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The purpose of this paper is to use ideas drawn from two founders of American pragmatism, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, in order to propose a philosophical foundation that supports the value of collaborative tagging and reinforces the structure and goals of the Semantic Web.

The study employs a close analysis of key literature by James and Peirce to answer recent calls for a philosophy of the Web and to respond to research in the LIS literature that has assessed the value and limitations of folksonomy. Moreover, pragmatic views are applied to illustrate the relationships among collaborative tagging, linked data, and the Semantic Web.

With a philosophical foundation in place, the study highlights the value of the minority tags that fall within the so-called “long tail” of the power law graph, and the importance of granting sufficient time for the full value of folksonomy to be revealed. The discussion goes further to explore how “collaborative tagging” could evolve into “collaborative knowledge” in the form of linked data. Specifically, Peirce’s triadic architectonic is shown to foster an understanding of the construction of linked data through the functional requirements for bibliographic records entity-relation model and resource description framework triples, and James’s image of the multiverse anticipates the goals Tim Berners-Lee has articulated for the Semantic Web.

This study is unique in using Jamesian and Peircean thinking to argue for the value of folksonomy and to suggest implications for the Semantic Web.

This will be an attempt to construct a pragmatist theory of the self, drawing on the four major classical pragmatists. From John Dewey, I will take the self as actor or agent; from George Herbert Mead the social self; from Charles Sanders Peirce the semiotic or significative self; and from William James the emotion of self feeling. The four fit together reasonably well, and the result is a highly egalitarian, democratic and humanistic idea of what it means to be a human being.

Current research methodologies in the field of information science employ induction or deduction, ignoring the third fundamental mode of cognition, retroduction. This paper seeks to introduce the Retroductive Recognition of Absence (RRA) methodology that expands inquiry from its current inductive and deductive bases to include the intuition‐based retroduction/abduction of Charles Sanders Peirce.

In brief, RRA consists of an iterative performance, of its nine‐step heuristic, with each iteration narrowing the scope of the research, while increasing the depth of examination. The nine steps are: perceive a phenomenon leading to surprise; perform the fundamental and primary retroduction; synthesize the phenomenon into a hypothesis; bracket intuitive prejudices; immerse in the data; conceptualize; hypothesize; select the hypothesis most efficient to test; and test the hypothesis. The iterations continue until the researcher reaches a hypothesis testable by inductive or deductive methods. This RRA methodology incorporates a “definition heuristic” that defines any previously undefined concept, a heuristic based on Spradley and McCurdy's classification of definitions.

A study of Compelled Nonuse of Information (CNI) demonstrated the usefulness of RRA in the study of phenomena from an initial “hunch” to a testable hypothesis. As such, the RRA methodology decreases subjectivity and imparts rigor to the study of absent or newly emergent phenomena that have no theoretical basis, no data, and no pre‐existing, coherent body of literature.

This paper presents the philosophy and practice of the RRA methodology and the retroductive philosophical inquiry postulated by Peirce.

The purpose of this article is to describe the similarities between abductive reasoning and entrepreneurial learning processes in order to contribute to the conceptual understanding of learning as an entrepreneurial process in itself.

The research is theoretically rooted in a conceptual development of the understanding of entrepreneurial learning processes as abductive reasoning inspired by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. The theoretical explication of the connection between entrepreneurial learning processes and abductive reasoning is additionally illustrated by a hypotheses-based didactic model, developed by the authors to scaffold abducting reasoning into learning processes.

The authors found in the theoretical investigation of abductive reasoning a conceptualisation of entrepreneurial learning processes that connects entrepreneurial learning processes to basic cognitive human competences, and the authors found that key concepts in entrepreneurship, such as hunches and experiments, can be understood in a broader philosophical framework as basic cognitive competences.

The authors exemplify how abductive reasoning can be used in practice through a hypothesis-based didactic approach designed as a loop model.

The authors have discovered that abduction is closely related to entrepreneurship and can be a central conceptual link in understanding the relationship between entrepreneurship and learning. The athors also believe that Peirce's concept of abduction can contribute to the philosophical understanding of entrepreneurship as another name for a constant rethinking of the world.

Purpose – To explore lines of inquiry by Hayek and C. S. Peirce on sensation and cognition and Hayek's interest in Peirce.

Methodology – To compare Hayek and Peirce's relational interpretations of sensation and cognition.

Research limitations – The theories of both Hayek and Peirce on sensation and cognition are more extensive than can be addressed here. This exploration is more suggestive than comprehensive.

Findings – Both Hayek and Peirce emphasized the relational and abstract nature of human mental processes. Hayek viewed his contribution as overlapping with psychology while Peirce viewed his theory as being logically before psychology.

Social implications – The ideas of Peirce and Hayek imply that the traditional empiricist and rationalist epistemologies of cognition and sensation are limited and incomplete and thus embrace cognitive inefficiencies.

Originality/value of paper – Hayek's brief references and interest in the ideas of C. S. Peirce have not yet been explored to date.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that abductive reasoning is a typical but usually unrecognised process used by HRD scholars and practitioners alike.

This is a conceptual paper that explores recent criticism of traditional views of theory‐building, based on the privileging of scientific theorising, which has led to a relevance gap between scholars and practitioners. The work of Charles Sanders Peirce and the varieties of an abductive reasoning process are considered.

Abductive reasoning, which precedes induction and deduction, provide a potential connection with HRD practitioners who face difficult problems. Two types of abductive reasoning are explored – existential and analogic. Both offer possibilities for theorising with HRD practitioners. A range of methods for allowing abduction to become more evident with practitioners are presented. The authors consider how abduction can be used in engaged and participative research strategies.

While this is a conceptual paper, it does suggest implications for engagement and participation in theorising with HRD practitioners.

Abductive reasoning adds to the repertoire of HRD scholars and practitioners.

The paper elucidates the value of abductive reasoning and points to how it can become an integral element of theory building in HRD.

This research explores two interconnected questions: (1) How do we approach stylistic features of multimodal rhetorical artifacts such as protest posters? (2) Do said artifacts designed for different purposes exhibit systematic stylistic differences? Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic categorization, this study develops a framework for examining concision, one of the primary stylistic considerations for multimodal rhetorical artifacts such as protest posters. This paper illustrates the use of this framework by exploring the correlation between rhetorical purpose and concision in posters created and disseminated before and during the 2011–2012 Québécois student movement. This study fine-tunes our existing knowledge on multimodality with style sensitivity, and demonstrates how an economy-of-sign based semiotic approach could enrich the empirical examination of multimodal rhetorical artifacts by generating more controlled interpretations.

This paper explains at least some of the major problems related to the subject indexing process and proposes a new approach to understanding the process, which is ordinarily described as a process that takes a number of steps. The subject is first determined, then it is described in a few sentences and, lastly, the description of the subject is converted into the indexing language. It is argued that this typical approach characteristically lacks an understanding of what the central nature of the process is. Indexing is not a neutral and objective representation of a document’s subject matter but the representation of an interpretation of a document for future use. Semiotics is offered here as a framework for understanding the “interpretative” nature of the subject indexing process. By placing this process within Peirce’s semiotic framework of ideas and terminology, a more detailed description of the process is offered which shows that the uncertainty generally associated with this process is created by the fact that the indexer goes through a number of steps and creates the subject matter of the document during this process. The creation of the subject matter is based on the indexer’s social and cultural context. The paper offers an explanation of what occurs in the indexing process and suggests that there is only little certainty to its result.

The importance of context dependent modelling of complex systems, depending on the observer's point of view will be discussed. Thus, context is synonymous for the content of a problem in a frame of the goals, starting points and ways to achieve these aims. In this light, difficulties of model validation and a general method how to overcome them was discussed. The relations among subject – object – model in the light of a systems approach; Charles Sanders Peirce's triad principle and the semiotic principle of communication was presented.

The appropriateness of a system dynamics methodology, which is due to its transparency and clarity an excellent tool for modelling of complex systems.

In the paper the equivalence of different methodologies was shown, whose differences and similarities can be judged only in context of a problem and the aims of researches. For illustration, the methodology is applied to a tourism system, which possesses the typical properties of global and local organisations. A verbal description of a tourism problem is followed by a causal loop diagram, which helps to discuss the problem categorically.

As the methodology is implemented using quantitative model and POWERSIM tools; it offers the solution of national tourism strategy implication, selected from different scenarios.

This paper presents a simulation model of the tourism in a frame of system dynamics, developed from qualitative models, as an illustration of the discussed methodology.

South African scholars, like most scholars in the developing world, have sold the idea that social constructivism is the gold standard of qualitative management research. In this chapter, we caution against this subordination to unquestioned conventions and offer a process relational ontology as an alternative to social constructivism that is often punted by most qualitative research programmes and textbooks. We also debunk the idea that ‘grounded theory’ exists by delving into epistemology and showing how science is ‘self-correcting’ rather than ‘tabula rasa’. Instead of boxing business ethics knowledge, as has been done by the case study gurus, we encourage business and organisational ethicists to own their indigenous heritage through storytelling science based on the self-correcting method underpinned by Popperian and Peircian epistemological thought. This chapter encourages business management researchers to move towards more profound ethical knowledge by refuting and falsifying false assumptions in each phase of the study, in a sequence of self-correcting storytelling phases. This is what Karl Popper called trial and error, and what C.S. Peirce called self-correcting by the triadic of Abduction–Induction–Deduction. We offer a novel method for accomplishing this aim that we call ‘Conversational Interviews’ that are based on antenarrative storytelling sciences. Our chapter aims to evoking the transformative power of indigenous ontological antenarratives in authentic conversation in order to solve immediate local problems ad fill the many institutional voids that plague the South(ern)-/African context.