Action Habit as Imperative: Peirce’s Supreme Art by Donna E. West

This inquiry illustrates how Peirce’s concept of habit-change is foundational to inference-making.  A 1911 manuscript features how, within the initial five years, children translate dynamic belief structures into action-habits.   Insightful belief structures recommending behavior change operate as primary agents to discover new meanings.  Ultimately, these novel belief structures cultivate novel explanations to resolve real-world problems/unexpected consequences.

Embodied Experience and the Semiosis of Abductive Reasoning by Donna E. West

A case will be made for the indispensability of embodied experience as a foundation for Peirce’s pragmatic semiotic, especially given the place of semiosis in signification. Lakoff and Johnson’s model of space and time, from dependence on physical, embodied experience, to more analogous based concepts in the mental world, is employed as a framework for a discussion of the primacy of Secondness in Peirce’s model of reasoning.