Sorry. I meant to include this quote of Peirce’s and neglected to. This I think is the textual evidence for what I’m saying. Emphasis mine.
…it is easy to see that the object of the sign, that to which it virtually at least professes to be applicable, can itself only be a sign. For example, the object of an ordinary proposition is a generalization from a group of perceptual facts. It represents those facts. These perceptual facts are themselves abstract representatives, though we know not precisely what intermediaries, of the percepts themselves, and these are themselves viewed, and are - if the judgement has any truth - representations, primarily impressions of sense, ultimately of a dark underlying something, which can not be specified without its manifesting itself as a sign of something below. There is, we think and reasonably think, a limit to this, an ultimately reality, like a zero of temperature. But in the nature of things, it can only be approached; it can only be represented. The immediate object which any sign seeks to represent is itself a sign. The sign is never the very object itself. It is, therefore a sign of its object only in some aspect, in some respect. Thus, a sign is something which brings another sign into objective relation to that sign which it represents itself, and brings it into that relation in some measure in the same respect or aspect in which it is itself a sign of the same sign. If we attempt to say what respect or aspect it is in which a sign is a sign of its object, that respect or aspect must then appear itself as a sign. Its own full aspect, the sign cannot evoke or endeavor to evoke. It is only some aspect of that aspect that it can aim to reproduce. Here again there will be an endless series. But this aspect is only a character of the necessary imperfection of a sign. A sign is something which in some measure and in some respect makes its interpretant the sign of that of which it is itself the sign. It is like a mean function in mathematics. We call (P)x,y a mean function of x and y, if it is such a function that when x and y are the same, it is itself that same. So a sign which merely represents itself to itself is nothing else but that thing itself. The two infinite series, the one back toward the object, the other forward toward the interpretant, in this case collapse into an immediate present. The type of a sign is memory, which takes up the deliverance of past memory and delivers a portion of it to future memory. (MS 599.35f; c.1902) http://www.unav.es/gep/ReasonRules599.html <http://www.unav.es/gep/ReasonRules599.html>
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