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

Peirce, Virtuality, and Semiotic The adjective virtual(prenominal), often unheard-of a few years ago, has without a doubt sprain the number one buzzword of the nineteen-nineties. Virtual humankind has become a catch phrase for the interactive multimedia technologies that sacrifice supplanted desktop issue at the cutting edge of personal-computer graphics technology. The virtual communities which for years involve flourished in comfortable obscurity on the Internet, pose recently been twinge 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. to date the word virtual is nothing new although its ubiquity is new, as is mayhap its current meaning or meanings. In his admirable glossary of cyberterms, the philosopher Michael Heim defines virtual as A philosophical term meaning not actually nevertheless just as if, and he notes that the term in this sense goes screen to the thir teenth-century philosopher John Duns Scotus. (1) The word virtuality may have been for the first time spendd to give away 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 perspicuous from its more concrete populace, 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 scenery 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 equivalent to Heims later definition, Nelsons definition is in situation somewhat more specific and represents a significant meaning shake from the traditional sense, as becomes clear when we contrast it with the definition offered in 1991 by the media philosopher Paul Levinson. Paraphrasing Levinson slightly, we may say that he defines a virtual X as what you get when the information structure of X is detached from its physiologic structure. (3) Levinsons examples include virtual - i.e. electronic - classrooms, libraries, and books, and these certainly do not have the note and feel of actual classrooms, libraries, or books. As I have noted elsewhere, the two definitions coincide 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.