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would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. . . . The very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a community" (5.311). |
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The process of knowledge is not an individual affair: "In storming the stronghold of truth one mounts upon the shoulders of another who has in the ordinary apprehension failed, but has in truth succeeded by virtue of the lesson of his failure" (7.51, 4.547). The truth can at least be reached in the long run (2.758). |
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There is community because there is no intuition in the Cartesian sense. The transcendental meaning is not there and cannot be grasped by an eidetic intuition: Derrida was correct in saying that the phenomenology of Peirce does notlike Husserl'sreveal a presence. But if the sign does not reveal the thing itself, the process of semiosis produces in the long run a socially shared notion of the thing that the community is engaged to take as if it were in itself true. The transcendental meaning is not at the origins of the process but must be postulated as a possible and transitory end of every process. |
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In section 1 above, it has been accepted that the notion of interpretation holds for worlds seen as texts as well as for texts seen as worlds. Consequently, all the remarks above can be applied to the critical activity of text interpretation. |
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In the Peircean line of thought it can be asserted that any community of interpreters, in the course of their common inquiry about what kind of object the text they are reading is, can frequently reach (even though nondefinitively and in a fallible way) an agreement about it. |
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In the next chapter it will be clear that to reach an agreement about the nature of a given text does not mean either (a) that the interpreters must trace back to the original intention of its author or (b) that such a text must have a unique and final meaning. There are (see Eco 1962a) "open" texts that support multiple interpretations, and any common agreement about them ought to concern just their open nature and the textual strategies that make them work that way. |
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But, even though the interpreters cannot decide which interpretation is the privileged one, they can agree on the fact that certain interpretations are not contextually legitimated. Thus, even though using a text as a playground for implementing unlimited semiosis, they can agree that at certain moments the "play of musement" can transitorily |
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