< previous page page_226 next page >

Page 226
0226-001.gif
Figure 8.5
'fussy' semantic representation of /brougham/ should assume the format presented in Figure 8.5. In reality this representation should be even more fussy, since also «receptacle», «moving», «horse», and so on, should be dissolved into a network of more analytical definitions.
Fortunately, we have at our disposal metalinguistic shorthands by which (to save time and space) we avoid making explicit those properties that the encyclopedia has already recorded under hyperonomical headings (such as «carriage»), so as to make them equally applicable to coaches, chaises, landaus, phetons, berlins, and victorias. This is the phenomenon of unlimited semiosis theorized by Peirce: every sign is interpreted by other signs or strings of signs (definitions and texts), so that every term is a rudimentary assertion, and every proposition a rudimentary argumentation (C.P.2.342-44).
In this way analyzation and procedures of entailment appear only as metalinguistic devices substituting a broader (and potentially infinite) list of factual properties. In a 'fussy' description there will be no difference between necessary and accidental properties, as in the example of meaning postulates proposed by Carnap, where it is a matter of entail-merit to say that a bachelor is a male adult as well as to say that ravens are black.
It is true that in Carnap's perspective there is still a difference between L-truths and synthetic truths, an L-implication being "meant as explicantum for logical implication or entailment" (Carnap, 1947:11) and entailment being intended as a case of analytic truth.
From this point of view, coupés and broughams still seem to be analytically moving structures by virtue of a meaning postulate, while the fact that they were bourgeois vehicles seems to remain a mere factual truth. But on this subject one cannot but agree with Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) and his critique of Carnap's views. That

 
< previous page page_226 next page >