Re: The word "symbol"

David Cressey wrote:
> "VC" <boston103_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:wr2dnQNiDv01YWbfRVn-iQ_at_comcast.com...
<snip>
> All I'm trying to show in this discussion is that the word "symbol" is NOT
> my own peculiar addition to the language of the study of data. The idea
> that the data inside a computer is expressed in symbols may be novel to you,
> but it hasn't been a new revelation to me since about 1962.
>
> That doesn't mean that "symbol" is the silver bullet for the "theory of
> everything". It just means that it's an accepted concept that has real
> meaning to some people in our field. And its meaning is not subsumed by the
> word "value".

I suspect that the term "symbol" would have a more agreed-upon meaning among us than many of our terms. I like it better than the terms "sign" or "signifier" even if those are more common in semiotics.

> However, the entire chapter 1 of the book is devoted to the relationship
> between symbols and meaning. I keep seeing the word "semiotics" used in
> here, and that word is novel to me.

My daughter explained it to me once as "what linguistics is to words, semiotics is to signs/icons/pictures". The language of semiotics can incorporate the use of words as signifiers (symbols) too. I have found it helpful to have read a little about semiotics as well as linguistics in order and apply this to modeling activities. I came away from such reading with the feeling that applying a mathematical precision to data models after we have done the mapping from the real world to the data model has the same difficulty as measuring with a micrometer and cutting with an axe.

> It's not clear to me just what
> semiotics is, but I suspect that the relationship between symbols and
> meaning is pretty close to it.
<snip>
Yup.

The question of whether to model integers used within software as subclasses of strings, for example, makes sense when we understand that 1234 is not a number, but a symbol for one, just as "David" is not a name, but a symbol for one (in response to VC's question about whether "symbol" and "name" are synonyms).

--dawn Received on Mon Aug 15 2005 - 01:58:37 CEST