>>24473708
>If he supposes that a thing is different from its name, then surely he's mentioning two things.
if you say, "a tree is not the same as the word 'tree'", you are now talking about two things:
The word 'tree' (the sign)
The actual tree (the referent)
acknowledging the difference between a name and the thing it names necessarily means we are speaking of two distinct entities: the name, which is a symbol, and the thing, which exists independently of the name. This distinction preserves the link between language and reality, allowing words to meaningfully refer beyond themselves