A Dialogue on Inquiry

The Oxford Handbook of Charles S. Peirce, ed. Cornelis de Waal, Oxford University Press, 2022

This article considers how Peirce's semiotic work suggests perspectives on learning and education. It focuses mostly on Peirce's outlines of a speculative grammar from the mid-1890s, but it also considers earlier and later phases of his philosophical development. In the mid-1890s Peirce analyses signs used in assertions and how the uses of these signs serve as conditions for learning from experience. Peirce qualifies these signs in terms of his symbol/index/icon typology and analyses how they enable learning in everyday life and further prepare the learner for scientific education and specialization. The article shows how Peirce's analysis may shed further light on learning processes through a comparison with Habermas' theory of communicative action. Finally, the article considers how Peirce's semiotic analysis can be complemented by perspectives on learning and education that philosophers of education recently developed from his post-1900 semiotic work.

2009

What is the logical background of pragmatism? The answer I want to suggest in this paper is that pragmatism is supported by some mathematical and logical ideas that provide a logical background for it. That is to say, they may be used to back up pragmatism’s claim to give us a viable account of thought and knowledge acquisition that describes some of the crucial relations by which knowledge acquisition and action are guided. I will start by giving a short account of why some mathematical and logical ideas coming from the logic of relations, order theory in particular, might be helpful for pragmatism’s view of knowledge and praxis. That is, I claim that they support, clarify and strengthen some of the claims made by the pragmatic maxim. In a second step I describe why these logical concepts and rules of reasoning acquire a normative meaning when they become part of pragmatism‘s semiotic, methodology and epistemology. In particular, the normative role of a semiotic concept of the iden...

Foro de Educación, 2013

The author of this essay draws out some of the most important implications of Peirce's thought for the philosophy of education. In particular, he focuses on the deliberate cultivation of phenomenological attention, methodological (or heuristic) imagination, experiential realism, contrite fallibilism, and wide erudition as implications of Peirce's texts. Especially in conjunction with phenomenological attention, he develops a notion of world, but a distinctively pragmatic conception of this highly ambiguous word. Then, in connection with this understanding of world, the author makes a case for the pragmatist reconstruction (or reconceptualization) of human experience. While the received view takes experience to be inherently and invincibly subjective, the reconstructed (or pragmatist) one takes experience to be a direct, yet mediated encounter with reality. Peirce's thought drives in the direction of recognizing, in reference to education, the need for a recovery of the world and the reconstruction of experience. But it also prompts us to see just how important are a resolute fallibilism, heuristic imagination, and wide learning.

International Philosophical Quarterly, 2011

Drawing on the work of Charles Peirce and Bernard Lonergan, I argue (1) that inferences are essentially related to a process of inquiry, (2) that there is a normative pattern to this process, one in which each of Peirce's three distinct types of inferenceabductive, deductive, and inductive-plays a distinct cognitive role, and (3) that each type of inference answers a distinct type of question and thereby resolves a distinct kind of interrogative intentionality. 1

Choice Reviews Online, 2002

Cognitio, 2020

There is, at the heart of this paper, a comparison between Peirce's understanding of inquiry and Royce's account of interpretation. It is framed by a consideration of self-misunderstanding (a consideration developed in reference to Peirce) and, tied to this discussion of self-misunderstanding, a consideration of understanding itself. For Peirce, in his account of inquiry, and Royce in his meta-interpretation (i.e., his interpretation of the meaning and function of interpretation itself), some form of understanding is at stake. For example, the task of the scientific inquirer is unfinished if it stops at the discovering of the bare facts (simply that something is actually the case-i.e., a body such as a small stone held aloft by a person will fall to the ground if the person lets it go). While for both thinkers, science is not a body of secure knowledge but rather a form of ongoing inquiry, it aims primarily at understanding. Both Peirce and Royce are animated by a commitment to the intelligibility of the cosmos in its full sweep and smallest detail. Peirce's account of inquiry and Royce's conception of interpretation are endeavors to detail how human actors render ever more deeply and widely intelligible the world of their experience. Much can be learned comparing them in this respect.

Southwest Philosophy Review, 1996

"Genuine Doubt and the Community in Peirce's Theory of Inquiry." Southwest Philosophy Review (Spring 1996) Peirce defined "inquiry" as the passage from genuine doubt to settled belief; in the long run, a properly-functioning scientific community's inquiries must converge toward Truth. To explain why Peirce believed such convergence is necessary, I examine two notions: community and genuine doubt. Genuine doubt, I find, not only makes convergence possible, but also constitutes the starting point of most inquiries. The exception is philosophical inquiry, where, increasingly in Peirce's later writings, "genuine doubt" is supplanted by "cultivated doubt." This shift creates a tension in his general account of inquiry which I attempt to moderate by offering two interpretations.

In the seminal essay " Pragmatism " , Peirce discusses the end of interpretation in terms of the ultimate logical interpretant, which is varyingly characterized as habit or habit-change. While it is broadly accepted that his conception of pragmatic meaning rests on habit, the precise role of habit-change in his account of conceptual purport has not been examined in detail. In this chapter, I address this issue, which turns out to be closely linked to the pivotal question of the purpose of Peircean pragmatism itself. My primary aim is to demonstrate that Peirce's pragmatic account of the interpretant surpasses that of mere explication of habitual meaning, something that can be teased out from an embryonic account of three logical interpretants, sketched in " Pragmatism " and supported by certain suggestive references to first, second, and third pragmatistic interpretation in other writings. This investigation not only exposes the hitherto overlooked fact that Peirce recognizes a stage of conceptual clarification beyond that of the ultimate logical interpretant; it also paves the way for a reassessment of the significance of the pragmatist approach within a broader developmental-normative framework aimed at the improvements of our habits.