Dynamic Semiosis: Meaning, Informing, and Conforming in Constructing the Past

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In this article the author attempts to bring together some previous
work characterising the cultivation of historical knowledge with both
a semiotic account and a more worked out ontological basis. This is
certainly a very worthwhile aim and I believe that such a combination
will help broaden the appeal of the approach as well as mking explicit
interesting interconnections for develo** it further. In attempting
to do this, however, the author does open themselves up to some
further questions as well as some related work that is not addressed;
I would suggest that the paper show some awareness of that work
(mostly in ontology) but without necessarily going into any great
detail: that could well be the subject of more developed discussions
in other papers if this is taken further. The connection with
semiotics also appears to have been published before, however, and so
this should be referenced and structured more prominently in the
current paper; as an example, the flavour of semiotics drawn on is
strongly biosemiotics in orientation -- this is stated explicitly in
other papers but here appears more or less implicitly: the restriction
(quite appropriate and unproblematic in its own right) to adopt terms
and positions from biosemiotics (or biosemiotic developments of
Peirce) should be clearly signposted. I take the connection with
ontology to the main new content of the present paper.

My comments are thus mostly to be taken as suggestions for
potential improvements, rather than critique at this point. I'll run
through the paper rather than organising by topics or
importance.

The paper's opening comment in the abstract (and in the first
paragraphs) that ``anything in the past is the product of cognition''
reads a little oddly as one must ask, what, then, might not be a
product of cognition (if we are concerned with human understanding of
the world)? I think this makes much more sense when expressed more
fully as the author does in one the paper's cited: ``The past is
always something that is constructed by thinking, writing or speaking
about former times.'' This makes it clearer what is being said and
so could be used here as well.

In section 1 we hear: ``CPT is a general, abstract, ....'' etc. but no
references are given. It would help the reader considerably here if
already the present paper were related to the previous papers by the
author and its state of development. On reading the second paragraph
it is unclear whether the author is describing a new theory, a theory
that allready exists, a theory developed by someone else somewhere
else, etc. This is unnecessary given the previous existing work. The
``Earlier publications about CPT" (penultimate paragraph of §1) comes
to late and also fails to explicit cite the appropriate references.

In §2, where the connection to ontology is made, there should also be
a more liberal sprinkling of references to appropriate work. The
distinction between endurants and occurrents is indeed fundamental,
but the reader would be helped considerably with some references to
where these terms are used or defined. This is also important because
the precisely placement of ontological dependents (which could also
receive appropriate references) under endurants/occurrents (or
endurants/perdurants or continuants/occurrents to use the pairs more
frequently contrasted) could well make reference to relevant
discussions in the formal ontology literature. The referene to TypeDB
is here rather weak given the ontological discussions that would be
relevant here. How, for example, might the proposal for CPT relate to
formal ontologies such as DOLCE and BFO, more or less standard in the
formal ontology literature (see for example Applied Ontology - Volume
17, issue 1 for some overviews). In addition, and particular relevant
for the use to be made of the proposals in the current paper would be
the relations of the model to the Descriptions and Situations
extensino to DOLCE, as this appears to overlap considerably with the
author's current aims as well. It would be relevant therefore to
contrast or relate the approaches; this would be necessary for the
work in a formal ontology context -- for the current paper making
reference to the existence of such ontological developments and why
they might (or might not) be relevant may suffice. There are several
other areas where development is underway and which might at some
point impact on the formalisations suggestions: the modelling of
behaviours (and affordances and dispositions) is itself an extremely
active area at this time. CPT's approach appears broadly compatible
with other formal ontology work, but the devil is in the details as
ever. There are also questions of method: the author quite correctly
notes issues with too lax attributions of roles; well-known techniques
for making sure ontologies do not get this 'wrong' include OntoClean
from Guarino/Musen as evaluation standards to be applied and so on.

Typo: ``the behavior, icon'' : no comma presumably
Typo: ``at on end'' --> ``at one end''

Figure 1: the design is a little unclear as too little separation is
made graphically between the networks presented and the notations for
those networks given below. One tries at first to read them as one
integrated diagram rather than a network plus further information.

The author mentions as a quality criterion: ``empirically
falsifiable'': this was not clear to me as empirical suggests a
relation to testing in the world, whereas the definition given appears
only formal. Is one talking of internal logical consistency here? Or
perhaps some form of model checking? It certainly did not seem to be
calling for experiments of some kind, which the term 'empirical' would
at first glance place nearer.

In FIgure 2 the entire framework could be benefically linked or
contrasted more with the DOLCE Descriptions and Situations (DnS)
framework as several of the categories appearing here appear to be
Descriptions in the formal sense that DnS offers.

In the discussion paragraphs following that figure I would have
expected more explicit use of the formalisation. The descriptions
given remain rather informal. Woiuld it be possible to draw more
explicitly on the ontological categories and relations defined?
If this is not done, and this applies to the sections following on
semiotics as well, then it is not clear what exactly the ontology is
offering for guiding inference and restricting/extending
descriptions. This is perhaps one of the differences between offering
a UML description and moving to ontology. One expects the ontology to
do more work in forming and validating descriptions and in suggesting
potential restrictions on characterisations of situations. This sense
of mutual constraint between ontological specification and the
informal descriptions offered was almost entirely missing: this means
that one could have given the informal descriptions without the
ontology, which is not how things should be. What follows from the
ontological description for the informal descriptions that would not
be evident without the ontological account?

I was not quite convinced as yet by the treatment of the relation
between the intentional descriptions assumed and products expressing
those descriptions. This is clearly an interesting area related also
to the semiotic account that follows. Talk of publications, etc. takes
one to the also very active area of formal ontological research into
Information Artefacts (compare the IAO: Information Artefact Ontology
initiatives: e.g.,  Sanfilippo, Emilio M. (2021) Ontologies for
information entities: State of the art and open challenges. Applied
Ontology. 16(2)). Later the author does make a reference to
'Information Object' but the reference offered (Deacon) is a long way
away from current IAO work.

I liked the description of vestiges and traces a lot; this could well
enhance some of the IAO descriptions at some point; there is work of a
related kind in more formal Editions Research, however. So perhaps
there there would be beneficial overlaps to tease out.

However, building on these points, although perhaps appropriate for
the Information journal, the discussion of Information in §4 is a bit
limited ontologically. This makes this section all the more
interesting potentially, of course, because it might then well be
valuable to make a connection with formal ontology efforts concerning
information (particularly in the IAO) that seem to me rather more
developed. This would then be even more interesting to combine with
the semiotics input, which is typically not done very much in the IAO
work.

More generally in the discussion of Peirce it was not always made
sufficiently clear where the author was drawing on Peirce and where
something different to Peirce was being done. My impression was that
almost everything that the author wrote, particularly about the role
of dynamics in semiosis, is quintissentially Peircean. But the text
sometimes appeared to be setting up a contrast between Peirce and
dynamics, which makes little sense. The author appears to be (wanting
to) refer to a "static sign model" with the usual representamen,
object, interpretant roles frozen into rigid structures: that such
static views have been adopted over time is certainly a problem, and
the author is entirely correct in calling that out and rejecting
it. But the static view is not Peirce's and that should be made
clearer in the discussion: in an important sense, the description the
author offers is reaffirming the importance of semiosis that Peirce
was at such pains to bring out -- this is certainly a good thing to
do, but should then be phrased more clearly in this sense.  Similarly,
I then became unclear (but have a suspicion given how the text is
phrased) in "CPT departs from the user of 'stands for' in Peirce's
..." whether 'departs' was meant in the 'begins from' or the 'differs
from' sense. I would suggest that the 'begins from' is the reading to
pick as all Peircean semiotics is dynamic. The static view is just not
Peircean.

And again: the author writes "Following Peirce's definition, semiotics
commonly models 'sign' such that the 'Something which stands' and the
'For Something' are both simple things" ... now, there are no doubt
semiotics of some stripes that might do such a thing, but Peirce does
not, and so to write this as 'following Peirce's definition' gives a
very inaccurate position. Unlimited semiosis that the notion that an
Interpretant can then feed into further cycles of semiosis makes it
impossible that just 'simple things' are involved, regardless of
whether one wishes to support Peirce's (earlier) use of unlimited
semiosis or not.

The proposals for the ontology diagrams for the semotic component are
a nice component, but the descriptive passages around them again do
not seem to be drawing (or being restricted by) the information in
those diagrams. For an ontological account, one would again want the
active role of the ontology in constraining what is said to be made
clearer. This is similar to the point made above about the lack of use
of the ontological descriptions provided. This connection is made
occasionally in the paper -- as in "FIgure 4 identifies five types of
things that can be targets of a semiotic construct": this is exactly
what is required and it would be good if this could be done more
often. But there are many interesting things to follow up here from both a
semiotic and an ontological orientation and that is certainly very
valuable already. I would take the contribution not so much as one of
'correcting' Peirce but of attempting to bring a thoroughly Peircean
view of dynamic semiosis together with ontology: a very worthwhile
goal.

Typo: (I presume): "Like its suptertype..." unless this is terminology
that I am not familiar with...

I found the use of syntactics, semantics, pragmatics is perhaps a bit
too traditional and there is certainly a lot of work on the multimodal
semiotics necessary for engaging with different kinds of forms of
expression more effectively; but perhaps that is unnecessary here.

Typo: "past can be viewed as as a synthesizing"

It would be far more convincing of the utility of develo** an
ontological account if the paragraphs beginning "An inferred ensemble
can bea strongly supported projection ..." also made mroe explicit
reference to the classes and relations proposed for their ontological
treatment earlier. Here again we fall back on informal description
that oculd have been written without any of the ontological work (it
appears). This might be sufficient here, but would certainly need more
development if the work to be presented in more ontological contexts.

The final paragraph then adds in additional references to 'systemic
functional linguistics' that I did not understand at all as no
relevant connection was made to that body of work. There would need to
be far more content there to warrant the connection and that might
also be too far afield for the current paper. The one reference
provided at that point (simply a handbook) is not convincing. If one
really wanted to make the connection with biosemiotics and the like,
more appropriate references would be work by Paul Thibault such
as "Languaging, Affective Dynamics, and the Human Ecology" (2020),
'Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body: An Ecosocial Semiotic Theory'
(2006), all fairly strongly embedded within SFL.

Author Response

Thank you for your extensive and insightful comments. They have lead me to almost entirely rewrite this article.

Your comments on ontology were catalytic generating the main element in the rewrite. They made me recognize that it was a mistake to try to include ontology within CPT. Doing so would inevitably lead to the types of criticisms you made regarding things such as the BOF and DOLCE.  More fundamentally, even the minimal ontology in the draft violated a basic principle of CPT, that it should be neutral not only with respect to what is asserted about the past but even about how a target past is constructed. CPT should not interfere with any constructor's use of ontology or taxonomy, but also it should not favor any particular one or even the premises behind an ontology, such as the BOF's assertion of objective realism. Imposing an ontology would also conflict with the use of semiotics which is ontologically and epistemologically neutral.

To avoid this conflict, ontology has been removed from the document.  Instead, the rewrite uses concepts from type theory to flesh out topics especially relevant to the domain of CPT, such as event and action. It extends this approach by showing how core concepts of semiotics can be expressed in type theoretical terms.

Accordingly, the discussion of semtiotics has been rewriten, not only in light of type theory, but also to eliminate what were, in this paper, inappropriate critiques of semiotics.  The revised version takes a more positive stance, concentrating on the applicability of semiotics to CPT.  There is no pretense that this is either exhaustive or definitive. Much more can and needs to be said.  That will be done in additional articles.  Much of the original concluding section addressed that issue, but in retrospect that was not appropriate.  The section has been rewritten to fit with the rest of the article.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read this interesting manuscript and to review it critically. I was not familiar with Constructed Past Theory and I learned a lot about it. I see myself as being very familiar with Peirce's work and semiotics more generally, so this is what I have focused on most in my critical reading. 

The application of semiotic concepts to CPT seems very feasible and reasonable and the article gives strong and convincing arguments for this throughout. Some of the details discussed about semiotics, meaning-making and signs are sometimes a bit blurry or treated in a way that it might lead to misunderstandings of the background and the theory's relation to this background. I am not to judge the correctness of the author's understanding of some bits and pieces, but I will point to some aspects that might profit from revisions to make things even clearer: 

- The main argumentation is that deviations from Peirce's theory are needed to better fit CPT and that one of the deviating aspects is the shift from signs to semiosis as a more dynamic process. After reading the text, it remains unclear to me whether this is a shift that seems not possible with or on the basis of Peirce's semiotic theory (by the way: Peirce is clearly not the founder of semiotics, but rather of a specific strand of the more modern approaches? semiotics has been there since ancient times...) or whether this is something that the author simply wants to highlight in a specific way. There is not much referencing in this part of the text, so it might also just be the case that some aspects of the richt work have rather been overseen. Clearly, Peircean semiotics does not only include the definition of signs as triadic concepts and a classification of several sign types, but also and most importantly, a very comprehensive understanding of sign interpretation, i.e. semiosis - in my opinion in exactly the way it is strengthened in this article, but without any clear references to Peirce's work later on. Peirce's thoughts on logics, abductive inferences, and semiosis  precisely argue for dynamic procedures of meaning-making, which I would also understand as 'common practices in semiotics' (p.10). The author, however, clearly states that 'CPT deviates from' them (p. 10). It is then a bit surprising that many of the aspects discussed thereafter are still very much in line with Peirce's ideas about knowledge, reasoning and the association of ideas, i.e. his conceptualization of logic as a general science of the forms of thought. I think that a more comprehensive insight into these aspects of Peirce's work would be very profitable for the manuscript and the theory in general. Important references here are 

 

Peirce, C. S. (1865). Logic of the Sciences. MS 726, 921. 

Peirce, Charles S. (1893–1913). Short Logic. Chapter 1: Of Reasoning in General. In: The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings: Volume 2. London: Bloomington, 11–26.

I think that the concept of abduction as introduced by Peirce seems a valuable and needed concept for further theorizing the construction of past, especially with regard to the differences and conditions in and for reconstructing signs and semiotic processes. 

- Details that are then discussed, such as 'semiotic construct' as the output of semiosis or 'semiotic coherence' then also seem to be concepts that are not completely new or newly constructed. It seems a bit too far off the topic of the manuscript, but I think that a lot more parallels can be found in contemporary work about Peircean semiotics in the context of multimodality research, i.e. in the work by John Bateman and in other approaches that for example also connect methods such as discourse analysis to semiotics. This might not be too relevant for this manuscript, but surely, further connection is possible and helpful. This is also interesting with regard to the small reference to systemic-functional linguistics that the author makes at the end of the paper. In order to include the notion of context further, which I find very important indeed, not only SFL, but also other discourse analytical perspectives could be valuable additions. If this then needs to be reconnected to Peircean semiotics, formal discourse analysis seems more reasonable, since these refer back to meaming-making processes on the basis of logics and abductive inferential meaning-making (see also above). 

Some discourse-related work by Peirce is available in

 

Peirce, Charles S. and Christine Ladd-Franklin (1902). Universe of Discourse. Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, volume 2, The Macmillan Company, Macmillan and Co, 742, URL: https://archive.org/stream/philopsych02balduoft.

The main reference for contemporary Peircean semiotics in the context of multimodality research more broadly would be 

Bateman, J. A. (2018). Peircean Semiotics and Multimodality: Towards a New Synthesis. Multimodal Communication, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1515/mc-2017-0021.

 

A final small point, which is more a formal aspect: at the end of the manuscript there is a rather abrupt ending. I would suggest that a somewhat broader outlook or discussion of the overall purpose of the manuscript can give a bit more guidance for the broad readership of the journal. 

 

 

Author Response

Thank your for your insightful comments.  They have enabled me to make substantial improvements in the manuscript.

In particular, the comments about the discussion of semiotics lead me to realize that I had deviated from my basic intention of apply concepts from semiotics in constructed past theory to express critical views of some aspects of semiotics.  I have carefully revised the relevant parts to accord with the original intent. In places where I had to address some difficulties, specifically with the various ways interpretant is treated in the literature, and indeed in Peirce's writings, I addressed them by showing that the -substantially different- articulation of CPT in the revision can accommodate various types of interpretant.  This was done in a positive tone. It is appropriate and valuable that a field as broad as semiotics encompasses different possibilities.

Your comments on the final section of the manuscript enabled me to see that what I had written was mainly musings on a follow-up article that I am working on.  The section has been completely rewritten to align it with this paper.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is an interesting advance on the author's previous work on CPT and, in my view, a more accessible approach. Semiotics could benefit from a more specific focus on the past, as the author is surely correct in noting that almost all traces of semiotic activity are ephemeral at best, while most semiotics models tend to present an ahistorical present. Semioticians also has the advantage of not being separated into "archival" and "non-archival" domains of interest as is often the case with LIS research, though I'm not sure that this journal attracts a wide readership of semioticians.

My main suggestion would be that the author provide a few more examples to illustrate his points, as the writing tends to be very abstract and providing "the bones" to flesh out the theory (as he successfully does in one instance) may help the non-ontologically-oriented reader to follow the discussion.

I was somewhat puzzled by the use of "wholistic" rather than "holistic" on page 9. If that usage was intentional, its meaning (which is of course different than that of "holistic") should be defined (though the difference is not nearly as dramatic as the many different meanings of "information" in the rest of the paragraph.) If it was not intentional, it should be corrected.

Author Response

Regarding your " main suggestion" to provide a few more examples, I have added several examples throughout the document. I have also added comments as to the possible applicability of the concepts of CPT.

"wholistic" on p. 9 was a typo that has been corrected.

For your information, Information has published articles on semiotics, including by one of the most prominent experts in the field, Terence Deacon