The first term in a proposition

Usage examples of referent.

The communication revolution, seen by sociologists like Baudrillard to be the key constitutive feature of our age, has aggrandized the media to the point where signs have displaced their referents, where images of the Real have usurped the authority of the Real, whence the subject is engulfed by simulacra.

This real substrate, open to critique, revised by the ethico-political approach, represents the real ontological referent of philosophy, or really the field proper to a philosophy of liberation.

Kundera is playing on the incongruity of the phrase, as well as on the near total indeterminacy of its referent, for it is impossible to know whether the rioting students came to it spontaneously, or whether the graffitti author was knowingly quoting Rimbaud: a neat textual demonstration of the impossibility to determine clearly whether art is imitating life or vice-versa.

Further, the subject of the knowing itself develops in an intersubjective space that alone discloses aspects of these overall referents.

It is definitely true that the number of levels in any holon has an element of arbitrariness to it, simply because there is no upper or lower limit to a manifest holarchy and therefore no absolute referent.

Provided, of course, that it is not done as a merely academic endeavor, where a bunch of disengaged dunderheads attempt to analyze the signifiers without having a clue as to the actual referents.

Teach these what-if scenarios to preop or conop individuals, and no matter how much they parrot the words, they do not possess the developmental signified and thus they have no real idea of the actual referent.

They are armchair contemplatives, so to speak, and they are trying to make sweeping pronouncements about spiritual referents without possessing the corresponding developmental signified.

The referents of knowledge, as we saw above, exist only in specific world-spaces, and those worldspaces are not simply given empirically, lying around for all and sundry to perceive.

Buddha and show you that, unless you have developed the requisite cognitions that will allow you to resonate with the signifier whose referent exists only in the spiritual worldspace and whose signified exists only in the interior heart of those who have awakened to that space.

But I can't run around and find Buddha and show you that, unless you have developed the requisite cognitions that will allow you to resonate with the signifier whose referent exists only in the spiritual worldspace and whose signified exists only in the interior heart of those who have awakened to that space.

More vocabulary, verbs, and I dare to suggest we've got a few colloquialisms or ejaculations, though I've no referents to translate them fully.

The words alone meant little without their connotative referents, and his connotative referents and mine were separated by thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of years.

Just as the human mind universally grows images and symbols and concepts (even though the actual contents of those structures vary considerably), so the human spirit universally grows intuitions of the Divine, and those developmental signifieds unfold in an evolutionary and reconstructible fashion, just like any other holon in the Kosmos (and their referents are just as real as any other similarly disclosed data).

Instead, he sat slumped loosely over the control board, staring with unfocused eyes at his image in the panel, while his fingers doodled black aces, hangman's knots, and all the other symbols of doom for which his culture had no real referents.