Hi John. (01)
Rather than continue this debate in this forum, I'll just register my
view that this idea of anything being a 'sign' is absurd, as is the
idea that all life is intentional. If a tree in a field is a sign
that there is a tree in the field, then a sodium atom is a sign that
there is a sodium atom; indeed, for all x, x is a sign that x exists.
At this point the terminology is not worth discussing. (02)
BTW, one observation. You say (03)
"What makes something a sign is the interpreter -- human, animal,
or even bacterium." (04)
This view makes sense in a 19th-century perspective on the centrality
of agency in interpretation (except you seem to focus on life rather
than agency, which is more like an 18th-century view). It does not,
however, make sense when we take a late-20th century perspective on
how such agents actually work, since cognitive science seeks to
explain intentionality as a byproduct of the internal manipulation of
'signs' in the agent's brain. If 'signness' (aka Searle's 'original
intentionality', etc.) is to be explained by intentional agency, and
intentional agency is to be explained by manipulation of signs, we
are in a vicious circularity. I would rather toss aside Peirce (and
Ogden & Richards) than give up on the insights of computational
psychology. (05)
Pat
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