Frances has a quickie... (A) In the realist philosophy of Peirce for an object to be signed as the "same" is for an object to be "identical" with another version of the object, rather than being virtual or similar or peculiar or familiar. In the logic of relativity this relation would tend to be a teridentical equivalency. (B) It is possible for a group or a game to be sensed as an objective fact as is a member of the group or a part of the game, which is precisely what happens with say the particles of atoms as they feel an inclined tendency to join together into a closed molecule. The traits yield habits, and the habits become laws, and the laws of nature are as objective as are the particles and atoms and molecules. The parts are in a group to play a game and close a goal, and there need not be any human mind to note this actual concrete objectivity. (C) All signs and to include all words as signs are "clusters" of signs in that they merge and continue to change or grow, but then that is evolution for you.
Frances partly wrote... > (3B) The product of a single football exists as a token artifact, > but the game of football exists as an ideal typical class of > existent token football games, so to sense a specific football > game is also to sense the general game of football, therefore the > token and the type exist, and the token furthermore is an iconic > sign that indicates its own tone and type. Cheerskep partly replied... I can't agree. My view, I'm afraid, says this thinking is based on a common but almost never identified basic mistake. It's rarely identified because when you hear it my guess is you'll feel the mistake is mine because my suggestion is so bizarre. As Kate might observe, when we examine a specific football, we experience a number of specific sense data, all of which we believe are occasioned by an object "out there", ouside our minds. (There is even your " collective group of percipients" who would corroborate our "perception".) We could point at the single object, palp it, smell it. But there is nothing specific you can point at that is "the game". Everything you can point at it is "accounted for" by sense data -- of this player running this way, that player running after him with the ball, collisions -- none of which is "the game". While we'd all agree there's a football "out there" because we can point at the object etc, there is nothing we can point at, palp, smell etc that is the game. Does Peirce have a term for such "cluster" words -- of which there are many, many: footall game, game, race, poem, novel, play and on and on. Or would he say ALL words are cluster words, even for objects. E.g. Theseus's boat. For those not familiar with that, a very old question in philosophy asked: If over the course of many years of repairing his boat, Theseus replaced every single piece of wood on the craft, is it still the SAME boat? Back in the 1890s, when Frege began his musings that are sometimes credited with being the beginning of the philosophy of language, he announcd his topic as the problem of "same".
