Comments on Brian Kemple’s Essay (2020) "Signs and Reality"

By Razie Mah

In the essay, titled "Signs and Reality: An advocation for semiotic realism", Brian Kemple Ph.D. engages the works of Thomas Aquinas (Reality, volume 1, (2020) 75-123).
Yes, Aquinas discusses things and how things influence the mind. There is a difference.
Perhaps, because of this difference, some philosophers think that things are real and their influence is not. Things are material. Their significance is not material.
Kemple says, "Au contraire."
Signs, the conveyance of signficance, are real, recognizable and impactful. They cannot be ignored. They allow reference, intelligibility, as well as a judgment that weighs the two.
Even more curious, Thomas Aquinas writes about this. Kemple's argument examines texts. He considers technical terms. He does so in the defense of semiotic realism.
Matthew Minerd pens a response to Kemple's article, titled "The Analogy of Res-ality", playing on the Latin word, "res", translated as "thing" (Reality, vol. 1, (2020) 124-145). Minerd suggests that a consideration of (what Latins call) "signa practica" would assist Kemple's argument.
Does that cover "practice of signs" or "practical signs"?
If so, then these comments add value to Kemple's argument by offering diagrams, constructed from category-based nested forms, that help the reader to visualize scholastic terminology. The Latin terms, "species impressa", "species expressa" and "species intelligibilis" are actualities in a three-level interscope. They are also sign-objects for interventional, specifying and exemplar signs.
Yes, the category-based nested form offers a practical method of constructing signs.
It allows the inquirer to see the sign as a structure built with simpler triadic relations.
On top of that, there is the matter of telling a narrative about the realness of signs. These comments offer a narrative that draws many of Kemple's discursive threads into a disquieting story, told by an interior decorator, about decor that defies the label that defines the room.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Razie Mah
• Release date: Jul 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781955931038

Razie Mah

See website for bio.

Book preview

Comments on Brian Kemple's Essay (2020) Signs and Reality

By Razie Mah

Published for Smashwords.com

2021 AD

7821 U0'

Notes on Text

Brian Kemple Ph.D. argues that signs are real. Indeed, signs are things. My goal is to comment on this work using the category-based nested form and other relational models within the tradition of Charles Peirce.

‘Words that belong together’ are denoted by single quotes or italics.

Prerequisites: A Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form, A Primer on Sensible and Social Construction

Recommended: Comments on John Deely’s Book (1994) New Beginnings

Table of Contents

What Is Real?

Reality Is More Than Res Naturae

Interventional Signs

Judge Not, Lest Ye Be

Semiotic Realism is Surreal

What Is Real?

0001 Brian Kemple publishes an essay in the first issue of Reality: A Journal for Philosophical Discourse (vol. 1 (2020) pages 75-123). This issue is devoted to philosophical realism. The full title is Signs and Reality: An Advocation for Semiotic Realism.

The essay is followed by a critique by Matthew Minerd, titled "The Analogy of Res-ality: A Response to Brian Kemple" (Reality, vol. 1 (2020) pages 124-145). "Res is Latin for thing".

Yes, the title shows