Frances to Cheerskep and others... My stance is realist. Your stance is antirealist and specifically with a notional and nominal thrust. That is the actual source of our disputes. My task and goal here is to convince members that idealist realism with its naturalist pragmatism and objective relativism is tentatively the best support philosophy for thinking about stuff that is currently available. Incidentally and as clearly noted earlier in a previous message, my attempted definition of a "sign" using this support will be posted here in due course.
Recent discussions about signs that are marks and symptoms tend to prove the wisdom of my realist way. For example, if written marks or bodily symptoms, that show the style or the injury of a person, is actually sensed by some other signer, but the words or pathogens carried by the material marks and symptoms are foreign and unknown to that signer, then the marks and symptoms will still signify their contents to that signer, because they are objective phenomenal constructs, even though the words or pathogens like diseases are admittedly subjective mental constructs as notions or nominations. Even if the words or pathogens are unknown to a signer, the marks and symptoms that carry them will continue to objectively identify their maker to that signer, and regardless of any subjective notion or nomination the signer might have to the contrary. The factual "reality" of marks and symptoms that "causally" show styles and injuries is external to mind, but is dependent on a relation with sense. The marks of style or the symptoms of injury are existent phenomenal facts that are simply as real as sense. PS If there is a good umbrella term other than "global" as some kind of a class under which the members of "general" and "special" and "universal" can fall, please advise me of the alternative; and also perhaps tell me just what this class of members might be called, such as say arenas or spheres or domains or realms or ranges. Cheerskep partly wrote... Frances can write on "signs" without ever forcing herself to tell either us or herself what she has in mind with the word. I may have done something similar in the past, but I'm sure I never continued after it was pointed out to me. Frances also continues to talk about "global theories" long after she's been told her readers have no idea what she means by the term. Frances's initial incomprehensibility, cloaked as it was in ostensibly learned locutions, gave alert readers pause. But, after seeing her reaction to persistent pressure for clarification, my position now is that Frances's mind is sufficiently different from mine to make a useful exchange of philosophical views impossible.
