Peirce’s Semiotics and its Relation with Habermas’s Discourse Ethics

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to compare Peirce’s Semiotics with Habermas’ updated Discourse Ethics thus reworking his formal pragmatics related to the philosophical questions of truth, justification, correctness and moral legitimacy; he adopts Peirce’s Fallibilism for his concept of truth in accordance with Peirce’s philosophy and indicates, for issues that require moral correctness, an epistemic realism without representation, which arranges itself with a moral constructivism, able to claim a pretension of unconditionality for moral legitimacy under the assumption of an independent world which is more or less the same to everyone. He maintains, in his formal pragmatics, an “almost” ideal condition to speech, which keeps the tension between the empirical and the ideal. As opposed to Peirce, Habermas refutes the Peircean concept of final opinion of inquirers to ensure the fallible propositions taken as true, because he considers this request a priori, directive and transcendental, not applicable to the consensus of those involved in moral phenomena. It is concluded, however, that the solution of integrating all these philosophical questions given by Habermas, especially for the tension of ideality within his pragmatic bias, embodies substantial elements from Peirce’s philosophy that allows to assert that in updating his moral philosophy, there is an extension and elaboration of what existed in suggestions and roots in Peirce’s classical pragmatism.