Michael writes: "Eco says that a sign is always an element on the expression plane that is conventionally correlated to one (or more) elements on the content plane. More exactly, he says, we should refer to a sign-function in which two functives (content and expression) are mutually correlated. He then elaborates about codes and how the sign-function operates.
"Peirce wrote extensively about signs, and his system was indeed complex. He refers to representamen, ground, and object, and describes three kinds of triadic configurations of them.... "You want to take it from here?" Crikey, no, don't take it from there -- because that sounds very much like you're saying, Okay, that much is clear, but what comes next? Eco, the life-long semiotician, is not a hell of a lot clearer than Frances. And, of course, Peirce's style is a kind of Maginot line, studded with neologisms and other concrete verbal obstacles denying students any access to alleged enlightenment -- or access to evidence of fundamental errors. The most frequent of those other obstacles to comprehension is the taking of an old, familiar, relatively simple word, and disfiguring it out of recognition with a new stipulative (and usually very complicated) definition. So each time a reader encountered the old familiar word there ensued a screeching of brakes, a backing up, and a slow turn to the left to proceed carefully down a narrow alley to a newly built labyrinth of "meaning". It was all very exasperating. Peirce, in his final years, looked back on his writings and cursed his own style as counter-productive, perhaps the chief reason his teachings did not dominate philosophy the way he'd expected. He was only half right in this. His philosophy failed to triumph because, after brilliant beginnings, his thinking had gone wrong. He was a self-destructively reifier, jamming an attic so full of chimerical entities, categories, sub-categories, qualities, etc, its floor finally gave way, and the lot crushed everything below right down into the basement. ************** It's raining cats and dogs -- Come to PawNation, a place where pets rule! (http://www.pawnation.com/?ncid=emlcntnew00000008)
