So I can add to my apokrisis dictionary: what's a vague-crisp distinction when it's at home? And what's the epistemic cut? — fdrake

Vagueness is that to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to obtain. It is ultimate ambiguity in that it is neither a something nor nothing. It is a state of radical indeterminism. The crisp would then be its matching complementary opposite. It would be the absolute determinate, the definite and certain. The PNC would be in full effect.

Imagine being in a boat on a lake drifting in a fog. Whether you were moving somewhere or going nowhere would be indeterminable. There just wouldn’t be a definite answer either way. But then you suddenly bump the shore. Now you definitely know. Well, either it is now definitely the case you drifted in the shore’s direction or the shore moved and managed to bump into you.

The epistemic cut is Howard Pattee’s term for the semiotic modelling relation that is the basis of life and mind. He was drawing on von Neuman’s theory of self reproducing automata to talk about the necessary division between a dynamical system and its symbolically-encoded self-description.

So it is about the separation between observer and observables, laws and initial conditions, software and hardware, genes and metabolism, etc. Or in general, our metaphysical distinction between rate dependent dynamics and rate independent information.

See - https://www.informatics.indiana.edu/rocha/publications/pattee/pattee.html and
http://www.academia.edu/863864/The_physics_of_symbols_and_the_evolution_of_semiotic_controls

For instance, Pattee captures the strangely hybrid metaphysics of the statistical view rather nicely....

There has always been an apparent paradox between the concept of universal physical laws and semiotic controls. Physical laws describe the dynamics of inexorable events, or as Wigner
expresses it, physical explanations give us the impression that events ". . . could not be otherwise." By contrast, the concepts of information and control give us the impression that events could be otherwise, and the well-known Shannon measure of information is just the logarithm of the number of other ways.

One root of this paradox is the fact that the formulation of physical laws depends fundamentally on the concepts of energy, time, and rates of change, whereas information measures and the syntax of formal languages and semiotic controls are independent of energy, time, and rates of change. A second root of the paradox is that fundamental physical laws, as they are described mathematically, are deterministic and time-symmetric (reversible), whereas informational concepts like detection, observation, measurement, and control are described as statistical and irreversible.

Perhaps the deepest root of the problem, however, is the conceptual incompatibility of the concepts of determinism and choice, a paradox that has existed since the earliest philosophers. The modern attempts in physics to live with this paradox require introducing statistical concepts that allow alternatives into the framework of physical laws by reinterpreting the essential distinction between the laws themselves that describe all possible alternatives and the initial conditions that determine one particular case. Statistical physics accepts the inexorability of the laws, but assumes that virtual alternatives can exist in the microscopic initial conditions.

One measure of the alternatives is the entropy. Thus, we create imaginary statistical ensembles of systems which all follow the same dynamical laws, but that have different sets of initial conditions. These virtual microscopic states are restricted only by statistical postulates and their consistency with macroscopic state variables.

A modification of this classical view by Born points out that initial conditions of even one particle can never be measured with formal precision, and therefore even the classical laws of motion can predict only probability distributions for trajectories. Only when a new measurement is made can this distribution be altered.

The fact remains, however, that all our formal semiotic descriptions and computations, whether we interpret them as probabilistic, statistical, or fuzzy, are in practice assumed to be manipulated by crisp, strictly deterministic rules, even though physical laws require the execution of semiotic rules to be stochastic events.

The physics of symbols and the evolution of semiotic controls - 1996

Here is a more recent quote where Pattee makes a full-fledged connection to Peircean semiotics...

A description requires a symbol system or a language. Functionally, description and construction correspond to the biologists’ distinction between the genotype and phenotype. My biosemiotic view is that self-replication is also the origin of semiosis.

I have made the case over many years (e.g., Pattee, 1969,1982, 2001, 2015) that self-replication provides the threshold level of complication where the clear existence of a self or a subject gives functional concepts such as symbol, interpreter, autonomous agent, memory, control, teleology, and intentionality empirically decidable meanings. The conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature

Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.

Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subject’s Umwelt or world image.

This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement – a symbol – and what is being measured – a material object.

I call this the symbol-matter problem, but this is just a narrower case of the classic 2500-year-old epistemic problem of what our world image actually tells us about what we call the real world.

http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/pattee/

Been busy, there will be a reply. I've been working a little bit on mathematical details for this 'native generation of parameters' using entropy. I'm hoping you'll find it more interesting than my criticisms.