Every IT system in financial services is, in a sense, a frozen argument — a moment when someone decided that this data model, this workflow, this alert threshold, was the right way to carve reality at its joints. The trouble is that the argument stopped, but the world didn't. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce made a sharp distinction between 'indexical' signs — those that point directly at something real — and 'symbolic' signs, which only work because a community agreed they would. Most of your dashboards, data fields, and reporting schemas are symbolic all the way down: they feel like they're touching reality, but they're touching a consensus that may be decades old. This matters because when a financial IT system starts producing outputs that feel slightly off — anomalies that get rationalized away, KPIs that no longer seem to track what they once tracked — the temptation is to debug the code. Peirce would say: first ask whether the symbolic agreement underneath the code still holds. The system may be working perfectly and measuring the wrong thing perfectly.

Name one data field or metric in a system you use regularly that everyone treats as objective — then trace back: who defined it, when, and under what market or business conditions that no longer exist?

Drawing from American Pragmatism / Semiotics — Charles Sanders Peirce (Collected Papers, Vol. 2, 1932, on the trichotomy of icon, index, and symbol as modes of signification)