a 3-fold sense of action • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Area	further aspects

	a 3-fold sense of action: significance (S-oriented), meaning (p-oriented), and integrity (s-oriented) gary e. davis	July 9, 2020

1. The significance of an action is usually associated with contextual value.

2. The “meaning“ of an action is usually relative to interactive referentiality,
being [inter]personal, being substantive or specific.

Mentioning significance before meaning feels apt because, in fact, we usually act for the sake of an importance (e.g., context of interest) which denotational means serve.

The implicit pun in ‘meaning’ is integral to what meaning is: always for the act that seeks to satisfy an importance (i.e., serve a context). Reference is always part of doing “things” by means that serve importance. Meaning (a proximal ambiguity
of referential efficacy and its instrumental function for satisfying an importance) prevails ambiguously in an actor’s ordinary (quick) feeling whether or not the act was the “right” one; and whether or not the act is satisfactory.

3. The “integrity” of an action is usually about the invested identity of intention-ality (selfal implicature). One’s act is indeed (presumably) the act that the actor finds important.

A [3] cohering of [1] significance (importance, context) and [2] instrumental refer-ence/ denotation is immanent to the act which has been enacted. The actor pre-sumably “stands” by her/his act as the one that s/he intended to do because an importance for the actor was being served. Acts are presumably done genuinely as the acts that the doing seems to be. An implicit claim to genuineness goes with acting satisfactority.

Action usually has a proximal sense of Meaning (s/p <–> p/s), but also may have a deeply selfidentical sense (S <–> s). That difference is commonly troped as a nebulous differentiation of “surface” and “depth” of self-invested Meaningfulness. The felt degree of depth probably differs substantially between participants, which is why one commonly clarifies or explains or amplifies a just-said or just-done thing which causes unanticipated response (or lack of adequate response)
or shows misunderstanding.

The presence of an act has (presumably) genuine coherence because it’s given significance as intended or valued. The presencing of the act gives point to an instrumental referent.

Analogously with phenomenality—(a) bringing to a (b) present a coherence of both (b) and “mirrored” (a) as presence—acting gives a momentary point presence (importance, context).

next—> The S/s/p-differential venture called “phenomenology”