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Jonathan Beardsley (Mar 26 2020 at 15:20):Has anyone seen this paper on "Algebraic Semiotics?" @Shon Feder (he) (F2'19) on Twitter just shared it with me: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/as.pdf They're already using the word morphism and talking a bit about category theory.
Shon Feder (he) (F2'19) (Mar 26 2020 at 15:55):Jonathan Beardsley said:
Has anyone seen this paper on "Algebraic Semiotics?" Someone on Twitter just shared it with me: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/as.pdf They're already using the word morphism and talking a bit about category theory.
Just to clarify and sharpen the point, iiuc, Goguen's work on Algebraic Semiotics is explicitly rooted in a category theoretic formalization of Peircian semiotics.
Jonathan Beardsley (Mar 26 2020 at 17:56):Thanks for the clarification! At first I hadn't realized that because it hadn't been OCR'd so I ctrl+f'd the word "category" and couldn't find anything, haha. But now I see that it's VERY categorical. Cool!
Burak Emir (Mar 26 2020 at 18:30):Yes, Goguen was there before us, it seems!
Burak Emir (Mar 26 2020 at 18:32):"a user interface for a computer system can be seen as a semiotic morphism from (the theory of) the underlying abstract machine (what the system does) to a sign system for windows, buttons, menus, etc."
Matt Cuffaro (he/him) (Mar 26 2020 at 18:34):I think Goguen has gotten the closest to a theory. There is the Leandro Categorical Semiotics paper which I haven't examined closely
Johannes Drever (Mar 26 2020 at 18:37):Goguen did also quite some work together with Varela. In his "categorical manifesto" he writes that western thinking tends to focus on the objects rather than the morphism and cites Varela's radical constructivism for a different perspective.
Matt Cuffaro (he/him) (Mar 26 2020 at 18:46):there's the Varela name again!!
Johannes Drever (Mar 26 2020 at 18:54):yeah, at some point I got really interested in radical constructivism. It's kind of the epistemology of cybernetics, at least following von Foerster and von Glasersfeld. Maturana and Varela visited the Biological Computer Laboratory and von Foerster picked these ideas up.
Jonathan Beardsley (Mar 26 2020 at 18:55):oh wait are Maturana and Varela the autopoiesis people?
Johannes Drever (Mar 26 2020 at 18:56):yes, they summarized their finding in the "Tree of Knowledge" and that is what Goguen is citing.
Jonathan Beardsley (Mar 26 2020 at 18:57):Aha. Yeah I briefly bumped into the ideas around autopoiesis a while ago, but like everything else never wrapped my head around all of it (perhaps because I was simultaneously doing a PhD in algebraic topology)
Matt Cuffaro (he/him) (Mar 26 2020 at 19:01):M&V are very popular in the Gregory Bateson/Margaret mead "second order cybernetics" people. I'm making a reading list for us
Matt Cuffaro (he/him) (Mar 26 2020 at 19:01): Matt Cuffaro (he/him) (Mar 26 2020 at 19:02):anyone heard of this? by mathematician A. Ehresmann (spouse to the other Ehresmann)
Johannes Drever (Mar 26 2020 at 19:11):Autopoiesis is a bit weird. Maturana has developed a specific langue to describe these phenomena. This makes it hard to understand, IMHO. Varela was more mathematical inclined and used category theory to describe his ideas. In "Prinicples of biological autonomy" he describes autopoiesis as the complement of control. An engineer looks at a system and identifies the variables which can be used to control the system. The complementary view is autonomy, which describes which processes happen inside the system. These processes are also what creates the system, hence autopoiesis. So the complementary views are the control view from the outside and the recursive, autopoietic view from the inside.