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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.

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 purpose of this paper is to explore the basics of semiotic analysis and concept theory that represent two dominant approaches to knowledge representation, and explore how these approaches are fruitful for knowledge organization.

In particular the semiotic theory formulated by the American philosopher C.S. Peirce and the concept theory formulated by Ingetraut Dahlberg are investigated. The paper compares the differences and similarities between these two theories of knowledge representation.

The semiotic model is a general and unrestricted model of signs and Dahlberg's model is thought from the perspective and demand of better knowledge organization system (KOS) development. It is found that Dahlberg's concept model provides a detailed method for analyzing and representing concepts in a KOS, where semiotics provides the philosophical context for representation.

This paper is the first to combine theories of knowledge representation, semiotic and concept theory, within the context of knowledge organization.

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.

This paper endeavours to translate Peirce's ideas into paradigmatic sociological theory in general, and praxis linked to that paradigmatic theory. Greater comprehension of the general usefulness of a Peircian Pragmaticist semiotic perspective (and ‘fallibilism’) will enhance social action and collective responsibilities. As a philosopher, C. S. Peirce interpreted the world, but he himself did not attempt to change it. How can we incorporate a unifying ‘perspective’ such as Peirce's theory into ‘method’ (both methodology and techniques)? How does that an emphasis on methodology improves sociology as an empirically based, rigorous discipline (a human ‘science’) and various forms of praxis, especially applied sociology and public sociology? If politics is going to have any long-term impact, there has to be a degree of sophistication about the theories involved (e.g. conservation of fundamental human rights and liberties, reform within liberal parliamentary democracies, transformation within neo-conservative regimes, applied sociology in professions and occupations like social work and criminology, Feminist critique and action, GLTB action, neo-Gramscian critiques and Michael Burawoy's ‘public sociology’ in the narrow, technical sense.) Praxis can include many forms of political activity that are not specifically informed by any well-developed and coherent theory. In terms of Peirce's Pragmaticist semiotics, we can translate theoretical awareness into praxis, to interpret and to change the world. Good theory and methodology is the most practical way to promote useful social action, applied sociology and public sociology. Anything less than Peircian Pragmaticism and semiotics tends to lead to fragmentation of ‘paradigms’ or postmodernist nihilism.

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.

Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry that the incomplete determinism in Nature opens to the occurrence of innovation, growth, organization, teleology communication, control, contest and freedom. The new tier to the methodological edifice that cybernetics provides stands on the earlier tiers, which go back to the Ionians (c. 500 BC). However, the new insights reveal flaws in the earlier tiers, and their removal strengthens the entire edifice. The new concepts of teleological activity and contest allow the clear demarcation of the military sciences as those whose subject matter is teleological activity involving contest. The paramount question “what ought to be done”, outside the empirical realm, is embraced by the scientific methodology. It also embraces the cognitive sciences that ask how the human mind is able to discover, and how the sequence of discoveries might converge to a true description of reality.

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.

This study aims to focus on the interpretation component of Peirce’s triadic model of sign to identify: the components affecting the interpretation of an object and the components affecting the meaning creation by people for use in ontologies. Ashura was selected because it is a historical event and a meaningful sign in Iranian religious culture.

This qualitative study was conducted in two steps. In the first step, the Instagram pages of five groups of people were chosen as the sample and examined using qualitative content analysis. In the second step, 18 creators of Ashura works were selected, their lived experience in creating these works was collected using in-depth semi-structured interviews and analysed through phenomenology method.

Based on the results, the concept is context-oriented; one cannot interpret the signs according to one’s personal preferences because the context, social rules and habits limit this interpretation. Accordingly, the use of reference systems and rules of logic, as well as artificial intelligence and computer science tools alone cannot help represent meaning in ontologies. Rather, individual characteristics, contexts, presuppositions and components existing in personal, social and technological worlds are effective on concept formation and meaning creation. Thus, these factors must be considered in ontology, especially for multi-faceted and context-oriented concepts, such as Ashura.

This research adopted a new approach and method to study ontology. This study focused on interpretation and adopted Peirce’s sign model for ontology design.

The purpose of the research reported here is to improve comprehension of the socially‐negotiated identity of concepts in the domain of knowledge organization. Because knowledge organization as a domain has as its focus the order of concepts, both from a theoretical perspective and from an applied perspective, it is important to understand how the domain itself understands the meaning of a concept.

The paper provides an empirical demonstration of how the domain itself understands the meaning of a concept. The paper employs content analysis to demonstrate the ways in which concepts are portrayed in KO concept maps as signs, and they are subjected to evaluative semiotic analysis as a way to understand their meaning. The frame was the entire population of formal proceedings in knowledge organization – all proceedings of the International Society for Knowledge Organization's international conferences (1990‐2010) and those of the annual classification workshops of the Special Interest Group for Classification Research of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (SIG/CR).

A total of 344 concept maps were analyzed. There was no discernible chronological pattern. Most concept maps were created by authors who were professors from the USA, Germany, France, or Canada. Roughly half were judged to contain semiotic content. Peirceian semiotics predominated, and tended to convey greater granularity and complexity in conceptual terminology. Nodes could be identified as anchors of conceptual clusters in the domain; the arcs were identifiable as verbal relationship indicators. Saussurian concept maps were more applied than theoretical; Peirceian concept maps had more theoretical content.

The paper demonstrates important empirical evidence about the coherence of the domain of knowledge organization. Core values are conveyed across time through the concept maps in this population of conference papers.