IA = Irving H. Anellis
IA: From the quotation which follows J.R.'s claim that some 90 percent or
more of Peirce’s work in philosophy is concerned with semiotics, i.e.
CSP: "Know that from the day when at the age of 12 or 13 I took up, in my
elder brother's room a copy of Whately's "Logic," and asked him what
Logic was, and getting some simple answer, flung myself on the floor
and buried myself in it, it has never been in my power to study anything,
--
mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics,
chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economic,
the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a
study of semiotic,"
IA: one might conclude either that Peirce regards logic not so much as a
discipline alongside of others, but rather, in an Aristotelian manner,
as an organon, or that semiotics is a synonym for logic conceived in the
broadest possible sense. Skimming very lightly through my copy of Whately
(sorry, got to be careful here, it's the 1840 edition, published in London
by B. Fellowes, very brittle and falling apart), I find it to be composed of
Aristotelian syllogistic, but with a strong accretion of philosophy of mind,
metaphysics, grammar, and philosophy of language. It starts out with the
usual
definition: "Logic, in the most extensive sense which the name can with
propriety
bear, may be considered as the Science, and also as the Art, of Reasoning."
Along
the way, it deals with those sorts of topics one might find in an
undergraduate
introductory course, including fallacies and induction, and by the time one
reaches the conclusion, it is manifest that logic is concerned, so far as
Whately has it, not merely with argumentation and its forms, but with
"the search for truth."
Irving,
Yes, that would be my sense of Peirce's overall grasp of logic as formal
semiotic,
that it serves in practice as an organon, a "handbook" or "handtool" of
reasoning,
a conceptual framework or workbench of thought that guides how we view and
tackle
every other subject. Letting the chips fall where they may when it comes to the
business of pigeonholing Peirce's output, if we ask how much the instrumentality
of the pragmatic maxim and a sensitivity to the working medium of sign relations
affect our approach to every other topic, the answer would have to be "totally".
Regards,
Jon
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