The Phaneron

Higher Assurance Functional RDF in Haskell describes the results of my recent code writing project. The purpose of the project is to demonstrate each of the capabilities suggested by the title above in a working solution and to develop a set of practices to deliver such a solution.

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.

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.