One brief last point. I think Peirce’s distinctions between token, type, and tone are rather helpful here and should be kept in mind. Of course the token/type distinction in particular can be blurry but I’m not sure that’s relevant to the discussion at hand.
My sense is that the metaphysics/epistemology distinction is also at play. I’d just note that we can talk about a sign process without requiring that anyone be able to know that sign as a sign. That is some unseen entity could signify a particular interpretant without any person being able to know it. That’s why I think semiotics and physics should be kept clearly separated. One might say that because of the structure of some physical phenomena it can’t communicate information due to the physics but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other semiotic analysis at work. To give an example of this consider the group velocity and the phase velocity of a wave. One can go faster than the speed of light while the other can’t. And it’s trivial to show that according to relativity one can’t transmit useful information faster than the speed of light. However we must be careful not to limit semiotical structures just to this information that can be communicated only at the speed of light or slower. Put an other way, we have to be careful not to equivocate over the term “information" while moving back and forth between physics and semiotics. Again as I mentioned earlier an excellent example of this are Feynman Diagrams. These diagrams clearly are a type of semiotic analysis of interactions even if the nature of the interactions become problematic when treated materially. Hopefully that clarifies things rather than confuses them.
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