William, I think you have me wrong when you write:
" Miller is an advocate of the correspondence school of thought in art, as is
Cheerskep with respect to "notions". If something does not look-like some
other absent but known thing, it is blank, nothing, muddled, or false."
My efforts on our forum are repeatedly and aptly humbling as I see my
failures to convey serviceably various notions I have in mind. But I have to
temper
my sense of inadequacy occasionally. You put the general reason nicely when you
write:
"Some viewers are more sophisticated than others. They don't pay attention to
anything that falls beyond their capacities."
I feel I what I've written over time on the forum should be adequate to show
any alert reader that I'm not an advocate of any "correspondence school of
thought" -- none that I know of anyway -- in art or anything else. This is
especially so when I've insisted that words (and pictures, gestures, etc) do
not
"refer, signify, denote, "pick out", or "mean" anything. They are solely the
occasion for notions.
The principal source of those notions is the associations that arise in the
minds of contemplators, supplemented by the products of processing mental
apparatus. Those of us brought up in similar communities will have acquired
many
associations common to all of us.
The standard correspondence theories of "truth" and "meaning" assume that,
say, for any noun there is an object to which the noun has a "connection" of
some sort called "correspondence". It's exactly this sort of entity that I have
called chimerical. Nouns don't "mean", "denote", "signify". There is no entity
that is either the action or the bond implied by those verbs. I have no
illusions I've said everything that that might be said on the subject, but I am
non-humble enough to claim I have adequately conveyed I am not an advocate of
any
"correspondence", and I think all theories of such alleged correspondence are
false.
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