Amidst the increasing militarization of such border spaces as the US-Mexico border or the southern edges of the European Union, there is a persistent and publicly salient gap between widely-held normative assumptions about sovereignty and the empirical conditions that obtain in specific border spaces (De Haas 2023). This is an epistemic challenge, one that not only complicates efforts to grapple with the deleterious political (Brown 2010), social (Walia 2021), and ecological (Youatt 2020) consequences of hardening borders but, insofar as public resources are directed toward borders on the basis of unwarranted assumptions, actively precipitates such consequences. The core argument of the proposed paper is that the work of C.S. Peirce is a vital and neglected resource for addressing this challenge and promoting a form of epistemic responsibility.
The paper builds its argument across three key claims, each of which—in appropriately Peircean fashion—takes the form of a triad. The first claim is that international borders display three characteristics that are amenable to Peircean analysis. First, borders are constitutively semiotic, not only in their function of demarcation, but also as visual manifestations of cultural and political assumptions about territory, membership, and power. Second, borders are logically triadic, in that borders’ paradigmatic two-sidedness requires the participation of an interpreter whose semiotic engagement with borders renders their two sides intelligible. Third, borders are fundamentally normative, in that thinking about how borders are interpreted opens onto norms, communities, and practices that reveal insights into how communities think. As Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson write, “Insofar as it serves at once to make divisions and establish connections, the border is an epistemological device, which is at work whenever a distinction between subject and object is established” (2013, 16). There is a moral as well as epistemological dimension to this claim; as the geographer Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary puts it, “[A]ny kind of place where an object and a subject are to be thought together is a theater of unequal relations and domination processes” (2015, 10). As both an "epistemological device" and a "theater of unqeual relations and domination processes," borders are, therefore, in the odd position of being both relevant as a moral problem and beneficial as an analytical resource. Either way, they demand attention.
The second claim is that such attention benefits from engagement with Peirce’s thought, which in invaluable in three ways as “roots” for responding to both the epistemological and moral challenges of borders. First, Peirce’s pragmatic maxim stipulates that the assumptions that shape the public understanding of borders be considered alongside the consequences of those assumptions’ being adopted; this suggests a vital pathway for inquiry that bears both empirical and normative dimensions. Second, in addition to being triadic, dynamic, and staunchly realist, Peircean semiotics works within an intricate logic of relations, one of whose fundamental attributes is that interrogating likeness and alterity—an inescapable task when analyzing borders—is less about determining classes than discerning the task of interpreting borders is undertaken less in terms of static essences than dynamic habits or tendencies that are discernible diachronically and empirically. This is a helpful feature for embedding classic moral questions within specific normative communities and cultures. Third, Peirce’s mature work explores at length the nature of continuity and discontinuity, including—as demonstrated in Peirce’s chalkboard example from his 1898 Cambridge lectures—the continuity and discontinuity that operate in the manner by which lines bisect otherwise undifferentiated spaces. Such insights are not only cartographically relevant (and hence relevant to borders); they have also generated research on the nature of emergence (Deacon 2011) that has explicitly been applied to borders (Schilbrack 2025).
The third claim is that a Peircean approach to international borders generates, as “fruits,” three particularly promising yields. First is a clearer understanding of the epistemic dimension of borders, in that Peircean logic and semiotics help clarify how “the border” functions in contemporary social and cultural contexts. In this respect, the present paper not only builds on scholarship that links Peirce's thought with critical realism (Ritz 2023), which is a rich resource for investigating culture; it also complements efforts to articulate a “Peircean rejoinder” (Chicka 2025) to diagnoses of misinformation and “post-truth” sociopolitical conditions that draw from more recent pragmatist figures such as Jeffrey Stout (Friedline 2025). Second, a Peircean approach embeds the symbolic significance of borders within comparatively concrete iconic and indexical forms of signification. This open up lines of research that integrate empirical studies of borders with those focused on public discourse. Third, on the basis of this normative-empirical integration, it becomes possible to investigate not just how assumptions about borders carry practical consequences, but also how borders can be reimagined both more justly (normatively) and with greater sensitivity to both ecological systems and human communities (empirically).
Cited:
Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary (2015). Borders and Boundaries. In: Handbook of Political Geography, edited by John Agnew et al.. Wiley-Blackwell, 13-25.
Wendy Brown (2010). Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Princeton University Press.
Benjamin J. Chicka (2025). A Peircean Rejoinder in Defense of Metaphysics and Communities of Inquiry. AJTP 45(3) (Forthcoming)
Hein De Haas (2023). How Migration Really Works: A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics. Penguin Books.
Terrence Deacon (2011). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. W.W. Norton & Company.
Mary L. Friedline (2025). Democracy Without Truth? Re-reading Democracy and Tradition for the Post-Truth Era. AJTP 45(3) (Forthcoming)
Sandro Mezzadra/Brett Neilson (2013). Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press.
Charles S. Peirce (1898). The Logic of Continuity. [Chalkboard illustration found in: Collected Papers, Vol. 6.203]
Michael Raposa (1989). Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion. Indiana University Press.
Bridget Ritz (2023). Continuities Between Peircean Realism and Critical Realism. The Theory of Social Behavior 53 (4), 434-453.
Kevin Schilbrack (2025). Analytic Borders: Emergence and Value Realism. In: Ethics Across Borders: Reconsidering Religious, Political, and Ecological Divides, edited by Gary Slater and Lisa Landoe Hedrick. Routledge. (Forthcoming)
Harsha Walia (2021). Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Haymarket Books.
Rafi Youatt (2020). Interspecies Politics: Nature, Borders, States. University of Michigan Press.
How international borders function symbolically within public discourse differs notably from the empirical conditions that obtain in specific border spaces. This discrepancy has deleterious consequences, including border militarization, ecological degradation, and narratives of disorder that promote xenophobia. To respond to this problem and promote epistemic responsibility, this paper draws from C.S. Peirce, whose work on logic and semiotics is well-suited to borders for three reasons. First, borders are constitutively semiotic, logically triadic, and indicative of deeply held normative assumptions within public life. Second, Peirce’s contributions to the logic of relations, metaphysics of continuity, and link between theory and practice facilitate analyses of borders both normatively and descriptively. Third, pairing Peirce with borders yields a clearer understanding of the epistemic dimension of borders, facilitates the embedding of the symbolic significance of borders alongside iconic and indexical forms of signification, and integrates empirical studies of borders with those focused on public discourse.