Browsing by Author "De Tienne, André"
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Item A Peircean Approach to the Umwelt(UNIL, 2022) De Tienne, André; Philosophy, School of Liberal ArtsThe concept of Umwelt has become so significant in biosemiotics that one may wonder whether Peirce could conceivably have missed it within the broader logical and metaphysical context of his realist pragmaticist semiotic theory. This brief paper suggests that far from having missed it, Peirce tackled it front and center at a most fundamental level.Item CORPUS: Toward a Collaborative Online Research Platform for Users of Scholarly Editions(2013-04-05) De Tienne, AndréScholarly editions are central to the humanities: they seek to reconstitute the texts of seminal writers and thinkers with rigorous exactitude in order to provide researchers with an authoritative standard text. In the digital age, scholarly editions need to rethink from the ground up their dissemination methods in the light of the kind of services they need to provide to their growing international constituency. Successful scholarly editions will be those that take full advantage of advanced contents management frameworks so as to stimulate transformative scholarship while opening it to broader audiences. They need to offer online a wide but conveniently centralized array of options to users, including powerful search tools, interactive tools, collaborative tools, work zones, discussion areas, and—especially important for academic users—feedback areas where their contributions get peer-reviewed, assessed, and professionally accredited. We present the results of a research we have conducted toward the design of CORPUS, a dissemination platform that will (1) provide electronic access to the specialized content of critical editions; (2) provide access to a database of digital images while allowing authorized users to contribute metadata to that database; (3) provide an interactive interface allowing scholarly users to conduct research both publicly (in collaboration with others) and privately; (4) provide different levels of privileges allowing users to enhance the electronic product with their own scholarly contributions; (5) institute a quality-assessment system that keeps track of all contributors, gauges the quality of their contributions, protects the system’s integrity to guarantee a safe and productive environment, and offers peer-reviewed certifications that scholars can use as evidence of professional worth for instance in P&T dossiers or grant applications. We will report the results of a contextual study based on a series of IRB-approved interviews. We identified seven key user requirements, and generated corresponding design ideations for CORPUS.Item Farouk Seif’s Hypostatic Semiotic Metaphysics(Philosophy Documentation Center, 2020) De Tienne, André; Philosophy, School of Liberal ArtsItem Patternhood, Correlation, and Generality: Foundations of a Peircean Theory of Patterns(2016-07) Aames, Jimmy Jericho; De Tienne, André; De Waal, Cornelis; Lyons, Timothy D.This thesis develops a general theory of patterns on the basis of the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce. The main questions with which this thesis is concerned are: what is the ontological status of patterns? In what does their reality consist in? Why does exhibiting patternhood seem to be a necessary condition for the very possibility of cognition? The development of the theory is motivated by a discussion of Ontic Structural Realism (OSR), a theory that has recently been gaining attention in analytic philosophy of science, especially in philosophy of physics. The central claim of OSR is that only patterns (structures) are real; individual objects are not real, or have only a “thin” being in some sense. In this thesis I deal mainly with the version of OSR developed by James Ladyman and Don Ross in their book Every Thing Must Go. I address two criticisms that are commonly levelled against OSR, (1) that it cannot give an adequate account of the difference between physical structure and mathematical structure, and (2) that it cannot give an adequate account of the relationship between the world and our representations of the world. I then show how Peirce’s philosophical framework, as encapsulated in his pragmatism, theory of the categories, Scholastic realism, and theory of the continuum, could provide an answer to these difficulties. OSR will also be used to illuminate an aspect of Peirce’s philosophy which I believe has not been sufficiently emphasized in the literature, namely its structuralist aspect. Specifically, it will be shown that Peirce’s philosophy leads to a worldview very similar to that of OSR, via a path of reasoning that is completely different from those standardly used to argue for OSR. This thesis as a whole is an attempt to throw light on the nature of patternhood through an elucidation and justification of this path of reasoning, which I call the alternative path to OSR.Item Peirce and Scientific Realism(2022-01) Tekin, Atmaca; de Waal, Cornelis; De Tienne, André; Lyons, Timothy D.Scientific realism and antirealism are two main views in the philosophy of science regarding the status of unobservable entities in science and whether we have good epistemic reasons to believe that our current successful scientific theories are (approximately) true. Briefly, the former claims that our scientific theories are (approximately) true and unobservable entities these scientific theories postulate exist. On the other hand, the latter claims that we do not have good epistemic reasons to believe that our scientific theories are (approximately) true and that unobservable entities our scientific theories postulate exist. The scientific realism has two primary tenets, one axiological (i.e., science should seek truth) and the other epistemological (namely, our current successful theories are (approximately) true). In this thesis, the issue has been examined from standpoint of the account of Peirce’s philosophy of science, more accurately based on his understanding of reality, truth and basic idealism. In the first chapter, I outline the main points of the debate from the perspectives of both sides. In the second chapter, I give reasons why the scientific realists’ argument is not convincing. In the third chapter, I attempt to draw an accurate picture of the account of Peirce’s views on the nature of scientific theories. In the last chapter, I make a case for scientific realism from the Peircean account of philosophy of science. I have claimed why the current debate cannot be settled without accepting a kind of Peirce's basic idealism and his understanding of reality. I think both scientific realists and antirealists accept a kind of naïve realism. This is the main reason why it is not possible to settle the debate from their standpoints. In order to overcome this issue, I attempt to develop a more sophisticated realism based on Peirce’s understanding of reality, truth and basic idealism.Item Peirce on the Symbolical Foundation of Personhood(Eidos, 2021-10) De Tienne, André; Philosophy, School of Liberal ArtsThis paper discusses the semiotic and metaphysical framework within which Peirce elaborated a symbolical and dynamical conception of personhood. It exhibits the centrality of Peirce’s early conception of the “unity of consistency” along with its decentering advantages. It describes how this gave rise to a metaphysics of personhood that questions the singularity of individuals. It then conducts a semiotic study of the evolutive process across which something indeterminate evolves into something determinate that increasingly personifies itself following the logic of symbolization, taking into account two major types of indetermination: generality and vagueness. It then considers the kind of teleology at work within personification. It concludes that personhood so conceived is not restricted to only individual human beings, for the process of symbolization at work is not confined to a particular species-specific application.Item Postprandial Peirce: A Final Talk(Indiana University, 2020) De Tienne, André; Philosophy, School of Liberal ArtsThis is the transcript of a public conversation held by a medium with Peirce's spiritual consciousness following an excellent dinner in the Delmonico Room at the Hôtel Fauchères in the evening of April 19, 2019, the 105th anniversary of Peirce's death. The transcript testifies to the continued reality of metaphysics in the afterlife, where one encounters the ultimate community of inquiry. It provides a number of revelations soundly supported by intricate semiotic distinctions. It also sets the methodological ground for a new subdiscipline of metaphysics open to a wide range of creative applications.Item Preface to Ivo Ibri’s volume 2 of his Semiotics and Pragmatism: Theoretical Interfaces(Editora Oficina Universitária, 2021) De Tienne, AndréItem Prolegomenon to Horosemiotics: Semiotic Ramifications of a Peircean Borderline Distinction(Philosophy Documentation Center, 2019-07-01) De Tienne, André; Philosophy, School of Liberal Arts