A Semeiotic Interpretation of a Proposition of Race: Determining the
“Perching and Flights” of the Perceptions of Race Series
Abstract
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.