Cathy Legg, “Discursive Habits: Peirce and Cognitive Semiotics”

Enactivism has greatly benefitted contemporary philosophy by demonstrating that the traditional intellectualist ‘act-content’ model of intentionality is simply insufficient, and showing how minds may be built from world-involving bodily habits. Many enactivists have assumed that this must entail non-representationalism concerning at least basic minds. Here I argue that such anti-intellectualism is overly constraining, and not necessary. I sketch an alternative enactivism which draws on Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics, and understands signs as habits whose connections with rich schemas of possible experience render them subject to increasing degrees of self-control. The talk’s key innovation is to align this cyclical process of habit cultivation with Peirce’s representationalist icon-index-symbol distinction, in a manner which I will explain.

Catherine Legg is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University (Melbourne, Australia), Faculty of Arts and Education, SHSS Arts & Education Department. Her research focuses on Peirce’s Pragmatism and, within a pragmatist direction, on logic, philosophies of mind, language and epistemology. She is also interested in automated knowledge representation (“formal ontology”). Since 2001, she has published several articles in scientific journals and chapters in edited books and has taken part in many conferences.

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