summary symbol and referent

  

SYMBOLS AND REFERENTS

     A symbol is an object that refers to a referent.  A referent is an object that is referred to by a symbol.The referent of words such as table or buildingis pretty clear, but some referents are more abstract, like for the words happiness or danger. The word referent is handy in grammar-land, when you’re trying to figure out how words are being used in a sentence.We know from previous discussion that there are qualities,objects and classes.Objects are collections of qualities, namely the qualities thatdescribe the object, and classes are collections of objects, namely all objects that have the qualities that are both common and unique to that class.        

     An object is defined by its qualities, by the qualities that ithas.  And its qualities are gathered togetherinwhat we call an Object Quality Set. An object quality set could also be called a description qualityset, and is often just called a quality set.  Classes are also defined by a quality set called the Pertinent Quality set, its the quality set that is pertinent to the concept of the class.In other words objects in the class may have many different qualities, but only some will be pertinent to why the object is in the class.

     Pertinent quality sets are subsets of the qualities in an object's quality set.  In other words any dog has a lot more qualities than just being a dog, but its those doggy qualities that make it a

dog! The pertinent quality set contains all those qualities that are both common and unique to all the objects that are in that class.Common means that every object in the class has those qualities,

in other words every object has the pertinent quality set as a subset of its full object quality set. In other words all dogs are dogs  Unique means every object in the universe which has thosequalities in the pertinent quality set is a member of that class.In other words only dogs are dogs! Thus commonness means being in the class implies having the pertinent quality set, and uniqueness means having the pertinent quality set implies being in the class.

SYMBOLS AND REFERENTS ARE TWO DIFFERENT OBJECTS

     So the second most important thing to know about symbols and referents is that they are two different objects. And because they are two different objects they have two different quality sets, each one describing the object that the quality set belongs to.

     For example the picture of the cow is made of paper, made with ink, made with a photographic process, is basically two dimensional and exists in a book.

    That's a symbol, it has qualities and it is an object whichexists.The referent is a real cow, its made out of skin and bones and blood and teeth and eats grass and goes moo!So you can see that that the two different objects have two different quality sets.

SYMBOLS AND REFERENTS HAVE DIFFERENT QUALITY SETS

     So the third thing to know about symbols and referents is that some of the qualities of the symbol will not exist in the referent at all.  And some of the qualities of the referent will not exist in the symbol at all.

 For example the picture of the cow is made of paper and ink, and

yet there is no paper or ink in the real cow.The real cow is made out of blood and bone.  The picture of the cow is not.So each one of these objects has qualities that are unrelated to

the other object.Yet the picture of the cow looks very much like the actual cow,

they have 'geometrical congruence or simiarity'.

     Technically congruence means identical in shape and size, while similar means same shape but different size.  We use the two terms interchangably through out this lecture. Also the paper that the picture is printed on has 'substance' and so does the real cow.  Both have mass and weight etc. Thus there will often be qualities between symbol and referentthat belong to both symbol and referent.

 SOME OF THE QUALITIES OF THE SYMBOL ARE MAPPED TO QUALITIES

OF THE REFERENT.

     The fourth thing to know about symbols and referents is that some of the qualities of the symbol are mapped to some of the qualities of the referent.  In other words some of the qualities of the symbol are used to refer to some of the qualities of the referent. The quality in the symbol that is mapped to the quality in thereferent may be two very different qualities.  It is not the

similarity in qualities that matters but consistency of mapping and use.

     In this way the symbol can be used to refer to the referent, not

just in a dumb way where symbol refers to referent, but in a more

meaningful way in which the symbol's qualities point directly to the

referent's qualities.For example in the picture of the cow there is a pictogram of a

cow, of Daisey in particular.  Its a space time drawing, with color,

black and white spots, outlines, projected in two dimensions, that has

a one to one general spatial correspondance to what Daisey actually

looks like.  We call this geometrical congruence between symbol and

referent.  In this case it is pretty easy to look at the symbol and tell

what it symbolizes because a certain subset of the symbol's qualities

are very related to a subset of the referent's qualities.