Introduction to CCTP-711

Computing and the Meaning of Code

Professor Martin Irvine

Communication, Culture & Technology Program
Georgetown University
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 Key Questions We Will Address in the Course:
The Big “Why,” “What,” and “How” Questions

❏ What do we mean by “computing” and “code”?

❏ Why and how are computing systems based on our core human
symbolic capacity, and why and how do we design the systems
to serve our shared symbolic systems for meaning, expression,
and communication?
❏ What kinds of symbolic systems do we have (from language to
multimedia), how do they work?
❏ How/why does programming code work for representing and
transforming all our symbolic systems that we use every day?
 Some Terms and Concepts to Get Started With

We need good “mental software” -- clearly defined terms and concepts

-- to think in and with so that we can make discoveries for building new
knowledge.

It’s the words we take for granted that often get us into trouble when we
try to think with them.

You will contribute to making our own “Key Terms and Concepts”
Dictionary!
 Our words for technologies in our common discourse
seem so obvious that we never think about them.

❏ Computation
❏ Computer
❏ Computer System
❏ Why we will almost always say “computer system,” not
“computer,” when we talk about code, languages, signs,
symbols, and the “why” and “how” of the design of
computing systems.
❏ Code (before and after uses for the term in computing)
Closely related terms we need to clarify in our disciplinary contexts:

❏ Sign
❏ Symbol
❏ Symbolic
❏ Representation
❏ Type/Token
❏ Pattern/Instance
❏ Meaning [how many meanings of meaning?]
 Other important related terms that we need to clarify:

❏ Language

❏ Natural Language

❏ Formal / Artificial Language

❏ Mathematical signs and symbols: what kind of signs/symbols are they?

❏ Programming Language
Humans as The Symbolic Species The evidence for our symbolic, meaning-
making activities are all around us every
day:

Everyday conversations, artworks, every form of

writing and text, music, video and movies,
mathematics and scientific notation, computer
code, software and apps running on all devices
(large or small).

And we continually use new or additional signs and

symbols to interpret, expand, represent, translate,
and comment on prior sets of signs and symbols.

C. S. Peirce termed this unlimited, generative

capacity semiosis -- symbolic processes and
productivity -- which is the observable and tangible
evidence of all our symbolic cognition (thought and
perception).
Leaders in computer science are defining computing by returning to
the roots of computation as symbolic processes:

Subrata Dasgupta, It Began with Babbage: The Genesis of Computer

Science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Etymologically [from the Latin word, computo: calculate]… computation’s

domain would seem to be the realm of numbers. However, as we will see, we
have come a long way from this association. We will see that the domain of
computation actually comprises symbols—by which I mean things that
represent other things…. The act of computation is, then, symbol
processing: the manipulation and transformation of symbols. Numbers are
just one kind of symbol; calculating is just one kind of symbol processing. And
so, the focus of automatic computation, Babbage’s original dream, is whether
or how this human mental activity of symbol processing can be performed by
(outsourced to) machines with minimal human intervention. Computer
science as the science of automatic computation is also the science of
automatic symbol processing. (12)
Let’s Think About the Meanings of Code

❏ “Secret Code,” encrypt, decrypt, cypher

❏ Encode/Decode
❏ Code in Signals Engineering and Digital Information in Computer Science
❏ Code as what is written in the formal “language” of programming
❏ Code as technical term in linguistics
❏ Generalized theory of code in semiotics and communication theory
❏ As rules and correlation patterns we use to interpret any kind of
expression or representation; e.g., genre codes in popular culture
Code: comes from Latin codex, a book of pages bound in hard covers

Codex Sinaiticus. c. 350 AD. British Library.

Oldest complete copy of the Christian Greek Bible. Example of the
Roman codex book (bound pages).
 Code: A Legal Code, Code of Law
(extended from the Books that Laws
were written and transmitted in)

A 12th century European codex of Roman Law with text and

commentary (with image representing a Roman Emperor).
British Library, MS Codex Justiniani.
 Examples of Code:
How can we “Encode” written characters in an electronic form?
From “Morse Code” to Unicode
Electrical signals, switched current, on/off, short/long:
Begins of binary code with electricity
It all starts with Samuel Morse and telegraph “code”:

“[I saw an experiment with electrical current, and] the

electricity traveled through the whole circuit in a time
not appreciable, but apparently instantaneous. It
immediately occurred to me that, if the presence of
electricity could be made VISIBLE in any desired part
of this circuit, it would not be difficult to construct a
SYSTEM OF SIGNS by which intelligence could
be instantaneously transmitted. The thought,
thus conceived, took strong hold of my mind ... and I
planned a system of signs, and an apparatus to carry it
into effect.”
(Samuel Morse, reflecting on the idea he had in 1832)
After over a hundred years of further development,
we now have Unicode, an international standard
for byte code representations of the characters of every language,
built into all our software!

https://home.unicode.org/
 What’s Motivating this Course and What Will You Learn?
Symbolic Cognition is the “Core Human Operating System” (I call it OS Alpha)

Everyday we use, produce, and understand hundreds of symbolic expressions

and representations -- symbolic artefacts -- in language, text, images,
mathematics, musical sounds, computer code, and in multimedia like film and
video -- all of which stand in relation to prior symbolic representations and to an
assumed world of experience “outside” the symbolic forms we use.
Our collective symbol systems allow us to generate and interpret an unlimited
number of new symbolic expressions with meanings that seem automatic and
transparent (we can’t observe the process).
But we now have ways to understand how & why both cultural sign
systems and technologies for automating them are based on the same
Core Human OS. You will learn why this matters and how to apply this
knowledge. (The field of semiotics provides the unification methods.)
OK, let’s clarify and define:
What are “signs” and “symbols” (defined scientifically)?
What do we mean by “Symbolic Cognition”?

Signs and symbols are the constituent units or structures of meaning systems (e.g.,
language, writing, images, graphics, music, computer programs, visual media, gestures,
rituals, etc.).

All sign and symbol structures have material-perceptible forms that are
understood to correlate to something not material and physical (meanings, ideas,
values, etc.)

The constituent units are formed as clusters or “stacks” of features (perceptible

and conceptual) that we correlate to form meaningful units.

All uses and instances of symbolic structures are part of sign systems or meaning
systems, not isolated things or independent objects.
For anything to function with meaning for us in human communities --
that is, function symbolically -- it must have an irreducible three-part
(triadic) structure of correlations with a “grammar” for combining
components:

(1) physical-perceptible tokens (instances) of the forms of signs/symbols (types)

they represent,

(2) already known, associated “objects,” any kind of “aboutness” or meaning

motivation = that which sign units stand for in relation to an interpreting
agent/agency, and

(3) a meaning-response from correlating the two as concepts and/or actions:

what we “get” as meaning and can express or represent in further signs and
symbols, and/or respond with actions and emotions.
Symbolic Cognition allows us to “go beyond the
information given” -- beyond the individual
occurrences of sense perception.

We are always making inferences and detecting

patterns of abstract and general objects of thought.

Signs and symbols allows us to be good “pattern

recognizers”!

(Pattern recognition is now the core problem in

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.)
What are “signs” and “symbols,” and how many kinds do we have?

[T]he term "sign" [includes] every picture, diagram, natural cry, pointing finger, wink, knot in one's
handkerchief, memory, dream, fancy, concept, indication, token, symptom, letter, numeral, word,
sentence, chapter, book, library, and in short whatever, be it in the physical universe, be it in the
world of thought, that, whether embodying an idea of any kind (and permit us throughout to use
this term to cover purposes and feelings), or being connected with some existing object, or
referring to future events through a general rule, causes something else, its interpreting sign, to be
determined to a corresponding relation to the same idea, existing thing, or law…

It is necessary to insist upon the point for the reason that ideas cannot be communicated at all
except through their physical effects. Our photographs, telephones, and wireless telegraphs, as
well as the sum total of all the work that steam engines have ever done, are, in sober common
sense and literal truth, the outcome of the general ideas that are expressed in the first book of the
Novum Organum [book by Francis Bacon on the scientific method].

C. S. Peirce, 1904 [MS 774, “Ideas, Stray or Stolen” (On Signs and Communication)]
Key Terms and Concepts

1. The terms for the triadic sign/symbol relation and meaning processes over time.

2. The Type/Token distinction: physical-perceptible instances of general patterns.

3. Main kinds of sign/symbol functions:

Icon
Index
Symbol
Which are usually used in combination to create structures of meaning

4. The importance of sign/symbol systems: all uses of symbolic forms are part of an
interrelated system (like language, musical genres, visual image genres)

5. The importance of meaning-making in live situations and contexts (the “dialogic” and
“pragmatic” principles).
What We Can Learn from Semiotic Thinking and Theory:
A First Look at Using C. S. Peirce’s Model of the Sign and Sign Process (Semiosis)

There are several traditions of theory and inquiry in semiotics and its related fields. We will use the
work of C. S. Peirce (1839-1914), whose ideas are being recovered and applied in many sciences and
disciplines. (We will fill in more background on Peirce’s ideas throughout the course.) (My research.)

C. S. Peirce (some representative statements):

“[A] sign is something by knowing which we know something more.”

“A sign, or representamen [the physical perceptible component], is something which

stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody,
that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more
developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign.”

“Thought [... ] is in itself essentially of the nature of a sign. But a sign is not a sign unless it
translates itself into another sign in which it is more fully developed.”
We will reference examples from all our sign systems
(single and compound) to test hypotheses and models:

1 Language and writing Examples (instances) will

be formed with
2 Image genres (all visual art genres, graphics, photography) combinations of sign
tokens for which we
3 Music and genres of music understand the symbolic
types.
4 Film/video as combinations of sign systems

5 Computation and computer device: software, high-level code-text

and programs; apps; memory systems, interfaces and signifying We can analyse
examples as nodes in the
substrates
symbolic network,
and as interfaces to their
6 Multimedia interfaces (interactive screens, surfaces): continuities and system of meanings.
differences in substrate function
How Does Our Capacity for Symbolic Thought and Using Signs
Connect Everything from Language to Computation?
Let’s Think About This Sequence of Definitions:

[A] sign is something by knowing which we know something more.

All my notions are too narrow. Instead of ‘Sign,’ ought I not to say Medium?
All thought is in signs. --C. S. Peirce (c.1906)

A symbol is any device whereby we are enabled to make an abstraction….

All abstraction involves symbolization. --Susanne Langer (1962)

Computation is about automating abstractions. -- Jeannette Wing, “Computational Thinking” (2008)

The stored-program computer, as conceived by Alan Turing and delivered by John von Neumann,
broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things.
Our universe would never be the same. --George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral (2012)

Computation is information processing through transformations of symbolic representations.

--Peter Denning, “What is Computation” (2010)
What do these symbolic systems as represented in their sign tokens have in common?
(Hint: abstract away the material form of the individual instances)
 All symbolic structures are “interfaces”:
Semiotic technologies have a cognitive “interface”
Because signs and symbols require
physical-perceptible instantiation,
we have developed methods for
technically mediating symbolic
forms: these are symbolic cognitive
technologies.

Our communication, information,

and media technologies are all
motivated by our meaning systems:
they form a continuum of cumulative
development.
What do human sign systems have to do with our contemporary technologies?

We have centuries of cumulative symbolic activity and mediating technologies for

representing, storing, recording, and transmitting symbolic expressions in
writing/text, images, graphics, sound, and all media combinations,

and long histories of cultural institutions that function to mediate symbolic

transmission (schools, libraries, museums, governments, industries), and
industries with complex ecosystems for producing the technical artefacts for
transmitting and representing symbolic forms.

We also now know that the built-in features of symbols for abstraction and
translation allow us to re-mediate all our inherited symbolic systems in
digital form for all kinds of computational devices.

All these past and present cumulative material and social

configurations = symbolic cognitive technologies => computation.
Consequences (Part 2)
Signs/symbols are also used in clusters, stacks, or layers of
signifying elements in time-based media like music, film, and
video.
Symbolic cognition is also parallel processing! We are able to
parallel process multiple layers of concurrent or simultaneous
signifying components that we sum up for mental “snapshots” of
meanings through moments in time, feeding back to prior
moments and feeding forward for anticipated combined
meanings.

Let’s try it out:

❏ How do we know what a music composition

means?
❏ How does a musical section or phrase mean?
❏ How does a musical sound mean?

Music creates meaning in stacks or layers of concurrent, parallel

signifying sounds with syntax and combinatorial rules and constraints.
Animated Music Scores: Symbolic Processes in Time
Consequences (Part 3)

What kind of symbolic processes are used in information (data

encoding) and computation (software and hardware design)?

Peter Denning’s summary:

“Information [in the computer science sense] consists of (1) a sign,

which is a physical manifestation or inscription, (2) a relationship,
which is the association between the sign and what it stands for, and
(3) an observer, who learns the relationship from community and
holds on to it. This package incorporates all the previous notions of
information. The observer as a member of a social community gives
uniformity of interpretation and continuity over time.”
Further:

Peter Denning, “What is Computation?” (2012)

The definition [now evolving in computer science] refocuses from

computers to information representations. It holds that representations
are more fundamental than computers.

This is actually a fundamental shift. It relinquishes the early idea that

“computer science is the study of phenomena surrounding computers”
and returns to “computer science is the study of information processes”.
Computers are a means to implement some information processes. But
not all information processes are implemented by computers -- e.g., DNA
translation, quantum information, optimal methods for continuous
systems.