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Beyond Peirce: The New Science of Semiotics and the Semiotics of Law

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International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper shows how Peirce's semeiotic could be turned into a powerful science. The New Science of Semiotics provides not only a new paradigm and an empirical justification for all these applications, but also a rational and systematic procedure for carrying them out as well. Thus the New Science of Semiotics transforms the philosophy of law into the science of legal scholarship, the discipline that I call jurisology.

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Notes

  1. Roughly 400 CE (St. Augustine) to 1900 CE (Peirce).

  2. From the Greek word for “final”.

  3. The first scientific stage.

  4. Still using Peirce’s categorization schema, however.

  5. To be discussed in Sect. 4.4.2.

  6. Ironically, this is the same name that Peirce gave to his own philosophy.

  7. Cf. Peirce’s concept of a multi-filament cable and his convergence concepts of truth and reality.

  8. Combining random selection with the appropriate experimental design.

  9. As small as one in the case of a good guess at a theory.

  10. See Pearson [24].

  11. I want to acknowledge the inspirational help of Thomas Daddesio who first asked me to analyze interdisciplinary translation.

  12. See Sect. 4.1.2. for the concept of empirical convergence of many facts to one law that describes them all.

  13. The W series was not yet available at the time the majority of this work was performed.

  14. Representation is used here in its mathematical rather than its semiotic sense.

  15. Now called the “subduction” rules. See Pearson [29].

  16. Strictly speaking, this will not be exactly the Peircean taxonomy, but an explication of it (in the sense of Quine [36]) since the three classification schemes used by Peirce to define his sign categories are significantly changed, despite bearing the same names, due to a change in the concept of semiotic dimensionality [22].

  17. It must be remembered that Peirce employed a great number of different and differing nomenclatures. The one adopted here was used in Pearson [22].

  18. Peirce’s actual term was ‘deloam’ from the Greek \(\delta \varepsilon \lambda \omega \mu .\)

  19. A preliminary version of this section appeared as “The Theory of Operational Semiotics” in Pearson [31].

  20. However, Peirce, who pioneered SAT [37] did not so limit his analysis.

  21. Such as Hempel and Popper.

  22. Carnap called it “translation”, or “decoding”.

  23. And because theories are invented by fallible human beings, they must be tested against reality.

  24. A preliminary version of this section appeared as Pearson [29].

  25. See Figs. 5, 17.

  26. Figure 3 of Sect. 4.4.2.1(Background).

  27. We are essentially adopting Quine’s concept of ‘explication’ [36] wherein one sets about refining one’s concepts in such a way as to maintain those theoretical implications which have the strongest anchors at the lowest levels of observability and doing the least damage in those areas where our intuitions are not as strong. Theoretical implications which have no anchor in reality at all have a “don’t care” impact on the design of our concepts so that in these cases we are free to invent our refinements in such a way as to simplify the overall theory.

  28. The first modification to the language of Menetics since it was initially designed in 1976, (1977).

  29. I provided the name “subduction” (1991).

  30. This diagram was originally published as Fig. 8 in my review of Rauch and Carr (1989), in the section discussing Allan Chinen’s paper (1989).

  31. It was Chinen who originally gave me the idea of relating the various kinds of reasoning to each other, although he related reasoning to the reference of signs. It was I who conceived of interpreting reasoning as the change in structure of the signs used in the reasoning process, and the way these processes fit together. I thank Chinen for his original contribution.

  32. Due primarily to Peirce and myself.

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    Charls Pearson

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Pearson, C. Beyond Peirce: The New Science of Semiotics and the Semiotics of Law. Int J Semiot Law 21, 247–296 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-008-9063-7

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