Wednesday, 1 January 2020

Making Sense Of Reality

Axiom 1: Immanence: All meaning is within semiotic systems

Axiom 2: Semiotic systems distinguish between a non-semiotic domain and a semiotic domain.

Axiom 3: Within the semiotic domain, the semiotic system of language distinguishes between a material-relational domain and a mental-verbal domain.

Axiom 4: It is the mental-verbal domain (the process of consciousness) that construes experience of the non-semiotic domain as the meaning of the semiotic domain.


In this view, 'reality' is identified with the semiotic domain: the outer material-relational ± the inner mental-verbal. For example,
Galilean science is concerned with the outer material-relational domain ('primary qualities') rather than with the inner mental-verbal domain ('secondary qualities'); and
in Cartesian philosophy, the certainty of the existence of the inner mental-verbal domain (cogito) guarantees (ergothe existence of the outer material-relational domain (sum).

To be clear, this does not mean that the domain outside meaning (e.g. what is construed as 'cancer') "does not exist", but that to think or say that anything exists is to transform the meaningless into meaning (e.g. a material world).