Peirce, signs, and meaning / Floyd Merrell.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

C.S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, was an American philosopher and mathematician whose influence has been enormous on the field of semiotics. Merrell uses Pierce's theories to reply to the all-important question: "What and where is meaning?"

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Merrell (semiotics and Spanish American literature, Purdue Univ.) presents "a neo-Peircean semiotic view of meaning." One theme is the prevalence of vagueness, indeterminacy, and paradox. Merrell's Peirce is a fellow traveler. A second theme is that too many authors--Peirce is a welcome exception--overlook how meaning includes far more than linguistic meaning: for example, smells mean much to a dog. Too cursory to be insightful, this volume hurries through a great variety of intriguing topics that include the liar paradox, G"odel's incompleteness theorem, Quine's gavagai, Putnam's twin earth, wave-particle duality, strange attractors, Goodman's grue, and Bohm's implicate order. The connections with Peirce are underdeveloped; the reader's natural objections are seldom answered. Too much is presented as an opposition between the good (paradox, vagueness, infinity) and the bad (logic, formal theories). Key terms are inadequately clarified. There are numerous observations but a lack of sustained argumentation. Merrell displays the complexity and virtuosity of Peirce's complex taxonomies, but they are neither used nor illuminated. Christopher Hookway's Peirce (1985) is recommended instead as an introductory yet sophisticated account of Peirce's extraordinary philosophy. D. Christie; University of New Hampshire