Pragmatism and Realism: Semiotics as Language Transgression

Abstract

Anyone who studies Peirce’s Phenomenology carefully will probably notice, in this first science of Philosophy, which deals solely with appearances and a taxonomy of experience – thus establishing the author’s categorial structure – a prediction of an ontology which has no theoretical space therein, but that will later come true in its own realm, that is, in Metaphysics. Within Phenomenology itself, the categories of experience will also index a symmetry between subject and object, suggesting, genetically, that the sphere of epistemology strongly interact with the ontology, imposing upon Semiotics a commitment of theoretical attunement with the realism of the continua adopted by Peirce. It is thus that the sphere of meaning or the universe of interpretants can neither be confined solely to language, nor be taken as a founding instance of the object when it wishes to stand for reality. Such theoretical boundary conditions will include Pragmatism as an essential doctrine that will enable an amplification of the concept of meaning, necessary to a harmonious relation between Semiotics and Peircean realism.The cognitive possibility of the sign will be provided by the actualization of its inner side as phenomenical exteriority, thus honoring the epistemological commitment provided by the rule of pragmatic meaning. It is in this line of theoretical development that we shall endeavor to highlight, in this short essay, that Semiotics is not simply a system of signs in which human languages and their respective logics are organized, organizing thus the contents of knowledge and meaning of its objects, but also, that it deals with a pragmatic science in its most wide-ranging aspect. In other words, it should enable not just a reading of the intersubjective communication phenomena, but equally, a realistic reading of the world in which natural signs interconnect transitively, that is, signify communicative and pragmatically. In this essay we intend to show, briefly, that Semiotics, when associated with a principle of meaning provided by the relation between sign and the action caused by it, i.e., to Pragmatism, acquires the true realistic reach required by Peirce’s philosophy.