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One word is worth one coin; silence is worth two.
Talmud
The question of reference
The question of reference constitutes a somewhat peripheral but nonetheless perennial problem throughout the history of semiotic discourse. Indeed from select perspectives it constitutes a core concern. For example, emphasis upon, or seeming disregard for, "reference" helps distinguish the endeavors of American semioticians (viz. Peirce and Morris) from the otherwise largely complementary endeavors of Continental semioticians, following Saussure. Since such emphasis or disregard is hardly unrelated to hermeneutic and epistemological issues as well, some re-examination of the question of referentiality seems in order. Thus I would like to begin by reviewing the problem-both from American and Continental perspectives-and end by suggesting a new insight into the problem: an insight drawn from the non-Western metaphysics of Sanskrit philosophical discourse.
Reference, as topic, is neatly addressed in Catherine Porter's recent translation of Ducrot and Todorov's Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du language (1983:247 ff):
Since linguistic communication often has extra-linguistic reality as its object, speakers have to be able to designate the objects that constitute this reality; this is the referential function of language (the object or objects designated by an expression form its referent).
Ducrot goes on to distinguish empirical from imaginary realities, to distinguish reference from signification, and then to relate the "Saussurian opposition of signified and referent" to the enterprises of medieval logicians as well as Frege's "analogous distinction between the referent of a sign (Bedeutung) and its meaning (Sinn)."
In instructive contrast, Jonathan Culler's popular Penguin study, Ferdinand de Saussure, barely mentions the question of referentiality in its careful explication of de Saussure's revolutionary remove from "object to structure". Only in his discussion of pronouns does Culler finally offer the following consideration. "There are certain philosophical problems here which Saussure did not tackle; in particular, philosophers would want to say that what Saussure calls the signification of an utterance involves both the meaning and the reference" (1976:27). Such contrast is instructive precisely because Saussure's very influential concept of sign becomes the key obstacle to that notion of referentiality which conversely marks the alternate semiotics of Morris and Peirce.
Recall Morris' predication of his term/concept designata upon reference: "Objects need not...