ABSTRACT
The landscape metaphor: what you see depends on your position—as you project your history, values, and beliefs, you create the ridges and troughs that hinder or help your understanding. Every creation or reading of a text involves the author or reader in projecting another entity onto the text. For an author, the other entity is a constructed and projected reader, and for a reader it is a constructed projected author. Projecting is inevitable and ubiquitous; there is no bird’s-eye view, all are embedded in the semiotic process (including the authors of this book). Many potential readings of a text—so no shared meanings? But Wittgenstein shows that language must be shared; there can be no private language. However, in practice, there is a great deal of evidence to show meanings are not shared. Example: surveys. Respondents and interviewers occupy different positions, which determines how questions are asked, the responses, and how responses are recorded; the interviewers’ reports depend on their interpretations of the responses and their projections of their survey leader/employers or whoever will write the final report; the final report’s author projects an image of assumed readers onto the report’s content. What is essential is the belief in sharing.
