Ahti‐Veikko Pietarinen
ahti‐[email protected]
Professor of Semiotics, University of Helsinki, Finland
Department of Philosophy, History, Culture, and Art Studies
Beijing Jiaotong University
21 July 2010
The research on organisational semiotics deals predominantly with the question of
how to bring the notion of information to bear on semiotically conceived accounts of
human organisations. In this talk, I take up what I perceive as some of the key
theoretical and conceptual elements involved in this endeavour, and assess their
status from the points of view of philosophy of science and Peirce's theory of signs.
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How to bring the notion of information to bear on semiotically conceived accounts of human organisations?
What is the meaning of information?
2. How organisations may be seen as semiotic or sign‐
theoretic systems?
1.
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Answers are relevant for applications of semiotics to economics, social and cognitive sciences, IT, informatics,...
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Background:
ƒ Philosophy of Science
ƒ Peirce’s theory of signs, semiotics (’semeiotic’)
The basic questions on the methodology of OS:
1. How to build a science of information systems from the theory of signs? 2. How to study what signs do in human organisations? 3. What is true and false in social constructionism taken to depend on the use of signs? 4. Which successful theories to be allied with the notion that signs are necessarily contextual representations?
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Peirce (1901), “signs are something by knowing which we know something more.”
ƒ Refers to increase of information
ƒ Operational definition for sign users to seek and find objects of signs
ƒ Information: inherent property of signs .
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SIGN VEHICLE
(REPRESENTAMEN)
OBJECT
INTERPRETANT
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SIGN VEHICLE
(REPRESENTAMEN)
INTERPRETER
OBJECT
INTERPRETANT
UTTERER
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1.
information = elimination of uncertainty
(property of signs; e.g., the semantic definition rediscovered e.g. by Carnap and Hintikka)
2.
3.
knowledge = the triadic sign‐relation (Peirce’s semeiotic)
meaning = habit of acting in a certain way in certain kinds of situations (pragmaticism).
All these notions are captured by processes linked with Peirce’s triadic sign relation.
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Theory of the meaning of intellectual signs in use
Externalist: look at practical and experimental effects that signs have upon their interpreters
Meaning of information structures in organisations is in habits of action (action routines, institutional practices, plans, strategies,…)
Social reality is the reality of beliefs and habits
Institutional economics (Veblen, Commons,...)
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Pragmaticism does not imply SC
ƒ habits of action (action routines, practices, strategic plans) are “generalizing tendencies” (Peirce)
ƒ there must be hard facts of the matter that make communication possible
ƒ no actualism: not all action that we in fact make constitutes the meaning of intellectual signs
ƒ Counterfactuals: ”What is possible is real” (Peirce)
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Normativity of meaning (responsibility, trust) (”Why is the Normativity of Logic Based on Rules?” Pietarinen 2010)
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Communication is not to be explained by encodings, transmissions and decodings of something, but in terms of ‘mind’ that is different from the Cartesian notion:
“a mind is not absolutely an individual” (Peirce)
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Meaning, relevance: Context‐change potential
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”Communicational interpretants”: results of successful ”weldings of minds” (Peirce)
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Pragmatic meaning: interaction resulting in various interpretants
ƒ Sign User ≠ Human User
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Pragmatic constructs ontologically different from social constructs
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Reality not subjective, socially or culturally constructed, or fictional...
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Semantic and pragmatics need not be extended with ’the social’... Why thought to be so?
1.
Proper logic for information sciences, logic programming etc. is the first‐order predicate logic;
Notion of information system could be ‘purely formal’, or non‐contextual;
Semantic and pragmatic dimensions do not yet tackle with the interactive notions of sign‐users.
2.
3.
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These beliefs now to be shot down...
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Pragmatism takes all informative signs to be contextual
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Theory of Games (von Neumann & Morgenstern 1944)
(Signs of Logic: Peircean Themes on the Philosophy of Logic, Games, and Communication, Pietarinen 2006)
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Evolutionary Economics of Institutions (Geoffrey Hodgson)
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OS: Doing informatics and computer science ‘with the human face’:
ƒ a limitation to think of this solely in terms of human
organisations?
ƒ Peirce’s theory of signs was not confined to human beings as the sign users
ƒ ‘the social’ not above what is ‘the physical’ or ‘the natural’
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OS: A general theory of meaning, Peirce’s pragmaticism, interspersed with some modern developments up to the theory of evolution and theory of games, as applied to the areas of institutional economics…
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“Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. I live on the 21st floor.”
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Alan Sokal: ”Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward the Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, Social Text
1996.
ƒ The point was not only to show problems with the journal’s peer review practices, but to defend the standards of scientific & philosophical work from the threats of those “postmodern literary intellectuals pontificating on science and its philosophy and making a complete bungle of both.” ƒ
Check out Sokal’s new book: Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture, Oxford University Press, 2009.
ƒ Explains the original ’joke’ sentence by sentence
ƒ Includes an ”Afterword” that was rejected by Social Text journal “on the grounds that it did not meet their intellectual standards”.
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Finland Factbook:
Population: 5.223.442
Languages: Finnish 92% (official)
Swedish 5.6% (official)
Independence since 1917. Previously a grand duchy in the Russian empire for 108 years, and a part of Sweden for 600 years before that.
188.000 lakes; 98.000 islands.
Beer drank by Finns / year 404.193.000 litres.
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