Naming What We See: Philosophy as the Habit of Asking After the General that Transpires Through the Particular

Abstract

This article tries to describe in rich semiotic detail the work that’s involved in ‘naming’ ‘what we see’, i.e. in knowing. For this purpose, it introduces in Section 1 a real-life scene that provides rich experiential grounding for the paper’s theoretical claims. The scene is that of a researcher confronted with the difficulty of translating her earlier work into another language. This scene is worthwhile because it helps illuminate the close connection that exists in practice between (i) paying attention to particulars, and (ii) bringing to articulation the forms that transpire through those particulars. In Section 2, the article relies on semiotic terminology drawn from the tradition of C.S. Peirce and John Deely to tease out more rigorously the relationship between the general and the particular in the act of knowing: neither splitting them nor positing one as ‘more real’ than the other. Finally, the paper situates the notion of philosophical inquiry, as a habit of critically re-visiting our objects of experience, in the pragmaticist tradition by mobilizing C.S. Peirce’s distinction between ‘idioscopic’ and ‘cenoscopic’ inquiry.