Among the flaws I see in myself as I reread postings of mine is the habit of putting too many argument, too many subjects, in a single posting. So I'll see if I can, at least for a while, address one point at a time.
When Michael suggests we should think of the speaker/writer as someone who chooses/creates a "Thing in the Middle", and we should distinguish between the Writer, The Thing in the Middle, and the Reader, I think I follow Michael and I agree with him. Michael writes: "the maker can evoke a notion in the other person's head by using the word or image as his way of aiming. He can say, "This represents my thought, and I formed it in this way to convey my thought to you."" My point (about the writer's responsibility) is that we on the forum should be more alert to the possibility that our "Thing" is not doing a good job of "conveying". Granted, a Writer's Thing can never be perfectly "clear" in the sense of occasioning in the Reader's mind an exact replica of the notion in the Writer's mind. "Clarity" is a matter of degree. And to improve his degree of success, the writer should often add to Michael's "word or image" something more: a description of the notion he has in mind. This is especially so when the word is being used as the vehicle for an "abstraction". If a writer says "Parthenon" or "apple" to me, chances are I'll end up with a notion serviceably close to what he has in mind. The "concreteness", the specificity, of those images tends to restrict and channel the associations that arise in my mind. But if he says, 'content', 'context', 'express', 'denote', 'meaning', 'as if', etc, too many "interpretations" can arise. And certainly if he says "rules", and adds "i.e. signs", I have no surety at all what he has in mind. The impression I have of how Michael and William differ from me is that I believe the Thing in the Middle has to be a description-of-the-writer's-notion, a "definition" of the key terms, a lot more often than they do. Their knowledge, insights and abilities in visual arts are far, far more than I can ever match, but my own peculiar background has perhaps trained me to be more on guard against ambiguity and confusion -- and not just my training in philsophy: When I was in publishing I used to say that the most important aptitude in a non-fiction editor is the ability to see when something is not clear. (And, yes, I'm aware that that ability is itself a matter of degree, and I certainly wish I had more of it than I do.)
