Frances to Cheerskep and others... The eventual goal of Peirce was to apply signs logically and objectively to the whole world. He should be applauded for his evolving exploratory efforts. For him signs are the hazy seeming phenomena that represent at most the objective stuff of pure ideal logics, which external logics he held cannot be accessed by mind directly. Only sure real signs can provide a hint of pure ideal logics to signers like scientific thinkers, but the signed logics of mind will be a degraded and degenerative and incomplete version of logics. The mind therefore can only interpretively guess or infer what a sign may mean, because mind cannot know exactly for certain the absolute meaning of signs or logics. The mind accidently finds or discovers pure logics. The mind does not arbitrarily make or invent pure logics. This is also a reason why Peirce rejected any global sense of positivism for symbolic signs. My interest of course is the application of signs to arts, but in ways that satisfies logics. (By all reported accounts Peirce used "semiotics" as a synonym for "logics" which is admittedly a difficult subject to master, but there is a revisionist approach to sign theory now current that justly seeks to separate semiotics and linguistics from logics, and let these stand alone as related studies in their own right; however, that is another evolving topic.)
Cheerskep partly writes in effect... On the 76 definitions of signs from Peirce I find three faults here. 1, they are often incomprehensible. 2, they include key terms that are not defined anywhere in the 76. 3, they expose key assumptions that are flat errors. And "consistent" they're not, in good part because they are from four decades of statements by Peirce, and he changed his mind a lot.
