Reflection On Recursion • Discussion 1

Re: Reflection On Recursion • 1
Re: Laws of Form • John Mingers

JM:: This is a very important and interesting topic. I think you should consider the relationship to self‑reference, indeed are they really the same thing?
Also the work of Maturana and Varela on autopoiesis and the neurophysiology of cognition which also has recursion at its heart.

Thanks, John. Yes, we certainly find the whole array of self concepts coming into play here — selfhood, autopoiesis or self creation, self reference and self transformation, just to name a few. But one thing I need to emphasize from the start is how radically different such concepts appear when viewed under x‑rays of Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics.

I forget where I first heard it, but it’s fairly common observation that the persistence of a recurring problem is a symptom of how unlikely it is to be solved in the paradigm where it keeps occurring.

After a while, it simply becomes time to change the paradigm …

Just by way of a first example, take the very idea of “self‑reference”. The moment we place it in the medium of triadic sign relations we realize signs do not refer to anything at all except insofar as an interpreter refers them.

And when we think to ask, “What is this that we call an interpreter?”, the pragmatic theory of signs tells us we cannot tell when we turn out the light but under the x‑ray of the pragmatic maxim the sum of its effects is effectively modeled by an extended triadic sign relation.

Everything I’ll be working at here will be done within a framework like that.

Regards,
Jon