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Showing papers on "Sign (semiotics) published in 1969"



01 Jan 1969

2 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For all the height of excellence of the practical music of moderns, there is not heard or seen today the slightest sign of its accomplishing what ancient music accomplished, nor do we read that it accomplished it fifty or one hundred years ago when it was not so common and familiar to men.
Abstract: For all the height of excellence of the practical music of the moderns, there is not heard or seen today the slightest sign of its accomplishing what ancient music accomplished, nor do we read that it accomplished it fifty or one hundred years ago when it was not so common and familiar to men. Thus neither its novelty or its excellence has ever had the power, with our modern musicians, of producing any of the virtuous, infinitely beneficial and comforting effects that ancient music produced. From this it is a necessary conclusion that either music or human nature has changed from its original state.1

2 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, it has been suggested that Voltaire's works should be read as literature, that is, as a discourse whose central preoccupation is the linguistic sign itself.
Abstract: V OLTAIRE HAS BEEN the victim of his reputation and of his place in the Republican pantheon. Successive liberal regimes have expected his work to provide an appropriate sagesse-anti-clericalism (but not atheism), respect for property, optimism mellowed by a sense of life's ironies, a feeling for the refinements of civilized living and a decent concern for the well-being of others. It is, of course, possible to read Voltaire's works for the ideas in them and for the values they explicitly communicate. Candide, for instance, could be construed as a lively illustration and elaboration of Book 2, chapter 23, section 12 of Locke's Essay. Occasionally, it has been suggested that Voltaire be read as literature, that is, as a discourse whose central preoccupation is the linguistic sign itself. The two readings need not exclude one another, but the second, though it has had fewer champions than the first, may prove to be the more comprehensive. In general, Voltaire's discourse is made up of a single text.' There is no "second text" such as is constituted, to take two celebrated examples from the literature of the Enlightenment, by the footnotes in Bayle's Dictionary or the internal cross-references in

1 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
John Yates1
TL;DR: The U-language significance of the notion of "implication" is discussed in this paper, where it is used as a label for "addition" and "multiplication".
Abstract: Algorithmic techniques of various kinds are almost universally used in mathematical physics. These are frequently supplemented, in the case of fundamental physics, by a few of the elementary techniques of formal logic. In most cases, the semiotic aspect of the subject is not considered explicitly. This may be justifiable in principle if one has arrived at a short set of mathematical axioms from which the results of the theory under consideration may be deduced mathematically in a direct manner, though any interpretations of terms and connectives left without semantic comment until such axioms are obtained are in general likely to be unrewarding from the point of view of a directional semantic discussion of physical concepts. For instance, typical summaries of the lattice-theoretic approach to quantum mechanics assume that the sign ' =' means 'implies'. Reference to the literature of formal logic gives a large number of different ways 'implication' may be mathematically formalised (Curry, 1957), none of them (of course) entirely satisfactory as formalisations of the U-language term. There is no immediate reason why the term 'implication' should be forced into the description of a physically complex theory like quantum mechanics. One can quote Kleene (1962); '"Implication" is a handy name for '~ '. In using it, we follow the practice common in mathematics of employing the same designation for analogous notions arising in related technical theories. An example is the many different kinds of "addition" and "multiplication" in mathematics'. The easiest way out is to regard 'implies' as a label for' ~' and to endow that label with a U-language significance whenever one feels inclined to do so. However, if semiotic problems are ignored in this way, there are problems involved if one wishes to deduce a set of mechanical rules which will allow the axioms of a theory to be deduced from given experimental data. As well as the obvious difficulty that it is hard to define connectives properly if one does not know what they are intended to mean in the U-language, there is also the diff that until the metasemiosis problem has been considered a primitive frame with a clear U-language significance is unlikely to be obtained. In particular, since connectives 'v', '^', and '~' appear to be basic connectors in many schemes of deduction, they may also arise as adjunctors in the axioms ifa distinction (Curry, 1957) is not made between

1 citations