The “Emergent Interpretant”

August 19, 2010

Symbolic Interactionism (Herbert Blumer):

1. “Humans act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things.”
2. “The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with others and the society.”
3. “These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters.”

Semiotics (saussure, peirce, locke):

* Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata
* Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures
* Pragmatics: Relation between signs and their effects on those (people) who use them

Trivium (medieval education):

Logic is concerned with the thing as-it-is-known,
Grammar is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-symbolized, and
Rhetoric is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-communicated.

Ok, now you couple the three above subjects with maybe “mind control / brainwash” and “hypnosis” and add some “pattern recognition” and “figure ground” art studies, and you may a pretty complete body of phenomenological humanistic understanding (yea I would advise saying understanding rather than knowledge)… but of course everyone might get turned off the minute I said brainwash or hypnosis. This is precisely because I think they think what is actually “passionate” is mistakenly believed to be a pursuit or belief in what is “true”. Science would love you to believe that atoms truly and really exist as if the human did not invent the concept of an atom through some permanence of figure ground pattern recog.

Its a simple conflict / confusion of ontology and phenomenlogy I think… resulting in epistemology being mistaken for concerning the acquisition of “knowledge” of an objective reality.

xwisee_methodologicalSolipsisticModel

That link is to a diagram I have created to try and encapsulate my understandings and reflections on all the above subjects, while also attempting to include my idea of an “emergent interpretant” which manifests itself at the epicentre of interpretive, subjective, objective…

As you can see in the diagram, things almost always get to the point where people delusionally think/expect a word to actually have a meaning in the present, which was created inthe past, and then contemplated to be permanent into the present… and as if they act accordingly, it will continue into the future a certain way. Just reflect back on all the arguments you have had with people regarding the “correct” definition of a word… Sure it makes practical sense… but not logical sense… but who cares about logic, thats a flawed system as well (look to Godel’s theorem of incompleteness, and then think twice about using a formal axiomatic system)… the point being that we should reflect on the presence of passion in regards to what drives us… rather than trying to escape it through the prism of science… at least in the idea that science can provide any objective “answers”.

Funny how we continue to look for reassurance outside of ourselves, rather than accept that we cannot ever escape ourselves.

Ok, so what are some examples of an “emergent interpretant”, which what I mean by that, is that it hijacks the individuals capacity to interpret, because the individual comes to believes that something actually has intrinsic value in the present…

Examples are marriages, countries, monetary systems, companies, laws, as well as very simple everyday things like walking on a sidewalk.

You can find evidence of the emergent interpretants in language such as , “the rule of law and order”, or “I shouldn’t be doing this, I am married”, or “fiat money has no intrinsic value, but gold does”…

The reason I say this is because of temporal concerns…

Ok so, lets say I want to buy some apples… so I go to the store and I see a sign that says “$1 per apple”, well does that actually mean that the price of an apple is $1, or does that set an exchange rate in stone? If you believe it does, then that is actually the emergent interpretant in control… because nothing can actually be worth anything specifically until it is exchanged as such… but at which point after the transaction it moves to the past… so in order for anything to equal anything in the present, it requires a contemplation of permanence of the past into the present.

Your country, your marriage, your company, your relationships to anything, do not exist in the present… it is how you think, believe, and act in the present in correspondence to other interactants, that the relationships will be maintained or persisted or constructed or deconstructed as such…

Dont take them for granted, as actually existing in the present… we must “bring them forth”… and not let them “bring us forth”…

Any relationship I think will fail when the people involved let the construct become greater than they are… you must always work to keep the construct in check, and keep it as an emergent construct of your independent selfs…

This has value I think in well practically anything regarding two or more individuals…

Ill try and explain better later, as well as provide some additional diagrams.

Oh and this is the diagram for freedom vs. security (all of them are constantly under revision)…

xwisee_temporalModel

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