Re: The word "symbol"

"dawn" <dawnwolthuis_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:1124063917.008727.271740_at_o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
> David Cressey wrote:

> 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 like this. In linguistics, you have units of meaning called "words". At another level, you have
"morphemes", and at another "phonemes". The brain does a remarkable job of sorting all this out, and integrating it into "meaning".

Likewise, the values you find at the intersection of a row and a column of a table, or in whatever structure you prefer to think about, are "atomic" when viewed from a certain perspective. When viewed from another perspective, they are anything but atomic. The lowest perspective I deal with is the "bit" and the "string of bits". There are plenty of perspecitves below that, but I don't deal with them.

It's handy to have a word like "symbol" that applies generically to signal elements, even if they have specialized names in particular contexts. There are certain features that are common to symbols, regardless of whether they are phonemes or relations.

> 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).
>

Agreed.

Just to give a practical example, there are many circumstances in which it is more practical to store and use a telephone number as a string of digits than as an integer. Received on Mon Aug 15 2005 - 14:33:14 CEST