T. L. Short begins his most recent volume with the following admonition:

Those ‘very problems’ in philosophy to which Peirce devoted his life's work, Short reminds us, are: firstly, “to construct a naturalistic but non-reductive account of the human mind” and secondly, “to explain and defend the claim that the sciences are objective in their mode of inquiry and, in fact, yield knowledge of an independently existing reality” (ix). Taken together, these twin projects may indeed be seen as attempts at tackling the defining philosophical questions of modernity, and as this book makes clear, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) had much of interest to say about them both.

Known to the generally educated public primarily as the founder of the philosophical movement of pragmatism (a movement whose subsequent development at the hands of his protégés William James and John Dewey, he came to vehemently reject), Charles Peirce was also a logician, chemist and mathematician of exceptional brilliance. He was also, apparently, an extremely difficult man in his professional relations and, during his own lifetime, his genius went unrecognized by all but the most astute of his contemporaries.

Over the course of the last two decades, however, a keen renewal of interest in Peirce's thought has been taking place, as the more than 80,000 manuscript pages left behind at the time of his death are now finally being brought into chronological order and made widely available to scholars. This recent scholarship has revealed that Peirce's lifelong attempt to develop a “logic of sign relations” at the end of the 19^th century found him not only anticipating – but also offering provocative and often prescient answers to – many of the questions that are today at the forefront of the contemporary projects of naturalized epistemology, modal logic, process philosophy, and biosemiotics.

Yet, with Peircean logic now being successfully applied to both biological and computer models of information processing, it remains a curious fact that within mainstream analytic philosophy, Peirce's subtle and voluminous writings on logic, language, cognition and sign relations remain to this day largely unread. It is to remedy this deficit that philosopher T. L. Short has set out in this volume to explicitly detail what Peirce's theory of signs – his semeiotic – has to offer the contemporary philosopher of science, philosopher of language, and philosopher of mind.

Wisely, Short devotes the first part of his book to teaching his audience the basics of Peirce's extremely complicated and densely interconnected ‘architectonic’ of knowledge. Only once this firm grounding in Peirce's logic of sign relations is in place, does the author turn his attention towards explicitly considering the applicability of Peirce's ideas to those raised in the works of Putnam, Kripke, Fodor, Quine, Dennett, Feyeraband, Millikan and Haack. These early ‘educational’ chapters are not only crucial for an understanding of the later ones, but are themselves alone worth the price of the volume, surpassing in clarity and accessibility any other overview of Peirce's sign logic that I have thus far encountered. The focus of the present review will be on the volume's last three chapters, however, as this is where the author most explicitly considers the ways in which Peirce's architectonic of knowledge might profitably inform the debates germane to the readers of Philosophy.

In the first of these chapters, entitled How Symbols Grow, Short examines some fundamental issues in the philosophy of language to show how Peirce's grounding of his epistemology in the communal, real-world practices of pragmatic meaning – the ‘mooring of our words by certain applications and letting them change their meaning as our conceptions of the things to which we have applied them progress” (264) – anticipates Putnam's notion of the irreducibility of reference to individual psychology, and fleshes out a non-naïve notion of ‘natural kinds’ that can allow for both the fundamental commensurability underlying theory change in science, as well as the distributed and transient, yet ‘veridical enough’ “fixing” of reference and meaning among ordinary language users.

It was towards these ends that Peirce, in the construction of his logic of reference, developed the notion of hypostatic abstraction – “a necessary inference whose conclusion refers to a subject not referred to in the premise …something whose being [as an ens rationis] consists in some other facts” (267). Such abstraction from the indexicality of robustly subsisting real-world relations allows us to introduce an object of reference – “that x which we are talking about” even when we disagree or are unsure about the specific nature of precisely what it is that we are talking about. By way of example, Short provides an edifying discussion from the history of science, regarding the ways in which a definitionally vague – but experientially stable (or what Short calls a ‘virtuously inspecific’) – notion of heat allowed for not only the proposal of reasonable but contradictory explanations (i.e. of ‘caloric substance’ and ‘kinetic energy’), but also provided the grounds by which to decide which of the two explanations is the more felicitous. Science uses such abstraction ubiquitously to get on in its work – but so, insists Peirce, do ordinary agents in their daily routine accomplishment of understanding the world.

Accordingly, in the chapter that follows, entitled Semiosis and the Mental, Short turns his attention from the relevance of Peirce's sign logic for questions arising from the philosophy of language, and towards its potential application for furthering contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind. Anticipating the ‘dynamic emergence’ theories of the systems scientists of the late 20^th century, Peirce posited a presciently non-mechanistic, yet thoroughly naturalistic, understanding of the phenomenon of ‘mind’ – a phenomenon which is, to Peirce, but a particularly high-level form of sign logic, wherein the perceptual and associative relations guiding all animal behavior come to be understood as the irreducibly triadic agent-action-object sign relations that they really are (in Peirce's technical vocabulary: humans become able to understand these latter experiential relations as symbols, rather than just as iconic or indexical signs, of an extra-mental reality).

Evolutionarily coherent, yet able to avoid the kind reductionist fallacies that plagued the late 20^th century projects of evolutionary epistemology and sociobiology, Peirce's semeiotic theory of ‘mindedness’ understands the species-specific form of human linguaform cognition to be an evolutionarily derivative, but functionally unique, form of sign manipulation that has its roots in the innate outward-directedness that is characteristic of, and makes possible, all purposeful animal behavior in the world.

This discussion of outward-directedness, critical for the grounding of sign-action in extra-mental relations, leads Short to consider Peirce's semeiotic in light of the arguments for and against functionalism, eliminative materialism, and epistemological externalism. Most intriguingly, it leads him to consider in some depth the teleological functionalism and biosemantic theories of Ruth Garrett Millikan, whose ideas deeply resonate with many of the ideas put forth by Peirce. Yet while the ideas of Millikan and Peirce have much in common, Short argues that Millikan's use of ‘indicative and imperative sentences’ to serve as the paradigm form of all sign relations “subverts the naturalist intention” (306) behind the biosemantic project in ways that Peirce's more encompassing logic of sign-relations does not – as the latter accounts for not only the evolutionarily late exaptation that is human language, but also non-verbal gestures, animal display behaviour, and even Augustine's signa naturalia – i.e. signs which are not themselves produced for the sake of signifying.

Such an unreservedly naturalist account of the cumulative evolution of sign-processing from the naturally selected mechanics of brute perception to the abstract virtuality of human thought, argues Short, can also inform our understanding of the naturalistic emergence of ‘self’ as an ens rationis – a relation “whose being consists in facts about other things” – that is both materially consequential as well as “separable from any Cartesian assumption of intuitive self-knowledge, and from any assumption of impenetrable privacy” (315). Readers interested in such matters will find fascinating Short's masterful exegesis on how Peirce's logic of sign relations allows this to be so.

In the final chapter, The Structure of Objectivity, the author ties together many of the earlier ideas with a clear and concise explication of Peirce's pragmatic theory of truth. “This may seem an impossibly ambitious topic to address so late in this book,” writes Short in the context of this discussion, “but, in fact, we have hardly been talking of anything else” (344) – as the following pages will well attest. Widely misunderstood by those who know the doctrines of ‘pragmatism’ only through James and Dewey, Peirce's ‘pragmaticist’ theory of truth – while ineliminably communal and processural – is in no way culturally relativistic, nor grounded in ‘the practical concerns of action’ as that phrase may be commonly understood. It is, rather, a theory justifying the very project of inquiry itself – a project begun at the dawn of humanity and pursued by various communities of inquirers ever since – and one “that, in the absence of [self-authenticating] foundations and despite our not having truths with which to begin, nevertheless converges, over the long run, on answers to at least some of its questions” via the distributed logic bridging personal and extra-personal relations that Peirce refers to as the ‘sign action’ of semiosis (347).

In all of the above discussions and more, writes Short, “we witness contemporary philosophers gradually groping their way back to the positions that Peirce formulated from about 1902 to 1907, that is, a hundred years ago” – to which he then adds: “I think that they have not yet made it all the way” (298). The teasing presumptuousness of this last statement, however, is only indicative of the writing in rest of the book in its combination of boldly assertive clarity and an engagingly light touch. For the goal of this book is not to advance what the author has described elsewhere as an ‘unwarranted Peircean imperialism’ – indeed, few Peirce scholars are as critical of so many of their subject's conjectures as Short is in this book – but instead to do the hard work of bringing the oftimes exasperating denseness of Peirce's epistemological architectonic into a form from which contemporary philosophers of mind and language can profitably employ and extend its hypotheses.

Indeed, doing so is precisely what is at the heart of both this book, as well as Peirce's entire lifelong project. “No philosopher was ever more besotted with science than Peirce,” writes Short, “who made philosophy itself a science, or a set of sciences, to be pursued in relation to the other sciences” (307) and, by so doing, “embraced a fresh beginning for philosophy, one at once empirical and conjectural.” (65). This very 21^st century vision, in turn, “indicates how Peirce ought to be read” (xii) – for Peirce's “theses are like hypotheses in natural science: based on observations, they are nonetheless not fully justified by observations already made, but must prove themselves by their fruitfulness to further research, in competition with alternative hypotheses” (65). Peirce, then, truly can be said to have written “philosophy like a scientist, setting out ideas not intended as ‘final’ – but to be applied and developed, perhaps by others. The arguments for those ideas appear not just wholly on the page, but consists instead in what can be done with them – just as pragmatism implies” (xii).

Short's book admirably adopts the same forward-looking perspective, and for any 21^st century philosopher endeavoring, as Peirce did, to develop a scientifically-sound philosophy of mind, of language, or even of science itself – Peirce's Theory of Signs offers a wealth of philosophical riches just waiting to be mined.