Stephen, lists,
People sometimes misinterpret a speaker, but this is partly because the
communication system is not even structured to be purely the kind toward
which Shannon's communication theory was mainly oriented - a system with
rigid pre-established code and so on. Sometimes communication is merely
faulty. Our ways of communicating do involve more potential for
miscommunication than might seem necessary. But this is a price paid for
flexibility, the opportunity to learn, e.g., to revise one's 'codes' on
the run, on the wing, etc., and to learn to interpret signs from mixes
of sign systems that are not one's own. People, like species, come with
their own questions and interests, seeking to extract information to
answer their own questions, not necessarily the questions that the
speaker anticipates or imagines, even when the speaker is a preacher or
teacher who wants people to revise their ways, learn new ones. A
constraint that tends to keep interpretations from being too arbitrary
is that, if one's interpretations do not reflect reality, then reality
will exact a cost for it. To understand what interpretation is, means
understanding it in terms of purpose and success, how interpretation can
go right, and not only how it can go wrong, reducing it to only the
cases wherein it is arbitrary, capricious, consisting _/merely/_ in the
eye of the beholder.
Best, Ben
Post by Stephen C. RoseIf you have ever preached you will remember times when your statements
are remembered by an enthusiast who repeats to you what you said,
implying a meaning. Often not what you meant. I think meaning must be
seen to be in the eye of the beholder with only scant (if that)
reference to what was actually meant. This may be why advertisers
surmise that seven or eight repetitions is needed to elicit the
intended response.And why a good communicator is one who manages to
overcome the disconnect more often than others. Maybe dicisigns are
truths that transcend this problem, a realm of clarity within the
welter of failed communications.
Gary F., Howard, Stephen,
A long time ago in an introductory perception course I suggested
to the professor that the creative filling in of missing sensory
information might be better called _/restoration/_ (like that of a
painting, involving skill but without assurance of perfect
accuracy), and he agreed. However, I don't think that that covers
all cases of interpretation. Generally one would say that the
meaning or implication is not 'created' but drawn out, brought
out, inferred , from something like the "hidden" state into which
Howard said (in an older post) that symbols, as encodings, put the
information that they carry. If the meaning or interpretant is
arbitrarily 'created', on the other hand, then it was never
'hidden' in the signs.
The most 'creative' kind of interpretation seems to be at the
evolutionary scale, in the sense that the species and its special
interpretive norms are 'created' by evolution. These special norms
let the vegetable-level organism interpret, appraise, signs in the
perspective of the species' special interests, its special
questions, i.e., the norms seem to add value to the interpretants.
But that value was added or created by the evolutionary process,
and the kinds of interpretant that result still need to reflect
the realities and actual and variable conditions faced by the
organism and its species - most 'creations' or mutations are for the worse.
Best, Ben
Post by Gary FuhrmanHoward, Stephen,
I think it would be more accurate to say that meaning is
*recreated* by the interpreting agent. In other words, the
interpretant is a sign, but not just any sign arbitrarily
invented by the interpreter. In order to be meaningful, it has to
carry forward the functioning of the very sign that it
interprets, translates or transforms.
gary f.
-----Original Message-----
From: Howard Pattee
Sent: 12-Oct-14 8:19 AM
Subject: [biosemiotics:7218]
Re: Natural
lol. And who says what the meaning is?
HP: Meaning is created by the interpreting agent. Most
biosemioticians believe that interpreting agents and life are
coextensive. Certainty the first self-replicating cell must
interpret its coded symbolic instructions.
Howard