one novel · two instruments
Gibson's novel coded line by line against two incompatible theories of the sign. The dissertation's theory chapter runs on both pillars and asserts they are complementary; these are the passes that test it.
Peirce. Every passage where someone reads, grants, or refuses a mind, coded for the cue on offer and the mode it was read in. Five machines hold fluent conversation and every one of them is ignored: fluency reads as resemblance, never as cause, and resemblance licenses no inference to a mind. A blind second coder then refuted the author.
Saussure. A dyadic, synchronic instrument applied to the whole novel, asking what system of differences makes a conscious machine sayable at all. Machine-target predicate assignment climbs across four states of the book, from pre-naming to post-Neuromancer.
Peirce's sign is triadic. It carries an interpretant — the effect the sign produces in a reader — so it can model the moment someone looks at a machine and decides there is, or is not, a mind on the other end. It sorts signs by how they reach their object: by resemblance, by real causal connection, or by convention alone.
Saussure's sign is dyadic and synchronic. It has no interpretant and no time axis, so it cannot model that moment at all. What it can do is map the system of differences that makes conscious machine a sayable proposition in the first place, and locate the value of AI inside that system.
The two instruments were run independently over Chapter Three and then compared directly. Neither dominates. Each caught passages the other missed, in both directions — which is what complementarity would have to mean if the claim is to be worth anything.
That result is one chapter of twenty-four, and the divergence count stands at zero, which is a sample-size artefact rather than agreement. The cross-instrument page sets out what it does and does not currently support.