Stjernfelt - Truth, Icons, and Reality in Peirce

Peirceana

Volume

ISBN 9783110793581

e-ISBN (PDF) 9783110793628

e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783110793673

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

The present collection of s up to 2022, the majority of them from the latter parts of the period.

They are the result of a continuous interest in Charles Peirce's logic, semiotics, and philosophy, earlier finding expression in books such as Diagrammatology (2007) and Natural Propositions (2014), insisting upon the investigation of the fecundity of Peirce's notions of diagram and dicisign. Those central concepts have played an undervalued role in much Peirce scholarship and in the plethora of applied versions of Peirce's semiotics.

The papers in the present volume continue that quest. That task is double, for not only does it require detailed investigation and reconstruction of Peirce's central argumentsbut it also requires charting the possible present actuality and fertility of those results. This also finds expression in the importance of understanding not only the depth of Peirce's investigations, but also the breadth of his conceptions: in which empirically appearing sign types and complexes do his ideal, theoretical conceptions find expression?

Doing so continues a certain double strategy present in Peirce's own mode of thinkingwhat could be called his a priori-a posteriori methodology. After, as a young man being extremely skeptical against a priori reasoning, e.g., in the 18771878 definitions of pragmatism, the mature Peirce increasingly realizes that his own philosophical architectonic, his philosophy of logic, his semiotics, his philosophy of science, actually do constitute a priori theories. Still, Peirce now insists that such theoretical predictions should not be accepted immediately at face value, but should be constantly checked against reality, true to his insistence on the constant collaboration of ab-, de-, and induction in the research process.

As to his semiotics in particular, it is crucial to scrutinize which kinds of actual sign token utterances realize which theoretically predefined sign types. Much too many interpreters remain content with citing and interpreting a selection of Peirce's general, theoretical definitions without going into detail regarding which empirical phenomena they really cover. Thus, the proper understanding and development of Peirce's ambitious logic-as-semiotics project requires the ongoing interplay between his ever-sharpening and proliferating conceptual definitions on the one hand, and the empirical semiotic phenomena they cover, on the other. In 1896, arguably the beginning year of Peirce's large mature philosophical explosion peaking in 1903, Peirce explicitly stated this doctrine in his first review of his German disciple Ernst Schrder, when defining the triad of icon-index-symbol as so many different aspects of an assertion: In such analysis of assertions there are two kinds of reasoning which we have to employ, he emphasizes, one of the two is rhetorical, a term Peirce here takes from Schrder while remarking upon how the latter is a bit condescending about it because of its undeniable formal imperfection (That Categorical and Hypothetical Propositions are one in Essence, 1896, SWS, 58). It refers to inducting, generalizing, and abstracting from below the knowledge of the structure of assertions based on empirical observation of signs in the wild. Peirce defends this inductive stance: Now to me this very imperfection marks the reasoning as being drawn direct from those observational sources from whence all true reasoning must be drawn; and I have often remarked in the history of philosophy, that the reasonings which were somewhat dark and formally imperfect, often went the deepest (SWS, 58). Such inductive results, however, are not in themselves sufficient but must be organized by means of a theoretically developed conceptual apparatus:

The other kind of reasoning which I employ in the analyses of assertion consists in deducing what the constituents of assertion must be from the theory, which I accept, that truth consists in the definitive compulsion of the investigating intelligence. This is systematical; but it is only half a method. For the deductions, or quasi-predictions, from theory having been made, it is requisite to turn to the rhetorical evidence and see whether or not they are verified by observation. If we find them to do so, not only does the analyses of assertion gain evidence of being completely rounded, but the theory of truth is rendered more probable (SWS, 59).

Here, Peirce goes on to deduce the classic triad of indices, icons, and symbols as aspects of assertions, in each step comparing, at length, his theoretically deduced findings with a host of very different empirical examples of such signs. Particularly, this effort strives to get as comprehensive a view as possible of the variety of signs in the wild actually incarnating the theoretical predictions. Thereby, Peirce goes against the logical tradition of erecting a linguistic standard norm for logical analysis of propositions built on Latin and other Indo-European grammars, as he underlines. Here, Peirce's scope of examples goes to show that the too swift assumption of such canonical forms overlooks a large number of empirically found signs satisfying his theoretical predictions.

Six years later, after having considerably developed his sign theory to the famous three-trichotomies-ten-signs calculus during his work on the 1903 Syllabus, he sums up the a prioria posteriori method in the final version of that seminal paper, the Nomenclature of Triadic Divisions:

The principles and analogies of Phenomenology enable us to describe, in a distant way, what the divisions of triadic relations must be. But until we have met with the different kinds a posteriori, and have in that way been led to recognize their importance, the a priori descriptions mean little; not nothing at all, but little. Even after we seem to identify the varieties called for a priori with varieties which the experience of reflexion leads us to think important, no slight labour is required to make sure that the divisions we have found a posteriori are precisely those that have been predicted a priori. In most cases, we find that they are not precisely identical, owing to the narrowness of our reflexional experience. It is only after much further arduous analysis that we are able finally to place in the system the conceptions to which experience has led us. In the case of triadic relations, no part of this work has, as yet, been satisfactorily performed, except in some measure for the most important class of triadic relations, those of signs, or representamens, to their objects and interpretants (1903, EP II, 289; CP 2.233).

This arduous task is the reason behind the interest of the present author to analyze examples from mathematics, logic, linguistics, biosemiotics, poetry, arts, and more. Such examples transgress the limit of this volume, but I hope the constant interest of exemplifying is palpable also in the present selection of primarily theoretical papers.

The different original contexts and datings of the papers of this book imply that the Peircean reflections are presented to different degrees of depth and explicitness. This also implies that the reader must be ready to accept certain redundancies or repetitions. Maybe this also holds an advantage. In any case, Peirce claimed that A book that goes to the bottom of an abstruse and complicated subject in such a manner that it can with profit be currently read ought to contain repetitions (