Charles S. Peirce on Dialogic Form

Abstract:According to Charles Peirce, “thinking always proceeds in the form of a dialogue —a dialogue between different phases of the ego—so that, being dialogical, it is essentially composed of signs, as its matter, in the sense in which a game of chess has the chessmen for its matter” (CP 4.6, 1906). As this insight seems to imply that thought processes are essentially semeiotic, because they are dialogical, it is the dialogical form of thought that grounds and necessitates its semeioticity. The truth of the ‘dialogicality thesis’ for Peirce “is not merely a fact of human Psychology” but rather reflects “a necessity of Logic, that every logical evolution of thought should be dialogic” (CP 4.551, 1906). But is all thought really dialogic? And what is the set of formal properties belonging to logically evolving thought that Peirce here designates with the term ‘dialogic’? What does “the form of a dialogue” in which all thinking proceeds actually consist in? And what kind of truth is expressed by the dialogicality thesis, if it is not a psychological one? We contribute to answering these questions by distinguishing two ways in which dialogic form is thematized in Peirce’s writings. Dialogicality is, on the one hand, a rhetorical principle of composition operative in his writings. As such, it thematizes dialogicality performatively. On the other hand, dialogic form is also the object of his writings. As an object of philosophical inquiry, dialogic form fascinates Peirce from the very inception of his development in the late 1850s and takes center stage in the development of quantification-theory in the 1880s; however, he did not use the term ‘dialogical form’ before 1904, so that it is only in the last decade of his life that he provides a coenoscopic analysis of the components and normative dimensions of the dialogic form of thought.