Arthur's Bentley obstinate philosophy

Abstract

[Abstract] In the first half of the 20th century, Arthur Bentley was a relatively well-known philosopher of the social sciences, who is today mostly remembered by his collaboration with John Dewey on their book, Knowing and the Known (1949), and for a very early study on group pressures, The Process of Government (1908). Now largely forgotten, Arthur Bentley developed a unique methodology and epistemology for social sciences that remains unique to this day. Over the years, and especially in opposition to the «semiotic» of Charles Morris, Bentley developed his own system and vocabulary of signs, signals, designations and symbols, or rather the behavioural activity of «symboling», in support of his radical «floating cosmology», a fundamentally relational, pragmatic and thoroughly anti-dualistic epistemology. At the core of his thought is the concept of transaction, a general epistemological principle that sees all distinctions, such as organism-environment, perceptioncognition, subject-object etc., as subsumed under a more general whole, from which distinctions are drawn by an act of provisional reflection and naming. Thus all such dualisms and distinctions are treated as secondary separations within an integrated, inseparable whole, which in turn is constituted by the set or system of transactions proceeding in it. The presentation will provide a short overview and introduction to Arthur Bentley’s thought as it pertains to semiotics, in the hope of rescuing the thought of this fascinating thinker from the obscurity into which it has today fallen.