Forms of sign and forms of being. The phaneroscopic and synechistic ontology of C.S. Peirce

Abstract

With the introduction of phenomenology as High Philosophy, we see a turn in Peirce's thought, a renewal of the metaphysical themes that, already unfolded in the very first essays, he had abandoned for some years in favour of strictly formal logic reflections. In fact, through an observational glance on reality, finally translated in a theory of the universal forms of experience, philosophy can elaborate an ontological theory of a more refined character than that originally proposed in the anti-cartesian and pragmatist writings. The new categoriology developed in the breast of phaneroscopy seals an ontology of a semiotic kind, rooted in the presymbolic and pre-rational cognitive processes yet: earlier than a "symbolics of being", we can see the development of an ontology from the semiosic premisses of knowledge. This is then liable to a pragmatic reading, that is, as a "pragmatics of being", in which praxis draws the ontological profiles of reality and so ratifies the encounter with the logos-sign. In the complex semiotic interlacement of interpretants and semiosic objects, pragmatism rises again as an ontology of praxis that, therefore, constitutes the achievement of a semiotic theory of being, supported by a metaphysics of the possible of aristotelian flavour, in which the real offers itself first of all in the semiosic premisses of cognitive activity, icons and indexes - ontological continuum as pure possibility of significance that leads to truth the entire chain of signs. Beyond every form of idealism, the concept of reality is no longer limited only to the operativity of Thirdness, but to all the three forms of experience enumerated by phaneroscopy. Reality appears, then, as the product of a categorial dialectics of triadic nature, of which the sign represents the higher point of growth. This dialectics, besides, lights up the mysterious relation - plain in the peircean writings - between pragmatism as a logical and methodological maxim and synechism. In fact synechism admits a convergence of sign and being, that we can recognize in the philosophical and strictly metaphysical gist of the logic of pragmatism.