Peirce's Semeiotic Realism

Abstract

I integrate Charles Peirce’s theory of signs with his realism and synechism to develop a novel interpretation of his philosophical system, which I refer to as Semeiotic Realism. I argue that Peirce’s Semeiotic Realism makes a devastating critique of Ockham’s nominalism, particularly his theory of conceptual signs. Semeiotic Realism is the doctrine that signs are real relations existing independently of particular thoughts and therefore have a generality irreducible to any discrete number of singular cognitive acts. Chapter One introduces Peirce’s theory of signs. I argue that Peirce arrives at his triadic sign relation to ground an anti-psychologistic theory of logic. I establish the connection between sign relations and the structure of inference, tracing this connection back to Greek thinking about the semeῖon and outlining its consequences for Peirce’s theories of categories and inquiry. Chapter Two disentangles the nominalism-realism controversy from the problem of universals. I show that the nominalist’s position about universals results from their logical analysis of terms. These terms are conceptual signs that stand for their objects only relative to singular cognitive acts. For the nominalist, reality is exhausted by existing particulars outside the mind and since signs only have mind-dependent being they are not real. To address this problem, I clarify Peircean reality and use his mature theory of semiotic interpretation to explain how signs have a reality irreducible to singular cognitive acts. Chapter Three introduces Peircean continuity, explaining how it informs his mature critique of nominalism, his method for analyzing propositions as sign relations, and his theory of sign inference. Continuity underpins his analysis of propositions into continuous relations. These relations precede the subjects they relate, which makes relations themselves out to be the elementary units of logic. The chapter concludes by introducing Peirce’s existential graphs to model and diagram sign inferences as continuous transformations.