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Peirce’s Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics offers a comprehensive, philologically accurate, and exegetically ambitious genetic account of Peirce’s theory of speculative grammar. The book traces the evolution of Peirce’s grammatical writings from his early research on the classification of arguments in the 1860s up to the complex semiotic taxonomies elaborated in the first decade of the twentieth century. It will be of interest to academic specialists working on Peirce, the history of American philosophy and pragmatism, the philosophy of language, the history of logic, and semiotics.

The paper argues that if there is a philosophy of language in Peirce, this is to be sought in his conception of speculative grammar. I reconstruct the evolution of Peirce’s speculative grammar in the period 1894-1906 and I show that while in the 1890s speculative grammar is considered as a theory of the proposition, beginning 1903 Peirce conceives it as a general classification of signs, which also includes a pioneeristic speech act theory.

Questo contributo è una recensione e un'analisi critica del libro di Giovanni Manetti, In principio era il segno (Milano: Bompiani 2013)

Il contributo è una recensione all'ottavo volume dell'edizione critica degli scritti di C. S. Peirce (Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A Chronological Edition, Volume 8: 1890-1892, ed. Peirce Edition Project, Indiana UP 2010)

This paper explains in what sense for Peirce phaneroscopical analysis is a kind of formal, rather than material, analysis. It addresses the question of the presuppositions of phaneroscopy, i.e., the way in which this science presupposes the results of a more primary science (mathematics, and in particular the logic of relatives); it deals with the specific phaneroscopical analysis of the idea of combination, or thirdness; and it discusses the relationship between phaneroscopical and logical analysis.

Il contributo è una recensione al volume di Claudio Paolucci, Strutturalismo e interpretazione (Milano: Bompiani 2010)

In questo lavoro si suggerisce che, nonostante il giovanile rifiuto dell’intuizione cartesiana, la semiotica matura di Charles S. Peirce è invece caratterizzata da un ritorno all’Anschaaung kantiana. L’ambito del “ritorno” all’intuizione è la filosofia kantiana della matematica, che Peirce approfondiva e trasformava in una dottrina del pensiero diagrammatico.

Nel Trattato Umberto Eco sosteneva che il soggetto dell’enunciazione deve essere pensato non tanto come l'Io trascendentale kantiano o husserliano, quanto come “uno degli elementi del contenuto veicolato”, e suggeriva che pertanto il soggetto della semiotica è la semiosi stessa. A questo proposito Eco citava un famoso passo di “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (1868) di Charles Sanders Peirce, in cui il filosofo americano affermava che “l’uomo è un segno” e che “il linguaggio è la somma totale di me stesso perché l’uomo è il pensiero”. Questo lavoro cerca di ricostruire una speciale e finora poco esplorata teoria peirciana del soggetto e di mostrare come, mediante il rifiuto della soggettività trascendentale kantiana, Peirce abbia davvero inteso il soggetto come “uno degli elementi del contenuto veicolato”

This paper presents two major aspects of Frege's and Peirce's views on assertion and denial: first, their arguments for the notational choices concerning the representation of assertion and denial in Begriffsschrift (BS) and Existential Graphs (EGs), respectively; and second, those properties of BS and EGs which reflect their inventors' views on assertion and denial. We show that while Frege's notation has an ad hoc sign of assertion and an ad hoc sign of negation, Peirce has a sign of assertion which is also a sign of logical conjunction, and a sign of scope which is also a sign of negation.

We propose a reconstruction of the constellation of problems and philosophical positions on the nature and number of the primitives of logic in four authors of the nineteenth century logical scene: Peano, Padoa, Frege and Peirce. We argue that the proposed reconstruction forces us to recognize that it is in at least four different senses that a notation can be said to be simpler than another, and we trace the origins of these four senses in the writings of these authors. We conclude that Frege, and even more so Peirce, developed new notations not to make drawing logical conclusions easier but in order to answer the needs of logical analysis.

We examine Charles S. Peirce's mature views on the logic of science, especially as contained in his later and still mostly unpublished writings (1907–1914). We focus on two main issues. The first concerns Peirce's late conception of retroduction. Peirce conceived inquiry as performed in three stages, which correspond to three classes of inferences: abduction or retroduction, deduction, and induction. The question of the logical form of retroduction, of its logical justification, and of its methodology stands out as the three major threads in his later writings. The other issue concerns the second stage of scientific inquiry, deduction. According to Peirce's later formulation, deduction is divided not only into two kinds (corollarial and theorematic) but also into two sub-stages: logical analysis and mathematical reasoning, where the latter is either corollarial or theorematic. Save for the inductive stage, which we do not address here, these points cover the essentials of Peirce's latest thinking on the logic of science and reasoning.

We explain the grammar and the critics of the habits of reasoning, using Peirce’s 1903 Lowell Lectures and the related Syllabus as the key textual source. We establish what Peirce took sound reasoning to be, and derive a major soundness result concerning his logic as semeiotic: an argument is valid if for any object that the premises represent, the conclusion represents it as well, which in semeiotic terms translates to a sign being a valid argument if for any object that the sign represents, the interpretant sign represents it as well. The perfect adherence of the grammar to the critics is evidenced by the un-eliminability of leading principles. Just as a logical leading principle is an un-eliminable element of reasoning, because any attempt to use it as a premise engenders an infinite regress, so a logical representative interpretant is a habit that cannot be rendered a sign. The logical representative interpretant is a principle not itself a premise, a rule not itself subject to rules, a habit not itself a sign.

open 1 no Include Commento di Helmut Pape (pp. 416–418). The paper argues against what I call the “Fregean interpretation” of Peirce’s distinction between the immediate and the dynamic object of a sign, according to which Peirce’s dynamic object is akin to Frege’s Bedeutung, while Peirce’s immediate object is akin to Frege’s Sinn. After having exposed the Fregean interpretation, I briefly reconstruct the genesis of Peirce’s notion of immediate object in his semiotic writings of the years 1904–1909 and defend the view that, according to Peirce, only propositions have immediate objects. none Bellucci F. Bellucci F.