[Inquiry] Re: Sign Relations -- Commentary

[Jon Awbrey]

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SR.  Commentary Note 13

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We have just seen one of the most primitive of linguistic forms in which
the widely distributed phenomenon of POV-relativity arises, namely, with
the understanding of so-called demonstratives, indexicals, pronouns, and
words like that.  What's the "ontology" of words like "I", "you", "they",
"this", "that"?  Silly way to ask the question.  There is just no way to
understand such words by way of a simple fixed map from signs to objects.

Even when the structure of the object domain !O! is reconstructed on the
semiotic plane !S! x !I!, by partitioning signs into equivalence classes
of some sort, it's a sure bet that the details of the representation are
going to be different for different interpreters.

The kicker of the story is this:  When you really begin to look at how
people actually use language, you will find that their use of words is
far more personalized, that is, far more indexed to their own peculiar
identities, and thus far more like demonstratives, indexicals, pronouns,
and so on, than most people would like to think, and so it is only with
a whole lot of luck and work that we ever begin to extract common senses
out of the massa confusa of all this initial idiosyncracy.

Jon Awbrey

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