Peirce on Practical Reasoning

Semiotica

Charles S. Peirce attempted to develop his semiotic theory of cognitive signs interpretation, which are originated in our basic perceptual operations that quasi-prove the truth of perceptual judgment representing reality. The essential problem was to explain how, by a cognitive interpretation of the sequence of perceptual signs, we can represent external physical reality and reflectively represent our cognitive mind’s operations of signs. With his phaneroscopy introspection, Peirce shows how, without going outside our cognitions, we can represent external reality. Hence Peirce can avoid the Berkeleyian, Humean, and Kantian phenomenologies, as well as the modern analytic philosophy and hermeneutic phenomenology. Peirce showed that with the trio of semiotic interpretation – abductive logic of discovery of hypotheses, deductive logic of necessary inference, and inductive logic of evaluation – we can reach a complete proof of the true representation of reality. This semiotic logic of re...

C.S. Peirce defined his concept of sign and semiotic as a logical concept and theory. As such its principal purpose was to develop a logic of science, how rational scientific inquiry proceeds and what are its normative standards. Although from this we should not conclude that the logic of science would be the sole domain of application of Peirce’s semiotic terminology, Peirce’s methodological principles and the way how he derived his concept of sign as a triadic relation hints that the legitimate domain of application of Peirce’s logical sign is narrower than many metaphysical semioticians seem to think. Basically the argument is that no interpretant what so ever would be constructed by the semiotic agent unless the agent could in principle strive for some knowledge about the object of a sign (Vehkavaara 2006). Mere energetic or emotional (or perhaps also associational) reactions to the would-be sign cannot be counted as interpretants, because without the formation of a logical interpretant (a conception about the object), they cannot provide the internal reference to the object of sign. Peircean semiotics is most clearly applicable to such cognitive processes that construct or modify some kind of internal model of the life-world of a semiotic agent (Umwelt). Such semiotic agent must in principle be capable of self-reflection and intentional self-modification of these processes, even if these abilities were not (or even never) actually used. However, humans seem to have meaningful cognitive processes that are non-representational (in a sense of having content without referring to any determinable object) and which do not directly modify any internal model of the world but the world itself. Moreover, many biosemiotic agents do not seem to have at all any updatable internal model of the world while still being capable of self-functional world-construction. I will argue that instead of trying to generalize the Peircean logical concept of sign, it is more reasonable to search for other, perhaps less rich, concepts of sign and meaning. Peirce’s idea of three normative sciences gives one starting point. For Peirce, logic was the third one of the three theoretical philosophical normative sciences, “the theory of self-controlled, or deliberate, thought. Especially practics the second normative science is here in interest – a science of self-controlled conduct, which should in generally be conceptually independent on logic. For Peirce, practics was needed for more deep self-control of thought than what is possible at purely logical level. In Peirce’s own few descriptions of the subject matter of practics, the logical signs are indeed in use when human action is self-controlledly guided – before the action is actually executed, a series of little inquiries (thought-experiments) are employed to anticipate and evaluate the possible effects of the plan of the action. The positive content of the practics is nevertheless in its normative characters – not in its means or degree of self-control – whether the result of action really correspond the expectation or desired effect or not. From this expectation or the ‘idea’ that is tried to ‘materialize’ in the action can be abstracted another kind of concept of sign that mediates transition of one state of the agent to another one. Such concept of practical sign might be needed for semiotic modelling of perceptual processes, creative interpretation, or any practical purpose-oriented action beside of the logical concept of sign. The main difference to logical sign is that practical sign is not referring or representing any object (or such reference is irrelevant), while still being triadic, dynamic, and normative.

2009

What is the logical background of pragmatism? The answer I want to suggest in this paper is that pragmatism is supported by some mathematical and logical ideas that provide a logical background for it. That is to say, they may be used to back up pragmatism’s claim to give us a viable account of thought and knowledge acquisition that describes some of the crucial relations by which knowledge acquisition and action are guided. I will start by giving a short account of why some mathematical and logical ideas coming from the logic of relations, order theory in particular, might be helpful for pragmatism’s view of knowledge and praxis. That is, I claim that they support, clarify and strengthen some of the claims made by the pragmatic maxim. In a second step I describe why these logical concepts and rules of reasoning acquire a normative meaning when they become part of pragmatism‘s semiotic, methodology and epistemology. In particular, the normative role of a semiotic concept of the iden...

Peirce on Perception and Reasoning

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Contemporary logic and cognitive science have partially revived the old idea of the possibility of theorizing about the nature of the instinctive faculty of logic, the logica utens. This paper sets the agenda and argues that the logic of discovery, abduction and imaginative and iconic thought are the key parts of the puzzle.

Transactions of The Charles S Peirce Society, 2012

The immediate purpose of this paper is to expound C. S. Peirce's conception of reasoning as he refined it in his mature reflection on the normative sciences and their hierarchical relations (the dependence of logic on ethics and, in turn, that of ethics on esthetics). In order to clarify adequately Peirce's position, however, it is helpful to consider his rejection of Christoph Sigwart's attempt to ground logical soundness in subjective feeling. What is at stake in this debate is nothing less than Peirce's endeavor to articulate a thoroughly pragmatic understanding of truth, not simply his commitment to argue against subjective approaches to logical questions. Accordingly, the ultimate purpose of this paper is to shed light on the problem of objectivity. From a pragmatist perspective, there is an essential relation between an affectively involved agent and a deliberately conducted, successful inquiry. This alone secures the possibility of objectivity in the only form in which finite, fallible agents can hope to attain or, at least, approximate this ideal.

2009

In the current literature about Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) it is usual to treat it both as a synonym of 'Abduction' (or at least, intimately related with peircean Abduction) and as encompassing non-deductive inference. However, Peirce not only distinguished between abduction, induction, and deduction, he did it in the framework of a very peculiar idea of experience, in which 'experience' is understood as future-action-oriented, rather than past-cumulative-data, more proper of the empiricist tradition. As a consequence, these two philosophical attitudes have a very different understanding on the role of evidence in the inferences. The purpose of this presentation is twofold. On one hand, to propose three criteria to distinguish between Peircean Abduction and Induction and to explain the role that Peirce's ideas of experience and evidence have in them. On the other hand, to contrast these criteria and philosophical framework with those proposed by contemporary IBE's theorists.

In the current literature about Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) it is usual to treat it both as a synonym of ‘Abduction’ (or at least, intimately related with peircean Abduction) and as encompassing non-deductive inference. However, Peirce not only distinguished between abduction, induction, and deduction, he did it in the framework of a very peculiar idea of experience, in which ‘experience’ is understood as future-action-oriented, rather than past-cumulative-data, more proper of the empiricist tradition. As a consequence, these two philosophical attitudes have a very different understanding on the role of evidence in the inferences. The purpose of this presentation is twofold. On one hand, to propose three criteria to distinguish between Peircean Abduction and Induction and to explain the role that Peirce’s ideas of experience and evidence have in them. On the other hand, to contrast these criteria and philosophical framework with those proposed by contemporary IBE’s theorists.

Literary and Linguistic Computing, 2013

The importance of abductive reasoning is increasingly emphasised within diverse research domains in 28 which interpretation plays a central role. This reasoning type appears to provide an answer to various 29 significant issues in diverse domains, especially in combination with deductive and inductive 30 reasoning, as C.S. Peirce eventually presented it in his process of (scientific) inquiry. Central in our 31 interpretation of Peirce's process of inquiry thus stands a cycle of abductive, deductive and inductive 32 reasoning, which is iterated continuously with the surrounding world as its subject. This world is here 33 understood as the environment that surrounds us and that we experience through our senses. The 34 continuous iteration of Peirce's process of inquiry allows constructing experience-based knowledge 35

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was an accomplished scientist, philosopher, and mathematician, who considered himself to be primarily a logician. His contributions to the development of modern logic at the turn of the 20th century were colossal, original and influential. Formal, or deductive, logic was just one of the branches in which he exercized his logical and analytical talent. His work developed upon Boole’s algebra of logic and De Morgan’s logic of relations. He worked on the algebra of relatives (1870-1885), the theory of quantification (1883-1885), graphical or diagrammatic logic (1896-1911), trivalent logic (1909), higher-order and modal logics. He also contributed significantly to the theory and methodology of induction, and discovered a third kind of reasoning, different from both deduction and induction, which he called abduction or retroduction, and which he identified with the logic of scientific discovery. Philosophically, logic became for Peirce a broad discipline with internal divisions and external architectonic relations to other parts of scientific inquiry. Logic depends on mathematics, phaneroscopy (= phenomenology), and ethics, while metaphysics and psychology depend upon logic. One of the most important characters of Peirce’s late logical thought is that logic becomes coextensive with semeiotic (his preferred spelling), the theory of signs. Peirce divides logic, when conceived as semeiotic, into (i) speculative grammar, the preliminary analysis, definition and classification of those signs that can be used by a scientific intelligence; (ii) critical logic, the study of the validity and justification of each kind of reasoning; and (iii) methodeutic or speculative rhetoric, the theory of methods. Peirce’s logical investigations cover all these three departments.