A semiotics of freedom: “fabulous” freedom and the agential self in narration as dialogic abduction

Abstract Peirce’s speculative rhetoric, namely, methodeutic, culminates in the reconciliation of theory and practice, which is regarded as his pragmatism. In this context, for him, pragmatism is the logic of abduction, emphasizing experience as semiotic process from perception to conception as a method of right thinking. Based on Peirce’s idea of abduction for pragmatic meaning-making, this paper concerns Peirce’s esthetics of freedom in terms of dialogic and dialectic abduction in the act of narration. Therefore, the semiotic concept of human freedom is explored by interpreting agency of the self in dialogic condition between the interpreted-sign and the interpretant-sign. As a method of methods, abductive reasoning in narrative by means of narrative imagination, explanation, and interpretation is discussed in the semiotic process from indetermination to determination. I thus argue that Peirce’s esthetic vision of freedom, which is characterized by the pragmatic and existential in poetic logic of narration by means of the agential self, will set oneself free, leading to reconciliation between the self and other, thus allowing one to say that “I am what I do.” In the end, “fabulous” freedom in narrative agential self becomes a personal reality in the actual mind, resulting in personal identity in the actual world.