Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Does this mean that meanings have no place within the process of communication itself, but only within its post hoc theoretical reflection?

Thus, though it is the process of interpretation that is constitutive of meanings, this does not mean that getting hold of a particular meaning must always involve me in interpretation.

Or take the interesting results of the systematic investigations of the linguistic evidence for the count/mass, event/process or individual/stage distinctions.

One of the clearest articulations of the semiotic approach was given by Charles Morris: 'The properties of being a sign, a designatum, an interpreter, or an interpretant are relational properties which things take on by participating in the functional process of semiosis.

If it is the process of semiosis that establishes the link between an expression and its meaning, then there is no room for any kind of indeterminacy: there must be a determinate, pre-existing object that becomes meaning through semiosis.

If we accepted the semiotic view, then we could not see any problem in determining whether 'N' refers to A or B even if A and B had precisely the same properties; 'N' would simply unequivocally refer to that object which took part in the relevant process of semiosis.

Notes 1. A less ambiguous way to call this approach would be to use the term nomenclatural, employed by Peregrin (forthcoming b), but here we want to stress the roots of this approach, which are connected with understanding language as arising out of a process of semiosis.

To give a reason is to go through a process of calculation, and to ask for a reason is to ask how one arrived at the result.

The process of inspection is looking, not seeing.

No sort of process of pointing is connected with explaining "number", any more than it is with explaining "permission to sit in a seat at the theatre".