Vis-à-vis: Signification Does Not Necessitate Any Kind of Backward Causation

Claudio Rodríguez

The following presentation will argue that no account of signification—be it semantic, semiotic or organic—requires appealing to backward causation.

John Deely’s views on the relevance of vis a prospecto and vis a tergo as well as their connection to sign virtuality are ontologically expensive as a result of a framework that calls for other specific features to make signification actual.

I will argue here that signification is, on the contrary, a parsimonious phenomenon, metaphysically speaking, and that accounts of backwards causation build instead a kind of explanation of the metarelations of signification that does not map to actual significative relations.

[Slides from the lecture]