Abstract
This article uses tagmemic theory as a semiotic framework to analyze symbolic logic. It attends particularly to the issue of context for meaning and the role of personal observer/participants. It focuses on formal languages, which employ no ordinary words and from one point of view have “no meaning.” Attention to the context and the theorists who deploy these languages shows that formal languages have meanings at a higher level, colored by the purposes of the analysts. In fact, there is an indefinitely ascending hierarchy of theories of theories, each of which analyzes and evaluates the theories at a lower level. By analogy with Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theory, no level of the hierarchy can capture within formalism everything in a sufficiently complex system. The personal analysts always have to make judgments about how a formalized system is analogous to the world outside the system. Arguments in analytic philosophy can be useful in clarification, but neither clarification of terms nor clarification of the structure of arguments can eliminate the need for personal judgment.
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Articles in the same Issue
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Special section on Peirce and Consciousness; Guest Editor: Donna E. West
- Peirce’s vocation for consciousness: an evolutionary account
- The element of surprise in Peirce’s double consciousness paradigm
- Peirce’s legacy for contemporary consciousness studies, the emergence of consciousness from qualia, and its evanescence in habits
- Consciousness and mind in Peirce: distinctions and complementarities
- On the bottomless lake of firstness: conjectures on the synthetic power of consciousness
- Toward a Peircean logic of meditation
- Regular Articles
- Semiotic analysis of symbolic logic using tagmemic theory: with implications for analytic philosophy
- A. J. Greimas in the world: travels, translations, transmissions
- Analyse sémiotique de l’index de livre : Étude de la construction complexe et unique d’un paratexte
- Kubrick’s audible bodies: unseen subjectivities in 2001 and The Shining
- An experimental study on the effect of emotion lines in comics
- What do hashtags afford in digital fashion communication? An exploratory study on Gucci-related hashtags on Twitter and Instagram
- Surviving a natural disaster as a semiotic reformation of the self and worldview
- Hotspots for textual dynamics: cultural semiotic approach to digital archives
- Book Review
- Review of Conspiracy theories as a form of phatic communication