Elize Bisanz - Böcker

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), American Scientist, Mathematician, and Logician, developed much of the logic widely used today. Using copies of his unpublished manuscripts, this book provides a comprehensive collection of Peirce’s writings on Phaneroscopy and the outlines of his project to develop a Science of Reasoning. The collection is focused on three main fields: Phaneroscopy, the science of observation, Semeiotic, the science of sign relations, and Logic, the science of inferences. Peirce understands all thought to be mediated in and through signs and its essence to be diagrammatic. The book serves as a timely contribution for the introduction of Peirce’s Phaneroscopy to the emerging research field of Image Sciences.

The volume focuses on the application of Peirce's semeiotic as a methodological tool to establish a common field for interdisciplinary research. Contributors from the fields of biology, architecture, logic, esthetics and neuroscience, among others, work on diverse research problems, unified by the idea of transcending the dyadic limitations of disciplinary restrictions and applying Peirce’s triadic method, and the structure and process of sign relations of the particular problem that has to be solved. The result is an invigorating example of methodological plasticity wherein the reader acquires an understanding of scientific observation within the complex universe of semeiosis relations.

The approach to images as cultural documents of collective memory and instruments of social shaping builds a central theoretical component of cultural theories since its establishment as a critical discipline. Prominent thinkers ofcultural studies and art history defined images as symbolic representations and expressions of cultural memories.The anthology covers this broad understanding of images as carriers of archival value, texts, and complex language; it elaborates on the fundamental role of images as a driving force of ideologies and cultural evolution.The book also includes Charles S. Peirce’s full manuscript On the Logic of drawing History from Ancient Documents especially from Testimonies, a genuine treatise on applied science as a universal method of incorporating knowledge across disciplines.

In this book, Peirce’s logical apparatus is used to explain some topics in biology where traditional scientific methods fail to establish the relation between the real and the virtual in the genetic script, the irreducibility of evolution to the genome, and the multidimensionality of the passage from genotype to phenotype. The interdisciplinary nature of this study consists in combining Peirce’s triadic logic, linguistics and biology; the author, as a linguist, draws out similarities between sentence construction and protein folding. Three main branches from the biological sciences are focused on: evolution, epigenetics and protein folding. The volume applies Peirce’s logical tools to demonstrate the universal validity of his scientific method in the current research.