Construct · 4 fields · 4 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, four constructs Nearest construct by meaningsymptomcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to sign is symptom.
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The two-sided unit that a language pairs together: a signifier, the sound-image, joined to a signified, the concept, so that the sign is neither the spoken word alone nor the thing it names, but the whole formed by that association. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics argued that the bond between the two sides is arbitrary and that a sign carries value only through its differences from the other signs in the same system. The referent is a psychological unit inside a language, fixed by its place among neighbouring signs, not the polarity of a number, a finding at the bedside, or a general relation of standing-for.[1]
Whether a real number is positive, negative, or zero: the sign is the number's position relative to zero on the line, and the sign function sgn records it by returning +1, -1, or 0. Courant and Robbins's What Is Mathematics? set out how the negative numbers and the rules for combining their signs follow from extending ordinary arithmetic across the whole number line. The referent is a two-valued property of a quantity, three-valued if zero is counted, carried by the leading symbol + or -, and it has nothing to do with a unit of language, an observed finding in a patient, or a philosopher's relation of representation.[2]
An objective finding that a clinician observes or elicits on examination, such as a fever, a heart murmur, or a swollen joint, as distinct from a symptom, which is what the patient feels and reports. Nessa's About signs and symptoms examined how clinical medicine reads such findings as evidence of an underlying condition and how a semiotic view can frame that reading. The referent is a perceptible bodily finding taken as a pointer to disease, gathered at the bedside, and it is separate from a unit of language, the polarity of a number, or a formal theory of representation.[3]
Anything that stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity: in Peirce's account a sign, or representamen, is determined by its object and in turn determines in an interpreter a further sign, the interpretant, so the sign is one leg of an irreducible three-part relation. Peirce's Collected Papers developed this triadic theory as the core of a general logic of signs, which he called semiotic. The referent is a formal relation of standing-for among representamen, object, and interpretant, broader than a two-sided linguistic unit, and unrelated to the polarity of a number or a finding at the bedside.[4]
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