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Page 189
ile of Oabut can no longer be confused with Oa. In fact, facsimiles are iconic signs but are not fakes.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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