Ideas
in Laws of Form

At the foundation of Laws of Form is the concept of distinction. Here is a distinction:

Notice that there's nothing there. That's because the distinction lies in the viewing frame. The break in the text surrounds empty space, thereby highlighting it. You naturally see through this frame and recognize the nothing inside of it, rather than the frame itself.

In considering the frame, we did a context shift from being inside of the discourse to being outside of it, where we studied its spatial form. This change of perspective is also a distinction. In one case we step in, in the other we step out.

Now let's collapse those two distinctions by making the content of the frame the same as its context:

Notice here that you can recognize the frame within the frame. And the frame within that. This is called self-reference because when we cross the distinction, we arrive at the very place we started.

Now, this isn't true self-reference since the document image isn't the same as the document and because you can step out of this frame and see the rest of your display. Self-reference is an important aspect of Spencer-Brown's work which we'll come back to later on.

Since we seek to recognize distinctions, we need a clear means of denoting them. Rather than use an implicit frame as above, we like to draw distinctions explicitly. Below is one way to do that (another way is to use parentheses).

To review, notice that the inside of the circle is empty. In order to confirm this, your perspective must cross both the viewing frame and the boundary of the circle.

The concepts of frame, reference, representation, and boundary all involve a basic disconnection of content from context; they are all distinctions.

Calling		Crossing