Nathan Houser

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis | IUPUI · Department of Philosophy

Semiotics has not been warmly welcomed as an area of research concentration within philosophy, especially not within philosophy in the English empirical tradition. But when we consider that much of the focus of semiotic research is signification, reference, and representation, it seems evident that semiotic questions are as old as reflective though...

O trumpismo nos Estados Unidos, assim como outras erupções populistas ao redor do mundo, demonstra que valores fundamentais herdados pelo Iluminismo são muito menos seguros no Ocidente do que fora presumido. Estima pela racionalidade e conhecimento objetivo e o respeito pela liberdade individual vem sendo enfraquecidos pela dissolução da sociedade...

To survive and thrive in our always evolving world, humans must learn from experience and conserve vital intelligence for immediate access when needed for the resolution of existential predicaments. Peirce described this process as one of inquiry, a trial and error proceeding that resolves quandaries (doubts) and forges habits (beliefs) that accumu...

This essay addresses a question raised by Helmut Pape: “What logical, semiotical and mental structure does our consciousness have to have in order to establish the proper link between perception, thought and propositional content expressed by indicators?” The answer, it is proposed, is found in Peirce’s Existential Graphs (EG). First, EG is, itself...

Peirce, like his father before him, was proud of his American heritage and was convinced of his fitness to stand shoulder to shoulder with scientists and philosophers from any place or time. Yet, as he well understood, scientific progress is a long- term commu-nal enterprise and he knew that the roots of his own knowledge sprang from European thoug...

Early in the 20th century, Peirce began a paper on the foundations of mathematics which would validate a new approach in mathematics education. He titled his paper, “Kαινὰ στοιχεῖα” or “New Elements,” conjoining his project with the work of Euclid. Peirce never finished this paper and it remains one of his most problematic and obscure unfinished wr...

The themes of SSA 2006, "The Future of Semiotics", and of SSA 2007, "Semiotics and Survival", are linked by an initial consideration of the prospects for the survival of semiotics as a discipline. Since its separation from philosophy in the United States in the mid-twentieth century and its founding as a separate multi-disciplinary study, semiotics...

It is commonly supposed that the pragmatisms of Peirce and James are fundamentally opposed; this view is supported by the fact that in 1905 Peirce deliberately chose a new name for his original doctrine. Yet Peirce and James were not only life-long friends but to a surprising extent were life-long collaborators. It is true that their approaches to...

In his Four ages, John Deely points to Peirce's 1905 Monist article, "What is pragmatism," as a key text in the history of human intellectual development. It was there that Peirce famously kissed his child ( the word "pragmatism") good-bye and renamed his great contribution to philosophy "pragmaticism," a word "ugly enough to be safe from kidnapper...

A considered reexamination of Santayana's exposure to Peirce's thought and a comparison of his views with those of Peirce leads to a cautious acceptance that Santayana was influenced by Peirce, perhaps more than he realized. To what extent and in what respects Santayana was influenced is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine but it is conject...

In the spring of 1880, not long before leaving for Europe on scientific business for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, Charles Peirce sent a paper entitled “On the Algebra of Logic” to The American Journal of Mathematics 1 (hereafter referred to as AJM-1880; I will similarly refer to two other papers published in that journal). Peirce ha...

1. This paper was presented as my Presidential Address to the Charles S. Peirce Society on 28 December 2003 in Washington, D. C. It has been modified only slightly. 2. John Sowa's research on applications of his EG-based Conceptual Graphs and Knowledge Representation is what I have in mind (see Sowa's website: www.jfsowa.com). 3. For example, see R...

This is an early attempt to understand how much cognitive science and semiotics have—or should have—in common. I had heard remarks occasionally (starting in the 80's) about how cognitive science should take semiotics more seriously, and I had even heard Thomas Sebeok reprove cognitive scientists for staking a claim to part of the territory of semio...