What I liked about the term "replica" is that a symbol could be a replica of a more general symbol. For example, a sentence - not an individual token but a type - in a particular human language could be a replica of a proposition conceived as a kind of meaning, apart from any particular human language. Below is my footnote about it from the Wikipedia article now titled "Semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotic_theory_of_Charles_Sanders_Peirce
"New Elements (Kaina Stoicheia)" MS 517 (1904); EP 2:300-324, Arisbe Eprinthttps://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/stoicheia/stoicheia.htm , scroll down to 317, then first new paragraph. On 11/7/2025 7:31 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt wrote:
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)
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