The Phaneron

Cookbooks are a tradition in software and mashups are all the rage today, so I couldn’t resist starting a mashup cookbook. But, before I show some of my recipes and what I have in the oven, I thought I’d explain the role mashups and social production play in solving a problem too hard and too expensive to solve under conditions controlled by corporations or the government. An issue we face today is producing a sufficiently complex mirrror world to match the needs of an information society.

Demonstrates the value of Perice’s semiotics in ontology alignment and unification. It shows that a) OWL SameAs is a degenerate case of using a global semiotic domain ontology based on Peirce’s thirdness or mediation; b) the semiotic domain provides deeper insights into how machine understanding can model human understanding; and c) how to use type inferencing with the Pellet description logic reasoner. There’s much more to be done than what this small example demonstrates. This example is just the beginning of developing a semiotic domain.

The central topic for this post is to sketch out a program for developing a new theory of meaning. In short, my hypothesis is this: a) semantics provides a theory of representation and truth; b) semiotics provides a theory signs and their interpretation; c) pragmaticism defines the effect of a conception on other objects as the whole of the conception; and d) meaning emerges in a complex system through the convergence of relational properties and domain knowledge.