user2016

According to the community site for R packages, crantastic, the most popular packages often provide us advanced statistical models, toolboxes for data manipulation, and different visualization capabilities. We see little packages that applies to the study of language. The philosophy of language, or semiotics, discusses the nature of the meaning in the language, its cognition and relationship to reality. Few R packages address these issues in today’s data rich environment. We raise the question: can we explore a semiotics theory in R and what is the outcome?nnSemiotics, the study of signs, is derived from the philosophical speculations on signification and languages (Chandler, 2004). In the nineteenth century, deliberation of the meaning of the term continued via two schools of thought that provided different interpretations. The first was promulgated by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who proposed the study of the sign as “semiosis.” Ferdinand de Saussure, on the other hand, studied the sign as a dyadic relationship that is connected by a linguistics structure. We focus on the work of Peirce with a triadic foundation of the term sign, where anything can be sign as long as someone interprets it as signifying something, referring to standing for something other than itself. Peirce’s semiotic theory is based on deductive logic, where the process of reasoning stands for one or more statements (premises) to reach a logically certain conclusion. His approach has merit both in its defined scope and its appeal to those who are interested in the development of modern logic.nnIn order to convert Peirce’s sign theory to R, we developed a new object classification. This classification holds the same attributes of the classes and methods as discussed by Becker, et.al (1988) but it also provides additional description to better organize the object properties and its triangulation relationships. We found that the advantage of using Peirce’s sign theory in R is the ability to convert data to a triangulation structure based on object classification. In our presentation, we demonstrate Peirce’s monadic logic and its iconic and visual representation in R.