Joseph Margolis

Contemporary Pragmatism, 2017

Pragmatism, Metaphysics and Culture: Reflections on the Philosophy of Joseph Margolis is the literary culmination of a conference entitled "Metaphysics of Culture-The Philosophy of Joseph Margolis" that was held in Helsinki, Finland on May 20-21, 2013. The volume contains revised versions of papers presented at the conference as well as "several other contributions including Margolis's own responses to each paper" (p. iv). We are presented with a variety of articles directed toward an analysis and explication of Margolis's philosophical projects; we are also given the opportunity to read Margolis's response to each paper-allowing the philosopher himself to frame and evaluate the commentaries. This style of call-and-response philosophical dialogue is reminiscent of the long running Open Court Library of Living Philosophers series. Following the editorial introduction, the volume opens with an article by Margolis himself ("Toward a Metaphysics of Culture"), setting the tone of the conversation as a communal attempt (on the part of Margolis and his commentators) to assess the direction and significance of Margolis's thought over the last several decades as he has explored themes of philosophical anthropology, a revitalization of American Pragmatism, and the possibility of a "metaphysics of culture." Margolis asserts that, to his mind, his philosophy has long been moving in the direction of philosophical anthropology and philosophy of culture, or as he puts it: a "definition of the human self and the analysis of the unique features of the human world and our form of life" (p. 1). Margolis has christened his approach to philosophical anthropology as "artifactualist" (see throughout). An artifactualist approach to philosophical anthropology holds that "the human self is a hybrid, artifactual transform of the primate of our species" (p. 10). As an artifact, the human person is a cultural construct that "emerges" (but does not supervene in the sense of Jaegwon Kim: see p. 16) from the natural animal homo sapien. As an artifactual transform, Margolis explains that the human person should be understood as "second-natured," which is to say that it is embodied in nature, but has the peculiar property of being "interpretable." Second-natured artifacts such as person "have (or are) histories rather than natures…" (p. 8). For Margolis, the key that enables the cultural transformation of second-natured artifacts out of natural kinds is the mastery of language: "we emerge as persons through the mastery of language" (p. 24).

Contemporary Pragmatism

This essay aims to adumbrate the relationship between ordinary language, history, and cognition in Joseph Margolis’ pragmatist account of the historical constitution of the human, cultural world. It emphasizes the important connections between his arguments for the essentially practical grounding of all forms of cognitive activity; the existential primacy of the historically evolved ordinary language in the formation of aptly socialized human persons as well as of productively functioning human societies; the transformational role of consciousness in history, including the history of cognition; and the insuperable informality inherent in all philosophical attempts to justify our historically articulated norms of cognition and our way of life. Margolis’ analysis of these relationships claims to show that cultural tolerance and historical plasticity deserve to displace the philosophical ideas of invariance and fixity as the favored resources of conceptual and social stability. This re...

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 2012

2018

Intersemiotic translation (IT) can be described as a cognitive artifact designed to distribute artistic creativity. Cognitive artifacts are part of material and cultural niches of human cognition. They have different forms and can be used in many different activities. Their varied morphology includes “material and mental” structures (Norman 1993), “designed for and opportunistic” entities (Hutchins 1999), and “transparent and opaque” processes (Clark 2004). For several authors, cognition is full of cognitive artifacts; even more radically, cognition is a network of artifacts. For many artists, intersemiotic translation is one of these tools, but what is its ontological nature, and how does intersemiotic translation work? As an augmented intelligence technique, intersemiotic translation works as a generative model, providing new, unexpected, surprising data in the target system and affording competing results that allow the system to generate candidate instances. To describe this pro...

The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (b. 1839–d. 1914) has had a profound, expansive, and sometimes unrecognized impact on anthropological research and theory. Part of Peirce’s impact has been mediated through the work of philosophers influenced by Peirce’s theory of signs, and who were themselves subsequently taken into anthropological theory. But the impact of Peirce’s semiotic on anthropologists who have interpreted Peirce directly has also been transformative, in particular, in developing a surprisingly transdisciplinary theory of meaning in anthropology. This article documents the role of Peirce’s theory of signs in facilitating a semiotic approach in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology and in providing a framework to critically expand research on visual and material culture, archaeology, trans-species environmental relations, life-systems, and the evolution of language and culture. The transformative impact of Peirce’s semiotic can be understood against the history of the dominant structuralist semiotic theory that guided much 20th- century anthropology that developed from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure called for a science of signs (termed “semiology”) that placed at its center an analysis of the arbitrary linguistic sign (constituted by an ideal binary binding concept and sound-image) and which has value as part of a system of oppositions (langue), held commonly in the minds of speakers as members of a society. A parallel model of language was incorporated into American anthropology by Franz Boas, who argued that language is a conventional system of classification for a society, and the dominant focus became the study of such systems of classification in domains such as botany, zoology, kinship, color, and so on. The structuralist concept of language as a conventional system also became a dominant model of culture in French and British anthropology, in particular through the integration of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s binary analysis of mythic and mental structures, and which was coordinated with the Durkheimian concept of language/culture as a public representation of a society’s values to itself. In contrast, Peircean semiosis does not take the idealist and arbitrary linguistic symbol as the privileged basis of semiotic analysis. Peirce’s semiotic provides a framework for understanding actions relating signs and their material qualities to their interpretations by agents (human and nonhuman) in the habit of making meaning in social-ecological contexts. Peircean semiosis focuses attention on dynamic interpretive processes and their consequences, and on the form, diversity, function, and positionality of signs in chains of actions playing out in time and space to practical, meaningful, productive, or consequential ends.

The Series: Semiotics, Communication and Cognition, Volume 14, Paul Cobley & Kalevi Kull (eds.), 2014

JoLMA - Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts, 2022

In this paper, we support a continuistic reading of Joseph Margolis' philosophy, defending the claim that in the 1970s, Margolis tackled the issues suggested by the analytic philosophy of art from an original theoretical perspective and through conceptual tools exceeding the analytical framework. Later that perspective turned out to be a radically pragmatist one, in which explicitly tolerant realistic claims and non-reductive naturalism converged with radical historicism and contextualism. We will endorse this thesis by focusing on two important concepts appearing in Margolis' aesthetics essays from the late 1950s to the 1970s: the type-token pair and the notion of cultural emergence. On the one hand, we will emphasise Margolis' indebtedness to Peirce's first formulation of the type-token distinction, involving a strong interdependence between the two elements of the pair, as well as an anti-essentialistic, historicised, and contextualised notion of type. On the other hand, we will delve into Margolis' exploration of the concept of emergence and cultural emergence, involving a genuinely pluralistic view of ontology, as well as a non-reductive, continuistic form of naturalism. Finally, we will connect the criticism of the so-called closure of the physical world with Margolis' anti-autonomistic stance in defining artworks.

Observing Wildlife in Tropical Forests, Vol 1: A Geosemeiotic Approach, Chapter 6, 2019

The following paper offers an introduction to the semeiotic logic, and phenomenology of Charles S. Peirce. The introduction is part of a broader account of Peircian semeiotic phenomenology that appears in Observing Wildlife in Tropical Forests, a book about the geosemeiotics of wildlife observation amongst tourists.

East Asian Journal of Philosophy, 2023

This paper develops an inquiry into the meanings and implications of Joseph Margolis' definition of artworks as physically embodied and culturally emergent entities. It starts from the pars destruens of his theory, by comparing two different texts criticizing Morris Weitz' denial of the possibility to define art. While in an early essay Margolis is ready to accept a constructivistic conception of necessary and sufficient conditions, six decades later he seems to have dropped the attempt to maintain a deflationary version of enabling conditions in view of a more coherent form of contingentism and pluralism. Secondly, the paper focuses on the "generic" character of Margolis' definition, namely its being too inclusive, insofar as it fits any kind of cultural entity. The author suggests that the first implication of Margolis' "generic" definition is the idea of continuity between artworks and the things and events of the cultural world. A second implication is that according to Margolis differences between artworks and other things can only be traced a posteriori, by looking at collective practices and at habitual uses of the term. Finally, the author argues that Margolis' radically historicist and contextualized approach to the arts should be integrated through a coherent historicizing and contextualizing of the very issue of the definition of art. A similar step could have strengthened his transition to a more inclusive philosophy of culture and philosophical anthropology.

Nóema: Rivista online di Filosofia, 2013