> On Jan 24, 2017, at 10:43 AM, Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > I acknowledge that I may be confused here, but how can a sign that is general > have an object that is not general?
Just a guess but I suspect the issue here is how one identifies a sign. That is what makes a general sign be labeled as general. This is really just a semantic issue. This confusion is why I don’t tend to use the phrase “general sign” as it’s not obvious what is general. For a legisign the sign consists of a general idea and that’s what I think you’re talking about. (Correct me if I’m wrong) To your other point regarding determination, the sign can be indeterminate in terms of how it represents the object but the object could be any sort of object (firstness, secondness, thirdness). In all cases the sign would still be indeterminate. So I might signify a several elements of firstnesses. What objects is indeterminate and thus general even though the objects are not general. The nominalist view is that all general signs must ultimately refer to individual objects rather than real structures. Peirce allows the real structure to be the object independent of these other individual objects. But for Peirce we must be able to signify both kinds of objects. Of course Peirce’s notion of continuity entails that any sign can itself be broken up into further signs. So all this depends upon the type of analysis one is conducting.
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