Jon, Robert, Ulysses, Helmut, List, Jon, Ulysses
Yes, but doesn't it stand to reason, scientific, that given possibility, which is infinite, minimally, there will be certain instances of this or that (of whatever) which could be called a sign which has no feasible "type" whatsoever? I'll wait for Robert's reply to conversation above as it's usually enlightening. Best Jack ________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, November 8, 2025 12:31 AM To: Peirce-L <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Sign Tokens and Sign Types (was Peirce's Categorial Involution, and Contemporary Peirce Scholarship) Robert, Jack, Ulysses, List: Ulysses has helpfully restated the point that I have been trying to make--thank you. Just to clarify, Robert's linked paper is not about all tokens (sinsigns), it is specifically about "replicas"--a term that Peirce discarded in favor of "instances" as his speculative grammar continued to develop after 1903, just like he discarded "representamen" in favor of "sign." CSP: An individual existing embodiment of such a type is called a graph-instance, or a[n] instance of a graph. I formerly called it a replica, forgetting that Mr. Kempe, in his Memoir on Mathematical Forms, §170, had already preempted this word as a technical term relating to graphs, and that in a highly appropriate sense, while my sense was not at all appropriate. I therefore am glad to abandon this term. (LF 2/1:171, 1904) CSP: I use 'sign' in the widest sense of the definition. It is a wonderful case of an almost popular use of a very broad word in almost the exact sense of the scientific definition. ... I formerly preferred the word representamen. But there was no need of this horrid long word. (SS 193, 1905 July) My question as posted is whether every sign token is an instance of a sign type, so using the earlier terminology, I am asking whether every sinsign is a replica of a legisign. Robert's paper does not address this, nor what I requested from anyone advocating a negative answer--a specific example of a sign token that cannot be understood as an instance of a sign type, i.e., a sinsign that cannot be understood as a replica of a legisign. This is my seventh post of the week, so I will voluntarily begin complying with the new rule that is going into effect next week by not posting again until Sunday at the soonest. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Structural Engineer, Synechist Philosopher, Lutheran Christian www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt<http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt> / twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt<http://twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt> On Fri, Nov 7, 2025 at 12:47 PM Ulysses <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Right. We can conceive of a rhematic iconic sinsign without conceiving of it being a replica/token of a legisign. And yet, a rhematic iconic sinsign could still be a token of a legisign. For example a sensory experience of redness could be an icon conceived without relation to a legisign or law. But we can also understand red as a manifestation of laws governing the electromagnetic spectrum (or regularities governing human perception). So even if it is quite clear only certain signs have replicas, it is not clear that certain sinsigns don’t have conceivable “types” or legisigns. Pure random chaos might be a candidate … but even that is an instance of the type “chaos” which has general characteristics that distinguish it from other things and thus is a token of a type. Even some things we might have once assumed were noise, such as cosmic background radiation, turn out to be important indices of larger processes (ie of the big bang). I don’t know this means every possible sign token can be mapped to at least one sign type but it does suggest we can work with the hypothesis that a sinsign is a replica of some conceivable legisign. On Fri, 7 Nov 2025 at 3:37 pm, Jack Cody <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Robert, List Robert, having read your work presented by you in the last post, I note that you deductively demonstrate that there are only six classes of signs to which the notion of token corresponds at all. Am I right, then, in assuming that the answer to JAS's general question is, as I suspect, "no"? That is, not all is an instance of token/type correspondence but rather there is a delimitation? Cheers, Jack ________________________________ From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf of robert marty <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Sent: Friday, November 7, 2025 7:50 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>; Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Sign Tokens and Sign Types (was Peirce's Categorial Involution, and Contemporary Peirce Scholarship) List, A few years ago, I posted a short note online that accurately addresses this issue. https://www.academia.edu/61335079/Note_on_Signs_Types_and_Tokens Regards, Robert Marty Honorary Professor ; PhD Mathematics ; PhD Philosophy fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Marty<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Marty> https://martyrobert.academia.edu/
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