Dissertation Abstract
Strange Attraction: C. S. Peirce, Chaos Theory and the
Reclamation of Pragmatism
by
Darin Michael Mcnabb
Degree: PH.D.
Year: 1997
Pages: 222
Institution: Boston College;
0016
Advisor: Adviser: Richard Cobb-Stevens
Source: DAI, 58, no. 12A, (1997): 4687
The
thought of C. S. Peirce was postmodern before its time. The pragmatic maxim and
his foundational work in semiotics offer potent challenges to traditional
Cartesian epistemology. The first three chapters of this dissertation examine
Peirce's challenge to Descartes and his transformation of Kant. However, Peirce
tempered this success with thoughts on normativity, metaphysics, and the Real.
His thought, then, is poised between a modernist metaphysics and a postmodern
epistemology. As such my thesis concerns the success with which he was able to
do this. I conclude that he was successful and my fifth chapter adduces the
insights of chaos theory to help illustrate this.
Chapter One introduces his critique of
Cartesian Intuitionism. By conceiving of thought as inferential and as carried
out by a community of inquirers he reoritented the concepts of judgment and
truth to a publicly open future mediated by the praxis of scientific method.
Chapter Two examines the structure of
inquiry in his conception of sign use. I compare his conceptions of signs to
that of Saussure's and examine the derivation of his categories as the basis
for his semiotic.
Chapter Three introduces the pragmatic
maxim by which Peirce gave teeth to the course of inquiry and by which meaning
was severed from its Cartesian trappings. I examine the way in which a
superficial understanding of the maxim leads to the nominalism which Peirce
despised. His attempt to amend it leads to the fourth chapter.
Here I discuss the trio of his
normative sciences--logic, ethics, and aesthetics, which he conceives as
indispensable in the approach inquiry makes to the Real.
Chapter Five concerns a discussion of
chaos theory, whose conception of the strange attractor clearly models the
structure of the Real as given in Peirce's metaphysics. It also provides a form
of justification for Peirce's insights.
Chapter Six presents Peirce's
conception of an evolving cosmos mediated by the relation between law and
spontaneity. The Real is seen to be neither absolute nor relative but of a
character which answers both the postmodern insights of his epistemology and
the more traditional notions of truth and reality.
SUBJECT(S)
Descriptor: PHILOSOPHY
Accession
No: AAG9818611
Provider: OCLC
Database: Dissertations