An “Historicist” Reading of Peirce’s Pragmatist Semeiotic: A Pivotal Maxim and Evolving Practices

Abstract:What would happen to Peirce’s study of signs if we did not focus to such a great extent on such phenomena as a sunflower turning toward the sun, or a person knocking on a door, or the formation of a fossil, or even a string of sentences woven into a text such as a literary essay or scientific memoir, but rather preoccupied ourselves with such complex and open-ended phenomena as the history of a science (say, the science of biology)? Would this make any difference for how we (for example) conceive the object of semiosis? Moreover, do not the paradigmatic instances of the experimental sciences in which Peirce was most interested display their vitality as much as anywhere in the continual refashioning (at least, rethinking) of their most basic concepts? These are the questions with which the author of this essay concerns himself.