Peirce on Perception and Reasoning

From Icons to Logic

Kathleen A. Hull, Richard Kenneth Atkins, Kathleen A. Hull, Richard Kenneth Atkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367372408
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315444628
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 What Do We Perceive? How Peirce “Expands Our Perception”
• 2 Perception as Inference
• 3 Inferential Modeling of Percept Formation: Peirce’s Fourth Cotary Proposition
• 4 Idealism Operationalized: How Peirce’s Pragmatism Can Help Explicate and Motivate the Possibly Surprising Idea of Reality as Representational
• 5 The Iconic Ground of Gestures: Peirce, Wittgenstein, and Foucault
• 6 Foundations for Semeiotic Aesthetics: Mimesis and Iconicity
• 7 Semiotics, Schemata, Diagrams, and Graphs: A New Form of Diagrammatic Kantism by Peirce
• 8 The Chemistry of Relations: Peirce, Perspicuous Representations, and Experiments with Diagrams
• 9 Graphs as Images vs. Graphs as Diagrams: A Problem at the Intersection of Semiotics and Didactics
• 10 C. S. Peirce and the Teaching of Drawing
• 11 What Is Behind the Logic of Scientific Discovery? Aristotle and Charles S. Peirce on Imagination
• 12 The Iconic Peirce: Geometry, Spatial Intuition, and Visual Imagination
• 13 Two Dogmas of Diagrammatic Reasoning: A View from Existential Graphs
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index