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Part II Order in Peirce's Sign Relations and Derived Categories

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Part II Order in Peirce's Sign Relations and Derived Categories Part II Order in Peirce's Sign Relations and Derived Categories 214 215 Chapter 4 Sign Relations and Categories D'una citt`a non godi le sette o le settantasette meraviglie, ma la riposte che d`a a una tua domanda. Italo Calving, Le Citt¶a Invisibility I have neither desires nor fears, the Khan declared, and my dreams are composed either by my mind or by chance. Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other su±ces to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives a question of yours. Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Themes through the mouth of the Sphinx. Italo Calving, Invisible Cities 1 1Italo Calving, Invisible Cities, Harvest Books, William Weaver (Translator), 1986, added italics 216 4.1 HCI and Communication The relatively recent awareness for a mutual influence between Informatics and com- munications has attracted the attention of some people across HCI and Informatics to disciplines that study language, communication, and interaction. In the remainder of this dissertation I increasingly narrow down the thesis' scope to such a niche. Across the HCI literature, several authors have already stressed the importance of com- munication in Informatics and in HCI. I quote some authors who expressed related thoughts in Table 4.1. However it should not be forgotten that linguistics played a key role both in the introduction of computer languages and in its formalizations. The presence of a broad understanding of communication in Informatics slowly drifted from a key role in the sixties to the periphery of the discipline. It has remained in its outskirts until recently. During the 1960s, the focus on syntax given in courses such as programming languages and compiler construction were complemented by topics with broader foci on languages and cognition in information retrieval and arti¯cial intelligence. With the development of Informatics, once programming languages and compilers acquired a certain autonomy, the semantic and the pragmatic aspects of language were slowly abandoned by the involved community. The trajectory of phenomena related to communications, language, and interaction has followed the same pattern discussed here in Informatics and HCI. See Table 4.2 for a brief trajectory of language and communication related topics across the ACM curricula recommendations. Noam Chomsky's contribution to the formalization of grammars has been key to the theoretical understanding of computers since the sixties. In 1956 he was working at the MIT Department of Modern Languages and at the Research Laboratory of Electronics. I have chosen Noam Chomsky's work to discuss how narrow are the concepts of languages in Informatics for two reasons. Firstly, Chomsky's theoretical sca®old has been partially discarded, and only a slice of his work in known in com- puter science. Secondly, in language studies, his whole work in linguistics has even 217 1993 Tom Dayton et al. Skills Needed by User-Centered Design Practitioners in Real Software Development Environments (Dayton et al., 1993, p 17) [S]ocial, organizational, and communication skills are at least important as formal, technical knowl- edge, and are even necessary to ensure that the formal, technical knowledge is used e®ectively. 1993 Judith S. Olson et al. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: Research issues for the 90s (Olson et al., 1993, p 93) Research in CSCW contains everything in HCI plus: There is a need for theories and models of the users. With group work, theories must additionally encompass the conversations among the participants, the roles they adopt, and the organizational setting which guides many group work actions implicitly, and the cultural practices. 1994 John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid Borderline Issues: Social and Material Aspects of Design (Brown and Duguid, 1994, p 5) We take design to be fundamentally a communicative process. 1994 Terry Winograd Designing the Designer (Winograd, 1994) Brown and Duguid's Article [Brown and Duguid (1994)] reflects a growing awareness that HCI has a social and a communicative dimension, which is equally central to the ¯eld as the psychological and cognitive issues that have long been at its core. 1994 Gary Strong et al. New Directions in Human Computer Interaction (Strong et al., 1994, pp 26) HCI research should probably confront human-human communication as the ¯rst order approximation of information transfer and study that. As development then works to make HCI more seamless with human-human interaction, success will be assured because interaction will then be transparent in the hands of the user, allowing the user to focus complete attention on the tasks at hand. 1996 Jean B. Gasen HCI Education: Past, Present, and Future? (Gasen, 1996, p 25-26) The emphasis on the social contexts of computing will become more important as everyone considers ways in which technology is metamorphosing communication at a global level. 1996 Brad Myers et al. Strategic Directions in Human-Computer Interaction (Myers et al., 1996) Human-computer interaction (HCI) is the study of how people design, implement, and use interactive systems and how computers a®ect individuals, organizations, and society. This encompasses not only ease of use but also new interaction techniques for supporting user tasks, providing better access to information, and creating more powerful forms of communication. Table 4.1: HCI and the study of communication 218 The historical relation between computing and communication can be traced across the several ACM Curricula recommendations. Briefly, in Curriculum 68 there were proposed courses on: (a) Formal Languages and Syntactic Analysis (b) Information Organization and Retrieval in which semiformal languages and models for the representation of structured information, as well as several methods for natural language analysis and evaluation were presented. (c) Computer Graphics, which were aimed at the study of handling graphic information in computers and its applications (d) Arti¯cial Intelligence and Heuristic Programming, which introduced students to non-arithmetic applications of computing machines and issues related to cognition and intelligence. There were several other courses in common with engineering, and Large Scale Information Processing Systems certainly intersected with Information Systems. In Curriculum'78, natural language processing and non-arithmetic issues were diluted into a topic of Arti¯cial Intelligence, large scale information systems were narrowed to ¯le-processing and database management, computer graphics disappeared, and an advanced course on computers and society was proposed, but seldom implemented. Formal languages remained in an elective course on Automata, Computability, and Formal Languages. In Curricula 1991, formal languages topics were listed within the areas of Algorithms and Program- ming Languages. Human-Computer Communication, basically interfaces and computer graphics, was introduced. Restricted topics in information retrieval, natural language, and social and ethical issues were listed as sub-topics of Database and Information Retrieval, and Arti¯cial Intelligence. The social and professional context was included but not clearly emphasized. In Curricula 2001, draft version of March 2000, formal languages are an item in automata theory within the area of Algorithms and complexity. Human-Computer Interaction and Computer graphics will be included; natural language processing is a topic of Intelligent Systems; Collaboration and groupware technology is a topic of net-centric Computing; Social and Professional Issues are clearly emphasized; and Databases turns into Information Management. In 2001 the committee subdivided the curricula in ¯ve strands, emphasizing the relations among four branches of Informatics: Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Computer Science, and Information Systems. Table 4.2: Communication in computer science curricula. See Chapter 1 for detailed references. 219 been criticized for being excessively narrow. Within the framework introduced here, Chomsky's formalization of syntactical structures are quasi-independent linguistic strata (levels). Indeed, as the ¯rst sentences of \Syntactic Structures", Chomsky wrote: 1957 Noam Chomsky Syntactic Structures (Chomsky, 1957, Preface) This study deals with syntactic structure both in the broad sense (as opposed to semantics) and the narrow sense (as opposed to phonemics and morphology). It forms part of an attempt to construct a formalized general theory of linguistic structure and to explore the foundations of such a theory. In that book, Chomsky dedicated a speci¯c chapter to syntax and semantics. In it, he clearly discusses the relation of the syntactical level of language to the phonologic, morphologic and semantic ones. Chomsky clearly stated that only a broader theory of language, one that included the theory of linguistic form and theory of linguistic use, would be capable of addressing the correspondence between formal and semantic traces (Chomsky, 1957, 9.3). Indeed, Chomsky also stated that to understand a sentence, knowledge about each linguistic level was not enough, because notions such as sense and reference, which belonged to the domain of semantics, were necessary (Chomsky, 1980, section 9.4, p 113) and Chomsky (1957). The assumed independence of Chomsky's levels facilitated the segmentation of language studies into several strata and its appropriation by Informatics.
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