I’ll confess I don’t quite understand what is at stake here. I’ll admit my biases against trying to ground meaning in terms of anything like “literalness” whether it be Saussure (or at least what goes under that term) or the approach of say Rorty in the literal vs. metaphor approach. Even in the debate over metaphor I typically think what’s really going on is less the issue of metaphor than the issue of vagueness as it relates to temporal issues of meaning.
> On Jan 23, 2017, at 1:18 PM, Edwina Taborsky <[email protected]> wrote: > > I explained a 'literal-bound' analysis in my post, when I gave the example of > Saussurian semiological nominalism, where 'this word' stands for 'that > meaning'. But the problem seems to be that even within a Suassurian structuralism the discussion is always narrowed to a particular type of structural analysis. That is the discussion is usually a static one of a particular text or code. Yet the traditional problem of such structuralism is that the boundaries of meaning are always fuzzy. That is to say that X stands for Y achieves nothing when Y is itself somewhat undefined. Nominalist attempt to avoid this problem by thinking there are individual entities one can quantify over. However I’m not sure even that works as we can see with the Sorites paradoxes. There are different approaches of course to how to deal with these issues of vagueness. Timothy Williamson has his justly regarded writings on that issue. (Vagueness and Knowledge and its Limits — both excellent books and worth reading even though I favor Peirce over his approach) His approach is to say there is a truth of the matter on when someone is say bald but that it’s unknowable. This is somewhat close to Peirce’s approach to vagueness although I think there’s a certain nominalist element to Williamson. It’s been a while since I’ve read him so I don’t want to attribute to him a position he might not hold. Elsewhere he has argued that using probabilities allows one to achieve some of the distinctions made in platonic conceptions of mathematical terms. This moves him somewhat towards the modal realist perspective (IMO) and perhaps closer to Peirce than his possible nominalist tendencies would imply. An other interesting move by nominalists that again verges upon realism is the recent approach of taking resemblance (or iconicity for Peirce) seriously as mind-independent. Again Williamson is frequently cited here but also again my memory makes me afraid to say too much without doing some research.
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
