“A Synthetic Pattern: Figural and Narrative Identity”

How can we recognize an identity? This fascinating topic is approached from a pragmatist perspective that tends to include our concrete way of reasoning into the rationale of our synthetic reasoning. Following Peirce’s semiotic study of elements of Gamma Graphs as the multidimensional sheet of assertion and the line of identity, the paper will individuate the semiotic characteristics necessary to the recognition of identity. These characteristics lead us to discover “complete gesture” as the tool that we use in our everyday reasoning for recognizing identity. “Complete gesture” is the key element for a pragmatist version of the narrative paradigm that is particularly apt to recognize an object that appears with different determinations at different moments. Naming them as “figurae,” the paper will call “figural” identity the kind of identity that we obtain from this synthetic process.