Some sign is any sign
The Orwellian sense of Doublespeak is often used to castigate some user of signs for mis-use of language. As suggested on Wikipedia:
Doublespeak is language deliberately constructed to disguise or distort its actual meaning, often resulting in a "communication bypass". Such language is associated with governmental, military, and corporate institutions. Doublespeak may be in the form of bald euphemisms ("downsizing" for "firing of many employees") or deliberately ambiguous phrases ("wet work" for "assassination"). Doublespeak is distinguished from other euphemisms through its deliberate usage by governmental, military, or corporate institutions.But I want to look at doublespeak, in a more neutral sense, as a semiotic device of interpretant shifting. It is a meme strategy, like a mis-directing iconicity that pulls one’s attention elsewhere or a truth-proof lie because it will not scan logically (according to the established set of interpretants). Parallel to evolutionary camouflage, or misdirection for purposes of predation, courtship, or pair bonding, doublespeak is a strategy of semiotic competition.
Now in the Orwellian sense, these type devices are clearly marked at deliberate uses of some institution, and I want to think of doublespeak as an area where signs struggle to give themselves Dawkins’ three markers of memetic successfulness: longevity, fecundity, and copying fidelity. Without either the political moralism of Orwell or the scientific moralism of Dawkins, I want to suggest that Peirce’s triadic relations of interpretants (and signs and objects for that mater) can be used to discuss how new signs are generated. Doublespeak can be a device for torquing marginal sign from more centristic signs to move the cluster in other directions. Here I am thinking of the Blue America and the Red American and how signs become re-valued for new and different purposes by one group or another , or how –how a sign, an interpretant, can be used to shift a discourse ( to develop an new series of signs and interpretants) in a particular way for particular purposes.
Now generally when one talks in these terms, one is talking from, if not a disputatious viewpoint, at least at skeptical one. For example when PBS Frontline “the Persuaders” looked at advertising they were concerned with how advertising does or does not corrupt our culture. But such analysis can take on the political edge (pro or con) of the Republican strategist/guru Frank Lutz who substituted “death tax” for “estate tax” because “nobody knew what an estate tax was”. Of course, Orwell sees doublespeak as the corruption of political discourse, Dawkins sees the memes of faith and religion as “ruthless and selfish replicators” corrupting scientific discourse; or PBS sees advertising as corrupting civil discourse. )
What I want to suggest is that interpretant shifting need not be judged morally (although it certainly can be), but discussed as a mechanism by which semiotic competition –evolutionarily, culturally, or scientifically takes place. If one keeps the oxymoronic quality of trickster in mind and the range of potentiality in Peirce’s Firstness, then the fluidity of signs, the morphing of meanings, and the interpretant dance can be discussed more openly and more honestly than agenda carping.
