Esteemed members of the peirce-l and biosemiotics lists, Today we begin an online seminar that will continue into 2015, based on Frederik Stjernfelt's Natural Propositions (henceforth NP), which was published earlier this year. In some respects this seminar will resemble the study of Cornelis de Waal's book which took place on the Peirce list last year; but its focus will be different.
Rather than an overview of Peirce's philosophical system, NP is a study of specific key features of Peirce's "logic considered as semiotic". Participating in this discussion will require us to think like logicians, which is a challenge for many of us. Physicists, biologists and psychologists especially may need to exercise patience, because we will need to become well acquainted with some crucial points of Peircean logic and semiotic before we can delve into their implications for those sciences (and for science generally). But i think our patience will be amply rewarded; so does Gary Richmond, who first proposed this seminar, and so do most others who have read as far as the middle chapters of the book. Another difference in focus is due to Frederik's wide-ranging knowledge of the philosophical and logical questions addressed not only by Peirce but also by his contemporaries such as Husserl, Frege, Russell etc., and by our own contemporaries. This places Peirce's work in a broader context than "semiotics" as the term is widely used today, and enables Frederik to place Peircean semiotics itself in a stronger light by comparing it with other ways of dealing with some core questions in logic. On the other hand, Frederik's penetration of the finer points of Peirce's mature semiotic is extraordinarily deep, often drawing on yet-unpublished manuscripts to clarify the ideas presented in better-known late works such as the 1903 Syllabus, "Kaina Stoichea" and the Monist papers of 1905-8. Readers will need some basic acquaintance with Peirce's three sign trichotomies, such as can be gleaned from de Waal's Guide for the Perplexed, Chapter 5. Acquaintance with Frederik's earlier book Diagrammatology would also be helpful, but not necessary. I consider NP a major contribution both to Peirce studies and to biosemiotics because its shows how and why semiosis is deeper than language, and illuminates the crucial connection between meaning and truth. I'll now turn over the leadership of this introductory thread to the author, who will fill you in on the genesis and aims of the book. gary f.
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