The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy by Mendieta Eduardo;

Author:Mendieta, Eduardo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2002-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

TRANSCENDENTAL SEMIOTICS: A NEW PARADIGM OF PRIMA PHILOSOPHIA65

In the following paragraphs, I would like to summarize what I understand to be the main building blocks of Apel’s transformed transcendental philosophy, whose need and inevitability have been sketched and shown throughout the length of this meandering chapter. Apel’s transcendental semiotics—which includes as “gleichursprünglich,” a transcendental hermeneutics, and a transcendental pragmatics—can be said to be constituted of the following philosophical points:

1. The rejection of methodical solipsism and affirmation of intersubjectivity. This is taken to be one of the main philosophical bequests from both Heidegger and Wittgenstein as well as from both Peirce and Mead (whose symbolic interactionism was highly estimated by Apel as a major advancement over Morris and Royce66). Essentially, this means that intersubjectivity can not be reduced to a transcendental subjectivity (as Husserl and Kant pretended). Nor can linguistically constituted subjectivity retreat behind dialogism; in other words, even when a subject is seen as being dependent on language, this language use cannot be reductively attributed to private intentions (as the late Searle has attempted to do).67 In the last instance, no one can follow a rule alone, and all monologues, even that of the soul with itself, are but derivative forms of a public language. Part and parcel of the rejection of solipsism is the rejection of semiotical idealism. More precisely, just as it is impossible to think of oneself as a pure cogito, it is impossible to think that there is no reality whatsoever and that we are really just brains in vats, that “everything is perhaps just a dream.” The rejection of solipsism also warrants the rejection of the demand after the proof of the existence of the real world. Here, Apel is no less scandalized than Heidegger when we still would like to or seem to want to provide a proof for the existence of the world.

2. Denouncement of abstractive and reductive fallacies. Scientism, solipsism, ontological-semanticism, behaviorism, philosophical autism (the name I would give to Heidegger’s history of Being and Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy as language therapy), and so on are to be seen as either abstractive or reductive fallacies that derive from a one-dimensional or even two-dimensional consideration of semiosis. Semiosis always presupposes a sign, a real thing for which it stands, and a community of sign users for which this sign denotes a designatum (to use Morris’s and Peirce’s language). An interpretant, as a sole consciousness, let us say, can only be heuristically abstracted from its being dependent on signs that denote things that, although not known entirely, are knowable in the “long run.” Most philosophical paradoxes and aporias derive from a foreshortening of the pragmatic-semiotic use of language.

3. Language has an irreducible double structure. Within a community of communication, language use can be reduced neither to the merely denotative nor to the merely performative. Language is our bridge to Karl Bühler’s three worlds: the objective, the social, and the subjective worlds. Through language, we communicate with others in a normative way about states of

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