In tychastic development – which in semiotic terms corresponds to symbolicity and in inferential terms to induction – chance determines new interpretive trajectories with unpredictable outcomes that in some cases are fixed in ‘habits’. Paradoxically, chance generates order, in other words, the fortuitous result generates the law while the law itself finds (an apparently contradictory) explanation in terms of the action of chance. This is the principle that informs Darwin’s book of 1859, The Origin of Species (cf. 1998). However, in Peirce’s view, Darwin’s success was largely determined by the values which informed his research and which could be represented by the principle of the survival of the fittest. As anticipated above, these values responded to the dominant values of the times which are values grounded in the logic of identity and which, in the last analysis, can be summed up with the word ‘greed’.
Anancastic development is connected with indexicality and deduction. New interpretive routes are determined by necessity – internal necessity (the logical development of ideas, of interpretants that have already been accepted and call for further developement) and external necessity with respect to consciousness (circumstance) – without the possibility of hazarding farsighted predictions concerning eventual results. So, logic understood in a strict sense as necessary cause is connected with anancastic development. The limit of this kind of development rests in the assertion that only one kind of logical procedure is possible, in the supposition, therefore, that the conclusion deriving from the premises is obliged and could not be different. This excludes all other argumentative modes and consequently the possibility of free choice (cf. CP 6.313). In anancastic inferential procedure, constriction, contingency and mechanical necessity all effectively dominate the relation between the interpreted sign and the interpretant sign. However, in reality, this procedure does not at all preclude the possibility of other interpretive modalities which, in fact, are always active even when anancastic procedure prevails. In semiotic terms the relation between the interpreted sign and the interpretant sign is of the indexical type, in argumentative terms it is deductive. The relationship between the conclusion and its premises is regulated by reciprocal constriction and as such is invested with low degrees of otherness and dialogism (Petrilli 2012: 127–156).
On the contrary, as Peirce states in his paper of 1893 included in his Collected Papers under the title ‘Evolutionary Love’ (CP 6.287-6.317), in agapastic development the deferral among interpretants is characterized by iconicity and abduction. The evolution of anthroposemiosis, progress in linguistic and nonlinguistic learning, the generation of sense, value, significance at the highest degrees of dialogic otherness, creativity, innovation, playfulness and desire are articulated in semiosic processes of the abductive, iconic and agapastic type, that is, in processes where abduction, iconicity and agapasm prevail. Agapasm, that is, the evolution of thought, or, better, semiosis, according to the law of creative love, is regulated neither by chance nor by blind necessity, but rather, as Peirce says, ‘by an immediate attraction for the idea itself, whose nature is divined before the mind possesses it, by the power of sympathy, that is, by virtue of the continuity of mind’ (CP 6.307). As an example, Peirce cites the divination of genius, the mind affected by the idea before that idea is comprehended or possessed by virtue of the attraction it exercises upon him in the context of relational continuity among signs, Peirce’s synechism, in the great semiosic network of the universe, or semiosphere.
There is manifestly a close connection between the concepts of agapasm, abduction and desire. Peirce in fact established an explicit relation between desire and meaning: these concepts both share in the semiotic and the axiological spheres, they are both connected with signs and values and, therefore, with meaning as value and desirability. In their correspondence, Welby and Mary Everest Boole – whom in addition to being the wife of the famous logician and mathematician George Boole (discussed by Peirce) was a researcher and author in her own right – in fact dedicated a significant part of their letter texts to considerations on the laws of mind and, therefore, to the interconnection between logic, love, passion and power (cf. Welby 1929: 86-92; Boole 1931b [1905], 1931c [1909], 1931d [1910]; Sebeok and Petrilli 1999; Petrilli 1998b, 2010b).