Zugl.: Köln, Univ., Diss., 2005

Thesis (Ph. L.)--Catholic University of America, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 73).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1937. / Private edition, distributed by the University of Chicago libraries. Chicago, Illinois. Published also without thesis note. Imprint date altered in pen.

Universiẗat, Diss., 2003--München.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Philosophy, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. L.)--Catholic University of America, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 73).

Texte remanié de: Proefschrift--Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1993.

In "Rethinking Legal Pragmatism: A Philosophical Approach," I take issue with the position of Judge Richard A. Posner, a contemporary spokesperson for legal pragmatism and the law and economics movement. Posner holds that academic philosophy and philosophical pragmatism in particular has no role to play in legal pragmatism as it manifests itself in the process of adjudication and the process of legal scholarship. By redefining philosophy functionally, as opposed to merely sociologically, I illustrate a threefold function of philosophy corresponding to the roles it plays in legal pragmatism. I show the methodological function of philosophy using C.S. Peirce's logic and epistemology, the critical function of philosophy using the insights of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s legal theory, and the normative function of philosophy, using John Dewey's illustration of continuity among moral, aesthetic, practical, and intellectual inquiries. By illustrating the insights of classical American pragmatism to Judge Posner, I show the normative dimensions of the use of history in adjudication and legal scholarship, which prescribe that we narrow the gap between theory and practice in the way we use history. By undermining the strict dichotomy Posner has erected between philosophy and law and between theory and practice, I cultivate a more productive dialogue between law and philosophy, prescribing a broad vision of normativity, allowing for intelligent social growth, and the reconstruction of ends.

The central argument of this project is that meaningful and intelligible experience is conditioned by the determinate relationship between realms of reality, and that our humanity is grounded on the semiotic process of symbolic references, which is manifest in Charles S. Peirce’s and Robert C. Neville’s theories of determination. However they are contained by the past such processes of determination can be extended to the future through transformative effort. My investigation ranges over multiple paths that lead toward determinate processes, by suggesting that the problem of interpretation and of the intelligibility of experience can be solved only in reference to the full purview of determinate features of experience. In his theory of determination, Peirce considered two processes of determination, the semiotic process and epistemology. The semiotic process is an extensional process from object to interpretant that consists of an infinite chain of references that can be spatially reversible. The epistemological process of determination is temporal and irreversible, where the idea grows into the individual mind, as the universe is unfolded by the agency of mind. Peirce’s study of the logic of individuals of Duns Scotus is to find answers for the problem of individuality. For Peirce, God is individualized in the course of determination and at the same time determines all possible determinations. Due to his adopting the Scotian sense of necessity, Neville also adopts Duns Scotus’s logic of individuals to his theory of determination and valuation. As revealed in his theory of determination, in the ontological act of creation God becomes individual as a creator, an individual as the determiner of all possible determinations. In his theory of determination, Neville proposes modes of determination at the ontological level, as well as a collection of cosmological determinations. Neville works “inter-cosmologically” in order to account for the fundamental conditions of our knowing that brings ontological and cosmological determinations together. In their theory of interpretation, Peirce and Neville suggest a triadic system of semiotic network. Among other things, Neville provides a more sophisticated version of theory of interpretation, which involves realms of intelligibility. Both Peirce and Neville symbolism allows for the pragmatic semiotics based upon a brokenness of signs, which opens for further interpretation.

Peirce's theory of retroduction, or the formation of hypotheses, describes, as a form of inference, the process of reasoning by which hypotheses to explain unexpected events are arrived at. In general, retroduction consists in the suggestion of a known class of events of which the event to be explained may possibly be a particular case. On the other hand, Peirce sometimes speaks of retroduction as positing an unobserved entity to explain observed phenomena. It has been argued, however, that this second definition of retroduction constitutes a special case of the first. The theory of retroduction is presented in two different forms, the earlier and the later, with a transition period between the two forms falling in the years from 1885 to 1900. The early theory stresses the formal structure of the retroductive form of inference, and presents retroduction and induction as parallel forms of reasoning, differing in that the former infers from observed facts other facts different from those observed, while the latter infers facts the same as those observed but of greater generality. Hypotheses and inductions are considered as of comparable stability. In the later theory retroduction originates all new ideas, in the form of suggested hypotheses, which themselves are little more than intelligent guesses, hut qualify as forms of inference in that unlike perceptions to which they are analogous they may be subjected to criticism as to their adequacy in explaining the events under question. Induction in the later theory is the process of testing hypotheses by deduction of experiential predictions from them and comparison of observed fact with those predictions. The criterion for the acceptance of hypotheses for inductive testing is purely one of economy. The validity of retroduction consists, not in any objective probability of its conclusions, but in the fact that only by retroduction can any new ideas be originated, and hence in the fact that together with inductive testing it constitutes the only method of arriving at true statements about the real world. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate