Here‘s a modified version of some earlier code I write, this time pared down to generate some semiotic square templates as opposed to analogic square templates. I don’t find them anywhere as amusing, but I guess it has some worth of its own anyway…
Following a brief elopement with Levi-Strauss earlier this year, I found myself one evening tinkering with a small program to generate semiotic/analogic squares.
Given two pairs of ‘opposites’ (a,b) and (c,d), one can construct a square by juxtaposing different elements from each pair.
For instance, we might get this
| body bad |
body good |
|---|---|
| mind bad |
mind good |
While reading this book, I came across a similar interpretation of Levi-Strauss’s canonical formula (more about which I will write in a future post) the form of which I’m sure you’ll be able to see by looking at a single example for a moment:
| technology ends mental |
-> | technology means mental |
|---|---|---|
| nature ends mental |
nature means physical |
This interpretation is given by Racine, and is not explicit in Levi-Strauss’s original work. I don’t find it especially rich either as interpretations go, but it was interesting to look at the results it could produce.
The resulting program may be seen here.
I’m quite proud of it *proud*, despite the grammatical incompatibilities (which could be fixed, but I don’t really want to put that much time into it).
