Vincent Colapietro

“The world is,” William James notes, “full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we cannot unify them completely in our minds”. As a radical empiricist, he takes there to be more to experience than any of our stories or other forms of account can ever capture. Here as everywhere else, “ever not quite” and “ever not yet” qualify even our master strokes. As a radical pluralist, accordingly, he takes these partial stories to be the best we can ever do. The plurality of narratives can never all be gathered into our hands and woven into a fully coherent metanarrative or even an all-inclusive story. Loose...

One criticism of pragmatism, forcefully articulated by Stanley Cavell, is that pragmatism fails to deal with mourning, understood in the psychoanalytic sense as grief-work (Trauerarbeit). Such work would seemingly be as pertinent to philosophical investigations (especially ones conducted by pragmatists) as to psychoanalytic explorations. Finding such themes as mourning and loss in R. W. Emerson's writings, Cavell warns against assimilating Emerson's voice to that of American pragmatism, especially Dewey's instrumentalism, for such assimilation risks the loss or repression of Emerson's voice in not only professional philosophy but also American culture. While granting Emerson's distinctive voice, this essay argues that the way Cavell insists on differences problematically represses recognition of the Emersonian strains in Dewey's own philosophical voice. In doing so, Cavell falsely flattens the resounding depth of Dewey's philosophical voice and narrows the expansive range of pragmatic intelligence. But Dewey all too often lends himself to such a misreading, for his writings at once repress and embody the strains of a distinctively Emersonian voice.

: The essay explores how C. S. Peirce, especially in his mature thought, addressed the question of meaning. It underscores how he not only took meaning to be at bottom a function of our habits but also how he conceived these habits themselves to be functions of the histories in which they originate and operate. Hence, what I propose here is this: One of the most fruitful ways to interpret Peirce's own contribution to this question is to see his efforts as carrying forward the impetus intensified by Hegel and Darwin's emphasis on temporality and historicity.In Part One of this paper , I suggest how Peirce approaches the question of meaning primarily in reference to what I call the drama of self-correction. Moreover, his approach is explicitly related to his pragmatism, semeiotic , and phenomenological doctrine of categories. Finally, the historical development of his own reflections on this question is taken to provide a basis for an historicist interpretation of his mature position. In Part Two , I propose that the metaphor of a route provides a corrective to the excessively formal and indeed formalistic interpretations of Peirce's theory of signs still dominating the discussion of this theory. Routes are understood here not as antecedently fixed paths, but as historically emergent and alterable trajectories defined by the movements of travelers. In conjunction with this emphasis I explore several distinct senses in which both beliefs and signs are what agents go on. Such reflections are articulated for the purpose of facilitating a deeper understand of not only what Peirce meant by meaning but also what we might mean by this elusive term.Key-words: Meaning. Sign. Interpretant. History . Pragmatism . Evolutionism. Intuition. Self-correction .Resumo: O ensaio explora como C. S. Peirce, particularmente em seu pensamento maduro, abordou a questão do significado. Ressalta como ele não apenas tomou significado como, basicamente, uma função de nossos hábitos, mas também como ele concebeu esses próprios hábitos como funções das histórias nas quais se originam e operam. Assim, o que proponho aqui é o seguinte: Uma das formas mais fecundas de interpretar a própria contribuição de Peirce a essa questão é ver seus esforços como levando adiante o ímpeto intensificado pela ênfase dada por Hegel e Darwin à temporalidade e à historicidade.Na Primeira Parte deste trabalho , sugiro como Peirce aborda a questão do significado principalmente em referência ao que eu chamo de drama da autocorreção. Ademais, sua abordagem está explicitamente relacionada ao seu pragmatismo, a sua semiótica e sua doutrina fenomenológica das categorias. Finalmente, o desenvolvimento histórico das suas reflexões sobre essa questão é considerado como base para uma interpretação historicista de sua posição madura. Na Segunda Parte , proponho que a metáfora de um caminho proporciona uma correção às interpretações excessivamente formais, e, até mesmo, formalísticas, da teoria dos signos de Peirce que ainda dominam a discussão dessa teoria. Os caminhos devem ser entendidos aqui não como rotas pré-fixadas, e sim como trajetórias historicamente emergentes e alteráveis, definidas pelos movimentos dos viajantes. Juntamente com a ênfase, exploro alguns sentidos distintos, nos quais tanto as crenças como os signos são aquilo em que os agentes se fundamentam. Essas reflexões são articuladas com a finalidade de facilitar um entendimento mais profundo não só do que Peirce quis dizer com significado, mas também o que nós queremos dizer com esse termo indefinido.Palavras-chave: Significado. Signo. Interpretante. História . Pragmatismo . Evolucionismo. Intuição. Autocorreção