Four Pragmatists

A Critical Introduction to Peirce, James, Mead, and Dewey

Israel Scheffler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136643392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Pragmatism in Philosophy

First published in 1974, this book is a critical introduction to the work of four quintessential pragmatist philosophers: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, George Herbert Mead and John Dewey.

Alongside providing a general historical and biographical account of the pragmatist movement, the work offers an in depthcritical response to the philosophicaldoctrines of the four main thinkers of the pragmatist movement, with reference to thetheories of meaning, knowledge and conduct which have come to define pragmatism.

PART ONE

CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE

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I

BIOGRAPHICAL COMMENTS

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Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1839, the second son of Benjamin Peirce, professor of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard and one of America's leading mathematicians. He was educated at Harvard College, graduating in 1859-one of the youngest graduates, ‘with one of the poorest records in his class’.¹ He got much of his education from his father, with whom he enjoyed an affectionate as well as an intensely intellectual relationship, which could not, however, have been wholly beneficial to the son.

After graduation, Peirce spent a year surveying in Louisiana. In 1861, he began work with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, where he continued, while doing other things, until 1891. Peirce took his M.A. at Harvard in 1862; and in 1863, he received the Sc.B. degree in chemistry, summa cum laude.²

During the 1860s, he gave occasional lecture courses on logic and philosophy. In 1864–5, he lectured on philosophy of science at Harvard, although, as he later wrote in a letter to F. E. Abbot, ‘My lectures fell through for want of an audience.’³ In 1866–7, he gave the Lowell Institute Lectures in Boston on ‘The Logic of Science and Induction’ and, in 1869–70, he delivered fifteen University Lectures in philosophy. In 1871, Peirce founded the Metaphysical Club, where pragmatism originated in a paper he read to the Club in 1872.¹

‘It was in the earliest seventies’, writes Peirce, ‘that a knot of us young men in Old Cambridge, calling ourselves, half-ironically, half-defiantly, “The Metaphysical Club” – for agnosticism was then riding its high horse, and was frowning superbly upon all metaphysics – used to meet, sometimes in my study, sometimes in that of William James.’² The Club included, aside from Peirce and James, Chauncey Wright, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jnr, and Nicholas St John Green, a lawyer and disciple of Bentham, who, as Peirce says,³

often urged the importance of applying Bain's definition of belief as ‘that upon which a man is prepared to act’. From this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism.… Wright, James, and I were men of science, rather scrutinizing the doctrines of the metaphysicians on their scientific side than regarding them as very momentous spiritually. The type of our thought was decidedly British. I, alone of our number, had come upon the threshing-floor of philosophy through the doorway of Kant, and even my ideas were acquiring the English accent. Our metaphysical proceedings had all been in winged words… until at length, lest the club should be dissolved, without leaving any material souvenir behind, I drew up a little paper expressing some of the opinions that I had been urging all along under the name of pragmatism. This paper was received with such unlooked-for kindness, that I was encouraged, some half-dozen years later… to insert it, somewhat expanded, in the Popular Science Monthly for November, 1877 and January, 1878.

The original paper written for the Club has not survived. The published version referred to, somewhat expanded, appeared as two essays, under the titles, ‘The Fixation of Belief and ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’. The second of these essays contains the pragmatic maxim (though not the word ‘pragmatism’).

The 1860s were years of promise, for Peirce, still a young man, was acclaimed and recognized as a man of great gifts. He was appointed an Assistant at the Harvard Observatory in 1869, and his work there led to his Photometric Researches (1878);¹ this book of his was the only one he saw published during his lifetime.

In 1875, Peirce sailed to Liverpool. One of his fellow passengers, W. H. Appleton, invited him to contribute to the Popular Science Monthly. His series of six articles, ‘Illustrations of the Logic of Science’, of which ‘The Fixation of Belief and ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ were the first two, was the result. During his stay in England, Peirce visited Cambridge University and attended meetings of the Royal Society, engaging in discussions with James Clerk Maxwell and W. K. Clifford, among others.

Peirce's early promise never culminated in years of satisfaction or happiness. Although he continued to write and to work, he never succeeded in completing his system of philosophy. He could not get along well with other people, and gained the reputation of being a difficult person. He never got a university position of a permanent sort, the only extended teaching he did having been during the period from 1879 to 1884 on a logic lectureship at Johns Hopkins. There he was apparently considered an able and popular teacher, among whose students, incidentally, were John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and Joseph Jastrow. Peirce was, however, dismissed from Johns Hopkins in 1884 in circumstances that have never been fully disclosed, and he was never able to regain another academic post.

He continued his lecturing and scientific work. In 1892 and 1903 he again lectured at the Lowell Institute. He served as American delegate to the International Geodetic Conference in 1875, and was in charge of weights and measures for the U.S. Coast and Measure Survey in 1884–5. In l891, his active scientific work and government career ended when he left the Coast Survey, having ‘quarreled with his superiors’ there.² His wife, whom he had married in 1862, left him in 1876, and he divorced her in 1883, remarrying soon thereafter.

In 1887, having inherited a small bequest, Peirce retired to Milford, Pennsylvania, where he spent the rest of his time in almost complete isolation, working on his philosophical system. But he never produced any systematic books, and he was plagued by ever-worsening financial difficulties, though he tried to make some money by writing reviews for the Nation, and he also contributed to the Century Dictionary and Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. William James continued to help him and arranged occasional lectures for him. He died in 1914, ‘a frustrated, isolated man, still working on his logic, without a publisher, with scarcely a disciple, unknown to the public at large’.¹

Peirce was a difficult man, and the puzzle of his personality is not yet solved. One scholar describes the character that emerges from reports of him (including Peirce's own) as: ‘highly emotional, vain, snobbish, morose, quarrelsome, intellectually arrogant, and quick to take offense, and, at the same time,… easily duped, hopelessly unpractical about money matters, and with a remarkable capacity for forgetting appointments’.² On the other hand, he was capable of insightful irony and self-criticism: ‘I insensibly put on a sort of swagger here… which is designed to say: “You are a very good fellow in your way; who you are I don't know and I don't care, but I, you know, am Mr. Peirce, distinguished for my varied scientific acquirements, but above all for my extreme modesty in which respect I challenge the world.” ‘³ Peirce was also capable of being charming and witty and of inspiring affection as well as respect in his friends. And his philosophical temperament, as revealed in his writings, is broad, generous, self-critical, and totally problem-centred, without a trace of pettiness.

Despite his abrasive personality and lack of university backing, he influenced the eminent philosophers James and Royce, and achieved a certain fame through his papers. He published nearly eighty philosophical papers (if we include his contributions to Baldwin's Dictionary) and about twenty papers and a small book (photometric Researches) on topics in the physical sciences and the theory of measurement. Between 1891 and 1906, he contributed about 180 reviews to the Nation.⁴

His inability to complete the systematic books he promised was in part due to his temperamental difficulties, no doubt, and in part also to his failure to secure a university position, through alienation of such persons as President Eliot of Harvard, for example. But a deeper reason, it has been suggested, lies in his abstract interests and his researcher's temperament. As Peirce himself put it in comparing himself to William James, ‘Who, for example, could be of a nature so different from his as I? He is so concrete, so living; I a mere table of contents, so abstract, a very snarl of twine.’¹ A philosopher's philosopher, Peirce was too self-critical and too involved in the deepening of various special researches to which his work led him to be able to systematize and expound his achievements adequately.

Despite all these difficulties, Peirce's fame and influence continue to grow with the years. At his death, he left a huge collection of original manuscripts, now in the care of the Harvard Philosophy Department. As H. S. Thayer remarks,²

In attempting to get at Peirce's philosophic thought in these volumes of ambitious but incomplete writings, one is often in a position not unlike Peirce's creditors who came to the Milford house to collect on their bills. Peirce had an attic study accessible only by ladder, and there he r...