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"The ultimate meaning of a proposition is the law expressed in the conditionals" (5.491). The meaning of a descriptive proposition is the condition of its verification (2.511, 2.639., 2.640., 2.511., 5.203., 5.198, 5.402., 5.423). There is a real perfection of knowledge by which "reality is constituted" (5.356). |
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If for the pragmatic maxim (5.462) the meaning of any proposition is nothing more than the conceivable practical effects which the assertion would imply if the proposition were true, then the process of interpretation must stopat least for some timeoutside languageat least in the sense in which not every practical effect is a semiosic one. It is true that even the practical effect must then be spelled out by and through language, and that the very agreement among the members of the community cannot but take the form of a new chain of signs. Nevertheless, the agreement concerns somethingbe it a practical effect or the possibility of a practical effectthat is produced outside semiosis. |
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There is something for Peirce that transcends the individual intention of the interpreter, and it is the transcendental idea of a community, or the idea of a community as a transcendental principle. This principle is not transcendental in the Kantian sense, because it does not come before but after the semiosic process; it is not the structure of the human mind that produces the interpretation but the reality that the semiosis builds up. Anyway, from the moment in which the community is pulled to agree with a given interpretation, there is, if not an objective, at least an intersubjective meaning which acquires a privilege over any other possible interpretation spelled out without the agreement of the community. Peirce makes clear that the community of researchers is independent of what we think (5.405). The result of the universal inquiry points toward a common core of ideas (5.407). There is an activity of communitarian thought that works as the Destiny (5.408). There is a true conclusion of semiosis and it is Reality (5.384). "The fact that diverse thinkers agree in a common result is not to be taken simply as a brute fact" (Smith 1983:39). There is an ideal perfection of knowledge (5.356). |
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The thought or opinion that defines reality must therefore belong to a community of knowers, and this community must be structured and disciplined in accordance with supra-individual principles. The real is "the idea in which the community ultimately settles down" (6.610). "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real" (5.407). |
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"The real, then, is what, sooner or later, information and reasoning |
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