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lieu. Insofar as it takes into consideration the pragmatic dimension, a liberal semantics also provides frames and schemes of action. |
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According to Peirce's famous example (C.P., 2.330), lithium is defined not only by a position in the periodic table of elements, and by an atomic number, but also by the description of the operations that must be performed in order to produce a specimen of it. Peirce's definition is text-oriented because it also predicts the possible contexts in which the expression lithium can usually occur. If we admit, for the sake of the story, that Adam knew and named lithium, we must say that he did not simply assign a name to a thing. He figured out a given expression as a peg for hanging a series of descriptions, and these descriptions pictured, along with the sequence of actions that he performed with and upon lithium, the series of contexts in which he met and expected to meet lithium. |
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According to my revised version of the myth, Adam did not see tigers as mere individual specimens of a natural kind. He saw certain animals, endowed with certain morphological properties, insofar as they were involved in certain types of action, interacting with other animals and with their natural environment. Then he stated that the subject x, usually acting against certain countersubjects in order to achieve certain goals, usually showing up in the circumstances so and so, was only part of a story pthe story being inseparable from the subject and the subject being an indispensable part of the story. Only at this stage of world knowledge could this subject x-in-action be named tiger. |
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In the light of this version of the myth, we can understand better all the arguments that Plato lists in his Cratylus in order to support the theory of motivated origin of names. All the examples of motivation he gives concern the way in which words represent, not a thing in itself, but the source or the result of an action. Take the example of Jupiter. Plato says that the curious difference between nominative and genitive in the name ZeusDios is due to the fact that the original name was a syntagm expressing the usual action of the king of gods: ''di' òn zen," the one through whom life is given. |
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Likewise man, ànthropos, is seen as the corruption of a previous syntagm meaning the one who is able to reconsider what has been seen. The difference between man and animals is that man not only perceives but also reasons, thinks about what has been perceived. We are tempted to take Plato's etymology seriously when we remember that Aquinas, facing the classical definition of man as a rational animal, maintained that "rational" (the differentia that distinguishes man from any other species of the mortal animals) is not an atomic accident, as it is usually be- |
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