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this case the addressee should rely on certain preestablished conventional interpretations of fig which are not those foreseen by, say, apple or cat.
3. The addressee, being a critic used to interpreting medieval texts, supposes that the message in the bottle is an allegory, written by a poet: the addressee smells in that message a hidden, second sense based on a private poetic code, holding only for that text. Figs can be a synecdoche for ''fruits," fruits can be a metaphor for "positive astral influences," positive astral influences can be an allegory for "Divine Grace," and so on and so forth. In this case the addressee could make various conflicting hypotheses, but I strongly believe that there are certain "economical" criteria on the grounds of which certain hypotheses will be more interesting than others. To validate his or her hypothesis, the addressee probably ought first to make certain conjectures about the possible sender and the possible historical period in which the text was produced. This has nothing to do with researching the intentions of the sender, but it certainly has to do with researching the cultural framework of the original message.
Probably our sophisticated interpreter should decide that the text found in the bottle referred on a given occasion to some existing figs and was indexically pointing to a given sender as well as to a given addressee and a given slave, but that afterward it lost all referential power. The addressee can dream of those lost actors, so ambiguously involved in exchanging things or symbols (perhaps to send figs meant, at a given historical moment, to make an uncanny innuendo), and could start from that anonymous message in order to try a variety of meanings and referents. . . . But the interpreter would not be entitled to say that the message can mean everything.
It can mean many things, but there are senses that would be preposterous to suggest. I do not think that there can be somebody eager to say that it means that Napoleon died in May 1821; but to challenge such a farfetched reading can be a reasonable starting point for concluding that there is at least something which that message cannot positively say. It says that once upon a time there was a basket full of figs.
I admit that in order to make such a statement one must first of all assume that sentences can have a "literal meaning," and I know that such a point is controversial. But I keep thinking that, within the boundaries of a given language, there is a literal meaning of lexical items and that it is the one listed first by dictionaries as well as the one that Everyman would first define when requested to say what a given word means. I thus assume that Everyman would first say that a fig is a

 
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