Digitality, Goodman, and Greece

I've spent a few days in Greece with a good friend of mine, and while on the airplane finished re-reading Goodman, producing some notes for perusal by Henry. For those who are interested they are here. The most interesting thing about Goodman is his notion of a "notation" system and his strict separation from semantics and syntax, and he defines a notation as something where every syntactic marking has a distinct semantic marking, much like either music or computer programs (Goodman being more interested in music than computer programs). However, both fail on a level as notation systems, since the syntax of both can be ambiguous. While his general concept of notational system may be simply too fanciful for any real system, the ideas he propounds are wonderfully suited to an analysis of the Web and representation in general.

His idea of notation is fascinating. A notation is a symbolic language where every syntactic marking has a distinct semantic class, much like either music or computer programs (Goodman being more interested in music than computer programs). It is also a fairly sensible idea that has never been carried out in practice. Even in music and computer programming, one of the few fields where syntax has a clear incarnation in the physical world (this quarter note means play this, this piece of code means move this to a register, write something in standard output!), there is still syntactic forms of code with the same semantics (for and while loops) and in music (two half-note rests and a full rest). However, I think his ideas do apply very well to digitality.


The Weather in Thessaloniki