1st Edition

Peirce on Perception and Reasoning From Icons to Logic

Edited By Kathleen A. Hull, Richard Kenneth Atkins Copyright 2017
    232 Pages 25 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    232 Pages 25 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    The founder of both American pragmatism and semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) is widely regarded as an enormously important and pioneering theorist. In this book, scholars from around the world examine the nature and significance of Peirce’s work on perception, iconicity, and diagrammatic thinking. Abjuring any strict dichotomy between presentational and representational mental activity, Peirce’s theories transform the Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian paradigms that continue to hold sway today and, in so doing, forge a new path for understanding the centrality of visual thinking in science, education, art, and communication. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of issues related to Peirce’s theories, including the perception of generality; the legacy of ideas being copies of impressions; imagination and its contribution to knowledge; logical graphs, diagrams, and the question of whether their iconicity distinguishes them from other sorts of symbolic notation; how images and diagrams contribute to scientific discovery and make it possible to perceive formal relations; and the importance and danger of using diagrams to convey scientific ideas. This book is a key resource for scholars interested in Perice’s philosophy and its relation to contemporary issues in mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, semiotics, logic, visual thinking, and cognitive science.

    Chapter One: What Do We Perceive?: How Peirce "Expands Our Perception"

    Aaron Bruce Wilson

    Chapter Two: Perception as Inference

    Evelyn Vargas

    Chapter Three: Inferential Modeling of Percept Formation: Peirce’s Fourth Cotary Proposition

    Richard Kenneth Atkins

    Chapter Four: "Things Unreasonably Compulsory": Hume and Peirce on Perceiving Necessity

    Catherine Legg

    Chapter Five: The Iconic Ground of Gestures: Peirce, Wittgenstein, and Foucault

    Rossella Fabbrichesi

    Chapter Six: Foundations for Semeiotic Aesthetics: Mimesis and Iconicity

    Kelly A. Parker

    Chapter Seven : Semiotics, Schemata, Diagrams and Graphs: A New Form of Diagrammatic Kantism by Peirce

    Claudio Paolucci

    Chapter Eight : The Chemistry of Relations: Peirce, Perspicuous Representations, and Experiments with Diagrams

    Chiara Ambrosio and Chris Campbell

    Chapter Nine : Graphs as Images vs. Graphs as Diagrams: A Problem at the Intersection of Semiotics and Didactics

    Michael May

    Chapter Ten: C.S. Peirce and the Teaching of Drawing

    Seymour Simmons III

    Chapter Eleven : What is Behind the Logic of Scientific Discovery?: Aristotle and Charles S. Peirce on Imagination

    Christos A. Pechlivanidis

    Chapter Twelve: The Iconic Peirce: Geometry, Spatial Intuition, and Visual Imagination

    Kathleen A. Hull

    Chapter Thirteen: Two Dogmas of Diagrammatic Reasoning: A View from Existential Graphs

    Ahti-Viekko Pietarinen and Francesco Bellucci

    Biography

    Kathleen A. Hull resides in Boston and taught for over a decade at New York University and Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research and publications have focused on Charles Sanders Peirce and pedagogy. She has won awards for teaching excellence, creative thought, and inspiring students with a love of learning.

    Richard Kenneth Atkins is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He is the author of Peirce and the Conduct of Life: Sentiment and Instinct in Ethics and Religion (2016) and Puzzled?! An Introduction to Philosophizing (2015) as well as numerous essays.

    "This book contains original, insightful, and inspiring papers on important aspects of Peirce’s theory of perception, the role of icons and indices in reasoning, and diagrammatic reasoning more generally. This is most certainly a must-read book for anyone interested in the most recent work on the later Peirce, theories of perception, the connection between perception and semiotics, phenomenology, visual thinking, and the constitutive role of diagrams in logic and reasoning."Cornelis de Waal, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, USA