Rocco Monti

My aim in this essay is to shed light on the origins of Peircean vagueness. The intention is therefore primarily historical-philological, exploring the logical-semiotic roots of vagueness. First, I distinguish the two senses in which Peirce treats the notion of vagueness: one referring to the subject, the other to the predicate within a proposition, specifying that I am only concerned here with the first sense of vagueness. Second, I argue that Brock and Chauviré, while attempting to unravel the origins of Peircean vagueness through the notion of the _individuum vagum_, fail to fully resolve the problem. Third, I expound the medieval theory of _suppositio_, which concerns the denotation and quantification of the propositional subject. This medieval logical theory aimed to clarify the meaning of indefinite and indeterminate propositions. Fourth, I present textual evidence in which Peirce demonstrates his thorough knowledge of the medieval theory of _suppositio_, Peter of Spain's theory in particular. In the same section, I highlight a neglected detail within R 530, in which Peirce directly refers to the origins of the notion of vagueness. Finally, I argue that once the quantifiers (existential and universal) were discovered and formalized, Peirce gradually lost interest in the theory of _suppositio_ as a useful tool for clarifying vague (indefinite) and general (indeterminate) propositions, since he had a better logical tool at his disposal.

This paper aims to focus on the concept of experience and reconstruct its evolutions within Royce’s thought. To do so, I divide this paper in three parts. I begin by analysing Royce’s concept of experience, which takes roots in his interpretation of the British empiricists, such as Locke, Berkeley and Hume, in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892). In the second part I outline Royce’s theory of experience from a philosophical and psychological point of view. My claim is that, in his philosophical writings, Royce argues that cognitions are not abstract ideas but plans of actions: meanings and concepts are embodied, situated and time-oriented. I refer also to Royce’s contribution to the psychological field, with regard to embodied aspects of cognitions. According to Royce, cognitions are enriched with elements related to sensorimotor, imaginative and perceptual faculties. Action and perception are no separated aspects of cognitions, because perception implies sensorimotor dynamics. At the same time, the perception of the object is entangled with the imagination of the would be, i.e., the result of doing different actions with the object.

My aim in this paper is to provide some introductory coordinates aiming at orienting a unified discourse on the doctrine of vagueness in Peirce. After tracing some of the stages in Peircean scholarship that have brought the concept of vagueness into focus, I will show that vagueness, as it appears in Peircean philosophy, is a three-dimensional concept. Thus, while vagueness is a concept that appears in a logical-semiotic dimension – and more specifically as a problem related to the quantification of the subject within the propositional context – it is also articulated in an epistemological and metaphysical dimension. Here I focus primarily on the semiotic dimension and suggest how an account of vagueness might hold together the epistemological and metaphysical consequences of the notion of vagueness.

Giovanni Battista Armenio & Rocco Monti – Who is Carlo Sini? Carlo Sini – As Giovanni Gentile would say, we die to others. Hence, I will answer this question by recalling a sentence by Charles Sanders Peirce: we cannot say who we are, who we have been, what we have done, what the meaning of our life has been. It is others who will outline our identity posthumously, as long as it will remain in personal and public memory. And after all, what would I be without the memory of Peirce, of his life...

In this essay I will discuss the issue of vagueness when defining the concept of open work within the philosophy of Umberto Eco (1932-2016), particularly considering its relevance for the development of his original semiotic view. The analysis of vagueness allows us to stress the importance of Eco’s concept of open work not only in Opera Aperta (1962) but in different phases of his thought. This paper is divided into five sections. Section 1 briefly outlines the Peircean notion of vagueness, trying to understand it as a pivotal concept to define the structure and dynamical form of the open work. Section 2 dwells on the concept of quality in both John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce: here the possibility of articulating an interpretation is considered embodied in the vague immediacy of the qualitative experience. Section 3 analyses to what extent an artwork can be considered open and in motion, according to the Pareysonian concepts of form and interpretation. Section 4 stresses the hypothesis that vagueness produces not only the condition of possibility of an open work and of its multiple interpretations, but also an increase of information due to its aesthetic quality. Section 5 calls into question the distinction between use and interpretation and specifies that interpreting an open work does not mean using it for your own purposes but interpreting a developmental movement towards its own fulfilment; a text is nothing other than the rule that constitutes the universe of its interpretations.