Copy [in Semeiotic]

The simplest kind of agreement of truth is a resemblance between the representation and its object. I call this verisimilitude, and the representation a copy.

Resemblance consists in a likeness, which is a sameness of predicates. Carried to the highest point, it would destroy itself by becoming identity. All real resemblance, therefore, has a limit.

By a copy, I mean a representation whose agreement with its object depends merely upon a sameness of predicates.

A representation which denotes without connoting is a mere sign. If it connotes without thereby denoting, it is a mere copy.

Representations are of three kinds according to their truth or coincidence with their objects. These are

     1. Signs. Representations by virtue of convention.
     2. Symbols. Representations by virtue of original or acquired nature.
     3. Copies. Representations by virtue of a sameness of predicates.

A copy is a representation which really and of its self refers to its object by resembling it.

Representations whose subject and object depend immediately upon the ground and not upon any character of either. But the ground in any case must be a character of the representation which connects it with subject and object. Hence such representations are those which agree immediately with both subject and object in some characters. It is this sort of representation which an individual is of itself; and also which a sensation is. For a sensation agrees immediately with the thing in affecting the sense and with the mind in being affected by the thing. It is this sort of representation also which a picture is. Accordingly I call this species of representation copy.

… I must call your attention to the differences there are in the manner in which different representations stand for their objects. In the first place there are likenesses or copies - such as statues, pictures, emblems, hieroglyphics, and the like. Such representations stand for their objects only so far as they have an actual resemblance to them - that is agree with them in some characters. The peculiarity of such representations is that they do not determine their objects - they stand for anything more or less; for they stand for whatever they resemble and they resemble everything more or less.

The first and simplest kind of truth is the resemblance of a copy. It may be roughly stated to consist in a sameness of predicates. Leibniz would say that carried to its highest point, it would destroy itself by becoming identity. Whether that is true or not, all known resemblance has a limit. Hence, resemblance is always partial truth. On the other hand, no two things are so different as to resemble each other in no particular. Such a case is supposed in the proverb that Dreams go by contraries, - an absurd notion, since concretes have no contraries. A false copy is one which claims to resemble an object which it does not resemble. But this never fully occurs, for two reasons; in the first place, the falsehood does not lie in the copy itself but in the claim which is made for it, in the superscription for instance; in the second place, as there must be some resemblance between the copy and its object, this falsehood cannot be entire. Hence, there is no absolute truth or falsehood of copies.