Are we really masters of our signs?
Are we really masters of our signs?

Summary/Abstract: Availing himself of Humpty Dumpty and Mrs. Malaprop – the original author of that rhetorical device, the malapropism – Donald Davidson suggests that on occasion we are apparently masters of our words. But we don’t really know it, because we do what we do on tacit as well as conscious levels. Davidson’s ‘triangulation’ model accounting for our way with words brings to mind what Peirce calls the ‘pragmatic maxim’, which also involves both tacitness and consciousness, since one’s feeling, sensing, imagining, conjecturing, experiencing and conceiving develop along multiply nonlinear paths, from signs to physical and imaginary worlds and their interpretations. This process entails interdependent, interactive interrelatedness. An effort to pattern the process takes us through (1) key aspects of Buddhist thought, (2) certain aspects of mathematics and geometry, (3) the creation of world-versions, and (4) their interpretation by means of (5) our co-participatory role with respect to our signs, other semiotic agents, and our physical world.

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