Frances to Cheerskep and others... My earlier claim that some classes and signs will be found as originating or existing outside the mind has motivated Cheerskep to partly write in reply that he cannot know what Peirce or others have in mind with the words "sign" or "class" because in his view beginning with Plato the notion of "class" has been fuzzy, and beginning with Frege the notion of "sign" has been wrong, but that my notion and idea of "sign" may be different and that an attempt should be made by me to "define" my idea of it.
In my experience and to my knowledge, all attempts by scholars at clearly and finally defining the terms "class" and "sign" have given us meanings that are agreeably ambiguous or confused. What the pragmatist Peirce seemingly took in mind with the notion he called by the name "class" is an objective "category" of phenomena. What he seemingly took in mind with the notion he called by the name "sign" is an objective "representamen" of logic. The notion here of "category" and "representamen" would for him be assumed as objects of reference that are represented by the words "class" and "sign" in our language. It is my learned opinion that since the time of Peirce all notions turning on these terms have been successfully addressed by him, albeit mainly in the logical interest of science. In effect he has made these issues philosophical and metaphysical, but within the formal sciences. Your challenge to have me try and define my notion of what the idea called a representative "sign" might be seems a welcome task, and one that does remain a constant struggle. If as you imply in your response that all notions of what the categorical term "sign" means before the time of Frege have perhaps been right, then this would call Peirce wrong in his attempt to define what the term "sign" as a "class" might refer to. The fact is however that Peirce and pragmatists since him have gone out of their way in an attempt to get it right. The whole wide world for pragmatists seems to be a perfusion of that class called signs, in that all phenomenal things are necessarily felt or sensed and known only as signs of objects. The arena of feelings and classes and signs ranges from that of nonhuman mechanisms and organisms to that of humans, in that feelings and classes and signs are not the exclusive arena of only normal humans. This means that matter is effete mind engaged in acts of quasi thought. In regard to signs as a categorical class of phenomenal stuff it seems felt by pragmatists that aesthetic objects as social works of human art are also indeed found to be signs. The warranted key to justifying the notion and theory of signs is the logic of relativity, which deals with the "objective relative" relations occurring between signs and objects, or between objects and subjects, or between categories and representamen; but a relation only within their contextual periphery of being, such as a ground and margin or a sphere and domain and realm or an era and eon and epoch. In brief and to the point, nothing in the world is purely mental or only notional, but rather is phenomenal and existential and experiential. The mind engaged in thought often yields a notional idea, but the thought or the notion or the idea is not in the mind, but rather is found in the signs used to carry them, such as a psychical vision or a visual depiction or an oral mention or a written notation. The mind is in thought with visions and notions and ideas as the body is in motion with gestures and movements and displays; so that the motion is not in the body, nor is the notion in the mind.
