Diagrams as Centerpiece of a Peircean Epistemology

Recent developments in semiotics, semantics, and linguistics tend to give concepts like "schema," "gestalt," and the like a renaissance in the description of signification processes. The actual cognitive semantics tradition (Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, Fauconnier, etc.), for instance, highlights the central role of schemata and their mappings between conceptual and mental spaces in the description of many levels in linguistics. Another related development is the renewed interest in diagrammatic calculi in computer science and AI communities, documented in e.g. the influential Diagrammatic Reasoning volume (Glasgow 1995) - where the diagram category is most often taken for its common sense value as an opposition to the symbol category; little effort is spent on determining the general status of the diagram as such.