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In the pragmatic theory of signs it is often said, “The question of the interpreter reduces to the question of the interpretant.” If this is true then it means that questions about the special interpreters that are designated to serve as the writer and the reader of a text are reducible to questions about the particular sign relations that independently and jointly define these two interpreters and their process of communication. The assumptions and the implications that are involved in this maxim are best explained by retracing the analysis that leads to this reduction, setting it out in the following stages:
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1. By way of setting up the question of the interpreter, it needs to be noted that it can be asked in any one of several modalities. These are commonly referred to under a variety of different names, for instance:
a. What may be: the "prospective" or the "imaginative";
also: the contingent, inquisitive, interrogative, optional, provisional, speculative, or "possible on some condition".
b. What is: the "descriptive" or the "indicative";
also: the actual, apparent, definite, empirical, existential, experiential, factual, phenomenal, or "evident at some time".
c. What must be: the "prescriptive" or the "imperative";
also: the injunctive, intentional, normative, obligatory, optative, prerequisite, or "necessary to some purpose".
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It is important to recognize that these lists refer to modes of judgment, not the results of the judgments themselves. Accordingly, they conflate under single headings the particular issues that remain to be sorted out through the performance of the appropriate judgments, for instance, the difference between an apparent fact and a genuine fact. In general, it is a difficult question what sorts of relationships exist among these modalities and what sorts of orderings are logically or naturally the best for organizing them in the mind. Here, they are given in one of the possible types of logical ordering, based on the idea that a thing must be possible before it can become actual, and that it must become actual (at some point in time) in order to qualify as being necessary. That is, being necessary implies being actual at some time or another, and being actual implies being possible in the first place. This amounts to thinking that something must be added to a condition of possibility in order to achieve a state of actuality, and that something must be added to a state of actuality in order to acquire a status of necessity.
{| align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="90%"
| colspan="2" | But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
|-
| colspan="2" | In proving foresight may be vain:
|-
| colspan="2" | The best laid schemes o mice an men
|-
| width="5%" | || Gang aft agley,
|-
| colspan="2" | An lea'e us nought but grief an pain,
|-
| width="5%" | || For promis'd joy!
|-
| colspan="2" align="right" | — Robert Burns, ''To a Mouse'', [CPW, 132]
|}
All of this notwithstanding, it needs to be recognized that other types of logical arrangement can be motivated on other grounds. For example, there are good reasons to think that all of one's notions of possibility are in fact abstracted from one's actual experiences, making actuality prior in some empirically natural sense to the predicates of possibility. Since a plausible heuristic organization is all that is needed for now, this is one of those questions that can be left open until a later time.
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2. Taking this setting as sufficientaly well understood and keeping these modalities of inquiry in mind, the analysis proper can begin. Any question about the character of the interpreter that is acting in a situation can be identified with a question about the nature of the process of interpretation that is taking place under the corresponding conditions.
3. Any question about the nature of the process of interpretation that is taking place can be identified with a question about the properties of the interpretant that follows on a given sign. This is a question about the interpretant that is associated with a sign, in one of several modalities and as contingent on the total context.
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==Outline Formats==
==Outline Formats==
