....
All these people agree that there is something significant about
living organisms, but they can't agree what to call it.  Any
traditional metaphor they choose is likely to raise somebody's
hackles.

Peirce's solution was very simple:  he called it Thirdness.
That is one of Peirce's "ugly terms", which cannot stir up
anybody's preconcieved associations.

I forget where exactly he mentioned it, but one of my
favorite quotations from Peirce is that rather than searching
for the origin of life, it is better to search for the first
irreducible Thirdness in the world.  That is better because
it is more precise, less emotion laden, and more likely
to be answerable in a definitive way.

....Nobody likes to attribute "purpose"
or "intention" to a bacterium, but Thirdness can be
attributed to any living organism at any level.

In my interchange with Pierre, I used the words "purpose"
and "intent" because I didn't want to go through the overhead
of giving a tutorial on Peircean semeiotic before I could
get to the point.


Thirdness is Thirdness.  You can push it
around all you like, but when you think you've squeezed
it out from one spot, it pops up somewhere else. -- John Sowa 


===========================

There are two fundamental issues -- different, but
related:

 1. Knowledge representations that involve purpose,
    intentionality, and many related concepts cannot
    be represented without an explicit or implicit
    triadic relation.

 2. Any representation that has fundamentally triadic
    connections cannot be reduced to a representation
    that eliminates the triads.

For point #1, please read Peirce.

For point #2, you can keep showing one representation
after another, but all they do is convert one kind
of triad to another.

The idea of breaking up relations or tables with
muliple columns into collections of purely binary
tables has been done time and again, and it proves
absolutely nothing.

If you want to play with examples, study the attached .gif.
Represent a 3-column table for the Gives relation, then
replace it with three 2-column tables for Agnt, Thme,
and Rcpt.  Then look at how you would use that information
in any kind of SQL database.  To recover the information
in the 3-column table, you have to use join operators (in
the relational DB sense) to join the three 2-column tables
on the column that represents the verb.  All you have done
is to replace a 3-column table with a 3-way join operation.

Bottom line:  It's a mathematical theorem:  When you have
a triadic connection in a graph, there is no possible
transformation that will eliminate the triad.  If you
draw it as a table, you have only disguised the triad,
not eliminated it.

John