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terminate it reserves for some other possible sign or experience the function of completing the determination" (4.505).
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But there are other ideas in Peirce that seem to undermine Derrida's reading. If the theory of unlimited semiosis can appear, in Rorty's terms, as an instance of textualism, that is to say, of idealism, we cannot disregard the realistic overtones of Peirce's idealism.4 Besides, I have already quoted the assertion of Rorty, who considers Peirce still Kantian and in this sense opposed to the current pragmatistic textualism. |
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Despite fallibilism, synechism, vagueness, for Peirce "the idea of meaning is such as to involve some reference to a purpose" (5.166). The idea of a purpose, pretty natural for a pragmaticist, is pretty embarrassing for a "pragmatist" (in Rorty's sense). A purpose is, without any shade of doubt, and at least in the Peircean framework, connected with something which lies outside language. Maybe it has nothing to do with a transcendental subject, but it has to do with referents, with the external world, and links the idea of interpretation to the idea of interpreting according to a given meaning. When Peirce provides his famous definition of lithium as a packet of instructions aimed at permitting not only the identification but also the production of a specimen of lithium, he remarks: "The peculiarity of this definition is that it tells you what the word lithium denotes by prescribing what you are to do in order to gain a perceptive acquaintance with the object of the word" (2.330). |
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Semiosis is unlimited and, through the series of interpretants, explains itself by itself, but there are at least two cases in which semiosis is confronted with something external to it. |
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The first case is that of indices. I am eager to challenge Peirce's idea that indices, in order to be understood as signs, must be connected to the object they designate. (I think it is possible to define the meaning of an indexical sign without making recourse to its actual referent; see Eco 1976:2.11.5.) But it is irrefutable that in the act of indication (when one says this and points his fingers toward a given object of the world), indices are in some way linked to an item of the extralinguistic or extrasemiosic world.5 |
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The second case is due to the fact that every semiosic act is determined by a Dynamic Object which "is the Reality which by some means contrives to determine the sign to its Representamen" (4.536). We produce representamens because we are compelled by something external to the circle of semiosis. The Dynamic Object cannot be a piece of the furniture of the physical world but it can be a thought, an emotion, a motion, a feeling, a belief. We can say that a text can be interpreted independently of the intention of its utterer, but we cannot deny that |
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