Finite semiotics: recovery functions, semioformation

and the hyperreal

Abstract: The grounding of semiotics in the finiteness of cognition is extended by examining

the assumption that cognition can be compared or described. To this end, the two means by

which qualitative values for cognition are putatively derived – introspection and observation

– are framed in terms of the semiosic field as metacognition and trans-metacognition. These

recovery functions are seen to be complex and mutable, dependent on context and habitus

rather than objective encapsulation of past thought. An alternative view of cognitive

similarity is offered: that recovery functions stabilise a mythology of cognition that facilitates

its allocation by important discourses such as psychology, neurology, philosophy, and indeed

semiotics. These superstructural discourses, in turn, operate to shape the context and habitus

of new agents, including the proliferation of recovery functions. To formalise this cyclically

determinative process, a concept of semioformation is introduced that locates the ontogeny of

agents among the cumulative externalities of other agents. Determination, rather than

description, is therefore posited as the effect of the assignment of qualitative or equivalence

values to cognition. With this in mind, technology is highlighted as a critical area in which to

examine recovery functions and semioformation. In particular, the category of the real is seen

as undergoing rapid mutation.

Keywords: finite semiotics, recovery function, metacognition, trans-metacognition,

semioformation, hyperreality

1 IntroductionIn Shackell (in press) I outlined a theory of semiotics based on the finiteness of cognition and

defined an artefact (rather than a “sign”) as: “a more or less dynamic division of the universal

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state that works in a reticular manner to determine and regulate cognition and perpetuate

itself.” This definition rests upon the assertion that the world (“universal state” in my

preferred term) has no objective form relative to any agent and is instead continuous with and

idiosyncratic to each agent that arises as part of it. From the observation that cognition is

finite, I asserted that the modality of cognition is discretisation, meaning that the relation of

the agent to the universal state appears to us in cognition as arbitrary objects that nonetheless

have non-arbitrary reality due to the finiteness of cognition (for what occupies cognition must

at that moment be all we know of reality). It is these cognitively real objects that I called

artefacts, in part, as will become clear, to suggest that they are historical and human-

centrically constituted, and that their recovery is not trivial. There is something of quantum

mechanics in such assertions. I am at the same time saying that there are no objects, that

objects nonetheless are real in cognition at the time of thinking, and that, once thought, they

can only be recovered as fleetingly real “new” objects. The implication is that regularities in

the serialisation of cognition is what creates the structure we experience as meaning, and that

paradoxes in the discourses that examine this structure should not be unexpected.

2 Review of core concepts of finite semioticsThe formal foundations for the theory of finite semiotics can be summarised as:

1. Cognition being finite, each agent (human being) is or is not having a thought at any

moment.

2. As cognition is finite there is a sequence to cognition.

3. The sequence of cognition bears a relation to the world. For example, hot weather

often accompanies thoughts of drinking water. Similarly, hearing the words “Look

out!” can cause an agent to suddenly change its thinking, as can consumption of

alcohol, or the positioning of text in front of the eyes.

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4. The movement from one cognitive state to another we can label semiosis. The study

of how this movement occurs we can label semiotics.

5. The effect of semiosis on the cognition of other agents (through action of the body as

part of the world, for example) can be called its valency.

6. The observation that much semiosis has a zero valency may be important to the

structure and stability of cognition.

2.1 The semiosic field

The above propositions, applied at the population level, lead to the construct of the semiosic

field which is simply a formal model of global cognition highlighting the relativity of the

cognition of any one agent. A basic representation is offered in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The semiosic field of all agents

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2.2 Equivalence of the semiosic and epistemological fields

An important corollary of finite semiotics is that due to the dependence of knowledge on

thought (for what is never thought cannot be knowledge), the semiosic field is coextensive

with epistemological space. This is seen as a possible source of relativistic effects in

examination of the field by any single agent.

3 The recovery of qualitative features cognition

3.1 Sememes and the comparability of cognitive

In Shackell (in press) I offered an exploration of pattern possibilities in the semiosic field,

specifically a new definition of a sememe as a recurrent string of cognition either within

single agents or between multiple agents. This was seen as useful because such patterning is

the level at which semiotic analysis traditionally operates: if a sign causes multiple agents to

think in similar ways, or causes a single agent to think habitually in a certain way, semiotics

has a substrate upon which to build tropes, mythologies, master signifiers and so on.

Analysis, so predicated, continues to be a tool for negotiating much insight and

understanding, not just in semiotics but in many fields. The underlying assumption that signs

and the cognition that engenders them are comparable is generally not problematized, but

acquiesces perhaps to the paradox that the semiological must always flirt with the semiurgical

(Cf. Berger, 1972).

Finite semiotics, however, seeking to progress from the single tenet that cognition is finite,

must question the implicit practice of assigning cognition a qualitative or equivalence value.

In fact, qualitative treatment of cognition has already famously been questioned by Quine

(1951) who saw little evidence that cognitive synonymy (the possibility that two agents can

think the same thing) has any rationale beyond pragmatic illusion. Quine notwithstanding,

finite semiotics might return to the question to ask: given the relativistic discretisation that

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accompanies an instance of identification of a cognitive state, and the supposed entropic

progression of the world, how could cognition ever be assigned an objective value allowing

comparison? Must not any qualitative statement about our own or another’s cognition be

arbitrary and tendentious?

3.2 Intentionality

To answer the question above and enrich the finite semiotics model, it is necessary to

challenge the most accepted and some might say obvious feature of cognition: that our

cognitive states are “about” things – a notion that has been keenly asserted in western

philosophy under the label intentionality since Brentano (2012 [1874]). Proponents of

intentionality such as Searle (1983) use metaphors of containment and directedness to

describe thought and leave tacit the assumption that the cognition of agents is comparable.

Implicit is the assertion that speaking of cognition as “I think X” or “Anne thinks X” must be

possible, for a denial of this property of thought would seem to fly in the face of the process

that has taken place to communicate it – a performative contradiction. It is this circularity

upon which intentionality relies.

I wish, however, to approach the issue of the assignment of equivalence values to cognitive

states from a different perspective: by taking as it were the integral of the intentional “about”

and examining the ways cognitive states about cognition arise from agent ontogeny rather

than as a backformation of situational outcomes (such as communication). To this end, I wish

to begin by formalising, in terms of the semiosic field, the two ways in which knowledge

about cognition is supposedly derived.

3.3 Metacognition and trans-metacognition

Two methods of interrogating cognition using cognition are commonly adduced: a

metaphorically inward, self-focused case (“introspection”); and an outward, other-focused

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case (“observation”). The statement “I felt hungry yesterday” is taken to be an instance of the

former; while “John smiled at me so he likes me” is taken to be an instance of the latter. For

recovery of our own thoughts we can borrow the label metacognition. For recovery of the

thoughts of others we can coin trans-metacognition. In each case, both the precedent and

resultant cognition form part of the semiosic field as illustrated in Figures 2 and 3.

Figure 2. Metacognition in the semiosic field.

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Figure 3. Trans-metacognition in the semiosic field.

3.4 Recovery

Cognition in both these modes proceeds by what we might call recovery, in which we

supposedly recover our own previous thoughts or the thoughts of others and either directly

recapitulate those thoughts or make them some component of new thoughts. Implicit is a

recovery function by which a resultant cognitive state supposedly bears some relation to a

previous one (direct re-experiencing, for example). Above I introduced very simple examples

of metacognition and trans-metacognition involving hunger and smiling. But consider how

we might interrogate several slightly more complicated and contextualised examples of

recovery:

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1. We are asked what we were thinking about on New Year’s Eve 1999. We mention the

“Y2K bug”. The “Y2K bug”, in this instance, comes into cognition as an artefact via a

metacognitive recovery function that we may justify as “remembering”. In what sense

does “Y2K bug” capture the cognition of that entire day or some moment of that day?

This question might be answered in terms of salience, the effects of intervening

cognition on memory, the pragmatics of the moment of asking, or evoke numerous

other discourses. The “Y2K bug” may even still seem an acceptable answer even

when we later recall that we were actually reading a Harry Potter book and watching

Casablanca most of that day.

2. We wake one day to see on our smartphone that the date is July 14 and that the

Google logo is coloured red, white and blue like a Tricolore. We might think of the

Prise de la Bastille on 14 July 1789 even though we live on the far side of the world

from Paris, were not alive even two hundred years after the recalled event, and could

not name any specifics beyond guessing at peasants with pitchforks and guillotines.

What exactly have we recovered in this case?

3. We remember that a friend has a birthday coming up. We ask ourselves what that

friend would like as a present and decide on something to do with “skiing” because

we look over and see her looking intently at a web page showing the name of a ski

resort. (In this case the artefact “skiing” is recovered by a trans-metacognitive

recovery function via the valency of the web page. Semiotic arguments could be

variously made that the web page is an index, metonym or synecdoche of the friend’s

thoughts; or we might invoke psychology, fate, logic or any number of rationales.)

Later, however, we find out that the page was just being studied as a good example of

web design. Nonetheless, we have already acted in a certain direction from our initial

inferential recovery and ordered her a pair of mittens online for her birthday. We later

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tell the story of how the gift was chosen and the rationale becomes socially useful to

explain such a gift in the middle of summer.

4. We look at ourselves in a mirror and ask “What am I thinking about?” We find that

our thoughts enter a loop striving to capture a thought other than “What am I thinking

about?” In this case a regressive collision of meta and trans-metacognitive functions is

rationalised to occur.

The common lesson of these examples is that the trajectory of a recovery in semiosis may be

longer, more mutable, and complex than the traditional narrative of introspection and

observation suggests. I leave it to the reader to judge how successful a definition of a

recovery function could ever be, especially given the distortions, biases and appropriations

recovery exhibits.

3.5 Contrary direction of recovery to cognitive determination

The problem of ever defining a recovery function can be illustrated further by reference to the

arrow of time enforced on an agent by the universal state. Recovery is supposedly a process

that can be executed “at will” by an agent: I can ask myself or another what they were doing

yesterday and they will respond. Again the success of communication seems to bear out the

obviousness of recovery. But this ignores the path leading up to the prompt to remember.

Even more fundamental than the recognition of communication, is the fact that thought is

path dependent. If we had never before thought of Europe, we would be unlikely to suddenly

find ourselves thinking that we were standing in it, or that Napoleon was European. If we had

never learned to read, we would be unlikely to stare for long periods at the inside of books.

We find ourselves recovering thoughts not only because we previously had them, but also

because we had many other thoughts before and after them that led to the moment and

context of recovery. The only evidence we can find in our cognition of recovery is more

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cognition asserting that we remembered, an interrogation that must also result from path

dependence.

In terms of the semiosic field, recovery functions operate as a cultural mythology of

command and of the reality of the past. Without this transparent mythology there could be no

larger allocative disciplines: the juridical, psychological, political, scientific all rely on the

unassailable functions of cognitive recovery to assert intent, sanity, legitimacy and

objectivity. This unassailability perhaps explains the feeling of performative contradiction

described above in regard to the success of communication making the notion of

intentionality seem necessary.

A depiction of the contrary direction of recovery functions and the determination of thought

in metacognition is presented in Figure 4. In essence it proposes that the cognitive state

resulting from metacognition is dependent on (only arrived at due to) previous states and so

cannot bear any purely objective relation of recovery to them.

Figure 4. Contrary directions of recovery functions and path dependent cognitive determination

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3.6 Recovery functions as habitus

A recovery function describes a mechanism of semiosis, which finite semiotics defines

simply as the process of moving from one cognitive state to another. In a common narrative

of remembering, for example, we supposedly move from thoughts of here and now to re-

experience thoughts from the past: the equivalent of a movie flashback. But such a narrative

is naïve. In creating objects from semiosis, we divide or discretise the world and advance

semiosis by that discretisation in probabilistic rather than mechanical ways. Thus we

remember a bicycle we once owned and how it blew a tyre and caused a crash and resolve to

replace bald tyres on our car and get a donut from the place next to the tyre shop and aren’t I

hungry and so on. This is sometimes discretised, for example, as “what we are thinking

about” or “the stream of consciousness”. The process can itself become the object of

cognition – as in the narrative of remembering. The idiosyncratic nature of such

discretisation, however, is not usually recognised but is a habitus more in the manner

Bourdieu ([1972]1977) theorised, having instilled momenta and potentialities in the agent via

long exposure to cultural vectors.

3.7 The discourses of qualitative cognition

The above discussion emphasises a key assertion of finite semiotics: that any analysis of

cognition must be via cognition. For introspection and observation, if the initiating and

resultant cognitive states of such analysis are to bear any regular relation other than seriality,

they must imply an objective recovery function.

This would seem problematic to discourses assigning values to cognition. For there appear to

be many subjective influences on recovery, and considerable path dependence in the role of

previous cognition in arriving at an instantiation of recovery. The discourse of intentionality,

for example, seems particularly prone, for it is derived from a set of strict but arbitrary

recovery functions that must lead to a resultant cognition by definition at odds with that

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which it seeks to be “about”. For in essence intentionality relies on “observing that I am

thinking X” having a special, extra-cognitive relation to “thinking X”, which it only has in

the discourse of intentionality and the paths that lead to and away from it. Comparably

privileged recovery narratives might be seen to operate in psychology, neurology, and

information technology. The tacit boundaries of interrogation created by recovery functions

(which one must accept or be silently excluded) allow the description of domain-local objects

from which other discourses can more broadly elaborate systemic semiotic prescription.

A common objection to this discussion might be to point out that phenomenology, philosophy

of mind, psychology, neurology, information technology and other recovery dependent

disciplines do plainly exist and do offer tangible textbooks and articles that occupy large

buildings and computer server farms, and that many people state that they work in these

areas, and that these disciplines do good, have saved lives and explain much. Apart from the

usual observation that phlebotomy, phrenology and alchemy once were similarly extolled, or

that the externalities of a discourse are not always fully accounted, we might glean an insight

from such a bricks and mortar objection: these historical discourses are all around us. They

organise thought, and moreover, they organise the world thought emerges from. Any new

agent is confronted with a world that already contains philosophy, psychology and

information technology: each of which implies cognitive comparability and has evolved to

make this mythology ubiquitous.

Whatever else such disciplines engender, their fundamental and collective role is systemic: to

supply a discourse to capture, direct and neutralise cognition about cognition. In this vein we

might pose some provocative counter-questions:

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1. Could cognition not in fact be completely idiosyncratic but nonetheless worked upon

by a system of valent discourses via which the rationale of comparability is made

irresistible and its denial “silent madness”?

2. If (1) is true, would this not make cognitive comparison a habitus of action and

response rather than a matter of fact?

3. Would scepticism about cognitive comparability be usefully explanatory in regard to

issues in the discourses that rely upon it? (The notion of “cognitive biases”, for

example.)

3.8 An alternative view of cognitive comparability

Above I have suggested that a “cognitive state” can only come into existence (that is, into the

semiosic field) by some path dependent identification of it as such an object by an agent. As a

next step, we might ask how such habitus might arise. To this end, it is necessary to view the

semiosic field longitudinally and consider how agents develop in relation to the universal

state from which the field arises. In doing so we bring into play the enormous complexity of

overlapping, historical agent ontogenies: a process we might call semioformation.

4 Semioformation: agent ontogeny and semiosisHeidegger observed that a human agent enters a world of arbitrary form or facticity, leading,

he claimed, to feelings of Geworfenheit or “thrownness” (Heidegger ([1927] 1996, p. 176).

One might add to this the fact of idiosyncratic variation: a baby born in Ecuador will

encounter a different world than one born in Greenland. Even monozygotic twins will

encounter the world with a diverging perspective. Nonetheless, however, the world each

agent develops into will always be one prepared for it by other agents in ways that render it

finite in cognition. This preparation will consist not only of the constraining form of the

world – continents, oceans, jungles, deserts, pyramids, houses of parliament, roads, books,

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computer networks – but also of the agents currently passing through it with their variegated

habitus arising from their individual ontogenies. This habitus is not simply the prevailing

effect of recent ancestors, but arises from the accumulated externalities of generations as they

emerge from the overlapping ontogeny of agents. Language, for example, arises in each new

agent via the meeting of the phylogeny of the agent (the potential to learn language) and the

world it encounters (agents producing the English language in context, for example). We can

call such a world “semioformed”. It is not a “natural” world but one in which the bequeathed

token “natural” awaits us.

It is important to note the level of ontological commitment above. An agent may enter the

universal state (and semiosic field) via a sterile delivery room filled with apparatus and

personnel who will perform specialised techniques immediately on it. It may be tempting,

therefore, to think that the semioforming of the world the agent enters is of an interventional

physical nature – a world of tubes, tables and televisions; a world of immediate explicit

physical disciplining of the agent such as Foucault emphasised. But the division into the

physical and non-physical is not asserted, for the physical cannot be named without the

discretisation necessary to also name the non-physical. The broadest perspective must be

adduced: each agent enters a world of immemorial origin with which speciation has been

coextensive. Each agent is continuous with the universal state and is constituted by the fact of

its existence to some role in it. In other words, the agent’s existence is not contingent on the

universal state but is coextensive with it. This relation manifests itself to observers in the

semiosic field as the “innate” ability to learn language, walk and so forth.

Rather than asserting as Chomsky (1959) did an objective “innateness” however, the situation

at this level is rather more that the world encountered has been calibrated to ensnare the

agent’s cognition and discipline it to certain valencies via existing discretisation habitus in

the semioformed context. In other words, the interplay of the agent and the world in which

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agents have lived since speciation is historical and determinative and not explainable as

simply physical (the concept of physicality being simply a basic structure in the Western

intellectual tradition). Or to put it more explicitly: human action in the world creates

structures that mould cognition of new agents by creating within those new agents

discretisation habits that structure, stabilise and delimit the agent’s cognition and semiotic

valency. In fact, the valencies that flow from the new agent are the very criteria by which the

agent is judged for admission to the semiosic field as an agent. If a new agent does not speak,

for example, a special treatment typically ensues.

From a cognitive perspective, agent ontogeny consists of the progressive discretisation of the

prepared world into the “facts” that become increasingly fixed as the “things” it ineluctably

divides into for us. Put another way, we inevitably bootstrap our cognition from the

externalities of other agents. Part of this is the habitus of recovery functions discussed above.

Semioformation builds potentialities in cognition that move us between cognitive states in

valent ways that sustain us as agents. These states appear structured and synonymous to us

because a supporting or scaffolding set of potentialities also develop that we experience as

the interrogative flow of consciousness. These interrogative functions seem satisfied when

they divert from a counter potentiality and cognition is deallocated.

A formal definition of semioformation is given in definition 1.

Definition 1

Semioformation is the progressive development of habits of semiosis by an agent

entering and progressing through a world containing the externalities of the

cognition of other agents.

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5 Hyperreality: semioformation and information

technologyInformation technology is currently the most ascendant force in semioformation. It is

characterised by its tendency to alter intermediation between thought and its outcomes in the

world: we consult our smartphones to see if it is raining rather than look out the window; we

download to e-readers rather than visit libraries; we order shoes online rather than go to a

store. This re-intermediation promotes what Baudrillard ([1981]1994, p. 1) called

hyperreality: “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality”. While the

progressive replacement of reality with simulacra may or may not be discernible, the concept

of hyperreality does have relevance to information technology, for it promotes the

reassignment of valency: a shift in cognition and its outcomes.

5.1 Reality functions

Just as metacognition and trans-metacognition are mythologised to recover objects from

thought but arise instead from larger forces in the semiosic field converging on the agent via

semioformation, the issue of what is real arises from a habitus of cognitive interrogation. The

question of reality arises only in certain contexts. When it does arise it appears that some

interrogation of our own has prompted it. We feel something is odd, weird, manipulated,

deceptive or alien. As for other recovery functions, however, the triggers for this are more

broadly engendered than the perception of something as “unnatural”. In any situation an

agent finds itself on a narrative trajectory bounded by a semioformed reality function. In

terms of Pokémon Go, for instance, the appearance of a Pokémon character on a correctly

positioned screen in front of a tree does not break the reality function of the engrossed player.

Cognition is seamlessly allocated to the game’s tasks and logic by such appearance, which

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saturates cognition. The emergence of a snake from the tree on screen, however, might well

confuse the player as to what is real, and lead to a rapid shift in reality functions.

5.2 Plasticity of reality functions

The question of hyperreality emerges when reality functions begin to mutate under pressure

from semioformation. To Baudrillard this had its origins in the relations of production and

consumption, but the causes are perhaps less about the finiteness of the material than the

cognitive.

There has never existed, for instance, an eBay store in the way physical stores exist. Early in

its history, eBay borrowed from the experience of physical stores: inviting one to “browse”,

add items to a “cart”, and “check out”. But eBay was able to incrementally enhance and

reconfigure itself from day to day to evolve new objects for its customers to contemplate:

“buy it now”, “auction”, “voucher”, customised banner ads, enhanced shipping options, the

“second chance”, the shifting bias of product images, feedback ratings, customer reviews,

listing offers, PayPal integration, trusted sellers and so on. A generation later, the experience

created is now cognitively much more intermediated than purchase from a physical store or

from a neighbour. (In fact, today when browsing through a physical store one may feel a

sense of frustration with the difficulties of finding a book or a correctly sized pair of jeans in

a “non-virtual” store.) As a by-product, the enhancement process creates new objects that

take up increasing amounts of cognition, becoming increasing real in this sense. This invested

cognition, in turn, promotes the emergence of still more objects allowing further re-

intermediation, making possible next generation sites that make use of customers’ newfound

readiness to buy online, a readiness pioneered by their eBay experience and the cognitive

artefacts created, not least of which is trust (being the absence of interrogations of deception).

With the passage of time, a significant shift occurs in patterns of cognition and the reality

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cognition implies. Facebook, to take a less mercantile example, is much more real to most

teenagers than it is to their grandparents.

Perceptions of hyperreality, however, cannot long endure. The relations between agents

become so intermediated that the intentional stance must mutate to accept as human the

onscreen avatar and digital proxy. To ask if something is real becomes unanswerable. Why

post on Facebook the question whether Facebook is real? At this point interrogation ceases

and the reality function collapses.

5.3 Hyperreality in finite semiotic terms

Finite semiotics frames the tendency to hyperreality as the progressive repopulation of the

semiosic field with low valency states that nonetheless have the effect of promoting a certain

social, economic, and psychological stability.

This is simultaneously compatible with, and reinforced by, the need for “docile bodies”

(Foucault, [1975]1977, p. 135) in modern environments (bodies that sit quietly on a bus, for

example); the need for economic activity (revenue for telecommunications companies, music

purchases, for example); and incremental “informing” or “disciplining” of agents (news,

advertising, bus timetable changes). Technology in this sense facilitates an orderly allocation

of cognition to socially unproblematic activities promoting economic efficiency and social

order. Moreover technology in this way establishes a dominant position in which it is

impervious to its own use.

Consider, for example, the valency observed daily in the use of mobile phones: some physical

effects occur via activity on the phone (pixels are activated, computer memory is updated,

friends are made to smile at text messages and meet us at cafes), but very little disruption of

the world is involved, for, in this case, by disruption we must mean anything affecting the

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continuance of the mobile phone system. One might compare this with McLuhan’s statement

that “it doesn’t matter much what you say on the telephone” (McLuhan, 1977).

A definition of hyperreality that might be useful in finite semiotic analysis is offered in

definition 2.

Definition 2

Hyperreality is characterised by low valency semiosis that promotes its own

reoccurrence and stability and tends towards extinction of interrogations of reality.

A representation of real and hyperreal cognition in the semiosic field is offered in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Hyperreality as decreased valency of cognition

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6 ConclusionThe recasting of introspection into metacognition, signs into artefacts, semiosis into finite

semiosis, and habit into semioformation may seem doctrinaire. What does such “micro-

semiotics” have to do with the study of signs? Is a reduction of cognition to cognitive states

and quibbling over how cognitive states are themselves recognised useful? Up until the

present age such an approach may not have been of the last importance. Much better to

examine the clear shape of static signs than the shifting shape of thought. While this is still

true at a certain level of analysis today, the shape of signs is becoming less obvious than the

rate of sign oscillation.

The mythology of the comparability of cognition, in the new context, seems powerfully

enlisted in support of the technological. Announcements about self-driving cars and

intelligent drones offer the impression that objective needs – based on our “common”

cognition – are being better met on a daily basis. They imply a teleology of longevity,

comfort, progress and security. However, the more important mechanisms by which

technology currently advances are cognitive. Technology, under guise of an informational

remit, now operates at the ontological level, divorcing cognition from valency to the point of

problematizing reality. Applying finite semiotics and derived formalities such as

semioformation can allow interrogation of an otherwise inscrutable terrain. It might allow us

to ask, for instance, if there is any longer an “un-Google-able” fact? How technology driven

increases in the basal rate of semiosis might create mental illness? Why trust on the internet is

seen as requiring a technological solution? All of which might lead us to a better ability to

discretise our predicament.

Above all, however, finite semiotics alerts us to one mechanism of the hyperreal that

Baudrillard perhaps stressed too little: to deceive and determine us a technology need not

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perfectly simulate reality – it need only offer signs at the margin to which interrogations of

reality, be they introspective or observational, can be mutated or excluded.

7 ReferencesBaudrillard, J. ([1981]1994). Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press.

Berger, R. (1972). La mutation des signes. Paris: Denoël.

Bourdieu, P. ([1972]1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Brentano, F. (2012 [1874]). Psychology from an empirical standpoint. Hoboken, NJ:

Routledge.

Chomsky, N. (1959). A review of BF Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language, 35(1), 26-58.

Foucault, M. ([1975]1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York:

Random House.

Heidegger, M. ([1927] 1996). Being and time: A translation of Sein und Zeit. New York:

SUNY Press.

McLuhan, M. (1977) The Medium Is The Message/Interviewer: R. Moore. Monday

Conference, ABC Radio National. Transcript accessed 1 August 2016 at

http://www.allreadable.com/3d76Kk8V.

Quine, W. V. (1951). Two dogmas of empiricism. The philosophical review, 20-43.

Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind: Cambridge University

Press.

Shackell, C. (in press). Finite cognition and finite semiosis: a new perspective on semiotics

for the information age. Semiotica.

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Bionote

Cameron Shackell (b. 1969) is a researcher at the Queensland University of Technology

c.shackell@hdr.qut.edu.au and a software entrepreneur. His research interests include applied

linguistics, computational intelligence, and evaluation of natural language processing

systems.

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