Semiosis and pragmatism: toward a dynamic concept of meaning

Philosophers and social scientists of diverse orientations have suggested that the pragmatics of semiosis is germane to a dynamic account of meaning as process. Semiosis, the central focus of C. S. Peirce's pragmatic philosophy, may hold a key to perennial problems regarding meaning. Indeed, Peirce's thought should be deemed seminal when placed within the cognitive sciences, especially with respect to his concept of the sign. According to Peirce's pragmatic model, semiosis is a triadic, time-bound, context-sensitive, interpreter-dependent, materially extended dynamic process. Semiosis involves inter-relatedness and inter-action between signs, their objects, acts and events in the world, and the semiotic agents who are in the process of making and taking them

Resemblance: From a complementarity point of view?

Three premises set the stage for a Peirce based notion of resemblance, which, as Firstness, cannot be more than vaguely distinguished from Secondness and Thirdness. Inclusion of Firstness with, and within, Secondness and Thirdness, calls for a nonbivalent, nonlinear, context dependent mode of thinking characteristic of semiosis — that is, the process by which everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming — and at the same time it includes linear, bivalent classical logic as a subset. Certain aspects of the Dao, Buddhist philosophy, and Donald Davidson’s ‘radical interpretation’ afford additional, and perhaps unexpected, support for the initial set of three premises

Life Before Matter, Possible Signification Before Tangible Signs: Towards a Mediating View

Life is a creative response to creative nature. This notion heeds Norm Hirstrsquo;s call, by way of Robert Rosen, that life as creativity follows a lsquo;logicrsquo; that is radically distinct from classical logical principles. This alternate lsquo;logicrsquo; of creative life follows differentiating Identity and Included-Middle Principles. Charles S. Peircersquo;s process philosophy and his concept of the sign, offer a sense of the nonlinear, nonmechanistic, creative emergence of signs and life through possibly possible signification and living forms as illustrated by means of amorphous topological variability

Toward a concept of pluralistic, inter-relational semiosis

Brief consideration of (1) Peirce’s ‘logic of vagueness’, (2) his categories, and (3) the concepts of overdetermination and underdetermination, vagueness and generality, and inconsistency and incompleteness, along with (4) the abrogation of classical Aristotelian principles of logic, bear out the complexity of all relatively rich sign systems. Given this complexity, there is semiotic indeterminacy, which suggests sign limitations, and at the same time it promises semiotic freedom, giving rise to sign proliferation the yield of which is pluralistic, inter-relational semiosis. This proliferation of signs owes its perpetual flowing change in time to the inapplicability of classical logical principles, namely Non-Contradiction and Excluded-Middle, with respect to elements of vagueness and generality in all signs. Hempel’s ‘Inductivity Paradox’ and Goodman’s ‘New Riddle of Induction’ bear out the limitation and freedom of sign making and sign taking. A concrete cultural example, the Spaniards’ world including the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Aztecs world including their Goddess, Tonantzín, are given a Hempel-Goodman interpretation to reveal the ambiguous, vague, and complex nature of intercultural sign systems, further suggesting pluralism. In fact, when taking the ‘limitative theorems’ of Gödel, Turing, and Chaitin into account, pluralism becomes undeniable, in view of the inconsistency-incompleteness of complex systems. A model for embracing and coping with pluralism suggests itself in the form of contextualized novelty seeking relativism. This form of pluralism takes overdetermination, largely characteristic of Peirce’s Firstness, and underdetermination largely characteristic of Peirce’s Thirdness, into its embrace to reveal a global context capable of elucidating local contexts the collection of which is considerably less than that global view. The entirety of this global context is impossible to encompass, given our inevitable finitude and fallibilism. Yet, we usually manage to cope with processual pluralism, within the play of semiosis

Are We Always Translating Signs Whether We Know It or Not?

This paper is an extended review-and-discussion of Professor Dinda Gorlee's recent book Wittgenstein in Translation: Exploring Semiotic Signa­tures. Professor Gorlee's volume focuses on Ludwig Wittgenstein's frag­ments, many of which ended up in enticingly interconnected books prima­rily edited by others, and Charles S. Peirce's stops and starts ending in mounds of unpublished papers, a fraction of which have found their way between book covers. Both authors challenge whoever might venture to translate them, especially when they have so much to say on vague and un­certain interpretations, which is to say, translations