Ksenia Elisseeva - Bruno Osimo, traduzioni, semiotica della ...

However, it is significant that a number of predicates do not specify a
precise meaning even with substitution of suit and value; a long journey or
financial meeting tell us nothing or almost nothing by themselves. This pertains
particularly to 10♣ and 9♣, which constitute group one of predicates. “Change”
is such a broad term that in fact it embraces all the other groups of predicates,
any of which introduces change into the person's life. It would surely be
tempting to adopt an order of reading that passes from the less informative to
the more informative cards, for instance from 10♣ to A♠ or 9♦ 1 , but in our
system the amount of information conveyed by a card does not influence the
order of reading. Possibly, therefore, “change” should not be considered as
including all the other signs of the system, but rather all the rest of the possible
predicates not contained in the table of meanings. Strictly speaking, it is
impossible to measure abstractly a relative amount of information or even to
establish a hierarchical scale, since the informational meaning of a card can
increase considerably in any specific context; and moreover, the person whose
fortune is being told, whether a listener or viewer of the process of distribution
and reading, could experience various subjective reactions to any card. For a
certain person, a card that in context is more informative may prove to be far
less quantitatively and qualitatively informative than a supposedly rather
uninformative card, and vice versa. As in perceiving a work of art, subjective
associations cannot be avoided, and therefore several, if not an infinitely great
number, of referential variants can correspond to the sign's meaning. But also
as in art, there exists none the less an objective system of rudimentary symbols
that can be transcribed by “formulae” (the cards' conventional signs), by
distribution in a quadrant, or more conveniently,
1 For example, this is how M. I. Lekomceva and B. A. Uspenskij describe the system
known to them, in «Gadanie na igral'nyh kartah kak semiotičeskaâ sistema», 86.
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