Frances to Kate and Saul... You are both correct from an antirealist stance, but not from a realist stance, which is my position on facts and signs. Remember that under realist pragmatism signs are merely ordinary objects that already exist as phenomenal qualities and facts and laws; and can be subsigns and serisigns and supersigns; and can be of micro stuff like sights and noises and smells, or of meso stuff like humans and trucks and cities, or of macro stuff like planets and galaxies and gods. Ordinary objects are signs of objects that infuse and permeate the whole world, just as the physical neutrinos of material matter do. The key antirealist ideas of Hegel on this issue for example were well known to Peirce and neatly fixed by him.
Frances remarks... The signs of the world are phenomenal facts that exist external to life. Kate replies... Eh? a floating cloud of signs drifting about? Wasn't there something in Hegel about this? Saul replies... They do not exist as signs or even as fact except in human life.
