Frances to Boris and others... The referred object determines the sign to include a term or name that signers may use to signify or refer to the object, which determined sign could be transformed or translated into hundreds of signs, such as visual images or causal signals or lingual ideas, to then stand for one and the same originating object. In the absence of any particular sign, the object remains in fact and will still determine some kind of sign to represent it. Furthermore, the signer of the sign that does the signing as a result of the object need not be a human signer and the sign need not be a lingual symbol. In the absence however of a human signer, no sense or knowledge of the object as a "real" factuality is possible. The object will still be a fact and will still be signed by a signer, but not necessarily called or named by a human signer. Only a normal human signer can feel or sense or know that a fact as an object is real. There also seems to be far too much emphasis placed on signs and signers being only human. (My reference to your past message was not stated by me to be a "quote" of yours, but rather was clearly identified by me as being what was "partly wrote in effect" by you, which therefore is not a quoted passage. In any event, my liberally edited paraphrase of what you actually stated was done to clarify your statement, which seemed confusing to me, but my attempt to rewrite your statement did yield a distortion. The meaning of your original statement now appears clear to me. We perhaps should blame the confusion on that sign system called verbal language.)
Boris wrote... I deal with this problem on regular basis. Listers don't read posts with full attention to important details, which leads to cascade of confusions. In my post on Peirce I said: "The only thing I wish Peirce stress more often that in order to REGISTER sign human is a must." Frances distorted the message by quoting me: "The only thing I wish Peirce would stress more often is that signs should APPLY only to humans". There is ton of differences in the substance of those two phrases. Signs as an independently existing thing apply to everything and everyone, but they are called 'nothing' without 'name' we gave them. Boris Shoshensky Frances wrote... 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.
