Abstract

The dense prose in Signs Grow by the distinguished semiotician Floyd Merrell draws on and connects multiform sources and repeatedly demands extremely careful reflection and interpretation by the reader, and so it illustrates a point often taken to be a hermeneutic truism, that the incipient meaning created by the reader is most probably very different from the meaning intended by the author. Fortunately not totally different, however. Shared meanings may increase by expanded access to common background knowledge, which is always a challenge in interdisciplinary discourse, where the presuppositions and styles of reasoning are only partly shared. Even the most polymathic semiotician must, as any of his readers, face the constraints of background knowledge and special education, limits that can only be completely transcended by gods, demons, or some ultimate interpretant of the semiotic web itself