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I N T RODUC TION Peirce Compared: Directions for Use Although the present book is a collection of essays written over ¤fty years, either in French or in English, according to circumstances, my way of approaching Peirce has always followed the same line which allows me to call them Essays in Comparative Semiotics. As to the title, Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs, I am not responsible for the fact that Peirce’s theory of signs is philosophical, rather than “ethnological” like that of Claude Lévy-Strauss, or “linguistic” like that of Roman Jakobson. That is why not only philosophy in general, including ideology, but metaphysics in particular, play a part in Peirce’s semiotics, and consequently in my book. In spite of the fact that my papers were written to introduce Peirce to a French public, and perhaps thanks to it, my book has a unity of method which explains itself. First, writing for French readers, I could not refer them to English or American authors whom they were not supposed to know. I could resort only to French authors or French translations of English-speaking authors, dealing with the same semiotic subject matter. Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, their approach was so different that I could stress only the differences and not the resemblances. That is why my “comparative” method is differential. Peirce stands alone of his kind. Second, I had to compare Peirce, not only to French authors or foreign authors translated into French, but to himself both chronologically and contextually. As a reader of Peirce myself, I wanted to be fair and read Peirce’s writings chronologically. One cannot reject an argument, developed, let us say in 1906, by quoting a text from 1867 or 1877–1878. Between 1867, when Peirce proposed his new list of categories, or 1877–1878 when he proposed his “pragmatic maxim,” and 1904–1911 when he was corresponding with Lady Welby, he changed his mind. The new logic of relatives which he invented around 1875 led him to abandon the Western “dualistic” way of thinking as promoted from Aristotle to Kant, for a “triadic” and “anti-inductive” way of reasoning which experimental method and evolutive sciences ¤rst practiced.That is why I sometimes, when necessary , give the date of my quotations from Peirce. To be fair, one has also to read an author in context. The vocabulary of a philosopher is not the same as that of a mathematician or a biologist. When a philosopher is also a mathematical logician and pragmatist, as was the case with Peirce, one has to specify the public to which a given text (already dated) is addressed . For instance, Peirce uses the concept of “degenerate” when he wants to be understood by mathematicians or logicians. When he addresses philosophers, he uses other concepts, such as the three phenomenological or rather phaneroscopical categories. In the ¤rst instance, he would say that a “proposition” is a degenerate case of “argument” (“argument,” in Peirce’s sense, i.e., any ordered system). In the other instance, he would say that a Third is “vague and empty,” a mere “structure” and that a Second is a single, singular, and unique replica of a Third, the best example being the relation between “type” and “token.” But it would be nonsense to speak here in terms of “degeneracy,” because, as a First, the type is not a “genuine” category, but an “accretive” sign. Let us give another more simple and general case. In a paper published in the Times Literary Supplement on August 23, 1985, Jonathan Cohen insists on what he thinks to be a contradiction in what he calls Peircean “anti-realism”: The Peircean anti-realist “assumes that scienti¤c method [ . . . ] is suf¤cient to guarantee the convergence” between scienti¤c consensus and truth, because “he takes such convergence to be an a priori philosophical truth.” “So though the Peircean is a fallibilist in relation to science itself, he is an infallibilist in relation to methodology” (Cohen 1985: 929). Jonathan Cohen is mistaken here because his conception of truth is out of context. “Inquiry” has nothing to do with “truth” and certainly not with “an a priori philosophical truth.” According to Peirce, “inquiry” can give birth only to “warranted assertibility,” to use the expression coined by John Dewey and quoted by Cohen. The same mistake was made by the analytic philosophers when they were orthodox and by the renegades of the next generation, whether they were “realists” or “neo-pragmatists...

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