ONT Re: Classification Of Signs
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COS. Note 24
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JA: There's no such thing as a proper name, a sign so magically sympathetic with
its one and only intended object that it can pick it out of a crowded cosmos
and will this one thing with purity of heart as its uniquely sole denotation.
Strings of char like "Omaha" and "Perth" can only do so much, nothing at all
by themselves, and serving as signs that are capable of determining singular
existents just isn't one of them. And if you're determined to find the rest
of that misplaced determination in the context, countryside, county, environ,
neighborhood, province, state, surround, or vicinity then you are barking up
the wrong bailiwick. All of which the pragmatic thinker says by saying that
words from "Time" to "Timbuktu" are properly read as "symbols", and if they
mean, then they mean what they mean just because some interpretant says so.
TG(IF?): And what you say seems true enough in terms of terms.
But suppose we conjoined two of those terms (along with
what their interpretants say they mean), say Omaha and
Nebraska. Wouldn't that pinpoint a location? And even
if there were 2 or more Omaha's in Nebraska or several
parallel Nebraska's, wouldn't the conjunction point to
determinate locations nevertheless? Kind of like using
two or more vectors of our direction-finding equipment to
pinpoint a location in an otherwise inaccessible terrain?
Tom,
Do you mean "Turn of the Century Omaha.Ne" -- and by the way, which century? --
or do you perhaps mean "Antebellum Omaha.Ne" -- and by the way, which bellum? --
at some point one simply has to grasp the basic information-theoretic thistle
that five bytes, or a gadshillion bytes, or any finite number of bytes can
only byte off so much of the world, or all conceivable worlds, to chew on,
and it's always a bit more than any sort of ontological atom.
Jon
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