Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

Robert E. Innis is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

• ContentsPrefaceIntroduction: Pragmatism and the Forms of SensePart 1: Framing Language1. Perceptual Consciousness and the Structures of Meaning: Peirce and Polanyi2. From Indication to Predication: Situating Language with Bühler, Gardiner, and Wegener3. Pragmatism and the Analysis of Meaning: Lessons from Giovanni Vailati Part 2: The Senses of Technics4. Technics and the Bias of Perception: Polanyi and the Forms of Embodied Meaning5. Pragmatist Aesthetics and the Critique of Technology6. Form and Technics: Scope and Nature of Cassirer’s Semiotic Analysis of TechnologyConclusion: Matrices of MeaningBibliographyIndex

“This is a work of first-rate scholarship and deep-cutting philosophy, replete with important insights and fruitful suggestions. The author brings into sharp focus, above all else, language and what he calls (following Ernst Cassirer) technics by drawing upon diverse traditions—principally the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey, the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, the work of Cassirer and Langer in the philosophy of symbolism, and that of Bühler and others in linguistics. He shows how these and related phenomena (for example, perception, action, agency, and consciousness) are at once fully embodied and irreducibly symbolic. His explorations of linguistic and other forms of sense ought to be of interest to a wide audience.”—Vincent Colapietro, Penn State University