Jon McCormack
>But it
>did suggest that if you can represent a process in another form (e.g. the
>interactive visualization of some mathematical function) and that leads to a
>new or different understanding of that function, then is this a new mode of
>communication?
One shouldn't say there cannot be new modes of communcation. But as yet,
no, this is not an example of a new mode (form, kind, type).
Visualizing mathematical functions is old, not new.
OK, what about a new way of doing this? Without having anything concrete
to discuss, I can only say that this would be analogous to a new spoken
language. Different spoken languages are not different modes of
communication. Spoken language is a mode of communication.
Pictorial visual imagery is (we allow here for the sake of argument) a
another mode of communication.
A basic premise is that showing is not saying and saying is not showing.
Stick figures show, words say. Either can be minipulated to have the
other's significance. 50 different techonologies for showing are not
fifty different modes of communication. They are 50 different ways of
engageing one mode of communication.
What are other modes of communication?
To go further requires agreeing on what counts as communication. What
gets communicated is information. For something to communicate
information it must fix some (determinate to some degree) bit of
information as its meaning content. This is to say that something about
it (usually in conjunction with some things about the context in which it
occurs) must make it reasonable that some interpretation of its
(determinate to some degree) information content is the correct
interpretation, others are not. (This does not rule out multiple
meanings.) OK, for a pictorial image to communicate a (determinate to
some degree) bit of information, that is, for it to be reasonable to say
that some interpretation of the image's information content is the
correct interpretation, others are not, what has to be true of it (and of
the context in which it occurs)?
Anyone who beieves they are creating pictorial images to communicate
information ought to be able to answer this.
- George
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