Advent of writing

Historians draw a distinction between prehistory and history, with history defined by the advent of writing. The cave paintings and petroglyphs of prehistoric peoples can be considered precursors of writing, but are not considered writing because they did not represent language directly.

Writing systems always develop and change based on the needs of the people who use them. Sometimes the shape, orientation and meaning of individual signs also changes over time. By tracing the development of a script it is possible to learn about the needs of the people who used the script as well as how it changed over time.

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Presentational markup

Presentational markup is an attempt to infer document structure from cues in the encoding.

For example, in a text file, the title of a document might be preceded by several newlines and/or spaces, thus suggesting leading spacing and centering. Word-processing and desktop publishing products sometimes attempt to deduce structure from such conventions, but, as the enormous variety of Wiki plain-text conventions prove, this is, as of yet, an unresolved problem.

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Metalanguage used in computing

The development of a programming language involves the use of a metalanguage. Backus–Naur form is one of the earliest metalanguages used in computing and was developed in the 1960s by John Backus and Peter Naur.

HTML and XHTML are examples of markup languages that can be used by anyone wishing to present Web pages on the internet with media such as text (formatted or unformatted), graphics, sound and video. Markup languages are different to metalanguages as they only describe how a document should be presented and not the syntax of a computer programming language. XML is the metalanguage used to describe to XHTML just as SGML is used to describe HTML. XHTML is much stricter than HTML, for example XHTML is case sensitive unlike HTML.

XML is used to describe other document types such as "OpenDocument Text" which is the native format for the word processor application in OpenOffice.org. Many other metalanguages have been based on the W3C XML 1.0 standard, including:
XQuery (An XML based Query language)
XLink
SVG
SMIL
Many more

There are in addition special markup languages for mathematical and scientific notation such as Tex and LaTeX or one of its many variants.

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Programming and natural languages

Programming languages differ from natural languages in that natural languages are only used for interaction between people, while programming languages also allow humans to communicate instructions to machines.

Some programming languages are used by one device to control another. For example PostScript programs are frequently created by another program to control a computer printer or display.

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Written language

Written language should be distinguished from natural language. Until recently in the developed world, it was common for many people to be fluent in spoken or signed languages and yet remain illiterate; this is still the case in poor countries today.



Furthermore, natural language acquisition during childhood is largely spontaneous, while literacy must usually be intentionally acquired.

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Post-structuralism as radicalization

Contemporary trends in usage seem to employ the term 'post-structuralism' less, rather than to engage with a specific body of scholarship, as there is no unified post-structuralist position with which to engage.

The term is also used as shorthand for what is seen as a radicalization of the French, academic left—and its American cousins—following the failure of the May 1968 French-student protests to produce a much-hoped-for revolution. This aspect also has some institutional context: many figures associated with post-structuralism were associated with the University of Paris VIII Vincennes in the northern Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis, established as part of the reorganisation of the French university system in general, and the Sorbonne in particular, either serving on its faculty or as formal and informal advisors on matters of faculty and pedagogy.

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Metalanguage

In his work, Elements of Semiology (1967), Roland Barthes advanced the concept of the "metalanguage".

A metalanguage is a systematized way of talking about concepts like meaning and grammar beyond the constraints of a traditional (first-order) language; in a metalanguage, symbols replace words and phrases. Insofar as one metalanguage is required for one explanation of first-order language, another may be required, so metalanguages may actually replace first-order languages. Barthes exposes how this structuralist system is regressive; orders of language rely upon a metalanguage by which it is explained, and therefore deconstruction itself is in danger of becoming a metalanguage, thus exposing all languages and discourse to scrutiny.

Barthes' other works contributed deconstructive theories about texts.

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Critical reading

Basically, many who began by stating that texts could be interpreted based solely on the cultural and social circumstances of the author came to believe that the reader's culture and society shared an equal part in the interpretation of a piece.

If the reader sees it in one way, how do we know that that is the way the author intended? We don't.

Therefore, critical reading seeks to find the contradictions that an author inevitably includes in any given work. Those inconsistencies are used to show that the interpretation and criticism of any literature is in the hands of the individual reader and will necessarily include that reader's own cultural biases and assumptions.

While many structuralists first thought that they could tease out an author's intention by close scrutiny, they soon found so many disconnections, that it was obvious that their own experiences lent a (possibly different) view that was unique to them.

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Diachronic and synchronic reading

Post-structuralists generally assert that post-structuralism is historical, and classify structuralism as descriptive.

This terminology relates to Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between the views of historical (diachronic) and descriptive (synchronic) reading. From this basic distinction, post-structuralist studies often emphasize history to analyze descriptive concepts. By studying how cultural concepts have changed over time, post-structuralists seek to understand how those same concepts are understood by readers in the present.

For example, Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization is both a history and an inspection of cultural attitudes about madness. The theme of history in modern Continental thought can be linked to such influences as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals and Martin Heidegger's Being and Time.

Structuralists also seek to understand the historical interpretation of cultural concepts, but focus their efforts on understanding how those concepts were understood by the author in his or her own time, rather than how they may be understood by the reader in the present.

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How knowledge is produced

The general assumptions of post-structuralism derive from critique of structuralist premises.

Specifically, post-structuralism holds that the study of underlying structures is itself culturally conditioned and therefore subject to myriad biases and misinterpretations. To understand an object (e.g. one of the many meanings of a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself, and the systems of knowledge which were coordinated to produce the object.

In this way, post-structuralism positions itself as a study of how knowledge is produced.

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reader as primary subject

In the post-structuralist approach to textual analysis, the reader replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry.

This displacement is often referred to as the "destabilizing" or "decentering" of the author, though it has its greatest effect on the text itself. Without a central fixation on the author, post-structuralists examine other sources for meaning (e.g., readers, cultural norms, other literature, etc.). These alternative sources are never authoritative, and promise no consistency. Texts signify from the "world" and from the position of one who is looking.

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Variety of perspectives

A post-structuralist critic must be able to utilize a variety of perspectives to create a multifaceted interpretation of a text, even if these interpretations conflict with one another.

It is particularly important to analyze how the meanings of a text shift in relation to certain variables, usually involving the identity of the reader.

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Chronotope

“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” introduces Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope.

This essay applies the concept in order to further demonstrate the distinctive quality of the novel . The word “chronotope” literally means “time space” and, in the essay, Bakhtin defines it as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature”.

For the purpose of his writing, an author must create entire worlds and, in doing so, is forced to make use of the organizing categories of the real world in which he lives. For this reason chronotope is a concept that engages reality.

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Individual purpose

The meaning the author intended is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives.

Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having a single purpose, a single meaning or one singular existence. Instead, every individual reader creates a new and individual purpose, meaning, and existence for a given text.

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Invention of american academics

Post-structuralism is difficult to define or summarize.

There are two main reasons for this. First, it rejects definitions that claim to have discovered absolute 'truths' or facts about the world. Second, very few people have willingly accepted the label 'post-structuralist'; rather, they have been labeled as such by others. Therefore no one has felt compelled to construct a 'manifesto' of post-structuralism. Thus the exact nature of post-structuralism and whether it can be considered a single philosophical movement is debated.

Indeed, it has often been pointed out that the term is not widely used in Europe (where most supposedly "post-structuralist" theory originates) and that the concept of a post-structuralist theoretical paradigm is largely the invention of American academics and publishers.

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Semiotic literay criticism

Later semiotic approaches to literature have not been systematic (or, in some special cases such as Roland Barthes's S/Z, they have been so specifically and exhaustively systematic as to render the possibility of a complete literary semiotics doubtful).

As structuralist linguistics gave way to a post-structuralist philosophy of language which denied the scientific ambitions of the general theory of signs, semiotic literary criticism became more playful and less systematic in its ambitions. Still, some authors harbor more scientific ambition for their literary schemata than others.

Later authors in the semiotic tradition of literary criticism include Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Michael Riffaterre, and Umberto Eco.

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Kristeva vs Barthes

Julia Kristeva sees that for Saussure linguistics is only part of a general science of signs and proposes that linguistics in due course will merge in a universal science or, more colourfully,

"La sémiotique se construira alors à partie du cadavre de la linguistique, d'une mort . . . à laquelle la linguistique se résignerait après avoir preparé le terrain à la sémiotique."

At the other extreme, Roland Barthes asserts the unquestioned primacy of language from which all other sign systems must be derived.

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3-place relation among signs

The study of signs — the full variety of significant forms of expression — in relation to the things that signs are significant of, and in relation to the beings that signs are significant to, is known as semiotics or the theory of signs. As just described, semiotics treats of a 3-place relation among signs, their objects, and their interpreters.

The term semiosis refers to any activity or process that involves signs. Studies of semiosis that deal with its more abstract form are not concerned with every concrete detail of the entities that act as signs, as objects, or as agents of semiosis, but only with the most salient patterns of relationship among these three roles. In particular, the formal theory of signs does not consider all of the properties of the interpretive agent but only the more striking features of the impressions that signs make on a representative interpreter.

In its formal aspects, that impact or influence may be treated as just another sign, called the interpretant sign, or the interpretant for short. Such a 3-adic relation, among objects, signs, and interpretants, is called a sign relation.

Signhood and triadic relation

In the general discussion of diverse theories of signs, the question frequently arises whether signhood is an absolute, essential, indelible, or ontological property of a thing, or whether it is a relational, interpretive, and mutable role that a thing can be said to have only within a particular context of relationships.
Peirce's definition of a sign defines it in relation to its object and its interpretant sign, and thus it defines signhood in relative terms, by means of a predicate with three places. In this definition, signhood is a role in a triadic relation, a role that a thing bears or plays in a given context of relationships — it is not as an absolute, non-relative property of a thing-in-itself, one that it possesses independently of all relationships to other things.

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Neopragmatism

Putnam, in Words and Life (1994), enumerates the ideas in the Classical Pragmatist tradition, which newer pragmatists find most compelling. To paraphrase Putnam:

1. antiscepticism (the notion that doubt requires justification just as much as belief);
   


2. fallibilism (the view that there are no metaphysical guarantees against the need to revise a belief);
   


3. antidualism about "facts" and "values";
   that practice, properly construed, is primary in philosophy.

Three Basic Moves. Linguistic pragmatism revises pragmatism in three basic moves.

First, one applauds pragmatists such as James and Dewey for repudiating a variety of methods and goals in traditional philosophy.

Second, one renounces their attempts to reconstruct what should not be reconstructed.

Finally, once one accepts the idea that only language is available to furnish philosophy's materiel. This step complete, one can create freely, even poetically, to serve whatever ends seem best.

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Real-world hypertextual writing

When interpreting a system of signs, the audience will make a judgement about the modality of the whole, i.e. they will decide whether it is more likely to be fact or fiction, real or unreal.

It also refers to how the audience feels about the message's validity and reliability. Images with higher modality appear more real than those with a lesser modality. To make this calibration, the audience will draw on its collective experience and understanding of the real world and of the particular medium of communication being used. Hence, those who enter a cineplex or theatre are aware that the content of the system they are about to view will usually be delivered by actors. But, if an individual randomly switches channel on the television, the new set of signifers must be evaluated: does this appear to be live or recorded, are these people known to be actors or do they have real-world roles that would explain their presence on the television, what does the genre or format of the programme appear to be, etc?

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Way signs are transmitted

Semioticians classify signs or sign systems in relation to the way they are transmitted (see modality). This process of carrying meaning depends on the use of codes that may be the individual sounds or letters that humans use to form words, the body movements they make to show attitude or emotion, or even something as general as the clothes they wear. To coin a word to refer to a thing (see lexical words), the community must agree on a simple meaning (a denotative meaning) within their language. But that word can transmit that meaning only within the language's grammatical structures and codes (see syntax and semantics). Codes also represent the values of the culture, and are able to add new shades of connotation to every aspect of life.

What is modality

In semiotics, a modality is a particular way in which the information is to be encoded for presentation to humans, i.e. to the type of sign and to the status of reality ascribed to or claimed by a sign, text or genre.

It is more closely associated with the semiotics of Charles Peirce than Saussure because meaning is conceived as an effect of a set of signs. In the Peircian model, a reference is made to an object when the sign-carrier (a representamen) is interpreted recursively by another sign (becoming its interpretant), a conception of meaning that does in fact imply a classification of sign types.

Sign and its object

Most theorists refer to the relation between a sign and its objects, as always including any manner of objective reference, as its denotation.

Some theorists refer to the relation between a sign and the signs that serve in its practical interpretation as its connotation, but there are many more differences of opinion and distinctions of theory that are made in this case. Many theorists, especially in the formal semantic, pragmatic, and semiotic traditions, restrict the application of semantics to the denotative aspect, using other terms or completely ignoring the connotative aspect.

Connotative and denotative relation

Two aspects of meaning that may be given approximate analyses are the connotative relation and the denotative relation.

The connotative relation is the relation between signs and their interpretant signs. The denotative relation is the relation between signs and objects. An arbitrary association exists between the signified and the signifier.

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Limits of Hyper-computation and never-ending Hypertext

Even machines with big databases, which seemingly represent the limit of automata that we could imagine, run into their own limitations.

While each of them can solve for instance the halting problem for a Turing machine, they cannot solve their own version of the halting problem. For example, an Oracle machine cannot answer the question of whether a given Oracle machine will ever halt.

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Hypertextual course and loops

To know whether a course in a hypertext will halt, it is necessary to know whether recursive functions are involved in the choosen algorithm, which is still an unsolved mathematics problem to me.

Recursive functions and loops are equivalent in expression; any expression involving loops can be written using recursion, and vice versa. Thus the termination of recursive expressions are also undecidable in general. Most recursive expressions found in common usage (ie. not pathological) can be shown to terminate through various means, usually depending on the definition of the expression itself.

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Termination

Some writers restrict the definition of algorithm to procedures that eventually finish.

In such a category Kleene 1952 places the "decision procedure or decision method or algorithm for the question" (Kleene p. 136). Others, including Kleene, include procedures that could run forever without stopping; such a procedure has been called a "computational method" (Knuth, Vol.1 p. 5) or "calculation procedure or algorithm" (Kleene); however, Kleene notes that such a method must eventually exhibit "some object" (Kleene).

Minksy makes the pertinent observation that if an algorithm hasn't terminated then we cannot answer the question "Will it terminate with the correct answer?":
"But if the length of the process is not known in advance, then 'trying' it may not be decisive, because if the process does go on forever -- then at no time will we ever be sure of the answer" (Minsky (1967)

Thus the answer is: undecidable. We can never know, nor can we do an analysis beforehand to find out. The analysis of algorithms for their likelihood of termination is called Termination analysis.

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Halting problem

In computability theory the halting problem is a decision problem which can be informally stated as follows:
Given a description of a program and a finite input, decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever, given that input.
Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist. We say that the halting problem is undecidable over Turing machines.

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