The Semiotics: Culture in Context Workshop is happy to announce our Autumn quarter theme.
Each of the papers in our Autumn quarter series, as well as ongoing discussion on this blog will be oriented to the problem of…
Inference: constructing continuity in the life of signs
“But suddenly, while we are poring over our digest of the facts and are endeavoring to set them into order, it occurs to us that if we were to assume something to be true that we do not know to be true, these facts would arrange themselves luminously.”
— C. S. Peirce (Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, a Deleted Passage, PPM 282-283, 1903)
What sorts of continuities, ruptures, and causalities must be presupposed in the semiotic achievement of coherent biographies or histories? More specifically, what role does inference–the simultaneously retrospective and predictive assemblage of facts and effects–play in sign phenomena and in their analysis?
This quarter, we will consider the kinds of after-the-fact construals and predictive leaps sign-user and analyst alike must make in precipitating and transforming selves, cultures, and histories that may be discovered in and between communicative events.