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Orientation Meeting
6 PM
Local Office

There seems to be a perfectly good - not entirely clear - sense in which texts are defined by character string identity - lines of letters. This is neither a syntactic nor a semantic notion, because letter is neither a syntactic nor a semantic notion. (Nor is ‘letter order’.) This notion of text is a ‘shape’ concept, very broadly speaking. Letters are shapes. Of course, this is not to say we can define this shape concept. It isn’t a ‘pure’ concept. The property of ‘looking like’ a word is crucial to the whole lorem ipsum business, and ‘looking like’ a shape is not a shape property.

Also, awareness that text - letters - normally subserve some syntactic, semantic function bleeds in early and often. The concept of lorem ipsum as text depends on awareness of what normal texts are like, i.e. not like this. Still, the fact that typographers and copy editors don’t have to worry about semantics and syntax, if they want to see just strings of letters, says something. You can take up the typographical stance, as Dennett might say. It’s stable.

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