1Representationism and Presentationism Mats Bergman

In the late 1860s, the young Charles S. Peirce launched a crushing criticism of Cartesian thought in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. In a series of seminal essays, he advocated a semiotic theory of cognition that denied the privileged status of individual intuitions while affirming the dynamic and ultimately social nature of knowledge. Arguably, these texts set the scene for Peirce's subsequent philosophical labours. At least, Peirce clearly affirms some of the the basic principles of his early position in his mature writings, and he expresses the main upshot of this outlook in a letter to Victoria Lady Welby: with “the exception of knowledge, in the present instant, of the contents of consciousness in that instant (the existence of which knowledge is open to doubt) all our thought & knowledge is by signs ” (SS 32 [1904]; cf. MS 8:1 [c. 1903?]). Quite understandably, such remarks have sometimes been taken to imply a thoroughgoing semiotic stance, that is, a position according to which cognition, at least, is self-subsistent or autonomous in the sense of being an affair of signs exclusively. However, running parallel with Peirce’s later reflections on signs and representation there is a different strand of thought that seems to qualify the radical semiotic position in certain respects – namely, hi