James Liszka

In his Cambridge Lectures of 1898, Peirce seemed to dismiss the role of ethics as “a guide to conduct” in favor of a reliance on conventional morality and moral sentiment. Yet, in just two years, Peirce reversed his position. Drafts of The Minute Logic of 1902 show that Peirce now thought of logic as a normative science, grounded in ethics and esthetics and planned to devote a significant part of the work to the development of these sciences. In the 1903 Harvard Lectures—he gives the first public presentation of this plan—and follows this up in the Lowell Lectures of the same year. In using manuscripts and other materials during this period, I explain why Peirce took this normative turn and suggest a coherent picture of his normative sciences.

Peirce’s semiotic may help in explaining the process of mediation, key to the study of media. As an essential feature of semiosis, signs mediate between two determinative processes: the sign by the object and the interpretant by the sign. The determinative process is transitive. The object determines the sign, and the sign determines the interpretant in a way that the object representatively determines the interpretant. That which is carried through the transitive relation is the form of the dynamical object, initially meaningless but, once represented in the sign in an interpretable manner, can produce a meaningful effect, an interpretant for some sign agency. Additionally, I argue that the two processes of determination are themselves mediative processes. The sign’s medium—the sign vehicle as Peirce calls it--mediates the determination of signs by objects, and what Peirce calls collateral information, mediates the determination of interpretants by signs. The latter is understood as the relevant collection of existing interpretants that act like a schema for interpretation. I conclude by suggesting that the fault in Peirce’s semiotic is lack of appreciation for the role of the sign’s medium in mediation, which can be supplemented by the good work of media studies.

Problems are generally defined as barriers to goals. Consequently, it is a form of practical reasoning, understood as figuring out the means by which such barriers are to be removed. The general form of practical reasoning suggests three processes that would be involved in problem-solving. The first is coming to an understanding of the problem, which involves the process of conversation. The second is a matter of inquiry – figuring out the practical hypotheses, the means of solving the problem. Since problem-solving requires cooperation of others, it also requires deliberation among those affected by a problem as to which of the practical hypotheses will work best, ending in some agreement. Using the work of pragmatists, such as Peirce, James, Dewey, Addams, Wallace, Kitcher, among others, the aim of the article is to show a normative framework for each of these processes that can best lead to effective problem solving.

: According to T.L. Short, Peirce's early thought-sign account of semeiotic engenders fatal flaws. On the one hand, it entails an infinite regressus of representation that cannot feasibly explain the connection between signs and objects and, on the other, an infinite progressus, leaving Peirce's theory without the wherewithal to account for the sign's meaning and significance. According to Short, Peirce overcomes the first flaw through the robust development of the notion of the index and the concept of collateral experience. The second flaw is overcome through the pragmatic theory of meaning, connected as it is to the notion of purpose and, ultimately, a complex theory of teleology. My commentary focuses primarily on Short's important analysis of Peirce's teleology. I argue that he is successful in giving a plausible, naturalistic account of Peirce's theory without straying from the spirit of Peirce's systematic thought. Although, in my view, the book is the best account of Peirce's semiotic grammar in print, it fails to give a sufficient systematic analysis of the other two branches of Peirce's semeiotic—critical logic and formal rhetoric

The claim here is that semiosis is concomitant with life and not simply one of several possible adaptive mechanisms. Signs, particularly indices, serve as steering mechanisms for even the most primitive organisms, completing a circuit between the detection of energy sources and behavior that is conducive to acquiring those sources. Without that kind of agency, no form of life is possible. To show this, an understanding of the interrelation among energy, matter, information, and meaning is required, and how they are interlaced in the notion of work. One specific thesis of the paper in this respect is that meaning is the propagating work of information. Peirce’s theory, with some modifications, can be used to articulate this account of things, and brings a powerful analytical tool to the problem.

Although philosophers often focus on the essays of Leopold's Sand County Almanac, especially "The Land Ethic," there is also a normative argument present in the stories that comprise most of the book. In fact the shack stories may be more persuasive, with a subtlety and complexity not available in his prose piece. This paper develops a narrative ethics methodology gleaned from rhetoric theory, and current interest in narrative ethics among literary theorists, in order to discern the normative underpinnings of the stories in Part 1. The narrative ethics approach sidesteps the need to ground the land ethic in ethical theory—which has been a reconstructive and problematic task for the philosophical interpreters of Leopold—and suggests, instead, that it emerges in Leopold's very effort to narrate his, professional, personal, and practical experience with nature. The involves examining the stories in terms of their emotional, logical and performative aspects. The result is an analysis that shows not only how these stories express normative claims, but also justify them. One conclusion of the analyses is that, in the narratives, there is less emphasis on the problematic notion of an over-arching "community" than in the prose pieces, and more emphasis on the metaphor of other living things as "fellow travelers" in the "odyssey of evolution." Second, the narratives take on an ironic attitude toward the ecological order, less discernable in the prose essays. The order itself may not be ethically admirable, but should be preserved since it makes possible any ethical relations within it. Thus, the narrative reading suggests some temperance to the usual holistic interpretation of his land ethic and its concomitant criticisms especially the charge of ecofacism. We should not take the land ethic imperative at its face value, in the sense that the good of the order itself is an intrinsic good. In the narratives, individuals are shown not merely to be means to the ecological whole, but the focus of sympathy and concern, in a manner that demands their good should also be an object of moral consideration

Abstract:In Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences, I argue that Peirce was motivated to develop a normative science of ethics because of his growing concern with the corruption of science in the Gilded Age, and the recognition that the pragmatic maxim entailed an amoral instrumentalism. Rather than taking a Kantian approach to resolve the latter issue, he adopts an Aristotelian one, engaging in a search for an ultimate end that could order all other ends. What is right is what would be conducive to that end. As such he sees the necessity of a science of esthetics which would study such an end. However, rather than eudaimonia as the highest end, Peirce sees reasonableness as the summum bonum. Although barely sketched by Peirce, I argue that its principal sense is that of an ongoing process of self-correction away from error. In regard to this end, what is most important is the design of practices and the establishment of habits of conduct and sentiment most conducive to self-correction. For this reason, a proper community of inquiry with these features ought to be established, armed with the general methodology of science to assess the norms that guide the experiments of living together. Assurance that communities of inquiries are moving away from error and toward improvement is based on a convergence theory of truth.