Mike Frank writes "if, in fact, "signifiers differ from culture to culture" then obviously what these different things have in common is their function, within the meaning system, AS SIGNIFIERS. . ." What if to "function" as a "signifier" had not one meaning but a set of meanings related by family resemblances? We can use the word "game," for example, to talk about a board game, a game of baseball, what a child does with dolls, throwing a ball in a field without rules, a psychological stratagem, etc. These meanings of game aren't the same. They have no one function in common. They are connected by intermarriage as it were. Mike Frank continues". . . if they do have this in common then we can establish general principles examining what this commonality is and how it works. . . if they do NOT have at least this trait in common then it seems to me to make absolutely no sense to say that they are all signifiers. " In the example of "game" there are no general principals, just principles shared by a couple of meanings of game but not others and so on so that use A can have principle p in common with use B and principal p' in common with C and where as b has p'' in common with C and E and so on. Games and signifiers are motley. ". . . semiotics as a field--like all other fields, i suspect--requires that the categories of the field apply to uniformly to a range of things that otherwise are heteronomous" Wittgenstein denied that this is true of math. He showed that math was not based on uniform categories, but was an assortment of techniques. This is supported by Godel's proof that a formal system cannot be complete and consistent (i.e.,. that arithmetic or geometry cannot be generated from a set of axioms), though the two thinkers attack from different sides. Surely the motliness of semiotics is much more apparent. There are good reasons for calling both W. C. Fields in the film of *David Copperfield* and Mr. Macawber in the novel signifiers, but we are using the word in two different ways when we do so. When we call the algebraic variable "x" a signifier we add a third. We might claim something like "all of these signifiers stand in for something that they are not," but it would be hard to say that of W. C. Fields in the same way that we say it of x or Mr. Macawber. If we say that Mr. Macawber stands in then we must mean that he stands in for a mental image of a person or a mental image of awkward goodheartedness, or some such interpretation. Yet he stands in for those things in an odd way: by being them. (To say that the name " Macawber" is a signifier while the character is not is absurd, they are both signifiers though of different kinds, and that is the point.) W. C. Fields's mode of standing in is radically different. He pretends to be someone he is not and becomes fully formed as a signifier by a system of filmic processes such as costume, editing, the other players etc. "X" functions (in some equations) as something like a pure opening, standing in not for what it is not but for what is unknown. So we have three different senses of standing in here. Any other attempts to give a common principal to all signifiers will only result in different uses of the same term. This is just a repetition of the "problem" engendered by calling all of these things signifiers and soon leads to an infinite regress. The problem is, fortunately, a false one since our linguistic and semiotic competancies allow us to make sense of terms whose uses are related by family resemblances (all terms?). In other words we can play various language games separately or at the same time. The only real problem arises when we attempt to account for them all with the same system. But that does not mean that we must give up on semiotics, merely recast it as semio-pragmatics=8A Now I really am off to SCS. -- lgs ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]