Frances to Saul and William and listers... There is much to chew on and sort out here in your comments. The issue of signs is indeed a thorny snarl of twine that is often hard to deal with. The integration theory of signs is just another stance or thrust to wrestle with. Allow me to offer a few points and invite some correction. 1. Under realist pragmatism there is a distinct difference to note between semiotic signage signs and linguistic language signs, which seems to be the better approach to the overall study of signs, at least in any global vein. 2. It is unlikely that preliterate human babies would translate anything sensed whatsoever into language, but who nonetheless may be able to think other than discursively to some degree with the icons and indexes and symbols of semiotic signage systems. 3. Pragmatist semiotics holds that the referred object determines the main kind a sign will be in any particular situation, which would be as an icon or index or symbol, but also that there will nonetheless be degrees of icons and indexes and symbols in each such sign situation. Furthermore, all signs are held to necessarily be sensed as material indexes, which are token phenomenal facts that stand for mystical icons and other material indexes and mental symbols. In addition, it is symbols as laws that control the relation between indexes as facts and icons as qualities as both icons and indexes lay together connected in a common ground, so that symbols might assure signers of some normal conformity between the brute indexes and the hazy icons that are given uncontrolled to sense. 4. It is interesting to note that when early pragmatists sought a synonym for "logic" in the wider sense of signs they first considered the term "symbology" but eventually settled on the term "semeiotic" which is now called semiotics as the pragmatist theory of logical signs. It seems that early pragmatists were not aware of the term "semiology" or chose not to use it. 5. If an object is agreed by a community of signers to be reasonably signified by a sign, or if an object is agreed by them to be found true in a sign, then that object or sign or truth is so regardless of what any individual signer may want or think of it or whether they even know it at all, so that the communally agreed object or sign or truth is consequently independent of any individual mind, and thus they exist objectively as a real thing. The object signified by the sign of truth for example is an existent reality. The signer is then brought into a relation with the sign of their sense, and the object and any truth it is agreed the sensed sign may carry, so that the signer is not held to be brought into a relation with their own inner sense of the sign, because it is after all the sign and its object like truth that is held to be sensed. 6. It is clear in the field of linguistics that there is at the present no language of flowers or language of images or any somatic body language, although these nonlingual signage systems may eventually be developed as nonverbal languages in accord with linguistic science. As a part of lingual languages it would be nice to have virtual visual languages and variable vital languages that could compliment variable verbal languages. Verbal languages at present seem to be oral or spoken, and literal to include cherical or deaf gests and orthal or written scripts along with other numeral and digital and coded languages. Verbal language is indeed a cascade of sign systems. 7. The presence of mathematics and its laws is found to exist in the world by the mind of humans. The mind does not arbitrarily invent or make mathematics. The mind however must use sure signs to stand for pure mathematics, which real signs will posit in mind a degraded or degenerative version of ideal mathematics. The same can be held for logics and its laws, or nature and its laws, or science and its laws. What is found by mind as the telic agent of purposive design is a disposed trait for things to take on regular habits of routine conduct that can become laws, such as gravity for example.
Saul wrote... But we do tend to translate all communication into language - what Lacan and Hiedigger posit as a symbolic order - a means to control our understanding of that aspect of what we experience or imagine that might be shared - in this manner the symbolic language of images, as well as things like body language or certain aspects of music and mathematics might be thought of as being signifiers whose referent is still another sign system
