Frances to Cheerskep and others...
Signs enable signers to be taken into other possible worlds. The
use of analogous icons and expressive indexes and abstract
symbols in imaginative ways will nonetheless yield real
phenomenal objects of sense. Even deluded illusions and playful
pretentions and concocted fictions carried in the form of signs
will refer to seeming objects in the world. It should not be
surprising then that nonfictional diaries and theories and
interpretive histories of a speculative hypothetical kind would
also refer to real objects, including such general objects as
phenomenal categories or infinitesimal continuities. It is after
all the phenomenal object that determines the very being of a
sign and then the kind a sign will be in acts of semiosis,
regardless of whether the referred object is vaguely possible or
concretely actual or communally agreeable. The process of
linguistic translation that substitutes verbal signs from one
language to another proves this contention. The extent to which
nonhuman animals pretend and imagine when they play a game is
akin to humans imagining stories and performing mimes and
creating fictions, so that the general play or stage and the
typical game or plot are given to sense, and are as sensible as
are the individual characters involved in such acts. This biotic
ability is an engrained trait that goes to the habitual capacity
of an organism to deal with phenomenal objects previously
experienced, but that are only now present to mind when they are
in no way now present to sense. The human ability to make works
of literary fiction and faction, either mentioned in mind or
written in text, depends of course on their use of symbolic
language systems, which surrogate signs of proxy nonetheless are
objective material constructs. The abstract and the general are
hence as real as the individual and the particular, because both
sorts of phenomenal objects are given uncontrolled to sense. The
ability for any mind or body to engage in a fictive game of play
is proof that the signer can sense a general class in the form of
gaming and playing by using signs, along with sensing any
particular individuals and products also involved in the same
game of play. It is also proof that some general classes do exist
as real sensible objects aside from mind. They may be mere
possible objects of imaginative pretence, but they are in any
event phenomenal and existential and experiential as objective
stuff. If this objectivism is agreed to, the task then is to find
out whether art as a class is such an object.
