asian art

When Buddhism entered China from the Greco-Buddhist world of Gandhara, it carried Hellenistic wind-god imagery: the wild-haired airborne form associated with Boreas and the great wind bag motif linked to Aeolus.

These Greco-Buddhist forms later passed into Japan through Chinese Buddhism, where they were adapted into the wind god Fūjin. The Gods took new names, but the Hellenic image endured from Greece to Japan.

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