Explaining Experience In Nature / memeio

Here is an update on two contemporary works that relate to Peirce, Ben mentioned my memeio project in an earlier post here.

After two years of intense and difficult work I represent the "Introductory Remarks" to "Explaining Experience In Nature." This constitutes the most accessible 50 pages or so of the book.

"memeio," meant to imply the input and output of contagious ideas, is the technology that I have developed to aid me in my work. The above document was generated by memeio.

The technology, which uses a constrained English grammar, captures a semeiotic model of the kind advocated by Peirce and an epistemology that is evolved from Peirce through Carnap. In this case the primary epistemological distinction is between "necessary distinctions" and "ways of speaking."

Things to note as a reader are the document decorations and the concept map.

In this project I pursue an "exploratory" learning method, i.e. the reader will discover these features and thereby learn them more deeply as they engage with the document. So if your first questions are "where is the concept map and where are the decorations?" just look a little harder. All of this is automatically generated by memeio.

At this stage memeio is not a product, it is a research project that happens to aid me in my work. It consists of a set of code in a mix of standard technologies, written by me, that enables a deep analysis of the concepts an author is dealing with. See my comments on the memeio website for more detail.

The platform for the project is the latest and most advanced set of XML technologies produced by the W3: including the latest versions of XML Schema, XSLT, XPath and XQuery. Technology-wise it is currently a little bleeding-edge, but this stuff ages quickly.

I have released the above document early, before I am finished refining the presentation through memeio. I have, for example, yet to finish my "concept reconciliation," a central feature of memeio. This feature enables me to process the document, constructing a concept database and reconciling the concepts, biographies and references in the document against a database assembled from other parts of the work and other works, of mine and others, containing similar concepts. I have to finish a little XQuery code to implement all that I am trying to achieve here.

I hope to find the time and resources to apply this technology to the work of Peirce, where it will make an excellent scholarly exercise and tool. Certainly Peirce's work is among the first on my list to demonstrate the power of the technology on documents other than my own.

With respect,

Steven