Generating New Possibilities for Action in Research Through a Peircean Aesthetic

• In Event: Narratives at the Boundaries: Research Positioned in the Borderland Spaces

Abstract

This paper offers that Peirce’s semiotics provides a way to understand the relation between the aesthetic features of narrative modes of representation and other more traditional forms of representing knowledge. In Peirce’s semiotic, the discernment and communication of felt qualities in our experience is a necessary part of any epistemic relation. For Peirce, these felt qualities are ontologically real; without them, there can be no experience of knowing. A significant contribution of this paper will be in elucidating an ontological reality of aesthetics in narrative representations. Instead of conceiving of such works only in terms of epistemic invitations to know differently, Pierce’s semiotics offer a way to think about narrative interventions as a fundamental transformation of being.

Author

• Casey Emmanuel Tiemann, University of Oregon