Pragmatic Maxim Research Articles

Zhuangzi, Peirce, and the butterfly dreamscape: concentric meaning in the Qiwulun 齊物論

AbstractWaking from a vivid dream, the sage finds himself lost between worlds of possibility and ultimately transformed. Zhuangzi’s famous butterfly story may seem familiar, but the text-linguistic structures of its broader interpretive context are little discussed and poorly understood. In this paper I argue that theQíwùlùn齊物論 chapter, like so many other ancient writings, is composed in a concentric, chiastic pattern, with sections in each half mirroring each other throughout, while the central sections provide a pivotal peak and interpretive key that radiate meaning back out to the margins. To quote Mary Douglas, “the meaning is in the middle.” The middle is also the place of Peircean Thirdness. In this paper I map the chapter’s text-level chiastic structures and trace its intimations of Peircean semiotic pragmatism. The core rings of the text endorse contrite fallibilism while also prefiguring triadic structure, the pragmatic maxim, and the continuity thesis. Referencing cultural and historical contexts plus recent scholarship on Zhuangzi and Peirce, I ultimately argue that this ancient text, like the pragmatist semiotic it foreshadows, can be better appreciated and applied by embracing the interplay of centers and margins, discarding debilitating ideologies, and waking up to new degrees of freedom.

Opening up is not showing up: human volition after the pandemic

A global pandemic on the scale of Covid-19 upsets all standard decision protocols. Pressure from politicians to "open up" the economy presumes that individuals grant credible trust to politicians and merchants eager to recover customers. The asymmetric concern for safety compounds normal heuristics. The Peircean pragmatic maxim reminds us that it is the perceived effects of a post-pandemic society and economy that will drive human volition in the aftermath of Covid-19. Opening up does not equal showing up.

The Nexus between Igbo Traditional Belief System and Masquerade Act: A Pragmatic Analysis

This paper explores the proposition that the traditional belief-system and masquerade act of the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria is a demonstration of Charles Peirce’s pragmatism. Pragmatism’s central theme is that only practice or action can validate the veracity or meaningfulness of any thought or concept. In like manner, masquerade act or practice in Igbo land is, in many respects, a manifestation of the traditional belief system of the Igbo (also known as Ndi-Igbo). In other words, masquerade act in Igbo land correlates with and validates a key concept communally shared by Ndi-Igbo, thus fulfilling the ultimate goal of Peirce’s pragmatism and the pragmatic maxim, namely, that the actual or potential consequence of a concept is the only true proof or validity of that concept.

Hegel, Peirce and us

Historically, our theme is situated within the triangle of three of Kant's students: Hegel (1770-1831), Bolzano (1781-1848) and Peirce (1839-1914). All three wanted to change Kant's strict separation of philosophy and science by developing a new conception of logic. Bolzano inaugurated the so-called linguistic turn of philosophy which became the guiding principle of all analytical philosophy (Dummett, 2014) and he opposed Hegel’s unity of concept and object of knowledge. Charles Peirce took a middle position, a position that is expressed in his so-called Pragmatic Maxim (Peirce, CP 5.3). Taken together we might say that a universal principle of complementarity of meaning and reference, or of meaning and information (in the sense of Shannon) finds its origin in Post-Kantian philosophy. We encounter here the very same approach of principled thinking endorsed by Einstein in physics (special theory of relativity) or by the formal axiomatic approach in mathematics (Hilbert)! Key Words: Bolzano, Hegel, Peirce; Complementarity of sense and reference; Geometry from Euclid to Einstein; Hilbert.

Expertise that matters. On Dewey’s understanding of relevant science

Expertise is much contested in modern democracies. In this article I shall investigate whether Dewey’s understanding of science and expertise provides us with some answers about the interplay between science, the public and society. Decisive for Dewey’s vision of the relation of democracy and science is that epistemic qualities and what he calls “organized intelligence” should contribute to find the best solutions for human wellbeing and growth. Science and expertise that can live up to this purpose are relevant from a pragmatic viewpoint. I shall suggest a reading of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim as a test for relevance that can be used to conceptualize a pragmatic version of science and expertise in the public interest.

The Nexus between Igbo Traditional Belief System and Masquerade Act: A Pragmatic Analysis

This paper explores the proposition that the traditional belief-system and masquerade act of the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria is a demonstration of Charles Peirce’s pragmatism. Pragmatism’s central theme is that only practice or action can validate the veracity or meaningfulness of any thought or con-cept. In like manner, masquerade act or practice in Igbo land is, in many re-spects, a manifestation of the traditional belief system of the Igbo (also known as Ndi-Igbo). In other words, masquerade act in Igbo land correlates with and validates a key concept communally shared by Ndi-Igbo, thus fulfilling the ul-timate goal of Peirce’s pragmatism and the pragmatic maxim, namely, that the actual or potential consequence of a concept is the only true proof or va-lidity of that concept.

Peirce’s Convergence Theory of Truth Redux

A teoria convergente da verdade de Peirce é uma abordagem intuitiva e razoável da verdade. No seu sentido mais geral, vincula a verdade aos resultados da investigação. De acordo com a máxima pragmática, Peirce percebeu que as consequências práticas de afirmações verdadeiras são de trazer investigações à fruição e resolver opinião. No entanto, a teoria da verdade de Peirce é muitas vezes difamada e mal-entendida. Argumenta-se, aqui, que uma vez que se entende que a teoria convergente é uma inferência e generalização oriunda do notável teorema matemático conhecido como a Lei dos Grandes Números, e como esse teorema fornece certeza matemática à indução como o cerne do método científico, muitos dos problemas desaparecem. Parte do mal-entendido também se deve ao fato que Peirce tinha três sentidos distintos de convergência, os quais muitos comentadores confundem ou interpretam erroneamente. Com esse entendimento, será mostrado que ao contrário das análises de Cheryl Misak e Christopher Hookway, Peirce argumenta que investigação persistente por bons métodos não é apenas um ideal regulador para atingir a verdade – uma esperança intelectual – mas uma possibilidade comprovada matematicamente que já resultou em verdades estabelecidas.

Form vs Power: Pragmatism and the wave of Spinozism

Eu inicio por introduzir algumas citações que Peirce faz sobre Espinosa. Poucos, mas importantes comentários, sugerem que uma nova consideração da “essência” filosófica pode emergir dessa análise. Conforme lemos na Ética de Espinosa, essência (ou significado, em termos contemporâneos) não deve ser considerado como forma pura; tampouco é uma qualificação definida com designações rígidas. Significado é potência: em termos pragmáticos, como buscarei demonstrar, o poder de estar pronto para agir, expandindo a própria disposição para responder, encarnando dado hábito de modo eficaz. Assim, não procede que o significado é, de modo acabado e de uma vez por todas. Antes, este se faz na medida em que é capaz de produzir novos efeitos. Como disse Espinosa, é uma potentia agendium conatusinexaurível que sempre produz uma prontidão para perseverar na ação. Conceitos são mensuráveis à luz de seus resultados: expandem seus efeitos como uma floresta, ou onda, sem uma fronteira ou limite claros. Nossa concepção desses efeitos é o todo de nossa concepção do objeto, diz a máxima pragmática. Significado implica um vasto oceano de consequências inesperadas, Peirce escreve (CP 8.176). Em termos espinosistas: ninguém sabe até onde chega o poder da mente – ou do corpo. Lançarei mão de algumas sugestões de Giorgio Agamben e Gilles Deleuze a este respeito, construindo sobre eles para abordar a ética de Espinosa em termos pragmáticos e o pragmatismo numa forma espinosista.

Toward a pragmatic clarification of materiality and animacy: the materials of life and the life of those materials

A materialidade, ou o que alguns teóricos preferem identificar como materiais, vem sendo cada vez mais assunto de discussão e investigação. Embora esses autores sejam muito cuidadosos em especificar o que querem dizer com tais termos, o assunto exige maior esclarecimento do que recebera até agora. Isso faz com que seja um candidato ideal para o tríplice-escalonado esclarecimento proposto por C. S. Peirce em “Como tornar nossas ideias claras” e que daí em diante foi utilizado por ele para, diante do propósito em questão, tornar adequadamente claras suas próprias ideias. Assim como considerava inatingível a certeza absoluta, ele julgava também a clareza absoluta estar fora de alcance. Mesmo assim, ele ofereceu sua máxima pragmática como o nível mais alto de esclarecimento conceitual. Para inúmeros fins, aderir a essa máxima nos permite esclarecer nossas ideias de forma adequada. Embora ele seja enfático em sublinhar as limitações de definições abstratas (o segundo ou nível intermediário de clareza), ele aprecia o valor de tais definições, das quais são na maior parte do tempo definições verbais (pois, em definições abstratas, trata-se de traduzir uma palavra ou expressão em outras palavras). Se tomarmos as práticas bem-sucedidas do investigador experimental, porém, subitamente vemos a necessidade de traduzir nossas palavras não em outras palavras, mas sim, em hábitos de ação. Além do mais, o primeiro nível de clareza (aquele de familiaridade tácita) é muitas vezes menosprezado ou ignorado. Este grau de clareza é, no entanto, de uma importância muito maior do que lhe é atribuído pelos comentadores, e por vezes, pelo próprio Peirce. Este artigo, portanto, é uma busca de esclarecer o significado de materialidade e termos cognatos, usando as sugestões de Peirce para cumprir esta tarefa. Destaca-se a necessidade de esclarecimento pragmático, sem denegrir, porém, o valor de familiaridade tácita ou definições abstratas. Espero mostrar, de uma só vez, a força das sugestões metodológicas de Peirce e o significado de alguns termos elusivos.

Assessing the Influence of Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics in Student Interpretation of Multiply Quantified Statements in Mathematics

This study compares the relative influence of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in university students’ interpretation of multiply quantified statements in mathematics, both before and after instruction. Like previous studies, results show that semantics plays a heavy role in student interpretation, especially before instruction. Unlike previous studies, our data suggests that the patterns of student interpretation rely more upon the mathematical context than upon the order of the quantifiers. We operationalize two of Grice’s (1975) pragmatic Maxims to evaluate whether they help explain which interpretations are harder for students to adopt for various statements. Our data support the claim that students find it easier to construct relevant interpretations, but do not support the claim that students find it easier to construct interpretations that render the statement true. Finally, based on our sample from six Transition to Proof classes across the US, we observe that after their experiences in such courses students became more sensitive to syntax in their interpretation of the statements.

Two Concepts of Experience: Singular and General

The purpose of the article is to make a distinction between two concepts of experience, singular and general. They track two ways in which we connect experientially to the world. The former is captured by the idea of “having an experience”; the latter is captured instead by the idea of “having experience”. Classical and contemporary pragmatists contribute to this distinction, and the article explores some of their views. Finally the article indicates some consequences of the distinction. In fact, in the spirit of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, those consequences are the very meaning of the conceptual distinction at stake, since they point out how we inferentially treat in different ways the fact of having an experience and the fact of having experience.

Peirce’s Pragmatic Maxim as a Logical Consequence of Semiotic Idealism.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the pragmatic maxim can be construed as a logical consequence of semiotic idealism. Peirce proposed his semiotic idealism in the 1860s and based it on two premises: first, that we could know only symbols and, second, that the only things that exist are those that could be known. From these premises, he concluded that only symbols exist. This conception was meant to refute the distinction between the substance and its phenomenal manifestations. If semiotic idealism implies the pragmatic maxim, then it becomes clear why the pragmatic maxim says that the conception of the effects of the object is the conception of the object: it is because Peirce thought that the effects are the object. Furthermore, the close link between these conceptions may account for Peirce’s prolonged silence about pragmatism.

Scalar and Ignorance Inferences Are Both Computed Immediately upon Encountering the Sentential Connective: The Online Processing of Sentences with Disjunction Using the Visual World Paradigm.

Accounts based on the pragmatic maxim of quantity make different predictions about the computation of scalar versus ignorance inferences. These different predictions are evaluated in two eye-tracking experiments using a visual world paradigm to assess the on-line computation of inferences. The test sentences contained disjunction phrases, which engender both kinds of inferences. The first experiment documented that both inferences are computed immediately upon encountering the disjunctive connective, at nearly identical temporal locations. The second experiment was designed to determine whether or not there exists an intermediate stage at which the truth of the corresponding conjunction phrase is ignored. No such stage was found.

The Pragmatic Maxim and Four Classical Pragmatists

The Pragmatic Maxim and Four Classical Pragmatists

Kidnapping an ugly child: is William James a pragmaticist?

ABSTRACTSince the term ‘pragmatism’ was first coined, there have been debates about who is or is not a ‘real’ pragmatist, and what that might mean. The division most often drawn in contemporary pragmatist scholarship is between William James and Charles Peirce. Peirce is said to present a version of pragmatism which is scientific, logical and objective about truth, whereas James presents a version which is nominalistic, subjectivistic and leads to relativism. The first person to set out this division was in fact Peirce himself, when he distinguished his own ‘pragmaticism’ from the broad pragmatism of James and others. Peirce sets out six criteria which defines ‘pragmaticism’: the pragmatic maxim; a number of ‘preliminary propositions’; prope-positivism; metaphysical inquiry; critical common-sensism; and scholastic realism. This paper sets out to argue that in fact James meets each of these criteria, and should be seen as a ‘pragmaticist’ by Peirce’s own lights.

Pragmatic Maxims and Presumptions in Legal Interpretation

The fields of linguistic pragmatics and legal interpretation are deeply interrelated. The purpose of this paper is to show how pragmatics and the developments in argumentation theory can contribute to the debate on legal interpretation. The relation between the pragmatic maxims and the presumptions underlying the legal canons are brought to light, unveiling the principles that underlie the types of argument usually used to justify a construction. The Gricean maxims and the arguments of legal interpretation are regarded as presumptions subject to default used to justify an interpretation. This approach can allow one to trace the different legal interpretive arguments back to their basic underlying presumptions, so that they can be compared, ordered, and assessed according to their defeasibility conditions. This approach allows one to understand the difference between various types of interpretive canons, and their strength in justifying an interpretation.

The Inherent Empirical Underdetermination of Mental Causation

ABSTRACTIt has become a popular view among non-reductive physicalists that it is possible to devise empirical tests generating evidence for the causal efficacy of the mental, whereby the exclusion worries that have haunted the position of non-reductive physicalism for decades can be dissolved once and for all. This paper aims to show that these evidentialist hopes are vain. I argue that, if the mental is taken to supervene non-reductively on the physical, there cannot exist empirical evidence for its causal efficacy. While causal structures without non-reductive supervenience relations can be conclusively identified in ideal discovery circumstances, it is impossible, in principle, to generate evidence that would favour models with mental causation over models without. Ascribing causal efficacy to the mental, for the non-reductive physicalist, is a modelling choice that must be made on the basis of metaphysical background theories or pragmatic maxims guiding the selection among empirically indistinguishable models.

On the Wording of Images and Dispersion: Poe’s Breathing Method. A Canvas and Dialectic of Flowing Waters Within

This essay, not an evaluative but a descriptive, inspecting and interpreting one, intends to theorize about the cognitive hallmarks within Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional universe of nemesis, rhetorical grotesque semantics, foregrounded and highlighted macabre philosophical vestiges, both in terms of the constants and prisms playing a fundamental role in his encoding creative process depicting reality –context of utterance– and productively transforming it into an abiding and refuge-like paradise of the ineffable –context of reference–, as well as on the significant choices and pragmatic maxims involved in his gradual and methodic regression into madness as a purely literary and individual quest for the Sublime. The lines that follow are also impelled, as a second articulation of our proposition, to provide the reader with some of the most prominent and notorious features in Poe’s prose and poetry: his patterns of impact and scars of defamiliarization, his peculiar and obsessive delineation of sequenced states heading for the last glimpse of unity after self-annihilation, the disciplined wording or orchestration of microeffects towards the knowledge of the Absolute, aiming to establish a parallelism between the different seasons covering the envisioning of the innerly maturing self and the explicit pattern of dawning colours that founds the definition of the erotically desirable, the mannequin of the supernal or macroeffect of everlasting existence categorized by inner metaphors and intrinsically artistic inventions.

Do Normative Predictions Make Sense? Pragmatism and Ethics in Calderoni

The work deals with the applicability of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim to normative concepts, defining them in terms of predictions. The starting point is the work of Mario Calderoni (1879-1914), an Italian pragmatist who tried to apply pragmatism to ethical and legal issues. The conclusion of the paper is that it does not make sense to make normative predictions with a definitional purpose, that is, for the purpose of defining a normative concept, although it does make sense for cognitive ends, that is, for the purpose of knowing what will (probably) happen following the application or misapplication of certain norms.

Viejo y nuevo pragmatismo

<p class='p1'>C.S. Peirce, fundador del pragmatismo, propuso una filosofía científica reformada que se rige por la máxima pragmática, que asocia el significado de un concepto con sus consecuencias experienciales. Sin embargo, con el tiempo, el pragmatismo evolucionó: de la articulación lógica, idealista-realista de Peirce, pasó por el pragmatismo más psicológico y nominalista de James, hasta llegar en nuestros días a Richard Rorty, quien propone, en nombre del pragmatismo, que el territorio metafísico y epistemológico que forma el centro tradicional de la filosofía se abandone, y que la filosofía se convierta en un género de literatura; mientras que, en el otro extremo, filósofos científicos como Paul Churchland y Stephen Stich también se describen así mismos como pragmatistas. Revisando la historia del pragmatismo desde Pierce y James, pasando por Dewey, Mead y Schiller hasta nuestros días, este artículo detalla la transmutación del viejo pragmatismo en el nuevo.</p>