Web gems: information entropy; teleology in semoitics; and, Uuh?

[Glenn Scheper]

“[Socrates]: Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like 
painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one 
asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written 
words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you 
question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and 
the same thing [they are unary devices, in our terminology]. And every word, 
when [275e] once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who 
understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to 
speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its 
father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.”.
  -- http://www.science.uva.nl/~seop/archives/spr2006/entries/information-semantic/
Semantic Conceptions of Information (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Spring 
2006 Edition)

	and

In a remarkable programmatic paper titled "Anticipation: A Spooky Computation" 
Mihai Nadin has written that "every sign is in anticipation of its 
interpretation". He explains (NADIN 2000: §5.1.1):

  Signs are not constituted at the object level, but in an open-ended infinite 
sign process (semiosis). In sign processes, the arrow of time can run in both 
directions: from the past through the present to the future, or the other way 
around, from the future to the present. Signs carry the future (intentions, 
desires, needs, ideals, etc., all of a nature different from what is given, 
i.e., all in the range of a final cause) into the present and thus allow us to 
derive a coherent image of the universe.

Anticipation is a process through which the representation of a future state 
determines a present semiotic event, and this implies a teleological dimension, 
not of an Aristotelian, but of a Peircean kind15. Put briefly, one simply needs 
to remember that for Peirce every symbol is teleological in the sense that, 
being preoccupied with its own development into new interpretants, some of which 
are dynamic and thus anchored in an experience they modify, it adopts a 
conditional (would-be) form that orients it toward the future.
  -- http://www.unav.es/gep/SeminariodeTienne.html
André De Tienne: "Peirce's Logic of Information"

	and

Protestant ethics sanctioned local reflexivity in our colloquial command of the 
world. If reflexive functions can subsequently be ascribed as degrees of freedom 
to subsystems of communication (e.g., the free market, the freedom of religion, 
etc.), the gradual transition into a self-organizing regime of translations is 
only a matter of time: global adjustments are based on the recursive selection 
of lower-level variations.
  -- http://users.fmg.uva.nl/lleydesdorff/commsoc.htm
THE NON-LINEAR DYNAMICS OF SOCIOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS


BTW, my freeware WordsEx program is getting very competent now!

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.