Terry, That's a good way to explain the issues -- especially because you and Peirce illustrate your interpretations with concrete examples. A definition or discussion of any new term must have one or more examples to show (1) that the term is not vacuous, and (2) the kinds of features or characteristics a typical instance may have. Examples from astronomy illustrate the issues very clearly. Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe was too hot for any living things to exist. But today, astronomers are routinely seeing and interpreting marks from billions of years ago as tokens of various types. Historians and anthropologists have shown how people from different cultures have interpreted similar marks in the sky as tokens of very different types. Although some of their interpretations may have been fanciful, much of what they said was true as far as it was tested in practice. The Polynesians, for example, were using the stars to guide their travels across the Pacific for centuries before the Europeans ventured far from shore. John ____________________________________________________TLR> I find it helpful to think of at least some possible signs or protosigns or pre-incarnate signs as being cognitively incomplete signs. Familiar example from PWP 104 & CP 2.304: An index is a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant. Such, for instance, is a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not. Another striking (pun intended) example are the gravity waves emitted by the inspiral collision of two neutron stars identified in B. P. Abbot, et al.,GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral. Physical Review Letters 119, no. 161101 (October 16, 2017): 1-18. The shot and hole in the mould thus are manifest or incarnate causal-indexical signs but they remain cognitively incomplete unless and until somebody has the sense to attribute it to a shot, So too are the gravity waves and the inspiral collision of neutron stars that caused them manifest incarnate empirical signs until 130 million years later and 780 quintillion miles away astronomers on Earth had the sense to detect the waves and attribute them to that inspiral collision, thus cognitively completing those causal-indexical empirical signs as manifest, incarnate, actual interpretants in the mind of an Interpreter.
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