Symbol and Referent

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     How's life? I will never stop to ask you first about it. Cause I wanna make sure that my dear Readers feel healthier every moment. Now I come with different sensation. Sensation? haha. Yeah, this is my third post. Don't worry, it isn't talk about "Who is Restina?". I don't have any idea anymore if the theme is still about my self. But wait wait, if there are some of you (probably) want to know about me more, let follow Restina's social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram which I had mentioned on the first post (promotion is a necessity haha).

      

      TUGAS!!! ini adalah kata-kata keramat yang nggak akan pernah lepas dari kita semua selama kita masih berkecimpung dalam dunia pendidikan. Buku yang tebal, modul yang berlimpah dan apalah-apalah itu yang berhubungan dengan tugas selalu menjadi momok (agak seram ya) bagi kita untuk mendekat ke meja belajar.

     

     Tapi tunggu dulu Readers, masalah keramat di atas sebenarnya bisa kita atasi dengan mudah. Setiap permasalahan itu pasti punya win-win solution yang siap untuk membungkus habis setiap hambatan. Duuh, agak berat ya bahasa Restina kali ini Readers, haha ini adalah efek keracunan bahasa buku Entrepreneurship. So, what is win solution? Nah, yang namanya belajar itu Readers, kita tidak harus membolak-balik buku yang tebalnya na'uzubillah atau membaca modul yang lembarannya terlihat wow (banyak). Biar nggak bosan, sekarang kita cukup menggunakan jari-jemari cantik kita untuk mengakses semua materi pelajaran yang ingin kita cari. Salah satunya adalah 'learning by blog'. Sambil ngopi, duduk santai di teras rumah, dengerin musik yang kalian suka, dan yang pastinya sambil baca postingan pelajaran di blog akan membuat cara belajar kalian jauh lebih menyenangkan Readers. Let's have fun learning by blog.

    

    OK my dear Readers, I won't say the word of introduction so long as I'm not currently delivering a speech (sebenarnya itu udah panjang juga sih). Now we get to our topic discussion is about Symbol and Referent.

SYMBOL AND REFERENT

THE NATURE OF SYMBOLS AND REFERENTS 

1) Definition of Symbol and Referent

     The first is, that a symbol is an object that is being used by someone or something to refer to another object called the referent.

For examples:

• in a book, you have the word cow, and the word cow is then used to refer to some real cow out in the real world.

• or you have a picture of a cow in a book, and its a picture of cow named Daisey, with black and white spots, who live on a particular farm, at a particular farm, at a particular time, and here is this complete picture of Daisey. 

The picture is an object, and the ink on the paper is an object, and the picture is made of paper which is an object, and this compound object is being used to refer to the actual cow that existed in the real world.

      
      The referent also is an object, it too exists in the real world, just as the symbol does.
Obviously, that's where milk comes from. Mooo!
Or the other example of referent:

• in the sentence Marry saw me, the referent of the word Marry is the particular person called Marry who is being spoken of, while the referent of the word me is the person uttering the sentence.

2) Symbols and Referents are Two Different Objects

     We have to know that symbol and referent are two different objects.

Due to they are two different objects, they have to 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, make 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 which exists.

The referent is a real cow, its made out of skin, bones, blood and teeth, eats grass and goes moo!

So we can see that the two different object have tow different quality sets.

3) Symbols and Referents have Different Quality Sets

     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 i the symbol at all.

For examples: 

• 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 bones. 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 similarity.  

      

     Technically congruence means identical is shape and size, while similar means same shape but different size. We use the two terms interchangebly through out this lecture.

     

      Also the paper that the picture is printed o has substance and so does the real cow. Both have mass and weight etc.

     Thus there will often be qualities between symbol and referent that belong to both symbol and referent.    

4) Some of The Qualities of The Symbol are Mapped to Qualities of The Referent.

      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 the referent 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. w 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 of certain subset of the referent's qualities.

 

5) Symbols can Have Picture Form and Data Content.

     The fifth thing to know about symbols and referents, is that symbols can have pictogramness or picture form, and they can also have data content.

 For example:

•  the word 'cow' certainly doesn't look like a cow, and certainly doesn't have a lot of data in it that would tell you what a cow might be

It's an arbitrary symbol.

However a picture of a cow has both picture form and data content.

     Picture form means there is a one to one correspondance between some part of the symbol, the picture of the cow, and the actual referent. Picture form means the same thing as geometrical congruency.

     Data content means that contained in the symbol either in its picture form or in some other form is encoded data that will tell you something specific and true about that referent.

     For example a hologram film plate of a cow has very low picture form but very high data content about the cow.  The data content can be extracted from the hologram film plate and in fact turned back into picture form with lasers shining through it at just the right angle.

     A digital photograph of the cow, that is turned into one's and zero's and then encrypted has zero picture form, but again the data content remains very high and can be recovered from the data form.

A scientific tome without pictures or diagrams about the cow is also a symbol for the cow.

     Such a book, being all printed words, has a very high density of symbols which in themselves have very little picture form or data content. The word 'cow' tells you nothing about the referent, but once connected to a memory bank that understands what cow refers to, the data content can again be extracted that properly describes the

referent.

     So the word 'cow' is low picture form and low data content.

     A book about the cow is low picture form and high data content.

     A photographic picture of a cow is high picture form and high

data content.

     So in summary symbols can have very high picture form, very high data content, or both or neither.

     In general however high picture form implies high data content as long as the picture form is geometrically congruent to the referent.

6) Symbols and Referents always Have a Causal Pathway between Them. 

      The sixth thing to know about symbols and referents is that there is always a causal 

pathway between them.   

For example:

·         if you take a photograph of a cow, clearly light bounces off the cow, comes into the camera lens, affects the silver crystals on the film, and it gets developed,and the film is a direct causal result of physical interactions in the physical universe that can be traced back from the film surface to the cow and the photons bouncing off the cow from the sun.

       Even if someone a million years ago invents the word 'cow' to refer to the general  class of cows, there still had to be at some point a causal pathway between the actual  cow and the fact the person one way or another, directly or indirectly, came up with  a word 'cow' to represent it.  If there were no causal connections between the cow and the person, the person would never have had a need or cause to invent a word to refer to it.

       And so that symbol 'cow' invented by the caveman still has a causal heritage,  a causal pathway, back to an actual cow or mental imagine of a cow in the mind of the person using the symbol.

      Thus where ever there is a symbol that refers to a referent, there must have been some causal pathway, either direct or indirect between the original referent and the symbol.

       From this we conclude that if there is no causal pathway between two objects, they can not be symbol and referent to each other. And if they are symbol and referent to each other, there must be a casual pathway between them.

       So there we have said something very odd, and the astute reader will notice that the following definition of symbol and referent is a superset of the normal language usage.

       We are going to assert by definition that any two objects which are causally related to each other are symbol and referent to each other. The referent is the earlier event and the symbol is the later event.

       Notice that when two objects (events) are causally related to each other, the symbol always contains some data in its final state about that causal relationship between the symbol and the referent. Some data content is transfered between referent and symbol every time there is a causal event. This is called a data transfer via causal imprint.

        In any two objects that are causally related to each other, the after object is the symbol for the before object which is the referent, and the after object contains a data 'imprint' on its state that contains data content about the nature of before object. The symbol is imprinted with data content about the referent.

       In the case of arbitrarily chosen symbols chosen by man to refer to objects, such as the word cow, the data imprint is not so obvious. It isn't obvious that we can learn about what a cow really is by looking at the word 'cow'.

      The data transfer has either been interrupted between referent and symbol, lost to antiquity, or dropped below the noise floor.

      But in the case of symbols that are directly and intimately causally connected to an immediately prior referent event, the data imprint on the symbol is embodied in the very nature and state of the symbol after the event occurs.

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Sources:

http://www.lightlink.com

https://en.wikipedia.org