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Page 37
Adam is intended as the first man, and that, according to our biblical competence, Adam ate a forbidden fruit.
Derrida would beand indeed he wasthe first to deny that we can always use language as an instance of drift and the first to refuse the objection that there arc no criteria for verifying the reasonableness of a textual interpretation. In Grammatology he reminds his readers that without all the instruments of traditional criticism "critical production will risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guard-rail has always only protected, it has never opened a reading" (Eng. tr., 158).
Let us for a while protect the reading of Peirce, rather than open it too much.
7. Peirce Alone
It is true that Peirce speaks of a possible infinite interpretation. This is possible because reality appears to us in the form of a continuum where there are no absolute individuals, and this is the principle of synechism: "A true continuum is something whose possibilities of determination no multitude of individuals can exhaust" (1934:6.170). Reality is a continuum which swims in indeterminacy (1.171172), and just because of this the principle of continuity is "fallibilism objectified" (1.171). In a continuum where one can isolate infinite undetermined individuals, the possibility of error is always present, and therefore semiosis is potentially unlimited. "The absolute individuals can not only not be realized in sense or thought, but can not exist, properly speaking. . . . All, therefore, that we perceive or think, or that exists, is general. . . . That which exists is the object of a true conception. This conception may be made more determinate than any assignable conception: and therefore it is never so determinate that it is capable of no further determination" (3.93).
This indeterminacy of our knowledge involves vagueness: "A subject is determinate in respect to any character which inheres in it or is (universally and affirmatively) predicted of it. . . . In all other respects it is indeterminated" (5.447). In this sense Peirce is affirming a principle of contextuality: something can be truly asserted within a given universe of discourse and under a given description, but this assertion does not exhaust all the other, and potentially infinite, determinations of that object. Every judgment is conjectural in nature, and common sense, even when true, is always vague (5.181, 7.646647). "A sign is objectively vague insofar as leaving its interpretation more or less inde-

 
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