Pragmatic Maxim 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.

Peirce’s Pragmatism, Semiotics, and Physical Representation

Charles Peirce is widely credited as the originator of semiotics, or the general theory of signs, and recognized as the founder of American pragmatism, albeit in that peculiar kind Peirce himself went on to distinguish as “pragmaticism.” The semiotic and pragmatist strands in Peirce’s thought come together in an appraisal of scientific diagrammatic representations. Peirce’s pragmatic maxim entails that the consequences of a sign inform our entire conception of the sign, while his most considered semiotic system entails that a complex sign partakes of iconic, indexical, and symbolic aspects. We illustrate Peirce’s insights by means of the celebrated Feynman Diagrams in Quantum Electrodynamics. We argue that Peirce’s late, post-1903, semiotics provides an adequate characterization of such “hypoicons,” and his pragmatic maxim explains how they can motivate and drive inquiry. We conclude that Peirce’s pragmatic approach to scientific diagrams remains a viable position that skillfully avoids dogmatic scientism and nihilistic skepticism alike.

The Practical Bearings of Truth as Correspondence

AbstractPragmatists are usually very antagonistic toward the correspondence theory of truth. They contend that the evidence-transcendent standard entailed by the theory is antithetical to the pragmatist methodology of elucidating concepts by exposing their practical bearings. What use could truth be to us if it offers a target we cannot even see? After judging the correspondence theory to be in violation of the Pragmatic Maxim, the pragmatist is prone to banishing it to the wastelands of empty metaphysics, where nothing of practical importance could ever grow. This article makes the case that this unjust condemnation must be appealed and overturned. The ground for my case is an argument to the effect that the correspondence conception of truth can be practically advantageous, which provides proof of the fact that, contrary to popular pragmatist belief, the correspondence theory does comply with the Pragmatic Maxim.

Relation of normative sciences and the predisposition to act in Peirce's philosophy

The article aims to show that Peirce, after realizing the appropriation that James and others made of Pragmatism, taking it far from an ideal of justice and keeping it in the service of a “nauseating utility”, whose principle was that only individual utility, including spiritual well-being, would be the ultimate goal of all practice, he sought a philosophy that would keep logic and science united in a realistic manner with laws that could be metaphysically real. In this way, he perceived the necessity to transcend the hypothetical considerations incorporated into the sense of the pragmatic maxim, attempting to distance it from nominalist risk. In this process, he took into account two new normative sciences, esthetics and ethics, in addition to logic, so that Pragmaticism, in intelligent criticism, would investigate whether an admirable end of a subject could be pursued in an indefinite and prolonged course of action, without grounding it solely on individual utility, thus replacing the ideal of justice for the renamed Pragmatism, the Pragmaticism.

On That <em>Toy-Being</em> of Generative Art Toys

On That <em>Toy-Being</em> of Generative Art Toys

More Is Required of Us: Complicating an Ontology of Experience at the Heart of Community-Based Research

More Is Required of Us: Complicating an Ontology of Experience at the Heart of Community-Based Research

TEMPORAL STRUCTURE OF RAP NARRATIVES VS. FAIRY TALES (SYNTACTICAL AND NARRATIVE FACETS)

The paper focuses on the linguistic and narrative manifestations of linear time in rap lyrics compared to fairy tales. It aims at scrutinizing narrative time by the criteria of its acceleration, retardation and generalization, based on syntactical, narrative and pragmatic devices, interpreted from the viewpoint of their iconic isomorphism to the expressed temporal relations. Linear time in fairy tales is self-sufficient, forward-oriented and isolated from external time, while rap narratives are consistent with historical time and free in its movement from the past to the present, and vice versa. Time acceleration in rap occurs in the past or dramatic present and involves syntactical devices aimed either at reducing syntactic patterns by means of detached constructions, asyndeton, nominative sentences and ellipsis, which iconically reproduce the events’ change rate, or at increasing emotional power through climax, reproducing time “condensation.” Instead, fairy tale time is accelerated by lexical-semantic means. The slowed time in rap lyrics relies either on the redundancy of the syntactical pattern, provided by anaphora, repetitions, polysyndeton and enumerations, iconically reproducing the time extension, or on meaning implicatures and their corresponding violation of pragmatic maxims, foregrounded by enjambment, catachresis, aposiopesis and parenthetical phrases, semantically incoherent with the clause they must qualify. Instead, the time extension in a tale never relies on the inference of the deliberately implicated meanings and is expressed by formula and plot elements repetitions. In contrast to subsequent and monotemporal tale narratives, rap lyrics time is often marked by the violation of the temporal sequence, indicating psychological time, inherent in poetry in general.

“MI AYAM ORA KUDU ANA AYAME”: PEMAKAIAN BAHASA DALAM WACANA HUMOR BOCAH NGAPA(K) YA, PELANGGARAN PRINSIP KERJA SAMA, DAN RELASI HUMORNYA

In addition to serving as a medium of daily communication, the Banyumas dialect can also be used for entertainment, as seen in the television program Bocah Ngapa(k) Ya. This article seeks to identify linguistic quirks and pragmatic maxims that have the potential to be humorous. The data was collected from gathered information through the episode transcripts of the Bocah Ngapa(k) Ya video series, which were downloaded using YouTube Trans7 using the download-transcript-listen-record procedure from April to June 2019. The finding transcriptions were then described utilizing comparison, introspection, and pragmatic equivalent techniques. What linguistic components are crucial for producing the humour effect? How does the principle work? These are questions that the analysis is trying to address.

Honorifics without [hon

Honorifics are grammaticalized reflexes of politeness, often recruiting existing featural values (e.g. French recruits plural vous for polite address, and German, third person plural Sie). This paper aims to derive their cross-linguistic distribution and interpretation without [hon], an analytical feature present since Corbett (2000). The striking generalization that emerges from a cross-linguistic survey of 120 languages is that only certain featural values are ever recruited for honorification: plural, third person, and indefinite. I show that these values are precisely those which are semantically unmarked, or presuppositionless, allowing the speaker to consider an interlocutor’s negative face (Brown and Levinson 1978). I propose an alternative analysis based on the interaction between semantic markedness, an avoidance-based pragmatic maxim called the Taboo of Directness, and Maximize Presupposition! (Heim 1991) to derive honorific meaning.

The end of all things. Kant and Cohen on religion and reason

According to Kant’s concept of natural religion, the moral concept of God consists in the coordinated aggregate of the concepts of holiness, goodness and justice. I argue that this concept can be used to define a critical account of religion’s role within the public sphere. In order to do so, I refer to Hermann Cohen’s philosophy of religion. Cohen undertakes to explicate a concept of religion as progress toward the “dominion of the good on earth”, especially in relation to Kant’s ideas of natural religion and ethical community. It is inferred that Cohen’s difference between progress in religion and religious progress opens a path to a definition of religion as pre-institution (religion without religion). The goal is to make the concept of religion distinct in the tradition of critical philosophy and its logic. I argue that the emancipatory project of Kantian public reason presupposes a set of rules defining the translation from postulates (Kant’s rational theism) to problems and assignments. Since natural religion is a pure practical concept of reason, religions are subject to moral evaluation. The latter being guided by the pragmatic maxim of overcoming logical and moral egoism, means that any community, even many communities at once (different cultures) can occasionally represent an ethical community, if not in the sense that an ethical community is constituted.

An Overview of Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences

In Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences, I argue that Peirce was motivated to develop a normative science of ethics because of his growing concern with the corruption of science in the Gilded Age, and the recognition that the pragmatic maxim entailed an amoral instrumentalism. Rather than taking a Kantian approach to resolve the latter issue, he adopts an Aristotelian one, engaging in a search for an ultimate end that could order all other ends. What is right is what would be conducive to that end. As such he sees the necessity of a science of esthetics which would study such an end. However, rather than eudaimonia as the highest end, Peirce sees reasonableness as the summum bonum. Although barely sketched by Peirce, I argue that its principal sense is that of an ongoing process of self-correction away from error. In regard to this end, what is most important is the design of practices and the establishment of habits of conduct and sentiment most conducive to self-correction. For this reason, a proper community of inquiry with these features ought to be established, armed with the general methodology of science to assess the norms that guide the experiments of living together. Assurance that communities of inquiries are moving away from error and toward improvement is based on a convergence theory of truth.

The Application of the “Pragmatic Maxim” in Jewish Tradition: The Case of Rabbi Ḥayyim Hirschensohn

The Application of the “Pragmatic Maxim” in Jewish Tradition: The Case of Rabbi Ḥayyim Hirschensohn

Pragmatism Turned Inward: Notes on Voparil’s Reconstructing Pragmatism

Abstract: This article raises a series of doubts about Chris Voparil’s reading of Rorty, particularly the claim that what he calls “Rorty’s Pragmatic Maxim” represents what is at the heart of his philosophical vision. Those doubts are tied together with some scattered thoughts about how Voparil describes the affinities between Rorty and William James in chapter 2 of Reconstructing Pragmatism . Voparil is correct to claim that it is James, more than any other figure in the pragmatist tradition, who shares the most with Rorty in “basic philosophical orientation”. Yet I also argue that Voparil fails to correctly puts his finger on what that “basic philosophical orientation” really comes to, due in large part to an excessively political reading of James and Rorty that he relies on.

Towards a Doctrinal Pragmaticism: Charles S. Peirce and the Nature of Doctrine

Summary In this paper, I aim to retrieve insights from the philosophy of the polymath Charles Sanders Peirce, which he referred to as pragmaticism. What Peirce is perhaps best known as is being the father of pragmatism. In order to differentiate his project from other thinkers such as William James and John Dewey, who likewise referred to their projects as pragmatism, he renamed his pragmatism to pragmaticism.Peirce’s pragmaticism has much to offer theologians, especially concerning theological method. I demonstrate this claim by showing the usefulness of three of Peirce’s pragmaticist concepts. The first section of this paper briefly explicates the foundational concepts of pragmaticism, which are the pragmatic(ist) maxim, the semiotic nature of understanding, and fallibilism. The second section of this paper provides a sketch of the benefits these three concepts have for theological method.

Pragmatism, Peirce, and the Pandemic

Pragmatism, Peirce, and the Pandemic

The Point of Margolis’ Dissatisfaction with Peirce (and Pragmatism)

Abstract Margolis’ philosophical thought and career is framed by the pragmatism that dominated his early education and his vision of a “resurgent” pragmatism as the most promising direction for an increasingly eclectic Western philosophical tradition. This version of pragmatism is based on Peirce’s formulation of the pragmatic maxim, but Margolis sees the implications of that maxim as running counter to a central strand of Peirce’s own thought: fallibilism as an infinitist, self-correcting process of inquiry asymptotically tending toward to truth and reality. Margolis argues that this version of fallibilism is untenable and un-pragmatic, and his most mature work on the subject identifies an “abductive turn” in Peirce’s philosophy which points in the direction of an improved pragmatism, a pragmatism that is anarchic, relativistic, cast in terms of tolerances instead of laws, and without “Hope” in Peirce’s sense.

Peircean semiosis as the process for the making of meaning

Abstract One domain in which one would expect to find enlightenment concerning the nature of meaning is the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce and, in particular, the various versions of the pragmatic maxim that he refined over the years. For the maxim was, he claimed in a late text, really nothing more than a sort of protocol for determining the meaning of “hard words.” However, at the same time, Peirce saw the communication of meaning as a process that necessarily involved signs, thereby placing the onus of meaning-making within the scope of semiotics. The paper begins by examining the possible contributions to our understanding of the nature of meaning provided by Peirce’s pragmatism and the well-known ten-class classificatory system of 1903 derived from his theory of universal phenomenological categories. However, finding that both present structural limitations for such a study, the paper proceeds to develop the hexadic, 28-class sign-system of 1908 – based, in this case, on three modal universes of existence – and the process of semiosis in order to show how a neo-Peircean conception of semiosis enables the researcher not only to demonstrate the way meaning is communicated but also to hypothesize the way meaning is made through mediatization.

Understanding and teaching pragmatism: “by their fruits ye shall know”

It is not easy to explain what pragmatism is. Everybody who has had to teach pragmatism to university students has found herself or himself in a difficult situation trying to make a clear exposition. Moreover, it was not easy for Charles S. Peirce himself to explain in a simple manner the pragmatic maxim. In this contribution, I will not go into the technicalities of the pragmatic maxim, but I will share the fruits of my reflection of many years about how pragmatism can be more easily understood and taught. The article is arranged in two parts: the first one is dedicated to the old logical rule of the gospel, “By their fruits ye shall know”, which appears in two texts of Peirce; and the second one to what I call the “logic of the kitchen”, in which I will pay attention also to Peirce’s example of the apple pie. I will add a final consideration about how to teach philosophy today, according to Peirce.

Translating official documents from French to English in Uganda

AbstractAlthough underexplored in Africa, the translation of official documents presents a revelatory context for examining translation practice and theory. Through a sociolinguistic and pragmatic lens, this study explores how translating official documents by focusing on linguistic equivalences without taking into account national institutional systems can be misleading. The argument is made that sociolinguistic variables and Grice’s pragmatic maxims are essential in enhancing translation effectiveness. A sample of 151 pairs of source and target documents dating from 2011–2017 was purposively selected. This corpus from nineteen Francophone countries covers three broad categories: Education, Legal, and General Administrative Correspondence. Nineteen translators and fourteen end-users were also interviewed regarding the translation effectiveness of corpus examples. Data is analyzed using sociolinguistic and pragmatic criteria. Finally, the analysis is positioned within the broader scholarship on translation studies to demonstrate how this approach expands our knowledge regarding effective translation.

C. S. Peirce’s Forgotten but Enduring Relevance to Psychological Science

Abstract Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was one of the most polymathically brilliant scientific thinkers in American history. He was also arguably the first American experimental psychologist, strongly influencing some of the nation’s earliest modern psychology pioneers. Yet partly because of the lasting effects of personal scandals and powerful enemies, he has been almost entirely forgotten by the broader field of psychology. This article aims to briefly reintroduce Peirce as a historically important figure in psychology to a general audience and highlight a few ways in which his trailblazing perspectives point to pervasive deficiencies and opportunities in psychological science. First, his pioneering writings on the economy of research call on us to consider how diminishing returns may plague our research programs, potentially leading to waste of time, money, and intellectual labor in our communities of inquiry. Second, his pragmatic maxim of clarity for intellectual constructs provides a compelling framework in which to understand how jingle and jangle fallacies often undercut the cumulativeness of our field. We contend that Peirce’s work, much of it still unpublished, is a rich resource for psychological scientists across many domains.