Review of Ivo Assad Ibri, Semiotics and Pragmatism. Theoretical Interfaces
Ivo Assad Ibri, Semiotics and Pragmatism. Theoretical Interfaces, London, Springer, 2022
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1A deep relationship binds semiotics and pragmatism together, rooted in their common father, Charles Sanders Peirce. However, as deep as this relationship is, it is also complex and not straightforward. This is evidenced by the scant attention that post-Peircean pragmatism (and so much of contemporary pragmatism) has paid to more specifically semiotic problems and by the separation of semiotics into a science in its own right. This estrangement between semiotics and pragmatism means that today one must trace “theoretical interfaces” capable of showing their intertwining and mutual benefit. In this book, Ivo Assad Ibri works on this task: to explain how pragmatism and semiotics find their convergence in the sphere of meaning. This allows him to broaden the horizon of semiotics beyond the linguistic domain and to reestablish its core in the interweaving of thought and action that is the essence of pragmatist philosophy (320).
2This is the main thesis of the book, but surely not the only topic covered. Indeed, Ibri’s book collects twenty-four essays written over the course of his career, which deal with Peirce’s entire philosophical system and manage to combine historical exegesis with the application of the principles of Peirce’s philosophy to a wide range of topics. In the preface, the author lists the reasons that prompted him to compile this volume: in addition to the practical reasons of assembling disparate articles and essays into a single text and making them available in English, the book offers a retrospective look at a career in interpretation that turns out to revolve around a few fundamental topics. Thus, as one reads, one encounters, for instance, arguments for Peirce’s realism, his objective idealism, the semiotic dialogue between theory and fact, the symmetry of epistemological and ontological categories, and the genetic and evolutionary nature of the system.
3Ivo Assad Ibri’s book stands out as a peculiar interweaving of thematic diversity and systematic unity. Indeed, while the topics range from phenomenology to organizational studies, from cosmogenesis to fake news, they are all “entrances to the Peircean edifice” (241), i.e., into is his system, which is the last, the author says, of Western philosophy (241). Ibri reiterates that Peirce’s philosophy should be considered from the point of view of the system; that is, from the point of view of the systematic unity that underlies the various issues at stake. This systematic interest is expressed by the great attention paid to Peirce’s metaphysical vocation, in the constant discussion of his three categories, and in the interpretation of the interfaces of mathematics and phenomenology with the various normative sciences – especially aesthetics.
4Such complex work requires specific methodological choices, which the author does not shy away from. For example, in order to apply Peirce’s philosophy to some of the most pressing contemporary problems, it is necessary to maintain the rigor of Peirce’s terminology while complementing it with what Ibri calls the “instinct for guessing” (226), which comes from long exposure to his philosophy, and which allows one to glimpse some open possibilities in his system. These are clues to expand or specify, to apply and deepen, in the spirit of Peirce’s philosophy, what the latter could not accomplish. The most striking example of this is the philosophy of art and emotional interpreters; what Ibri calls “the poetics of nameless things” (50). By developing possibilities left open in Peirce’s philosophy, Ibri comes to formulate an original aesthetic in constant dialog with Schelling’s philosophy. Schelling, incidentally, is also the inspiration for Ibri’s latest methodological movement: the one according to which one should not approach Peirce (nor Ibri’s book itself) in search of logical exactitude, but with a “sense of poetry” (116) that resonates to the original and the innovative.
5As for the content, Ibri’s book deals with a large number of philosophical problems. The twenty-four essays are divided into seven parts. The first is entitled “On the Philosophy of Art” and contains five essays. The opening text sets out some of the key themes of the volume, advancing a “poetics of otherness” (1) that corresponds to Peirce’s realism. Criticizing the self-sufficiency of the modern ego, it argues for a harmony between sign and thing which does not reduce the object to a product of the subject, but accounts for its intrinsic otherness. The second essay deals with the search for a “poetic ground” (9) in Peirce’s philosophy, which Ibri does not understand as foundationalism. He draws comparisons with Schiller and Schelling in order to create an aesthetics that argues for the irreducibility of the present instant in time (what Ibri calls Kairos), which cannot be understood through the laws of logic but can only be grasped poetically. This peculiar aesthetics is further developed in the next essay, entitled “Peircean Seeds for a Philosophy of Art.” Ibri traces five seeds in Peirce’s philosophy that can lead to the development of an aesthetic theory. These are: the heuristic significance of mathematics (38), the present instant in its relation to the category of firstness (41), the concept of chance in its relevance to creativity (43), the ontological limit of the generalization of thirdness with respect to the “nameless things” (45), and finally the relationship between idealism and cosmology, leading to a genetic philosophy analogous to Schelling’s (47). The fourth essay takes up once more the theme of the poetics of nameless things (51), and the fifth essay concludes the first part of the volume by establishing a comparison between Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Peirce, starting from the category of firstness (65-75).
6The second part of the volume is entitled “On Heuristic Logic.” The first essay in this section addresses the problem of Peirce’s developing realism through the question of abduction and its heuristic exclusivity (79). Abduction is defined as a natural intuition and lume naturale that corresponds to, and is grounded in, the genetic growth of the cosmos on the one hand, and chance as a real and objective principle on the other (96). The second essay returns to the problem of abduction, this time through the lens of Peirce’s agapism. It discusses the relationship between reality and ideality in dialogue with Duns Scotus and Schelling (98-103) and leads to an investigation of the agapic law that causes nature and reality to adopt habits and laws to grow and generalize (112). The third essay is devoted to the problem of uncertainty, which the author addresses by linking it to the notion of fallibilism (117) and by reaffirming Peirce’s critique of the unknowable, finally suggesting replacing the limits of knowledge with the limits of certainty (122). The essay that concludes the second part applies the principles of Peirce’s philosophy to the applied sciences. To do so, the author refers to the fallibilism implicit in the applied sciences (130) and introduces the notion of a semiotic dialogue between theory and fact, which underlies both the pragmatic maxim and the concrete intertwinement of theory and practice in the applied sciences (129-31).
7The third part of the volume is devoted to Peirce’s theory of belief. The first essay attempts to mark the difference between choice and bet: even in the ontological uncertainty that pervades Peirce’s system, the scientific method of the fixation of belief stands out as the best one because it guarantees better control, and it is able to correct itself (142). Similarly, the second essay argues that the scientific method is the only mode of belief fixation that can do justice to facts – which always have the last word (154).
8The fourth part of the volume contains a single essay devoted to the history and context of the development of pragmatism in Brazil, in search of a “Latin element” in Peirce’s philosophy (162).
9The fifth part of the book is devoted to Peirce’s theory of habits. The first essay considers the genesis of habits, focusing on Peirce’s Cambridge Conference VII and investigating the relationship between the genesis of laws and their fluctuation in the uncertainty of chance and firstness (171). The second essay examines the temporality of habits, proposing the distinction between Chronos (the objective time of laws), and Kairos (the discontinuity in time in which the emergence of a new possibility of conduct can occur) (189). The third essay concludes the analysis of the concept of habit by examining its self-organizing aspect. “Habit” thus turns out to be a self-organization supported by the natural tendency of reality to generalize and to establish mediations with the environment (204).
10The sixth part of the book investigates Peirce’s objective idealism. The first essay deals with the Schellingian roots of Peirce’s idealism, focusing on intellectual intuition and aesthetic experience, the relation between nature and mind, and the genesis of the cosmos, trying to see how these ideas from Schelling influenced Peirce (212-24). The second essay focuses on the notions of life and continuity by advancing the idea of a biosemiotics (225). According to biosemiotics, meanings are not mental representations, but actual reactions of conduct, thus establishing a dialogue between nature – understood as a living organism – and the human being.
11The seventh and final part focuses on pragmaticism and pragmatism, as already indicated in the first essay entitled “Neopragmatism Viewed by Pragmaticism: A Redescription.” Here Ibri tries to imagine the critique that Peirce would make of the later development of pragmatism, focusing on Rorty’s neopragmatism. Ibri thus contrasts Rorty’s “linguistic idealism” (262) with Peirce’s objective idealism. He argues that only the latter can account for a criterion of relevance that can explain why changes should be made in our behavior or beliefs. This criterion is identified by Ibri as the brute force of facts that compel us to change and guide our decisions. The three essays that follow are devoted to Peirce’s ethics. The first aims to identify an ontology of action in Peirce’s work (267), the second examines the status of ethics as a discipline in his philosophical system (277), and the third applies Peirce’s realism to the problem of fake news (283). The fifth essay brings the problem of aesthetics to the fore, this time approaching it from the standpoint of Peirce’s epistemology: it shows how, in the experience of firstness, we can grasp nameless things (302), thus revealing the heuristic character of the admirable (310). The last essay, which gives the collection its title, takes up the thesis mentioned at the beginning: the possibility of theoretical interfaces between semiotics and pragmatism (311-24). The key to these interfaces is again Peirce’s realism, which accounts for a dialog between theory and fact, between meaning and action, and which for Ibri represents the originality of Peirce’s thought in the contemporary landscape.
12Overall, Ivo Assad Ibri’s book is an important work in the landscape of contemporary pragmatism. It sheds light on some issues in Peirce’s philosophy that have not yet received the attention they deserve: the question of his relationship to Schelling, his realism, his aesthetics, and his metaphysical systematics. For scholars of Peirce and American philosophy, the book is an opportunity to appreciate, often for the first time in English, the voice of one of the most original scholars on the scene today.
References
Electronic reference
Nicola Ramazzotto, “Review of Ivo Assad Ibri, Semiotics and Pragmatism. Theoretical Interfaces”, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [Online], XV-2 | 2023, Online since 13 October 2023, connection on 10 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/3600; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.3600
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