1. Introduction Ce livre offre une plongée saisissante dans le bouillonnement intellectuel qui a généré le mouvement pragmatiste à la fin du xixe siècle. Mathias Girel considère que “le continent pragmatiste reste encore en grande partie à explorer” (2021: 16). Parfaitement documenté, son ouvrage est une contribution importante à cette exploration. C’est sans doute le meilleur ouvrage en langue française sur les controverses à travers lesquelles ce courant philosophique inédit a pris forme....

This thesis presents a communicative account of personhood that argues for the inseparability of the metaphysical and the practical concepts of a person. It connects these two concepts by coupling the question “what is a person” with the question "how does one become a person". It argues that participation in social interactions that are characterized by mutual recognition and giving-and-taking reasons implied by the practical concept of a person is in fact an ecological and developmental condition for an entity to (...) possess the kind of characteristics and capacities such as reflexive self-consciousness addressed by the metaphysical concept. The chief theoretical contribution of the dissertation research lies, accordingly, in demonstrating that an adequate metaphysical concept of a person has to make reference to the kind of social processes that are necessary for the emergence and development of the distinguishing attributes of persons among other moving, perceiving, desiring and cognizing agents. Methodologically, it undertakes an original philosophical analysis that is enriched by an interdisciplinary investigation of several notions and insights from semiotics, comparative and developmental psychology, cognitive science and anthropology. The main argument of the thesis is that one becomes a person through internally recreating a social, communicative process; namely, that of dialogical transformation of habits. We find the paradigmatic case of this social process in mutual persuasion. The internalization of this process in the form of an inner dialogue cultivates a social self that is in ongoing communication with the embodied, organismic self of uncritically habituated attitudes, convictions and desires. This inner dialogue can be conceived as a temporally extended process of self-persuasion, which is characterized by an ongoing strive for attaining higher degrees of self-control; that is, for achieving a more coherent alignment between our habits and the kind of person we would like to be. It starts with self-interpretation and self-evaluation, and culminates in the formation of higher-order desires that facilitate habit-change and novel habit formation in accordance with certain social, moral, aesthetical or intellectual categories and norms one comes to endorse. For this reason, self-induced, deliberate habit-change is also a process of appropriation or self-appropriation, through which we strive to cultivate habits of feeling, thinking, acting that we can deem more truly ours. The thesis demonstrates that the capacity for engaging in this kind of self-persuasion consists chiefly in the capacities for metasemiosis, perspective-taking, and for cultivating habits of reflexivity. It explicates how all these capacities have a social origin and ultimately a social function by showing that they all presuppose certain higher-order communicative patterns that arose through an evolutionary and cultural history, and develop through the internal reconstruction of these patterns as cognitive-semiotic processes. The thesis concludes that becoming a kind of being who can engage in self-persuasion, thus a person, consists ultimately in internalizing the patterns of communicative social interactions in the form of an ongoing auto-communication. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Among his other contributions to advancing our understanding of classical American pragmatism and, in particular, Charles S. Peirce, none is more worthy of our attention than Richard S. Robin's characteristically painstaking attempt to address the puzzle of Peirce's "Proof" of pragmaticism.1 In this as in so many other respects,2 he shows himself to be, in effect, the student of Max H. Fisch (see especially 1986, chapter 19).3 There are hermeneutical traditions as well as philosophical ones and often the former are (...) integral parts of the latter. This is certainly the case regarding pragmatism. A deeper or better understanding of the inaugural figures in this philosophical movement is taken, by the interpreters of.. (shrink)

Darwin’s explanation for the natural phenomenon of evolution has been well established in the scientific community. That is a generally accepted historical fact, even if the situation has been very nuanced all along. If an alternative theory is to get established at all, it would have to take almost the same route that Darwin’s theory took. While the hair-splitting philosophical exegesis keeps moving the intellectual scholarship forward, some individuals from the “indefinite community” would have to decide to “charitably” put their (...) “faith” in an interpretation of the theory, put this abductive interpretation to a set of empirical tests, and “hope” that this also solves their pressing problems. Effectively, this.. (shrink)

Se busca argumentar la concepción y el sentido de la ética en Peirce, teniendo en cuenta que es más una propuesta de su alcance que una presentación de lo que el filósofo norteamericano expuso. Peirce escribió pocas líneas sobre la función normativa de la ciencia de la ética y de su papel en la filosofía en general, de ahí la necesidad de reconstruir y complementar el vínculo de este saber teorético con la reacción entre fenómenos según unos fines de acción (...) determinados. Para esta labor se realiza una discusión con escritos actuales de especialista que han intentado abordar y explicar la temática. (shrink)

“What is abduction?” asks Jaakko Hintikka in the title to his 1998 article on C. S. Peirce’s concept. The answer to Hintikka’s question is problematic on several counts. There is, to begin with, a difference between Peirce’s own views on abduction and later interpretations of abduction as “inference to the best explanation” (Minnameier 2004; Paavola 2006). There are, furthermore, tensions within Peirce’s own account of abduction, for instance, a tension between “inferential” and “instinctual” aspects of abduction (Fann 1970; Anderson 1986; (...) Kapitan 1990; Paavola 2005; Paavola and Hakkarainen 2005). These tensions are exacerbated by two factors. First, there are several terminological variants of the word.. (shrink)