truth, meaning, done
Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Fri, 19 Jan 96 22:12:43 EST
I think we may have had enough on the perennial issue of
meaning/reality, but I do agree with Gary that semiotics, as a
generalization of semantics, needs to concern itself with the
meaning of 'states of affairs': actions, events, situations, etc.
I try to do this in my own theorizing, and considers utterances
to be a species of action, contexts aspects of situations, and
'propositions' just a formalization of some of this for language.
Activities and practices, I think many of us would agree, are
more fundamental than verbal propositions as such, and cannot be
set in one-to-one correspondence with (verbal) 'texts' (much less
with propositions, which are only a very restricted species of
verbal texts). My notion of meaning, like Peirce's I believe, is
not fundamentally a semantic one, but applies to actions and
practices, etc. 'Truth' concerns a tiny subdomain of all this,
and not one I think is worth all the trouble philosophers go to
about it. There is very little in life about which it is
meaningful to ask 'is it true?', but hardly anything about which
we do not need to ask 'what can it mean?'
One might even ask why truth has been made out to be so
important, and what historically that has to do with modern
rationalism, individualism vs communitarian values, capitalist
political economy, and many other contemporary social
determinants of philosophical discourse. But not today. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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