Abstract
This chapter examines communities of inquiry, arguing that neither selves nor communities are simple, discrete entities. Rather, following Peirce’s theory of synechism (continuity), Sect. 3.1 examines selves as communities of relatively tightly coordinated habits. Section 3.2 uses Peirce’s theory of signs to explain how communities achieve different levels of integrative coordination while arguing that both selves and communities are loci of interpretive, inquisitive engagement. Section 3.3 argues that inquiry is best understood as a process of adapting, coordinating, and harmonizing one’s components, one’s communities, and oneself to other selves, communities, and components. Further, it argues for understanding inquiry as a process of habit coordination. Section 3.4 delves more deeply into a Peircean triadic theory of signs and wrestles with the question of how habits may be coordinated when they are not already adequately signified or known. Turning again to the notion of corrective feedback, this time with an emphasis on semiotic correction, it explores the unique potential of indexical signs to orient communities of inquiry toward the unknown and unhabituated.
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- 1.
One of Colapietro ’s most helpful contributions is to show that too much has been made of scattered statements by Peirce that seem to identify selfhood and individuality with error. We do better, he argues to note that the self does not consist in isolation and error. Rather, selfhood is often made manifest (signified) in and through error and separation even as the possibility of communal participation remains (see Colapietro 1989, pp. 61–97).
- 2.
Throughout this text I use Peirce ’s idiosyncratic terms, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, sparingly and only when doing so sheds light on a particular topic.
- 3.
Writing of space and time as exemplary continua, Kant contends that “[e]very sensation, therefore, and likewise every reality in the [field of] appearance, however small it may be, has a degree, that is, an intensive magnitude which can always be diminished. Between reality and negation there is a continuity of possible realities and of possible smaller perceptions […] The property of magnitudes by which no part of them is the smallest possible, that is, by which no part is simple, is called their continuity. Space and time are quanta continua, because no part of them can be given save as enclosed between limits (points or instants), and therefore only in such fashion that this part is itself again a space or a time. Space therefore consists solely of spaces, time solely of times. Points and instants are only limits, that is, mere positions which limit space and time” (Kant 1965, pp. 203–204). Thus, any determinate span of time or space is a part of larger continua and, in turn, encloses further continua. Peirce ’s argument is that an individual is a similarly marked determination of encompassing continua, enclosing further continua. Thus, no self is simple and no person discrete.
- 4.
James Hoopes adopts and adapts Hausman ’s interpretation of Peircean personhood to good effect in chapter two of (Hoopes 1998).
- 5.
Peirce defines ethics as “the study of what ends of action we are deliberately prepared to adopt” (CP 5.130).
- 6.
Neville meticulously analyzes the connections between harmony, simplicity, complexity, and value ( 1981, pp. 79–91).
- 7.
- 8.
This is a key point for understanding the way Slater construes the NCM to engage with Robert Cummings Neville’s notion of creation ex nihilo. Creation cannot be determinately represented on the graph though the entire endeavor presumes the original ontological creative act as in some sense allowing for the possibility of continuity.
- 9.
Readers may at first be put off by the Slater ’s meticulous rules for applying the NCM (2015, pp. 46–56). But the rules for applying the model should not be confused with the use of the model itself any more than the 2015 Major League Baseball Rulebook—282 pages!—should be confused with the joy of playing or watching a baseball game. The model is designed to turn a problem into a visual icon that is much more elegant than any description for creating the icon could ever be.
- 10.
In Chap. 5 I explicitly tie Slater ’s notion of translucent contexts to a definition of venerable religious traditions.
- 11.
- 12.
“Upon our theory of reality and of logic, it can be shown that no inference of any individual can be thoroughly logical without certain determinations of his mind which do not concern any one inference immediately; for we have seen that that mode of inference which alone can teach us anything, or carry us at all beyond what was implied in our premisses—in fact, does not give us to know any more than we knew before; only, we know that, by faithfully adhering to that mode of inference, we shall, on the whole, approximate to the truth. Each of us is an insurance company, in short. But, now, suppose that an insurance company, among its risks, should take one exceeding in amount the sum of all the others. Plainly, it would then have no security whatever. Now, has not every single man such a risk? What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? If a man has a transcendent personal interest infinitely outweighing all others, then, upon the theory of validity of inference just developed, he is devoid of all security, and can make no valid inference whatever. What follows? That logic rigidly requires, before all else, that no determinate fact, nothing which can happen to a man’s self, should be of more consequence to him than everything else. He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is illogical in all his inferences, collectively. So the social principle is rooted intrinsically in logic” (CP 5.354).
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Daniel-Hughes, B. (2018). Selves, Communities, and Signs. In: Pragmatic Inquiry and Religious Communities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94193-6_3
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