TODAY’S POST: INT3RP INC / 15 of My 26 Semiotic Algorithms for Interpreting Crime Scenes, Natural Environments, Marketing and Branding Signscapes, and Social and Cultural Coding Framework
Updated from my book Biosemiotic Literary Criticism (Springer Nature 2021) for use in my ecofeminist Harry Potter meets Dan Brown meets Neal Stephenson-like science-fiction detective novel project, Emily Norah Clark and the Case of the Ten Commandments 2.0.
If you wish to purchase all 26 Semiotic Algorithms, visit the SHOP on this website.
Algorithm 1: The Law of Affect. A symbol or sign is often more powerful (more flexible and efficient) than the object it represents.
Algorithm 2: The Context-Dependency Rule. The very same symbol or sign can mean different things in different contexts.
Algorithm 3: The More-Else Measure. Signs shouldn’t merely stand for something else (a recipe for conspiracy thinking); signs should stand for something more than themselves (a basis for the science of semiotics).
Algorithm 4: The Rule of the Third. The meaning of a sign is not in the sign itself (the first) or in the object it represents (the second) but in the interpretation (the third) of the sign. (See Algorithm 11 below.)
Algorithm 5: The Honest Liar’s Law; or the “Virtureal” Algorithm. The real depends upon the virtual to make it real; sometimes, in order to create in another person an image of the full force of the original experience that one had and that one is trying to communicate to that other person, one must exaggerate. But the exaggeration must serve the Real, that is, the exaggeration must serve only to help another person understand the actual “affect” of the experience that the sign user is trying to reproduce.
Algorithm 6: The “Environ-Mental” Algorithm of Thought. Ideas aren’t “in” the brain. “Thought,” rather, is an environ-mental phenomenon (involving, of course, the “mental,” the “environmental,” the “logical,” and the eco-logical”). The “currency” for the environ-mental and eco-logical relationships and understandings that we call “thought” is the “sign,” a “sign” being that which mediates between the objects of the world and our understanding of those objects—thus the important term “thought-sign.” In other words, “Thoughts are in signs, not in heads”(Arisbe.sitehost). According to Peirce, “The psychologists undertake to locate various mental powers in the brain; and above all consider it as quite certain that the faculty of language resides in a certain lobe; but I believe it comes decidedly nearer the truth (though not really true) that language resides in the tongue. In my opinion, it is much more true that the thoughts of a living writer are in any printed copy of his book than that they are in his brain.” Thus, I am always surprised when I read an old article of mine by what I don’t know! In fact, we can discover what we think by writing! The human mind engages in “cognitive outsourcing,” which is the use of “signs” as advanced (external) storage devices “in the environment”: on the printed page; in the architecture of our homes; in our encounters with, and our making of, the landscape—which is to say in the signs that we use to represent the objects that we both make and encounter. Thus, the objects (experienced things) of our environments and the signs that represent them serve as an environ-mental platform or scaffold of thought. This platform or scaffolding is called our “Umwelt” (German for “around-world, or “environment”) by Jakob von Uexküll. Here’s how, in part, that Umwelt works.
Corollary 1: The Guesswork Algorithm: “Every sign is an hypothesis about its Object” (Michael Cabot Haley [MCH]). Thus, “educated guesses,” of the type that Sherlock Holmes routinely makes (technically “abductions,” not “deductions”), are an important part of everyday perceiving and understanding.
Corollary 2: The Power of Partiality: “No sign does or can represent everything about its object” (MCH), so, the more we pay attention, the more objects grow into themselves.
Corollary 3: The Mediation Algorithm: “All thought is mediated by signs; there is no immediate understanding . . . but this is not a bad thing” (MCH). We don’t bend spoons directly with our minds; we think about whether we’d like to bend a spoon or not, and then, if there is a good reason to bend a spoon, we have our hands do it. How dangerous would it be if we didn’t have the “firewall” of signs—which firewall gives us the opportunity to think critically about the relationship between signs, objects, and outcomes. Indeed, “[s]igns assist rather than hinder a better understanding or teleological integration of the Object” into our thoughts and actions—into the future that we can choose precisely because of the separation of sign from object and of sign from outcome that the mediation of the sign permits.
Corollary 4: Signs Make the World: As Peirce writes of one kind of sign, the Symbol, “A symbol is something which has the power of reproducing itself, and that essentially, since it is constituted a symbol only by the interpretation. This interpretation involves a power of the symbol to cause a real fact” (“New Elements” Essential Peirce [EP] 1998: 322). Recall the Jeep commercial: “The objects we make, make us,” but we shaped those objects in the first place with signs—especially the “symbol.” (See Algorithm 11.)
Algorithm 7: Relations Are as Real as Things. Relations (incorporated as signs) are themselves real, have their own agency, may be more real than real “objects,” and, in fact, come to define individual things. For example, a relationship between the members of a community can have real-world effects on the world that is separate from the actions or intentions of any of the individuals of a community.
Corollary 1: “The whole calls out its parts” (Peirce EP 1998:124); Corollary 2: The future calls out the present(Deely 2010b: 35; EP 1992: 54-55); Corollary 3: A “telos” of “diagrammatization” (Shapiro 1991: 118) seems general—in language and in nature. The “diagram”—say the complex web of interdependencies of a deciduous forest compared to the relatively simpler “diagram” of (the evolutionarily older) gymnospermous forests—evolves and directs its own growth' Corollary 4: Semiosis represents the causality of the non-existent. (Deely 2011 personal correspondence) That which does not yet exist influences the real. As Peirce writes, “the real . . . is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of you and me” (EP 1992: 52).
Algorithm 8: The SST (Sign System Thinking) Algorithm. Every sign exists within a text (other signs that make up a presentation), which text itself exists within a code (say, the “bro code,” a mostly invisible system of signs that governs perceptions, expectations, and behaviors), which code itself exists within a paradigm (a system of codes, texts, and signs that is so all-pervasive that we rarely can distinguish it from necessity and reality). Thus, to think about what a so-called simple “sign” means is not so simple; it requires that we understand everything in context—which is different, however, from “relativism”! And this is because signs, texts, codes, and paradigms interact according to laws (which process of lawful interaction we call “semiosis”). A real semiotician is aware of the nested contexts within which interpretation takes place.
Algorithm 11: The Rule of Three. (Compare with The Rule of the Third, Algorithm 4, above). All signs are irreducibly triadic in at least three ways: they always have 1. a Presentative function (how the sign “presents” itself—as i. qualisign [a quality, “Firstness” in Peirce’s triadic phenomenology], ii. sinsign [a fact, “Secondness”], and iii. legisign [a habit or law, “Thirdness”]); 2. a Representative function (how the sign re-presents itself via its relationship to its object—as i. icon [a resemblance, again, “Firstness”], ii. index [an instance of cause-and-effect, “Secondness”], and iii. symbol [the instantiation of a habit or convention, “Thirdness”]); and 3. an Interpretative function (how the sign relates to [determines] its future interpretation—as i. rheme [as determining “the interpretant to focus on the qualitative characteristics” of what is “assigned,” as in the predicate “ . . . makes one a human being,” “Firstness”]; ii. dicisign [factual determinations, as in “Chris is a heck of a human being,” “Secondness”], and iii. argument [law-like or habitual determinations, “Humane people like Chris don’t seem to get enough credit,” “Thirdness”]).
Algorithm 12: The “Commens”-Sense Algorithm; or Peirce’s “Social Algorithm”. Mind is a community phenomenon; we are not entirely ourselves. Recall that Peirce writes, “a person is not absolutely an individual” (CP 5.314). The meaning of a sign, of what we sense and what makes sense, is constituted as much by and for the community (Peirce’s Commens or Commind) of which we are a part as it is by ourselves. (First, the bad news: this “Social Algorithm” of “Commens Sense” does help explain in part (1) why “facts don’t change our minds” and (2) why we have “alternative facts”: the need to belong to a community of like minds, and the resulting “confirmation bias,” trumps “inconvenient facts”). But now the good news: this “Social Algorithm” of “Commens Sense” also reminds us that community-based thinking is “rooted intrinsically in logic,” for “He who would not sacrifice his soul to save the whole world, is illogical in all his inferences.”) Ultimately, the truth will out—which leads us to Algorithm 7.
Algorithm 14: The Barking-Braking Algorithm; or, How to Tell that a Message Is a Message
For a Symbologist (or semiotician), knowing when to put on the semiotic brakes (that is, knowing when to stop barking up the wrong tree, knowing when to stop seeing connections between signs—to say “no,” to embrace the freshness of the random) is as important as knowing how to connect the signs.
Algorithm 15: The Principal Algorithm; or the Node-Code Distinction
Some signs are elements of a “code to be cracked”—with a single solution—while others are part of a “node to be hacked”—with an open-ended network of associations and no one solution. Awareness of this distinction we help one to know what kind of symbologist to summon—or what approach to take to the clues (signs and symbols) that present themselves to your imagination.
Algorithm 16: The Meme-Deme-Seme Distinction
Symbologists have to be able to distinguish between (1) memes, signs with their own agency, with their own capacity to go viral; (2) demes, signs planted in the pages of the mind or in the media and maintained there artificially (thus deemed to be memes by others) through the agency of another, say a wealthy corporate sponsor; and (3) semes, those wrinkles (seams) in the semiosphere that are deemed to be memes but that are not even signs, having no interpretants (effects) other than that of seeming to have them.
Algorithm 20: The Dependent-Fact Rule
Clues are not independent facts; indeed, as Sherlock Holmes says in A Study in Scarlet, “I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.” Therefore, a Symbologist must realize that all clues are ultimately dependent upon or conditioned by (1) the material of which the clues are made and / or the form that they take (icons), (2) the nature of the object(s) that produced them (indices), and (3) that which interprets them (their interpreters—alive or not) into existence, into their status as clues in the first (and the last) place (interpretants).
Algorithm 25: The Symbolic Theory of Matter
“The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms” (Rukeyser); the real is always already virtual; “there can be no reality that has not the life of the symbol” (Peirce 324); “matter, in fact, is the non-logical difference” (Bataille). There may be a “there” there but we only have access to “it” through signs; the necessity of having a difference between things (the “its” that populate the world of the “there”) and objects (the world of experienced things) is this: we can only experience things (as objects) through the mediation or agency of signs. (See Algorithm 6.)
