The human universe is composed of two kinds of things: physical realities, which are beyond our knowledge as to the things themselves, and symbols, which are created anew in every human as ontogenetic knowledge through processes attendant on our living in groups and interacting with other humans.

As to the first: this is the realm of science, where we construct conceptions of correspondences among our perceptions of regularities in interactions with the things of our universe. Beginning from our individual actions on the world which are followed by perceived regularities of their sequelae, we look for regularities that enable us to act subsequently with anticipation of outcomes hopefully similar to those which followed previous similar actions. This is the ground of the conjecture of cause and effect. WE are the cause. The effect is what we hope the action will bring about in the world. The inherent intention is to control our environment. The need is to enable survival. We are, among other things, predators living in a universe of predators.
As to the value of these actions: they are valuable if they serve our ends, all those desiderata subsequent to survival, however the outcomes are perceived individually; in the middle of things, they are interesting if and only if they impel us to seek / hope for expanded control of our environment (a phylogenetic ground of “innate curiosity”). Actions of less value are of various sorts, usually ignored: contrary, indifferent, ineffective, incomprehensible.
Since Kant admitted the “Things themselves” are unknowlable, and as Peirce agreed “We’re all Kantians now,” science has gone on well despite the obstacles. In our own day, Feynman says plainly that “All we physicists do is count beans, but we don’t know what the beans are.”

As to the second, symbols: regardless of perceptual modality engaged, symbols are internal tokens the individual adopts indicative of reference to other things, whether they be physical or symbolic. If logic suggests they are no better than metaphors, an alternative view is required.

Everyone agrees that “The Word is not the Thing; the Map is not the Territory.” because a metaphor is what you get when you say something is something else that it is not’. It’s true as well that words have no inherent meaning. Yet we humans can and do assign them meanings in an effort to share what we think and how we do what we do. So we strive to make symbols and metaphors into semaphors (devices for carrying meaning) and we need to succeed, because our thinking, communication, and even our civilizations depend on that success.

What the Infant Peggy Study aims to provide is an extensive corpus of behaviors of one child, situated in her natural environment, considered as the suite of her contexts involving the entireties of both her physical and symbolic experiences.

The weekly video clips of her actions in a variety of her behavior settings,
– selected by her parents and including them, her siblings and pet dog,
– primarily in the family home over four years of regular recordings (and extended less regularly before and after to a total of six years),
– as they are unpacked and interpreted,
comprise a unique observational and investigative resource for understanding the self construction in an individual’s mind of her grasp of physical realities and her suite of observable and sharable representations. It is in sharing such understandings across different embodiments that artificial intelligence and genetic epistemology have overlapping objectives.

As to the observable representations, these are an Analysts’ constructed articulations of what he understands her grasps of realities are, as indicated by her actions. These representations are intended to be sharable with a community of peers who will be able to comprehend, to criticize and hopefully to improve them.
As to the infant’s sharable representations, these are intended to share an Analyst’s similar understanding of both the infant’s interpretation of and production of communicative acts in linguistic and other modalities. That is, to the extent that IPS involves a language development study, it is set in the broader context of communication behavior as captured in the video clips of the first four years of the child’s life within her nuclear family.

Tracing the development of these representations is studying how we perceive and appreciate ways humans come to understand our world and to think, to learn, and to share our knowledge. That’s the snark we’re after.

A Specific Example
For a 4 minute behavior sample capturing demonstrations of understanding physical objects engaging social interplay as well as multiple issues of language development, see the video clip P89D4 where object permanence is the basis of play and that playing is the medium of language performance and learning. Specifically, Peggy exhibits adverbial production [gone, too!], use of a verb [sit] (at the end of the clip) possibly functioning as a self-command, as a demonstration of knowing the word’s meaning, or as “thinking out loud,” a socially encouraged activity in our recorded sessions.
Additionally, Peggy takes two cups, fitting them together in various ways; inserting the smaller inverted, she points to a shape raised on the cup bottom and says “heart” then, saying “hat” puts the cup on her head so that it appears like that of “Curious George” in a favorite book. Her Mom (at camera) asks, “For a Monkey?” Peggy responds “Mut ney”. Bob tries to repeat her vocalization, “You’re a “mut ney?”. She corrects what she perceives as his mispronunciation and he apologizes.
From such sharable records of activity during development, we intend to spin together temporal threads with separable thematic foci to highlight specific kinds of development and the interactions they make manifest.

R. W. Lawler, Analyst
9/25/2026