I find all this tediously obscure with a highly in-bred self-congratulatory yet pointless circularity. How does an ordinary person use language? That is the ultimate and always in the end the final criterion of any verbal usage. You all have exactly the same “starting point” that you can never ever escape which is your body that you normally call “your self” (though not here of course) that you can not only NOT get back to but do not even know that you need to. If one of ‘you’ die, it has direct implications to the whole conversation, though ‘you’ will not notice it beyond trivial murmurs. And if the ‘you’ is everybody else who is just incidental to you? Do you start questioning yourself in letters as an “other”? Do you start getting replies? -x- No, this is not irrelevant. It points out the supreme particularity that is each person’s body as an absolutely necessary “presence”, first to themselves, and secondly to the whole endeavor. Peirce is exasperatingly obscure because he is trying to scientifically talk about “language” but only has ‘language’ to talk about it with. When you talk to people who know nothing at all about Peirce, as you must sometime, you are deservedly incomprehensible. But the way Peirce interpreted, he quite often used common parlance, sometimes, as the break in his analytic circularity involved with language interpreted by language. -x- But he did not identify this as the only possible break, the direct appeal to a physical denominator. “Common parlance” always necessarily implies bilateral correspondents in the flesh either as bodies or as text. There are no exceptions even when corresponding to oneself that you make into an “other”. To classify “common parlance” as not up to your astronomically high standards automatically hides the beginning and ending roots of any discourse you have whatsoever. You become air talking to air distinguishing one kind of breath from another. There is no scientific experiment whatsoever where the activity of ordinary people is not absolutely surrounding the experiment - even including all possible ‘extended families’ of any kind of impacting human group or person – that makes the experiment even possible to conduct. To utterly ignore this necessary presence in every single one of your statements is utter folly. Gary C. Moore
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