"A Process Philosophy of Signs"

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-a-process-philosophy-of-signs.html

What is a sign? We usually think that it is a fixed relation: a red light signifies ‘Stop’. In his bold new book, James Williams now argues that signs are varying processes: seeing the red light triggers a creative response to the question, Should I stop?

This looks pretty interesting! - I don't have much longer comments on it right now.  I found it b/c the author reviewed a book by Simon Duffy, who came to mind in the workshop I'm sitting in today.

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"What is a sign?" is indeed long-standing, reaching to antiquity, but I doubt if the process philosophy approach is as novel as the author makes it out to seem. In the abstract of the book offered by the publisher (Edinburg University Press), this process approach is set "in contrast to earlier structuralist definitions" of the sign. But here the time-line seems odd, since structuralist definitions might have been popular some time ago (earlier from the standpoint of present writing) but Peirce's process-based definition is chronologically earlier than the structural one. In problematizing the sign as "a fixed relation", the author is perhaps unaware how loose and fluid sign-thinking has really been. Personally, I see the real crux of the matter in how fixed a sign is. The structuralist sign is fixed by convention because the structuralists had linguistic signs in mind. The philosophical sign is less fixed and follows logical reasoning from phenomenon to relation to explanation.

The definition "the sign is process" seems to neglect terminological inventions like semiosis, the process of operating with signs. Here, a chiasm between agentive (someone operating with signs) and non-agentive (signs are processes operating as-if on their own) appears. I think it creates an opening for unconscious semiosis, or operations of signs that are quasi-agentive, i.e. the latent operations of signs that go unnoticed for some time before becoming conscious or ones so minuscule and everyday that they are noticed because insignificant (in reading this text you're operating with a lot of signs, literally hundreds of little distinct marks called "graphemes" which combine into words, phrases, sentences, and ultimately some point, perhaps).

The fixity of sign relations this author approaches with the clumsy phrase "some sort of constancy between referent and meaning". Roman Jakobson had a very neat term for this fixity in spoken language - he called it the phono-semantic knot. I won't go into how it made sense from Jakobson's point of view, but the figure itself is pretty neat - removed from spoken language, these knots can be understood as nodes in our "semiotic webs" (or networks of representations, association of ideas, or however one terms it). The process-based point here should be, I think, that constancy is problematic if the sign is understood as a process, and not as something that is involved (etym. "rolled into") a process. This will remain open-ended and questionable, much as it did in Peirce, whose "infinite semiosis" may not have been really infinite, but achieving constancy in "the circle of society", i.e. one's signs becoming fixed when others use them with a certain constancy. "Constancy" is a cool word, though, since it combines both sameness or continuity and repetition or reappearance.