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

Peirce, Virtuality, and Semiotic The adjective "virtual," practically unheard-of a few years ago, has without a doubt become the number one buzzword of the nineteen-nineties. Virtual reality has become a catch phrase for the interactive multimedia technologies that have supplanted desktop publishing at the cutting edge of personal-computer graphics technology. The virtual communities which for years have flourished in comfortable obscurity on the Internet, have recently been thrust 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. Yet the word "virtual" is nothing new; although its ubiquity is new, as is perhaps its current meaning or meanings. In his admirable glossary of cyberterms, the philosopher Michael Heim defines "virtual" as: "A philosophical term meaning 'not actually but just as if'," and he notes that the term in this sense goes back to the thirteenth-century philosopher John Duns Scotus. (1) The word "virtuality" may have been first used to describe 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 distinct from its more concrete "reality," 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 Heim's later definition, Nelson's definition is in fact somewhat more specific and represents a significant meaning shift 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 physical structure. (3) Levinson's examples include virtual - i.e. electronic - classrooms, libraries, and books, and these certainly do not have the look 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.