Abstract
In my paper I will concentrate on Roger Bacon's notion of imposition (impositio), an act by which a vocal sound acquires meaning, in connection with his description of sign-relation on the one hand, and his conception of what we today would call semiosis, or the action of signs, on the other. First, impositon, according to Bacon and unlike the usual scholastic view, is not a single unrepeatable act of attributing meaning to a voice, but is a subject to perpetual change, and so is therefore meaning.
Second, in Bacon's understanding, a sign-relation is not ontologically indifferent - it is impossible to signify the same thing as both existent and non-existent, because the primary relation of sign to its object is referential. A new imposition is required in order to refer to object for which the sign was not originally imposed.
I will argue how upon these grounds Bacon makes the process of meaning's attributions to rest upon the previous fixations of meaning, which are in their nature inferential. The flexibility of imposition compensates the impossibility of mutual reference to the existent, non-existent, or otherwise ontologically determined object.
Paradoxically then, Bacon's insistence upon the ontological description of sign leads him to free the bounds of imposition's unchangeability and present a view of semiosis which works upon the ontological bound of sign, which might seem surprising for those holding the sign's ontological indifference to be the only possible ground of semiosis.