Ah, okay. Sounds like he’s skipping straight to (social) praxis. I can work with this. Thanks. 
(Also, “skipping straight to” suggests more linearity than I mean to imply, so there’s that. It’s an approach I can deal with, is all I mean to say.)
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I encountered some Bakhtin a bit in my undergraduate studies in literature which I found congenial. I still have several of his books on my shelves, but I’ve never found the simultaneous time and impulse to explore deeper. Perhaps somewhere around now will be the time…
“The empirical objects as […] “ideal manifold” of its “aspects” or “moments”” resonates for me. Reminds me again of Zyporyn for whom every “coherence” (object of any kind: thought, feeling, sensation or worldly thing) is, in being locally coherent, also globally incoherent as well as possessing infinitely many possible “other” local coherences. This leads to the ideas of “subsumption” and “omnicentrism” wherein everything is subsumed by everything else and everything is everything else. This kind of relates to the Huayen Buddhist notion of “Indras Net” as well as (perhaps, perhaps not) quantum entanglement. Fascinating stuff!
I like this merely allusive (as I read it) linguistic gesture towards the unsayable―to sit with radical uncertainty and speak regardless with the hope that something will shift in us and in others. It seems that many in philosophy are in one breath not content with unsayability even as, with the another breath, they purport to acknowledge it and pay their respects to it.
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Are you familiar with the earlier triadic semiotics? This remains the more popular model in biosemiotics and applications I’ve seen to physics and information theory.
The original definition Saint Augustine gives is something like:
“A sign is a thing which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes something else to come into thought as a consequence of itself.”
Or as John of Saint Thomas puts it a bit more technically, the sign is: “That which represents to a cognitive power something other than itself.” This makes it its own unique form of causality. It’s the content determining cause that makes us think this instead of that. So for instance, smoke is a sign of fire in that is makes us think of fire.
It makes for a tidy diagram:
Anyhow, language would here be just a particular sort of sign. But animals without language would be said to be using signs all the time, and even inanimate processes could be signs.
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Yes, the diagram exactly shows Peirce’s model, and I seem to recall from reading John Deely, that Peirce is supposed to have gotten it from Augustine and John of St Thomas (if I recall correctly).
Yes, and it is different from a strictly causal relation in that smoke might lead us to think of fog, or cigarettes or the disco instead.
Right, biosemiotics and even pansemiotics have their contemporary advocates. As a one-time reader of Whitehead, I am also reminded of his ‘panexperientialism’. To me these ideas are fascinatingly different ways of thinking about things―much richer than ‘billiard ball’ causation.
John of St Thomas’ “that which makes a cognitive power think of something other than itself” would be perhaps extended in the aforementioned ways of thinking semiotics. Unless of course we conceive of minds or mind being ubiquitous, or extend the notion of cognition.
Yes that sounds right. The “way that the world shows itself pre-theoretically.” The way that the stop sign “manifests” in practical life. As part of a streaming of the world from my POV, but when I drive I am not explicit for myself.
Very cool ! I need to check Zyporyn out. Indra’s Net is mentioned by Schrodinger, who is basically an ontological perspectivist in My View of The World.
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This connects with “the ground is an abyss.” There is a “blind faith” in language that we can’t “get behind” or “dominate.”
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Yes ! So I read Heidegger and Derrida in this direction. “Everything is a sign.” The fundamental “character” of the world is “significance.” So there is no “leap” from human language proper in terms of a new ingredient like “immaterial meaning.” There is ( most of us assume) a vast “enrichment” and "self-referentiality " in human signs proper, the kind that get called signs, because “the signifier is arbitrary.” This arbitrariness contributes to a sense of a signified that is “more than” a role for a "role-instituted “equivalence class” of “same-enough” empirical events.
The word ‘everything’ is a sign, and almost any thing can be used as a sign. But everything? 
In human language or in general? The “natural signs” seem fairly “fixed.” Dark clouds and low pressure → rain, has a tight relationship. This is even true with mammalian body language and vocalizations. One needs no prior exposure to a beaver, skunk, bear, dog, etc. to know when it is angry.
But this holds for a great deal of human communication too, with body language, tone, etc.
The “stipulated sign” is then somewhat unique in its extremely flexibility. I would hesitate to call it “arbitrary” simply because etymology is so often informative and reveals a sort of rational development, even if it is chaotic and contingent, but it is certainly accidental. What is interesting is that the stipulated sign becomes part of the umwelt, so that it is experienced like a natural sign. One doesn’t need to think about the meaning(a) of a stop sign anymore than the meaning of smoke. The Stroop test is a great example of this. The stipulated sign can become stronger than the natural one of color.
I guess a difference in the models though is that infinite semiosis in the tripartite model isn’t thought to lead to infinite interpretation. This is Eco’s criticism of Derrida. But Eco, Deely, etc. have a lot of good to say about the later uses of Saussure’s semiotics, but mostly as critique. Actually, Derrida mentions Peirce as a sort of forerunner, but this seemed to me to be an oddly neutralizing reading, because while CSP certainly is criticizing modern realism in the same way, he’s also restoring a sort of medieval realism.
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Right, I’m not so familiar with semiotics but Goodman’s theory of symbols explains how some symbol systems are “fixed” while others are more or less arbitrary by their syntactic and semantic structures.
It’s a metaphor. Speaking more carefully, I’d say the world is “significant already.”
“Generalized signs” are called “signs (proper)” when the sign is instituted or conventional.
The “weird smell in here” is already “meaningful” in a way that is not best described in terms of an “immaterial conceptuality” being carried by it. The postulation of “immaterial meaning stuff” looks to me to come from instituted signs. Basically the “meaning” of a proposition is something like an equivalence class of “paraphrases.”
Yes. This is what I mean by “visceral” more or less. I suffer the “stipulation” as part of “world.” And “accidental” is better than “arbitrary.” I agree. An important component of all of this for me is “time” or cultural and personal history and their entanglement. The sign “consciousness” (for instance) changes as I read so-and-so. The sign “marriage” changes after 20 years of marriage. The sign is a “word in my ear.” A word in my ear. Yet I want to understand and be understood. So there’s a tension. If I “hear the sign in a new way,” then maybe I can change the way that others hear it. This is what the “great philosophers” do for me, change the hearing of signs, which is my hearing but directed toward an “ideal” hearing. Not necessarily the “true” meaning but a better meaning. More coherent, etc.
Definitely an issue I’m interested in. I’ve dabbled in Deely. Basically got distracted. Would like to grok Peirce on semiotics, but his lingo is not so welcoming. I’m open to some form of “realism” in this context. I suspect that it’s a fundamental issue. As in “the problem of the sign” is the “big problem” focused.
There is an interesting linkage to information theory too, because Shannon’s Model basically has the semiotic triad in the source, signal, and recipient. But it is also reductive and dyadic, yet also mathematical and easy to operationalize, so the two can help each other out.
I think this works better than attempts to mathematize meaning through extension, as in Carnap-Hillel information using possible worlds.
I’m trying to get at this from the world side, saying something about a thing in my “What is a thing?” thread.
So I’m interested in what you have to say.
I’ll just say what I think is the case and you can decide later if it is worth developing an argument in support of it.
There are things in the world (even if that world is a my solipsistic string of different experiences).
There are my words I tell my self and others about these things.
Then there is the meaning.
Meaning is the bridge - it is found in the things in the world, and it is found in the words. What I mean when I say something, is that thing in the world.
That thing, therefore, can generate its own meaning, and I can either catch it, see what it is, see how it performs in the unique way it performs, or not. Meaning in a thing in the world is better called “function” or “life”. It is particular to that thing, in that thing.
So there is the thing in the world, and the meaning I have in mind about that thing.
The words are the bridge between my meaning, and the meaning found in that thing in the world. I say “That thing rolls” and I unite the various aspects of some thing, one of which involves roundness, and my mind thinking of that roundness in motion. The words are not the meaning, because I can say “that thing moves by spinning.” These are different words but that convey the same meaning in my mind, and about the thing.
So words, meaning, and the thing meant, have to be distinct in order for there to be a functioning language.
I don’t have the background to understand what you are referring to here.
I like your “bridge” metaphor.
If I point to someone’s untied shoe, then I point at a shoe that I take to be in the world I share with that other person. But both of us have to be trained into reacting to an index finger by following the ray it implies to what is therefore being pointed at. Note also that “one keeps one’s shoes tied” is also implicit in the “ground” I assume between us. I assume that they can follow my finger, see their untied shoe, and appreciate my gesture as a kindness. I don’t mean we explicitly/“conceptually” assume this. I mean it’s tacitly there or “enacted.” Though we can “find words for” what we enact.
Right. The “meaning” is not reducible to a particular soundstream or the fugitive seeing of an inscription. As I see it, “meaning” involves a “temporal synthesis.” Lots of phrases “do the same-enough” thing in the social world, including the social world of our interior monologue, and we say they have the same “meaning.”
So I agree, depending on how we parse this. The paraphrase can thematized as its own entity. But the “role” of the paraphrase —an equivalence class of paraphrases — is the “meaning.” And we do of course distinguish between a vocalization and what it “refers” to.
But we might also emphasize the interdependence of these concepts.
Regardless of approach or whether one has read Derrida & Co, equivalence relations are reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. For example, an orange possesses properties which are recognizable in other oranges, but not in other fruits. That’s how something like an orange can be equivalent to other oranges. It’s not equivalent to other fruits, nor to words, classes, or paraphrases.
The meaning of the word ‘orange’ is set by its conventional use, and refers to oranges. Reference is asymmetric: the word ‘orange’ refers to an orange, but the orange doesn’t refer to the word. An orange can also exemplify its meaning by possessing certain recognizable properties plus being referred to by the word ‘orange’. An orange can also express a variety of meanings depending on context and convention. Reference, exemplification, and expression are asymmetric.
I have to say that made me laugh a lot. Thanks.
I know. I went to school for that stuff. Which suggests ( to razz you a little ) that a person can study math and like Derrida. But also love the logical positivists. Carnap mocked Heidegger ? Fine. Carnap is great, but Heidegger is even better.
The use of EQs was metaphorical. In math, EQs are often quite definite/exact. But away from that: We don’t all categorize sounds or marks the same way. Early neural nets read handwritten digits from zip codes. This is an example of what I’m talking about. Categorization. Infinite ways to scribble in pencil what counts as a 9.
Does nine-ness live “above” all of these scribbles ? Or is it the equivalence of these scribbles ? And the possibility of more counting-as-nine scribbles ?
Sure, I mean I don’t disagree at that level of generality. But you leave “meaning” un-explicated or still-folded-up here. If I speak about an orange at a particular time, I make sounds.
How does that particular sound “connect” to “the” word “orange” ?
What makes a non-repeatable sound, at a particular time and place, a saying of the enduring word “orange” ?
What makes a non-repeatable perception, at a particular time and place, a perception of a particular enduring orange ?
What “synthesizes” both sayings and perceptions into enduring words and oranges ?
I mean we can speculate about empirical explanations, but for me the point is a pointing out of this strange synthesis. The world is there for us as enduring things that are between us. And this includes enduring “repeatable” signs ( like sayings of ) the word “orange.”
In concrete terms, the saying ( the sound) is the sign. But the sound has its “life” as a sign in being recognized or categorized as the saying of a relatively static word.
Looks to me like pragmatic blurry “equivalence classes” all over the place, layers on layers. Which weirdly is echoed in constructions of the real numbers in set theory.
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