Frances to Boris and others... The intriguing issue of whether signs should be limited only to normal human signers was rejected by Peirce and the early pragmatists who sided with him. To this day however many realists and pragmatists would expand the human limit of signs, but only to include all biotic organisms. My tentative feeling is that signs in their making and taking should be extended to include all phanerisms, from mechanisms of matter to organisms of life. What suggests to me that this stance might be on the correct track is that mechanistic machines from neutrinos to computers to neurons can engage signs albeit only as crude signals, and that microscopic organisms can be consciously aware of their own being in that they will not eat their own body parts when driven by the signals of hunger. Not all phanerisms of course would engage all kinds of signs, from icons and indexes to symbols, but would engage only those signs in the main that they are say capable of. It is admitted however that only normal humans can engage signs as symbols, and to include those symbols of linguistic languages. It is likely a philosophic mistake to claim that all abnormal humans and all nonhuman phanerisms can engage symbols of any kind. In any event, the determination of limits for signs must likely fall with the relative grounds that signs are found to lay in with their objects, and then this dyad to lay in with their effects. In other words, it is probably the sign situation as an act of semiosis that sets the signs and signers. Furthermore, it is the referred semiosic object that determines the main kind a sign will be in any given situation; so that for example many translated lingual signs can stand for one and the same object.
Boris partly wrote in effect... [posted Peirce text] "By a Sign, I mean anything that is, on the one hand, in some way determined by an object and, on the other hand, which determines some awareness, and this in such manner that the awareness is thus determined by that object." I think this Peircean passage is one of the more successful definitions. I have fished out things that make sense to me, even through heavy pondering of Peirce. The only thing I wish Peirce would stress more often is that signs should apply only to humans.
