Rhetorological Semiology

Abstract

The first four chapters of this book have been occupied with an undecidability which affects what Saussure calls the signified, that is, the sense or meaning of a sign, what he earlier calls a concept. An undecidability which affects reference was explicitly touched on in the third section of Chapter 2. It is implicitly touched on however where meaning is under discussion, since understanding concepts is not separable from the ability to refer to cases instantiating them and one cannot refer to something except under some description, even if the description is no more than ‘what I am referring to’. ‘This is this’ makes no sense.¹ Further, in the ‘Platonic’ theory of ideas to which are moored the phenomenological semiologies we have been considering so far, sense and reference are one.

Cite… [f. F citer f. L citare frequent. of ciēre set moving]

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