This article builds on C. S. Peirce’s suggestive blueprint for an inclusive outlook that grants reality to his three categories. Moving away from the usual focus on (contentious) cosmological forces, I use a modal principle to partition various ontological layers: regular sign-action (like coded language) subsumes actual sign-action (like here-and-now events) which in turn subsumes possible sign-action (like qualities related to whatever would be similar to them). Once we realize that the triadic sign’s components are each answerable to this asymmetric (...) subsumption, we obtain the means to track at which level of complexity semiosis finds itself, in a given case. Since the bulk of such a “trinitarian” metaphysics would be devoted to countenancing uninterpreted phenomena, I argue that current misgivings about sign-based ontologies are largely misplaced. (shrink)

Pragmatism, Experience, and the Given The doctrine of the Given is that subjects have direct non-inferential awareness of content of their experiences and apprehensions, and that some of a subject's beliefs are justified on the basis of that subject's awareness of her experiences and apprehensions. Pragmatist criticisms of the Given as a myth are shown here not only to be inadequate but to presuppose the Given. A model for a pragmatist account of the Given is then provided in terms of (...) refinements of Dewey's theory of experience. The doctrine of the Given is implicated in the functions of inquiry insofar as one must take it that experience is a source of justification. (shrink)

This is the second of two papers that examine Charles Peirce’s denial that human beings have a faculty of intuition. In the first paper, I argued that in its metaphysical aspect, Peirce’s denial of intuition amounts to the doctrine that there is no determinate boundary between the internal world of the cognizing subject and the external world that the subject cognizes.In the present paper, I argue that, properly understood, the “objective idealism” of Peirce’s 1890s cosmological series is a more general (...) iteration of the metaphysical aspect of his earlier denial of intuition. I also consider whether Peirce continued to deny that there is a definite boundary between the internal and external worlds in the years after the cosmological series. (shrink)

Umberto Eco argues that a mirror image is not a sign. At best it is a double, a thing that ceases to be once the reflected object is removed. Harry Mulisch narratively suggests that mirror images function metaphorically as gateways between human suffering and the divine. And interestingly, science employs mirrors and mirror images both to turn our gaze upwards and to show us reflections of our place in the cosmos. Tying together Eco's notion of the double, Mulisch's insistence that (...) mirror images reflect humanity's construction of the divine, and the Giant Magellan Telescope Project's cosmic images, it is my contention that modern, telescopic mirror images are much more than snapshots of the cosmos. They are constructions of human and divine meaning that—signifying—pose the question, what is reflected: the cosmos or humanity? (shrink)