Well Readers... This one of my Assignment for Semantics and i
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SYMBOL AND REFERENT
THE
NATURE OF SYMBOLS AND REFERENTS
1) Definition of Symbol and Referent
The
first is, that a symbol is an object that is being used by someone or something
to refer to another object called the referent.
For examples:
·
in a book, you have the word cow, and the word cow is
then used to refer to some real cow out in the real world.
·
or you have a picture of a cow in a book, and its a picture of cow named
Daisy, with black and white spots, who live on a particular farm, at a
particular farm, at a particular time, and here is this complete picture of
Daisy.
The picture is an object, and the
ink on the paper is an object, and the picture is made of paper which is an
object, and this compound object is being used to refer to the
actual cow that existed in the real world.
The referent also is an object, it too exists in the real world, just as the symbol does.
Obviously, that's where milk comes from. Mooo!
Or the other example of referent:
·
in the sentence Marry saw me, the referent of the
word Marry is the particular person called Marry who is being
spoken of, while the referent of the word me is the person
uttering the sentence.
2) Symbols and Referents are
Two Different Objects
We have to
know that symbol and referent are two different objects.
Due to they are two different
objects, they have to different quality sets, each one describing
the object that the quality set belongs to.
For example:
·
the picture of the cow is made of paper, made with ink, make with a
photographic process, is basically two dimensional and exists in a book.
That's a symbol, it has qualities
and it is an object which exists.
The referent is a real cow,
its made out of skin, bones, blood and teeth, eats grass and goes moo!
So we can see that the two
different object have tow different quality sets.
3) Symbols and Referents have Different Quality Sets
Some of the
qualities of the symbol will not exist in the referent at all. And some of the
qualities of the referent will not exist i the symbol at all.
For examples:
·
the picture of the cow is made of paper and ink, and yet there is no
paper or ink in the real cow. The real cow is made out of blood and bones.
The picture of the cow is not.
So
each one of these objects has qualities that are unrelated to the
other object.
Yet the picture of the cow
looks very much like the actual cow, they have geometrical congruence
or similarity.
Technically congruence means identical is shape and size, while similar means
same shape but different size. We use the two terms interchangebly through
out this lecture.
Also the
paper that the picture is printed o has substance and so
does the real cow. Both have mass and weight etc.
Thus
there will often be qualities between symbol and referent that belong to both
symbol and referent.
4) Some of The
Qualities of The Symbol are Mapped to Qualities of The Referent.
Some of the qualities of the
symbol are mapped to some of the qualities of the referent. In other words some
of the qualities of the symbol are used to refer to some of the qualities of
the referent.
The
quality in the symbol that is mapped to the quality in the referent may be two very
different qualities. It is not the similarity in qualities that
matters but consistency of mapping and use. In this way the symbol can be
used to refer to the referent, not just in a dumb way where symbol refers
to referent, but in a more meaningful way in which the symbol's qualities point
directly to the referent's qualities.
For example:
·
in the picture of the cow there is a pictogram of a cow, of Daisey
in particular, its a space time drawing, with color, black and white
spots, outlines, projected in two dimensions, that has a one to one general
spatial correspondance to what Daisey actually looks like. w call this
geometrical congruence between symbol and referent.
In this case
it is pretty easy to look at the symbol and tell what it symbolizes because
of certain subset of the referent's qualities.
5) Symbols can Have Picture Form
and Data Content.
The
fifth thing to know about symbols and referents, is that symbols can have
pictogramness or picture form, and they can also have data content.
For example:
·
the word 'cow' certainly doesn't look like a cow, and certainly
doesn't have a lot of data in it that would tell you what a cow might be
It's an arbitrary symbol.
However a picture of a cow has
both picture form and data content.
Picture
form means there is a one to one correspondance between some part of the
symbol, the picture of the cow, and the actual referent. Picture form means the
same thing as geometrical congruency.
Data
content means that contained in the symbol either in its picture form or in
some other form is encoded data that will tell you something specific and true
about that referent.
For
example a hologram film plate of a cow has very low picture form but very high
data content about the cow. The data content can be extracted from the
hologram film plate and in fact turned back into picture form with lasers
shining through it at just the right angle.
A
digital photograph of the cow, that is turned into one's and zero's and then
encrypted has zero picture form, but again the data content remains very high
and can be recovered from the data form.
A scientific tome without
pictures or diagrams about the cow is also a symbol for the cow.
Such a
book, being all printed words, has a very high density of symbols which in
themselves have very little picture form or data content. The word 'cow' tells
you nothing about the referent, but once connected to a memory bank that
understands what cow refers to, the data content can again be extracted that
properly describes the
referent.
So the
word 'cow' is low picture form and low data content.
A book
about the cow is low picture form and high data content.
A
photographic picture of a cow is high picture form and high
data content.
So in
summary symbols can have very high picture form, very high data content, or
both or neither.
In
general however high picture form implies high data content as long as the
picture form is geometrically congruent to the referent.
6) Symbols and Referents always
Have a Causal Pathway between Them.
The
sixth thing to know about symbols and referents is that there is always a
causal
pathway between them.
For example:
· if you take a photograph of a
cow, clearly light bounces off the cow, comes into the camera lens,
affects the silver crystals on the film, and it gets developed,and the film is
a direct causal result of physical interactions in the physical universe that
can be traced back from the film surface to the cow and the photons bouncing
off the cow from the sun.
Even
if someone a million years ago invents the word 'cow' to refer to the
general class of cows, there still had to be at some point a causal
pathway between the actual cow and the fact the person one way
or another, directly or indirectly, came up with a word 'cow' to
represent it. If there were no causal connections between the cow and the
person, the person would never have had a need or cause to invent a word to
refer to it.
And
so that symbol 'cow' invented by the caveman still has a causal heritage, a
causal pathway, back to an actual cow or mental imagine of a cow in the
mind of the person using the symbol.
Thus
where ever there is a symbol that refers to a referent, there must have
been some causal pathway, either direct or indirect between the original
referent and the symbol.
From
this we conclude that if there is no causal pathway between two objects, they
can not be symbol and referent to each other. And if they are symbol and
referent to each other, there must be a casual pathway between them.
So
there we have said something very odd, and the astute reader will notice that the
following definition of symbol and referent is a superset of the normal
language usage.
We
are going to assert by definition that any two objects which are causally
related to each other are symbol and referent to each other. The referent
is the earlier event and the symbol is the later event.
Notice
that when two objects (events) are causally related to each other, the symbol always
contains some data in its final state about that causal relationship between
the symbol and the referent. Some data content is transferred between referent
and symbol every time there is a causal event. This is called a data
transfer via causal imprint.
In
any two objects that are causally related to each other, the after object is
the symbol for the before object which is the referent, and the after
object contains a data 'imprint' on its state that contains data content about
the nature of before object. The symbol is imprinted with data content
about the referent.
In
the case of arbitrarily chosen symbols chosen by man to refer to objects, such
as the word cow, the data imprint is not so obvious. It isn't obvious that
we can learn about what a cow really is by looking at the word 'cow'.
The
data transfer has either been interrupted between referent and symbol,lost to
antiquity, or dropped below the noise floor.
But in the case of symbols that are directly and intimately causally connected
to an immediately prior referent event, the data imprint on the symbol is embodied
in the very nature and state of the symbol after the event occurs.
Sources:
http://www.lightlink.com
https://en.wikipedia.org
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