Floyd Merrell

Meinongian 'objects' are evoked in an effort to critique and expand upon traditional theories of reference. The argument stems from an account of Peirce's categories of meaning in light of vague, contradictory, inconsistent, general, incomplete, and incompleteable signs. In addition to signs as either 'true', 'false', or meaningless, the function of imaginary numbers reveals the possibility of a sign's being both 'true' and 'false' or neither 'true' nor 'false', over time, and dialogically speaking. This demands a tolerance for vagueness, ambiguity, contradiction, and incessantly changing meaning

Abduction, the overlooked dimension of the semiosic process, is with us in our everyday activities, whether we know it or not. Interrelated and intermeshed with practical, concrete consequences of the pragmatic maxim, both induction and deduction depend upon abduction, yet there is no fixed boundary between them. Rather, like the categories, abduction, induction and deduction incessantly find themselves in an interrelated swirl of interdependent interaction. The task is to strike a balance of the three processes.

We are all to a greater or lesser degree creative, and metaphor making is one of the most common channels along which the creative process flows. Three general theories of metaphor — comparison, substitution, and interaction — and three theories of creativity — mechanicism, organicism, and contextualism or holism — surface in the following pages. Peirce's categories delineating the semiosic process, his concept of signs incessantly becoming other signs, and his insight regarding abduction, are brought to bear on these theories of metaphor and creativity, leading to the conclusion that both theories are a matter of overdetermined Firstness becoming under-determined Thirdness through nonlinear, emergent interdependent, interrelated interaction between signs and their makers and takers.

This multifaceted essay emerges from a host of sources within diverse academic settings. Its central thesis is guided by physicist John A. Wheeler's thoughts on the quantum enigma. Wheeler concludes, following Niels Bohr, that we are co-participants within the universal self-organizing process. This notion merges with concepts from Peirce's process philosophy, Eastern thought, issues of topology, and border theory in cultural studies and social science, while surrounding itself with such key terms as complementarity, interdependence, interrelatedness, vagueness, generality, incompleteness, inconsistency, and mestizaje. Ultimately, a sense of semiosic process pervades in light of combined homogenous and hetergenous tendencies.