Peirce, Virtuality, and Semiotic :: Pierce Virtual Virtuality Essays

Peirce, Virtuality, and Semiotic The adjective realistic, practically unheard-of a few years ago, has without a doubt become the number one argot of the nineteen-nineties. Virtual frankness has become a catch phrase for the interactional multimedia technologies that have supplanted desktop publishing at the cutting touch of personal-computer graphics technology. The virtual communities which for years have flourished in comfortable unimportance on the Internet, have recently been thrust into the glare of publicity as commercial gateways have opened up the net to the public, while virtual corporations have transformed the world of business.Yet the word virtual is vigor new although its ubiquity is new, as is perhaps its current meaning or meanings. In his admirable glossary of cyberterms, the philosopher Michael Heim defines virtual as A philosophic term meaning not positively but just as if, and he notes that the term in this sense goes back to the thirteenth-century philoso pher John Duns Scotus. (1) The word virtuality whitethorn have been first used to describe interactive computer systems by Theodore Nelson (the inventor of the term hypertext), who proposed this definition, in 1980 (2) By the virtuality of a thing I mean the seeming of it, as distinct from its more concrete reality, which may not be important. ... I use the term virtual in its traditional sense, an opposite of real. The reality of a movie includes how the picture was painted and where the actors were repositioned between shots, but who cares? The virtuality of a movie is what seems to be in it.While this may at first blush seem identical to Heims later definition, Nelsons definition is in fact somewhat more specialised and represents a significant meaning shift from the traditional sense, as becomes overhaul when we contrast it with the definition offered in 1991 by the media philosopher Paul Levinson. Paraphrasing Levinson slightly, we may word that he defines a virtual X as what you get when the entropy structure of X is detached from its physical structure. (3) Levinsons examples include virtual - i.e. electronic - classrooms, libraries, and books, and these certainly do not have the look and feel of actual classrooms, libraries, or books. As I have noted elsewhere, the two definitions accept in the case of virtual reality - the information structure of reality as a whole includes its look and feel - but this is a coincidence the two definitions represent different concepts.