Context: Radical constructivism claims that we have no final truth criteria for establishing one ontology over another. This leaves us with the question of how we can come to know anything in a viable manner. According to von Glasersfeld, radical constructivism is a theory of knowledge rather than a philosophy of the world in itself because we do not have access to a human-independent world. He considers knowledge as the ordering of experience to cope with situations in a satisfactory way. (...) Problem: Von Foerster and Krippendorff show that the central goal of a constructivist theory of knowing must be to find a way of putting the knower into a known that is constructed so as to keep the knower, as well as the knowing process, viable in practice. Method: The conceptual and philosophical analysis of present theories and their necessary prerequisites suggests that such foundation for viable knowing can be built on the analysis of what the ontological prerequisites are for establishing viable observing, cognition, communication and observer-communicators, and communication media and vehicles. Results: The moment an observer chooses to accept his/her own embodied conscious presence in this world as well as language, he/she must accept other humans as partly independently existing conversation partners; if knowledge and knowing has to make sense, he/she must also accept as prerequisites for our observation and conversation a pre-linguistic reality from which our bodies come and which our conversation is often about. Furthermore, we can no longer claim that there is a reality that we do not know anything about: From being here in conversation, we know that the world can produce more or less stable embodied consciousnesses that can exchange and construct conceptual meanings through embodied conversations and actions that last over time and exist in space-time and mind, and are correlated to our embodied practices. We can also see that our communication works through signs for all living systems as well as in human language, understood as a structured and progressively developed system of communication. The prerequisite for this social semiotic production of meaning is the fourfold “semiotic star of cybersemiotics,” which includes at least four different worlds: our bodies, the combination of society, culture and language, our consciousness, and also an outer nature. Implications: The semiotic star in cybersemiotics claims that the internal subjective, the intersubjective linguistic, our living bodies, and nature are irreducible and equally necessary as epistemological prerequisites for knowing. The viable reality of any of them cannot be denied without self-refuting paradoxes. There is an obvious connectedness between the four worlds, which Peirce called “synechism.” It also points to Peirce’s conclusion that logic and rationality are part of the process of semiosis, and that meaning in the form of semiosis is a fundamental aspect of reality, not just a construction in our heads. Erratum: The paper erroneously refers to “pleroma.” The correct term is “plemora.” . (shrink)

The author examines Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion to discover a variant of the usual teleological argument that abandons reliance on analogical reasoning. This second version, never refuted in the Dialogues, is termed "pragmaticist" in Peirce's sense. It relies on an abductive hypothesis that claims not logical proof but the power of instinctual conviction. The Dialogues' espousal of sound common sense may then be viewed as an imperfectly articulated precursor of Peirce's pragmaticist argument for the reality rather than the existence (...) of God. (shrink)

SummaryIn 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 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. (shrink)

Despite some surface similarities, Charles Peirce’s philosophy of mathematics, pragmaticism, is incompatible with both mathematical structuralism and fictionalism. Pragmaticism has to do with experimentation and observation concerning the forms of relations in diagrammatic and iconic representations ofmathematical entities. It does not presuppose mathematical foundations although it has these representations as its objects of study. But these objects do have a reality which structuralism and fictionalism deny.

The history of pragmatism is still to be written. At many points throughout we lack even the prerequisite of history, a firm chronology. As a specimen, I offer a chronology for a short span of the history of Peirce’s pragmaticism. I begin with 1865, when Peirce is twenty-five, a scientist in the employ of the United States Coast Survey, married, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when he has been for perhaps nine years a student of Kant and is already (...) well along in those “successive steps” by which, from being a “pure Kantist,” he is being “forced … into Pragmaticism.” The method I follow is to base the chronology at each point on dated documentary evidence of the year, month, or day in question. I do, however, make subsidiary use, but only within square brackets, of documents of later date, or without date. My own inferences, conjectures and comments are also bracketed. (shrink)

The history of pragmatism is still to be written. At many points throughout we lack even the prerequisite of history, a firm chronology. As a specimen, I offer a chronology for a short span of the history of Peirce’s pragmaticism. I begin with 1865, when Peirce is twenty-five, a scientist in the employ of the United States Coast Survey, married, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when he has been for perhaps nine years a student of Kant and is already (...) well along in those “successive steps” by which, from being a “pure Kantist,” he is being “forced … into Pragmaticism.” The method I follow is to base the chronology at each point on dated documentary evidence of the year, month, or day in question. I do, however, make subsidiary use, but only within square brackets, of documents of later date, or without date. My own inferences, conjectures and comments are also bracketed. (shrink)

There are significant differences between the neopragmatism as formulated by Rorty, based on James’ and Dewey’s pragmatism, and what Peirce, in order to distinguish his own approach from the last two thinkers, called pragmaticism. I take in this paper the concept of solidarity as a focus, from which those differences will be implied, albeit many other points could be chosen. I highlight that the usual Rorty’s sentence beginning with ‘we pragmatists…’ shall necessarily exclude Peirce. Exemplarily, I could mention the (...) concepts of representation, which for Peirce has nothing to do with mirror, and of truth that, for him, also has no relation at all with fixed essences. Those differences will not only mark a very clear border between the two concepts of pragmatism, but also will question how the idea of community can be supported only by dialogical agreements, without the anchor of common open human experience. Pragmaticism and neopragmatism differ not only regarding their specific range of philosophical problems but, moreover, on what kind of problems they really consider as genuinely philosophical. (shrink)

When pragmatics was established as a new subdiscipline in linguistics in the 1960s and 1970s, pragmaticists referred to Peirce as one of their ancestors. Since then, Peirce has remained in the collective memory of pragmatics, and is cited now and then—but not more. As a matter of fact, his ideas on natural language and communication have hardly been scrutinized, let alone applied, and wrongly so. This paper shows that the later Peirce sketched a theory of natural language and communication, which (...) offers a new perspective on the heavily debated Semantics-Pragmatics-Interface. Peirce was a contextualist. But he did not refrain from developing a formal method to analyze the meaning of sentences uttered. Standing between radical pragmaticists on one side and formalists on the other, Peirce furnishes us with nothing less than an architect’s plan to bridge the two approaches, and to look for new ways to analyze the phenomenon of meaning in language. (shrink)

Peirce thought of himself as an “objective idealist;” and in 1892 he called his philosophy a “Schelling-fashioned idealism.” But this claim of his is one of several fundamental assertions that he made about his work which has not been well or widely understood. The prevailing attitude of the Pragmatists as a school, toward speculative idealism, was set by Dewey, for whom pragmatism was an escape route. So, although Peirce’s position in the great medieval battle about the reality of universals has (...) been studied and appreciated, the work done on his relation to German idealism still tends to place him in the critical tradition of Kant and his own father, rather than in the speculative tradition of Schelling’s Identity Theory and of Hegel’s Logic. (shrink)

Peirce thought of himself as an “objective idealist;” and in 1892 he called his philosophy a “Schelling-fashioned idealism.” But this claim of his is one of several fundamental assertions that he made about his work which has not been well or widely understood. The prevailing attitude of the Pragmatists as a school, toward speculative idealism, was set by Dewey, for whom pragmatism was an escape route. So, although Peirce’s position in the great medieval battle about the reality of universals has (...) been studied and appreciated, the work done on his relation to German idealism still tends to place him in the critical tradition of Kant and his own father, rather than in the speculative tradition of Schelling’s Identity Theory and of Hegel’s Logic. (shrink)

E. San Juan Jr. examines Peirce’s discourses on semiotics, ethics, and aesthetics and suggests their analogies with the radical critiques of Marx and other progressive trends.

For many years, Charles Peirce maintained that all senses of the modal terms "possible" and "necessary" can be defined in terms of "states of information." But in 1896, he was motivated by his work in set theory to criticize that account of modality, and in 1905 he characterized that criticism as a return "to the Aristotelian doctrine of a real possibility ... the great step that was needed to render pragmaticism an intelligible doctrine." But since Peirce was a realist (...) about modality before 1896, and since he continued defining "possibility" in terms of "states of information" after that date, it is not clear exactly what he changed his mind about. In this essay I explain what it was that Peirce changed his mind about and why, in retrospect, he viewed that change as a decisive step in the development of pragmaticism. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce Society 2016 Presidential Address Peirce never could finalize a book or publish it and especially no book on the aesthetic basis of pragmaticism. This is not only a historical note, but has a deeper meaning. It arouses in the attentive reader a strong desire to do what Peirce himself did not have the chance to do: to find a way of linking together his hints and clues in such a way that respects the spirit of his (...) work and not just its letter. This practice of apprehending the spirit is successful, I believe, when, on the one hand, we familiarize ourselves with the author’s text and, on the other, perhaps more importantly, when we initiate this apprehension because the text arouses a feeling of... (shrink)

Reflecting a revival of Peirce studies and the rediscovery of the pragmatist tradition in American philosophical thinking, this study articulates a contemporary and relevant interpretation that may offer a challenge to neo-pragmatists.

Charles Sanders Peirce has been characterized as the greatest American philosophic genius. He is the creator of pragmatism and one of the founders of modern logic. James, Royce, Schroder, and Dewey have acknowledged their great indebtedness to him. A laboratory scientist, he made notable contributions to geodesy, astronomy, psychology, induction, probability, and scientific method. He introduced into modern philosophy the doctrine of scholastic realism, developed the concepts of chance, continuity, and objective law, and showed the philosophical significance of the theory (...) of signs and mathematical logic. The present series is the first published edition of his systematic works. (shrink)

We show how Peirce's architectonics folds on itself and finds local consequences that correspond to the major global hypotheses of the system. In particular, we study how the pragmaticist maxim can be technically represented in Peirce's existential graphs, well-suited to reveal an underlying continuity in logical operations, and can provide suggestive philosophical analogies. Further, using the existential graphs, we formalize — and prove one direction of — a “local proof of pragmaticism,” trying thus to explain the prominent place that (...) existential graphs can play in the architectonics of pragmaticism, as Peirce persistently advocated. Finally, we present a web of “continuous iterations” of some key Peircean concepts that supports a “lattice of partial proofs” of pragmaticism. (shrink)

Since 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. (shrink)

How scholastic realism met the scientific method.

Peirce believed that his pragmaticism can be conclusively proven. Beginning in 1903, he drafted several attempts, ending by 1908 with a semeiotic proof. Around 1905, he exposes the proof using the theory of Existential Graphs . This paper modernizes the semantics Peirce proposed for EGs in terms of game-theoretic semantics . Peirce's 1905 proof is then reconstructed in three parts, by relating pragmaticism to the GTS conception of meaning, showing that Peirce's proof is an argument for a relational (...) structure of the meaning of intellectual signs that our interpretative and strategic practices give rise to, and bringing out the key links between EGs and pragmaticism. (shrink)

A semiótica ontológica de Peirce retomou o sentido de práxis racional de Aristóteles em seu sentido compartilhado da função de mediação do Interpretante lógico. O artigo está dividido em três partes. A primeira delineia a conceitualização de Ivo Assad Ibri da semiose de Peirce com relação à diferença entre o Interpretante emocional e o lógico, em especial com relação ao primeiro nos modos “degenerados” de fixação de crença e conduta; a segunda parte explica a conceitualização inicial de Peirce daquela doutrina (...) em seu tratamento do “Homem-signo” em “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” ; a terceira parte apresenta a Ética a Nicômaco de Aristóteles como a origem clássica da trajetória principal da semiose de Peirce, ao correlacionar o conceito de teleologia de desenvolvimento de Peirce com o conceito paralelo de caráter disposicional ativo de Aristóteles energizado pela média ética como o interpretante pragmatista da conduta. (shrink)

This study examines C.S. Peirce's repeated remarks between 1904 and 1909 characterizing Spinoza as a precursor pragmatist.

This reconsideration of Hume’s classic essay “Of Miracles” via the lens of American pragmatist ways of thinking about history and power shifts our attention from Hume’s epistemic concerns about the legitimacy of witnesses and testimony to his distaste for sacred history, his critical stance regarding the social force of revelation, and his disdain for religious authority. To view Hume’s essay both as an articulation of a critical philosophy of history and as an exercise in moral dynamism (social power or, authority, (...) is a result of epistemic transactions), is to intervene in both Hume studies and Contemporary Pragmatism. (shrink)

This book is a collection of pragmatist inquiries into the epistemology of artistic creation and evaluation of artworks. It offers a new concept of aesthetics and beauty of artworks. Aesthetics is the mode of artistic representation of reality, and artworks are beautiful when proven aesthetic true representations of reality.