[Inquiry] Re: Sign Relations -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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SR.  Discussion Note 9

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KM = Kirsti Määttänen

Re: SR-DIS 8.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-January/002267.html
In: SR-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-January/thread.html#2247

KM: Thanks a lot for this.  I'll read it later more carefully, in detail.

KM: Dummet, once I happened to read something of him, I dropped after a few sentences.
    Thinking:  Why on earth, having Peirce to read, would I read Dummet.

At any rate, the idea itself, of relating semantics to equivalence classes
of syntactic entities, is pretty generic, often enlightening, and seems to
occur to most folks sooner or later.  The big difference in attitude comes
in whether one thinks that this "reduces" semantics to syntax or not.
Weighing against the reduction, aside from the non-uniqueness of the
construction, already mentioned, is the "generative" character of
a living language, and the fact that a set of syntactic entities
is not in general a syntactic entity itself, but an abstract
object over and above the syntax.  These factors compell
an approach to semantics, and even the syntactic theory
itself, that involves rational concepts and categories,
not merely empirical ones.

Jon Awbrey

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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
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