Frances to William and listers... It is agreed that Harris regards all communication as legitimate, but only when it does happen to occur, and it need not necessarily occur amongst members of groups who contact each other. When communicative contact does occur the participants may be matter or life or human, and contact may occur by whatever means or modes available. The mere contact need not yield exchange or accord, and for nonhumans or abnormal humans or immature humans it will not necessarily yield any lingual sign. Communication among nonhumans will not yield any sign whatsoever. Harris further insists however that when communication occurs among normal mature capable humans that this may entail the act of creating lingual signs. All the means and modes and methods of creating lingual signs are furthermore integrated together in particular communicative situations, but only when able members gang together intentionally into agreed groups. The central idea he agreeably rejects is the predetermined sign, whereby a sign "means" something independent of a particular group or context. This idea is fine in ordinary everyday conversation, but not when learned experts use lingual signs to access the "meaning" and "ruling" of pure mathematics and sure logics. The laws of nature and mathematics and logics are not created or invented arbitrarily by even smart humans in agreed contact with one another, but rather are objective constructs that exist independent of matter and life and sense and mind. This consideration however may be unkind to his humanal theory of linguistic language signs, because linguistics after all is mainly a practical science, and is not mainly a theoretical science, which is to say that mathematics and logics will exist without the need of linguistics. If his sign theory is kept well within the strict psychical limits of antirealist nominalism, then there is little to quarrel about. His process of lingual integration indeed seems to reflect the need in science for a good consensus of expressed agreement among any collective community of expert researchers; but that their opinions of observations will be fallible, and thus temporary and contingent and conditional and provisional and probable.
There is admittedly a lot of editorial conjecture here on my part, because it is about my understanding of what is given to me in the book. My slow deep read is after all still prodding through the first chapter. William partly wrote to Frances in effect... Harris regards all communication as legitimate, whatever the modes, and he insists that communication is the act of creating signs. All the modes of creating signs are furthermore integrated. The central idea he rejects is the predetermined sign, whereby a sign "means" something independent of a particular context.
