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4 Peirce’s Horse: A Sympathetic and Semeiotic Bond Douglas R. Anderson The systematic philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce is not the ¤rst place one might turn to in looking for a description of the relationship between human persons and other animals. The writings of Henry David Thoreau or John Muir might at ¤rst blush seem more likely homes for such a story. But Peirce’s work, by his own admission, retains some features of transcendentalism; and one of these, the belief in the perceptibility or sensibility of meaning, provides a reasonable basis for developing just the sort of story that Thoreau and Muir do tell us. The difference is that Peirce’s story is not so much a discourse on nature as a pragmatic outcome of his synechism, or theory of continuity, and his realistic idea of perception that underwrites his theory of inquiry. In Lecture IV of his 1903 lectures on pragmatism, Peirce worked to describe the practice of phenomenology as the basis for all inquiry. Phenomenology, for Peirce, involves a practical attentiveness to the world—what we might call an aesthetically motivated perception. Another way in which he puts this point is that we perceive or feel meanings. As Richard Bernstein argues, Peirce was sensitive to the “dimension of felt immediacy and argued that an adequate theory of perception must give it its proper due” (177). Thus, in Peirce’s own words: “all reasoning . . . turns upon perception of generality and continuity at every step” (Essential Peirce [EP] 191). This theory of phenomenological perception, which is akin to William James’s “radical empiricism,” is tied closely to Peirce’s realism and synechism; taken together, they suggest “that Thirdness [generality, continuity] is operative in Nature”(Collected Papers [CP] 5:93).1 That is, natural laws, relations, habits, and meanings are real and knowable. My aim here is to build from this basis an account of how we might understand our relations to animals from a Peircean perspective. We will not be able to discern a speci¤c recipe for dealing with animals, but we should be able to establish several general suggestive claims that open up the possibilities for human-animal relationships in a Peircean world. In Lecture IV and elsewhere, Peirce insisted that feelings have semeiotic power—that is, that they can function as signs.2 “A mere presentment,” he said, “may be a sign” (CP 1:313; see also EP 161). Thus, feelings or presentments can bear meaning and can function interpretively. It is in this sense that we can feel or perceive meaning. In an often-cited example, Peirce suggests that a blind person might maintain that the color red resembles “the blare of a trumpet” (CP 1:314). Finding himself understanding the blind person’s meaning, Peirce considers the import of this experience: He [the blind person] had collected that notion from hearing ordinary people converse together about the colors, and since I was not born to be one of those whom he had heard converse, the fact that I can see a certain analogy, shows me not only that my feeling of redness is something like the feelings of the persons whom he had heard talk, but also his feeling of a trumpet’s blare was very much like mine. (CP 1:314) Thus, not only can we feel meanings and analogies, but we are able to share such feelings. Let us turn aside from Peirce’s pragmatism lectures for a moment to consider a relevant consequence of his synechism. In a nominalistic world constituted of discrete individual entities, the borders between species would be clearly demarcated , and there would be de¤nite ontological breaks between species. In a synechistic world, however, all borders are continuous and consequently are inherently vague. Thus, when we consider species of similar genera, we can think of their being as continuous with one another. On such a view, there is no ontological obstacle to the possibility of communication across species and, perhaps , even across genera. At the very least, there would be borderline beings whose species home it is dif¤cult to discern; and it would be reasonable to suppose that such borderland creatures could communicate with each other and with those on either side of the border. With no theoretical obstacle, Peirce is led by experience to the belief that we in fact do so communicate. He claims that animals have an instinct for communication: “for some kind of language there is among nearly all animals. Not...

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