ONT Re: Rightful Reigning Regent
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RRR. Dialogical Note 1
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MB = Michel Balat
MB: Je ne sais pas ce qu'est un referent et donc je ne puis comprendre
ce que signifie "determination d'un referent". (Je suppose qu'il
s'agit du reste d'une discussion qui a eu lieu, mais que je n'ai
pas suivie.) En soi (si un tel terme avait un sens!) aucun signe
ne signifie quoi que ce soit, puisqu'il ne signifie qu'en contexte.
Or le contexte est clair s'il s'agit du titre de la reine actuelle
(cf. Kantorowitz "The King's Two Bodies"), et le signe complet, en
situation, laisse au signe partiel que tu extrais de l'ensemble une
signification parfaitement claire dont l'objet est la reine actuelle.
Ce signe partiel est du registre de la loi, pour improbable que soient
ses occurrences reeles. Mais peut-etre ceci est hors de ton propos.
Michel,
I am exploring yet another variation on a very old theme:
How much power of determination does the sign alone have
over the semiotic orbit in which it bears its trajectory?
In this case I am alluding to one of Bertrand Russell's
favorite examples of a "singular description", namely,
"The present King of France is bald", and I am very
suspicious of his notion that the "logical form" of
a "succession of characters" is sufficient all by
itself to determine either an objective referent
or a definite sense, fictional or otherwise.
Just because we fail to render interpretive assumptions explicit,
or prefer not to render them explicit for hosts of tacit reasons,
does not mean that they are not present and active, nevertheless.
Indeed, "ever-the-more" in many cases.
In particular, just because we devise some clever trick ("the fan")
to eliminate the appearances of indexical signs ("the green beard")
from a sentence or a text does not mean that we have eliminated the
indicial features of all our signs from the expressions that we use.
To fantasize that we have eliminated the reality by eliminating the
"weit und breit" sign of it is an indirect, but all the more severe
case of nominal thinking, if not downright psychopathology.
You may remember the discussions that we had -- the fights that broke out! --
in the Stand Up Ontology Working Group as to whether ontology is political
(personal, cultural, generally speaking implicit-theory-laden in some way).
This is not unrelated to that.
I am exploring this theme in more detail on
the "Peirce Through The Looking Glass" (PLG)
thread, in relation to the Duhem-Quine thesis.
http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2003-February/001682.html
http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2003-February/001685.html
http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2003-February/001692.html
http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2003-February/001695.html
http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2003-February/001701.html
Amicalement,
Jon Awbrey
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