In this rather philosophical presentation, our recent but firm seminar participant Manuel Quezada, who has taught both Peirce and Husserl in his previous career in Chile, will address head-on the key problem with Peirce: the relation between his metaphysics and his semiotic theory, proposing a divorce! These are issues very much in the spirit of the late Göran Sonesson, so we are happy to be able to continue debating them. As usual, we start gathering from 15:00, and the talk will start at 15:15, followed by discussion, and then a post-seminar. Please let me know if you are joining the post-seminar by Monday, March 17. As for the seminar itself, it is a drop-in. Welcome!

More than 110 years after C. S. Peirce's death, there is still no standard interpretation of his work. This is not due to a lack of effort or available material but rather to the complexity of his writings, his constant revisions, and the fragmented history of their publication. As a result, studying Peirce requires engaging both with his semiotics and his metaphysics, yet both exist in multiple, sometimes conflicting versions.  Peirce's sign classification is famously triadic: icon, index , and symbol. These categories have been extensively developed, showing intricate interrelations. They are based on Peirce's three fundamental metaphysical categories: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, which, like his semiotics, underwent multiple revisions. However, there is a profound asymmetry between Peirce’s metaphysics and his semiotics. While his semiotics have proven productive across multiple disciplines and remain influential, his metaphysics have not.

This raises a crucial question: Must Peirce's semiotics be tied to his metaphysics? I argue that we do Peirce a disservice by insisting on their connection and that his semiotics can survive without his metaphysical categories. I propose that the best way forward is to cut the Gordian knot: rather than forcing semiotics to fit into Peirce's metaphysical framework, we should start from semiotics and derive its metaphysical implications, not the other way around. From this perspective, we are not required to assume the reality of qualia (Firstness) or the necessity of icons as fundamental. Instead, indexicality appears to be primary, actual relations take precedence over abstract potentiality. This shift allows us to reconfigure Peirce's metaphysics to serve semiotics, rather than subordinating semiotics to metaphysics.

Atkin, A. (2016). Peirce, Charles Sanders. Routledge.
Short, T. L. (2007). Peirce’s theory of signs. Cambridge University Press.
Sonesson, G. (2013). The natural history of branching: Approaches to the phenomenology of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Signs and Society 1(2). 297-326.
Tiercelin, C. (1993). C. S. Peirce et le pragmatisme. Collège de France.
Zhao, Y. (2022). Indexicality is the Firstness in Semiotics. In Philosophical Semiotics (pp. 137–153). Springer.