Signs, solidarities, and sociology : Charles S. Peirce and the pragmatics of globalization / Blasco José Sobrinho.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sobrinho, Blasco José, 1954-

Series:

Postmodern social futures

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839-1914.

Peirce, Charles S.

Sociology--Philosophy.

Sociology.

Globalization.

Pragmatism.

Physical Description:

xi, 303 pages ; 23 cm.

Other Title:

Signs, solidarities & sociology

Place of Publication:

Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, [2001]

Summary:

Agency and Power: A Formal-Pragmatic Theory of Cultural Process addresses the formation and fragmentation of identity in today's postmodern world. Informed by the conceptual convergence in the theories of Durkheim, Peirce, Mead, and Lacan, this book surveys the range of twentieth-century sociology to deconstruct those favored nostrums of subjective meaning, personal power and autonomous self-hood that comprise its semantics of agency. Revealed beneath this semantic screen is the triad of pragmatic codes -- premodern affiliation, modern calibration, and postmodern globalization -- that govern the social construction of the self. While the ill-comprehended confluence of these three signification codes in the present world situation can indeed fragment personal identity, their formal structural linkages, as shown in this book, may inform a truly postmodern, globally applicable, science of culture.

Contents:

Introduction: Theory in a Time of Fragmentation: Toward the Fusion of Horizons 1

From Durkheim's Detour to Goffman's Gulch: The Need for Re-Framing Social Theory 1

Pragmaticism: The Scientific Realist Completion of Durkheim's Project 15

Global Cultural Process: The Evolution of Interpretant Form 25

Chapter 1 Agency: Meaning, Perspectivism, and Pragmatics 63

Rationality and the Problem of Meaning 65

The Semantic Alternative: Contingency, Language, and Perspectivism 72

Pragmatics in Context: Meaning and Method in the Social Sciences 78

Chapter 2 Social Power: The Signifying Context of Communicative Meaning 103

Structure and Power: Family Resemblances and Conceptual Relations 104

Domination: The "First Face" of Power 109

Power's Other "Faces": From the Empirical Mismeasure of "Power Over" to the Theoretical Definition of "Power To" 114

The Social Order of Puissance: Negotiation, Communication, and Closure 119

Chapter 3 Empowerment: The Social Construction of the Self 133

The Scientific Logic of Abstraction 135

Social Theory's First Encounter with the Mirror Concept: Cooley and Mead 140

Social Theory's Second Encounter with the Mirror Concept: Lacan 149

Peircean Pragmatics and Durkheimian Internalization 156

Chapter 4 Formal System: The Autopoietic Evolution of Pragmatic (Interpretant) Codes 167

System, Evolution, and the Habits of Knowledge 172

Modernization as Code-Transition from Filiation to Calibration 192

Globalization and "Postmodernity" 229

Conclusion, 2000 C.E.: Globality as "Semantic Regionalization"? 254.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0847691780

0847691799

OCLC:

46359399