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Page 42
stop by producing a consensual judgment. Indeed, symbols grow but do not remain empty.
The reason for which I have insisted so much on the differences between Peirce's positions and various forms of drift is that in many recent studies I have remarked a general tendency to take unlimited semiosis in the sense of a free reading in which the will of the interpreters, to use Rorty's metaphor, "beats the texts into a shape which will serve their own purposes." My own purpose in beating (respectfully) Peirce was simply to stress that things are not that simple. Since in the following chapter it will be stressed that, if it is very difficult to decide whether a given interpretation is a good one, it is, however, always possible to decide whether it is a bad one, my purpose was to say, not so much what unlimited semiosis is, but at least what it is not and cannot be.
Notes
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1. To speak of connotation one needs a clear-cut distinction between literal and figurative meaning, and such a distinction is today more and more challenged. (For a survey of the most recent debates, see Dascal 1987:259269.) However, it is still possible to assume a statistical notion of literal meaning as zero-degree relative to contexts (Cohen 1966:22; Ricoeur 1975:180ff) artificially constructed (Genette 1966:211; Groupe µ 1970:30ff). This zero degree would be that meaning accepted in technical and scientific contexts. If one asks an electrician what he means by dark, he would probably answer "without light, obscure." Webster (at the item dark as adjective) provides first the same technical definition and records "sinister" and "evil" as secondary definitions. Only this way one can understand why, at the beginning of Dante's Divine Comedy, dark wood signifies, by connotation and as a metaphor, the sinister and evil life of a sinner. In every connotative relationship the first sense does not disappear in order to produce the second one; on the contrary, the second sense must be understood on the grounds of the first one. To say that figurative meanings presuppose the literal does not mean that the actual addressee of a connotative expression ought to realize its literal meaning in order to understand the figurative one. An actual speaker can use the ready-made expression what a mess to designate a confused situation without thinking of the original culinary meaning of mess (a portion of food that, when composed of different pieces of meat and vegetables, can be a hodgepodge). But in order to explain why the empirical speaker was entitled to intend what he actually intended to mean by his utterance, a theory of connotation presupposes a complex semantic representation of mess which, first of all, takes into account the properties that compose its literal meaning. Only so is it possible to justify that mess can also connote a confused collection or mass of things and events, a muddle, a jumble.
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2. I disregard the fact that in the magic perspective not only one thing be-

 
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