Choices, dogmatisms and bets – justifying Peirce’s realism

Abstract

The conceptual axis of this paper is a reflection on Charles Peirce’s realism, trying to show it as the ground from which many others of his philosophical doctrines are derived. In its first part, the paper analyses the problems posed by the classical Peircean paper Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man, proposing to extract from the consequences of this analysis the guidelines of a realism that gradually become more radical in Peirce’s mature work. Such consequences will be consolidated in his Phenomenology, a science that will ground Semiotics and a conception of symmetry related to Peirce’s categories. This symmetry regarding his epistemology and ontology will be, by the way, omnipresent in all Peircean philosophical system. The second part of the paper discusses the concepts of mediation and representation, also under a realistic background, concluding that these concepts cannot be coherently interlaced in nominalistic philosophies, in which is often found theoretical consequences somehow committed with dogmatic and no dialogic postures, in the sense of a meaning analysis proposed by the classical Peircean pragmatism.