Charles Sanders Peirce was a semiotician, philosopher, and logician that developed his renowned Theory of Signs to describe the relationship between objects and the signs (language or symbols) that represent them. His semiotic explorations argue that every sign comes in three parts: there is an object, or the concept that is being discussed; its sign or sign-vehicle, or the symbol that represents it, whether that's a visual marker or word; and an interpretant that connects the object and the sign.
Peirce doesn't argue what causes what; instead, he asserts that the object determines its sign and its interpretant (i.e. how the object is translated) based on whatever constraints are present. Further, only certain characteristics of an object matter.
These ideas are notable to Plot Twisters because the basic unit of interaction, the human experience as represented by a cookie, is a sign. A human experience or cookie must account for its own internal qualities as well as its perception in context. The unit contains an object which documents a sequence of material qualities, as well as a store of the object's connected signs, or the qualities that are recognized by an interpretant. The interpretant for our Cookies are the contexts in which the Cookies belong, which decide what qualities to recognize and translate into the context's own sequence of material qualities. The triadic relationship here is the grounds for our Cookie object, and also characterizes/informs other behaviors, like siblinghood and infinite parent-child nesting.
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