Frances to William with some further sign rants and raves... To say that the text as meaningful content determines the typeface as form is to correctly hold a good semiotic stance, which is that of objective relativism. Pragmatist semiotics holds that the referred object or content or text, laying in a limited ground and related to the sign form, determines the sign form or vehicle, which is obvious in say foreign language translations that signify the same contents. Pragmatist semiotics further holds that then the sign vehicle in turn determines the sign effect or interpretant supersign say within the mind of the competent human signer. The sign effect therefore is determined by the sign form, and not by the sign object or content or text. In summary of the semiotic stance: the object is related to the syntactic form in a semantic ground; and the form is related to the effect in a pragmatic ground; and the form moderates between the object and effect as poles; and the effect acts as a governing control between the form and object to assure signers that there should be some degree of normality in the signing act.
To clarify the meaning of some terms used in this topic and thread, semiotics holds that a "text" is the literal written statement of any verbal language, and that the oral spoken statement of any verbal language as an equivalent would be a "remark" uttered by voice. The written text therefore is not the written form, but is the written object and stated content. The content of a statement as a literal text, like that found in say a literary book, has a syntaxic lingual form and usually has a graphic literal form, but the form and format of the text is not determinatively crucial to the text itself or its content. It is rather the text and its content however that is determinatively crucial to the form and format, and the form and format that in turn is determinatively crucial to the effect of the text as given in its form. (It is understood of course that some theories posit "text" in a much different and even broader manner than does pragmatism and its semiotics.) On a marginal note, pragmatists hold that the "thought" of the writer as a literal signer lays in the text as a sign of the writing, and not in the mind of the reader or any other signer. The pragmatist idea here is seemingly that the mind when reading a text is in thought, but that the thought is in the written text and not in the mind. The practical analogy given by pragmatism in regard to the mind being in thought is that of the body which is deemed to be in motion, but that the motion is not deemed to be in the body.
