Peirce's Universal Categories and Critical Realist Ontology

Bibliographic Data

ID6431990
AuthorsTobin Nellhaus (0000-0003-3622-0374, Independent Scholar New York New York USA, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume55
Issue1
Publication date2024-11-22
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8308 • E-ISSN: 1468-5914
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/jtsb.12435
OpenAlexW4404652178
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited21

Much of Charles S. Peirce's philosophy hinges on his “universal categories” of Firstness (qualities, potentialities), Secondness (action, otherness) and Thirdness (relationship, rule‐boundedness). Despite their abstractness, the categories have concrete applications and shed light on several critical realist theories, such as its ontological domains, its social ontology and its more nascent semiotics. Using Peirce's categories this way requires building on his effectively non‐deterministic materialist arguments and extricating his ontology from his better‐known phenomenology. Peirce's universal categories, which are stratified and emergent, unearth a systematic pattern unifying critical realist ontologies and address certain problems elsewhere in critical realist philosophy. Most significantly, Peirce's semiotics provides critical realism with the mechanism connecting epistemology to ontology and grounds a case for reconceptualizing critical realism's empirical domain as the semiosic domain

Critical realism (philosophy of perception · Epistemology · Materialism · Ontology · Phenomenology (philosophy · Realism · Semiotics · Social ontology · Sociology · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Critical Realism in Sociology · Philosophy · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education