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This definition sounds strikingly similar to an analysis in terms of semantic marks organized according to a case grammar of some sort. What makes the analogy hard to establish is the fact that Peirce's definition contains an impressive amount of characters, which are difficult to organize into a structure of arguments and predicates or of different actions and actants. Peirce shows how a representation in the form of an encyclopedia should be, but he does not say how it could be formally elaborated. One of the reasons for such a complexity is that in this definition there is not a sharp distinction between the marks that should be basically attributed to the meaning and those that can be further interpreted as included or entailed by the basic ones, according to the principle of nota notae. Had Peirce said that lithium is an alkaline metal, some of its properties could have been considered as semantically entailed by the first character. But Peirce was not giving an example of 'economic' definition; on the contrary, he was showing how a term entails the globality of information about it. A satisfactory translation of this definition into a formal semantic representation should distinguish those two levels of interpretation. |
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Another aspect of the definition is that it constitutes, in spite of its encyclopedic complexity, only a section of the possible global encyclopedia of lithium. The Immediate Object established by the definition puts the corresponding Dynamic Object in focus only in some respects, that is, it takes into account only what is required in order to insert the term within a strictly chemical-physical proposition or argumentation. This means that the regulative model of an encyclopedia foresees many 'paths' or many complementary disjunctions of the entire semantic spectrum. The marks imputed here should have been labeled as concerning a technical universe of discourse. Lithium is a vitreous, translucent mineral which sometimes appears as a globule of pinkish silvery metal; if the universe of discourse had been an imaginary one (for instance, a fairy tale), then those marks would have been differently focused and organized along with others which do not appear in the above representation. For instance, lithium is known as the lightest solid element at ordinary temperature, and this character of 'lightness' should have been considered in another context. Peirce was conscious of this problem, and the solution that his whole philosophical system provides for concerns some crucial problems of contemporary semantics, namely, (i) whether the marks are universal and finite in number or not, and (ii) what size the encyclopedical representation should assume in order to be both satisfactory and reasonably reduced. |
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In the light of the Peircean notion of interpretant, one no longer needs a finite set of metasemiotic construction. Any sign interpreting another sign, the basic condition of semiosis is its being interwoven with |
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