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expression with a more analytical definition; by associating to an expression all the emotional connotations conventionally recognized by a given culture and therefore specifically coded ('lion' connotatively meaning 'fierceness' and 'ferocity'). But no semantic analysis can be complete without analyzing verbal expressions by means of visual, objectal, and behavioral interpretants, and vice versa. |
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This list of possible components corresponds to the various types of interpretants proposed by Peirce. I am still not convinced that (as somebody has suggested) the classification 'immediate, dynamical and final' corresponds to the one 'emotional, energetic and logical'. I think that Peirce has foreseen many types of interpretants, but has failed to organize them in a correct categorical analysis just because he did not directly think of their possible classification as means of content analysis. |
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But it is not so important to outline a complete casuistry of interpretants; it is more useful and far more urgent to show how this notion saves the category of content (and of meaning) from being an ungraspable platonic abstraction or an undetectable mental event. Once the interpretant is equated with any coded intentional property of the content, since these properties cannot be isolated but under the form of the other signs (that is, other representamens), the elements of the content become something physically testable. A given culture displays, in any of its activities, accepted correlations between representamens (or expressions), each becoming in turn the interpretant of the other. In order to understand how an explicit correlation of expressions makes the content analyzable, think of the Rosetta Stone, carrying the simultaneous translation of a hieroglyphic text in Demotic and in Greek. The content of the first Egyptian text has become testable because of the mediation of the Greek one, this latter being in its turn interpretable, not only because there existed public lexicons equating given words with given contents, but also because these contents were already largely analyzed by the Western culture. Egyptian became understandable insofar as it was interpreted by Greek, and Greek was understandable insofar as it was already interpreted, not only by other languages, but also by the correspondence between Greek words and many images, facts, and behaviors, as well as by the continued work of mutual definition performed by the Greek language reflecting upon itself by means of treatises, poems, letters, and so on. Notice that, according to Peirce, interpretants are not only what I have equated to the semantic elementary components; as a matter of fact, the notion of interpretant is richer than that. Even the inferential labor elicited by a sentence or by a book is to be considered an interpretation of the first semiotic stimulus. If I interpret Peirce correctly, the entirety of Stendhal's text Le rouge et le noir should be considered an interpretation of the proposition 'Napoleon died in 1821'. |
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