Abstract
In his divisions of science, Peirce placed pedagogy in the branch of practical sciences. This means that the profession of teaching can only be meliorated by experience, through practice. However, I argue that a holistic look at Peirce’s semiotics reveals an implicit philosophy of education. The key lies in understanding his account of experience in the context of his theory of evolution. By experience Peirce meant semiosis (action of signs), not the modern empirical notion of experience. The sign, unlike an idea (purely mental entity) does not belong strictly to mental or non-mental phenomena. Experience is a characteristic of the Universe (CP 5.448), understood as a physiology of arguments (Stjernfelt 2007). According to Peirce’s taxonomy of signs, learning is the evolution of signification from the Icon sign type to the Argument sign type, being the Universe’s way of discovering itself through life forms. The Argument sign type is a result of agapasm, evolution due to creative love (CP 6.302). The paper explains how Peirce’s theory of agapistic evolution underpins an educational paradigm.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Contemporary approaches to a pedagogy of process
- Signs as functions: Edusemiotic and ontological foundations for a semiotic concept of a sign
- Edusemiotics as process semiotics: Towards a new model of semiosis for teaching and learning
- The implications for education of Peirce’s agapist principle
- Writing and Différance
- Seeing through the metaphor: The OECD quality toolbox for early childhood
- Values, edusemiotics, and intercultural dialogue: From Russia with questions
- Usage de l’objet, signification et émergence de la conscience à l’étape préverbale du développement: Une perspective édusémiotique
- Les intuitions édusémiotiques des grands pédagogues : Engagement sémiotique, théorie de l’enquête et narrativité
- Edusemiotics and Karl-Otto Apel’s transcendental semiotics
- Edusemiotics of meaningful learning experience: Revisiting Kant’s pedagogical paradox and Greimas’ semiotic square
- Can design inquiry advance edusemiotics? Rethinking factual information and imaginative interpretation
- Monstrous hermeneutics: Learning from diagrams
- Learning to take play seriously: Peirce, Bateson, and Huizinga on the sacrality of play
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Contemporary approaches to a pedagogy of process
- Signs as functions: Edusemiotic and ontological foundations for a semiotic concept of a sign
- Edusemiotics as process semiotics: Towards a new model of semiosis for teaching and learning
- The implications for education of Peirce’s agapist principle
- Writing and Différance
- Seeing through the metaphor: The OECD quality toolbox for early childhood
- Values, edusemiotics, and intercultural dialogue: From Russia with questions
- Usage de l’objet, signification et émergence de la conscience à l’étape préverbale du développement: Une perspective édusémiotique
- Les intuitions édusémiotiques des grands pédagogues : Engagement sémiotique, théorie de l’enquête et narrativité
- Edusemiotics and Karl-Otto Apel’s transcendental semiotics
- Edusemiotics of meaningful learning experience: Revisiting Kant’s pedagogical paradox and Greimas’ semiotic square
- Can design inquiry advance edusemiotics? Rethinking factual information and imaginative interpretation
- Monstrous hermeneutics: Learning from diagrams
- Learning to take play seriously: Peirce, Bateson, and Huizinga on the sacrality of play