I. Introduction A perennial concern among Peirce commentators has been the articulation of Peirce’s model of individual selfhood which underwrites his notion of self-control. A sticking point for most accounts is that Peirce seems to characterize the self along two different lines, at times describing it as a sign and produced by a community while at others characterizing it primarily in terms of embodiment and continuity with the rest of nature. However, if we adopt a view of Peirce’s evolut...

This paper discusses the semiotic and metaphysical framework within which Peirce elaborated a symbolical and dynamical conception of personhood. It exhibits the centrality of Peirce’s early conception of the “unity of consistency” along with its decentering advantages. It describes how this gave rise to a metaphysics of personhood that questions the singularity of individuals. It then conducts a semiotic study of the evolutive process across which something indeterminate evolves into something determinate that increasingly personifies itself following the logic of symbolization, (...) taking into account two major types of indetermination: generality and vagueness. It then considers the kind of teleology at work within personification. It concludes that personhood so conceived is not restricted to only individual human beings, for the process of symbolization at work is not confined to a particular species-specific application. (shrink)

The two concluding chapters of Josiah Royce's The Problem of Christianity pose significant interpretive challenges. The final chapter, "Summary and Conclusion," sets forward Charles S. Peirce's theory of scientific inquiry. Although Royce had earlier explained Peirce's theory of signs and interpretation, he had not examined Peirce's theory of scientific inquiry in detail, making its appearance in the summary and conclusion of the book peculiar. Moreover, it is not wholly evident how a theory of scientific inquiry is supposed to address the (...) problem with which the second part of the book sets out, viz., how Christianity can possess a "more than human meaning and foundation" given that such... (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Psychological hedonism is the theory that all of our actions are ultimately motivated by a desire for our own pleasure or an aversion to our own pain. Peirce offers a unique critique of PH based on a descriptive analysis of self-controlled action. This essay examines Peirce's critique and his accounts of self-controlled action and of desire.

John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in perception, (...) criticizing both empiricism and idealism, and argued for a moderate nominalist view of universals as being in rebus and only ‘apprehended’ by their particulars. His influence helped swaying Oxford away from idealism and, through figures such as H. A. Prichard, Gilbert Ryle, or J. L. Austin, his ideas were also to some extent at the origin of ‘moral intuitionism’ and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ which defined much of Oxford philosophy until the second half of the twentieth-century. Nevertheless, his name and legacy were all but forgotten for generations after World War II. Still, his views on knowledge are with us today, being in part at work in the writings of philosophers as diverse as John McDowell, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

This chapter presents a detailed explanation of Peirce’s early and late views on semiotic indeterminacy and then considers how those views might be applied within biosemiotics. Peirce distinguished two different forms of semiotic indeterminacy: generality and vagueness. He defined each in terms of the “right” that indeterminate signs extend, either to their interpreters in the case of generality or to their utterers in the case of vagueness, to further determine their meaning. On Peirce’s view, no sign is absolutely determinate, i.e., (...) every sign is indeterminate to at least some degree and so exhibits some degree of generality or vagueness. If Peirce was right about this, then no instance of biosemiosis is completely determinate—every biosign must be general or vague to some degree. I show that on Peirce’s view, whether a sign is general or vague depends on its immediate object, “the idea which the sign is built upon,” and I explain how Peirce would go about identifying the immediate object of a sign lacking both a minded utterer and a minded interpreter—an identification that must be possible if any biosign is indeterminate. (shrink)