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Page 36
tant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum. . . . If the series of successive interpretants comes to an end, the sign is thereby rendered imperfect, at least" (2.300).
Peirce could not do differently, since he was assuming (as he did in "Questions concerning certain faculties claimed for man") that (i) we have no power of introspection, and all knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning; (ii) we have no power of intuition, and every cognition is determined by previous cognitions; (iii) we have no power of thinking without signs; and (iv) we have no conception of the absolutely incognizable. But in spite of this, deconstructive drift and unlimited semiosis cannot be equivalent concepts.
I do not agree with Searle when he says that "Derrida has a distressing penchant for saying things that are obviously false" (1977:203). On the contrary, Derrida has a fascinating penchant for saying things that are nonobviously true, or true in a nonobvious way. When he says that the concept of communication cannot be reduced to the idea of transport of a unified meaning, that the notion of literal meaning is problematic, that the current concept of context risks being inadequated; when he stresses, in a text, the absence of the sender, of the addressee, and of the referent and explores all the possibilities of a nonunivocal interpretability of it; when he reminds us that every sign can be cited and in so doing can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitablein these and in many other cases he says things that no semiotician can disregard. But frequently Derridain order to stress nonobvious truthsdisregards very obvious truths that nobody can reasonably pass over in silence. Rorty would say that "he has no interest in bringing 'his philosophy' into accord with common sense" (1982:87). I think rather that Derrida takes many of these obvious truths for grantedwhile frequently some of his followers do not.
If it is true that a notion of literal meaning is highly problematic, it cannot be denied that in order to explore all the possibilities of a text, even those that its author did not conceive of, the interpreter must first of all take for granted a zero-degree meaning, the one authorized by the dullest and the simplest of the existing dictionaries, the one authorized by the state of a given language in a given historical moment, the one that every member of a community of healthy native speakers cannot deny. Every sentence can be interpreted metaphorically: even the assertion John eats an apple every morning can be interpreted as "John repeats Adam's sin every day." But in order to support such an interpretation, everybody must take for granted that apple means a given fruit, that

 
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