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analogies) the Peircean idea of Unlimited Semiosis. At first glance certain quotations from Peirce seem to support the principle of an infinite interpretive drift. For instance:
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The meaning of a representation can be nothing but a representation. In fact it is nothing but the representation itself conceived as stripped of irrelevant clothing. But this clothing never can be completely stripped off: it is only changed for something more diaphanous. So there is an infinite regression here. Finally the interpretant is nothing but another representation to which the torch of truth is handed along; and as representation, it has its interpretant again. Lo, another infinite series. (C.P. 1.339)
Can we really speak of unlimited semiosis apropos of the Hermetic ability to shift from term to term, or from thing to thing? Can we speak of unlimited semiosis when we recognize the same technique implemented by contemporary readers who wander through texts in order to find in them secret puns, unheard-of etymologies, unconscious links, dances of "Slipping Beauties," ambiguous images that the clever reader can guess through the transparencies of the verbal texture even when no public agreement could support such an adventurous misreading? There is a fundamental principle in Peirce's semiotics: "A sign is something by knowing which we know something more" (8.332). On the contrary, the norm of Hermetic semiosis seems to be: "A sign is something by knowing which we know something else."
To know more (in Peirce's sense) means that, from interpretant to interpretant, the sign is more and more determined both in its breadth and in its depth. In the course of unlimited semiosis the interpretation approximates (even though asymptotically) the final logical interpretant, and at a certain stage of the process of interpretation we know more about the content of the representamen which started the interpretive chain. To know more does not mean to know everything, but it means that a sign entails all its remote iliative consequences and the meaning of a proposition embraces "every obvious necessary deduction" (1934:5.165).
We can know more of a sign because we accept knowing its object according to a certain ground, that is, under a certain description, from the point of view of a given context, "in some respect or capacity" (2.228). In structuralistic terms, one could say that for Peirce semiosis is potentially unlimited from the point of view of the system but is not unlimited from the point of view of the process. In the course of a semiosic process we want to know only what is relevant according to a given universe of discourse.

 
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