Charles Sanders Peirce was one of the United States’ most original and profound thinkers, and a prolific writer. Peirce’s game theory-based approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of signs and language, to the theory of communication, and to the evolutionary emergence of signs, provide a toolkit for contemporary scholars and philosophers. Drawing on unpublished manuscripts, the book offers a rich, fresh picture of the achievements of a remarkable man.

In this essay, we propose that Peirce’s Existential Graphs can derive the desired uniqueness implication (or in a weaker claim, the definite description readings) of donkey pronouns in conjunctive discourse (A man walks in the park. He whistles), without postulating a separate category of E-type pronouns.

Endoporeutic method exemplifies the fundamental principle concerning the direction of the flow of interpretation in Peirce’s diagrammatic logic of existential graphs. It boils down to the fact that in EGs, one starts with the outermost graph-instance or the cut and proceeds inwards according to the conventions of EGs. The interpretation is dialogic, which Peirce laid out in his semeiotics in terms of two players, the Interpreter and the Utterer, and in EGs in terms of the Grapheus and the Graphist. Endoporeutic (...) method is thus closely related to semantic games. It is also an early sketch of model theory in logic, and marks an outlook on logic that puts the notion of compositionality under critical scrutiny. (shrink)