A Semeiotic Interpretation of a Proposition of Race: Determining the "Perching and Flights" of the Perceptions of Race Series

The fallacy of race as a product of the categorization of the cognitive systems of human beings is well documented (Feagin & Ducey, 2019; Higginbotham, 2013; Hirschfeld, 1938; Miles & Brown, 2003). Recently, the calls to dismantle racism is reaching crescendo catalyzed by the movement ignited by the murder of George Floyd. In fact, a Google search of “dismantling racism” produces 13,600,000 results (June 7, 2020). But what are the criteria, or system of ideas, to determine if racism is, or is not, ‘dismantled’? Are we aware and in agreement as to “what” racism is individually, let alone collectively? And when we know, will we then know “how” to dismantle it individually and collectively?

Toward establishing and developing a mechanism for addressing questions of this nature, the semeiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce (Houser & Kloesel, 1992; Houser & colleaugues, 1998) and an explanation for the thinking process argued by John Dewey (1991), this developing hypothesis for this work is to provide guidance for answering these questions by first establishing a method aimed at discovering the reasoning criteria that determine meaning of ‘racism’ for each of us. These logicians, and others including Burke and Stets (2009) and Ryan and Deci (2017), for example, make it clear that the reasoning process, including how one perceives, interprets, and reasons, sheds some light on the influencing criteria of these phenomena. So, what happens cognitively as a person makes meaning of entities, phenomenon, and events through the reasoning process including subprocesses of perceiving and interpreting associations to race.