Introduit à certains aspects de la pensée de Charles Sanders Peirce, le philosophe américain fondateur du pragmatisme et de la sémiotique, avec, notamment, une analyse des liens que Peirce établit entre la logique, la psychologie et la philosophie de la connaissance.

While Peirce presented himself as a "scholastic realist of a somewhat extreme stripe", merely adapting the virtues involved in Scotism to the requirements of modern science to erect a plain scientific realistic metaphysics, he was also eager to emphasize that "everybody ought to be a nominalist at first" because such an hypothesis is "simpler than realism" and because "the economy of research prescribes to try the simpler one first, and to continue in that opinion", until one "is driven out of (...) it by the force majeure of irreconciliable facts". Even if, at first, he had been "blinded by nominalistic preconceptions", he also confessed that he had "never been able to think differently on that question of realism" and... (shrink)

The aim of the text is to evaluate Peirce's evolutionary cosmology and to try to make sense of the mixture of idealistic and naturalistic elements that may be found in it, especially by focusing on Peirce's conception of logical norms and rationality, and on the links that may be drawn between such views and some evolutionary themes in the contemporary debates on norms, belief and knowledge.

This symposium contribution discusses some issues of ontology involved in the metaethics of Hilary Putnam's book Ethics without Ontology.

Part of the obvious revival of pragmatism, at least in Europe is linked with the present success or "boom" of moral philosophy and the increasing tendency to identify the classical pragmatists as a common group of writers who, much better than any philosophers from other traditions, knew how to define scientific inquiry as an inquiry submitted to norms and principels, and realized that "what applies to investigation in general equally applies to ethical investigation ". The paper examines such claims and (...) focuses, in particular on Peirce's arguments against any form of moral rationalism and in favor of a normative conception of rationality, closer to a conception of the possible objectivity of ethics as may appear at first sight. (shrink)

Peirce's realism is a sophisticated realism inherited from the Avicennian Scotistic tradition, which may be briefly characterized by its opposition to metaphysical realism and various forms of nominalism. In this chapter, I consider how Peirce's realism fits his approach to mathematics, which is often presented as a somewhat incoherent mixture of Platonistic and conceptualistic elements. Without denying these, I claim that Peirce's subtle position not only helps to clear up some of these so-called inconsistencies but offers many insights for contemporary (...) ways of dealing with the mathematical aspects of the problem of universals. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to present some important insights of C. Hookway's pragmatist analysis of knowledge viewed less in the standard way, as justified true belief, than as a dynamic natural and normative question-answer process of inquiry, a reliable and successful agent-based enterprise, consisting in virtuous dispositions explaining how we can be held responsible for our beliefs and investigations. Despite the merits of such an approach, the paper shows that it may be inefficient in accounting for some challenges (...) posed by scepticism or by the nature of epistemic normativity. In which case it might be premature to propose it as a new conception of knowledge against the standard one and worth considering a different, though still pragmatist, strategy, in which inquiry would aim at the fixation of knowledge, still viewed as justified true beliefs, i.e critical commonsensical, warrantedly assertible, intellectual and sentimental dispositions for which the epistemic agent, viewed less as an individual person than as a scientific community of inquirers, should be taken as a knowing and reliable agent, both answerable and responsible for her assertions. (shrink)

The aim of the text is not so much to stress the importance of Peirce's formal contributions to the semantic view in formal logic as to argue that Peirce's semantic trend is part and parcel of his semiotic treatment of a general theory of meaning, understanding, and interpretation, a theory of how signs function which enables him to classify different sorts of signs in a natural way.

Après avoir dégagé quelques incarnations du rationalisme dont Bouveresse se démarque, j’indique quelques aspects qui ancrent son œuvre dans la tradition de l’Aufklärung (mais en la renouvelant), avant d’insister sur ce qui me semble plus distinctif de ce rationalisme dans lequel parviennent miraculeusement à cohabiter des sources philosophiques, littéraires et scientifiques : Cournot, Vuillemin, Carnap, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Russell, Frege, Sellars, Bolzano, Boltzmann ou Helmholtz, mais aussi Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Husserl, Cavaillès, Canguilhem, les pragmatistes James, Putnam, ou encore des écrivains (...) comme Valéry, T.S. Eliot, et, plus que tout peut-être, Lichtenberg, Kraus et Musil. Puis je me concentre particulièrement sur l’examen de ce rationalisme à l’aune des liens de Bouveresse avec la tradition « analytique », et avec Wittgenstein en particulier. (shrink)

For C.S. Peirce, who had a well‐known influence on many aspects of Ramsey's thought, pragmatism was viewed as inseparable from realism. The aim of this paper is to challenge the view according to which Ramsey's reflexions on universals are of a mere linguistic and logical nature. Not only is this view controversial, but it may be argued that some elements in Ramsey's analyses suggest a possibly realist answer to the problem of universals. By drawing comparisons with Peirce's own position, it (...) is suggested that Ramsey's views might not be inconsistent with many aspects of Peirce's scholastic and even Scotistic version of realism. (shrink)

Le pragmatisme est souvent associé au nominalisme. Pourtant, dans l’esprit de son fondateur, C. S. Peirce, le pragmatisme va de pair avec le réalisme. Après avoir examiné les ressorts de ce paradoxe et noté plusieurs points communs aux divers pragmatistes, on présente les grands traits de ce que pourrait être un réalisme pragmatiste bien compris. On suggère qu’un tel réalisme dispositionnel, qui s’inscrit dans une démarche métaphysique et éthique résolue, constitue une voie prometteuse pour qui veut pouvoir donner sens au (...) projet d’une « connaissance » métaphysique et apporter de possibles réponses au cynisme relativiste ambiant. (shrink)

For C.S. Peirce, who had a well‐known influence on many aspects of Ramsey's thought, pragmatism was viewed as inseparable from realism. The aim of this paper is to challenge the view according to which Ramsey's reflexions on universals are of a mere linguistic and logical nature. Not only is this view controversial, but it may be argued that some elements in Ramsey's analyses suggest a possibly realist answer to the problem of universals. By drawing comparisons with Peirce's own position, it (...) is suggested that Ramsey's views might not be inconsistent with many aspects of Peirce's scholastic and even Scotistic version of realism. (shrink)

The aim of the text is to present Peirce's relevance for cognitive science,especially in terms of his views in semiotic, logical machines, and the psychology of iconic reasoning.