Donna E. West – författare

This book presents a fresh approach to the communicability of narratives, revealing the cognitive underpinnings of Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatistic model. It demonstrates how abductive processes modify habits of belief and action in what Peirce refers to as double consciousness.  Abductions generated during double consciousness paradigms have increased efficacy compared to instinctual abductions. Novel inferences from working memory become consciously integrated with existing long-term memory units which permits fuller consideration of the plausibility of propositions.  Special attention is given to children’s prelinguistic means to represent propositional or assertory conflicts, and to resolve these conflicts via listening and re-telling narrators’ accounts. Overall, this book serves both a theoretical and applied purpose. It is intended to support innovative therapeutic interventions to facilitate the (re)construction of narratives by adults and children.Its practical applications and theoretical grounding will appeal to graduate students and scholars alike, who wish to examine narrative as an interdisciplinary enterprise—an ontological and cultural phenomenon (narration by way of action/image sequences), not just a literary/linguistic paradigm. Ultimately, this account presents narrative as a modal forum to resolve logical and practical conflicts, compelling the interpreter to become an involved partner in the narrated event itself.

This book constitutes the first treatment of C. S. Peirce’s unique concept of habit. Habit animated the pragmatists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who picked up the baton from classical scholars, principally Aristotle. Most prominent among the pragmatists thereafter is Charles Sanders Peirce. In our vernacular, habit connotes a pattern of conduct. Nonetheless, Peirce’s concept transcends application to mere regularity or to human conduct; it extends into natural and social phenomena, making cohesive inner and outer worlds. Chapters in this anthology define and amplify Peircean habit; as such, they highlight the dialectic between doubt and belief. Doubt destabilizes habit, leaving open the possibility for new beliefs in the form of habit-change; and without habit-change, the regularity would fall short of habit – conforming to automatic/mechanistic systems. This treatment of habit showcases how, through human agency, innovative regularities of behavior and thought advance theprocess of making the unconscious conscious. The latter materializes when affordances (invariant habits of physical phenomena) form the basis for modifications in action schemas and modes of reasoning. Further, the book charts how indexical signs in language and action are pivotal in establishing attentional patterns; and how these habits accommodate novel orientations  within event templates. It is intended for those interested in Peirce’s metaphysic or semiotic, including both senior scholars and students of philosophy and religion, psychology, sociology and anthropology, as well as mathematics, and the natural sciences.

This work represents the first integrated account of how deixis operates to facilitate points of view, providing the raw material for reconciling index and object. The book offers a fresh, applied philosophical approach using original empirical evidence to show that deictic demonstratives hasten the recognition of core representational constructs.  It presents a case where the comprehension of shifting points of view by means of deixis is paramount to a theory of mind and to a worldview that incorporates human components of discovering and extending spatial knowledge.  The book supports Peirce’s triadic sign theory as a more adequate explanatory account compared with those of Bühler and Piaget.  Peirce’s unitary approach underscores the artificiality of constructing a worldview driven by logical reasoning alone; it highlights the importance of self-regulation and the appreciation of otherness within a sociocultural milieu. Integral to this semiotic perspective is imagination as a primary tool for situating the self in constructed realities, thus infusing reality with new possibilities. Imagination is likewise necessary to establish postures of mind for the self and others. Within these imaginative scenarios (consisting of overt, and then covert self dialogue) children construct their own worldviews, through linguistic role-taking, as they legitimize conflicting viewpoints within imagined spatial frameworks.