Peirce's Pragmatism Research Articles

Charles S. Peirce and Chinese Philosophy: A Comparative Study

Abstract: In this paper, I situate C.S. Peirce's theory of knowledge and action in comparison to Chinese philosophy. My argument is that the comparison makes it important to understand Peirce's abduction and his maxim as a much more potent force in comparative philosophy. Peirce's priority of practical effects over theory is similar to Confucian conceptions of truth and action. Jon Alan Schmidt has summarized sixty-one formulations of Peirce's maxim, from which I draw the four main expressions of the maxim here. According to Peirce, understanding the meaning of concepts in terms of actual effects is the core element of the maxim. This view can be seen as an echo in Wang Yangming's theory of the unity of knowledge and action. The theory is essentially a moral humanist philosophy. It integrates morality, ethics, and politics. It is similar to Peirce's pragmatic maxim, as James Liszka has explained. Finally, reflecting on the recent studies of Peirce's semiotics in China, I discuss the significance of Peirce's pragmatism in Chinese philosophy.

MODERASI BERAGAMA DALAM PERSPEKTIF PRAGMATISME PEIRCE DAN IMPLIKASINYA BAGI PENDIDIK KEAGAMAAN KATOLIK

This paper seeks to answer the following three main questions. First, why is religious moderation being socialized intensively; second, how religious moderation is understood in the light of Charles Sander Peirce's philosophical pragmatism; and third, what are the implications of Peirce's thinking for the development of religious moderation for Catholic Education Teachers. To answer the questions referred to, the authors use library research. From the results of the analysis found the following answers. First, the socialization of religious moderation is carried out in the midst of the proliferation of chaotic religions, namely ethno-religiocentrism, island mentality, myopic understanding of religion towards humanity, radicalism in the world of education. Second, religious moderation inspired by Peirce's pragmatism refers to the balance between belief, investigation and meaning. Third, the implications of Peirce's pragmatism for the development of religious moderation in Catholic teachers is that the religioucity of Catholic teachers must uphold a balance between belief, investigation and its meanings for social transformation.

The semiotic dimension of transmedia design

This discussion is based on the following questions: a) What are the limits and potential of transmedia design for contemporary communication planning?; b) How and to what extent can semiotics contribute to the issue? In order to answer these questions, we consider that the transmedia logic outlines the contemporary communication logic. In this sense, we emphasize the necessary articulation between communication and transmedia logic to discuss the specificities of design and semiotics in the scope of transmedia logic and their implications in various areas of knowledge. We seek to highlight the etymological approach between sign and design to elucidate the contributions of semiotics to this area of knowledge. Concomitantly, it is emphasized that transmedia logic can be better understood with the adoption of the logical perspective stemming from Charles Sanders Peirce's pragmatism, which identifies logic with semiotics.

Lo viejo, lo nuevo y su absorción. Comentario a "Viejo y nuevo pragmatismo" de Susan Haack

<p class="p1">En estas páginas retomo la discusión sobre Susan Haack: “Viejo y nuevo pragmatismo” (Diánoia 47) iniciada en este mismo volumen por Ramón del Castillo. En la primera sección abordo el tema de la autenticidad, la seriedad en oposición al carácter antiintelectual que Haack adscribe al neopragmatismo. En la segunda presento algunos argumentos de James y Dewey que respaldan la continuidad entre viejo y nuevo pragmatismo, para después aportar algunos elementos debidos a Hookway que hacen que el cuadro de la filosofía de Peirce resulte algo más complejo de lo que Haack sugiere en “Viejo y nuevo pragmatismo”. A partir de ahí contrapondré algunas consecuencias de los pragmatismos de Dewey y Peirce para la filosofía social. Por último, en la tercera parte, matizo algunas afirmaciones de Haack sobre el pragmatismo de Quine e intento presentar una imagen moderada del neopragmatismo de Rorty, una actitud filosófica más acorde con una teoría deweyana de la investigación como la que, según Haack, Rorty ha abandonado de una vez por todas.</p>

Peirce, Pragmatism, and Religious Education: Participating More Deeply in God’s Imagination

Approaching Christian education in light of Charles Sanders Peirce's Classical Pragmatism can help catechists make Christian tradition more intelligible to present-day North Americans; it can provide them with a rich framework for pedagogical practices; and it can help them offer a compelling vision of deeper participation in the Trinitarian life of God. A Peircean pedagogy of religious education emphasizes attentiveness, discernment, creativity, artistry, and the key role of the Holy Spirit.

Why Democracy Cannot Be Grounded in Epistemic Principles

In recent years, philosophers influenced by Peirce's pragmatism have contributed to the democracy debate by offering not simply a justification of democracy that relies on epistemic as well as mora ...

A Synthetic Pattern: Figural and Narrative Identity

How can we recognize an identity? This fascinating topic is approached from a pragmatist perspective that tends to include our concrete way of reasoning into the rationale of our reasoning. Following Peirce's semiotic study of elements of Gamma Graphs as the multidimensional sheet of assertion and the line of identity, the paper will individuate the semiotic characteristics necessary to the recognition of identity. These characteristics lead us to discover complete gesture as the tool that we use in our everyday reasoning for recognizing identity. Complete gesture is the key element for a pragmatist version of the narrative paradigm that is particularly apt to recognize an object that appears with different determinations at different moments. Naming them as figurae, the paper will call figurai identity the kind of identity that we obtain from this process.The issues about what identity is and how we can recognize it remain some of the most challenging topics of philosophy. This paper wants to propose a new approach to them drawn from classic pragmatism. It will focus on the second question: how can we recognize an identity? There is a hope that this will cast light also upon the ontological theme of the first question, but it will not be addressed in this paper directly.The epistemic theme of the recognition of identity is decisive in any philosophy, but it is even more important when one wishes - as in the case of pragmatism - to radically change logical patterns and philosophical presuppositions. The study of pragmatism, in particular of Peirce's pragmatism, permits us to enter into a new conception of this topic. This new conception, in fact, can be formulated starting from a kind of new logic, which - in my view - tends to be synthetic rather than analytic.Synthesis is the rational procedure by which we can think a predicate, and, more generally, a concept that is not included in the subject (cf. Kant 1996, A7; Bll). Here we will understand synthesis starting from the characteristics pointed out by Robert Hanna in his studies about Kant: (1) a judgment is when it advances beyond the intension of a concept and establishes a novel connection with another concept; (2) this connection is made possible by something 'altogether different' from a conceptual content; (3) the negation of a judgment does not have to be a logical contradiction necessarily; (4) judgments amplify the intensional structure whereas comprehension is narrowed (Hanna 2001, 191). Hanna understands 'something different from conceptual content' as Kant's and this latter is marked mainly by individuality and not conceptuality (Hanna indicates it also has priority to thought).1 If we set aside the Kantian notion of intuition, obviously foreign to pragmatists, we can still consider synthesis as marked by this use of singulars or individuals.2If we understand synthesis as this use of non-conceptual individuals in order to unify concepts, a love of synthesis prevails in pragmatism in the concrete development of scientific reasoning, a development which is wellrepresented by the progression of the degrees of clarity that Peirce ascribes to ideas: familiarity, definition, pragmatic maxim, concrete reasonableness.3 And you can find the same attitude in James's attention to the relationship between psychology and epistemology, Dewey's logic of inquiry, and Mead's concept of significant symbol. Pragmatism was and is strongly committed to understanding and using ampliative, or in other words 'synthetic', reasoning and to grasping its concrete way of acting with and through individuals. This attitude persists, including the extreme case of considering tools and experiments as part of our logic, leaning toward a 'complete synthetic' pattem of reasoning or a 'synthetic' philosophy. A philosophy is one in which the connection among concepts is made possible by tools altogether different from a conceptual content. …

How to Avoid Moralism, Apologetics, and Intimidation

How to Avoid Moralism, Apologetics, and Intimidation

Epistemic Norms and Democracy: a Response to Talisse

AbstractJohn Rawls argued that democracy must be justifiable to all citizens; otherwise, a democratic society is oppressive to some. In A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy (), Robert B. Talisse attempts to meet the Rawlsian challenge by drawing from Charles S. Peirce's pragmatism. This article first briefly canvasses the argument of Talisse's book and then criticizes its key premise concerning (normative) reasons for belief by offering a competing reading of Peirce's “The Fixation of Belief” (). It then proceeds to argue that Talisse's argument faces a dilemma: his proposal of epistemic perfectionism either is substantive and can be reasonably disagreed about or is minimal but insufficient to ground a democratic society. Consequently, it suggests that the Rawlsian challenge can only be solved by abandoning Rawls's own notion of reasonableness, and that an interesting alternative notion of reasons can be derived from Peirce's “Fixation.”

The Politics of Survival: Peirce, Affectivity, and Social Criticism By Lara Trout

Reviewed by: The Politics of Survival: Peirce, Affectivity, and Social Criticism David A. Dilworth Lara Trout . The Politics of Survival: Peirce, Affectivity, and Social Criticism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. 362 pp. with Index. In this book Lara Trout provides provocative but problematic food for thought. She crafts an exegesis of Peirce's concepts of evolutionary agapism and critical commonsensism as resources for a theory of social justice aligned with contemporary race and gender theories. Conforming Peirce's tenets to her own agenda, she develops a radical politics of societal inclusiveness by way of analyzing and critiquing putative "nonconscious biases" in the "background" beliefs of broad segments of the contemporary populace. Unfortunately, this steers Peirce's ship on an unrecognizable course. Trout's strategic word, straight out of the Foucaultian-Frankfurtian play-book, is "hegemonic," which she repeatedly applies to "white males," "heterosexuals," "able-bodied people," "stable wage earners," and like targets of leftist criticism. She contrasts such "hegemonic viewpoints that are circumscribed by whiteness, maleness, economic security, heterosexuality, and so on" with those of "oppressed groups, such as the poor, GLBTQs, people of color, and women." (The capitalized letters refer to persons who do not consider themselves heterosexual, such as "those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, queer, or questioning.") Through this problematically mixed polarization of societal groups—a kind of Nietzschean theory in reverse drive—she both coopts Peirce's philosophy for her communitarian concept of social justice and critically contests it—pointedly, as I will indicate below, by proposing a concept of "everyday science" or "communal science" in lieu of Peirce's concept of "real science." Needless to say, such a politicized "consensus" theory collides head-on with Peirce's objective realism—his sense of truth and reality that is independent of you, me, or any group or epoch of persons. By itself, Trout's polarization of social groups is an ingenious blame game. The accompanying problem is that her political solution seems logically to entail a system of social engineering not only over nurture but also over nature—shades of the flattened-out, dumbed-down populace of Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron. [End Page 524] For his part, Peirce's career followed in the wake of such leading 19th-century proponents of democratic social theory as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Though never directly framing a theory of the State, Peirce's Pragmatism (later Pragmaticism) wrote the so-to-speak epistemology of democracy in its essential logic of free inquiry and accomplishment in a merit-based society. (Continuing this heritage of the American cultural symbolic, James and Dewey, though arguably in more attenuated versions, wrote democratic scripts to the same effect.) Whitman's magnificently inclusive "Song of Myself " and Democratic Vistas followed in the lead of Emerson's "Politics" of 1844. In the latter Emerson inscribed his two laws of identity and metamorphosis, which in turn grounded his twin political principles of equality and property.1 The first of these principles Peirce generalized into his broad-banded Pragmatist sense (fallibilist, self-corrective, open-ended, cooperative, inter-national, inter-cultural, inter-generational) of equality of opportunity in the domain of conceptual activity. Any dedicated, competent person can cast a vote, so to speak, in the open-ended arena of the pursuit of truth—as inscribed in his guiding maxim of keeping open the road of rational inquiry. And for Peirce (as for Emerson and Whitman) differential property did not reduce to material gain—to the contrary, all three American thinkers inveighed against the Greed Gospel of their own century—but rather referred to the freedom of productive invention and achievement, and thus to the intellectual and moral property an individual person, or group of persons, or even nations and epochs can contribute to the progress of civilization. By and large, passages of Trout's book range competently over Peirce's social semiosis, and her overall vision of societal inclusiveness is preciously endearing. But her superimposed "biological survival model" crimps Peirce's more balanced pluralistic episteme of spontaneous orientations and creative achievements as ideal ends of nature and society. Trout's vision is transparently agenda-d. Adopting a contemporary "pragmatist-feminist" perspective, she goes so...

Peircean Polymorphism: Between Realism and Anti-realism

This paper provides a framework, based on Peircean pragmatism and a supplemental metaphysical principle, for reconciling realism and anti-realism. Peircean polymorphism, the resultant position defended in the paper, is a realist position, accepting that there is a world that exists and has characteristics of its own, independently of our experience of it. The position denies, however, what I call the uniqueness assumption about truth—that it is possible for one, unique representational approach to adequately represent reality. While Peirce does not explicitly address the uniqueness assumption, his account is sufficiently ambiguous on this point to have been understood as a uniqueness account. The supplemental metaphysical principle introduced here, that reality is polymorphic, serves to fortify Peirce's pragmatism against uniqueness. Briefly, the paper outlines some implications of accepting the fortified Peircean position, including greater explanatory power and more compelling motivation for continued scientific inquiry.

Um ensaio sobre as concepções de professores de Matemática: possibilidades metodológicas e um exercício de pesquisa

Este artigo tem como tema principal as concepções dos professores de Matemática. Considerando o termo "concepção" a partir do pragmatismo de Peirce, elabora-se um conjunto de parâmetros metodológicos - chamado de "método indireto" - a ser aplicado no estudo das concepções de professores de Matemática. Trata-se, em síntese, de investigar as concepções dos professores interpelando-os não sobre suas crenças, mas sobre suas práticas. Fundamentando essa abordagem indireta e explicitando-a em sua natureza qualitativa, o artigo segue apresentando, como exemplo, um exercício desse "método indireto": um estudo sobre os critérios que os professores utilizam quando escolhem livros-texto para sua sala de aula, abordando, conseqüentemente, quais concepções de Matemática e de seu ensino e aprendizagem tais critérios desvendam. Partindo de depoimentos de professores de Matemática, o estudo indica que os professores agem com certa independência quando escolhem os materiais utilizados em suas atividades docentes. Buscam, ao mesmo tempo, apoio em uma vasta gama de livros didáticos, desconsiderando as particularidades de cada obra e as abordagens e perspectivas defendidas por seus autores. Embora submetam-se ao livro didático - considerado uma referência legítima e segura -, os professores o subvertem, buscando adequá-lo ao que consideram correto. Dessa constatação, algumas das concepções dos professores podem ser realçadas: o aluno, via de regra, é avaliado e classificado pelas lacunas que apresenta em relação aos conteúdos. Dessa postura, segue a valorização da precedência lógica dos conteúdos, de sua apresentação linear, e a defesa de "pré-requisitos" que viabilizariam o ensino e, conseqüentemente, implicam a legitimidade de aulas predominantemente expositivas.

Cultural pragmatism and The Life of the Sign

Wanting to catalyse new approaches to interdisciplinary inquiry and practice within the field of journalism, media, and cultural studies (JMC), Shepperson reconceived interdisciplinary relationships in the light of the highly original-and still not fully understood-work of the American scientist, philosopher and logician, C.S. Peirce. Shepperson approached his reconceptualisation of interdisciplinarity in ways meant'to bear on the global dimension of the human condition’, even imagining that, as a consequence of their own evolving practice, such disciplines as JMC might begin to influence the general ethic of societies in ways which could meliorate social conditions. While he did not live to complete this work, his pioneering research in applying Peirce's pragmatism to inquiry into the social realm can be seen as preparing the theoretical foundations for a new discipline, cultural pragmatism.

The Logic of Abduction in the Light of Peirce's Pragmatism

The Logic of Abduction in the Light of Peirce's Pragmatism

Some more similarities between Peirce and Skinner

C. S. Peirce is noted for pioneering a variety of views, and the case is made here for the similarities and parallels between his views and B. F. Skinner's radical behaviorism. In addition to parallels previously noted, these similarities include an advancement of experimental science, a behavioral psychology, a shift from nominalism to realism, an opposition to positivism, a selectionist account for strengthening behavior, the importance of a community of selves, a recursive approach to method, and the probabilistic nature of truth. Questions are raised as to the extent to which Skinner's radical behaviorism, as distinguished from his S-R positivism, may be seen as an extension of Peirce's pragmatism.

Peirce's pragmatism: the design for thinking

Peirce's pragmatism: the design for thinking

Re-Semiotizing the South African Democratic Project: The African Renaissance

This article reviews the relationship between the semiotic implications of the emerging concept of the African Renaissance, and the historical trajectory of semiotic studies in South Africa. Linked with the residual ideological territories occupied under the rubrics of ‘semiotics’ and/or ‘semiology’ are the ways these discourses have been re-articulated or re-presented within the politics of the post-apartheid era. As a concept of the ‘post’, therefore, the semiotic implications of a projective strategy like the African Renaissance require more than the mindless dyadism of linguistic semiology. The article sketches the outline of the case for a radical appropriation of the semiotics embedded in C.S. Peirce's pragmatism as a way of constituting the reality of ‘Renaissance’ concepts in terms of a Task. The place of semiotics within the broader philosophical and analytical programme is illustrated by means of a table that links semiotics, pragmatism, and radical theory. The table indicates how the issues discussed in this article can be seen to fall under a schema that foregrounds Peirce's realization that aesthetic and ethical concepts are prior to those based purely on logic. As such, therefore, the article suggests that topics in social or cultural semiotics are more readily amenable to semiotic interpretation and analysis under a pragmatic rather than a linguistic methodological regime.

On the relation between Common Sense, Science and Metaphysics

Among A. J. Ayer's many influential contributions to philosophy are the accounts of the nature of metaphysics which he propounded at various stages of his philosophical development. Whereas his early position is a clear version of the antimetaphysical attitude of the Viennese circle and, more generally, of logical positivism, his later position is, as he generously emphasized, in some crucial respects indebted to Peirce's pragmatism and to Ramsey's analysis of the structure of theories. His later views on the nature of metaphysics are contained in his book Central Questions of Philosophy and in his reply to my criticisms in a Festschrift, published on the occasion of his retirement from the Wykeham Chair of Philosophy at Oxford University (Macdonald, 1979). Although in this reply he describes his later account of metaphysics as ‘much too perfunctory’, it does constitute an important attempt at answering one of the central questions of philosophy.

A ciência do olhar atento

Que é ciência? A distinção entre conhecimento científico e ciência como coisa viva, ciência da experiência. A dimensão científica das categorias de Peirce: dedução, abdução, indução. Pragmatismo peirceano. A indução como elemento de ligação entre a hipótese explicativa abdutiva apenas provável e a geração de uma lei dedutiva, necessária porque normativa para hábitos de conduta.

Logique, psychologie et métaphysique: les fondements du pragmatisme selon C. S. Peirce

The originality of Peirce's pragmatism is grounded in the very early project Peirce draws of a Logic, in which psychology and metaphysics are intimately connected: under the influence of Kant, Boole and the Scolastics, and through a certain logical use of the sign, Peirce elaborates a Logic, both more formal (anti-psychologism, critique of the metaphysics of intuition) and larger (raising a table of categories, studying the faculties through «a logical analysis of the products of thought», developing a theory of reality and abstraction), on the Scotistic model of a Speculative Grammar.