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without knowing the model that the statue portrays?). If the first books of Locke's Essay are about the relation between terms and ideas, the book "On words" is on the conditions of social use of linguistic terms.
Schlieben-Lange (1975:2) ranks among the forerunners of pragmalinguistics not only Peirce and Morris but also Mead, the Wiener Kreis, ordinary language philosophy, Wittgenstein, Apel, Habermas, many Marxists such as Klaus, symbolic interactionism, not to speak of Austin, Ryle, Grice, and Searle.
Thus the last turning point in semantic discussions, instantiated by differentbut fundamentally compatibleattempts to provide models for an encyclopedia-like representation of meaning, do not represent a revolution in a scientific paradigm but appear, rather, as a return to the very roots of the philosophy of language.
All these instances are in some way introducing pragmatic elements into the semantic framework.
In order to figure out a liberal notion of semantics, one must take a liberal notion of pragmatics. Let me take as such the one proposed by Bar-Hillel (1968), according to whom pragmatics is concerned, not only with the phenomenon of interpretation (of signs, sentences, or texts) or of indexical expressions, but also with the "essential dependence of communication in natural languages on speaker and hearer, on linguistic context and extralinguistic context, on the availability of background knowledge, on readiness to obtain this background knowledge and on the good will of the participants in the communication act" (271).
Some of the phenomena listed by Bar-Hillel are probably to be dealt with also by some other disciplines. It is, however, a matter of bibliographical evidence that many of them, and maybe more, have become the objects of liberal semantic theories as well as of that new branch of semiotics commonly labeled as text, or discourse, semiotics.
2.1. Interpretation
The first example of liberal semantics is Peirce's theory of meaning (as Immediate Object) and of interpretants. In the framework of Peirce's philosophy of unlimited semiosis,
(i) every expression must be interpreted by another expression, and so on, ad infinitum;
(ii) the very activity of interpretation is the only way to define the contents of the expressions;

 
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