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 example, 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 a
cow named Daisey, with black and white spots, who lived on a
particular farm, at a particular time, and here is this complete
picture of Daisey.
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. Moooo!
2.) SYMBOLS AND REFERENTS ARE TWO DIFFERENT OBJECTS
So the second most important thing to know about symbols and
referents is that they are two different objects.
And because they are two different objects they have two
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, made 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 and bones and
blood and teeth and eats grass and goes moo!
So you can see that that the two different objects have two
different quality sets.
3.) SYMBOLS AND REFERENTS HAVE DIFFERENT QUALITY SETS
So the third thing to know about symbols and referents is that
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 in the
symbol at all.
For example 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 bone. 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 simiarity'.
Technically congruence means identical in shape and size, while
similar means same shape but different size. We use the two terms
interchangably through out this lecture.
Also the paper that the picture is printed on 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.
The fourth thing to know about symbols and referents is that 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. We 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 a certain subset of the symbol's qualities
are very related to a 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 decribes 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 transfered between referent and symbol everytime
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.
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