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Page 184
lated into" (4.132). So the interpretation by interpretants is the way in which the ground (as immediate object) is manifested as meaning. The interpretant (as object of Speculative Rhetoric) is without doubt "that which the Sign produces in the Quasi-mind that is the Interpreter" (4.536), but, since the presence of the interpreter is not essential to the definition of the interpretant, this latter is "in the first place" to be considered as Immediate Interpretant, that is, "the interpretant as it is revealed in the right understanding of the Sign itself, and is ordinarily called the meaning of the sign" (4.536).
Therefore, being distinguished as formal objects of different semiotic approaches and in reference to different points of view, ground, meaning, and interpretant are in fact the same, since it is impossible to define the ground if not as meaning, and it is impossible to define any meaning if not as a series of interpretants. Many passages confirm this opinion: "by the meaning of a term . . . we understand the entire general intended interpretant" (5.179); "it seems natural to use the word meaning to denote the intended interpretant of a symbol" (5.175); "the complete Immediate Object, or meaning" (2.293).
7.2.4.
Nevertheless, we know that the interpretant is, not only the meaning of a term, but also the conclusion of an argument drawn from the premises (1.559). Has the interpretant a broader and more complex sense than meaning? In 4.127, when saying thatin its primary acceptationthe meaning is the translation of a sign into another sign, Peirce says that, in another acceptation "here applicable" (Peirce is dealing with problems of logic of quantity), meaning "is a second assertion from which all that follows from the first assertion equally follows, and vice versa. This is as much as to say that the one assertion 'means' the other." The meaning of a proposition, as well as its interpretant, does not exhaust its possibilities of being developed into other assertions and in this sense is "a law, or regularity of indefinite future" (2.293). The meaning of a proposition embraces "every obvious necessary deduction" (5.165).
So the meaning is in some way entailed by the premise, and, in more general terms, meaning is everything that is semantically implied by a sign. One could thus say that, according to Peirce, the meaning of a sign inchoatively contains all the texts within which that sign can be inserted. A sign is a textual matrix.
7.2.5.
At this point, however, the notion of meaning seems to be rather broad. Instead of being applied to single terms, it is applied to premises and arguments. Is there, beyond the meaning of a dicisign and of an argument, something such as the particular meaning of a rheme? The

 
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