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Arisbeans, ConGraphers, RDF Loggers, SemioComrades,
I have decided -- finally! -- to take a stand,
on all three of my formatively pragmatic and now
newly webbed feet, to go ahead and to start using
the e-phemistic phrase "pragmatic hermeneutics" (PH)
as the newest name for this, my oldest but goodest
of subjects.
There are, of course, many other more familiar names
that I might have chosen by which to call it to mind --
and you know how much I try to resist the production
of "yet another neological keyword" (YANK)! -- still,
sadder but wiser experience over the past few months
has taught me that every alternative course is beset
with obstacles that I can neither suffer nor surpass,
mostly on account of the conflicting claims to sense
that every other established term, like "semiotics",
"semeiotics", "semitotics", or even "pragmatics" or
"hermeneutics", separately conceived and adopted in
their own rites, cannot with which but help to find
its sign being evermore from now on sorely affected.
So I feel that I have no choice anymore but to try to clean my slate,
to start afresh, and to indite hereto a new prescription for the sense
of signs that I would heartily recommend for your earnest contemplation.
Aside from avoiding the mortemain of hagiographically, historically,
and hysterically controversial meanings, there are a host of vastly
more positive aspects that can be augured of this new term's office:
1.  For one, the adjective "pragmatic" can serve to remind us
    of its substantive correlate, the "pragma", that is to say,
    the "object" or the "objective" of our commonly dedicated
    endeavors and functions.  I will have more to say on this,
    maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, ...
2.  For another, the substantive "hermeneutics" that is used to denote
    the general science of "interpretation", encompassing the study of
    its agents, its dynamics, its embodiments, its implementations, and
    its support through the utilization of effective computational media,
    just to name a few of the topics that fall under its vastening survey,
    well, that is very nearly the best word on which I can currently fasten,
    given the constraints that I mentioned above, to convey the idea that
    exchanges of signs are instanced with regard to our pragmatic objects
    at the moment of exchange in question -- no matter whether it happens
    to be one sign (s) being exchanged for another sign (s' = i) within
    the internal dynamics of an integral modality of meaning, or perhaps
    an isolated person or processor, all assuming that we can really even
    get an actual fix on such a "subjectal/hypostatic entity" (S/HE) as
    this "modality of meaning" (MOM) or this "person or processor" (POP),
    of which we so glibly speak, or whether it is between two such agents
    that the exchange of signs in question is made.
Just by way of further introduction, I will stich here a triptych of links
to my dimly anticipatory and prescient, if only in a self-fulfilling way,
my former attempts to indicate the outlines of this, my now clearly last
remaining and uniquely open direction:
Pragmatic Maxim:
| Consider what effects that might conceivably
| have practical bearings you conceive the
| objects of your conception to have.  Then,
| your conception of those effects is the
| whole of your conception of the object.
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, 'The Maxim of Pragmatism', CP 5.438
|
| http://ltsc.ieee.org/logs/suo/msg00645.html
Pragmatic Hermeneutics:
| Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains,
| I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in
| a ferocious metaphysical dispute.  The 'corpus' of the dispute
| was a squirrel -- a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one
| side of a tree-trunk;  while over against the tree's opposite side
| a human being was imagined to stand.  This human witness tries to
| get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but
| no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the
| opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself
| and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught.
| The resultant metaphysical problem now is this:
|
| 'Does the man go round the squirrel or not?'
|
| William James, 'Pragmatism:  A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking'
|
| http://ltsc.ieee.org/logs/suo/msg00792.html
Pragma, Pragmata, Pragmatitude!
| When I am confused by all the ways that "object" is abused, 
| I turn from the Latin and return to the Greek, weighing the 
| anchor of my Liddell & Scott, unfurling the sail that I see 
| blazoned with the emblem "pragma", or "pragma" trans-writ, 
| and there I retrace my bracing, hearty, and regaling chant: 
|
|    Object, Objective, Purpose, Concern, 
|    Objection, Obstacle, Obstruction, Too, 
|    Trouble, Treatise, and a Thing or Two, 
|    What's Done, What's Doing, What's To Do, 
|    Act & Affair, Deed & Fact, Matter & Work, 
|    Business, Career, Duty, Expedience, Opus, 
|    Circumstantial Consequential Contingency, 
|    Annoyance, Engagement, Irritation, Peril, 
|    Powers That Be, Government, Undertaking, 
|    This is the meat in our pragmatic stew! 
|
| OK, so I spiced it up, just a pinch or two, 
| But I brewed it and cooked it just for you, 
| As I learned it from Our Chef You-Know-Who!
|
| http://ltsc.ieee.org/logs/suo/msg02089.html
Psahmes the Seamster,
Locally, Notionally,

Jon Awbrey
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