[Inquiry] Re: Sign Relations -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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SR.  Discussion Note 4

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BB = Bill Bailey

BB: Jon, I was apparently the one who was unclear;  I think I understood your post.
    Let me see if I can respond without the usual cut and paste job.  First, as I
    tried to convey, I have no problem with any of your analytics and schemata
    regarding sign relations, and if I did, given my lack of sophistication in
    semiotics, it wouldn't mean much.  Mainly, I think, my comments about not
    learning and using language (I didn't get the relevance of the hypothetical
    biological bases of language, by the way) went astray.  My only issue was
    what seems to me paradoxical in your summary statement.  You say people's
    actual use of words and language are problematic as regards extracting
    sense from all the idiosyncratic usage, but when you reference/anchor
    those sign relations relative to the abstracted conventions of words
    in language, wouldn't you expect that?  The behavior may be far less
    idiosyncratic when assessed relative to the pragmatics of context,
    where people do not compose their discourse word by word according
    to linguistic function, but rather use the learned communication
    artifacts of their culture/community/family.

Bill,

Maybe the word "idiosyncractic" is too red a flag.
When you say that signs need to be "assessed relative
to the pragmatics of context", that is pretty much all
that I am trying to flag, if you consider the additional
circumstance that context and the person speaking are not
constants but extremely variable.  The fact that we learn
to use, or otherwise grow into, languages that have these
qualities is not disputed, it simply goes beyond what many
people with no sensitivity to the pragmatic dimension take
for granted as being adequate to semantics and ontology.

Jon Awbrey

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