Page 148 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

Media as Mathematics - Calculating Justice 139

―abstract statement‖(3.364], or, as Kress would say, between ―different
semiotics‖ of visual image and spoken language [1996]. The linear expression
of an equation is deceptive, as what is being encoded or represented is a set of
possibilities that are as abstract as they are clear. Kevelson would say that a
paradox is involved in a ―reinterpretation of relationships‖ between the
abstract ―vague‖ and the ―determined‖ [1987, 145]. Both the vague or
possible, and the determined or factual, are epistemic forms elucidated in
media forms, and were defined according to Peirce as Firsts and Seconds
respectively. Kevelson shares a theme in the postmodern writings of Derrida,
that posits fundamental uncertainty in structures of verbal, linear language that
continually challenges determinist discourse and communication clarity.
―Derrida‘s method is to deconstruct, to confuse and confound a way of looking
at the world that is solely dyadic, binary, by using the very principles it
deconstructs‖[Kevelson, 1987, 130]. Kevelson celebrates this deconstructive
disequilibrium of actuality and possibility, and the indeterminacy it triggers for
implementation of legal codes, in an account of creative interpretation which
depicts the legal professional environment as an experimental space of a social
epistemology and media practice.
At one level an algorithm has no content or necessary form: its structure
invites participation and plays with all content. Values can be hypothesised, or
entered selectively, and variables can be changed. There is no implicit or
necessary relation of form and content: all kinds of possible cases, improbable,
imaginary, actual or near actual, could be expressed, and compared to any
other with any other. Peirce was always interested in how knowledge was
constructed on fallibility, vagueness, misunderstanding, ambiguity, fancy and
non-sense. [Peirce, 2.338] [Peirce, 4.560].
It is the inadequacy of legal reasoning in "right to counsel" appeals that
provided Kort with a minimal argument for his interventionist research, using
alternative mathematical techniques to correlate court judgements. He
responded to perceptions of indeterminacy and disorder, based on the
suspected fallibility of individual reasoning, that was being disguised and
controlled by verbal reasoning. He sought a logical method that included an
indeterminacy principle, in order to establish some principles of determinancy
within a wider field of indeterminacy. His case study can be regarded in terms
of the Peircean phrase ―Firsts-in-Seconds‖.