Verbal Medium and Constitution of Meaning

(The paper was read in he International Conference of Media, Kassel, 1995; it was published in Journal of European Semiotics, 1997 )

Summary                                                             
   The article attempts to use the semiotic concept of “medium” to solve a very important question of our time: certainty/uncertainty of interpretation. Contrary to the predominant Western trend of uncertainty of meaning in fields like philosophy, semiotics, literature and historiography, through a semiotic-comparative analysis of “medium” the article tries to maintain a pragmatic-semantic certainty in reading texts. The conception “operational certainty” employed here is intended to make argumentation in humanities discourses more rational and to point out that the irrationality in interpretation is due to an ambiguous use of the concept “verbal medium”. The important semiotic conception is further employed to deal with the epistemological problem in contemporary irrational philosophy.
0. Introduction
     Sign in communication and signifier in signification can be unified by the concept medium which contains three semes: the middle, the material and the semantic emptiness. The three semes are logically interrelated to each other. The middle has two senses: that between message sender and message receiver in communication and that between expression plane and content plane in signification. In the present paper I attempt to first indicate a necessary separation between the meaning-carrier as the semantic unit and the meaning-carrying substance as medium within the expression plane. In other words, the expression plane is the signifying mechanism per se which is physically based on material of the medium but semantically formed by codes. Consequently, in the verbal text there is also a contrast between verbal medium as the semantically empty substance (S) and signifier as meaning carrier (M) .The latter can only be defined in terms of a variety of meaning-constitutional conditions and the former is only the material or instrument to be employed according to the various semantic devices. It is essential that the singular verbal unit can be read in interpretation either as S or as M, that depends on the explicit and implicit contextual involvements determined by the chosen rhetoric strategy. Of course, any meaning must be carried by a M, but the same verbal shape a M has can be first functionally transformed to S and then recharged with a new meaning. Concretely, a word (verbal shape) can be taken either as M or as S, either as definite meaning or as the material substance to be used to carry some other meaning. After transformation of M to S, a verbal unit can be either rationally or irrationally, scientifically or artistically manipulated through grammatical, pragmatic and rhetoric devices in any possible context. The functional distortion of the word, particularly the philosophical ones, can lead to the falsification that a word carrying a meaning formed in a certain context is employed to be an index which is seemingly pertinent to many other possible contexts. The rhetoric manipulations in philosophical discourses are caused by dogmatically expanding or narrowing their related contextual range and arbitrarily recodifying or re-signifying their verbal medium, evidently disclosing an ideologically pragmatic dimension of the meaning-constitution.
1. Visual Media and Semantic Layers
    The non-verbal artistic text, for example conventional painting, is physically carried by the  visual matter (substance) which, different from the verbal text, itself, participates in the semantic constitution of the text. Thus we can briefly have the following semantically constituent levels at the expression plane of the visual text, such as the  material level (colour and lines), the meaning-formative elements (elementary images) and the syntactic connexions as the picture; while for modernist painting the division between signitive units and pure material is extensively blurred. The criteria for the division depends on the patterns of artistic works. In avant-garde film the significative units can cover the electric effects on screen and even the sound of projector. Therefore, the classical and the modernist paintings have different concepts of “content”. The latter's content plane (meaning) consists of the denotational and connotational levels; the latter can be highly complicated in its formation. Beside the linguistically connotational part, it can also be connected with a variety of cultural, historical and psychological domains forming a richly changeable result of the intention, reception and interpretation for both the sender and the receiver in the artistic communication; despite the pre-existent cultural, social and psychological conditions. The basic part of the artistic text is first caused by a technique of material and two pseudo-grammatical procedures (the semantic and the syntactic) manipulated by the text-operating agent.
   Generally speaking, a text is woven by these two procedures. And for each procedure there can be multiple alternative programs and changeable details, involving the semantic, syntactic, stylistic, pragmatic and other dimensions. Consider, then, the sharply contrasting patterns of the classical and modernist paintings as caused by different types of semantic and syntactic procedures. It is not only that the same medium or material can be used to express different meaning effects in a visual art text(by using colour and lines). Also, more changeable procedures can be connected with both semantic elements(image or shape) and syntactic elements(the realistically representational, the symbolically distorted and visually abstract). The different types of the procedures are, first of all, related to the subjective intentionality and design of the painter: he or she uses different ways to express different content (meaning) through different procedures. Here the elements of both media/semantic and syntactic procedures are only the “material” units for artistic manipulation. Their role, function and “meaning” must be first determined structurally within the operational procedures. There is no “innate meaning” for each elements; each of them can carry any possible meaning produced by the newly chosen or altered procedures. From the side of the receiver, the meaning of the visual art text will vary according to the chosen procedures of the painter, in addition with other extra-textual factors. In general the operative methods for the elements at the material and grammatical levels can produce any designed meaning effects.
2. The Verbal Text and Constitution of Meaning
     What is “medium“ for the verbal text? Auditory sound and visual graph in verbal texts look like those in music and painting. But the essential difference lies in that the material itself doesn't participate in constitution of meaning. Instead, medium for a verbal text is not the physical material itself, but the linguistically articulated forms supported by physical material such as ink and paper. The basic language units are words which are the material substance formed by semantic and syntactic rules. As the middle/matter layer a verbal medium exists between the verbal expression and meaning as well as between the sender and receiver.
   The concept of a verbal medium highlights a double-medium nature in the constitution of meaning at two levels: the linguistic and the pragmatic. They become “material matter” manipulated by the procedures at the two levels. In verbal texts, the physical matter of written and spoken verbal signs is not a constituent part of the expression plane M. Therefore, the pure materials in verbal texts are not as essential in contributing to the semantic constitution. However, physical matter such as sound and shape in verbal texts can also not be classified as the verbal medium S either. The verbal medium itself is the codified auditory or visual signs disconnected from the valid context. It is neither the physical matter itself; nor is it the meaning-carrying signs within an actual or virtual grammatical network. The verbal medium is not  identified sorely by the signs that are actually perceived, but by the contextually disconnected or semantically empty signs recognized by their actual function in a text. Concretely, a “word-shape” can  function as a word with its normal meaning in a context or as a verbal medium to be semantically recodified. In other word, a word can carry a meaning different from its normal paradigm.
3. Pragmatic Manipulation of the Verbal Medium
     If the auditory and visual signifier is stable for a language system, the signified is a group of senses called a paradigm. A word-sign is a set consisting of one signifier and multiple signifieds existing in a potential state (in vocabulary). A word as a medium (the used “material”) first presents a semantic elasticity (as the used material must offer such a elasticity in shaping a form) with its paradigm. The  verbal medium can now be more completely redefined in connection with both linguistic levels: word and text. For the word-shape, its status as medium is indicated in its basic semantic applicability. It can be used to form sentences or text. It is a middle layer between the non-linguistic material S and the verbal text M. Its status as medium is also indicated by its use in communication, it is the middle plane between sender and receiver. In brief, the text covers two levels of semantic constitution: the choice of signifieds at the word level and the rhetoric operation at the pragmatic level. As a matter of fact, the meaning of a text is caused by both the inter-linguistic and extra-linguistic operations which contain several procedures, including morphological and syntactic ones. More evident than in nonverbal texts, the verbal medium is only the physical carrier or substance of the expression plane. The physically visual and auditory signs are only the material matter used to substantialize the linguistic texts whose semantic organization is formed in a separate procedure. It is true, like Husserl described, that thought or thinking is essentially linked with the “Ausdruck”, but this means a matter made linguistic rather than the related physical matter per se. Ausdrücken are not “bloße Worte” but “the word on its meaning: the word carries significant intention; it serves as a bridge to lead to its meaning.” (Husserl 1981, 20; my transl.) For Husserl, the middle layer (bridge) or medium is not the visual mark of the word itself but the semantically charged written unit. The word is a combination of the perceptive mark and sense represented by the mark. Language is definitely different from its physical carrier. In Husserlian semiotics there is a triple division between “Reden, Denken and Gedachtes”; or, simply, a distinction between word, idea and thing. (Cf. Husserl 1981, 17) His “Worte” or “Ausdruck” are the mixture of physical matter (sound and graph) and intentional meaning; in our terms, a mixture of S and M.
   Regarding the two kinds of verbal medium, the visual one is more effective in carrying the conceptual units than the auditory one. More simply, the visual existence of written words and texts makes ideas more tangibly present. That means,  the visually material matter as verbal medium substantially exist there “under” the expression plane; it existentially support the plane or is materially mixed with the plane, making the latter look like the stable substance. The verbal medium can be taken as a verbal operator “x” which can have changeable signified or ideas. The delicate composition of the verbal medium lies in the double identity of the signifier: as the well-established index for the existent signified and as the pure instrument used to refer to any new signified. Additionally, the signifier in a language can be used as both valid sign (M) and the mere material for the new sign (S). Then the old signifier can be used as the new signifier as far as the signifier is defined as an index in reference to its definite signified. This can be formulated as such: one signifier can have several different signifieds, including both valid and potential ones. The same set of signifiers or perceptive marks (S) can operate in different language  codes to form different meanings. In semantic discussions there are different focuses of meaning and function in connection with the linguistic, rhetoric, pragmatic and behavioral communication. In brief, they can be classified in the following four categories for the present discussion: A) the denotational/basic-grammatical; B) the connotational (both grammatical and rhetoric); C) the associative (cultural, historical, psychological); D) the pragmatic/stimulant (extra-textual effects). The classification is based on sources of meaning production. However, a basic distinction should be made between signification and stimulation in textual communication. The analytic/pragmatic-directed analysis is inclined to blur the distinction. One point is what a sign/text signifies, another, however, is what change it causes in action. Or, what  makes you know something and what makes you react internally or externally. It is clearer what is contained within the sign/text that is passively received, than what the sign/text evokes beside its signification. Both processes can be caused by the same sign/text in different contextual situations, while the significational can be still separate from the stimulant, just like knowledge can be separate from action. Thus, a significational semantics and pragmatic semantics can and should be separately treated and then combined to form the total meaning effects.1
4. Dominance of the Written System in Chinese
     The semantic predominance of written in Chinese can be easily explained. For Chinese both the etymological and the morphological meaning of a linguistic unit can only be linked with the visual signs “characters”, without an “essential and necessary” connection with the correspondent auditory signs. Therefore, Chinese written language has an independent existence. The examples are given as follows.
a) There are too many Chinese characters of which modern people know their meaning but do not know their correct pronunciation;
b) One can, of course, use temporarily an alternative (perhaps wrong) sound to “carry” the visual sign in reading, but still there exist no parallel correspondence between the auditory and visual signs in the Chinese system. On the contrary, one auditory unit can correspond with several to dozens and to even over a hundred different characters and meanings.
c) From the original inscriptions on tortoise bones and even from the earlier visual signs modern scholars can decode the meaning of those ancient words or signs only through analyzing the structure of the visual strokes without a possible connection with their original sound; meaning can be expressed and communicated only at the visual level.
d) There are still many ancient words whose meaning have not yet been decoded. Thus they are purely verbal medium to modern readers without being charged with meaning.
e) Chinese, particularly classic Chinese, is especially rich in the semantic associations because of its innate semantic structure.
     One character, as a visual unit, and one or several auditory units can correspond with dozens of semantic units which exist in a hierarchy as a semantic reservoir for a reading of a text containing the character. That further proves the existence of the direct, arbitrary link between the visual signs and meaning in Chinese, although originally Chinese was a more pictographic system.
    The above Chinese example may be used to indicate that the semantic constitution in language is characteristic of an arbitrariness concerning the link between the expression plane and the content plane in general. According to structuralism the semantic relations between the two planes are interdetermined within the phonological Langue. For the pictoriographical Chinese such a inner link doesn't exist, although historically the practical link between sound and meaning is indeed prevailing. In principle, however, a written character can be made to signify anything without a necessary (but of course with a customary) limitation about its sound.

5. Chinese Character as Semantic Operator and Index in Pragmatic Rhetoric
     There exists more semantic ambiguity or multiplicity in abstract words which lack the concrete and stable referents. Semantic manipulation can be more easily performed by these kinds of words, particularly by selectively using semes from the related paradigms, and particularly through adding new semes. This concept can be explored through some Chinese examples again. Many important one-character words function as the central conceptions in the classical philosophical texts. The traditional usage of the individual characters as morphological units has been largely replaced in modern Chinese, by the double-character words, to more definitely (for abstract concepts) and more richly (for descriptive words) adjust the semantic scope implified by words. In other words, in Chinese classical texts the one-character conceptual word contains more alternative meaning which must be more ambiguous in a context. This characteristic offers more possibility to multiply the semantic potential. The typical philosophical terms such as “tao” (road, principle) and “jen” (good, benevolence) are so generic that they can even become the titles of the entire academic fields. In Chinese history, the most general philosophical term “tao” has aroused large amounts of enthusiastic inquiry into its immanent meaning. One of the traditional way of analyzing the philosophical concept is to trace back the etymological history in classical texts. It is interesting that all of the advocates of Tao-philosophy attempt to discover some new original implication from their reading of the historical texts. But is there anything which can be called an original philosophical implication? Originally, the word was a everyday concept meaning “the road“ which is a concrete matter only. Ancient Chinese mentality gradually used this imagery word to express more general or abstract idea. It could be used by anyone to represent his principle or ideal in any direction. Also people use the same visual sign “tao” to carry (to make it carry, owing to convenient or aesthetic reason) any desirable or preferable sense. In general, the example indicates clearly that ancient Chinese “abstract” one-character-words can be used to carry added meaning as long as the new semantic charge can be pragmatically circulated in textual communication. More precisely, it becomes a verbal medium as an operator x to be used to carry any possible meaning. There could be an arbitrariness of a double (auditory/visual) verbal sign system: the original link between an idea and a sound and between an idea and a character or simple graph. The double arbitrary system can only be regulated by the grammatical and pragmatic rules. The high contextual regularity makes the character (as a unity of idea, sound, graph)-signification also highly flexible, changeable and replaceable. A written character, more than its correspondent sound(s), is a verbal operator functioning only in contexts. On the other hand, in its separate appearance, namely, when disconnected from any definite context, a character becomes an index towards many possible meaning paths in a potential way. That means, it can be read in any implicitly possible context. The ambiguity will happen when the implicitly used contexts are different for different readers. The verbal operator can be inserted into any possibly chosen context in one's mind. Even when a character is used in a definite context, the latter can still be uncertain enough to lead to a different reading. The one-character words in ancient time were more frequently ambiguous. Now the new meaning can be more successfully put into the old words when they are made by two characters in modern times. This fact can technically explain why Western abstract or scientific ideas expressed in the phonological languages can be transformed to Chinese. What Gernet said about the special limitation of Chinese language doen'st exist. The semantic flexibility in Chinese expressions is due to the flexible use of the traditional words; that once again indicates meaning is not innately or structurally rooted in the linguistic system. (Gernet 1987,239) In Chinese, we see the idea can be separate from the sound of its historically formed word. There is a Hjemslevian “purport”; but it can exist in disconnection from the language form. (Cf. de Mauro's note in: Saussure 1986, 462)

    In general, any word, whatever convention it may be, can be used in a flexible way or be given any desirable seme, as long as the conventional stylistics and rhetoric permit. Or more precisely, the word or linguistic sign is a mixture of two planes: the signifier and the signified. When the former is constant with its medium-substance, the latter can be variable within language system through semantic manipulation. This situation is more evident in Chinese, because its expression and content planes are conventionally separate. One of the most important philosophical words or concepts is “jen”(human, benevolence) which has maintained its original visual shape without any change over 3000 years of Chinese written history. A conceptual genealogy in Chinese scholarship has been used to trace back the “original” meaning of the key Confucian idea, although its original meaning could be as simple as a mutually-loving relation between two people. Latter Confucianist scholarship places a lot of complicated meaning on the single character and takes the clarified meaning as some original “implication”. The fact is indeed that the one-character word has been added or enriched with many new meanings and functions in the development of intellectual pragmatism and historical scholarship. Simply, the word has been used to carry any desirable meaning in intellectual operations in the changing historico-cultural contexts. Thus it cannot be said that the word or the concept has some etymologically innate meaning which has to be revealed. Instead, it can only be observed how a textual agent uses the word or how he or she manipulate the word in a semantic construction within a texts. Of course, collective social practice can make the word carry a stable group of senses that are historically and communicatively accumulated. However, the historical meaning of a word is due to the pragmatic usage rather than to some “original” or “innate” implication connected to the written sign.
    The spatially separate existence of a Chinese character as one written unit can well explain how people tend to concretize a word as a three-element mixture of sound, graphic and idea. “tao” has been semantically condensed as an independent being implicative of innate meaning. In fact it is only a verbal medium or index or operator which is created by people to carry a chosen sense in a context. The spatial formation of the character also helps lead to a semantic mystification which may make it a symbol of worship. Thus, the verbal medium is used as a mysterious symbol now. Beside their normal function in texts  Chinese characters keeps a specially symbolic function as a semantic index when they separately existing, particularly those traditionally formed one-character words are philosophical symbols. Those separately existing symbols become the index for sets of semantic paths. In fact, the linguistic paradigm of one character becomes a group of statements rather than a set of semes. Concretely a philosophical character is an index or a hint at a group of ideas. The reading of singly existing characters causes a “feeling” of possible semantic and logical links in contexts. The feeling makes reader “feel” to understand a definite “meaning” which is in fact only a psychological certainty for a possible semantic concretization in a chosen context(s). The character in this separate status remains an index only. This trait of Chinese character system evidently indicates that there is no  immanent meaning implied in its etymological source. Instead, the pragmatic apparatus in Chinese rhetoric, in combination with the grammatical ones, are the genuine devices to make more certain meanings constituted in explicit and implicit contexts.
6. Pragmatic-Semantic Flexibility of Western Philosophical Terms
     Similarly, to a less evident degree, Western words can also be used this way, although they lack a comparably independent visual existence. On the other hand, the flexible scope of pragmatic use of semantic units is not limited in its grammatical potential; the connotational layers can bring about more extra-textual possibilities in semantic constitution. Therefore, the content plane carried by words and sentences has greater possibility than the mere grammatical one, i.e., a  word can have a more flexible scope of semantic charge than what its intergrammatical and intertextual codes permit. In general, semantic flexibility of a word can cover three levels: (A) the denotational, (B) the linguistically connotational and the culturally denotational. In addition, there are also © the associative and (D) the pragmatic semantic reservoir. Therefore, the semantic rearrangement at each level can change the meaning effects in the related text. If so, what is an innate meaning for a word or a concept? How can it be made explicit it by tracing it historically? It can only reasonably be said how a word is used this way and that way in different contexts. The word and its valid concept are frequently mixed together in discourse, just like the word as the semantic unit and its visual medium are frequently mixed together.
    Furthermore, despite a phonetic centralism Western language is also faced with the problem of the extra-grammatical semantic possibility. In comparison with Chinese word “tao” as the generic term of “principle”, the West has “logos” and “truth” as its most generic terms. The two words can be used both academically and commonly. Each philosophical discussion on history can develop its own conceptual system, choosing them as key words or concepts. As a more operational term, truth becomes a central conception of traditional philosophical constructions with different epistemological and metaphysical backgrounds. “Truth”, however, is only a verbal word to be used this way or other way; it exists as a signifier or index in connection with a semantic scope chosen or created through the inter/extra-linguistic procedures. As generic term, like the Chinese “tao” it has no “innate” meaning but only the chosen or used meaning manipulated by the pragmatic language user. After Nietzsche had started a huge movement against this traditional western monster consisting of all of its possible patterns, the term “truth” as something definite, as an independent entity in the world, with its innate, independent identity, must be taken as seriously ill. Of course the truth attacker can say the term can be taken to precisely refer to what Plato deals with, for example. Then there are still two questions. First, do you oppose Plato's concept “truth” itself or only a part of the related ideas? Second can Plato's truth can be representative of all concepts carried by the word “truth” in historical texts? Without necessity to go to the problem itself here, it can be stated that that the word truth can be practically used in very different ways. In fact, there exists a historical typology of truth.
   The word truth itself is only a verbal operator to be manipulated one way or another. How can the term truth “itself” be opposed? In a conference held in Kassel 1978 Paul Feyerabend stressed that what he opposes is not some “aspects of truth”, or the “context-bound truth” like those spoken in court but the “truth itself” which everybody in society should obey. He called the truth “this matter” and asked “why should people always follow it?” (Feyerabend 1981, 292; my transl.) Thus, he confuses different senses carried by the same word “truth”. In talking about Nietzsche, Richard Rorty gives a similar criticism:
     Nietzsche has caused a lot of confusion by inferring from `truth is not a matter of correspondence to reality' to `what we call truth are just useful lies'. The same confusion is occasionally found in Derrida in the inference from `there is no such reality as metaphysicians have hoped to find' to `what we call is not really real'. Such confusions make Nietzsche and Derrida liable to charge of self-referential inconsistency. (Rorty 1989, 8)

    First can or must one suggest that the word “truth” be eliminated in its daily and scientific use? Furthermore can or must one similarly erase the principle of “logos” or “reason” in its daily and scientific use? Can we refuse the activity of logical reasoning and positive confirmation in general? If not, how can we declare a necessity to destroy this “rational” terms. In addition, why we can be justified to use some definite types of learning about truth and logos in ancient time to represent all types of learning employing the same words, when the historical words are only the operational medium to be applied in different ways? The mistake of some radical thinkers can be identified in three aspects: first, they use a concrete example carried or indexed by a word to replace the general situation carried or indexed by the same word; second, they want to further destroy the “criminal” words themselves without intending to save them through some more relevant semantic rearrangement; third, they are satisfied in discussing at the most general level to cover the entire field possibly marked with the single words. The radicalist/ nihilist manner of treating the traditional words, truth and logos, appears as if they just wanted to destroy the words themselves as verbal medium(S), preventing any further search towards a hermeneutic certainty and positive confirmation in connection with the basic epistemological problem. Logic, language and reasoning cover many different aspects in both intellectual and practical life. A single word like “logocentralism” can hardly be used to cover the conceptual diversity. Even a Husserlian logicalism contains different semantic and psychological aspects which refute simplistic generalization.
   Amng current intellectual radicalists Derrida's recent defence (1991) of the “right of philosophy” is more interesting. Criticizing a conception that a philosopher is a rational legislator, he emphases that a philosopher is only an artist. 2 Nevertheless, we should ask what distinguishes a legislator from an artist; and what is the meaning of the artist here? Besides, what of human reason that is shared by philosophy and science? Furthermore, can so many different aspects of philosophy, science, technique, and the arts be described by the single word “reason”? When he employs this conception to challenge the human sciences, the issue is immediately related to the rational activity itself. He says,
    nous pensons devoir maintenir l’unité de discipline philosophique contre tous les tropismes séduisants des sciences humaines psychanalyse, sociologie, economie politique, ethnologie, linguistique, semiologie litteraires, etc.), et à travers  cette unité la force critique de la philosophie et des épistémologues philosophiques. (ibid., 176)
     Nihilist deconstruction of philosophical or historical rationality leads to the rejection of any “scientific” or rational treatment of human world. Strategically, Derrida is self-contradictory in his deconstruction endeavor. Using the example of Chinese script he states:
     Is it not evident that no signifier, whatever its substance and form, has a unique and singular reality? A signifier is from the very beginning the possibility of its own repetition, of its own image of resemblance. It is the condition of its ideality, what identities it as signifier, and makes it function as such, relating it to a signified which, for the same reason, could never be a ‘unique and singular reality’. (Derrida 1982, 91)
     It is true that a written signifier in Chinese has no a “unique and singular” signified in general. The correspondent tie can, however, be arranged that way through the definite grammatical code. In other words, the “unique and singular” tie between signifier and signified can and must be realized in actual textual practice.
   “verbal medium” can be used to further explain how  those radicalist statements be organized. If a word is only a typology of different (perhaps interrelated) concepts in various contexts, an arguing procedure against or for one concept can be arbitrarily used (in pragmatic rhetoric) as an arguing procedure against or for another concept contained in the same typology of the word. Precisely, a word can be first implicitly used as a verbal medium or context-free sign and then be contextually re-encodified. As explained before, a verbal unit can function in discourse in a double way:  either explicitly put into a definite context or implicitly disconnected from any context. In the latter case, a word is turned into a medium momentarily lacking any semantic charge, and simultaneously it can be reused in other related contexts in the same discourse. More simply, various conceptual components or alternatives contained in one word can be rhetorically and pragmatically manipulated through this multiply de-signifying/re-signifying process.
7. Flexibility of Grammatical Procedures
     Going back to the linguistic or grammatical procedures for semantic construction in verbal texts. A word's paradigm has a meaningful reservoir and it contains both the denotational and connotational elements. All related semantic elements can be preferably selected to form a definite grid of senses/statements with varying contextual effects to represent a concept carried by a word in producing a text. The changeable combinations of senses/statements from a paradigm are used to contribute to forming the entire conceptual grid, in  potential collaboration with other intellectual and cultural procedures for the total textual production. In all of such possibly semantic contribution to a conceptual formation, the related verbal carrier or medium remains unchanged. Also, one word can have different combinations of conceptual elements drawn from the inter/extra-grammatical procedures. Therefore, in a definite context within a text the word is far from been only regulated by a fixed or innate group of semes provided by the linguistic systems per se. In modernist texts the artistic creation is first caused by the special semantic arrangements at the morphological and syntactic levels through an operation with the grammatical procedures. Then the same linguistic signs can have different semantic charge. The fact can prove in turn  the flexible relation of the word to its historically accumulated meaning in a text. The actual meaning of words in discourse is doubly (linguistically/culturally) determined, and the meaning of a discourse is in fact multiply interpreted according to different procedures of meaning constitution. Thereby, difference in thinking can be first reduced to the difference between the semantic procedures. However, the resultant meaning of words or concepts in texts is also connected with  different rhetorics and pragmatically procedures. Multiple determinism in meaning constitution seems to prove an intellectual perspectivism. Nevertheless, it only indicates a multiple semantic/pragmatic possibility of handling semantic construction. In addition to the linguistically semantic flexibility, different practical goals can lead to different pragmatic procedures for reaching different goals in textuality. Therefore, scientific and literary styles mixed in a text should also be traced back to the pragmatically determined source of meaning-constitution. The general intelligent division between the logical reasoning and illogical rhetoric is naturally based on the same grounds. The linguistic medium and meaning-constituting procedures are used by the text-weaving agent for different purposes which should be distinguished in reference to different practical and teleological situations. Similarly, an entire text as the apparently syntactic combination of words can cover different textualizing strategies serving different practical purposes whose hermeneutic justification depends on different cultural contexts. By a special procedure the scientific or conventional words can be of course artistically operated to produce an artistic type of text. Then the nature of the text can be taken no longer as the scientific or conventional one despite the employed vocabulary of the same kind. Similarly, the discourse distortion using the rational word “truth” and similar ones functions no longer in the category of rational debate. It speaks about some other thing. In the same way, the modernist texts can  use common words to organize special meaningful connexion through special procedures. The conventional words are semantically distorted or changed by rhetorically chosen procedures. The resulting modernist texts may share the same vocabulary with normal texts but probably differ from the latter in semantic construction and pragmatic orientation. Specifically, the used words undergo a rhetorically transformation procedures of de-signifying/re-signifying interchange; the word first loses its normal meaning and thus becomes a verbal medium which is later put into a new meaning through some rhetoric manipulation.
8. Philosophical Irrationality and Semiotic Rationality
     Linguistic signs in the written form are only the signifying instrument to be operated by the subjective agent in reference to practical contexts. There are no innate meaning in the conventional terms. Nietzsche indeed attacks the traditional conceptions produced in the Western civilization which lack their own innate meanings as well. Thus, it is misleading when Foucault, based on Nietzsche, negatively mentions the “big terms” such as “truth”, “consciousness”, “power” and “knowledge” and attempts to destroy “a good/evil ideology”. (Cf. Foucault 1987, 99) Nietzsche's words belong to his special contexts. They cannot be naturally extended to all areas regardless of categorical and cultural disvergency. A more extreme example of this kind is Heidegger's “Sein”. 3 He asserts,
    Philosophie ist die theoretisch-begriffliche  Interpretation des Seins, seiner Struktur und seiner Möglichkeiten. Sie ist ontologische. Weltanschauung dagegen ist setzendes Erkennen von Seiendem und setzende Stellungnahme zu Seiendem, nicht ontologische, sondern ontisch.  (Heidegger  1989, 15)
     Semiotics as the semantic foundation for human sciences works exactly at the “ontische” level. The point lies in whether Sein-approach will lead to the deconstruction of the semantic endeavor per se. As Rorty criticizes,
     Heidegger goes on and on about `the question about Being' without ever answering it because Being is a good example of something we have no criteria for answering question about. (Rorty 1991, 36)
     When Heidegger's Seiende leads to Derrida's “presence”, stable objects and intelligent tool for their description will be further lost, becoming unsecured both objectively and subjectively. According to the proposed semiotic criterion, either “Sein” or “trace” or “tao” are only verbal media without innate meaning; or, they can carry any ascribed meaning, including the poetic ones whose intension and reference should be defined with respect to the contexts. Their historical contexts should be separated from their present ones which are determined by the new semantic world.
    In general, any text is caused by the operational procedure and its reading  also depends on the latter. There is no interpretation in disconnection with the operational procedures which contains both intentional and technical dimensions. Texts are based on the certain pragmatic procedures producing and interpreting them. For a certain procedure the interpretation can be relatively fixed. One has, of course, only this kind of certainty in reading and interpretation practiced within the relevant contexts. Everything in the world, including human existence, is put into our texts by some pragmatic procedures, scientific or non-scientific. Consequently, the meaning and interpretation is relative to the pragmatic projects. One searches for a certainty of understanding only within our reasonably chosen procedures for the forming of texts. Still, for human existence, there exists an interpretative certainty which itself should be relatively or pragmatically defined. Therefore there must be context-bound semantic certainty. And a context can be variously defined and readjusted in order to obtain the more desirable framework for a interpretative pragmatics.
    The same verbal mark as a verbal medium can have different semantic roles: the conventional, poetical, argumentative or descriptive. In normal contexts, the used mark is the “word” in a conventional sense, containing its conventional or traditional meaning; in special contexts, which can be made through changing semic structure and syntax, the same word is contextually changed to another sign through its semantic reconstruction. The more remarkable change within this strategy lies in expelling the medium itself from the conventional language through equalizing the word with the medium. The verbal mark itself is intended to be “erased” to create an empty spot in the conceptual system. One must not confuse some experienced ideas with their respective conventional carrying-substance medium. Thus, a possible mistake in a concept (A) carried by a word (C) cannot be used to cancel the word itself which in fact can also carry other possible concepts (B) in other contexts. Here both B and A are of course grammatically and intellectually context-bound. Concepts even exist only in contexts determined by procedures. A concept in one context (A) cannot be used to deny another concept in another context (B) despite the fact that both B and A have the same verbal medium C. Consequently, if we are right, the currently controversial words like Being, logos, truth, reason and many others can be reasonably used within suitable intellectual contexts which are determined by the different intentions, purposes, methods and fields. Therefore, the semantic work, in general, is to be prior to the scientific or positive. Its task lies in more, rather than less, precise description, and the result of this limited task of semantic treatment can be spread to the unlimited area of all scientific works. Traditional philosophical metaphysics can be therefore partly replaced by a semiotic universal semantics in order to more relevantly enlarge as well as to more relevantly narrow an epistemological operationalism. Ontologico-metaphysics can be replaced by a semiotico-semantics. Accordingly, “ideological” elements can be reduced to the minimum within the readjusted scope of work. Certainly there will still be mistakes in semiotic studies of any kind, just as it is the case in any other scientific fields, but that is another problem which can not be confused with the ideological one which used to be agnostically and nihilistly phrased. As to the search for certainty, Goal and result should be separated.
    Semantic rationality has nothing to do with a “meta- or final vocabulary” to serve a “objective truth”, as Rorty (Rorty 1989, 73; 1991, 37) warns. There is an operational or pragmatic necessity for semantic certainty in connection with the argumentative discourse. The object is allowed to be uncertain, but argumantive language describing the object is not allowed to be uncertain. A semiotic-semantic rationalism stresses an epistemological clarity or certainty which should not be simply called a new utopian or ideology as Eco warns. Eco asserts, “Science of sign today can provide us with nothing consolative, at least not a consolance of religion, philosophy and ideology”. (Eco 1968, 177; my transl.) It is true that we should not regard theoretical semiotics as an alternative to philosophy. For this reason, the foundation of semiotics cannot be any kind of philosophy, including a philosophy of language. Similarly, semiotics should not become an alternative for science either, if the latter is defined by its inferential/causal logic. As a matter of fact, the following intellectual processes should be separated rather than confused: causality, communication, action, valuation and signification. In discussing ideological problems the present author points out the self-contradictory tendency of some Western semioticians: they seem satisfied in their uncertain language in treating the ideological phenomena. (Li 1993, 549) Thus, the rational effort at minimalizing ideological factors could be metaphysically excluded from semiotic activity. On one hand, they confuse the semiotic with the empirical-positive; on the other, they confuse the semiotic with metaphysical-ontological. The so-called interdisciplinary direction of semiotics must lie first in its cross-disciplinary effort at the semantic level and second in its collaborative effort with various disciplinaries, including the axiological. Axiological studies, including the ideological one, remain the most difficult field in the humanities. It is in this field semiotics can play a uniquely creative role which natural science cannot and philosophy fail to handle.

References
Derrida, J (1982). Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
¾ (1991). Du Droit à la Philosophie, Galilee
Eco, Umberto (1985). Einführung in die Semiotik, UTB
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Feyerabend, Paul (1981). Erkenntnis für freie  Menschen, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M.
Gernet, Jacques (1987). China and the Christian Impact, Cambridge University
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Heidegger, Martin (1989). Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Klostermann,

    Franfurt/M.
Husserl, Edmund (1981). Formale und Transzendentale  logik, Max Niemeyer, Halle
Li, Youzheng (1993). Introduction to Theoretical Semiotics (in Chinese), Chinese
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Saussure, Ferdinand de (1986). Cours de Linguistique Generale, Payot, Paris
*  The main part of this paper was read in the International Conference „Semiotics of the Media“, Kassel, Germany, March 1995. It was first published in the special issue of Asian Semiotics of European Journal for Semiotic Studies, Wien, 1997.  The English of the paper is improved by Amy Milani.
Notes

1 Austin’s performative and perlocutiionary modes are still a combination of two processes: the significative and the conative. For example in the sentence “close the door!” it covers a double process of meaning:a statement about a behaviral process and an order or wish. The latter exists on or is overlapped with the former. From the intentional angle the speaker conveyes one thing: an order. From the communicative angle, however, it expresses two mind-states: one about an objective situation and the other one’s attitude towards the message receiver.

2 "S'il fallait rappeler que le philosophe idéal est un législateur et non un artiste, c'est que tous ceux qui traitent de la raison ne sont pas des législateurs. Le mathématicien, le physicien, le logicien même ne sont que des artistes de la raison. Ils ont des instruments, ils sont eux-mêmes des instruments entre les mains de celui qui est leur maître a tous parce qu'il connaît les fins essentielles de la raison humaine: et c'est le philosophe qui ne se trouve nulle part. mais l’idée de sa législation se trouve partout chez elle dans la raison de l'homme." (Derrida 1990, 370)

3 In the confrontation between Husserl and Heidegger, the former is a semiotician and the latter not, in a sense that the semioti-cian attempts semantical clarity.