Peirce and Descartes

Abstract

My purpose in this paper is not merely to provide a historical analysis of the difference between Peirce and Descartes, but to show how present-day interpretations of Peirce’s semeiotic fail to do justice to his most basic insights. In the last 50 years or so, Peirce has been frequently mentioned and quoted. The renaissance of Peirce studies is caused to a large extent by the great popularity of his semeiotic. Yet, it must be pointed out that the present view of Peirce as it is presented in numerous semeiotic studies seriously misconstrues the original sense of Peirce’s concepts and theories. Without going into all the details, I would like to argue that the main difference between Peirce and his so-called followers is related to the question of the opposition between realism and nominalism, between objectivism and transcendentalism, between logic and naive experience.