Peirce's Concept of Sign (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 115 The full weight of this view cannot be communicated here, but anyone who reads Allison's complete argument will find it convincing. The only point on which he stumbles concerns the problem of empirical concepts. The passage A 712/B 741-A 738/B 766 strongly suggests that Kant believed all empirical judgments to be synthetic just because one cannot ever be sure what the essence of something known only empirically is (A 738/B 766). Maass and contemporary empiricists tend to attack the distinction by using empirical concepts in their examples. This approach does not speak to the issue. The rest of Allison's commentary comprises an interpretation of the theories of pure sensibility and schematism. His main concern regarding pure intuition is to argue against Eberhard and other interpreters that space and time are not images but that which underlies the possibility of having images present to consciousness. As such, he characterizes them as dispositions (p. 84). The first part of this view will certainly pass muster, but the second is odd: It would be far more reasonable to hold that outer and inner sense are dispositions to organize sensation spatially and temporally. Although Professor Allison has several interesting comments on schematism, his position regarding its role in the Critique is difficult precisely and concisely to characterize, and I shall not attempt to do so here. Suffice it to say that this remains one of the truly murky aspects of Kant's thought. In sum, this is a work that anyone seriously interested in gaining a clearer understanding of Kant and the milieu in which he philosophized must read. It will repay close study. I found typographical errors on pages 12 and 19. TED B. HUMPHREY Arizona State University Peirce's Concept o/Sign. By Douglas Greenlee. Approaches to Semiotics, No. 5. (The Hague: Mouton, 1973. Pp. 148) This book is a valuable study of Peirce and of philosophic issues in the theory of signs. Further, there are some promising suggestions as to the role of a general theory of signs for philosophic naturalism. Professor Greenlee rightly sees the concepts of sign and signfunction occupying a central place in Peirces' thought; he fully appreciates the remarkable scope and depth of Peirce's theorizing, which, while often sketchy, remains unmatched in its wealth of suggestive distinctions, developments and applications. It was Peirce who said "the word or sign which a man uses is the man himself," and "all thought whatever is a sign, and mostly of the nature of language." One could be dogmatic, where Greelee is not, and contend that the concept of sign and what it entails is the key (if we had but one key) into the difficult and fragmentary recesses of Peirce's thought and writings. Greenlee's book is not a historical study. That is, no attempt is made to uncover and trace the historical development of Peirce's work on signs, the various problems as Peirce conceived them, and the phases of construction and revision and refractory considerations through which his investigations proceeded. Some such account of the objectives and difficulties that forced Peirce to certain reconsiderations might have enhanced this book and illuminated some of the topics to which the author is led by the questions he raises at the outset. As one instance, there is a basic question why, after many attempts, Peirce never arrived at one satisfactory definition of sign. The question is noted (p. 23) but an answer is not pursued of the kind that would require, among other matters, a scrutiny of the shifts in Peirce's thought from a moderate to an extreme "scholastic" realism as affecting the theory of signification. Moreover, the author confines himself to the Collected Papers and the letters to Lady Welby for his sources, and this, while a mine of material, is not all that could be desired. There are important unpublished Mss and letters which would 116 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY have proved invaluable for some of his analyses and helped him to find answers to issues about which he professes puzzlement and a sense of mystery. Finally there is a derth of references to the existing literature and...