Thursday, May 3, 2012

Symbols and Signs of Pragmatism

We kind of talked about this is class, but I don't think we actually labeled it as pragmatism.  When we were discussing the story Symbols and Signs, we talked about whether we should take the objects/actions of the story to be symbols.  We couldn't decipher what the true answer to who was calling and decided that the true answer was that we weren't really supposed to know because we couldn't find support for any theory, which created support for the no-answer idea.  In pragmatism, truth is the outcome of making sense of the world.  It is a property of humans and has nothing to do with whether or not the thing is real or not.  We can't deny that the story exists, along with every option mentioned in the story, but we don't know what it means because that isn't written and we can't find clues to make one option obviously more useful for the other.  The only truth we have is that we have observed most stories using symbolism in the past, so it makes sense that that trend continues in current story.

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