Editing Philosophical Research:Items (section)

== Signifier Items (S / S1) ==

<dfn class="topic" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: bold;">Signifiers</dfn> are spoken, written, or visual chunks of communication which are assigned particular meanings by particular individuals or groups.

For the purposes of analyzing art, signifiers may manifest as repeated images, repeated dialogue phrases, references to prior works, analogies, metaphors, literary motifs, or any general arbitrary association of one thing to another which specifically exists internal to one particular work or series. Here, the concept of signifiers has been stretched to its absolute limit such that characters, systems of fictional physics, and any number of things which are taken as literal within their respective works can be considered signifiers — for instance, Sonic the Hedgehog is considered a signifier for the purposes of contrasting the internal definition of Sonic the Hedgehog to other characters in platforming games or dramatically-inclined adventure stories. The Signifier-items for Shadow the Hedgehog (<cite>Sonic</cite> metaseries) and Vegeta IV (<cite>Dragon Ball</cite> metaseries) discuss each other in order to uncover the intentional and unintentional narrative parallels between these characters. At the same time, a character entry can also link to real-world concepts that it illustrates. If, for instance, Sonic and Tails were used in some particular text to illustrate the concept that individuals are not interchangeable, the Signifiers for each character would link to concepts such as "individual", "relativity", or "replacing Tails with Sonic", while the lattermost of these Signifiers, "replacing Tails with Sonic", would also link itself back to Sonic and Tails to represent how it directly references these previous images. This is the overall purpose of Signifier-items: to draw parallels between interconnected systems of objects or significances in fiction (cultural symbolism constellations, ontologies, or Facticities) and interconnected systems of objects and processes in reality, as well as other interconnected systems in fiction.

For the purposes of analyzing philosophies, signifiers may take the form of <i>jargon terms</i>, ordinary words employed in <i>recognizable but highly-specific usages</i>, <i>repeated quotes</i> from older texts, repeated <i>in-text citations or prior work titles</i>, or <i>images with controversial meanings across different philosophies</i>. For instance, "Stalin's government" could be considered a signifier because within the broad field of Marxist discourse Trotskyists and Stalin followers interpret the significance of the image differently and attach different underlying models of real-world function to it. If it happens that these models are so drastically different they hardly even resemble each other, the Signifier-item is best divided into two separate Signifiers, such as "Stalin's government (Trotskyism)" and "Stalin's government (Stalin Thought)". Using this method of combining relatively-ordinary or widespread usages and disambiguating tags, controversies can be exposed which are normally invisible within the bounds of particular philosophies. It can be argued that projects such as Wikipedia suffer from the inability to package themselves in localized, biased language familiar to real-world readers, who may look at the neutral framings of Wikipedia, regard them as foreign to their particular philosophy and experience, and reject the whole project as "biased" or "improperly infiltrated by mainstream thought". However, if a project instead decides to forego pretending that neutrality through a single point of view is possible and simply express itself in several different biased framings at once, it becomes easier to illuminate the differences between various different biased ideologies and the relationship of each ideology to material reality and what is most likely to be true.

This wikibase has a habit of favoring grouping together similar signifiers into a single item when their ranges of usage and meaning come close to being indistinguishable. This is to encourage a somewhat-more-efficient ontology, in which things with the same relationship to a particular thing are easily connected with the same things, and the focus can shift beyond specific instances of concepts to overall connections. It is also easier to correct mistakes made by lumping two items together than those made by creating two separate items. However, if there is any serious doubt about whether two images most likely refer to different things, they should be different Signifiers.