This study aims at a better understanding of Peirce’s conception of a philosophy of history. Peirce has a well defined place for historiography in his classification of the sciences, but what he has to say about history as a philosopher is not primarily referring to it as a form of historiographic knowledge, but to history as a process and a medium. As a process, history is, fundamentally, a cooperative activity of man resulting in civilization and capable of varying categoriological degrees (...) of directionality that reflect the ‘agents’ knowledge’ of history incorporated in the communicative practices of their community. As a medium, history – in the light of the cosmogonic narrative of Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics and of his mature conception of the summum bonum – is one of two forms of expression of the Absolute. Our paper studies the development of these conceptions from the Schellingian influences on “The Place of Our Age in the History of Civilization” (1863), to “Fixation of Belief” (1877) and “Evolutionary Love” (1892). Throughout this development, Peirce remains primordially interested in the philosophy of history as a mode of normatively conceiving of history (as a medium) in a way that enables us to pragmatically project our cultural development as a process in which an increasing control over our own history is actualized. (shrink)

Louis Loeb has argued that Hume is pessimistic while Peirce is optimistic about the attainment of fully stable beliefs. In contrast, we argue that Hume was optimistic about such attainment but only if the scope of philosophical investigation is limited to first-order explanatory questions. Further, we argue that Peirce, after reformulating the pragmatic maxim to accommodate the reality of counterfactuals, was pessimistic about such attainment. Finally, we articulate and respond to Peirce's objection that Hume's skeptical arguments in T 1.4.1 and (...) his commitment to common sense indicate that Hume was confused about whether we could have stable beliefs at all. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to explain why Charles Sanders Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics would not have seemed strange to its original 1890s audience. Building on the pioneering work of Andrew Reynolds, I will excavate the scientific context of Peirce’s Monist articles—in particular “The Law of Mind” and “Man’s Glassy Essence,” both published in 1892—focusing on the relationship between protoplasm, evolution, and consciousness. I argue that Peirce’s discussions should be understood in the context of contemporary evolutionary and physiological speculations, many of (...) which were featured in late- 1880s issues of Open Court, sister journal to the Monist. (shrink)

Résumé Depuis 1959, Pierre Parlebas tente de développer une éducation physique scientifique centrée sur la personne qui se meut et non plus sur le mouvement produit ou observé. La pierre angulaire de ce virage copernicien est un concept plein de résonances sémiologiques: la conduite motrice, entendue comme « organisation signifiante du comportement moteur ». En fait, sa proposition pédagogique est toujours allée de pair avec un projet épistémologique dont le noyau dur est une sémiologie de la motricité, c’est à dire (...) une « semiotricité ». Si l’action motrice est le fer de lance de l’éducation physique la sémiotricité, c’est le fer de lance de la praxéologie motrice. Cinquante ans après son démarrage, nous proposons revisiter les fondements de cette conception de l’éducation physique qui reste aujourd’hui révolutionnaire. La sémiologie de la motricité est née sous l’égide de la Sorbonne du milieu du XXe siècle. Les principes du sémiologie linguistique de Saussure inspirent les concepts et les modèles de « un champ du signe discordant » qui bénéficie également des contributions d’autres auteurs pertinents du moment. Cependant, à cette époque, le pragmatisme et la sémiotique américains étaient bien connus. Une question se pose aussitôt: à quoi ressemblerait une sémiotricité triadique? Les processus de communication praxique déclenchent phénomènes d’anticipation et préaction motrices basés en une continuelle interprétation des intentions d’autrui. Paradoxalement, autant ces phénomènes communicatifs que les signes propres des situations ludomotrices peuvent être plus facilement conçus et analysés avec un modèle plus complexe, voire triadique, que nous aimerions partager avec sémioticiens et praxéologues. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 213 Seiten: 197-211.

This book defends an interpretation of Peirce’s philosophical work as forming a systematic whole, emphasizing his empiricist epistemology and explaining the roots of his thought in earlier empiricist and common sense philosophers. In particular, the book develops the connections between Peirce, Reid, and the British empiricists, and provides focused analyses of Peirce’s accounts of experience, habit, perception, semeiosis, truth, and ultimate ends.

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...

This article aims to examine the relationship between image and narrative by means of Peirce’s first trichotomy of qualisign-sinsign-legisign or, for the purposes of the current argument, image-diagram-metaphor. It is argued that narrative, as an extended metaphor, can be examined in three modes: in the image; schematically, in the imagination; and allegorically or in a thought experiment, through hypothetic interpretation. The article outlines two kinds of diagrammatic reasoning emphasized by Peirce: corollarial deduction in which the image is ‘literally seen’ and (...) the reasoning steps are manifest in its conclusion; and theorematic deduction where the conclusion in a diagram is subject to a hypothesis which transforms the image into something new. Demonstrating the breadth of diagrammatic reasoning with reference to the 2018 film, The Shape of Water, the article seeks to explore how allegory and diagram are mutually cooperative, based on three ontological modes: the expressive, the cognitive, and the symbolic. Its primary focus, then, is not so much on the story events of the narrative, as the way that they are visualized and characterized as the fairy story unfolds. It is suggested that the interpreting activity involved in allegory and diagram ties interpretation to metacognition, ultimately (re)recognizing the image in The Shape of Water in an attempt to ascertain the meaning of love. (shrink)

How does a Muslim jurist think the law and how, accordingly, he judges a fact? Using Alice in Wonderland as hermeneutical device to explore the logic of fiqh, this article identifies a divergence between Western and Islamic legal thinking in the application of abduction as key form of inference in the law of Islam. In particular, looking at the fact/law relation in symbolic terms, the article highlights how, while a dichotomy between fact and law characterizes Western legal thinking, fiqh upholds (...) a connection between the “real” and the “right”, where the effort in understanding sharī‘ah postulates the actualization of the “rule” in God’s creation. Thus, if sharī‘ahpre-scribes the Law, not only is the rule discovered through the sources, but the right has to be justified through a verdict de-scribing the fact, for the law to be validly stated for the given situation. In this sense, abduction as explanatory “hypothesis” and “inference to the best explanation” of sharī‘ah provides an account for the probabilistic nature of fiqh, its ramification through verdicts, as well as for the epistemic and narrative function of the tradition as core aspects of the logic of Islamic law. At the same time, doubts can be raised about the compatibility between this logic and the deductive logic of modern state law, as a sub-product of Western legal thinking. (shrink)

I develop an account of scientific representations building on Charles S. Peirce's rich, and still underexplored, notion of iconicity. Iconic representations occupy a central place in Peirce's philosophy, in his innovative approach to logic and in his practice as a scientist. Starting from a discussion of Peirce's approach to diagrams, I claim that Peirce's own representations are in line with his formulation of iconicity, and that they are more broadly connected to the pragmatist philosophy he developed in parallel with his (...) scientific work. I then defend the contemporary relevance of Peirce's approach to iconic representations, and specifically argue that Peirce offers a useful ‘third way’ between what Mauricio Suárez has recently described as the ‘analytical’ and ‘practical’ inquiries into the concept of representation. As a philosophically minded scientist and an experimentally inclined philosopher, Peirce never divorced the practice of representing from questions about what counts as a representation... (shrink)

A pesquisa tem como objeto de estudo as comunidades digitais. O que garante relações efetivas entre os integrantes ou entre os integrantes e as ideias que circulam na comunidade, ou entre tais ideias a ponto de garantir a permanência da comunidade, bem como para o delineamento de tendências para o crescimento dessas ideias na comunidade?, é a pergunta norteadora. A partir dos conceitos de Charles S. Peirce de comunidade, lançamos a hipótese de que a comunidade permanece, pois pode construir uma (...) ambiência movida pelo amor evolutivo ou agapismo, e tende a contribuir para o aumento da razoabilidade concreta. Sendo assim, a pesquisa objetiva contribuir para a compreensão de como o amor evolutivo (ágape) se atualiza em uma comunidade e como a razoabilidade concreta nela se move. Nesse caso, consideramos que os Otaku se constituem como uma réplica para o conceito de comunidade, no sentido peirceano. Da mesma forma, nossos objetivos específicos são: argumentar sobre os vínculos entre amor evolutivo, comunidade e pragmaticismo no interior da arquitetura filosófica peirceana, além da noção de réplica em Peirce; identificar os produtos postos em circulação pela comunidade Otaku; inventariar o potencial de significados de um produto selecionado, ou atentar para o interpretante imediato do produto enquanto signo; identificar interpretantes dinâmicos vinculados ao produto selecionado; desenhar uma tendência para os interpretantes dinâmicos e argumentar sobre pistas que permitam aproximar o grupo dos Otaku com a ideia de comunidade em Peirce. Para tanto, tomamos como corpus seis capítulos publicados do manga One Piece pelo grupo de fãs OPEX, e as mensagens deixadas pelos leitores no mesmo site. As análises seguem um percurso metodológico orientado pelo conceito de interpretante e suas modalidades, proposto por Johanssen e Santaella, a partir da teoria peirceana. Assim, analisamos primeiro o potencial de significados latente no manga; depois os comentários, como efeitos atualizados do manga; e então uma nuvem de pontos formada pelos comentários classificados, para detectar tendências, a presença da ação de uma lei. A partir das análises, concluiuse que os efeitos do manga nos fãs (que dominam o manga) se apresentam nos comentários que sinalizam para interpretantes emocionais, energéticos e lógicos. Além disso, a nuvem de pontos sugere o estabelecimento de um hábito na comunidade, indicando o crescimento da razoabilidade concreta. Isso permite que aproximemos a o grupo de fãs da comunidade de Peirce, como uma réplica do primeiro nível da comunidade, a do amor, confirmando nossa hipótese. A exploração do conceito de comunidade, na perspectiva peirceana, e a proposta e aplicação do método de análise do movimento de ideias na comunidade digital, a partir da teoria dos interpretantes, constituem a relevância da pesquisa para a área. (shrink)