Peirce S Speculative Grammar

Peirce’s Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics offers a comprehensive, philologically accurate, and exegetically ambitious developmental 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.

This book offers a comprehensive, philologically accurate, and exegetically ambitious developmental account of Peirce's theory of speculative grammar. 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.

In all disciplines there are specifiable basic concepts, our universes of discourse, which define special areas of inquiry. Semiotics is that 'science of sciences' which inquires into all processes of inquiry, and which seeks to discover methods of inquiry. Peirce held that semiotics was to be the method of methods. An account of semiotic method should distinguish between the way the term 'sign' is used in semiotics and the various ways this term was meant in nearly all the traditional disciplines. In this monograph Roberta Kevelson minutely explores Charles S. Peirce's method of methods.

This monograph is about the semiotics of lexical signs, and is of particular interest for historical linguists, in particular those interested in etymology. Specialists in linguistic change have long noticed that certain classes of words seem to be in part exempt from regular patterns of sound change, or perhaps more likely to undergo unusual analogical shifts. The problem is far worse for the etymologist, since the lexicon of every language contains some hundreds of semiotically problematic vocables which must, if the etymological dictionaries are ever to be completed, be explained somehow. Always been struck by the sheer capriciousness of etymologies in which some sort of unusual form-meaning relations are involved, the author, with the help of C.S. Peirce, provides answers to crucial questions in his search to make sense of those capricious etymologies.

Praise for Volume 1: " . . . a first-rate edition, which supersedes all other portable Peirces. . . . all the Peirce most people will ever need." —Louis Menand, The New York Review of Books Volume 2 of this convenient two-volume chronological reader's edition provides the first comprehensive anthology of the brilliant American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce's mature philosophy. A central focus of Volume 2 is Peirce's evolving theory of signs and its appplication to his pragmatism.

This volume brings together papers originally presented at a seminar series on Speculative Grammar, Universal Grammar, and Philosophical Analysis, held at the University of Bologna in 1984. The seminars aimed at considering various aspects of the interplay between linguistic theories on the one hand, and theories of meaning and logic on the other. The point of view was mainly historical, but a theoretical approach was also considered relevant. Theories of grammar and related topics were taken as a focal point of interest; their interaction with philosophical reflections on languages was examined in presentations dealing with different authors and periods, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present day.

In 2014, Peirce will have been dead for one hundred years. The book will celebrate this extraordinary, prolific thinker and the relevance of his idea for semiotics, communication, and cognitive studies. More importantly, however, it will provide a major statement of the current status of Peirce's work within semiotics. The volume will be a contribution to both semiotics and Peirce studies.