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ile of Oabut can no longer be confused with Oa. In fact, facsimiles are iconic signs but are not fakes. |
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How are we to define a sign that works as such only if and when it is mistaken for its own denotatum? The only way to define it is to call it a fake. A peculiar situation, indeed. What kind of semiotic object is a fake? |
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The question that the Claimant asks when facing Ob is not "What does it mean?" but, rather, "What is it?" (and the answer which produces a false identification is "It is Oa"). Ob is taken as the same as Oa because it is, or looks like, an icon of Oa. |
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In Peircean terms, an icon is not yet a sign. As a mere image, it is a Firstness. Only iconic representamens or hypoicons are signs, that is, instances of Thirdness. Although this point is in Peirce rather controversial, we can understand the difference in the sense that a mere icon is not interpretable as a sign. Obviously, Ob, in order to be recognized as similar to Oa, must be perceptually interpreted, but as soon as the Claimant perceives it, he or she identifies it as Oa. This is a case of perceptual misunderstanding. |
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There is a semiosic process which leads to the perceptual recognition of a given uttered sound as a certain word. If someone utters fip and the addressee understands fi:p, certainly the addressee mistakes fip with a token of the lexical type "fi:p." But we can hardly say that the uttered fip was a sign for the intended fi:p. The whole story concerns a phonetic muddle or, insofar as both utterances are words, an expression-substance to expression-substance mistake. In the same sense when Ob is mistaken, for reasons of similarity, for a token Oa (and in the case of Downright Forgery Oa is a token which is the type of itself), we are facing a phenomenon of expression-to-expression misunderstanding. |
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There are cases in semiosis in which one is more interested in the physical features of a token expression than in its contentfor instance, when one hears a sentence and is more interested in ascertaining whether it was uttered by a certain person than in interpreting its meaning: or when, in order to identify the social status of the speaker, the hearer is more interested in the speaker's accent than in the propositional content of the sentence the speaker is uttering. |
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Likewise, in False Identification one is mainly concerned with expressions. Expressions can be forged. Signs (as functions correlating an expression to a content) can at most be misinterpreted. |
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Let us recall the distinction made by Goodman (1968:99ff) between "autographic" and "allographic" arts, Peirce's distinction among legisign, sinsign, and qualisign (2.243ff), and our own previous treat- |
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