In semiotics polar opposites are held to be confusingly significant in some contexts, as for example the absence of a white cane not necessarily signifying sightedness, and the presence of a white cane necessarily signifying blindness unless deceptive. So, the absence of a mention about confusion for you does not necessarily imply a lack of confusion about some topic, but the presence of a mention about confusion for you does necessarily imply confusion. It would however be my interpretation that an absence implies no confusion, so as not to wrongly over guess the silent member. (Assuming some confusion mentioned at least on your part, more will come later from me on your message below.) -Frances
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2009 12:45 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Sign Defined Frances, you must not believe that because "No other member has MENTIONED any confusion" about what you term "the meaning of the word 'sign'", that therefore there IS no confusion. Consider the following passage from a recent posting of yours. My guess is you received no mention whatever of the passage from any lister. Do you really believe this silence justifies your apparent belief there was no reader-confusion about what you had in mind?: " these subsigns would correctly be immediate syntactic actisigns, and not immediate semantic qualisigns like their referential tones and marks. The issue then is what dynamic or energetic intermediate object is signified by the preparatory subsign to a mark, and what proper sign is subsequently realized by this subordinate act of productive signification. Such an interpretation of marks wrongly and merely as immediate syntactic representations, and not correctly as immediate semantic referentions, subsequently turns the quasi marks as actisigns justly into nothing more than vital indexic signs like signals and symptoms caused by some organism." I guarantee this: there was much confusion. Moreover, even if it were the case that no reader FELT confusion, that would be no proof that there WAS no confusion. I have in my day often felt confident about my grasp of someone's concept or argument, only later to discover I had it "all balled up". Similarly, the absence of any mention of concern about whether or not there is "general agreement on the meaning of the term "sign"" is not evidence that there must therefore be general agreement. The recent thread, "Marks", saw many, many exchanges before it began to become clear that listers were all entertaining more or less different notions of a "mark". "To prove this claim of mine, members may wish to post a short message on what they think the meaning of the word or term "sign" might be." I claim you've put the question wrongly here. What you should ask is that each give a description of his or her notion behind the word 'mark'. That way you can excuse your ignoring of my repeated argument that words don't have meanings -- and of all the many implications of that argument. You say: "My own attempt to define a "sign" will still follow later in due course." Alas, I see I have been unavailing in my argument that the "due course" for that definition was long ago when you first began using the term. Your justification for not supplying it then was evidently that you assumed everyone, upon reading the word 'sign', would find arising in their minds the "same" notion as yours. Oy. Also, don't forget your notion of "global theory" as distinguished from "special theory". "The list debate and archive should both benefit." ************** It's raining cats and dogs -- Come to PawNation, a place where pets rule! (http://www.pawnation.com/?ncid=emlcntnew00000008)
