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Unlimited Semiosis and Drift: Pragmaticism vs. "Pragmatism"
1. Worlds and Texts
The double metaphor of the world as a text and a text as a world has a venerable history. To interpret means to react to the text of the world or to the world of a text by producing other texts. To explain the way the solar system works by uttering Newton's laws or to utter a series of sentences to say that a given text means so and so are, at least in Peirce's sense, both forms of interpretations. The problem is not to challenge the old idea that the world is a text which can be interpreted, but rather to decide whether it has a fixed meaning, many possible meanings, or none at all.
Let me start with two quotations:
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1. "What does the fish remind you of?"
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"Other fish."
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"And what do other fish remind you of?"
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"Other fish."
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(Joseph Heller, Catch 22, New York,
Simon and Schuster, 1961, p.290)
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First presented as "Drift and Unlimited Semiosis" at the Indiana University Institute for Advanced Studies, July 19, 1983. A different version was presented at the C. S. Peirce Sesquicentennial Congress, Harvard University, September 1989.

 
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