Thursday, April 5, 2012

Beyond Hermeneutics: Peirce's speculative semiology (mp3 audio link)

HT Peter Gratton.  Jim Bradley’s “Beyond Hermeneutics: Pierce’s Semiology as a Trinitarian Metaphysics of Communication.“  Audio link HERE.

Radical hermeneutics might say something like, "Reality is nothing but interpretation."  And, being correlationist in such a construal, reality is nothing but a human reading.

Peirce states that reality is an objective exchange of information.  A Peircean phenomenology and hermeneutics, better expressed as semiotics (or semiology) takes these methods "beyond" the human correlate in its speculative function.  It seeks the "outside" of thought.  Here "thought" means "exhange of information."

Eric Savoth's "Outside Thought: Meillassoux, Uexküll, Peirce” (Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis, 16.1, 2011) seems to be a great piece in explaining how Peirce's approach to phenomenology, hermeneutics, semiotics, was more realist and non-correlationist than many suppose.  In order to understand this, the nature of biosemiotic exchange is key.

Lately Meillassoux has been considering semiotics (see Meillassoux "Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition. A Speculative Analysis of the Meaningless Sign"), so it will be interesting to see where this all goes.  I think that it is possible that semiotics will be taken up into speculative realism in novel ways in the future.