Abstraction as a limit to semiosis

Abstract

Abstract:In highly evolved culture, discourse is made up of complexes of implicit and explicit intertextual relations, which form the meanings for new signifiers. Meanings for common abstract nouns are derived from the modeling of typical situations in everyday narratives. However at a further level of abstraction, models of discourses, which themselves contain abstract concepts, provide meanings for what are called "hyper-abstract" nominals. Here a certain limit is reached, and it is argued that this diachronic, onomasiological process provides a constraint on the notion of "unlimited semiosis." This constraint has both natural and ethical aspects.