Triangle of reference

The triangle of reference (also known as the triangle of meaning^[1] and the semiotic triangle) is a model of how linguistic symbols are related to the objects they represent. The triangle was published in The Meaning of Meaning (1923) by Ogden and Richards.^[2] While sometimes known as the "Ogden/Richards triangle" the idea dates back until at least 1810, by Bernard Bolzano, in his Beiträge zu einer begründeteren Darstellung der Mathematik.

The relations between the triangular corners may be phrased more precisely in causal terms as follows:

1. The matter evokes the writer's thought.
2. The writer refers the matter to the symbol.
3. The symbol evokes the reader's thought.
4. The reader refers the symbol back to the matter.

The commuicative stand

Such a triangle represents ONE person, whereas communication takes place between TWO (objects, not necessarily persons). So imagine another triangle and consider that for the two to understand each other, the content that the "triangles" represent must fit or be aligned. Clearly, this calls for synchronisation and an interface as well as scale^{[disambiguation needed ]} among other things. Notice also, that we perceive the world mostly through our eyes and in alternative phases of seeing and not seeing with change in the environment as the most inmportant information to look for. Our eyes are lenses and we see a surface (2D) in ONE direction (focusing) if we are stationary and the object is not moving either. This is why you may position yourself in one corner of the triangle and by replicating (mirroring) it, you will be able to see the whole picture, your cognitive epistemological and the ontological [[existential] or physical model of life, the universe, existence, etc. combined.

Direction of fit

Main article: Direction of fit

John Searle used the notion of "direction of fit" to create a taxonomy of illocutionary acts. ^{[3] [4]}

World or Referent	intended →	Writer's Thought
decoded ↑		↓ encoded
Thought Reader's	← extended	Symbol or Word

Word-to-World Fit

Writer's THOUGHT retrieves SYMBOL suited to REFERENT, Word suited to World.

World-to-Word Fit

Reader's THOUGHT retrieves REFERENT suited to SYMBOL, World suited to Word.

Actually the arrows indicate that there is something exchanged between the two parties and it is a feedback cycle. Especially, if you imagine that the world is represented in both persons' mind and used for reality check. If you look at the triangle above again, then remember that reality check is not what is indicated there between the sign and the referent and mareked as "true', because a term or a sign is allocated "arbitrarily'. What you check for is the observance of the law of identity which requires you and your partner to sort out that you are talking about the same thing. So the chunk of reality and the term are replacable/interchangeable within limits and your concepts in the mind as presented in some appropriate way are all related and mean the same thing. Usually the check does not stop there, your ideas must also be tested for feasibility and doability to make sure that they are "real" and not "phantasy". Reality check comes from consolidating your experience with other people's experience to avoid solipsism and/or by putting your ideas (projection) in practice (production) and see the reaction. Notice, however how vague the verbs used and how the concept of a fit itself is left unexplained in details.

The Delta Factor

Main article: The Message in the Bottle#"The Delta Factor"

According to Walker Percy, the anthropological theories of the modern age "no longer work and the theories of the new age are not yet known". Percy therefore sees his task as coming up with a new theory of man, which he chooses to center on language, man's attribute that separates him from the animals. Percy regrets that no existing research really deals with the question of how language really works, of how human beings use and understand the symbols of linguistics. Percy puts this question into a sort of no-man's land, what he calls a "terra incognita", between linguistics and psychology.

The Delta Factor, first published in January 1975, is Percy's theory of language on the one hand and his theory of man in a nutshell on the other, eventually to be expanded in The Message in the Bottle (1975).^[5] It adapts itself to the story of Helen Keller's learning to say and sign the word 'water' while Annie Sullivan poured water over her hands and repeatedly made the signs for water into her hand. A behaviorist reading of this scene might draw a causal relationship such that in response to Sullivan's stimuli in her hand Keller made a connection in her brain between the sign and the substance. This is too simplistic a reading, insists Percy. Keller was receiving from both the sign for water and the water itself, which make up a triangle together with Helen such that each corner leads to the other two corners. Percy argues that this linguistic triangle is "absolutely irreducible" and serves as the building block for all of human intelligence. The moment when this Delta Δ entered the mind of man, he became man.

Furthermore, the corners of the triangle depart and evolve from their behaviorist perspectives. Helen Keller becomes something other than just an organism in her environment because she is coupling two unrelated things—water the word and water the liquid—together. Likewise, water the liquid is made something more than water in itself because Keller has coupled it with the arbitrary sound 'water', and water the word becomes more than just the sound or sign for it. In this way, "the Delta phenomenon yielded a new world and maybe a new way of getting at it. It was not the world of organisms and environments but just as real and twice as human" -- man is made whole by the Delta Δ where the popular notions of religion and science had split him in two.

Looking at the story and example to illustrate thinking cognition one may see/interpret the set in terms of semantic primitives that are the building blocks of thinking in the pre-language period of individual and collective development. In terms of semantic primitives everything may be reduced to the concepts of object, relation and property that are the elements of an upper or foundation ontology. Here water (an object (a phyiscal tangible object) is related (through the mental operation abstraction represented by a verb) to the word water (another object, but as the result of the operation a property of the original object, now an object of abstraction or concept in the mind in whatever physical variation). This triplicity, trichonomyhttp://www.dictionarist.com/trichonomy or triangle is present in many other wording and model of the world, sometimes making you dazzled as they were paradoxes, because it is difficult to think in threes, even in algebra. (By the way, how do you multiply three numbers?)

References

1. ^ Colin Cherry (1957) On Human Communication
2. ^ C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards (1923) The Meaning of Meaning
3. ^ John Searle (1975) "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts", in: Gunderson, K. (ed.), Language, Mind, and Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) pp. 344-369.
4. ^ John Searle (1976) "A Classification of Illocutionary Acts", Language in Society, Vol.5, pp. 1-24.
5. ^ Walker Percy (1975) "The Delta Factor" in The Message in the Bottle

See also

• De dicto
• De se
• De re

External links

• Jessica Erickstad (1998) Richards' Meaning of Meaning Theory. University of Colorado at Boulder.
• Allie Cahill (1998) "Proper Meaning Superstition" (I. A. Richards). University of Colorado at Boulder.