Semiotics, Computing, and Information (original) (raw)

2022, The Bloomsbury Companion to Semiotics, ed. Jamin Pelkey (London: Bloomsbury, 2022)

This chapter presents a new synthesis of the key concepts in computing in a Peircean semeiotic framework. My argument is based on over forty years of experience in computing and ten years of recent research on the primary sources in the history of computing from Leibniz to the Internet. A major part of my research focuses on the unpublished papers of C. S. Peirce (especially during 1896-1912) for his unifying research program that he termed "Logic as Semeiotic," which included the philosophy of science, mathematics, logic, the theory of semeiotic, the design principles of scientific instruments, and theories of automated reasoning and computation. (Much of Peirce's thought is now implicit in the design principles of computing systems.) When we study the full scope of the intellectual history of computing and semiotics, we come to two compelling conclusions: semiotics and computing have been inseparable since 1700, and modern digital binary computer systems are structurally and constitutively semiotic, and thus must be distinguished from anything else we may call "machines." This is a final pre-publication draft of a chapter in The Bloomsbury Companion to Semiotics, slightly revised.