Abstract
Close encounters between Peirce and Husserl elucidate ties between Semiotics, Law and Philosophy. Peirce’s idea of firstness, consequently followed by secondness and thirdness, has been widely discussed in many Peirce texts and interpretations. The idea is a key concept that inspired semiotics. We conclude in hindsight that not thirdness but firstness needs full attention in philosophy and semiotics. Explaining firstness as an attitude inherent to the sign, Peirce refers to phenomenology as a major field of semiotics, so that semiotics can reveal the structure of legal thinking. There are remarkable parallels to this firstness in twentieth century philosophy. We highlight the “Einstellungsänderung”, (attitude change, or change of approach) in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, which makes us understand the complex structure of transcendental phenomenology in its close relationship with semiosis and semiotics. Peirce and Husserl accompany and even foreshadow the linguistic turn of modern philosophy and its implicit phenomenology of social relations. We need to decide whether semiotics is only to be applied in legal practice and legal scholarship, or the application be transcended in the law-semiotics relationship by changing its predominance and stimulating an attitude change, for instance as re-engineering law through its semiotic approach. This also depends on the question what materials might determine future legal cases. Semiotics is important where virtual reality, and where dimensions of reality created by nanotechnology play a predominant role in the context of our future cases. The character of firstness changes and highlights the relevance of semiotics.
Possibly … Firstness is the embryo of being
Peirce (1903)
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Notes
- 1.
“Peirce and Husserl were mathematicians who had common interests in language, ontology, and phenomenology. Yet the terminology they coined was so different that they misunderstood one another: each accused the other of ‘psychologism’”, and focuses on that publication: “Stjernfelt shows that they had a closer affinity to one another than either had to Frege or Heidegger. In fact, the writings of each frequently illuminate and extend the insights of the other…. Peirce and Husserl were cultivating a broad and fertile common ground, which was largely neglected by both the analytic and the continental philosophers during the twentieth century and which promises to be an exciting area of research in the twenty-first.” (John F. Sowa at Amazon.com). The IJSL, vol. 21, No. 3 issue has an extended book review, written by G. Sykes. An in-depth study beyond comparative notions of the Peirce-Husserl relationship seems to be overdue.
- 2.
Applicability of semiotics to law and legal discourse in particular is a problem in legal practice, legal education and semiotic theory formation. Analyses of legal discourse ex post facto are not enough, as legal doctrine, reflections on Court decisions and the contrasting traditions between formal and non-formal law show. Law may be understood as an example for semiotics and a system of signs (Kevelson 1988), semiosis in itself is deeper and more extended so that other forms of semiosis influence the problem of applicability. Where semiotics concentrates on signs (Peirce) or underlines the arbitrary character of signs (Saussure), the complexity and multitude of semiotic systems disturbs clarity about any straightforward applicability. Since there are animal features, mental organizations, neurological processes, structures of perception, systemic hierarchies, genetic and cultural developments, general ideas about applying semiotic fragments, one cannot satisfy the individual lawyer with simple semiotic instruments to improve his reasoning or his logical skills. An issue that fits our notion of accelerations in history is in a semiotic reengineering of law. This would contribute to redesign law semiotically as an organization process. Law is in that case regarded as a series of interconnected processes or otherwise as an architectural complexity. Reengineering law in semiotic perspective would be an alternative for applying semiotics to law. It includes (a) a reversal of the usual top-down approach of legal analysis, and (b) introduce communicative criteria, for instance in understanding the levels in legal hierarchy and the numbers of citizens involved, (c) approach the subject in law as a partner, not as subjected to the law, and finally (d) include all levels of reality, the virtual level in the first place.
- 3.
Of course, the Peirce edition volumes I–VI of Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss was published between 1931 and 1935, and the Arthur W. Burks edited volumes VII and VIII followed 1958. There was, and still is, however, no undisputed and entirely complete text edition. The Husserliana were not—and are not yet until today—completed when Spiegelberg presented his opinion on the comparison between Peirce and Husserl. The volume “Erste Philosophie” [First Philosophy] presenting lectures in Freiburg 1923/1924 was published in Husserliana Bd VII, 1956.
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Broekman, J.M. (2010). Firstness and Phenomenology—Peirce and Husserl on Attitude Change. In: Wagner, A., Broekman, J. (eds) Prospects of Legal Semiotics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9343-1_2
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