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39Peirce, Meaning, and the Semantic WebSemiotica 2013 (193): 119-143. 2013.This paper seeks an explanation for the challenges faced by Semantic Web developers in achieving their vision, compared to the staggering near-instantaneous success of the World Wide Web. To this end it contrasts two broad philosophical understandings of meaning and argues that the choice between them carries real consequences for how developers attempt to engineer the Semantic Web. The first is Rene Descartes’ ‘private’, static account of meaning (arguably dominant for the last 400 years in Wes…Read more
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371CatnessesIn Stephen D. Hales (ed.), What Philosophy Can Tell You about Your Cat, Carus. 2008.An introduction to cat metaphysics
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78The Purpose of the Essential IndexicalThe Commens Working Papers: Preprints, Research Reports and Scientific Communications. 2015.This paper takes indexicality as a case-study for critical examination of the distinction between semantics and pragmatics as currently conceived in mainstream philosophy of language. Both a ‘pre-indexical’ and ‘post-indexical’ analytic formal semantics are examined and found wanting, and instead an argument is mounted for a ‘properly pragmatist pragmatics’, according to which we do not work out what signs mean in some abstract overall sense and then work out to what use they are being put; rath…Read more
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265J. Brunning and P. Forster (eds), "The Rule of Reason" (review)Metascience 8 (1): 170-174. 1999.
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856The hardness of the iconic must: can Peirce’s existential graphs assist modal epistemologyPhilosophia Mathematica 20 (1): 1-24. 2012.Charles Peirce's diagrammatic logic — the Existential Graphs — is presented as a tool for illuminating how we know necessity, in answer to Benacerraf's famous challenge that most ‘semantics for mathematics’ do not ‘fit an acceptable epistemology’. It is suggested that necessary reasoning is in essence a recognition that a certain structure has the particular structure that it has. This means that, contra Hume and his contemporary heirs, necessity is observable. One just needs to pay attention, n…Read more
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43Letting reality biteTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 44 (2): 208-212. 2008.Describes an experiment in teaching undergraduate epistemology, guided by Peirce’s pragmatic maxim.
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98Engineering philosophyInternational Journal of Machine Consciousness 2 (1): 45-50. 2010.A commentary on a current paper by Aaron Sloman. Sloman argues that in order to make progress in AI, consciousness, "should be replaced by more precise and varied architecture-based concepts better suited to specify what needs to be explained by scientific theories". This original vision of philosophical inquiry as mapping out 'design-spaces' for a contested concept seeks to achieve a holistic, synthetic understanding of what possibilities such spaces embody. It therefore does not reduce to eith…Read more
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295J.J. Liszka, "An Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce" (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (1): 122-124. 1998.
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169“Logic, Ethics and the Ethics of Logic”In T. Thellefsen B. Sorensen (ed.), Charles Sanders Peirce in His Own Words, . pp. 271-278. 2014.This piece explores the meaning of the following quote from Charles Peirce (1902), ". . . the main reason logic is unsettled is that thirteen different opinions are current as to the true aim of the science. Now this is not a logical difficulty, but an ethical difficulty; for ethics is the science of aims. Secondly, it is true that ethics has been, and always must be, a theatre of discussion for the reason that its study consists in the gradual development of a distinct recognition of a satisfac…Read more
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414Mining meaning from WikipediaInternational Journal of Human-Computer Interactions 67 (9): 716-754. 2009.Wikipedia is a goldmine of information; not just for its many readers, but also for the growing community of researchers who recognize it as a resource of exceptional scale and utility. It represents a vast investment of manual effort and judgment: a huge, constantly evolving tapestry of concepts and relations that is being applied to a host of tasks. This article provides a comprehensive description of this work. It focuses on research that extracts and makes use of the concepts, relations, f…Read more
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220Peirce’s Reception in Australia and New ZealandEuropean Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 6 (1). 2014."Although I think it is far to say that in what natives of this part of the world call 'downunder,' Peirce is still a minority interest, appreciation of his work appears to be growing slowly but surely..."
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397Charles Peirce's Limit Concept of TruthPhilosophy Compass 9 (3): 204-213. 2014.This entry explores Charles Peirce's account of truth in terms of the end or ‘limit’ of inquiry. This account is distinct from – and arguably more objectivist than – views of truth found in other pragmatists such as James and Rorty. The roots of the account in mathematical concepts is explored, and it is defended from objections that it is (i) incoherent, (ii) in its faith in convergence, too realist and (iii) in its ‘internal realism’, not realist enough
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421This paper offers an expressivist account of logical form, arguing that in order to fully understand it one must examine what valid arguments make us do (or: what Achilles does and the Tortoise doesn’t, in Carroll’s famed fable). It introduces Charles Peirce’s distinction between symbols, indices and icons as three different kinds of signification whereby the sign picks out its object by learned convention, by unmediated indication, and by resemblance respectively. It is then argued that logical…Read more
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204Danielle Macbeth, "Realizing Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing" (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2015.This substantial book is a highly original and thorough work of synthetic first philosophy. Although it has some recognizable roots in the Kantian/Sellarsian tradition of the Pittsburgh school, it adds a wealth of precise discussion of examples from science and mathematics, made possible by Macbeth's dual training in arts and sciences. It presents a developmental story of human reason bootstrapping itself towards greater power and clarity through the Western tradition (which is the sole purview …Read more
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302Argument-Forms which Turn Invalid over Infinite Domains: Physicalism as Supertask?Contemporary Pragmatism 5 (1): 1-11. 2008.Argument-forms exist which are valid over finite but not infinite domains. Despite understanding of this by formal logicians, philosophers can be observed treating as valid arguments which are in fact invalid over infinite domains. In support of this claim I will first present an argument against the classical pragmatist theory of truth by Mark Johnston. Then, more ambitiously, I will suggest the fallacy lurks in certain arguments for physicalism taken for granted by many philosophers today.
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220This is Simply What I DoPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (1). 2003.Wittgenstein's discussion of rule-following is widely regarded to have identified what Kripke called "the most radical and original sceptical problem that philosophy has seen to date". But does it? This paper examines the problem in the light of Charles Peirce's distinctive "scientific hierarchy". Peirce identifies a phenomenological inquiry which is prior to both logic and metaphysics, whose role is to identify the most fundamental philosophical categories. His third category, particularly sali…Read more
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294Naturalism and Wonder: Peirce on the Logic of Hume's Argument Against MiraclesPhilosophia 28 (1-4): 297-318. 2001.Peirce wrote that Hume’s argument against miracles (which is generally liked by twentieth century philosophers for its antireligious conclusion) "completely misunderstood the true nature of" ’abduction’. This paper argues that if Hume’s argumentative strategy were seriously used in all situations (not just those in which we seek to "banish superstition"), it would deliver a choking epistemological conservatism. It suggests that some morals for contemporary naturalistic philosophy may be drawn fr…Read more
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715Predication and the Problem of UniversalsPhilosophical Papers 30 (2): 117-143. 2001.This paper contrasts the scholastic realisms of David Armstrong and Charles Peirce. It is argued that the so-called 'problem of universals' is not a problem in pure ontology (concerning whether universals exist) as Armstrong construes it. Rather, it pertains to which predicates should be applied where, issues which Armstrong sets aside under the label of 'semantics', and which from a Peircean perspective encompass even fundamentals of scientific methodology. It is argued that Peirce's scholastic…Read more
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315Naomi Cumming, "The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification" (review)Recherches Semiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry 22 (1-2-3): 315-327. 2002.
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33Ontologies on the Semantic WebAnnual Review of Information Science and Technology 41 407-451. 2007.As an informational technology, the World Wide Web has enjoyed spectacular success. In just ten years it has transformed the way information is produced, stored, and shared in arenas as diverse as shopping, family photo albums, and high-level academic research. The “Semantic Web” was touted by its developers as equally revolutionary but has not yet achieved anything like the Web’s exponential uptake. This 17 000 word survey article explores why this might be so, from a perspective that bridges b…Read more
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107Real Law in Charles Peirce's PragmaticismIn Howard Sankey (ed.), Causation and Laws of Nature, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 125--142. 1999.How scholastic realism met the scientific method
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598Extension, Intension and Dormitive VirtueTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 35 (4). 1999.Would be fairer to call Peirce’s philosophy of language “extensionalist” or “intensionalist”? The extensionalisms of Carnap and Quine are examined, and Peirce’s view is found to be prima facie similar, except for his commitment to the importance of “hypostatic abstraction”. Rather than dismissing this form of abstraction (famously derided by Molière) as useless scholasticism, Peirce argues that it represents a crucial (though largely unnoticed) step in much working inference. This, it is argued,…Read more
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1224What is a Logical Diagram?In Sun-Joo Shin & Amirouche Moktefi (eds.), Visual Reasoning with Diagrams, Springer. pp. 1-18. 2013.Robert Brandom’s expressivism argues that not all semantic content may be made fully explicit. This view connects in interesting ways with recent movements in philosophy of mathematics and logic (e.g. Brown, Shin, Giaquinto) to take diagrams seriously - as more than a mere “heuristic aid” to proof, but either proofs themselves, or irreducible components of such. However what exactly is a diagram in logic? Does this constitute a semiotic natural kind? The paper will argue that such a natural kind…Read more
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138Paul Forster, "Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism" (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 51 (1): 137-8. 2013.
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736Diagrammatic Teaching: The Role of Iconic Signs in Meaningful PedagogyIn Inna Semetsky (ed.), Edusemiotics – a Handbook, Springer. pp. 29-45. 2018.Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics uniquely divides signs into: i) symbols, which pick out their objects by arbitrary convention or habit, ii) indices, which pick out their objects by unmediated ‘pointing’, and iii) icons, which pick out their objects by resembling them (as Peirce put it: an icon’s parts are related in the same way that the objects represented by those parts are themselves related). Thus representing structure is one of the icon’s greatest strengths. It is argued that the implication…Read more
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369The Meaning of Meaning-FallibilismAxiomathes 15 (2): 293-318. 2005.Much discussion of meaning by philosophers over the last 300 years has been predicated on a Cartesian first-person authority (i.e. “infallibilism”) with respect to what one’s terms mean. However this has problems making sense of the way the meanings of scientific terms develop, an increase in scientific knowledge over and above scientists’ ability to quantify over new entities. Although a recent conspicuous embrace of rigid designation has broken up traditional meaning-infallibilism to some exte…Read more
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129Gabriele Gava, "Peirce’s Account of Purposefulness: A Kantian Perspective" (review)International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (2): 267-270. 2016.
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707Bill Gates is not a parking meter: Philosophical quality control in automated ontology buildingProceedings of the Symposium on Computational Philosophy, AISB/IACAP World Congress 2012 (Birmingham, England, July 2-6). 2012.The somewhat old-fashioned concept of philosophical categories is revived and put to work in automated ontology building. We describe a project harvesting knowledge from Wikipedia’s category network in which the principled ontological structure of Cyc was leveraged to furnish an extra layer of accuracy-checking over and above more usual corrections which draw on automated measures of semantic relatedness.
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790The Problem of the Essential IconAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 45 (3): 207-232. 2008.Charles Peirce famously divided all signs into icons, indices and symbols. The past few decades have seen mainstream analytic philosophy broaden its traditional focus on symbols to recognise the so-called essential indexical. Can the moral now be extended to icons? Is there an “essential icon”? And if so, what exactly would be essential about it? It is argued that there is and it consists in logical form. Danielle Macbeth’s radical new “expressivist” interpretation of Frege’s logic and Charles P…Read more
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481Anne Freadman, "The Machinery of Talk: Charles Peirce and the Sign Hypothesis" (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (4): 642-645. 2006.This book, officially a contribution to the subject area of Charles Peirce’s semiotics, deserves a wider readership, including philosophers. Its subject matter is what might be termed the great question of how signification is brought about (what Peirce called the ‘riddle of the Sphinx’, who in Emerson’s poem famously asked, ‘Who taught thee me to name?’), and also Peirce’s answer to the question (what Peirce himself called his ‘guess at the riddle’, and Freadman calls his ‘sign hypothesis’).
Deakin, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Interest
2 more
Metaphilosophy |
History of Western Philosophy |
Meaning |
Truth |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Wilfrid Sellars |
Ludwig Wittgenstein |