Peirce's Philosophical Perspectives
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Peirce's Philosophical Perspectives

Vincent G. Potter

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eBook - ePub

Peirce's Philosophical Perspectives

Vincent G. Potter

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This collection focuses primarily on Peirce's realism, pragmatism, and theism, with attention to his tychism and synechism.Peirce's Philosophical Perspectives is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

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Year
2018
ISBN
9780823283125
1
Charles Sanders Peirce: An Overview
HIS LIFE
CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE, philosopher, logician, scientist, father of American pragmatism, died of cancer on April 19, 1914, after five years of great suffering.1 He died an isolated old man of 75, still working on his manuscripts, without a publisher, without students or followers, practically unknown, penniless, and alone. This man, unappreciated in his lifetime, virtually ignored by the academic world of his day, is now recognized as perhaps America’s most original philosopher and her greatest logician. Indeed, on the latter score, he is surely one of the logical giants of the nineteenth century, which produced such geniuses as Cantor, Frege, Boole, De Morgan, Russell, and Whitehead. Today, more than eighty years after his death, another generation of scholars is beginning to pay him the attention he deserves.
Who, then, was Charles Peirce? He was born on September 10, 1839, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the second son of Benjamin and Sarah Hunt Peirce. His father, a professor at Harvard and one of the greatest American mathematicians of his day, played a decisive role in Charles’s upbringing and formal education, much in the way the elder Mill influenced his son, John Stuart. Charles’s father early introduced him to mathematics, the physical sciences, and logic. At the age of eight Charles took up the study of chemistry on his own, and at twelve had set up his own small laboratory. About the same time he composed a short history of that science. At thirteen, he had read and mastered his elder brother’s logic textbook. At fifteen, he entered Harvard College, and graduated four years later, in 1859, one of the youngest in his class. And yet, for all his genius, his scholastic record was poor. He describes himself as “a very insouciant student.”
Peirce’s interest in philosophy began during those undergraduate days. He read and expounded as best he could Schiller’s Aesthetische Briefe to his friend and classmate Horatio Paine. He studied Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason so thoroughly that he knew whole passages of it almost by heart. Still, due in large measure to his father’s influence, he chose to become a scientist. In 1863 he received from Harvard his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry summa cum laude. Meanwhile, in 1861, Peirce had joined the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, with which he was to be associated for thirty years, holding many important posts and doing much original research in photometry and gravitation. In fact, the only book he succeeded in getting published during his lifetime was entitled Photometric Researches (1878), and for it he won international recognition. Again, in connection with this research, he received the only official vote of confidence in his entire career when in 1877 he was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Science.
Despite his dedication to science, his interest in philosophy never diminished. In fact, it was strengthened and confirmed by his scientific work. His early efforts were concentrated in the fields of logic and the philosophy of science and in these areas anticipated much of present-day work. The technical papers he published between 1867 and 1885 established him as one of the greatest formal logicians of the day. He lectured at Harvard as an official member of the staff three times between 1864 and 1871, and it was about this time that the “Metaphysical Club,” as Peirce later called it, was formed—an informal discussion group which met fortnightly to discuss philosophical problems. It numbered among its members some of the finest minds of the day—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Chauncey Wright, Francis Abbot, and Nicholas St. John Green, among others—and it was in this imposing intellectual milieu that “pragmatism first saw the light of day.” About the same time, too, Peirce’s interest in logic led him to read the great scholastics—Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Bacon—and to declare unequivocally for “scholastic realism” against nominalism in every form. This exposure to the famous controversy over universals decisively influenced his brand of pragmatism, as we shall see.
Although it is certain that Peirce first discussed and formulated the pragmatic maxim in these informal meetings, the first definite statement of it did not appear until 1878, in a paper originally written in French while he was on his way to Europe in connection with his government employment, and published in Popular Science Monthly, under the title “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” It read as follows:
Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearing, we conceive the object to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (5.402)
The statement is admittedly crude and led to misunderstanding and misinterpretation by other philosophers who called themselves “pragmatists.” Peirce would take great pains to clarify his real meaning.
Despite his eagerness to teach, despite his ability and originality, Peirce never had the opportunity to do so for more than eight years of his life. Apart from the early Harvard lectures, his only academic post was at The Johns Hopkins University, and this he held for only five years (1879–1884). After that he never mounted a university podium except to deliver an occasional series of lectures by invitation, despite the direct and personal intervention of William James to the President of Harvard to appoint Peirce to a chair. Yet he was an inspiring lecturer. Too advanced perhaps for the ordinary student, he challenged the more gifted and was respected and highly esteemed by all. He organized a second metaphysical club for his students at John Hopkins, among whom was John Dewey. His rejection by university administrations was due in part to his difficult personality and in part to domestic problems. Paul Weiss sums up his character this way: “He was always somewhat proud of his ancestry and connections, overbearing toward those who stood in his way, indifferent to the consequences of his acts, quick to take affront, highly emotional, easily duped, and with, as he puts it, ‘a reputation for not finding things.’”2 His first marriage in 1862 to Harriet Melusina Fay (granddaughter of the prominent Episcopalian Bishop John Henry Hopkins) ended in divorce in 1883 while Peirce was teaching in Baltimore. His career there ended the next year. He subsequently married Juliette Froissey of Nancy, France, to whom he was devoted the rest of his life, and who survived him. In 1887, having inherited a small legacy, Peirce, now 48, retired to a small farm near Milford, Pennsylvania, where he lived out his life studying and writing. He was continually in financial straits. Once he applied to the Carnegie Foundation for help in publishing a series of books, but he was turned down. He was all but in exile. Near the end, it was only the touching fidelity of his lifelong friend William James that sustained him. Upon his death his widow sold all his papers to Harvard, where they remain to this day.
Such was the brilliant and tragic career of Charles Peirce. Though he never published a book on philosophy, his articles and drafts fill volumes. It has only been since the publication of the Collected Papers in the 1930s that the philosophic community has begun to appreciate the scope and depth of his speculations. Peirce is beginning to find his place in American thought: a place in the first rank. A new chronological edition of his works is in progress at the Indianapolis Campus of Indiana University under the general direction of Nathan Houser. Of the projected twenty or twenty-five volumes, five have already appeared.
HIS WORK
Realism vs. Nominalism
Why should Peirce be of interest to us? Because, I suggest, he is a very great thinker, and because he is a very great American thinker. But there is another reason why he is of particular interest to me. He knew, respected, and used the great tradition of Western thought, in particular the writings of the great Scholastic Doctors. He had a sense of continuity amid the dramatic changes in Western culture, and that sense saved him from being merely contemporary. It enabled him to address himself to an audience beyond his own time. He can speak to us whose world is perhaps even more dramatically different from his than his was from the Middle Ages. He was able to address himself to the relation of thought and action so much a concern for us today in the areas of social adaptation and politics. I find it remarkable that a great scientist, logician, and philosopher of the nineteenth century not only spent a good deal of time reading the original texts of Aquinas and Scotus but also declared for them on the great issue of our day as well as theirs: nominalism vs. realism. He could say at the end of his career that although he had revised his system several times over and changed his mind about many things, he always held himself to be a “scholastic realist.”
Peirce certainly was not uncritical of Scholastic thought. Though he was aware that much in it needed updating, he also recognized that much was to be learned from it.
The works of Duns Scotus have strongly influenced me. If his logic and metaphysics, not slavishly worshipped, but torn away from its medievalism, be adapted to modern culture, under continual wholesome reminders of nominalistic criticisms, I am convinced that it will go far toward supplying the philosophy which is best harmonized with physical science. (1.6)
In one of his early Harvard lectures he paid the Scholastic Doctors the highest compliment of which a man of science is capable. He likened their devotion to that discovering of the truth of the spirit which animates the scientific mind. And he contrasted it with the vanity of “those intellectual nomads, the modern metaphysicians, including the positivists,” who seem to be more interested in the brilliant hypothesis than in the humble facts.
Above all it is the searching thoroughness of the schoolmen which affiliates them with men of science and separates them, world-wide, from modern so-called philosophers. The thoroughness I allude to consists in this, that in adopting any theory, they go about everywhere, they devote their whole energies and lives in putting it to the tests bona fide. (1.33)
And again:
Now this same unwearied interest in testing general propositions is what produced those long rows of folios of the schoolmen, and if the test which they employed is of only limited validity 
 yet the spirit, which is the most essential thing—the motive, was nearly the same. And how different this spirit is from that of the major part, though not all, of modern philosophers—even those who have called themselves empirical, no man who is actuated by it can fail to perceive. (1.34)
What, then, was the issue at stake in the nominalist-realist controversy? It was not whether there was an external world, for nominalists and realists alike accepted that as but the requirement of common sense. It was, rather, whether “laws and general types are figments of the mind or are real.” If they are figments of the mind, then the world is not in itself intelligible. It does not exhibit any rational structure; it is but a mad puzzle into which man must introduce order. If, on the other hand, they are real, then scientific inquiry seeks to discover the world’s structure revealing itself in experience. In a word, because knowledge is always through general categories or universals, if it is to be knowledge of or about the world, the categories or universals must be grounded in that world: the world must exhibit itself as having a rational structure; that is, it must follow some kind of law. For this reason Peirce held that science always has been, and indeed must be, on the side of Scholastic realism, no matter how nominalistic the majority of philosophers who talk about science.
I need not mention that the realism of the scholastics admitted a variety of theories. Nor need I go into the differences between Scotus and Aquinas on this central issue. But I should say a word about why Peirce chose to follow John Duns rather than Thomas. The reason is simply this: Peirce saw in Scotus’s plurality of forms and formalities a stronger type of realism than Thomas’s stricter Aristotelianism. Thus, he called himself a scholastic realist of a rather extreme stripe. He even criticized Scotus for having been tinged with nominalism because he held onto a theory of the contraction of the universal to the singular through “haecceity” or “thisness.” Thomists are fond of criticizing Scotists for a tendency toward extreme realism, while Peirce, oddly, criticizes them for not being extreme enough. Peirce seems to go as far as to make the individual nothing but a bundle of universals (or habits, as he calls them). This is perhaps a serious mistake, and he errs, if indeed he does, in the opposite direction to those nominalists whom he is combating and so, according to some of his critics, never quite satisfactorily accounts for the concrete singular.
If Peirce may have been on the wrong track in his handling of the concrete individual, it seems clear to me that he was on the right one in his insistence on the reality of the general. And it is in this that he made his peculiar contribution to American pragmatism, which, unfortunately, has since developed in a decidedly nominalistic way.
His Pragmaticism
Peirce’s pragmatism cannot be adequately discussed without an acquaintance with his general categories: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Now, the names Peirce gave to the categories are not very informative, and he chose them precisely for that reason. Because they are universal categories, cutting across all reality in much the same way as Scholastic transcendentals do, Peirce felt that no more specific terms would do them justice. He himself likened them to various trios of more familiar categories as a help to his readers, while reminding those readers that the more familiar terms only approximated what he had in mind. For our purposes we can use the more familiar terms. Thus, Firstness approximates the quality peculiar to each thing taken in itself, independent of its relation to anything else. This is close to pure possibility. Secondness approximates the notion of brute, irrational action-reaction, clash, struggle, opposition. This brute aspect characterizes the concrete singular as such. Thirdness approximates the notion of law, rationality, objective thought, real generality, or potentiality. Thus, we have: quality, reaction, law; pure possibility, actuality, potentiality; feeling, volition, thought; and so on.
Let us take James’s version of pragmatism as typical of the position from which Peirce was to take care to dissociate himself. James once defined his pragmatism as the idea that “the effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence in our future practical experience, whether active or passive; the point lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular, than in the fact that it must be active.” It looks for the “cash-value” of particular concrete experience and makes it the ultimate interpretant of thought.
Thus, when in 1896 William James’s Will to Believe appeared, Peirce complained that James had pushed the pragmatic maxim “to such extremes as must tend to give us pause.” Peirce interpreted his old friend to hold that man’s end is action, and, in his article “Pragmatic and Pragmatism,” in Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1902), criticized him for not seeing that, far from action’s being man’s end, action itself supposes an end.
If it be admitted, on the contrary, that action wants an end, and that that end must be something of a general description, then the spirit of the maxim itself, which is that we must look to the upshot of our concepts in order rightly to apprehend them, would direct us towards something different from practical facts, namely, to general ideas, as the true interpreters of our thought. (5.3)
Action cannot be t...

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