The word “connotations” is cute but it’s a bit of a dodge. It’s a non-label label. “Everything else”. Fair enough, but everything else how? The statement is denotationally pretty tight, no wiggle room. There isn’t a hidden channel in HTML text. Where’s the connotation communicated?
I conclude: the connotation exists in the relation of the statement to the context. First order connotations are the denotation in relation to the world as seen by the speaker or listener. Second order, as seen by the speaker guessing what the listener sees, or vice versa. And so on.
The payload in the phrase discussed above is a third order connotation: the speaker’s moral weighting of what he guesses to be the listener’s ethical analysis of the denotation.
The word “connotations” is cute but it’s a bit of a dodge. It’s a non-label label. “Everything else”. Fair enough, but everything else how? The statement is denotationally pretty tight, no wiggle room. There isn’t a hidden channel in HTML text. Where’s the connotation communicated?
I conclude: the connotation exists in the relation of the statement to the context. First order connotations are the denotation in relation to the world as seen by the speaker or listener. Second order, as seen by the speaker guessing what the listener sees, or vice versa. And so on.
The payload in the phrase discussed above is a third order connotation: the speaker’s moral weighting of what he guesses to be the listener’s ethical analysis of the denotation.
(more to come)