RE: [humanmarkup-comment] Base Schema-community: SEMIOTIC COMMUNITY

[cognite@zianet.com]

Some analysis of the term 'community' for the HUML thread.
SC                                      c. 1 August, 2002 by S. Candelaria
de Ram, its author.

I. B A S I C S
	DECOMPOSITION
	RECONSTITUTION, with Features/Specs
II.  N O T E S
	Presuppositionals needed:  
	En fin:  COMMUNITY, SEMIOTIC COMMUNITY
III.  O T H E R 
	Representational adequacy

There's some work in here on the definition/description
of SEMIOTE and its relation to SELF/SELVES.  Looks like
COMMUNITY and SEMIOTIC COMMUNITY can be handled.  The
kind of things that can be members of communities gotta be
SHARERS.  This stuff coheres with the SEMIOTE stuff.
A concise formulation of COMMUNITY as Process may aid
in programming to underlie HUML markup (in the way HTML 
<UL><LI>*</UL> and <A HREF="LETTERSEQUENCEi">LETTERSEQUENCEj</A> 
entail computer program conversion functions in browsers to 
lay out an Un-numbered List or Hyperlink on the user's screen).

Like the earlier thing I made up on SEMIOTE, this turned out to be 
kind of hard-hitting or "dense", as Rex says, like math is, or logic. 
So for the sake of thinking about all the points, this time I've got 
them numbered like equations below.  I wish they didn't glop up
 the looks, but let's make a pact to just imagine them in tiny 
italics, or something ;)

--------------------------------------
I.  B A S I C S

[0]	commmunity

A.  DECOMPOSITION:

[1]	co + mun			

[2]	co <- [Romance/Latinate 'with']       + mn <- [Indo-European root, seen
also in 'moon' esp. as in 'moon around'; still a word in Hindustani]

[3]	co:  share/shared + mn:  one's own world-sensitivity/feelings

B.  RECONSTITUTION:

[4]        shared world
[5]		  selves with commonality of experience, whether past, present or future, 
	   		and openness to SHARING.

[6]	community: selves with commonality of experience, whether past, present
or future
			and openness to SHARING.

Features/Specs:

[7]	Members of a community must have selves with world-sensitivity/feelings.
(This does not require that members be all of a single species or agent
type.  Thus
a group's pets may be part of the community.  Conversely, any community must
needs 
be diversified.)

[8]	Pre-requisite  for a community's being seems to be the existence of
selves that share.
	("Proquisite" might be a better word  -- a possibilitator.)

[9]	Communication is a way of sharing.

[10]	A community may develop characteristic processes of communication,
describable
in general as ways of sharing world-sensitivity data (and/or feelings).

[11]	Community is causally prior to semiosis (and to signs as symbols and
systems of 
signs that serve as symbols).


--------------------------------------
II. N O T E S:  

A.  Presuppositionals needed:  

[12]	SELVES:  With this definition we might need a sufficient
definition/description of "self" 
			to have  a fully coherent system of terms.  Have we got one?
			Also a process to differentiate SELFi, SELFj (and ascertain plurality).

			Nice to see this fitting into the SEMIOTE stuff everybody liked, like this:

[12.1]
			SELFi [in context] * -- energy transmission [context] * --> SELFj [in
context] *
			==may become==>  
			SEMIOTEi [in context] * --signal [context] * --> SEMIOTEj [in context] *

[12.2]			which is in general:   pre-semiotic ==may become==> semiotic.

			A canonical special case is idempotency.  The idempotent cases are 
[12.3]			SELFj = SELFi and SEMIOTEj = SEMIOTEi .  
			Or, in the plural (after all, we are talking COMMUNITY),
[12.4]			SELVESj =~= SELVESi and SEMIOTEj* =~= SEMIOTEi*.
			(All carrying contexts as before.  I am using '=~=' here to mean 
			something like 'is approximately equal to'; it's a bit complex
			due to the time that communicating takes.)

[12.5]			Reflexivity and talking to yourself/yourselves are critical processes 
			for capturing a signal/symbol system.  Continues to fall out nicely.

			IT MAY BE THAT THIS, PROCESSUALLY, CONSTITUTES COMMUNITY FORMATION.
			
[12.6]
			(SELFi [in context] * 
			-- energy transmission [context] * -->
			SELFj [in context] * ) *  <==> COMMUNITY
			
			Note that last *, which indicates repetition; repetition leads
			to a CONTINUING COMMUNITY, with CONTINUING COMMUNICATION.
[12.7]			
			It's that last star that constitutes what the "-ity" suffix on
			"co + mn + ity" indicates.  The -ity says that we've got an 
			"abstract" object; actually what we have is a composite-phenomenon. 
			A composite-phenomenon, with embedded, intrinsic context.

			One more wrinkle regarding the nature of the SELFi whose
			COMMUNITY forms.
			Thinking of putting AGENTi,j * in place of SELFi, j * to form communities 
			seems not quite right; something is lacking, something to do with 
			personality or spontaneity of action or maybe of being a SHARER....  So: 
[12.8]			(1) Just having Agents does not necessarily give us a community.  
[12.9]			(2) We see that the kind of SELVES we need here must have the
nature for 
			SHARING.  They have to recognize and appreciate that
			COMMONALITY, processing their world with their sensitivity to it.
			Recognizing and appreciating are processes, in which HUML can aid. 

[12.10]			(Hmmmm....)  This is to posit that the SELVES have to be
SHARER-SELVES!  
			
			Earlier discussion in this thread of community-membership-by-assent
			and children in a family bears on this point; assent might be seen as
			enhancement of current-SHARING tendency, and dissent as its inhibition.
			This will still work for a baby.  It interacts with dependence needs.
			But that's psych, and a simple positing of SHARER-SELVES may cover
			just enough for what we need.  (Right?)  But the fact of actual
			participation, willy-nilly, seems to constitute membership.  

[12.11]
SHARING: Not neatly separable from [potential community-member-]SELVES, as
noted.  
			[Processual ascertainment might be practical for this:  What do you 
			think?]  			COMMONALITY is another essential, though.

[12.12]
COMMUNICATION: a way/ways of SHARING by SELVES 		[This is a partial 
			definition/description only]

[12.13]
Given such definitional dependency, COMMUNITY, based on it, would 
	not be a primitive. 

------
B.  En fin:

[13]
	COMMUNITY: SHARING-SELVES with commonality of experience, whether past, 
	present or future, and contextual conditions/enablement for SHARING.

[14]
			(SELFi [in context] * 
			-- energy transmission [context] * -->
			SELFj [in context] * ) *  <==> COMMUNITY

[15]
	SEMIOTIC COMMUNITY:

[16]
			SELFi [in context] * -- energy transmission [context] * --> SELFj [in
context] *
			==may become==>  
			SEMIOTEi [in context] * --signal [context] * --> SEMIOTEj [in context] *

		when

[17a]
			SELVESi* ==become symbolizers [to themselves and each other] ==> SEMIOTEi*
		That is, stated more precisely, with the essential contexts explicit:

[17b]
			SELVESi [context] * 
			==become symbolizers [to themselves and each other] [context] * ==> 
			SEMIOTEi [context] *

-----

A typical contextual condition for sharing used to be common geolocale and 
simultaneous existence.  No more.  Hence need for HUML, our HUman Markup 
Language work.


--------------------------------------
III.  O T H E R

C.  Comments on Representation:

	Seems to me sets are helpful concepts, as noted earlier in the thread, but 
sets are not sufficient for representing the semiotic:

[20]	A "self" is idiosyncratic, unlike an element of a set.
[21]	A "self" is grounded thru sensitivity, unlike an element of a set.

[22]	A community is necessarily diversified, more than a set is.
[23]	A set is defined by declaration; it is a theory construct.  A community
is not.
[24]	A community comes into being by virtue of its natural existence in the
real 
world.  [Sharability is also entailed.]  (Artificial agents are somebody's 
artifices -- and that somebody (or somebodies) is a realworld "self".  
[25]	Animal agents even more clearly come into being thru spontaneous
actions of 
realworld things.)

Therefore, whereas some of the properties of sets (distinct elements) and set
operations (intersection, idempotency for example) are conceptual analogues to 
sharing by individual agents, they are not adequate to represent community, or 
self, or communication, which are real (grounded).  

Similar problems are found with standard logics.  Ultimately, these
observations 
lead into non-classical, grounded logic for representing such things, such as 
given in Candelaria de Ram (1992, PRAGMASEMANTICS: TOWARD A
COMPUTER-IMPLEMENTABLE 
MODEL FOR LINGUISTIC COGNITION). Representing dynamics is an essential here.

However, for HUML we can finesse all that probably, in preference to our 
computer-document markup/handling goals.  There use of math notation is mighty 
mighty handy for what we're doing, and translates well for computer programming 
to implement it.

-------

SC