The more one looks at the writings of Roy Harris, Roland Barthes, and others, the more one concludes that for them just about everything we can observe is a "sign". If we stipulate that by a "sign" we mean an observable that occasions a notion, theirs is a defensible stance.
The confusion enters when we believe there is a "the" notion for any given "sign". All a sign can occasion in me is a "meaning/notion" for ME. It's can be very different for you. When thinkers like Barthes believe they are "decoding" a sign, finding its "real" "meaning", they go badly wrong.
