Notes on Peirce's semiotics and epistemology. 'Notas sobre la semiótica y la epistemología de Peirce'.

Resumen tomado de la publicación

‘God’s Truth’: Kant, Mill and moral epistemology in Oliver Twist

This essay aims to demonstrate how Dickens’s search for ‘truth’ (and his understanding of what that abstraction consists of) entered into and emerged from one of the key philosophical discussions of the early nineteenth century: namely whether moral knowledge is the sum of one’s experiences or whether there are such things as a priori or ‘natural’ principles of ethics that transcend human practice.

Harringtonian virtue: Harrington, Machiavelli, and the method of the 'Moment'

This article presents a reinterpretation of James Harrington's writings. It takes issue with J. G. A. Pocock's reading, which treats him as importing into England a Machiavellian ‘language of political thought’. This reading is the basis of Pocock's stress on the republicanism of eighteenth-century opposition values. Harrington's writings were in fact a most implausible channel for such ideas. His outlook owed much to Stoicism. Unlike the Florentine, he admired the contemplative life; was sympathetic to commerce; and was relaxed about the threat of ‘corruption’ (a concept that he did not understand). These views can be associated with his apparent aims: the preservation of a national church with a salaried but politically impotent clergy; and the restoration of the royalist gentry to a leading role in English politics. Pocock's hypothesis is shown to be conditioned by his method; its weaknesses reflect some difficulties inherent in the notion of ‘languages of thought’.

Poverty-of-the-stimulus and SLA epistemology: considering L2 knowledge of aspectual phrasal semantics

Coupling a review of previous studies on the acquisition of grammatical aspects undertaken from contrasting paradigmatic views of second language acquisition (SLA) with new experimental data from L2 Portuguese, the present study contributes to this specific literature as well as general debates in L2 epistemology. We tested 31 adult English learners of L2 Portuguese across three experiments, examining the extent to which they had acquired the syntax and (subtle) semantics of grammatical aspect. Demonstrating that many individuals acquired target knowledge of what we contend is a poverty-of-the-stimulus semantic entailment related to the checking of aspectual features encoded in Portuguese preterit and imperfect morphology, namely, a [±accidental] distinction that obtains in a restricted subset of contexts, we conclude that UG-based approaches to SLA are in a better position to tap and gauge underlying morphosyntactic competence, since based on independent theoretical linguistic descriptions, they make falsifiable predictions that are amenable to empirical scrutiny, seek to describe and explain beyond performance, and can account for L2 convergence on poverty-of-the-stimulus knowledge as well as L2 variability/optionality.

Linguistic epistemology and the notion of monolingualism

This article has several interrelated goals, all of which relate to an attempt at understanding why monolingualism is taken to be the default norm in linguistic inquiry (from sociolinguistics to formal linguistic theorizing). With others, I will take the position that comparing instances of multilingualism to so-called monolingualism is an unfair and inevitably inaccurate comparison since, among other variables, the social environments and access to input of multilinguals compared to monolinguals is most often unavoidably different (cf. Cruz-Ferreira 2006; Edwards 2004). Additionally, I will attempt to demonstrate that even so-called monolinguals have access to a variety of grammars related to different registers of speech and, therefore, are not truly monolingual in the sense that they poses one monolithic grammatical competence. Taken together, the present discussion questions both the default status of monolingualism as well as the functional adequacy of the term monolingualism.

Beyond description to pattern: The contribution of Batesonian epistemology to critical realist research

This paper proposes a limitation to epistemological claims to theory building prevalent in critical realist research. While accepting the basic ontological and epistemological positions of the perspective as developed by Roy Bhaskar, it is argued that application in social science has relied on sociological concepts to explain the underlying generative mechanisms, and that in many cases this has been subject to the effects of an anthropocentric constraint. A novel contribution to critical realist research comes from the work and ideas of Gregory Bateson. This is in service of two central goals of critical realism, namely an abductive route to theory building and a commitment to interdisciplinarity. Five aspects of Bateson’s epistemology are introduced: (1) difference, (2) logical levels of abstraction, (3) recursive causal loops, (4) the logic of metaphor, and (5) Bateson’s theory of mind. The comparison between Bateson and Bhaskar’s ideas is seen as a form of double description, illustrative of the point being raised. The paper concludes with an appeal to critical realists to start exploring the writing and outlook of Bateson himself.