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Roberta Kevelson (November 4, 1931 – November 28, 1998) was a semiotician and an important authority on the pragmatism theories of Charles Sanders Peirce. She was a professor at Pennsylvania State University and The College of William & Mary, Virginia. Among her published works are High Fives, The Inverted Pyramid, The Law as the System of Signs and possibly her most significant work, Peirce and the Mark of the Gryphon. She was a founding member of the Semiotic Society of America.
Kevelson was born in Fall River, Massachusetts. Although married at 17, she returned to college in the 1960s and received her PhD in semiotics from Brown University in 1978. During her postdoctoral tenure at Yale University (1979-1981), she introduced the concept of legal semiotics. She subsequently established an international cross-disciplinary center for its study in 1984.
Works
from the Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography
- Kevelson, Roberta (1986), Charles S. Peirce's Method of Methods, John Benjamins Publishing Co. (February 1986), 180 pages, hardcover (ISBN 978-9027232892, ISBN 90-272-3289-X), JB catalog page.
- Kevelson, Roberta, ed. (1991), Peirce and Law: Issues in Pragmatism, Legal Realism, and Semiotics, Peter Lang Publishing Group, 225 pages, hardcover (ISBN 978-0-8204-1519-2), PLPG catalog page.
- Kevelson, Roberta (1993), Peirce's Esthetics of Freedom, Peter Lang Publishing Group, 360 pages, hardcover (ISBN 978-0-8204-1898-8), PLPG catalog page.
- Kevelson, Roberta (1996), Peirce, Science, Signs, Peter Lang Publishing Group, 206 pages, hardcover (ISBN 978-0-8204-3016-4), PLPG catalog page.
- Kevelson, Roberta (1998 April), Peirce's Pragmatism: The Medium as Method, Peter Lang Publishing Group, 204 pages, hardcover (ISBN 978-0-8204-3982-2), PLPG catalog page.
- Kevelson, Roberta (1999), Peirce and the Mark of the Gryphon, Palgrave, 239 pages, hardcover (ISBN 978-0312176945, ISBN 0-312-17694-5). Draws from unpublished Peirce manuscripts. On the Internet, the publisher is variously given as St. Martin's Press, Macmillan, and Palgrave, but anyway Palgrave has a catalog page for the book.