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What I wish to say is that, even when separated from its utterer, its arguable referent, and its circumstances of production, the message still spoke about some figs-in-a-basket. I wish also to suggest that, reading the letter, and before questioning the existence of the sender, the addressee was in the first instance convinced that a given Figs Sender was in question.
Let us suppose now (narrative imagination has no limits), not only that the original messenger was killed, but also that his killers ate all the figs, destroyed the basket, put the letter into a bottle and threw it into the ocean, so that it was found seventy years (or so) after Wilkins by Robinson Crusoe. No basket, no slave, no figs, only a letter. Notwithstanding this, I bet that the first reaction of Crusoe would have been: "Where are the figs?" Only after that first instinctive reaction could Crusoe have dreamed about all possible figs, all possible slaves, all possible senders, as well as about the possible nonexistence of any fig, slave, or sender, about the machineries of lying, and about his unfortunate destiny as an addressee definitely separated from any Transcendental Meaning.
Where are those figs? Provided Crusoe understands English, the letter says that there are, or were, somewhere, 30 fruits so and so, at least in the mind (or in the Possible Doxastic World) of a supposed sender or utterer of that message. And even if Crusoe decides that these scratches on a piece of paper are the accidental result of a chemical erosion, he faces only two possibilities: either to disregard them as an insignificant material event or to interpret them as if they were the words of an English text. Once having entertained the second hypothesis, Robinson is obliged to conclude that the letter speaks of figsnot of apples or of unicorns.
Now, let us suppose that the message in the bottle is found by a more sophisticated student in linguistics, hermeneutics, or semiotics. As smart as he or she is, such a new accidental addressee can make lots of more elaborate hypotheses, namely:
1. The message is a coded one, where basket stands for "army," fig for "1,000 soldiers," and present for "help," so that the intended meaning of the letter is that the sender is sending an army of 30,000 soldiers for helping the addressee. But even in this case the mentioned (and absent) soldiers should be 30,000, not, say, 180unless in the private code of the sender one fig stands for six soldiers.
2. Figs can be intended (at least today) in a rhetorical sense (as in such expressions as to be in good fig, to be in full fig, to be in poor fig), and the message could support a different interpretation. But even in

 
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