EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PRAGMATISM AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PRAGMATISM
AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
Edited by
Rosa M. Calcaterra (Co-Executive Editor)
Roberto Frega (Co-Executive Editor)
Giovanni Maddalena (Co-Executive Editor)
Issue 1, vol. 6, 2014
Roma 2014
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EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PRAGMATISM AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy
Executive Editors
Rosa M. Calcaterra (Università Roma Tre)
Roberto Frega (EHESS)
Giovanni Maddalena (Università del Molise)
Scientific Board
Mats Bergman (Finnish Academy)
Rosa M. Calcaterra (Università Roma Tre)
Vincent Colapietro (Penn State University)
Rossella Fabbrichesi (Università di Milano)
Susan Haack (University of Miami)
Larry Hickman (SIU University – The Center for Dewey Studies)
Christopher Hookway (Sheffield University)
Hans Joas (Universität Erfurt)
Sandra Laugier (Université de Picardie – Jules Verne)
Joseph Margolis (Temple University)
Michele Marsonet (Università di Genova)
Annamaria Nieddu (Università di Cagliari)
Jaime Nubiola (Universidad de Navarra)
Carlo Sini (Università di Milano)
André de Tienne (Indiana and Purdue University at Indianapolis)
Fernando Zalamea (Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotà)
Editorial Board
Felipe Carreira da Silva (University of Lisbon)
Gianni Formica (Università di Bari)
Roberto Frega (EHESS)
Guillaume Garreta (Collège International de Philosophie)
Mathias Girel (École Normale Supérieure – Paris)
Roberto Gronda, Submission Manager (Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa)
David Hildebrand (University of Colorado, Denver)
Maria Luisi, Bookreview Editor (Università Roma Tre)
Giovanni Maddalena (Università del Molise)
Sarin Marchetti, Assistant Editor (University College Dublin)
Susanna Marietti (Università Roma Tre)
Henrik Rydenfelt (University of Helsinki)
Chris Skowronski, Bookreview Editor (Opole University)
Marco Stango, Assistant Editor (Università di Milano)
Giovanni Tuzet (Università Bocconi)
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European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Symposia. The Reception of Peirce in the World
Editors: Giovanni Maddalena (University of Molise), Alessandro Ballabio
(University of Bogotà)
R. M. Calcaterra, R. Frega, G. Maddalena, Introduction.............................................6
Ch. Hookway, British Champions of Peirce.................................................................7
G. Maddalena, The Three Waves of Italian Reception of Peirce.................................9
M. Girel, Peirce’s Reception in France: just a Beginning..........................................15
A. Hensoldt, Reception of Peirce in Poland.....................................................................24
S. Freyberg, Peirce in Germany: A Long Time Coming.............................................28
L. Santaella, Peirce’s Reception in Brazil...................................................................34
S. Barrena, J. Nubiola, The Reception of Peirce in Spain
and the Spanish Speaking Countries...........................................................................39
I. Mladenov, The First Steps of Peirce in Bulgaria.
From Ivan Sarailiev to Today..............................................................................46
H. Rydenfelt, Peirce in Finland..................................................................................51
B. Sørensen, T. Thellefsen, The Reception of Charles S. Peirce
in Denmark............................................................................................................58
T. M. Bertilsson, Reception of Charles S. Peirce in Sweden
and its Diaspora....................................................................................................64
C. A. Pechlivanidis, The History of Reception of Charles S. Peirce
in Greece...............................................................................................................70
F. Zalamea, Peirce’s Reception in Colombia..............................................................75
S. Atarashi, Peirce’s Reception in Japan....................................................................79
C. Legg, Peirce’s Reception in Australia and New Zealand......................................84
Essays
S. Grigoriev, Normativity and Reality in Peirce’s Thought........................................88
O. Belas, Popular Science, Pragmatism, and Conceptual Clarity...........................107
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Let Me Tell You a Story: Heroes and Events of Pragmatism
Interview with Richard J. Bernstein..........................................................................138
Bookreviews
I. Levi, Pragmatism and Inquiry: Selected Essays, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2012 (reviewed by G. Gava)...............................................................................148
J. Ryder, The Things on Heaven and Earth, New York, Fordham University Press,
2013 (reviewed by A. Garcia Ruiz)...................................................................153
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Symposia. The Reception of Peirce in the World
ISSN: 2036-4091
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EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PRAGMATISM AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Rosa M. Calcaterra, Roberto Frega, Giovanni Maddalena
Introduction
The symposium “Peirce in the World” is a homage that EJPAP wants to pay to
the Centenary of the death of the great American thinker Charles S. Peirce, one of the
founding fathers of pragmatism. The idea of the symposium stems from observing
that Peirce studies are nowadays spread out all over the world, and the scholarship
that comes from outside the US is becoming more and more important in breadth
and depth. This phenomenon is possibly the greatest change that happened to Peirce
scholarship in the last decades from the last big congress on Peirce, the Sesquicentennial
International Congress held in Harvard 1989. The Centenary Congress “Invigorating
Philosophy for the 21st Century,” which will be held in Lowell in July 2014 will display
this worldwide new reality.
We asked to some of the main figures of this story to tell how this huge movement
took place, retracing all the steps back in time. Some of them decided to write the
paper themselves, some decided to entrust younger scholars to this commitment in
order to avoid the embarrassing situation of writing also about their own work. We left
them free to decide the angle of the story from which they wanted to talk, and, except
for a limited length, we did not impose any particular rule.
The result is that you will find a peculiar but very interesting volume. If you read
the whole series of these short contributions, you will see how the knowledge of
Peirce grew over the years outside America according to a variety of philosophical
sensibilities. It is a patchwork of interrelated stories that tells about the world
community of inquirers. We think that Peirce would have loved this effort, even
though it is only a little sketch. However, this sketch offers you a further scholarly
perspective on the history of Peirce’s pragmatism.
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Christopher Hookway*
British Champions of Peirce
When the history of American philosophy in the nineteenth century can be written in
great detail than hitherto, the important place of Charles S. Peirce as a pathfinder in
every one of the many fields that his work touched will have to receive fuller recognition
than has as yet been accorded to it.
This quotation is from “Charles Peirce’s Pragmatism,” a paper by John Henry
Muirhead that was published in The Philosophical Review in 1930s. It is evidence that
the value of Peirce’s work was recognized in the 1930s. But Peirce’s work had been
recognized even earlier than this. One of the earliest indications of this was reflected
in the fact that Mind had published a positive review of Peirce’s Illustrations of the
Logic of Science. His works were also taken seriously in the following years.
Two thinkers had been especially effective in spreading the word of Peirce’s
importance. One of these is Frank Ramsey, who worked extensively on induction
and probability. He appealed to Peirce’s account of induction on several occasions.
Ramsey also drew attention to Peirce’s work on signs. In his review of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ramsey suggested that the book would have benefited
from the use of Peirce’s distinction between types and tokens.
The second was Victoria, Lady Welby, a member of the Bloomsbury Group with
great interests in semiotics, the theory of signs. She wrote several books defending
“Significs.” Her correspondence with Peirce is a major source of information about
Peirce’s writings on the theory of signs, and she worked hard to encourage the spread
of Peirce’s work in the United Kingdom. One product of this is an extended discussion
of Peirce’s work on signs in The Meaning of Meaning, an influential book by Ogden
(the translator of the Tractatus) and I. A. Richards. Their book would have ensured
that Peirce’s work was well known, even if it didn’t receive extended discussion and
admiration in philosophical circles. Moreover, Peirce’s work on induction continued
to be known, not least from the writings of Braithwaite’s Scientific Explanation: A
study of Theory, Probability and Law in Science.
Peirce’s work was also known though the work of Muirhead’s The Platonic
Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy: Studies in the History of Idealism in England
and America. Muirhead was, for many years, Professor of Philosophy in the University
of Birmingham. Peirce and Royce were the only American philosophers to deserve
chapters, although Peirce had only one chapter while Royce had five.
Muirhead’s chapter on Peirce began with a section on the “Anti-Hegelian Reaction.”
The chapter described Peirce’s logic and pragmatism as well as taking account of
tychism, and devoting a section to the “Reconstruction” towards idealism. He was
described as “a Germinal” thinker.
* University of Sheffield, UK [[email protected]]
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Christopher Hookway
British Champion of Peirce
After the 1930s, Peirce scholarship continued to prosper, but little of it was based
in the United Kingdom. In the 1930s, W. B. Gallie wrote an elegant and valuable book
on Peirce and Pragmatism, published by Penguin Books; I can testify to its role in
introducing many young philosophers to Peirce’s work, but, under the influence of
Wittgenstein and Oxford philosophy, few British philosophers were sufficiently stirred
by pragmatism or pragmaticism for Peirce to become a major topic for research. We
also see a growing interest in Ramsey’s work, particularly in Cambridge, to the degree
that some people talk of the “Cambridge Pragmatists” in UK as well as those from
Harvard.
During the 1950s and 1960s, British philosophy was dominated by Oxford
philosophy and Wittgenstein, so that Peirce’s work was not much discussed. Things
began to change in the 1970s. In the UK, in Warwick, Susan Haack wrote some
influential papers on Peirce and began her work using pragmatist ideas for research,
and she has continued to do so having moved to the USA. Christopher Hookway
published three books on Peirce from 1985 to 2014. After a general study of Peirce’s
philosophy, Peirce (1985), he wrote Truth Rationality of Pragmatism: Themes from
Peirce (2002) and The Pragmatic Maxim Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism (2013).
These included discussions on the pragmatic maxim, both the formulation of Peirce’s
pragmatic maxim and his reasons for accepting it. There were also papers on truth
and on Peirce’s views about rational self-control. Haack has also supervised Ph.D.
students on Peirce, as has Hookway in Sheffield.
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Giovanni Maddalena*
The Three Waves of Italian Reception of Peirce
Italy was one of the first places outside the US to manifest an interest in pragmatism.
However, the reception of Peirce has been discontinuous and asymptotic at the same
time. It grew over the time getting closer and closer to a complete acknowledgement
of what Peirce had really written, but there were many periods in which studies on
Peirce seemed quite stuck or absent. For clarity sake I will divide this reception in
three big generational waves.
1. The first wave: Leonardo
The first one is the one that coincides with the celebrated adventure of the journal
Leonardo. Among the four Italian pragmatists (Papini, Prezzolini, Vailati, Calderoni),
Vailati was the most aware of the relevance of Peirce’s ideas, even though he had not
read that much: for sure he knew the pragmatist maxim and therefore we assume that
he read the two papers from the Popular Science Monthly (they were also published
in French and this increases possibilities), and he certainly read the article “What
pragmatism is?” published on the Monist 1905. Based on the evidence of an envelope,
we know that he corresponded once with Peirce but we do not have the content of the
letter while we know the letter that Peirce sent to Papini, warning him about different
ways of interpreting pragmatism, and the one to Calderoni, with several criticisms of
Prezzolini, whose Leonardian pseudonym was Giuliano il Sofista. The distinctions
among kinds of pragmatism was the heart of Calderoni’s fight on the Leonardo
about the different species of pragmatism. From these documents critics have often
drawn the conclusion that the Italian pragmatists were split between a “magic”
(Prezzolini and Papini) and an “analytic” party (Vailati and Calderoni). As much as
this distinction contains elements of truth, this reading is partial and misleading if
considered complete. Sure enough, Vailati was Calderoni’s mentor and master and
he used “we” to indicate the intellectual partnership with him. However, Vailati, who
was around forty at the epoch of the Leonardo, assumed a role of intellectual teacher
for all of them and he was clearly particularly fond of Papini. Papini himself, who was
the real engine of the group, well defined the positions of all of them in a short note
on the Leonardo, putting himself on the side of a full psychological appreciation of
pragmatism through James’s formula of the Will to Believe:
There are those (Calderoni) who maintain that many things cannot be grouped together
under the same name; that genuine pragmatism is that of Peirce and simply consists
* Università del Molise, Italy [[email protected]]
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of wanting to make the theory more precise […] and is in full contradiction to the
dangerous theories of the Will to Believe, which are more concerned with the good than
with the true. Others (Vailati) recognize that, yes, there are two very distinct types of
pragmatism – the logical and the psychological – but that despite this fact there are links
between the two, points of contact, “elective affinities” that cannot be denied and that
justify the single name. (Leonardo IV/5, February 1906, 59-60.)
To be careful, we should admit at least three pragmatisms among the four Italians
(Papini, Prezzolini, Vailati, Calderoni) and it is quite unfair not to consider what they
say about themselves. The four of them embraced pragmatism as a reaction against
positivism, Kantianism, and idealism. They understood that anti-cartesianism and
anti-Kantianism were the secret root to overcome ancient rationalist dichotomies as
doing vs. understanding, practice vs. theory. Somehow they caught the profound unity
between Peirce and James about the conception of continuity of experience, a sort of
background conception that the correspondence between the two founding fathers
of pragmatism confirms. The Italians knew James personally by the visit he made
in Rome in 1905, and they knew his thought better than Peirce’s. But they did not
despise Peirce’s thought at all.
We can say that they underlined different tones of the pragmatist unity of experience,
but the starting point was absolutely the same and they found a perfect unity around
it. Papini gave to the pragmatic formula an existential tone that pushed him to explore
even occultism. Prezzolini followed the genial friend, while Vailati and Calderoni
stuck to the cognitive theory of Brentano and to a more refined voluntarism until their
premature disappearance (Vailati died in 1909 at the age of 46, Calderoni in 1914 at
the age of 35). But the four thinkers were not so far from one another. The existentialist
attitude was somehow in all of them, even though it relied outside pragmatism. The
famous corridor metaphor invented by Papini – for which pragmatism is a method that
crosses all philosophical attitudes like the corridor of a hotel crosses different rooms
in which people can attend to different disciplines, from science to religion – is a
metaphor that first holds for themselves. Finally, it is not true that Papini did not catch
the depth of the pragmatic maxim. When in 1923 he wrote the introduction to Vailati’s
writing, Papini showed to handle Peirce’s conditional future implied in the maxim.
Certainly, Vailati’s cultivated sense of historicity of science, of hypothetical
implications of deductions, and of the relationship of consequentiality between
thought and reality were destined to encounter Peirce’s views, even though he never
caught the possibility of a new paradigm as the abductive one because of the lack of
semiotic awareness and of openness to metaphysical realism. Therefore, when the
experience of Leonardo was over (1907), the early death of the two major admirers
closed the experience of this early reception of Peirce and pragmatism.
For years Peirce was present only in sporadic quotations, since pragmatism was
severely judged as anti-intellectualism by the dominant idealists. One of those who
recognized the existence of Peirce was Gramsci, who showed in that way to be open to
new forms of thought. Where did Gramsci take any acquaintance with the existence of
Peirce? Interestingly, in the same years Mussolini quoted James as one of his masters.
Both of them knew a little about pragmatism and pragmatists but the experience of
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the Leonardo and the epoch of the Journals had a profound impact on Italian culture
so that names and main ideas somehow survived. The only real exception of those
years was the work of Mario Manlio Rossi, Calderoni’s student, who kept recalling
the positive impulse of pragmatism of the Peircean stripe in a couple of volumes
(Il pragmatismo italiano, 1924; Saggio sul rimorso, 1933) and in one review of the
Collected Papers in 1936.
2. The second wave. Masters and sons.
The second wave happened after the Second World War. Turin and Milan were the
center and spring of this wave. The two leading figures of that time at the University
of Turin were Nicola Abbagnano and Augusto Guzzo, an original critical existentialist
the former, an original idealist the latter. A third figure, Luigi Pareyson, younger than
the two masters, early emerged directing existentialism toward hermeneutic passing
through aesthetics.
Abbagnano published the translation of the collection Chance, love, and logic
(Caso, Amore, Logica, 1956) with the introduction M. R. Cohen. Guzzo did not mention
Peirce but encouraged three of his students to study the American thought. Giuseppe
Riconda took James, Amalia De Maria Dewey, and Nynfa Bosco Peirce.
To Nynfa Bosco we owe both the very first monograph on Peirce in Italian (La
filosofia pragmatica di Ch. S. Peirce, 1959) and a new translation of the metaphysical
series of the Monist (Dalla scienza alla metafisica, 1977). The latter was accompanied
by a second monograph by the same title. Bosco’s main idea was that Peirce was a
Platonist of an odd stripe who somehow saw the possible convergence of science and
metaphysics in a sophisticated hermeneutic. Bosco was anticipating the international
scholarship in identifying a hidden profound unity of Peirce’s researches in several
different fields and the relevance of metaphysics in Peirce’s discourse.
From Turin Umberto Eco moved his first steps too, following Pareyson’s interests
for aesthetics. Eco soon transformed his esthetical interests (in which Dewey was
already present) in a profound study of semiotics of which the leading figure was
Peirce, whose work Eco studied during the 1960s. Eco’s interpretation emphasizes
Peirce’s triadic conception of sign and the dynamic movement of semiosis. In his
early works, Eco underlines the function of infinite or unbounded semiosis, while he
does not seem to recognize the doctrines of dynamic object, metaphysical realism,
logical modalities, cosmological evolutionism. Peirce’s semiotics is understood within
a nominalistic framework. As Bonfantini says, in this paradigm the dynamic object
becomes a cultural object and opens up a way to combine Peircean and Saussurean
semiotics. Eco undertakes also a brilliant study on the detective powers of abduction:
the book The sign of the three. Holmes, Dupin, Peirce, written with Sebeok became
a classic.
In the meanwhile Eco started to work in Bologna where he developed his own
semiotics and his school. Massimo A. Bonfantini and G. Proni are among the main
cooperators of Umberto Eco in spreading the knowledge of Peirce through introductory
textbooks (Proni, Introduzione a Peirce, 1990), scholarly work (M. A. Bonfantini, La
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semiosi e l’abduzione, 1986) and translations. They translated many parts of Peirce’s
semiotics following the thematic criterion of the Collected Papers. In 2003 Bonfantini
published a collected work of his translations by the title Opere.
The other part of the story of this second wave happened in Milan, where studies
on the history of Italian pragmatism were undertook by Dal Pra and Preti since the
1950s. In the 1970s Ludovico Geymonat, a radical marxist scholar who had quoted
Peirce also in 1930s while he was participating to the Circle of Vienna, inserted Peirce
in his History of Logic (Storia del pensiero filosofico e scientifico), somehow putting
him within a neo-positivist framework.
In the same years, from a different perspective, Carlo Sini published his history
of pragmatism and started his original way of understanding Peirce (Il pragmatismo
americano, 1972). Sini gave a comprehensive overview of Peirce’s work, stressing
the original path of Peirce’s relational understanding of categories and the peculiar
kind of hermeneutics that can stem from Peirce’s semiotic. Very interestingly, Sini
stressed also the nihilist hint of Peirce’s cosmological conception and the close tie
between this origin from nihil and the fate of Western metaphysics from the invention
of the alphabet to technology (Figure dell’enciclopedia filosofica, 2004-6). This
path shows how Peirce’s philosophy can join forces with Heidegger’s hermeneutics.
Comparing James and Peirce, Sini clearly underlined their differences and Peirce’s
logical capacity. Last but not least, Sini saw the great importance of Existential Graphs
and their iconic capacity to represent logical thought.
Among the few other significant contributes of this epoch, it is important to
recall the two essays by A. Guccione Monroy (Peirce e il pragmatismo americano,
1959) and A. Salanitro (Peirce e il problema dell’interpretazione, 1969, completely
dedicated to semiotics), and the figure of F. Rossi Landi, Morris scholar, who gave
impulse to studies that had to deal with Peirce’s semiotics. This semiotic stripe was
then carried on by his student A. Ponzio.
The event that better represents, and somehow closes, this second wave is the
congress “Peirce in Italia,” held in 1990 in Napoli (Peirce in Italia, 1993). The papers
of all the main characters of this second wave are collected in the proceedings, and
two significant articles by M. Quaranta and A. Martone recall the reception of Peirce.
3. The third wave. A contemporary living pragmatism
The third wave regards the ongoing studies on Peirce. It has two central places:
Rome and Milan. From the late eighties Rossella Fabbrichesi, Sini’s student, and Rosa
M. Calcaterra started their studies with several monographic books and translations.
Fabbrichesi deepened Sini’s insights on semiotics and categorical relationships (Sulle
tracce del segno, 1986; Il concetto di relazione in Peirce, 1992), compared Peirce’
semiotic and phenomenology with Leibniz, Goethe, Wittgenstein (Continuità e
variazione, 2001; Peirce e Wittgenstein: un incontro, 2014), Heidegger, and Nietzsche,
and she finally reached a vision that blends Peirce’s view with hermeneutics and
a philosophical social interpretation of biological evolutionism (Ermeneutica e
pragmatismo, 2009). In her last work she proposes an interpretation of the social body
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which stems from Peirce’s category of thirdness and from Royce’s conception of
community (In comune. Dal corpo proprio al corpo comunitario, 2012). Fabbrichesi
is also translator of a collection of Peirce’s writings on categories (Categorie, 1992),
founder and leader of the Centro Studi Peirce at the University of Milan, the only
place in Italy where you can find all Peirce’s manuscripts.
Calcaterra, who had heard about Peirce from her professor Filiasi Carcano, came
to Peirce through studies on Habermas. The normative and social understanding
of cognitive semiotic of the 1860s and the 1870s was the focus of her early book
Interpretare l’esperienza. Scienza Metafisica Etica nella filosofia di C. S. Peirce (1989),
while she later focused on the same intertwining between normative sciences and
logic in Peirce’s later works. Later on she broadened the spectrum of her interests
to all pragmatists critically reconstructing the relationship between pragmatism and
analytic philosophy (as editor of New Perspectives on Pragmatism and Analytic
Philosophy) and giving an original reading of classic pragmatism as common project
based on a qualified conception of experience (Pragmatismo: i valori dell’esperienza,
2003; Idee concrete. Percorsi nella filosofia di Dewey, 2011). This reading is the
distinctive characteristic of the Rome school of pragmatism and the continuity of the
pragmatist project from Peirce to contemporary neo-pragmatists is the content of La
filosofia in pratica (in print).
Embarrassingly enough, the third character of this third wave is my work. Coming
from Turin and having studied with Nynfa Bosco, I started working on Peirce in
Rome. After a dissertation on Peirce’s very late manuscripts (Istinto razionale, 2003)
I focused my research on the boundaries between logic and metaphysics proposing a
reading of several Peircean unfinished topics according to a metaphysical realism that
relies upon the mathematical conception of continuity (Metafisica per assurdo, 2009).
This conception accounts also for a profound synthetic drive in Peirce that could
never be completed and explains why Peirce was abandoning and contrasting Kant’s
legacy over the years. After a close study of the semiotic characteristics of Existential
Graphs, I proposed a different pattern for synthetic/analytic/vague reasoning and a
synthetic tool for understanding syntheticity: complete gesture, an action that carries
on a meaning thanks to its semiotic and phenomenological characteristics (Philosophy
of gesture, 2014). I also provided a huge (700 p.) chronological translation of some
of Peirce’s works (Scritti scelti, 2005) and, with Marco Annoni, a translation of a
selection of letters between Peirce and James (Alle origini del pragmatismo, 2011).
The three of us, with Carlo Sini and Susanna Marietti, launched an association
called Pragma that unites the efforts of the schools of Rome and Milan, and the Centro
Studi Peirce. The Associazione Pragma reunites many good scholars who gave
important specialized interpretations of pragmatism and Peirce. Among others I want
to recall Susanna Marietti, author of an important book on Existential Graphs and
one of the founder of Pragma (Icona e diagramma, 2001). She also translated some
important writings on Existential Graphs (Pragmatismo e Grafi Esistenziali, 2003).
Besides Marietti, important authors are Giovanni Tuzet, who gave a brilliant reading
of abduction in Philosophy of Law (La prima inferenza. L’abduzione di C. S. Peirce,
2006) and Maria Luisi, who worked on the comparison between Peirce’s and
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Husserl’s phenomenologies and a translation of Peirce’s writings on phenomenology
(Esperienza e percezione, 2009). Very good studies are also emerging from Claudio
Paolucci, Marco Stango, Gabriele Gava, Francesco Bellucci, Marco Annoni, and
Emanuele Fadda who are working on Peirce’s iconism, the conception of morality,
purposefulness, logic, bio-semiotics, and the relationship with Saussure respectively.
Associazione Pragma is also the owner of the European Journal of Pragmatism
and American Philosophy founded and directed by Rosa Calcaterra, Roberto Frega,
and me.
References
Bonfantini M. A. – Martone A. (eds), (1993), Peirce in Italia, Napoli, Liguori.
Maddalena G. – Tuzet G., (2007), I pragmatisti italiani. Tra alleati e nemici, Milano,
Alboversorio.
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COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Mathias Girel*
Peirce’s Reception in France: just a Beginning
“It is a grievous shame and imposition that the reader should […] have to traverse
this space, so full of marvels and beauties, as in a night train, pent up in this cramped
section, obscure and airless.” (Peirce, EP2, 376.)
The same caveat might apply to the present note: what follows is only a roadmap for a
larger account of Peirce’s reception in France and it will not aim at comprehensiveness.
Moreover, it will not attempt to assess the extent of the “misunderstandings” concerning
Peirce’s system. It will only mention who made use of what. To put it in a nutshell,
one can argue that Peirce’s reception is just starting, with a strong scholarship that has
been developing in the last thirty years in France, even if the reception dates, as in
Peirce’s own country, back to the 1870s, after a kind of Peircean “craze” in the 1960s
and 1970s.
1. A Faint First Reception
For the classical period of American Philosophy (1860-1914), historians were
facing at least two classical riddles, concerning France:
(1) The first one is being solved little by little: what did Peirce do during his sundry
stays in France?1
(2) The second one is still unsolved: Why did Théodule Ribot, the editor of
the brand new Revue philosophique, choose to publish the two first papers of
the Illustrations of the Logic of Science series?2 The archives from the Revue
philosophique have provided no clue so far.3 Peirce’s texts must have been deemed
paradigmatic of the new philosophic style endorsed by the Revue, discussing logic,
psychology and science, under Ribot’s editorship, but knowing how and when exactly
Ribot got acquainted with them is still a mystery. Interestingly, publishing the two
first Illustrations as a kind of stand-alone version of the “Logic of science,” as Peirce
would sometimes wish to do later on, was also encouraging misunderstandings: it was
* École normale supérieure, Paris, France [[email protected]]
1. We have some precious insights through some of the letters retrieved by Jaime Nubiola and his
colleagues at the university of Navarra: http://www.unav.es/gep/CorrespondenciaEuropeaCSP.html
(See in particular the letters from Paris in 1875).
2. C. S. Peirce, “Comment se fixe la croyance,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de L’Étranger 6
(December 1878), 553-569; “Comment rendre nos idées claires,” Revue Philosophique de la France et
de L’Étranger 7 (January 1879), 39-57, both are retrieved in W2. For the differences between the two
versions, see Deledalle (1981). Passing assertions, by Peirce, that the English version is a translation
from the French are not reliable. They were translated from the English by Léo Seguin, an anarchist
who had taken part to the “Commune”.
3. A point confirmed to the author in private communication by Jacqueline Carroy, who did extensive
work on these archives.
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cutting this “Logic of science” from the examination of the modes of inference, from
the theory of probability, from the problems of uniformity and of the order of nature.
All this involves a significant kind of distortion. Contemporary readers should keep in
mind that The Popular Science Monthly, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and
even in some respects, later, The Monist, the main philosophical sources for Peirce’s
thought, were not easily accessible at that time in France, so much so that these two
papers remained for a long time the one and only source for Peirce in French.
This being said, the first French reception is paradoxical enough: as mentioned,
Peirce’s Illustrations have been published very early in French but until recently Peirce
never reached the kind of recognition he enjoyed in Italy, and maybe in England (See
here Maddalena and Hookway).4
In the English-speaking world, there were at least four of Peirce’s contemporaries
who had clearly perceived his genius while he was alive: W. K. Clifford in England,
but he died at 33, James in America, but he clearly referred to Peirce to say something
else (the very nature of the “else” in question being still a matter of controversy),
Lady Welby in England, but it was very late in Peirce’s life, to which one should
certainly add Royce, with the same proviso. They had no French counterparts, there
was no young French Ogden discovering the semiotic work. Peirce has been read, but
Peirce’s disciples, those at least who were able to gain some knowledge of Peirce’s
contribution to Logic, whether it was Royce himself or his students, have only had
a dim echo in France. If we compare with another pragmatist, there was no one who
played the active role Renouvier played for James, no equivalent of what Bergson
would be to him after 1900.
Peirce was not totally absent, for sure, but he was definitely a minor, or even a
“repressed,” voice in the pre-1914 literature:
(1) Paul Tannery devoted a few notes to Peirce’s writings, and, even if he did
not do Peirce full justice, he clearly perceived what was at stake in the new logic of
relations that Peirce was building.5
(2) When the quarrel over pragmatism started, in particular after 1904, it would
become a topos in each and every account to mention Peirce’s role as the inventor of
pragmatism and to speculate about the “larger” version James was offering, which
confined Peirce into the role of a forerunner, a dangerous category indeed.
(3) Louis Couturat mentions Peirce in his accounts of symbolic logic and of the
algebra of logic (Peirce, Ladd-Franklin and Couturat are even listed as coauthors of
the entry on “Symbolic Logic” in Baldwin’s Dictionary), but in a reading that was on
the whole not favorable.6
(4) André Lalande, who was also interested in the ethics of terminology, devoted
4. For the early reception of Peirce, see Chevalier (2010).
5. See Paul Tannery, “Review of the Algebra of Logic,” Revue philosophique 1881, 646-50; Review of
Peirce’s “Small Differences of sensation,” Revue philosophique 1886, 386-87.
6. Bertrand Russell claims that Peirce was on the most original minds of the late XIXth century but, in
his correspondence with Couturat, also claims that Peirce is the source of most of the bad ideas that
James and Schiller are circulating (See to that effect an interesting, but very negative, exchange on
Peirce between Russell et Couturat, Feb 3, 1899, Feb 11, 1899, Jan 17, 1901, May 7, 1905, May 12,
1905, June 28, 1905 in Schmid 2001).
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a detailed paper to Peirce (Lalande, 1906), which is perhaps to only place in the
French literature where Peirce is considered for himself, before 1914, but the larger
framework of Lalande’s thought, with its remnants of spencerianism certainly did
not help Peirce’s contemporaries to get a fine grasp of the powerful resources of
his system, even if the “Pragmatism” entry in his dictionary is still a good starting
point for the early history of the “two” pragmatisms, insofar as Peirce’s and James’s
contributions are clearly disambiguated.
(5) Peirce’s scientific correspondents, physicists and mathematicians, held him in
high regard, but this was not enough to help with a philosophical recognition.7
Peirce was then confined to a marginal presence, and it is certainly ironic that the
most famous pages dealing with Peirce were those where, under James’s pen and to
his own dismay, he was compared to Bergson, in Appendix B of Pluralistic Universe.
The book was translated in France in 1910, and Peirce was put on a foothold with
Bergson and James as far as “synectic pluralism” was concerned, and Peirce’s tychism
and synechism were compared to Bergson’s “devenir réel” and Creative Evolution.
2. A Peircean Craze?
The next step occurs in the 1960s, when the publication of the Collected Papers
was complete. There are mentions of Peirce before, when the first volumes of the
CP were published, in the 1930s, but nothing comparable to the kind of hype Peirce
“enjoyed” later in the 1960s.
It is always easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to tell in which ways earlier scholars
were partial in their reading of Peirce, whether they emphasized Peirce’s semiotics,
his epistemology, whether they overlooked Peirce’s account of continuity or his
architectonics: one can easily start compiling a long series of “misunderstandings” or
of “misuses.” It is certainly true that the emphasis on Peirce’s post-1880s doctrine of
signs had shortcomings, but in the context of structuralism and post-structuralism, it is
the aspect that was the most salient to contemporaries, in the same way perhaps as his
formulations of the pragmatist maxim were germane to logical positivists in 1930s,
and it prompted a good deal of interest in Peirce’s texts.
During that period, Gérard Deledalle (1921-2003), who received a H. Schneider
Award in 1990 for his outstanding achievements, has been a pivotal figure, as far as
Peirce’s recognition in France is concerned. His doctoral work – his Thèse d’État
– was on Dewey’s theory of Experience and was soon followed by his translation
of the Logic and of Democracy and Education. But the French public, for a large
part, has discovered Peirce through his edition/translation of Peirce’s late texts on
Semiotics (Peirce and Deledalle, 1978). Deledalle showed, through comments and
annotations, that Peirce’s semiotics was much more promising than the dualisms of
the main reference for French structuralists and post-structuralists, Saussure.8 Écrits
sur le signe is where Deleuze found one of the main inspirations for his twofold
7. Peirce’s exchanges with his European colleagues are retrieved in W3 and W4.
8. The book had a companion, Deledalle and Réthoré (1979). On Peirce and Saussure, see Liszka
(1993).
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book on Cinema, in particular for the classifications of signs and for the obvious
resources provided by a non-linguistic semiotics for film-analysis: Deledalle’s volume
is explicitly credited in the course that provided the materials for the book.9
It would be wrong, though, to make of this edited book the main reference about
Peirce for the 1970s, for several reasons: it was anticipated by Deledalle’s history of
American philosophy (La philosophie américaine, 1954), which dealt with many other
aspects, and by a very useful anthology on Pragmatism (Deledalle, 1971). Deledalle
also stressed the relevance of Peirce to contemporary philosophical debates (Deledalle,
1990). But on the whole it is fair to say that it is Peirce as a semiotician who took the
lion’s share in that account, where semiotics is the foundation of the philosophical
contribution. This course of events took place through research papers,10 through
very large conferences at Perpignan mixing major philosophers and linguists (Balat
et al., 1992), through research activities in Deledalle’s own center, IRSCE (Institut
de Recherches sur la sémiotique, la communication, l’éducation), launched in 1974
and still active in the early 2000s. Members such as J. Réthoré, M. Balat, T. Jappy
and other scholars have explored Peirce’s contributions to phaneroscopy, language,
psychoanalysis and to philosophy of communication and have established a strong
tradition of semiotic scholarship, with Peirce as the core reference. English-speaking
readers will find in Deledalle’s C. S. Peirce’s Philosophy of signs (Deledalle, 2000)
some samples of his works on Peirce. Finally, Deledalle’s work was not confined
to purely semiotic texts, he was in charge, with colleagues, of the translation of In
Search for a Method (following roughly the plan designed by Peirce in the 1890s) and
also, even if it was published posthumously, of a selection of entries from Baldwin’s
Dictionary (Deledalle et al., 2007).
Still, a closer study of Peirce’s reception in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, after
the publication of the CP was completed, also shows that there was a Peirce “hype”
before the translations of the 1970s and before the Pragmatism revival of the 1980s.
If Peirce’s doctrine of signs was the prominent feature during that period, one should
mention at least three significant uses of Peirce before Deledalle’s translations:
(1) Derrida has passing references to Peirce and is claimed to have worked on
Peirce’s texts when he was doing some research at Harvard in 1950. He quotes from
Peirce in De la Grammatologie (in the chapter, “Linguistics and Grammatology”),
where he came close to claiming Peirce as a deconstructionist: “Peirce – Derrida
writes – goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the
transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end
to the reference from sign to sign. I have identified logo-centrism and the metaphysics
of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for such
a signified.” (Derrida 1976, 49.) The question of whether Derrida’s own notion of
9. See Deleuze’s course “Cinéma cours du 23/11/82.” Peirce is described as an “English” (sic)
philosopher and founder of “semiology” (sic) and, if the CP are mentioned, the main reference goes to
Deledalle’s Écrits sur le signe. See also “Peinture cours du 05/05/81.”
10. A list is given in Deledalle (2000) but a comprehensive list, with an online-access to the texts,
would be useful. As far as the present writer is aware, there is a Deledalle’s Nachlass, it would be useful
to have an idea of the Peirce-related content.
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deconstruction and differance could be thus traced to Peirce’s unlimited semiosis has
fueled fierce debates.
2) A mere glance at Lacan’s seminar, for example, might comfort us into thinking
that it is a merely “mercenary” use of Peirce’s semiotic texts and of the notion of the
“quadrant”.11 But a close reading of the 1972 sessions shows, for example, that there
were also more extended readings of Peirce in the same seminar, for example through
a presentation by François Récanati on zero-ness, on the potential, and continuity.
Récanati, who was to become and is still a leading figure in philosophy of language
and of mind, clearly traces today the intuition of his more recent works, including
Mental Files, back to the work he made on Peirce very early in his career: “The
basic idea can be traced to Peirce, one of the first philosophers I studied in my early
years: there is an irreducibly indexical component in our thought, without which
representation would not be possible. We think about objects in virtue of standing in
certain relations to them. That’s the core idea of the book.”12
(3) Another telling use, more discreet but perhaps more decisive for the last part
of our story, at least for the French philosophers versed into the analytic style, was
Gilles-Gaston Granger, starting with his Essai d’une philosophie du style (Granger,
1968). If there are important differences between Granger and Peirce, in particular
over the interpretation of triadicity, he credited Peirce with the most complete account
of signs to date and many readers have discovered the semiotic triangle and Peirce’s
series of interpretants in Granger’s book and in the following publications, which led
to see that another, more systematic, use of Peirce, distinct from the semiotic craze,
was possible. Granger stressed that how “fascinating” Peirce’s texts on the signs were
(op. cit., 114) and for many readers and young scholars, it opened new avenues for
rational thought.
3. Academic Recognition
For this last wave, which starts somewhere between the mid-seventies and the
mid-eighties, my account will be more impressionistic.
It is fair to say that, contemporaneously with the ongoing chronological edition,
Peirce reached the philosophy departments within the last three decades: dissertations
were devoted to Peirce, books and numerous papers were published, seminars and
international conferences were organized.
In addition to Granger’s incentive, Jacques Bouveresse certainly was the key
character in this new stage. Early in the 1970s, he stressed the resemblances between
Peirce’s fallibilism and Popper’s philosophy of science (Bouveresse 1974), encouraging,
this time also, a genuine and first-hand appropriation of Peirce’s philosophy of science,
as a resource against sundry kinds of relativism and irrationalism. Peirce was still
11. CP 2.455 sq., see in particular the “Identification” seminar IX, Jan, 17, 1962. Peirce is introduced
again in quite a very mysterious way in the session for May, 23, 1962, since Lacan never gives his
name (an “American author”). There are several “bootleg” versions of the seminar, which is still in the
process of publication. For a source, see Balat and Peirce (2000, 7-8).
12. F. Récanati, from a recent interview on his work, private communication.
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present in Bouveresse’s inaugural lecture, when, in the mid-nineties, he was elected at
Collège de France. André de Tienne, now Director of the Peirce Project, recalls having
first heard about Peirce, when he was 18, in a lecture by Bouveresse at Brussels13 and
it would be interesting to know how many students experienced the same thing while
Bouveresse was Professor at Paris I.
During this period, several influential works were published. For example Pierre
Thibaud, at Aix-en-Provence, has contributed fundamental work on key notions of
semiotics and the graphs (Thibaud 1975). It is important for the reader to know that,
up to the 1990s, a Professor had to defend two dissertations: a thèse de troisième cycle,
a relatively short dissertation, and, some ten or sometimes fifteen years later, a thèse
d’État, exceeding 1000 pages sometimes, and providing a quarry of manuscripts, texts
and books for decades. Christiane Chauviré, who published several papers on Peirce
already in the 1970s, started her thesis in 1975 and defended it at Paris I in 1988,
while she was a Professor at Besançon; the advisor was S. Bachelard and Chauviré
provided an account of the semiotic and logic of vagueness, with a keen interest in
the philosophy of mathematics. Parts of it are published in Peirce et la signification
(Chauviré, 1995) and L’oeil mathématique (Chauviré, 2008), and some other papers,
where Peirce and Wittgenstein, as well as Hintikka, Quine and Popper often dialogue,
can be found in Le grand miroir (Chauviré, 2004). Chauviré made very frequent use of
Peirce in her courses and seminars at Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, and she contributed
to the translation of Peirce’s 1898 Lectures. She was also in charge of a seminar
“Mental et social,” with Sandra Laugier and Jean-Jacques Rosat, starting in 1996,
the subject of which was mainly Wittgenstein, but where Peirce (as well as James)
was frequently discussed. At Paris I, the Groupe d’Études sur le Pragmatisme et la
Philosophie Américaine, active from 1999 to 2006,14 launched by Guillaume Garreta
and myself, hosted many seminars and several conferences on Pragmatism and
American philosophy (where R. Rorty, R. Brandom, R. Shusterman, R. Goodman,
and others gave lectures), and featured work on Peirce (reading seminars, lectures by
C. Hookway, I. Hacking, G. Heinzmann and others). I defended my dissertation on
Peirce’s account of belief there at Paris I in 2007. Now at École normale supérieure
(Paris) since 2009, I am using Peirce on a regular basis in my courses and working,
again, on Peirce’s early texts.
Back to our story. Bouveresse was the advisor for Claudine Tiercelin’s thesis
on realism and the universals, defended in 1990, building on the metaphysical, and
13. “I was eighteen when I attended for the first time a public lecture by a professional philosopher at a
university in Brussels. Professor Jacques Bouveresse had come from Paris to speak about connections
between Peirce and Popper. Attending philosophy students were required to pick some subtopic from
the lecture and explore it at greater depth. I thereupon went to the library, serendipitously found Gérard
Deledalle’s recent translation of Peirce’s Écrits sur le signe (1978), and got my first exposure to Peirce,
in complete innocence and ignorance. The paper I submitted summarized whatever I was able to
understand, which could not have been much. But unbeknownst to me, a seed got planted deep into
my mind’s recesses, and it germinated three or four years later while I was studying at the Catholic
University of Louvain.” From an interview to be published in Bellucci – Pietarinen – Stjernfelt (eds),
Peirce – 5 Questions, Automatic Press/VIP, 57.
14. Some of the archives can still be found at http://pragmatisme.free.fr.
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in particular Scotist, dimension of Peirce’s works. It was soon followed by two
books on Peirce – a collection of essays (Tiercelin 1993b) and an introduction to
Peirce (Tiercelin 1993a) – and numerous papers on Peirce defending a scientific and
rationalist metaphysics, with a particular interest in the metaphysics of dispositions.15
Tiercelin taught at Paris I, at Paris XII, then at Collège de France where she was
elected in 1990, and she was also, shortly, a C. S. Peirce Professor of Philosophy at
Fordham, and in another register, President of the C. S. Peirce society. At Créteil and
Collège de France, she advised several dissertations on Peirce (for example, O. Deroy
in 2008 and J. M. Chevalier in 2010), and organized several conferences on Peirce.
These were certainly the two places where Peirce was given full academic
recognition but there were many other sites. To take just two very different instances,
Bernard Morand at Caen used Peirce in an account of the logic of conception, Jérôme
Havenel defended his Ph.D. on Peirce’s account of continuity in 2006, with F. Nef
(EHESS) as advisor. A comprehensive bibliography of French Peirce-related content
would be extremely useful. But Peirce also turned into a key reference to nonpeirceans, i.e. to major philosophers who were not working primarily on Peirce. One
might hardly overemphasize the import of Descombes’s Institutions du sens (Paris
1996), which is not a Peircean text. The main influences would rather be Wittgenstein
and Dumont, but the book, through illuminating paragraphs on the irreducibility of
triadic relations, such as the most of the mental and the social, on the externalism of
the mental, revived an interest for Peirce in all the discussions on reductionism in the
philosophy of mind and on the social dimensions of mind.
As regards translations, the reader of Peirce’s 1868-69 and 1877-78 series had the
Écrits anticartésiens (Paris, Aubier 1984); if she was curious also about the Monist
series, she had À la Recherche d’une methode (Pup 1993). The most comprehensive
project, though, was the ten-volume edition of Œuvres philosophiques at Éditions du
Cerf (Tiercelin – Thibaud 2002­—). It is thematic, as the CP, but takes advantage of the
philological work made by the Peirce Project for the chronological edition. It seems
to be slowing down, though, after three volumes only. If the French philosophical
contributions to the Peircean scholarship are often published in English, if Peirce
scholars read Peirce in English, it is much easier for younger students and for the
general public to have access to James and now to Dewey in translation than to Peirce,
which might be a cause of concern for the future of Peirce’s reception. Still, if the
latter, as we suggested at the beginning, is just beginning, it relies on firm and widereaching foundations. Peirce should be soon where he belongs, with all the classics,
with Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Frege, on library shelves, where he is often already,
and also in undergraduate and graduate courses, where he might and should be more
present.
15. For a list see http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/claudine-tiercelin/bibliographie__1.htm.
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References
Balat M. – Deledalle G. – Deledalle-Rhodes J. (eds), (1992), Signs of Humanity /
L’homme et ses signes. Proceedings of the IVth International Congress / Actes du
IVe Congrès Mondial. International Association for Semiotic Studies / Association
Internationale de Sémiotique. Barcelona/Perpignan, March 30-April 6, 1989,
Berlin New York, Mouton de Gruyter.
Balat M. – Peirce C. S., (2000), Des fondements sémiotiques de la psychanalyse
Peirce après Freud et Lacan suivi de la trad. de “Logique des mathématiques”
de C. S. Peirce préf. de Gérard Deledalle, Paris/Montréal (Québec), l’Harmattan.
Bouveresse J., (1974), “Peirce, Popper, l’induction et l’histoire des sciences,” Critique
327-328, 736-752.
Chauviré C., (1995), Peirce et la signification: introduction à la logique du vague,
Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
― (2004), Le grand miroir. Essais sur Peirce et Wittgenstein, Besançon, Presses
Universitaires Franc-Comtoises.
― (2008), L’œil mathématique: essai sur la philosophie mathématique de Peirce,
Paris, Vrin.
Chevalier J., (2010), “La réception de Charles S. Peirce en France (1870-1914),”
Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, 179-205.
Deledalle G. (ed.), (1971), Le Pragmatisme choisis et présentés par Gérard Deledalle,
Paris/Montréal, Bordas.
― (1981), English and French Versions of C. S. Peirce’s “The Fixation of Belief” and
“How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 17,
141-152.
― (1990), Lire Peirce aujourd’hui, Bruxelles, De Boeck.
― (2000), Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy of signs: essays in comparative semiotics,
Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
Deledalle G. – Deledalle Rhodes J. – Balat M., (2007), Les textes logiques de
C. S. Peirce du Dictionnaire de Baldwin, Nîmes, Champ social éditions.
Deledalle G. – Réthoré J., (1979), Théorie et pratique du signe: introduction à la
sémiotique de Charles S. Peirce, Paris, Payot.
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Derrida J., (1976), Of Grammatology, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Granger G.-G., (1968), Essai d’une philosophie du style, Paris, A. Colin.
Lalande A., (1906), “Pragmatisme et pragmaticisme,” Revue Philosophique 61, 121-146.
Liszka J., (1993), “Peirce in France: An essay on the two founders of modern
semiotic,” Semiotica 93, 139-153.
Peirce C. S. – Deledalle G., (1978), Écrits sur le signe rassemblés, traduits et
commentés par Gérard Deledalle, Paris, Éditions du Seuil.
Schmid A.-F., (2001), Bertrand Russell, Correspondance sur la philosophie, la
logique et la politique avec Louis Couturat (1897-1913), Paris, Kimé.
Thibaud P., (1975), La logique de Charles Sanders Pierce: de l’algèbre aux graphes,
Aix-en-Provence, Éditions de l’Université de Provence.
Tiercelin Cl., (1993a), C. S. Peirce et le pragmatisme, Paris, Presses universitaires de
France.
— (1993b), La pensée-signe: études sur C. S. Peirce, Nîmes, Éditions J. Chambon.
Tiercelin Cl. – Thibaud P. (ed. – trad.), (2002—), Œuvres philosophiques, Paris,
Éditions du Cerf.
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COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Agnieszka Hensoldt*
Reception of Peirce in Poland
The first mention of Charles Sanders Peirce we find in Polish philosophical
literature is in the third volume of Historia filozofii (History of Philosophy) by
Władysław Tatarkiewicz, edited for the first time in 1931 in Lwów. Władysław
Tatarkiewicz was a Polish philosopher and historian of philosophy and his History
of Philosophy has been until now the most popular history of philosophy textbook in
Poland. However, in Tatarkiewicz’s History of Philosophy, there is no chapter devoted
to Peirce. Peirce is mentioned in a chapter called “Pragmatism” which talks mainly
about William James. Peirce is shortly introduced as James’ predecessor and friend
and his philosophical views as contrasting to James’s. Summing up, Tatarkiewicz’s
History of Philosophy is not a book in which you can learn much about Peirce’s
doctrine, with the exception of a few hints at his life and place in the history of ideas.
The real introduction of Peirce to Polish readers of philosophical literature occurred
in 1960s thanks to Hanna Buczyńska (later Hanna Buczyńska-Garewicz) and Marian
Dobrosielski. Dobrosielski is the author of three articles on Peirce published in the
early 1960s in the Polish journal “Studia filozoficzne.”
A small book titled Peirce was published in 1965 in the series “Myśli i ludzie”
(“Ideas and Men”) devoted to famous philosophers. The book consists of two parts.
The first one is an introduction to Peirce written by Hanna Buczyńska. Peirce’s
pragmatism is presented by Buczyńska as the genuine American philosophy and is
put in relation to the European philosophy of the 18th and 19th century. As for Peirce’s
views, Buczyńska is concerned with empiricism, the maxim of pragmatism, and
categories. The second part of the book consists in a translation of three of Peirce’s
papers into Polish by Zbigniew Dyjas: The Fixation of Belief, How to Make Our Ideas
Clear, The Doctrine of Chances. This is the first translation of Peirce’s papers into
Polish.
Two years later, in 1967, Dobrosielski published another book on Peirce. The
book was titled Filozoficzny pragmatyzm C. S. Peirce’a (C. S. Peirce’s Philosophical
Pragmatism). The book is a much longer and more detailed introduction to Peirce’s
philosophy than Buczyńska’s. Besides analyzing the historical context of Peirce’s
philosophy, Dobrosielski pays attention to Peirce’s theory of cognition, semiotics and
theory of meaning. Dobrosielski’s book is the first work from which Polish readers
could get acquainted with Peirce’s semeiotic ideas, the triadic conception of the sign
and Peirce’s typology of signs.
In 1970s and 1980s the only scholar writing on Peirce in Polish was BuczyńskaGarewicz. She published four articles on Peirce’s semiotics in “Studia filozoficzne.”
* University of Opole, Poland [[email protected]]
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She was also the author of some reviews of works on Peirce written in English,
which is an important achievement, given that at that time the reviews by BuczyńskaGarewicz were for Polish scholars nearly the only source of information on what was
going on in the international community of Peirce scholars.
Buczyńska-Garewicz’s research on Peirce’s semiotics finds its culmination in her
elaborate and detailed book titled Semiotyka Peirce’a (Peirce’s Semiotics) dealing with
all aspects of Peirce’s semiotics including its historical development, the typology of
signs, and semiosis. The book was published in 1994 in the series “Biblioteka Myśli
Semiotycznej” (“The Library of Semiotic Thought”), in which three years later the
translation of Peirce’s works titled just C. S. Peirce. Wybór pism (Selected Papers) was
also published. This second selection of translated papers is more extensive than the
first one. It is based on The Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce, mainly on Peirce’s works
published in volume I, V, and VIII. The most part of translated papers is devoted to the
theory of signs and Peirce’s views on the problem of categories.
The next book which focuses on Peirce’s semiotics was issued in 1996. This is
Znak i jego ciągłość: semiotyka C. S. Peirce’a między percepcją i recepcją (Sign and
Its Continuity in C. S. Peirce’s System of Philosophy. Semiotics Between Perception
and Reception) by Tomasz Komendziński. The three volumes issued in 1990s started
a real interest in Peirce’s thought in Poland, which is visible particularly after the turn
of the century. The foundation of the series “Biblioteka Myśli Semiotycznej” played
also an important role in the revival of Peircean research in Poland.
Two translations were issued also in the first decade of the 21st century. In 2005
Zaniedbany Argument i inne pisma z lat 1907-1913 (Neglected Argument and Other
Papers from 1907-1913) appeared with an introduction by Stanisław Wszołek. This
translation was based on The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings,
Volume 2 (1893-1913). The main aim of this selection is to show the latest Peirce’s
attempts of interpretation and justification for the maxim of pragmatism. The second
selection of Peirce’s translated papers was Charles Sanders Peirce o nieskończonej
wspólnocie badaczy (Charles Sanders Peirce on Unlimited Community of Inquirers)
with translation and introduction by Agnieszka Hensoldt, issued in 2009. The core
part of this selection are Peirce’s articles usually referred to as the JSP Cognition
Series from the years 1868 and 1869. Besides them the volume consists of Peirce’s
late (after 1900) works focused on the conception of community of inquirers.
As for monographs, in 2006 Tomasz Michaluk published Sem(e)iotyka Charlesa
S. Peirce’a jako zwinięcie systemu filozoficznego (Charles S. Peirce’s Sem(e)iotics as
Enfolding of the Philosophical System). Michaluk’s book is divided into three parts
in which the author studies in sequence: Peirce’s semeiotics, Peirce’s realism, and
finally the formalization of semeiotics by Max Bense. In 2007 Agnieszka Hensoldt
published Idee Peirce’owskiego pragmatyzmu i ich renesans w XX-wiecznej filozofii
języka (Concepts of C. S. Peirce’s Pragmatism and their Revival in the 20th Century
Philosophy of Language). The main thesis of the book is that Peirce’s pragmatist
views on the nature and role of language are present in all 20th century philosophical
theories of language. The author argues that Peirce’s linguistic ideas reappears in
works of such various thinkers as: J. L. Austin, J. R. Searle, K. O. Appel, J. Habermas,
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L. Wittgenstein, J. Hintikka, P. Winch, and H. Putnam, and that the concepts of
Peirce’s pragmatic theory of language have proven useful in solving problems,
ranging from the formulation of universal ethical maxims, to the problem of the
foundations of mathematics and knowledge, and the issue of the methodology of
the social sciences. In 2011 Piotr Janik published Koncepcja przekonania w ujęciu
semiotyczno-pragmatycznym: Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) (The Semiotic and
Pragmatic Account of the Conception of Belief: Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914)).
The main subject of Janik’s book is Peirce’s conception of belief which is examined
from the point of view of (1) the theory of signs, (2) the concept of fact as the result
scientific discovery, (3) the classification of the methods of fixation of the belief. Janik
argues that Peirce’s conception of belief plays an important role in contemporary
logic, semiotics, and philosophy of science.
Another important publication is Mateusz Oleksy’s excellent post-doctoral
dissertation: Realism and Individualism. Charles S. Peirce and the Threat of Modern
Nominalism (2008). Oleksy’s book provides readers with a detailed analysis of Peirce’s
evolving realistic stance or stances, as Oleksy argues, introducing the distinction
between “scholastic realism” and “pragmatic realism.” One of the main theses of his
book is that “pragmatic realism” is incompatible with “scholastic realism” as a whole,
and that it replaces the latter in Peirce’s mature thought.
The interest in Peirce’s thought among Polish scholars has been increasing in the
last fifteen years. Every year at least one article on Peirce’s doctrine is published
in Polish philosophical journals. Polish scholars write on Peirce also in English and
publish their papers in international journals. While originally it was only Peirce’s
semiotics that attracted the attention of Polish scholars, lately also Peirce’s pragmatism
has started to be considered as a rich source of philosophical insights.
Last but not least, in June 2007 an international conference on Peirce’s Normative
Thought was held in Opole, the first one in Poland devoted exclusively to Peirce.
References
Buczyńska H., (1965), Peirce, Warszawa, Wiedza Powszechna.
— (1994), Semiotyka Peirce’a, Warszawa, Znak – Język – Rzeczywistość, Polskie
Towarzystwo Semiotyczne.
Dobrosielski M., (1967), Filozoficzny pragmatyzm C. S. Peirce’a, Warszawa, Państwowe
Wydawnictwo Naukowe.
Hensoldt A., (2007), Idee Peirce’owskiego pragmatyzmu i ich renesans w XX-wiecznej
filozofii języka, Opole, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego.
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Janik P., (2011), Koncepcja przekonania w ujęciu semiotyczno-pragmatycznym:
Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), Kraków, Wydawnictwo WAM.
Komendziński T., (1996), Znak i jego ciągłość: semiotyka C. S. Peirce’a między
percepcją i recepcją, Toruń, Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika.
Michaluk T., (2006), Sem(e)iotyka Charlesa S. Peirce’a jako zwinięcie systemu
filozoficznego: próba oceny formalizacji semeiotyki dokonanej przez Maxa Bense’go,
Wrocław, Wydawnictwo DTSK Silesia.
Oleksy M., (2008), Realism and individualism: Charles S. Peirce and the threat of
modern nominalism, Łódź, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego.
Peirce C. S., (2009), Charles Sanders Peirce o nieskończonej wspólnocie badaczy, tr.
A. Hensoldt, Opole, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego.
—(1997), Wybór pism semiotycznych, ed. H. Buczyńska-Garewicz, Warszawa, Znak – Język – Rzeczywistość, Polskie Towarzystwo Semiotyczne.
—(2005), Zaniedbany Argument i inne pisma z lat 1907-1913, tr. S. Wszołek,
Kraków, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Papieskiej Akademii Teologicznej.
Tatarkiewicz W., (1931), Historia filozofii, Lwów, Ossolineum.
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COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Sascha Freyberg*
Peirce in Germany: A Long Time Coming
Although the relationship between Charles Sanders Peirce and German philosophy
was a very close one, it remained rather one-sided for a long time. This story would
make for a philosophical tragicomedy in three acts, but in what follows I will keep it
as sober and short as possible
1. As is well known, Peirce came into contact with philosophy via Kant and
German Idealism (especially Schelling and Hegel). He read Kant in German from
the age of 14 on and his own philosophical works – the early ones in particular – can
be read as an attempt to transform transcendental philosophy in the light of the move
from nominalism to realism.
While Peirce was philosophically well equipped to have a major impact on German
philosophy, German philosophy was not ready for the recognition of his importance.
Considering Peirce’s early presence in the German-speaking world, this judgment
sounds paradoxical. However, we have to understand the circumstances and reasons
of this ignorance – reasons that could seem rather tragicomic in retrospect if only they
were not so sad.
Peirce visited Germany several times and he was in personal and professional
contact with German mathematicians, scientists and engineers. Still more important
was his actual influence on Ernst Schröder, which was acknowledged by Schröder
in the very first page of his Algebra der Logik (1891). Schröder stated that the work
done by Peirce was crucial for the idea of a logical algebra or “exact logic.” Therefore,
with Cantor, Boole, Peano, Russell and Frege, Peirce was listed as one of the creators
of modern relational algebra and logic. Given the scientifically oriented Neo-Kantian
philosophical domination at the time, the reception of Peirce’s philosophical work
looked promising. However, he underwent an almost total omission for several
decades. Klaus Oehler called this fact, which included Pragmatism and American
Philosophy as a whole “the most significant lacunae” in the history of modern German
philosophy.1 Strangely enough, one of the reasons for the ignorance towards Peirce
was his association with Pragmatism, which was known via William James’ lectures,
which had a huge impact but negative, and even hostile, reactions. The reason was
that James’ concept of truth was seen as unscientific and dangerous.
Peirce’s own reactions towards the popular understanding of Pragmatism of course
went unheard and his semiotics were not known at all. When he died in 1914, the year
* Freie Universität Berlin, Deutschland [[email protected]]
1. Oehler (1981, 27): “The outbreak of World War I abruptly broke off the development of the
pragmatism debate that had begun to spread through Germany in the pre-war years. The fact that
it was not resumed after the war is one of the most significant lacunae in the history of German
philosophy. Instead of a productive exchange of ideas there arose a long chain of misunderstandings
and misconceptions of American pragmatism, originating from some of the most eminent German
philosophers, and passed on with an amazingly uncritical self-assurance to others.”
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in which World War I began, the philosophical scene in Germany began to change
according to the dramatic historical events. Socio-economic and political changes that
intervened after World War I moved the philosophical interest from Neo-Kantianism
to the so-called Philosophy of Life bringing more kulturkritische, existentialistic, and
psychological themes (like mood, will, place in the world, etc.) to the fore. Peirce’s
early fame was worth almost nothing anymore. With Bateson we could say that his
work got stuck in a double bind situation – a mixture of ignorance and ill reception.
Moreover, as in other countries the reception of Peirce was delayed due to the state
of publication of his philosophical works. What was known in Germany of Peirce at
the time came almost exclusively from James. Afterwards, it was understood only
under the heading of “Pragmatism,” a philosophical perspective which was strongly
misunderstood for a long time in Germany, often reduced to a concept of truth as cashvalue.2 Whereas Pragmatism began to find at least a small audience in the changing
philosophical climate3 the work of its founder was forgotten or never read at all.4
2. A nationalistic isolationism in philosophy, which began with World War I, was
decisive for this situation as well. Although the Third World Congress for Philosophy
held in 1908 in Heidelberg helped to spread discussions about Pragmatism in
Germany, after the war the interest in reviving, revising or continuing the debate was
gone. Who afterwards wrote on pragmatism either wanted to finish this debate (like
Max Scheler in his otherwise very interesting study Erkenntnis und Arbeit) or went
to know American philosophy first hand, as Gustav Müller and Edgar Wind did. They
both went to the USA in the twenties. Wind was a student of Ernst Cassirer and Erwin
Panofsky, and later worked at the famous Warburg Institute. In the introduction of
his book Das Experiment und die Metaphysik. Zur Auflösung der kosmologischen
Antinomien (Experiment and Metaphysics. Towards the Solution of the Cosmological
Antinomies), which was a challenge of (Neo-) Kantianism by pragmatist methodology,
Wind emphasized his Peircean point of departure. Leaving aside the works which
wanted to apply Pragmatism within limited fields (as pedagogy and sociology in
W. Jerusalem and philosophical anthropology in Arnold Gehlen), Wind’s work was
the first philosophical attempt of an independent adoption of a pragmatistic logic of
research. Nevertheless, all these exceptions to the mainstream ignorance did not have
any significant impact.5
2. Hans Joas described the reception of Pragmatism in Germany pointedly as “A History of
Misunderstandings” (1993). There were only a few explicit proponents of pragmatism mostly on
the margins of the academic scene, like Wilhelm Jerusalem, who translated James’s famous lectures
(1907), Julius Goldstein, or Günther Jacoby. The latter defended Pragmatism as a theory of science and
research, stressing the methodological potential over the controversies of the definitions of truth, but
didn’t even mention Peirce.
3. Of course it thus remained poorly understood, when taking into account that’s founder was not
read at all. Otherwise the ethical and epistemological ideas of Peirce would have stand in the way of
a fascist reading.
4. Whereas there existed translations of James, Schiller and Dewey from early on; the first translation
of Peirce appeared only in 1965.
5. Significant in this respect is the fate of Wind’s book, which appeared 1934 after he emigrated with
the Warburg Library to London in 1933. With Hume’s words Wind said, that his book “fell dead-born
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Even when in 1934 and 1936 a couple of reviews of the first volumes of the
Collected Papers appeared by Heinrich Scholz, the situation did not change. It
would be more precise to say that it was not a good time for such a philosophical
change. Nevertheless, in 1937 a short article on Peirce and Pragmatism appeared in
the Journal of the German nobility (Deutsches Adelsblatt). The author, Jürgen von
Kempski, relied heavily on Scholz’s review and agreed with Scholz in saying that
there was a vast potentiality in Peirce’s writings.6 After the World War II, during
which he served in the foreign ministry, Kempski kept writing a dissertation under
Adorno’s supervision.7 This dissertation (finished 1951) became the first monograph
on Peirce and an inspiration for the future reception of Peirce. Kempski pointed out
the relevance of the relation between Peirce and Kant, the consensus theory of truth,
the logic of research, and abduction. In retrospect, he was not right on everything and
his work on Peirce remained only as a first step; but it was a very important one. The
publication of Kempski’s monograph marks the beginning of a continuous German
reception of Peirce.8
The first volume of translation of Peirce into German was issued in 1965 (Charles
S. Peirce über zeichen) edited by Elisabeth Walther and translated by some of her
students. Walther took her motivation from Max Bense, who tried to follow Peirce’s
semiotics in an independent way. He became one of the most famous German
semioticians and was the founder of a school of experimental poetry.
3. In the first three decades after World War II the recognition of Peirce grew
exponentially and the interpretations improved significantly.9 The German philosophical
reception of Peirce afterwards can be distinguished in roughly four, sometimes
interrelated, approaches: a sociological approach understood in the broadest sense
from the press.” It got two reviews world-wide, none of which was German (one skeptical French and
one sympathetic English review written by Ernest Nagel).
6. It is important to note that semiotics played almost no role in this early reception of Peirce. Although
he was recognized as a great logician, the fundamental change brought by his whole approach was not
recognized.
7. In his memoirs Klaus Oehler recounted, that Adorno confessed giving the doctorate to von Kempski,
because he believed him to be a very bright man, at the same time stressing to have understood “not one
sentence” of the dissertation. See Oehler (2007, 139-140).
8. To be more precise: this was the beginning of West German reception, whereas the situation in
East Germany was quite different. Especially in the beginning the old established prejudices could
hold, intensified by the beginning of ideological warfare in the Cold War. Also Günter Jacoby, who
had changed his early progressive view on Pragmatism, did not try to defend it in any way, instead
adopted to the new ideological situation (again). Because of the pressure in the Soviet zone, there
where only very few writings where Peirce was discussed or even mentioned by name at all; and most
of it remained negative (one of the few exceptions was the cyberneticist Georg Klaus). Of course
we have to keep in mind that under these ideological conditions the importance of different reading
strategies was high: a critique could as well be seen as a source of information in the first place.
However, contact with American Philosophy was mainly second hand, often by way of presentations
given by soviet philosophers or marxists from other countries (e.g. the Polish Adam Schaff. In respect
to publishing restrictions Poland and Hungary were the most liberal countries of the “Eastern Bloc”).
As far as Pragmatism was concerned it went for almost all “eastern” writers as an “imperalistic” or
“proto-fascist” philosophy.
9. This had influence also on the reception of pragmatism as a whole, with other main figures pushed
in the background for some time. By the end of the seventies a lot of projects on pragmatism and
semiotics were institionalised in one way or the other and a broader reception began.
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of the word, which includes communication, society, law, politics; a mathematical
approach that implies logics, cybernetics, and the concept of a unified science; a
metaphysical approach oriented towards the history of philosophy and ontology; and
a culturological approach, which includes linguistics and media theory.
The sociological perspective was the first one to be developed and by far the most
influential one. It is this approach that established Peirce as a canonical philosopher.
Following von Kempski’s hints, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, both former
students of E. Rothacker with connections to the Frankfurt School of Critical
Theory, developed a theory of public communication and ethics of discourse for
the conditions of democracy. In their theory of communicative action they stressed
Peirce’s turn from a priori forms of knowledge and legitimation to an a priori of the
community of participants to public communication. They also underlined Peirce’s
idea of consensus achieved “in the long run.” Apel, who edited and introduced an
important translation of Peirce’s work (Apel (ed.) 1967-1970) called this approach
“transcendental pragmatics.” Given the philosophical situation after World War II
and the history of the Federal Republic of Germany with its delayed debates about
historical responsibility, democratic legitimation, the student protest 1968, etc., it is
by no means a coincidence that the socio-political perspective was crucial for the
(West-)German reception of Peirce.
This became instructive also for the culturological approach, which at first met
Peirce via semiotics as presented by Morris, Eco, and French semiology. An important
example is the work of John Michael Krois, who translated Apel’s work on Peirce
into English and was a leading specialist on Ernst Cassirer. Krois wanted to integrate
Peirce with Cassirer and pointed out the shortcomings of the theory of communication,
and emphasized the iconic basis of communication. He proposed a philosophical
iconology that studied mythological, aesthetical, and affective levels in relation
with visual studies, or what in Germany has been called “Bildwissenschaft” (image
science). In these studies culture and media theory clearly overlap with political and
sociological problems. Besides, the rising of telematic media went together with the
interest for Peirce’s diagrammatic thought.
As for the philosophy of mathematics, the reception analyzes not only on the
historical aspects of Peirce’s work, but also the diagrammatic potentialities of his
relational logic and semiotics. In this sense Max Bense tried to apply Peircean
semiotics to aesthetics (1971), thereby focusing strictly on the semiotic side of Peirce.
Several projects at the ZIF (Center for interdisciplinary research) in Bielefeld analyzed
the potentiality of Peirce’s thought for mathematical pedagogy (see Hoffmann 2003).
The most important approach for a better comprehension of Peirce’s philosophy
and the relation of semiotics and pragmati(ci)sm was the metaphysical one, mainly
concerned with the ontology of semiotics. Going deep into the history of philosophy,
Klaus Oehler, one of the pivotal figures of German semiotics, and Helmut Pape
(Oehler’s former student), showed the inversion of the usual relationship between
sign and being in Peirce’s semiotics. Pape stressed the importance of Peirce’s
phenomenology and edited several translations of Peirce’s work, which allowed a
broader audience to have access to Peirce.
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Today the situation is very diversified. There are hermeneutical, philological,
theological, and juridical studies dealing with Peirce. It should be noted, that while
there is a huge number of dissertations on Peirce, there are only a few monographic
books on him. In the last years there was a great, renewed interest for Peirce’s
epistemology, a field which was long dominated by works of analytic philosophy and
critical rationalism.
Nowadays Peirce is seen as a classic philosopher. In respect to Pragmatism and
Semiotics Peirce’s contributions are recognized as crucial for their understanding
(and development).10 However, it does not mean that these perspectives constitute
the mainstream of German Philosophy in any way. In 2008, a volume on the different
approaches to pragmatism and its future potentialities was issued. The title of the
volume opens a significant and still provocative question: Pragmatismus – Philosophie
der Zukunft?
References
Apel K.-O., (1081) Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism, transl. by
John Michael Krois, Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press.
― (1974), “Von Kant zu Peirce,” in Transformation der Philosophie I, Frankfurt/M.,
Suhrkamp.
Bense M., (1967), Semiotik. Allgemeine Theorie der Zeichen, Baden-Baden, Agis.
― (1971), Zeichen und Design. Semiotische Ästhetik, Baden-Baden, Agis.
― (1975), Semiotische Prozesse und Systeme in Wissenschaftstheorie und Design,
Ästhetik und Mathematik. Semiotik vom höheren Standpunkt, Baden-Baden, Agis.
Joas H., (1993), Pragmatism and Social Theory, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
― (1996), The Creativity of Action, transl. by J. Gaines and P. Keast, Chicago,
University of Chicago Press.
Kempski J. Von, (1952), Charles Sanders Peirce und der Pragmatismus, Stuttgart
und Köln, Kohlhammer.
10. Given the international orientation of researchers dealing with Peirce, there is probably no need
for a German Peirce Society. The Deusche Gesellschaft für Semiotik (founded in 1979), a part of
the International Society of Semiotics, incorporates some of the more application oriented studies
of Peircean concepts, sometimes lacking philosophical involvement. It nevertheless carries on an
interesting journal (Zeitschrift für Semiotik).
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Krois J. M., (2011), Bildkörper und Körperschema. Aufsätze zur Verkörperungstheorie
ikonischer Formen, Berlin, Akademie.
Oehler K., (1993), Charles Sanders Peirce, München, Beck.
― (1995), Sachen und Zeichen. Zur Philosophie des Pragmatismus (a collection of
articles from 1968-1994), Frankfurt/M., Klostermann.
― (2007), Blicke aus dem Philosophenturm. Eine Rückschau, Hildesheim et al.,
Olms.
Pape H., (1989), Erfahrung und Wirklichkeit als Zeichenprozess. Charles S. Peirces
Entwurf einer Spekulativen Grammatik des Seins, Frankfurt/M., Suhrkamp.
― (2002), Der dramatische Reichtum der konkreten Welt. Der Ursprung des
Pragmatismus im Denken von Charles S. Peirce und William James, Weilerswist,
Velbrück.
― (2004), Charles Sanders Peirce zur Einführung, Hamburg, Junius.
― (ed.), (1994), Kreativität und Logik. Charles S. Peirce und das philosophische
Problem des Neuen, Frankfurt/M., Suhrkamp.
Scholz H., (1936), “Anzeige der Collected Papers von Ch. S. Peirce,” Deutsche
Literaturzeitung, Heft 9, 4. März 1934 und Heft 4, 26. Januar.
Schönrich G., (1990), Zeichenhandeln. Untersuchungen zum Begriff einer semiotischen
Vernunft im Ausgang von Ch. S. Peirce, Frankfurt/M., Suhrkamp.
Walther E., (1989), Charles Sanders Peirce. Leben und Werk, Baden-Baden, Agis.
Wirth U. (ed.), (2000), Die Welt als Zeichen und Hypothese. Perspektiven des
semiotischen Pragmatismus von Charles S. Peirce, Frankfurt/M., Suhrkamp.
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COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Lucia Santaella*
Peirce’s Reception in Brazil
1. The first seeds
A number of scholars of international reputation visited Brazil at the end of the
1960s to give lectures and seminars. Among them were: Nicolas Ruwet, Abraham
Moles, Max Bense, Roman Jakobson, Umberto Eco, and Tzvetan Todorov. More than
any others, Jakobson’s lectures had deep and widespread effect on university circles
and on the intellectual and artistic milieu. A while after his visit, a volume containing a
series of Jakobson’s articles was translated and published in São Paulo. There was no
Brazilian scholar in the field of humanities who did not have the book always at hand
for discussion with colleagues. The visits of these scholars were a landmark; they
opened the doors for the emergence of a spirit of renewal which, in the 1970’s, arose
not only in the individual scholarly mind, but also in the academic institutions, in the
universities, in the publishing houses, and even in the cultural newspapers.
With regard to the reception of Peirce’s thought in Brazil, it is worth considering
that the collection of Jakobson’s translated texts contained “Quest for the Essence of
Language,” a text which had great influence on Peirce studies in the country. In fact,
Jakobson, and before him Bense, both reported the work of Peirce in their lectures
in Brazil and they left behind the great interest that Peirce’s semiotics awoke in the
mind of the concrete poets Haroldo de Campos and Decio Pignatari, who were also
theorists, critics and very active in the Brazilian intellectual life.
In the 1960s Pignatari was professor at the Escola Superior of Industrial Design
in Rio de Janeiro. The students were mainly architects, and it was in the field of
architecture that Pignatari took the first steps toward a Peircean semiotic theory of
communication. A few years later, he was invited to teach at the School of Architecture,
at Rio Grande do Sul Federal University. After his visit, a new area of study was set up
at this School, which was to comprise theory of information and the theory of signs.
2. The Postgraduate Program in Comunication and Semiotics
Those were the first seeds which were to flourish a few years later, at the beginning
of the 1970s, when Haroldo de Campos and Decio Pignatari became professors in
the postgraduate program in Literary Theory at São Paulo Catholic University. In
1978, this program was expanded into Communication and Semiotics. Campos’s
and Pignatari’s interest in Peirce’s work began to spread among the students of that
program. Already in 1972, seminars on the work of Peirce were developed and his
theory of signs was applied to arts, music, architecture, literature, and also to mass
* PUC-SP (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo), Brazil [[email protected]]
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communication phenomena. That same year, Cultrix, an important publishing house
in São Paulo, brought to light the first small collection of translations of Peirce’s
texts, under the organization of two Brazilian logicians, Octanny Silveira da Mota
and Leonidas Hegenberg. Hence some of Peirce’s writings reached Brazilian readers
with surprising and promising promptness. And the publications did not stop there.
In 1975, a popular series dedicated to philosophy, named The Thinkers, brought to
newspaper stalls in the streets of Brazilian cities, among other philosophers, a volume
of texts by Peirce and Frege which went subsequently through numerous re-editions.
In 1977, Perspectiva publishing house brought out a more substantial volume of
Peirce’s writing. Thus, even in the 1970s there were three books of translations of
Peirce’s selected writings circulating in Brazil – one possible reason for which Peirce’s
thought has become widespread in the country from that decade on.
But the main reason is to be found in the fact that already in 1972 a group of master
and PhD students gathered around Decio Pignatari at São Paulo Catholic University,
all of them oriented toward Peirce’s semiotics. Numerous master theses and PhD
dissertations applying Peirce to a variety of subjects, from literature and the arts to
cultural and communication phenomena, were defended. I was among those students
and, in 1976, I became professor at that same program where I had obtained my PhD
in 1973. I started to transmit to my students the same enthusiasm concerning Peirce
that had been transmitted to me years before by Campos and Pignatari.
Since 1976, I have never stopped giving courses on Peirce’s philosophical
semiotics once a semester every year at the graduate program in Communication and
Semiotics/Catholic University of São Paulo. Counting 20 students per semester in the
last 38 years, 760 master and doctoral students have passed through my classes. Not
all of them have continued studies in Peirce’s semiotics, finding their way into other
authors and theories. But since 1978, 220 students received their master and PhD
titles under my advisory. Many of these students, perhaps half of them, used Peirce’s
concepts extensively. Some of them went quite deep into their study, for example,
Julio Plaza, Elisabeth Saporiti, Conrado Paschoale, Cecilia Salles, Vera Grellet,
João Queirós, Priscila Borges, Roberto Chiachiri, Luciana Pagliarini, Isabel Jungk,
Tarcisio Cardoso, Gustavo Rick Amaral, and others. These PhDs are now professors
at various universities throughout Brazil and some continue disseminating Peirce’s
texts and concepts. It is my impression that there is no researcher in the field of the
arts and communications in Brazil that has no knowledge, even precarious, of Peirce’s
semiotics.
Along more than three decades, from 1980 on, I have published in Brazil nine
books each of them explicitly dealing with a different aspect of Peirce’s thought:
his semiotics in contrast with structuralist and formalist semiotics; an introduction
to phenomenology and the theory of signs; his philosophical edifice in the context
of the classification of the sciences; Peirce’s aesthetics, the normative sciences, and
pragmaticism; a detailed account of his doctrine of signs and his classification of
signs; his theory of perception; Peirce’s methodeutics in the context of the three types
of reasoning; a system of classification of sound, visual and verbal semiosis based on
Peirce’s triads; semiotics applied to different cultural and communication phenomena.
Besides these books which are entirely dedicated to Peirce’s thought, I also published
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half a dozen of other books, some of them co-authored with Winfried Nöth, where the
presence of Peirce’s semiotics is still relevant.
3. The International Center for Peirce Studies
In 1996, I founded the International Center for Peirce Studies at the Catholic
University of São Paulo (http://estudospeirceanos.wordpress.com/). Besides promoting
open public conferences throughout the school year, the Center is composed of
Thematic Groups of Study, whose members meet regularly to collaborate in their
investigation. The Center has three lines of research: Theoretical Semiotics, Semiotics
and Interdisciplinary Studies, Specific Semiotics. These lines are distributed into
seven different Groups of study. Each group holds events throughout the year, such as
lectures, seminars and discussion forums open to the public in general.
Participation in these groups is open to both students of the Catholic University of
São Paulo and other people interested in Peirce’s thought.
According to the profile that defines the Center, it aims to support a wide range of
studies for those who:
a) seek inspiration in Peirce only to achieve an introductory knowledge about his
thought;
b) want to penetrate the intricacies of the general theory of signs with a view to their
application to a variety of communication processes;
c) seek to solidify their methods of research supporting them on a broad concept of
logic as a synonym to semiotics;
d) want to reflect on the ontological and epistemological foundations of the universe
of signs and communication;
e) desire to exploit the semiotic interfaces with other areas of knowledge, particularly
philosophy in general and philosophy of language in particular, as well as cognitive
and psychoanalytic studies, both inextricably woven in the fabric of signs;
f) wish to become experts in Peirce’s semiotics.
In sum: Peirce’s work seems to be sufficiently broad, multifaceted, dialogical, and
internally consistent to meet all these interests.
At present the Center is under the executive direction of Priscila Borges and
Roberto Chiachiri. Since its opening, every year, a Colloquium is held with the
participation of researchers, students, and former students. Every two years, the
Colloquium is accompanied by the Advanced Seminar on Peirce’s Philosophy and
Semiotics. These seminars have relied on the participation of international experts
in Peirce, among which Vincent Colapietro and Fernando Andacht have repeatedly
been present. Deliberately these events have been small, because every second year
a theme is chosen to be studied in depth. These seminars have a publication that is
delivered to the participants before the beginning of the seminar so that they can have
time to read and study the subject in order to allow a richer discussion.
In 2006, I also founded a new post-graduate program at São Paulo Catholic
University, under the name of Technologies of Intelligence and Digital Design. One of
the lines of research is turned to a Peircean oriented cognitive and computer semiotics
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under the advisory of Winfried Nöth, who became a professor in this program from
2010 on. Seminars on Peirce are being developed there and his thought is being
disseminated among students who come from the hard sciences.
4. The Center for Studies in Pragmatism
For some years, Lauro Frederico Barbosa da Silveira was professor in the
department of philosophy at the Catholic University of São Paulo. As a specialist
in Peirce’s philosophy, he spread his knowledge among his master’s and doctoral
advisees. In the 1980s, Silveira moved to the University of the State of São Paulo, in
Marilia, where he continued to spread Peirce’s thought, also creating a sort of Peirce
school of thought in Marilia. In 2007, Silveira published an important book on Peirce’s
semiotics. Ivo Ibri was one of his students, having defended his thesis on Peirce’s
metaphysics and cosmology in 1986. In 1994, he defended his PhD at the University
of São Paulo, also about Peirce’s philosophy.
Since 1997, Ivo Ibri, already professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of
São Paulo, was also incorporated into the postgraduate program in Communication
and Semiotics, in which he teaches courses related to Peirce every semester. In
1998, Ibri founded the Center for Studies in Pragmatism-CEP (http://www.pucsp.br/
pragmatismo/) which is linked to the Program of postgraduate Studies in Philosophy at
São Paulo Catholic University. This Center was born to join researchers and students
interested in classical and contemporary pragmatism. Due to the background of its
founder, the Center is more emphatically dedicated to studies around Peirce’s work,
and since its inception it has formed a significant number of experts in Peirce’s thought.
The Center has encouraged mainly three lines of research, namely, pragmatism and
logic, pragmatism and ethics, and aesthetics and pragmatism. Studies around these
lines have been the topics for theses and dissertations at the postgraduate program in
philosophy that houses the CEP.
Also in 1998, the Center promoted the 1st Meeting on Pragmatism counting only
on Brazilian professors. From this date on, these meetings became annual, and in
2000 they turned into the International Meeting on Pragmatism (EIP), when the event
was expanded to count on the presence of foreign researchers in the area. With these
meetings on Pragmatism, Ivo Ibri certainly put the Catholic University of São Paulo
in the world map of Peirce studies.
It was also in 2000 that the first issue of Cognitio–Journal of Philosophy appeared
under the editorial direction of Ivo Ibri. This journal intends to publish papers in
the area and has published along the years the contributions coming from the
lectures of the International Meetings. Cognitio highlights the Center with its two
annual volumes, and has obtained excellent national and international repercussion.
Beyond this, CEP also edits the online magazine on Cognitio-studies which aims to
publish articles of young researchers, graduate and postgraduate students. CEP plans
to maintain and let all these activities grow, along with an intensive exchange with
other international research centers, taking its own approach of pragmatism, deeply
committed to a dialogue with the tradition of the history of philosophy.
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Although it is not certainly exhaustive, the panorama above descripted is sufficient
to show that the flourishing of Peirce studies in Brazil has produced many ramifications
and promises to be even more fruitful in the future.
References
Ibri I., (1992), Kosmos. Noetos. A arquitetura metafísica de Charles S. Peirce, São
Paulo, Perspectiva.
Peirce C. S., (1972), Semiótica e Filosofia, trad. Octanny S. Da Mota Leonidas
Hegenberg, São Paulo, Cultrix.
― (1974), Os Pensadores, Vol. XXXVI, trad. Armando Mora D´Oliveira, Col. Abril
Cultural.
― (1977), Semiótica, trad. Teixeira Coelho, São Paulo, Perspectiva.
Queiroz J., (2004), Semiose segundo C. S. Peirce, São Paulo, Educ/Fapesp.
Santaella L., (1980), Produção de Linguagem e Ideologia, São Paulo Cortez, (2nd ed.
1996).
― (1983), O que é Semiótica, São Paulo, Brasiliense (33th ed. 2009).
― (1992), A Assinatura das Coisas. Peirce e a Literatura, Coleção Pierre Menard,
Rio de Janeiro, Imago.
― (1993), Percepção. Uma Teoria Semiótica, São Paulo, Experimento (2nd ed. 1998).
― (1994), Estética. De Platão a Peirce, São Paulo, Experimento (3rd ed. 2002).
― (1995), Teoria Geral dos Signos. Como as linguagens significam as coisas, São
Paulo, Thomson (5th ed. 2004).
― (2001), Matrizes da linguagem e pensamento: sonora, visual, verbal, São Paulo,
Fapesp/Iluminuras (2nd ed. 2005).
― (2003), Semiótica Aplicada. Publicidade, vídeo, arte, literatura, instituições, São
Paulo, Thomson (5th ed. 2013).
― (2004), O método anti-cartesiano de C. S. Peirce, São Paulo, Unesp/Fapesp.
Santaella L. – Nöth W., (2004), Comunicação e semiótica, São Paulo, Hacker.
Silveira L. – Barbosa F., (2007), Curso de semiótica geral, São Paulo, Quartier Latin.
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EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PRAGMATISM AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Sara Barrena* and Jaime Nubiola**
The Reception of Peirce in Spain and the Spanish Speaking Countries1
A surprising fact about the Hispanic philosophical historiography2 of the 20th century is
its almost complete ignorance of the American philosophical tradition. This disconnect
is even more surprising when one takes into account the striking affinities between
the topics and problems treated by the most relevant Hispanic thinkers (Unamuno,
Ortega, Vaz Ferreira, Ferrater Mora, Xirau) and the central questions raised in the
most important native current of American thought in the late 19th and 20th centuries,
pragmatism.
In recent years there has been a resurgence of pragmatist philosophy in
contemporary culture, which is producing a deep renovation and transformation. One
of the important features of this process is precisely the recuperation and improved
understanding of the thought of Charles S. Peirce, who offers suggestions for dealing
with some of the most persistent problems in contemporary philosophy, and who in
addition can help us to reassume our responsibilities as philosophers, responsibilities
that a good part of the philosophy of the 20th century had renounced. We can confidently
say, as will be clear from what follows, that Spain and the Latin American countries
are playing an important role in this increased understanding and diffusion of Peircean
thought throughout the world.
1. The historic lack of knowledge about Peirce in the Spanish-speaking countries
During the first half of the 20th century the figure and thought of Charles S. Peirce
were practically unknown in the Spanish-speaking countries. This ignorance of Peirce
and of pragmatism in general in the world of Hispanic philosophy can be attributed
to several causes. First, Peirce’s works are not easily accessible, even in English. The
difficulty of gaining direct access to his works has been one of the causes of Peirce’s
remaining unstudied until recently. This difficulty has been even greater in Europe,
since it has only been for a quarter century or so that anthologies with reasonable
coverage have been available in Italian, French and German (Castañares 1992, 215).
Another likely cause of this disconnection of Hispanic philosophy from the American
tradition is a mutual lack of understanding at the cultural level: the sociological
factors that have separated these two cultures over the course of the 20th century have
impeded the ability to recognize their deeper affinity.
* Universidad de Navarra, Spain [[email protected]]
** Universidad de Navarra, Spain [[email protected]]
1. We are grateful to Giovanni Maddalena for his invitation to take part in this special issue and to Erik
Norvelle for his translation into English.
2. We use the term “Hispanic philosophy” to refer to that produced in Spain and Latin America. The
term was originally coined in 1961 by the Catalan philosopher in exile Eduardo Nicol
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Pragmatism is a response, on the basis of both scientific and lived experience,
to the problem typical of modern Cartesianism concerning the rift between rational
thought and creative vitality. The Spanish philosophers Unamuno, Ortega, and d’Ors,
in a manner entirely analogous to that of the Italians Papini, Vailati, and Calderoni,
were responding to this shared problem in a strikingly similar way to that of the
Americans. Nevertheless, the recognition of this “community” has come quite late,
perhaps due to the permanent pretension to originality that is typical of the Hispanic
tradition, and due to the provincialism that is characteristic of the American tradition.
As Vericat has noted, the reception of Peirce in the Hispanic world was a bit
phantasmagorical, in the sense that his importance was openly recognized, but hardly
anyone knew the contents of his philosophical works (Vericat 1988, 15). This began
to change towards the end of the 1970s, when there was a sudden flurry of interest
in the American scientist and philosopher, as witnessed to by the first translations
performed in Argentina. This interest has grown strongly over the last four decades,
as is indicated by both the numerous translations that have appeared during this
time, thus making a relevant part of Peirce’s vast writings available, as well as by
the growing number of books and research projects that have appeared concerning
pragmatism and its principal thinkers.
2. The rise of Peircean thought
“Most people have never heard of him, but they will,” wrote the American novelist
Walker Percy (Percy 1996, 1143) in reference to Charles S. Peirce, and it seems as
though that prophecy is beginning to come true. Indeed, in recent years the figure of
Peirce has acquired an increasing relevance in numerous areas of knowledge (Fisch
1980; 1981), and his influence continues to grow: in astronomy, metrology, geodesy,
mathematics, logic, philosophy, theory and history of science, semiotics, linguistics,
econometrics, and psychology. Scholars throughout the Spanish-speaking world are
coming to recognize Peirce importance.
In order to understand the new interest in Peirce in Spanish, we can point first of
all to the influence of Umberto Eco, Jürgen Habermas, and Karl-Otto Apel, as well
as to the slow closing of distances of Hispanic philosophy to the world of American
academic philosophy in recent years. The recent resurgence of pragmatism, together
with these two other factors, has been decisive for showing the Hispanic world that
Peirce was, or rather is, important for a correct understanding of our contemporary
culture. Even more, from a historical point of view, the study of the roots of Peirce’s
semiotics in the Hispanic Scholastic tradition – as exemplified by Beuchot (Beuchot
1991) and Deely (Deely 1995) – and the strange affinity between pragmatist
philosophy and Hispanic thought, have together helped to break down the traditional
isolation that has long affected and impoverished the Hispanic philosophical tradition.
In order to better understand how this new interest in Peirce studies has arisen in
the Spanish-speaking world, we will next focus on two key phenomena:
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2.1. Translations
The first translation of Peirce into Spanish was of a brief article, “Irregularidades
en las oscilaciones del péndulo,” published by the journal of Barcelona Crónica
Científica on October 25, 1883. It was a translation of Peirce’s observations from the
previous year published in The American Journal of Science. The second reference
in the Spanish bibliography is an article on Peirce published in 1892 in El Progreso
Matemático of Zaragoza by the mathematician Ventura Reyes Prósper, who had
corresponded with him. It is highly significant that the first notice that the Hispanic
world took of Peirce regarded his work as a scientist. In the realm of philosophy the
first references to Peirce were those by Marcelino Arnáiz, in his “Pragmatism and
Humanism” of 1907, those of Eugenio d’Ors – who had come to know the American
pragmatism of James and Peirce during his stay in Paris in 1906-07 – in his newspaper
column, and the 60-pages volume El pragmatismo, by José María Izquierdo y Martínez,
published by the Ateneo of Seville in March of 1910.
In Latin America, the first encounter with pragmatism was also through James –
for example, in the works of the philosopher Coriolano Alberini (Argentina), Carlos
Vaz Ferreira (Uruguay) and particularly Pedro S. Zulen (Perú), who stayed at Harvard
and prepared there a doctoral dissertation that was published with the title Del
Neohegelianismo al Neorrealismo (Lima, 1924). The book is a study about the origins
of American philosophy from the School of St. Louis, through the neo-Hegelianism
of Josiah Royce, and including Peirce, pragmatism and neo-realism. The section on
Peirce (26-33) is well informed and is a personal reflection about Peirce’s philosophy
relating it to James’ conceptions.
The first compilations of Peirce’s writings were published in Argentina thanks
to the work of the publishing house Editorial Aguilar (Buenos Aires). This project
produced two translations: Deducción, inducción e hipótesis, in 1970, and Mi
alegato en favor del pragmatismo, in 1971. Each of these books brought together
two articles published by Peirce in Popular Science Monthly between 1877 and 1878
(vol. XII-XIII), and which are particularly important for understanding the thought
of Peirce in his earliest epoch. In these articles one can see how he elaborates his
theory of abductive inference – which he still terms “hypothesis” – as well as certain
basic aspects of what he understood pragmatism to be. Both works are preceded by
introductions by Juan Martín Ruiz-Werner, which, despite being improvable in certain
respects, had the merit of making it possible for Spanish-speaking readers to get to
know an author that previously was totally unknown to them (Castañares 1992, 216).
In 1978 the same publisher brought out Lecciones sobre el pragmatismo. This is
a more extensive work that brings together Peirce’s lectures at the Lowell Institute
between March and May of 1903. In these lectures Peirce presented the basic ideas
for an outline of pragmatism that would be substantially different from that of William
James and others. The preparation of this edition was carried out by Dalmacio Negro
Pavón. As Castañares wrote: “Seen as a whole, the works published by Aguilar in
Argentina were intended to allow the reader to get to know the pragmatism of Peirce
with a certain rigor, and full-length works were chosen for this purpose.” (Castañares
1992, 216.)
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In 1988 in Spain there appeared a translation by Pilar Castrillo, entitled Escritos
lógicos (Madrid, Alianza), which brought together eleven articles by Peirce that were
representative of his contributions to logic, and the edition by José Vericat entitled
El hombre, un signo (El pragmatismo de Peirce) (Barcelona, Crítica), also appeared,
boasting an ample introduction and abundant notes and bibliographical information.
In this section about translations we would like to highlight the work undertaken
by the Grupo de Estudios Peirceanos of the Universidad de Navarra. Begun in 1994
with the purpose of promoting the study of Peirce’s works, especially in Spain and
other Spanish-speaking countries, this Group has translated a vast amount of material,
now available on its website: more than 100 translated texts by Peirce himself, a great
deal of his correspondence translated and annotated,3 and the publication of several
printed volumes containing texts by Peirce in Spanish. Among these volumes we
would like to underline several of particular importance: Un argumento olvidado en
favor de la realidad de Dios (Pamplona, Cuadernos de Anuario Filosófico, 1996); La
lógica considerada como semiótica. El índice del pensamiento peirceano (Madrid,
Biblioteca Nueva, 2007); El pragmatismo (Madrid, Encuentro, 2008); El amor
evolutivo y otros ensayos sobre ciencia y religión (Barcelona, Marbot, 2010).
Another important translation has been that of the compilation of Peirce’s texts
edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel: The Essential Peirce. Selected
Philosophical Writings (Indiana University Press, 1992-98). The two volumes of
this compilation were published in Spanish in Mexico with the title Obra filosófica
reunida (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012). The translation into Spanish of such an
important and highly cited selection of Peircean texts has been a major step forward in
the study and diffusion of the thought of Peirce in Spain and in the Spanish-speaking
world.
2.2. The influence of the Internet
The rise of the Internet was a fundamental landmark in the reception of Peirce in
Spain and Latin America, since it constitutes a powerful tool for studying this author
in Spanish. The enormous physical distance that separates Spain from the rest of
the Spanish-speaking countries can now be overcome thanks to the new computer
technologies. The website of the Grupo de Estudios Peirceanos (http://www.unav.
es/gep/) has been a tremendously important tool for this purpose, not only because
it provides translations of Peirce’s texts, but also because it has helped to create a
research community which, following the scientific method propounded by Peirce
himself, permits undertaking studies of his thought and advancing towards the truth,
which can only be achieved by the work of the entire community.
The website of the Grupo de Estudios Peirceanos, which receives hundreds of
thousands of visits annually, enables to put the bibliography and other instruments
necessary for undertaking research about Peirce into the hands of all interested
3. Currently, the Grupo de Estudios Peirceanos is developing an in-depth study of Peirce’s
correspondence during his five journeys to Europe. This project is financed by the PIUNA of the
Universidad de Navarra (2007-2009, 2012-2014) and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Research
(FFI2011-24340).
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researchers. It is also an invitation to think and to participate, and in this way the Group
has been able to give visibility to scholars interested in pragmatism, contributing to
the creation of important groups of researchers in numerous countries, including
Argentina, Chile, Colombia, México and Panamá. There are also scholars undertaking
research in Peirce in other countries, although in a more dispersed way: Cuba, Perú,
Puerto Rico and Venezuela. Within this network of Hispanic Peirce scholars we can
highlight the important work of Fernando Zalamea and his Centro de Sistemática
Peirceana at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (http://acervopeirceano.org/) and
of Mauricio Beuchot and Edgar Sandoval in México.
Among the new tools that have proven useful for the spread of Peirce studies
in Spanish we would also like draw attention to the newsletter that the Grupo de
Estudios Peirceanos publishes, which is sent free every two weeks to more than 300
subscribers, bringing some of the most relevant news concerning Peirce studies and
pragmatism to people around the world.
3. Peirce and the Hispanic World: Peirce Studies Today
The connections between Peirce and Spain – which until recently seemed very
meager – have been studied in depth, and the data collected suggest that, although
Peirce and Spain belong to different worlds, there are many more connections than
those that one might initially have expected. In this regard the book published in
2006 by Jaime Nubiola and Fernando Zalamea, Peirce y el mundo hispánico. Lo que
C. S. Peirce dijo sobre España y lo que el mundo hispánico ha dicho sobre Peirce
(Pamplona, Eunsa) is especially relevant (See also Nubiola 2012). This book not
only brings together all the available data about what Peirce wrote about Spain, but
also provides a valuable critical review of almost everything that the Hispanic world
wrote about Peirce between 1883 and 2000. This global view on the relations between
Peirce and the Hispanic countries contributes, as the authors suggest, to creating a
community that has a strong capacity for critical contrast and which can therefore
grow in a healthy way.
It is also important to emphasize the important role – on many occasions carried
out with great dedication and with insufficient means – that scholars from certain Latin
American countries have played in the reception of Peirce. Argentina, in particular,
occupies a privileged place in the reception of Peirce’s thought in the Hispanic world.
The primary cause of this preeminence is because, as we have already mentioned,
it was in Argentina in the 1970s that the first translations of Peirce in Spanish were
published. Nevertheless, the relevance is not merely historical: even today there is a
great interest in pragmatist thought in Argentina. As an indication of this interest we
can mention the creation of a Grupo de Estudios Peirceanos in Argentina, as well
as the biannual scholarly conference on Peirce that has been held in the Academy of
Sciences of Buenos Aires for a decade with great success (http://www.unav.es/gep/
JornadasPeirceArgentina.html).
As Wenceslao Castañares has written, Peirce’s writings are full of traps for
those who approach them without any preparation or due caution. Even those who
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repeatedly return to his works end up suffering an unpleasant sensation: the doubt that
their interpretation is not correct or coherent. This is why it is so necessary to maintain
a continual practice of reading as well as dialogue with others in order to overcome
the constant difficulties that arise (Castañares 1992, 224). The Hispanic community
that has formed around Peirce is essential for this purpose. With more than 100
dissertations and monographs published in recent years on Peirce and pragmatism,
Hispanic scholars have much to say within the context of the international community
of Peirce researchers. Increasing and bettering the diffusion of Peircean scholarship
in Spanish makes it possible for Hispanic researchers, standing on the results of their
predecessors, to advance like true “dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.” In the
purest Peircean spirit the Hispanic community must continue to build on our shared
fund of knowledge, thereby alleviating to the degree possible the heavy burdens that
each of us takes on as we walk this path together (Nubiola – Zalamea 2006, 11).
Reference
Arnáiz M., (1906), “Pragmatismo y Humanismo,” Cultura Española, 6 (1907), 616-27,
(http://www.unav.es/gep/ArticulosOnLineEspanolAnteriores.html).
Beuchot M., (1991), “La filosofía escolástica en los orígenes de la semiótica de
Peirce,” Analogía 5 (2), 155-66.
Castañares W., (1992), “Peirce en España; panorama bibliográfico,” Signa 1, 215-24,
(http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/n-1-ao-1992/html/).
Deely J., (1995), “Common Sources for the Semiotic of Charles Peirce and
John Poinsot,” Review of Metaphysics 48 (3), 539-66, (http://www.jstor.org/
stable/20129719).
Fisch M., (1980-81), “The Range of Peirce’s Relevance,” The Monist 63 (1980), 269-76;
64 (1981), 123-41.
Muñoz Delgado V., (1980), “Notas para la historia de la lógica durante la Segunda
República Española (1931-39),” Religión y Cultura 26, 909-11.
Nicol E., (1961), El problema de la filosofía hispánica, Madrid, Tecnos.
Nubiola J. – Zalamea F., (2006), Peirce y el mundo hispánico. Lo que C. S. Peirce dijo
sobre España y lo que el mundo hispánico ha dicho sobre Peirce, Pamplona, Eunsa.
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Nubiola J., (2012), “New Developments Regarding Peirce’s Reception in the Hispanic
World,” Inter-American Journal of Philosophy 3 (1), 86-94, (http://ijp.tamu.edu/
journal/sites/default/files/papers/Nubiola.pdf).
Percy W., (1996), “La criatura dividida,” Anuario Filosófico 29 (3), 1135-57 (http://
hdl.handle.net/10171/529).
Vericat J., (1988), “Introducción,” in C. S. Peirce, El hombre, un signo: (El pragmatismo
de Peirce), Barcelona, Crítica Editorial.
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COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Ivan Mladenov*
The First Steps of Peirce in Bulgaria. From Ivan Sarailiev to Today
Ivan V. Sarailiev (1887–1969) was a pioneer convert to pragmatism, incorporating
the pragmatic viewpoint in his writings as early as 1909. Born in an educated and
intellectual family, his father was a lawyer, who graduated from St. Petersburg. Ivan
Sarailiev studied in Paris under Bergson and graduated summa cum laude from the
Sorbonne in 1909. Although he was fluent in French, English, and German, he wrote
almost exclusively in Bulgarian. As a result, his achievements remained largely
unknown. To make things worse, his work was heavily suppressed by the communists
after they gained power in 1944. However, he might be the first disseminator of
pragmatist ideas in South-Eastern Europe and, certainly, the first one in the Balkan.
After his graduation from the Sorbonne, Sarailiev spent a year in England where
he had frequent discussions with F. C. S. Schiller (some of Schiller’s letters to Sarailiev
have survived). Upon his return to Bulgaria, Sarailiev taught at a high school in
Sofia for the next eleven years. In 1920, he was appointed assistant professor at the
University of Sofia, where he became a tenured professor in 1927. Sarailiev’s On
The Will appeared in 1924 (Sofia, Court Press). That same year Sarailiev returned to
Britain where he met again with Schiller and attended H. W. Carr’s course on Bergson.
In 1934, he published a collection of papers on Bergson under the title Essays. On
Some Unclear Moments in H. Bergson’s Philosophy (Sofia).
In 1931, about six years after his return from Britain, Sarailiev traveled to New
York, where he spent a year as a Rockefeller fellow at Columbia University. At
Columbia he discussed Peirce with William Pepperel Montague and with Dewey. In
his diary, Sarailiev made a special note on the pronunciation of Peirce’s name, and
in “Charles Sanders Peirce and his Principle,” which was published in the Bulgarian
journal Outchilisten Pregled (vol. 32, June 1933, 725–36) he made sure that the
readers knew how to pronounce Peirce’s name.
In March of the following year, Sarailiev went to Harvard where he met Ralph
Barton Perry, Alfred N. Whitehead, George Allen Morgan, and James Bissett Pratt.
Later that year he visited several other American universities. Upon his return to
Europe, Sarailiev traveled first to Italy, where he met with several Italian pragmatists,
and spent two years in Germany and Switzerland.
In the 1930s, Sarailiev gained recognition among Bulgarian intellectuals because
of his debate with a well-known Bulgarian Professor, Dimiter Mikhalchev, on the
dilemma between religion and science. Sarailiev used a pragmatic approach with
semiotic influences to defend his view that life is not solely a product of physical
causality. He argued that we live in a world of “pre-thought” and that we live and act
in accordance with its rules and laws rather than with physical ones. Those rules and
* Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgary [[email protected]]
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laws do not contradict modern science but, rather, complete and prove its validity.
As Peirce, Sarailiev sought to unify scientific and religious thought and to show how
knowledge of God might be gained through hypothetical (or abductive) reasoning.
Sarailiev set out his views on science and religion in two essays that were published
as Contemporary Science and Religion: Response to a Critic (1931, Sofia, Chipeff
Publishing House). With all this we can consider Ivan Sarailiev the first accomplished
Bulgarian pragmatist.
In 1944, however, Sarailiev’s career came to a sudden halt after the communists
took power in Bulgaria. This brought an abrupt end to his extensive international
travels, and immediately isolated him from the international scholarly community. In
June of 1946, Sarailiev was elected president of the University of Sofia, but because
of his unwillingness to cooperate with the communist authorities, he was compelled
to resign within the year. Then he was asked to give up his pragmatist ideas and to
teach Marxism. Again Sarailiev refused and was saved from the labor camps only
because of his reputation as a scholar. A few years later, in 1950, Sarailiev was forced
to retire, and he spent the rest of his life in almost complete isolation. He was banned
from publishing and his previous publications were blacklisted. Even his name was
classified. Sarailiev died peacefully but in total obscurity, in Sofia in 1969. There are
few reliable documentary sources on his life and it is still difficult to obtain any of his
books, articles, or papers. Sarailiev was all but erased from history.
This story of Ivan Sarailiev’s life and work might not have been told were it not
for a pure accident by which I stumbled upon one of his books. The book, entitled
Pragmatism (in Bulgarian), was published in 1938. Pragmatism, with a photograph
of the famous Ellen Emmet Rand portrait of William James for its frontispiece, is
a remarkable book. It is an important record of Sarailiev’s involvement with the
European spread of pragmatism and of his extensive travels to France, England,
Germany, and the United States. It also provides a vivid snapshot of pragmatism at
this critical period of Europe’s history.
In the introduction, Sarailiev identified Peirce as the founder of pragmatism with
a reference to “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878). Sarailiev added, however,
that this paper remained unnoticed until 1898, when William James published his
“Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” in which he credited Peirce
with the discovery of pragmatism. The further spread and the European premiere of
pragmatism Sarailiev credits to Ferdinand Schiller, in particular his 1891 Riddles of
the Sphinx.
Sarailiev found the greatest number of pragmatists in Italy, and he discusses
Giovanni Papini, Mario Calderoni, Giovanni Vailati, and Giovanni Amendola.
Sarailiev also includes a brief discussion of Mussolini. In the London newspaper,
Sunday Times (April 1926), the Italian dictator expressed his gratitude to pragmatism
by saying that it was of great help to his political career, and that he had learned
from James that any action must be tested through its results rather than on doctrinal
grounds. Mussolini continued: “James has inspired in me a trust in action and a will
for living and fighting on which fascism has built its great success.” To balance this,
Sarailiev also quoted others who were enthusiastic about pragmatism, like the Russian
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revolutionist Vladimir Lenin. Sarailiev also made sure to include Giovanni Amendola,
who died after being tortured by the fascists.
Sarailiev continued his overview of the European expansion of pragmatism with
an outline of its influence in German speaking countries. Although weaker than in
Britain and Italy, it had some influence; Sarailiev mentioned George Wobbermin,
Wilhelm Jerusalem, Julius Goldstein, Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Ostwald, Georg Simmel,
among others who were influenced by pragmatic ideas. He then continued to show
how pragmatic ideas influenced several of the Logical Positivists in Vienna.
Sarailiev finally follows pragmatism to France, where it was met with more
appreciation and played a role in the development of a new religious philosophy
founded by Alfred Loisy and George Tyrell. In the 1930s, Sarailiev continued, with
further contributions from thinkers such as Maurice Blondel, Laberthonière, Le Roy
and others, this developed into a French movement for a renewal of philosophy and
religion known as “modernism.”
The introduction is followed by the essay “Charles Sanders Peirce and his
Principle” as well as essays on the pragmatism of James, the humanism of Schiller,
and the instrumentalism of Dewey. The book included also an essay on Italian
pragmatism, a conclusion, and a supplement with an essay on the meaning of the
words “pragmatism,” the adjective “pragmatic,” and Peirce’s term “pragmaticism.”
The book finishes with a lightly annotated and remarkably complete bibliography of
pragmatic thought in 20 pages.
Sarailiev’s account of pragmatism’s invasion of Europe is scrupulously researched
and very well written. He described pragmatism as a new theory of truth, marked its
crucial points, and concluded that after the death of its chief representatives the debate
about it had begun to fade away.
Also in his own work Sarailiev followed a model of thinking that exemplified
Peirce’s “logic of science.” In his Genetic Ideas (1919, Sofia, Court Press), his
Socrates (1947, Sofia), and in his debate on science and religion, he closely followed
the pragmatists’ doctrine for the clarification of meaning.
Under more fortunate circumstances, Sarailiev would have enjoyed an influence,
perhaps a great influence. Instead, he suffered under harsh political persecution and
was forced to be a social outcast. His thought was suppressed and was left to drift in
the darkness of the following ignorant decades. As Peirce understood so well, thought
must not be imprisoned in the monastery of a single consciousness, but it must be let
out to fight in the street with other thoughts – for the sake of truth.
“The drift in darkness” continued for decades until the fall of communism
in Bulgaria. It was not before then when the first writings on pragmatism became
possible. But maybe it is worth noting that the first penetration of pragmatist ideas
in Bulgaria occurred as early as in 1902 with the appearance of William James’
book Talks to Teachers on Psychology translated from Russian.1 This alone is an
amazing fact having in mind that talks in the US about pragmatism at that time were
just growing wings. The interest in James’ and especially Dewey’s pragmatism in
1. William J., (1902), Besedi s uchitelite varhu psichologiata, transl. from Russian, Ilia Kraev, Lovetch.
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Bulgaria continued after the First World War, so that, for example, three lectures from
James under the title What is Pragmatism were translated and published in 1930.2
Pragmatism was the third big philosophical tendency that influenced Bulgarian
philosophy until the First World War after the German and French schools. In the
interwar period the impact of Dewey’s education methods was considerable with the
translation of many of his articles. Still, there was hardly a pragmatic philosopher in
Bulgaria before Ivan Sarailiev.
The span between Sarailiev and next writings on pragmatism in Bulgaria stretched
over three decades. Scattered mentionings of pragmatist’s names can be found in the
writings of several Bulgarian philosophers such as Atanas Iliev, Asen Kiselinchev,
Ceko Torbov, Sava Ganovski, Todor Pavlov, Ljuben Sivilov and others. Those were
mainly officially critics of pragmatism from the standpoint of the ruling Marxist
ideology. The first large presentation of Peirce’s thought after the fall of the communist
regime occurred in the introduction of a two-volumes collection of semiotic papers,
The Matter of Thought and Between Objects & Words in 1991(Mladenov Ivan, 1991).
Several articles on Peirce’s thought followed, as well as conferences and translations of
few of his most-known essays. I started teaching Peirce’s thought as early as 1994 and
continue until today. This became possible, after my two-years stay in Bloomington as
a Fulbright researcher, when I worked with Thomas Sebeok, and took the once-only
postdoctoral course on Peirce given by Nathan Houser from the Peirce Edition Project
at Indiana University. Occasionally, I returned to the Peirce Edition Project, including
a second stay on a Fulbright grant in 2010. Finally in 2006 my book on some of
Peirce’s ideas was published under the title Conceptualizing Metaphors. On Charles
Peirce’s Marginalia. The book was translated and published also in Japanese in 2012.
Thus, the road for the new undertaking of Peirce’s ideas was paved and a whole new
generation of young scholars took it. As a great example I would mention a new book
by a Doctoral student of mine, Andrey Tashev, on the first penetrating and spreading
of pragmatism in Bulgaria and the ideas of Ivan Sarailiev, which appeared in 2013.
The recent discovery of Sarailiev’s work most assuredly confirms, at least, that no
authority can hope to forever “fix” the truth. A good example might be the renaissance
of Sarailiev’s contribution. Several conferences on his behalf, some with international
participation, took part in Sofia. His books were reprinted and used as textbooks or
introductions to pragmatism at the Bulgarian universities. Doctoral theses and books
on his thought were published, slowly but steadily he gained the reputation he was
denied throughout all his lifetime. It is an open question whether today’s digging out
of Sarailiev represents a pure accident, or resumes a logical end of a human attitude
best described in Peirce’s beloved quotation of Shakespeare:
Proud man,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence.
2. William J., (1930), Shto e pragmatisam, transl. N.S.Nonev, Sofia.
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References
Mladenov I. (ed.), (1991), The Matter of Thought and Between Objects & Words,
Sofia, Nauka i Izkustvo.
― (1997), Ivan Sarailiev – purviyat bulgarski pragmatist?!, Sofia, Demokraticheski
pregled.
― (2006), Conceptualizing Metaphors. On Charles Peirce’s Marginalia, London &
New York, Routledge – Taylor and Francis Group.
Sarailiev I., (1919), Rodovite idei (psihologicheski i metafizicheski etjudi), Sofia,
Pridvorna pechatnica.
― (1924), Za volyata, Sofia, Pridvorna pechatnica.
― (1931), Suvremennata nauka i religiyata – publichna lekciya, iznesena v Sofiiskiya
universitet; Otgovor na edna kritika, Sofia, Chipeff.
― (1934), Razni etjudi. Nyakoi neyasnoti vav filosofiyata na Bergson. Statii i studii
sabrani ot samiya avtor, Sofia, Godishnik na Sofijskia universitet, kn. 30. Tom 12,
(Also published separately as a free-standing volume in the same year, publ.
Pridvorna pechatnica, Sofia).
― (1938), Pragmatizmat, Sofia, Pridvorna pechatnica.
― (1947), Sokrat, Sofia, Universitetska pechatnica (Universitetska biblioteka, 352).
― (2002), Pragmatizmat, Sofia, Nov balgarski universitet.
― (2004), Usilieto da uznavash (Sbornik sas statii i studii v chest na Ivan Sarailiev),
Sofia, Nov balgarski universitet.
Tashev A., (2013), Pragmatizmat i Ivan Sarailiev, Sofia, Akademichno izdatelstvo
“Prof. Marin Drinov”.
Ivan Sarailiev as Diplomat in Bern, 4th of May 1918.
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COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Henrik Rydenfelt*
Peirce in Finland1
Prior to the Second World War, Peirce was virtually unknown in Finnish
philosophical discussions. This was not the case of pragmatism altogether. For
example, James’s ideas were well received and discussed in Finland at some
length around the time of his death in 1910, including the translation of several of
James’s books and writings into Finnish. A central figure in this discussion was the
most prominent Finnish philosopher at that time, Eino Kaila, who also founded the
psychological laboratory at the University of Helsinki. Despite his affinities with
the logical empiricism of the time, Kaila (1934) took a deep interest in the practical
significance of metaphysical and religious views.
After the war, Finnish philosophical research concentrated heavily on the
offspring of logical empiricism, what became to be called analytic philosophy, various
developments in symbolic logic and Wittgenstein scholarship. References to Peirce
remain scarce. Of Kaila’s students, the Finnish philosophical giant of the time, Georg
Henrik von Wright discussed Peirce in his dissertation (1941) and viewed pragmatists
such as Peirce and James as precursors to the logical empiricist movement. The
logician Oiva Ketonen – whose views have close affinities with Dewey – also referred
to the classical pragmatists in a similar vein (Ketonen 1954).
It is only during the past 20 years or so that pragmatism as a philosophical tradition
has greatly grown in prominence both as a philosophical starting point and as a field
of inquiry in Finland. In this development, Peirce has figured centrally. The Finnish
reception of Peirce is in this sense in its first wave; but this wave is turning into a tide.
The development of the Finnish reception entails a couple of practical main points,
which deserve to be mentioned. An interdisciplinary discussion group focused on
pragmatism and Peirce’s philosophy as well as their application in various fields of
scientific inquiry, which in part ironically uses the name the Helsinki Metaphysical
Club, was initiated in 1997 and continues to organize several talks each year (http://
www.helsinki.fi/peirce/MC).
The Finnish Peirce studies website Commens was opened in 2001, and in 2003,
introduced the famed Commens Dictionary of Peirce’s Terms. In 2014, the site was
merged with the Brazilian Digital Encyclopedia of Charles S. Peirce, producing a
comprehensive online resource, Commens Digital Companion to C. S. Peirce (http://
www.commens.org).
With renewed interest, Finnish translations of and anthologies and books on
pragmatism again began to be published, including a somewhat controversial
* University of Helsinki, Finland [[email protected]]
1. Acknowledgements: indicative of the liveliness of Finnish Peirce scholarship, despite the tight
schedule in producing this article at the behest of the friendly editors, I had the benefit of helpful
comments and suggestions from Mats Bergman, Erkki Kilpinen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Sami Paavola, AhtiVeikko Pietarinen and Sami Pihlström.
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translation of a number of Peirce’s key writings. Nevertheless, a vast majority of the
Finnish literature on Peirce is in languages open to a wider readership.
In 2005, with funding from the University of Helsinki and private Finnish
foundations, a group of Peirce scholars started the Helsinki Peirce Research Centre
at the University of Helsinki, organizing several international events – such as the
conferences Applying Peirce (2007) and Applying Peirce 2 (2014) – and conducting
research into Peirce’s writings, including his philosophical correspondence (http://
www.helsinki.fi/peirce/).
The Nordic Pragmatism Network (http://www.nordprag.org), initiated in 2008,
has organized dozens of international events in the Nordic countries, all of which
have included talks on Peirce’s philosophy.
Peirce’s reception
Finnish philosophers are likely best known for their contributions in philosophical
logic and philosophy of science. The background for the growing interest in Peirce
is in the work of several Finnish philosophers working in these fields, most notably
Risto Hilpinen, Jaakko Hintikka and Ilkka Niiniluoto. Hintikka and Hilpinen are also
former Presidents of the Charles S. Peirce Society. In addition, Finland has a long
tradition of semiotic inquiry, which has been advanced especially in art studies, but
has long-term connections with Finnish Peirce scholars.
For heuristic purposes, I will distinguish three branches of Peirce’s Finnish
reception: (1) logic, (2) semiotics and its applications and (3) philosophy of science.
Obviously, with Peirce’s philosophical vision attempting to form a systematic
whole, these inquiries cannot be completely distinguished – for example, Peirce’s
semiotics may well be taken to encompass both logic and much that falls into the
purview of philosophy of science. Indeed, Finnish philosophers and scientists have
often contributed to all three fields of inquiry, but with different emphases which the
division will serve to underscore.
The literature is extensive, as indicated by the fact that three Finns won the
Charles S. Peirce essay contest within seven years. Accordingly, the following
references only include selected key publications.
1. Peirce’s logical inventions
The Finnish reception largely begins with Hintikka (1976; 1980) and Hilpinen
(1982; 1992), who pointed out that Peirce’s semantics anticipated Hintikka’s gametheoretical semantics. Hintikka has long held that Peirce’s understanding of the
logic of quantifiers far surpassed Frege’s. Moreover, Hilpinen has dealt extensively
with Peirce’s existential graphs (Hilpinen 2011), and Hintikka has emphasized
the importance of Peirce’s distinction between two forms of deductive inference,
theorematic and corollary reasoning (Hintikka 1980).
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This work has in many ways been continued by Leila Haaparanta and AhtiVeikko Pietarinen. Haaparanta has studied aspects of Peirce’s logic and compared
Peirce’s views with those of Husserl (Haaparanta 1994). Pietarinen has explored
Peirce’s diagrammatic logic at length, elucidating the intricate analogies between
Peirce’s vision of reasoning between an Utterer and an Interpreter and gametheoretical semantics equipped with a later 20th century notion of strategy. He has
further compared Peirce’s views of the meaning (or reference) of proper names with
competing semantic theories and views in the analytic tradition, as well as explored
Peirce’s so-called proof of pragmatism (Pietarinen 2004; 2006).
Abduction has been a prominent field of inquiry in Finland. Hintikka (1998)
connected abduction with his interrogative model of (scientific) inquiry. Niiniluoto has
defended abduction as serving an important role in scientific discovery and justification
(Niiniluoto 2010). Sami Paavola’s dissertation (2006) highlighted the strategic aspects
of abduction and the logic of discovery. Paavola’s extensive work (some of which
in collaboration with Matti Sintonen and Kai Hakkarainen) has delineated different
notions of abduction and their applications in e.g. discovery, learning processes,
innovation and creativity (Paavola, Hakkarainen & Sintonen 2006).
2. Semiotics and its applications
The first book-length study of Peirce published in Finland was Mats Bergman’s
Meaning and Mediation (2000a). Bergman’s dissertation in philosophy (Bergman
2004) – the first dissertation focused on Peirce in Finland – as well as his articles and
subsequent book on Peirce’s philosophy of communication (Bergman 2009) constitute
the most systematic Finnish contributions to the study of Peirce’s theory of signs.
Bergman has developed a view of Peirce’s ‘semeiotic’ as an inquiry both grounded
in everyday communication and aiming to improve communicative practices,
and has explicated how this rhetorical approach can be applied to key questions in
contemporary communication theory.
With an interest in diagrammatic logic, Finnish philosophers have scrutinized
Peirce’s notion of iconicity, often in contrast with the symbolic underpinnings of
contemporary logic (see works by Haaparanta, Hilpinen, Paavola, Pietarinen).
Peirce’s semiotic ideas have also been explored and applied in fields such as
cognition studies and aesthetics by Pentti Määttänen (2007), theology by Heikki
Kirjavainen (1999), biosemiotics by Tommi Vehkavaara (2005), media studies and
education by Merja Bauters (2006), translation by Eero Tarasti (2006) and Ritva
Hartama-Heinonen (2012), scientific representation by Tarja Knuuttila (2010),
literature by Harri Veivo (2011) and archaeology by Marko Marila (2013). Veikko
Rantala’s work on interpretation and conceptual change has also been informed by
Peirce (e.g. Rantala 2002).
Of the Finnish scientists who have taken an interest in Peirce, Erkki Kilpinen’s
careful and erudite employment of Peirce’s semiotics, pragmatism and the pragmatist
view of action in sociology and sociological inquiry deserves special mention
(Kilpinen 2000; 2010).
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3. Pragmatism and scientific realism
Defenders of scientific realism find a natural ally in Peirce, whose views still
continue to be a source for improvements in the contemporary discussion. Niiniluoto
(1993) has argued that Peirce was the inventor of the inductive-probabilistic model
of scientific explanation, antedating C. G. Hempel by almost a century. Niiniluoto’s
work on scientific progress and discovery, verisimilitude and his own critical scientific
realism is heavily indebted to Peirce’s ideas such as abduction and fallibilism, and
indeed he has referred to Peirce as his philosophical champion (Niiniluoto 1993; 2010).
Sami Pihlström has developed a form of transcendental idealist pragmatism.
While more inspired by William James and Hilary Putnam, Pihlström’s work includes
extensive commentary on Peirce, contrasting his views with those of other pragmatists
(especially Pihlström 1998; 2004).
Henrik Rydenfelt has defended a pragmatic, non-representationalist realism,
arguing that Peirce’s realism and his notion of normative science point towards a form
of normative (e.g. moral) realism with key advantages over competing views in the
contemporary meta-ethical and epistemological debate (Rydenfelt 2011; 2014).
References
Due to editorial needs of the volume, bibliography had to be reduced. You can find a
complete bibliography at: http://www.nordprag.org/hr/PeirceInFinland.html
Bauters M., (2006), “Semiosis of (Target) Groups: Peirce, Mead and the Subject,”
Subject Matters 206 (2[2]), 73-102.
Bergman M., (2000a), Meaning and Mediation: Toward a Communicative
Interpretation of Peirce’s Theory of Signs, Helsinki, Dept. of Communication.
― (2000b), “Reflections of the Role of the Communicative Sign in Semeiotic,”
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 36 (2), 225-54.
― (2004), Fields of Signification: Explorations in Charles S. Peirce’s Theory of
Signs, Philosophical Studies from the University of Helsinki 6.
― (2009), Peirce’s Philosophy of Communication, London-New York, Continuum.
Haaparanta L., (1994), “Peirce and the Logic of Logical Discovery,” in E. C. Moore
(ed.), Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science: Papers from the Harvard
Sesquicentennial Congress, Tuscaloosa and London, The University of Alabama
Press, 105-18.
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Hartama-Heinonen R., (2012), “‘Interpretation is Merely Another Word for
Translation’. A Peircean Approach to Translation, Interpretation and Meaning,”
COLLEGIUM: Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences
7, 113–129.
Hilpinen R., (1982), “On C. S. Peirce’s Theory of the Proposition: Peirce as a Precursor
of Game-Theoretical Semantics,” The Monist 65 (2), 182-88.
― (1992), “On Peirce’s Philosophical Logic: Propositions and Their Objects,”
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28 (3), 467-88.
― (2011), “Remarks on the Iconicity and Interpretation of Existential Graphs,”
Semiotica 186, 169-87.
Hintikka J., (1976), “Quine vs. Peirce?,” Dialectica 30 (1), 7-8.
― (1980), “C. S. Peirce’s ‘First Real Discovery’ and Its Contemporary Relevance,”
The Monist 63 (3), 304-15.
― (1998), “What Is Abduction? The Fundamental Problem of Contemporary
Epistemology,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 34 (3).
Kaila E., (1934), Persoonallisuus [Personality], Helsinki, Otava.
Ketonen O., (1954), “John Dewey 1859–1952,” Ajatus 18, 85–98.
Kilpinen E., (2000), The Enormous Fly-Wheel of Society: Pragmatism’s Habitual
Conception of Rationality and Social Theory, Research Reports 235, Department
of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki.
― (2010), “Problems in Applying Peirce in Social Sciences,” in Mats Bergman –
Sami Paavola – Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen – Henrik Rydenfelt (eds), Ideas in Action:
Proceedings of the Applying Peirce Conference, Helsinki, Nordic Pragmatism
Network, 86-104.
Kirjavainen H., (1999), “Peirce, Rantala and Theological Semiotics,” Acta Semiotica
Fennica 7 (Eero Tarasti (ed.), Snow, Forest, Silence: The Finnish Tradition of
Semiotics), 81-94.
Knuuttila T., (2010), “Not Just Underlying Structures: Towards a Semiotic Approach
to Scientific Representation and Modeling” in Mats Bergman – Sami Paavola –
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen – Henrik Rydenfelt (eds), Ideas in Action: Proceedings of
the Applying Peirce Conference, Helsinki, Nordic Pragmatism Network, 163-72.
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Määttänen P., (2007), “Semiotics of Space: Peirce and Lefebvre,” Semiotica 166
(1/4), 453-61.
Marila M., (2013), “Abduktiivinen päättely arkeologiassa: Arkeologian epistemologiasta
sen historian ja nykytilanteen valossa” [“Abductive Reasoning in Archaeology. On
the Epistemology of Archaeology in Light of Its History and Current Situation”],
Muinaistutkija 3, 45–63.
Niiniluoto I., (1993), “Peirce’s Theory of Statistical Explanation,” in E. C. Moore
(ed.), Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science, Tuscaloosa, University of
Alabama Press.
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Proceedings of the Applying Peirce Conference, Helsinki, Nordic Pragmatism
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Paavola S., (2006). On the Origin of Ideas: An Abductivist Approach to Discovery,
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Paavola S. – Hakkarainen K. – Sintonen M., (2006), “Abduction with Dialogical and
Trialogical Means,” Logic Journal of the IGPL 14 (2), 137-50.
Pietarinen A.-V., (2004), “Peirce’s Magic Lantern: Moving Pictures of Thought,”
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society.
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Proceedings of the Applying Peirce Conference, Helsinki, Nordic Pragmatism
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Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 34 (2), 382-413.
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Rydenfelt H., (2011), ”Epistemic Norms and Democracy: A Response to Talisse,”
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– S. Hartmann – T. Uebel – M. Weber (eds), New Directions in the Philosophy of
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COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Bent Sørensen* and Torkild Thellefsen**
The Reception of Charles S. Peirce in Denmark1
1. Setting the Scene
Despite of or maybe because of much activity and numerous Danish scholars
working with Peircean ideas, concepts, and methodology, there does not exist one
single current concerning the reception of Peirce in Denmark. However, it seems safe
to assume that the majority of Danish scholars working with Peirce – in one way or
the other – initially came and to some degree still come to Peirce with an interest in
his doctrine of signs or semeiotic, and then maybe from there, not seldom, will also
investigate other parts of Peirce’s intriguing and comprehensive system of thought.
Furthermore, most Danish scholars working with Peirce are exactly “working
with Peirce,” meaning that they come from a given area of research where they –
theoretically/methodologically/empirically – establish a Peircean perspective. Or put
in another way: strict exegesis of key texts within Peirce’s authorship was – so far –
not in the forefront in the Danish reception of Peirce, rather, the focus is on what we
can call “Peirce applied” using a broad conception of what it means to “apply” Peirce.
2. The First Beginnings
It is, of course, always difficult, if not impossible, to date the beginning of the
introduction of a thinker within a nationally delimited area, if anywhere, but, when
looking back from the beginning of the 80s until today, certain names and groups of
scholars with different affiliations and research interests, as well as certain events,
seem prominent and point towards how Peirce has been received, interpreted and
used in Denmark. The first Danish scholar to cultivate a strong interest in Peirce was
probably the physicist Peder Voetmann Christiansen at Roskilde University Center
who took interest in Peirce’s cosmology and theory of science in order to address
fundamental issues in quantum mechanics. He translated Peirce’s first set of Monist
papers under the title of Mursten og Mørtel til en Metafysik (Bricks and Mortar for a
Metaphysics), IMFUFA working paper no.169 (1988), later published as Kosmologi
og metafysik (below) and strongly contributed to the spread of Peircean ideas in
Danish academia.
When Danish semiotics saw a renaissance in the 1980s and the 1990s, Peirce was
also “a significant part of that.” Major figures in the development were the philologist
* Denmark [[email protected]]
** Københavns Universitet, Denmark [[email protected]]
1. We would like to thank Dr. of Philosophy, Professor Frederik Stjernfelt for his constructive
comments.
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Per Aage Brandt and the literary scholar Jørgen Dines Johansen, who both founded
their own school and published extensively internationally. Brandt arranged (together
with Anne Marie Dinesen) Seminar i Almen Semiotik (Seminars concerning General
Semiotics), founded the journal Almen Semiotik (General Semiotics) – the first issue
was a special issue on Peirce – and established “Center for Semiotik” (“Center for
Semiotics”) – and thereby making Peirce known to a broader Danish audience of
students and scholars coming from very different areas of studies and research. Brandt
published numerous of articles and books going more and more in the direction of
formulating a “Cognitive Semiotics” also making a recourse to Peircean concepts
such as sign, diagrammatic and iconic models, types of signs – and seeing processes
of thought as processes of inference within a realist epistemology. In 1982 Dines
Johansen went to Indianapolis to study the manuscripts of Peirce at The Peirce Edition
Project. When Dines Johansen returned to Denmark he published articles and books
inducing the readers to think semiotics with Peirce for example in Prolegomena to
a Semiotic Theory of Text Interpretation (1986) and Dialogic semiosis. An Essay of
signs and Meaning (1993). Dines Johansen was aiming to develop a semio-pragmatic
theory of literature and a semiotics of the production, transmission, and interpretation
of signs in human communication. Concerning the latter, Dines Johansen clarified the
presuppositions of dialogic communication according to Peirce dealing with Peirce’s
speculative grammar, rhetoric, fixation of beliefs and the concept of community,
and thereby Dines Johansen could introduce his own Peircean inspired “Semiotic
pyramid.”
3. Introducing Peirce
The 1980s and the 1990s also witnessed introductions to Peirce in Danish. Poul
Lübcke edited Videnskab og sprog (1982) (Science and Language) about the Anglo
Saxon Philosophy and one of the contributions by Niels Christian Stefansen placed
Peirce in the pragmatist tradition describing his pragmatic maxim, concepts of truth
and reality, semeiotic, theory of inquiry, and metaphysics. Furthermore, Anne Marie
Dinesen published C. S. Peirce–fænomenologi, semiotik og logik (1991) (C. S. Peirce–
phenomenology, semiotics, and logic), Keld Gall Jørgensen published Semiotik (1993)
(Semiotics), and Dines Johansen and Svend Erik Larsen published Tegn i brug (1994)
(Signs in use). Finally, two selections of Peirce texts were translated into Danish
Semiotik og pragmatisme (1994) (Semiotics and Pragmatism) edited by Frederik
Stjernfelt and Anne Marie Dinesen and Kosmologi og metafysik (1996) (Cosmology
and metaphysics) edited by Peder Voetmann Christiansen. These publications in the
1990s marked an increased interest in Peirce, and some of his texts now began to find
their way into the curricula of the philosophy departments, and Peircean concepts
– such as infinite semiosis, icon-index-symbol, abduction and pragmatism – could
also be seen, more and more, in the tool boxes of Danish students and scholars
coming from different humanistic disciplines e.g. literature theory, cultural studies,
communication, and media and advertising research.
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4. The Copenhagen School of Biosemiotics, Cyber-Semiotics, and
Diagrammatology
During the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s the “Copenhagen School of
BioSemiotics” has committed itself to develop a “Semiotics of Nature” ranging from
the lowest levels of sign processes in simple organisms to the cognitive and social
and communicative behavior of animals – and thereby crossing the nature-culture
barrier. Hence, theorists like biochemist Jesper Hoffmeyer, biologist Claus Emmeche,
cyber-semiotician Søren Brier, and polyhistor Frederik Stjernfelt have – in one way or
the other – worked their ways into a transdisciplinary framework in order to explain
how all the phenomena of inherent meaning and signification in living nature have
emerged in the universe – a universe which, in its very beginning, was chaotic and
devoid of meaning and processes of signification. Following Peirce (and Thomas
Sebeok) the “Bio-Semioticians” understand life and semiosis as being co-extensive
and inspired by Peirce’s writings on e.g. the triadic sign, mind, qualia, feeling, habit
formation, evolutionary love, objective idealism, spontaneity and anti-determinism,
they try to find and explain Signs of Meaning in the Universe (1996) as is the title of
Hoffmeyers landmark volume. In the Cyber-semiotics of Brier – e.g. Cybernetics: Why
Information is not Enough (2008) – a transdisciplinary bio-psycho-social framework
for understanding perception, signification, cognition, and communication, perhaps,
the strongest influence from Peirce is found, and Brier integrates the Peircean point of
view that the substance of reality is continuous, signs and regularities have real being,
and it is impossible to remove the mental and the emotional from basic reality. Besides
Stjernfelt’s participation in the Copenhangen School of Biosemiotics it should also be
mentioned that he has developed a “Theory of Diagrammatology” based on the mature
Peirce (as well as Husserl). Stjernfelt investigates the role of diagrams in thought
and knowledge as a centerpiece of epistemology – the Peircean diagrams allows for
observation and experimentation with ideal structures and objects. Stjernfelt focuses
on three regional areas of research within semiotics: biosemiotics, picture analysis and
literature, and his diagrammatological approach leave the traditional relativism and
culturalism behind, hence formulating a Peircean realist position. Stjernfelt’s theory
is most fully developed in Diagrammatology. An Investigation on the Borderlines
of Phenomenology, Ontology and Semiotics (2007). In 2014, he published Natural
Propositions. The Actuality of Peirce’s Doctrine of Dicisigns, arguing that Peirce’s
theory of propositions differs significantly from mainstream philosophy of logic
and that it allows for propositions transgressing the medium of language, embracing
pictures, diagrams, gesture etc. on the one hand and non-human communication and
cognition on the other.
5. Library and Information Science, Advertising Research, and Branding
From the 1990s and onwards Peirce’s thought has also been found relevant within
parts of Library and Information Science (LIS) in Denmark. Brier’s book Information
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er sølv – Om muligheden for en pragmatisk informationsvidenskab baseret på
anden ordens kybernetik, semiotik og sprogspilsteori (1994) (Information is silver
– concerning the possibility of creating a pragmatic information science based on
second order cybernetics, semiotics and language game theory) marked the beginning
of this new field of application, suggesting a transdisciplinary framework in which
a Peircean concept of information, encompassing nature and culture, is rooted in a
realistic ontology and evolutionary metaphysics. Building partly upon the works of
Brier, Torkild Thellefsen, Martin Thellefsen, and Bent Sørensen have developed a
Peircean concept of information primarily focusing on different cognitive aspects.
Seeking direction from Peirce’s phenomenological categories, speculative grammar,
rhetoric, and realistic epistemology/ontology, Thellefsen and Sørensen came to
understand information in relation to meaning creation and communication and define
the concept within the triad emotion-information-cognition, also pointing towards
its relevance for the system,- user,- and domain oriented perspectives within LIS.
Torkild Thellefsen’s book Fundamental Signs and Significance-Effects. A Semeiotic
Outline of Fundamental Signs, Significance-Effects, Knowledge Profiling and Their
Use in Knowledge Organization and Branding (2010) lays bare the theoretical
presuppositions. Another, perhaps more surprising, area of application of Peircean
ideas within Danish Academia is marketing and consumer research. Hence, from the
beginning of the 2000s Peirce’s semeiotic has been instrumental in understanding
advertising and branding. Using Peirce’s concept of consciousness, interpretant, and
three modes of inference, Christian Andersen, Bent Sørensen, and Christian Jantzen
have dealt with the structure of print advertisements indicating which signs functions to
potentiate different effects of comprehension within the perceiver. Concerning brands
and the process of branding Torkild Thellefsen and Bent Sørensen (also in collaboration
with Marcel Danesi) have introduced the Peircean concepts of “Cognitive Branding”
and the “Value Profile” in order to understand how the meaning of life style values
become embedded in products and thereby influence people to make their purchase.
The two concepts are anchored theoretically in Peirce’s pragmaticism including his
classification of the interpretants, the idea of habit and habit formation, and the maxim
of meaningfulness, which direct the research towards four (inter)related perspectives:
i) regarding branding as a process of meaning creation; ii) regarding a shared memory
between brand users; iii) regarding the cognitive attention of brand users; and iv)
regarding branding communities. In the pragmatic terminology of Peirce a brand is a
symbol representing, upholding, and communicating values and a shared memory in
a particular cultural setting (a universe of discourse, based on collateral experience)
to its interpreters.
6. Peirce’s Metaphysics and His Remarks on Metaphor
The metaphysics of Peirce has also attracted the interest of Danish scholars during
the 2000s. Søren Brier, Bent Sørensen, and Torkild Thellefsen have examined parts of
Peirce’s explanation of the main features of the universe such as chance, growth, laws
of nature and mind and feeling in order to understand the thorough-going evolutionary
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character of his cosmology. Furthermore, building on the Peirce-scholar Father
Vincent Potter (1929-1994), the authors have argued for a close connection between
Peirce’s concept of Summum Bonum (the highest good) and the aesthetical influence
on the growth of ideas as an important aspect of creative processes.
Peirce had no theory of metaphor and he provided only a few remarks concerning
the topic. However, Bent Sørensen and Torkild Thellefsen have worked with “the
metaphor in a Peircean perspective.” According to the authors Peirce had a “modern
view on metaphor” as a semeiotic mechanism (a hypoicon) which is fundamental
to thought and consciousness. Sørensen and Thellefsen try to develop the relation
between metaphor and cognition and they understand the Peircean metaphor as rooted
in the abductive mode of inference – hence, it is part of an intricate relation between
experience, body, sign, and a guessing instinct as a semeiotic mechanism which can
convey new insights.
7. The Reception of Peirce in the Future
It is now more than three decades ago since Peirce was first introduced in
Denmark. The reception of Peirce has been manifold showing a wide range of
areas of relevance and application – from general semiotics, over literature theory,
Biosemiotics, Cybernetics, epistemology of science, Library and Information science
to Marketing and Consumer research. Trying to foresee Peirce’s relevance for the
future Danish research and scholarship is not necessarily easy – but we still believe
that the prospects for applying Peirce should be legion – he was a true polyhistor with
a mind open towards new, interesting possibilities.
References
Brier S., (1994), Information er sølv – Om muligheden for en pragmatisk
informationsvidenskab baseret på anden ordens kybernetik, semiotik og
sprogspilsteori, Aalborg, Forlaget Biblioteksarbejde.
—(2008), “Cybernetics: Why Information is not Enough,” Toronto Studies in
Semiotics and Communication, Toronto, Toronto University Press.
Dines Johansen J., (1985), “Prolegomena to a Semiotic Theory of Text Interpretation,”
Semiotica 57 (3/4), 225-288.
—(1993), Dialogic semiosis. An Essay of signs and Meaning, Bloomington and
Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.
Dines Johansen J. – Svend Erik L., (1994), Tegn i brug, Bagsværd, Forlaget Amanda.
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Bent Sørensen – Torkild ThellefsenThe R eception of C.S. Peirce in Denmark
Dinesen A. M., (1991), C. S. Peirce – fænomenologi, semiotik og logik, Aalborg,
Nordisk sommeruniversitet.
Hoffmeyer J., (1996), Signs of Meaning in the Universe, Bloomington and Indianapolis,
Indiana University Press.
Lübcke P., (1982), Vor tids filosofi – Videnskab og sprog, København, Politiken.
Peirce C. S., (1994), Semiotik og pragmatisme, Oversat og redigeret af Peder Voetman
Christiansen, København, Gyldendal.
—(1996), Kosmologi og Metafysik, Redigeret af Frederik Stjernfelt – Anne Marie
Dinesen, København, Gyldendal.
Stjernfelt F., (2007), Diagrammatology. An Investigation on the Borderlines of
Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics, Dordrecht, Springer.
—(2014), Natural Propositions. The Actuality of Peirce’s Doctrine of Dicisigns,
Boston, Docent Press.
Sørensen B. – Thellefsen T. – Morten M., (2007), “Some Comments regarding Metaphor
and Cognition in a Peircean Perspective,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society 43 (3), 543-562.
Sørensen B. – Thellefsen T. – Søren B., (2012), “Mind, Matter, and Evolution – An
Outline of C. S. Peirces Evolutionary Cosmogony,” Cybernetics & Human
Knowing 19 (1), 95-120.
Torkild T., (2010), A Semiotic Outline of Significance-effect, Fundamental Sign and
Knowledge Profiling and Their Use in Knowledge Organization and Branding,
Saarbrücken, VDM Verlag.
Sørensen B. – Thellefsen T., (2006), “Metaphor, concept formation, and esthetic
semeiosis in a Peircean Perspective,” Semiotica 161 (1/4), 199-213.
Voetman P., (1988), “Mursten og mørtel til en metafysik (Bricks and Mortar for a
Metaphysics),” IMFUFA, working paper no.169.
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COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Thora Margareta Bertilsson*
Reception of Charles S. Peirce in Sweden and its Diaspora
Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy is not very widespread in Swedish academia.
Academic philosophy in Sweden is known for having quite rigidly adhered to formal
logic and analytical philosophy for several generations. For this reason, pragmatism
was never really absorbed by school philosophers, and those who chose to work with
such non-analytical ideas were relegated to the outskirts of academia, i.e. they did not
achieve a firm academic position.
This being said about school philosophy in Sweden, it should however be recognized
that there are a few independent scholars from various branches of science who has
worked with Peirce’s thought quite independently from one another. Their work will
be considered in this text. As no intellectual links exist between these scholars, there
is no systematic reception and elaboration of Peirce scholarship, a situation which
is in starch contrast to what happened in Finland for instance. Nevertheless, their
respective works have in some cases had fruitful consequences in inspiring younger
colleagues and students, so that the future of Peirce-reception among scholars in and
outside of Sweden is indeed quite open. The Swedish scholarship to be considered
here is not necessarily confined to the Swedish territory, as some of the scholars are
working abroad, in other Nordic countries or else in the USA.
1. A Brave Philosopher’s Try
The first philosophical work on Peirce in Sweden is a dissertation, The
Pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, An Analytical Study, defended in Uppsala 1962 by
Hjalmar Wennerberg. The author takes his point of departure in the discussion at the
time whether Peirce’s early formulation of pragmatism is compatible or not with the
development of his later (extra-empirical) philosophy. There were two schools, one
focusing on the similarity between pragmatism and logical positivism and thus the
distance to Peirce’s later philosophy considered as metaphysics, and the other and
more generous one that viewed Peirce’s philosophy not to be eligible for conventional
classification and thus that there was indeed a continuity among his stages of
thought. With careful consideration, Wennerberg sided with the last school and noted
especially that as both Peirce’s pragmatism and his later “transcendentalism” were
grounded in what he called a “speculative physiological theory,” it was possible to
trace a line of continuity embracing also Peirce’s ethics. Wennerberg taught courses in
the philosophy department at the universities of both Uppsala and Lund, but he never
seemed to have achieved a regular university position.
It is curious, however, that in a radio program from 2006 (available at the web)
Sören Halldén, an influent philosophy professor at Lund University when Wennerberg
* University of Copenhagen, Denmark [[email protected]]
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was active, mentions Peirce as a most original philosopher, lamenting at the same time
that his thoughts were not sufficiently appreciated yet. Halldén even regrets that he
did not take notice in time of this original thinker and describes his negligence as an
example of our being prisoners of our conceptual prejudices. Despite Halldén’s late
self-reflection, it is still difficult to detect an increased interest in Peirce’s thoughts in
regular philosophy departments in Sweden. However, there are signs of a blossoming
interest in the pragmatist tradition in disciplines such as philosophy of religion
(Zachariasson 1999).
2. Semiotics in Lund
Göran Sonesson is the one Swedish scholar whose work on and with Peirce’s
theory of signs has had significant impact on present semiotic scholarship both in
Sweden and abroad. Leading major studies in cognitive semiotics at Lund University,
Sonesson’s Peirce-related research touches especially on the “pictorial” aspects
of signs, research that extends into culture and evolutionary theory as well. In the
book, Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the Semiotic Heritage and Its Relevance to
the Analysis of the Visual World (1989), Sonesson problematizes, amongst many
other themes, Peirce’s triadic semiotics in contrasting and comparing it with the
structuralist tradition of Saussure/Hjelmslev. The book presents a tour de force in
critically reviewing the full array of methods in analyzing pictures. The pictorial
sign is viewed from three complementary perspectives: iconicity, indexicality, and
connotation. Although clearly influenced by Peirce’s classification and elaboration of
iconicity, Sonesson is nevertheless quite critical of Peirce’s insistence on the necessity
of the sign triad. A similar critical reflection of Peirce is also ventured in more recent
work as “The Natural History of Branching: Approaches to the Phenomenology of
Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness” (2013). Considering the categories in the light
of Husserl’s phenomenology, Sonesson suggests that Peirce’s triad may in fact be the
result of a phenomenological operation, “the free variation of imagination” (321).
From this viewpoint, Peirce’s phaneroscopy becomes a special variety of Husserl’s
phenomenology. As Sonesson himself concludes, such a suggestion is neither true,
nor false, but an “imaginary experiment” opening our minds to further thoughts as to
the semiotic status of Peirce’s triadic philosophy.
Sonesson has authored a wealth of other texts where Peirce’s thoughts are
translated into fields such as psychology, cognitive and evolutionary science, the life
sciences, and not the least the human and social sciences. These texts are in large
extent also available and can be downloaded from his webpage at Lund University
(www.sol.lu.se/en/person/GoranSonesson).
3. An Attempt to Pave the Road for Peirce into Social Science
When I was a doctoral student in sociology at the University of California, Santa
Barbara (1970-1974), the dynamics of scientific progress was hotly debated, not the
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least because of Thomas S. Kuhn’s epochal The Structure of Scientific Revolution
(1962) and the discussion that ensued. Kuhn’s attention to revolutionary vs normal
science generated considerable interest among social scientists as it opened up a
space both for social inertia within scientific communities and for the possibility of
ruptures and thus for different and competing frames in science. In the watershed
of Karl Popper’s attack upon Kuhn’s linguistically founded philosophy of science
for replacing philosophy proper with sociology/psychology, social scientists seized
upon a new territory: case studies of the internal dynamics within science. Traditional
sociology of science (Mannheim and Merton) exempted the sciences from outside
intrusion, but Kuhn’s texts and the pursuing debates opened the door of science
to critical empirical studies. In my doctoral thesis from 1974 entitled The Social
Context of Discovery in Science, clearly inspired by Kuhn’s interpretive turn, I made
an attempt to qualify various epochal discoveries in modern science from the point
of view whether or not they were much dependent upon individual achievements
(genius) or would occur sooner or later as “normal” stages of ongoing communication
in science. At the time, I had not really become acquainted with Peirce’s notion of the
“community of inquiry,” although I made ample use of it.
Forced to return to my native country Sweden for various personal reasons,
I reentered the study of “community of inquirers” several years later, but this time
from quite a different angle. Back in Europe, I took up readings of K. O. Apel and
Jürgen Habermas and here I was introduced to a Continental European appropriation
of Peirce’s philosophy as a semiotic-pragmatic translation of Kant’s transcendental
philosophy. I was enchanted to discover the critical employment of “the community
of inquirers” in the German texts as both empirical (the here-and-now-existing) and
transcendental (the final interpretation of truth, however vague). Now my Peircestudies took a serious turn: I was forced to find a point of mediation between USinspired (social) pragmatism and the German transcendental-critical reception of
Peirce. Again, I tried to hook up my intellectual restlessness in what at the time
(late 1970s) had become a contested space between (normative) philosophy and
(empirical) sociology of science. In 1978 I presented a new doctoral dissertation, this
time in Sweden, with the title Towards a Social Reconstruction of Science Theory,
Peirce’s Theory of Inquiry, and Beyond (Enlarged and Revised in 2009 as Peirce’s
Theory of Inquiry and Beyond). Apart from a social philosophical introduction of
Peirce’s “communal” interpretation of science and of truth as a point of convergence
in possible time, I was particularly interested in the normativity inherent in everyday
communication. In the revised version, a new article on abduction as elementary form
of social communication was included in a continuous effort of mine to make Peirce
relevant in social science community.
In more recent years, pragmatism is being rediscovered in social science as
harbouring new entrances into studies of social action from a relational point of view,
i.e. discovering the impacts of objects upon subjects and vise versa (Gross 2009,
Martin 2011). These ongoing efforts are clearly stimulating in pursuing further Peircerelated studies in the context of social science (Bertilsson 2014).
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4. On Theorizing – Why Peirce Matters
Richard Swedberg is a Swedish sociologist who moved to US many years ago.
For the last couple of years he has been very active in calling attention to the act
of theorizing as a process of thought and action (2012; 2014a; 2014b). He also
takes his point of departure in Peirce’s philosophy, especially in the insistence that
“Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant
staring, without making an abduction at every step.” (2012, 1.) In introducing the
process of theorizing as worthy of renewed attention, Swedberg takes notice of how
the fields of methodology in social science have opened up for many critical and
fruitful discussions in recent years while the field of theory appears to stagnate. He
suggests to forget “theory” as a unit imported from without (Durkheim, Bourdieu,
Foucault, Habermas, etc.) so as to start out on “theorizing” as a dynamic dialectic
between the profoundly personal (images) and the more impersonal community
(propositions, arguments of the profession). This dynamic covers what Swedberg
now alludes to as the discovery versus justification phases of science. Several other
heuristic rules of theorizing are proposed among which observation clearly has a key
role; conceptualizing, generalizing, abstracting are other such phases of the theorizing
process, not to forget the fertile role of metaphors.
Swedberg’s work on theorizing has led to further similar explorations on Peirce’s
fruitful ideas on abduction in connection with the revitalization of critical theory. A
younger Swedish colleague of mine, Mikael Carleheden (who like myself is now
also working at Copenhagen University in Denmark) is in the process of drafting
a book where he pursues in particular the critical communicative stance in Peirce’s
philosophy of science (2014). Carleheden exploits – like Swedberg – the inherited
bifurcation between discovery and justification as the mediating process between the
individual and the community, but in contrast to Swedberg, he introduces “norms of
validity” from a communication point of view, thus renewing what also Apel (and
myself) noted as a transcendental-critical strain in Peirce’s philosophy.
It is worth mentioning yet another social science effort to make abduction a pivotal
notion in the explanation of social events. In Explaining Society: An Introduction to
Critical Realism in the Social Sciences (2002), sociologists from Örebro University
in Sweden elaborated on the relation between abduction and retroduction as different
steps in securing valid explanations. Whereas the notion of abduction was borrowed
from Peirce’s philosophy, the notion of retroduction came from the philosophy of
critical realism that developed in Britain in the 1970s around the philosopher Roy
Bhaskar amongst others. Retroduction is then introduced as a more critical (theoretical)
stage in order to test the validity of hypotheses suggested by abduction. The text is
widely popular in the broader community of critical social scientists who want to
break away from more subjectivist and constructivist currents.
Finally, it is worthwhile to mention another effort where ideas of Peirce figures,
although it is not in strict but rather applied theorizing. In a doctoral dissertation soon
to be defended in public (June 27th, 2014), Maria Duclos Lindstrøm, a sociology
student at the University of Copenhagen, draws upon the triadic sign theory of
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Peirce in an institutional ethnography of OECD (Organisation of Economic and
Cooperative Development). At stake in OECD communication, as revealed by
Lindstrøm, is the tension between economic facts and economic communication:
there is a country-specific audience to be addressed when framing economic facts
but such communication of the specifics (facts) need consider also a much broader
world audience (what applies in general). Lindstrøm is inspired by the Australian
anthropologist Helen Verran (2001; 2012) whose elaboration of Peirce’s semiotics
results in a rupture between “facts” and “messages” (indices and symbols). Such
ongoing work is evidence of how Peircean ideas now push their way into the midst of
social science analysis.
5. Conclusion
As I noted at the outset, there is no systematic reception of Peirce within Swedish
scholarship. But there are individual scholars from various disciplines who in their
own ways have been influenced by Peirce and in turn elaborated upon his triadic
philosophy in a number of ways. Many of these scholars are no longer restricted to
Sweden, but work in what one perhaps could call the Swedish academic diaspora:
we are in sporadic contacts with one another without a real center. If a center was
to be proclaimed at all, it had to be centered in Charles S. Peirce, whose philosophy
continues to have ramifications in the various branches of the sciences.
References
Bertilsson M., (1974), The Social Context of Discovery in Science, University of
California at Santa Barbara, Doctoral Dissertation (Library of Congress, Mimeo).
—(1978-2009), Peirce’s Theory of Inquiry and Beyond, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin,
Peter Lang.
— (2014), “On Why’s, How’s, and What’s – and Why What’s Also Matter” (Work in Progress).
Carleheden M., (2014), “On Theorizing: C. S. Peirce and Contemporary Social Science,”
Sisäisyys & Suunnistautuminen, SoPhi 125, 128-59 (https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/
handle/123456789/42911).
Danermark B. et al., (2002), Explaining Society. Critical realism in the social sciences,
Milton Park, Routledge.
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Gross N., (2009), “A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms,” American
Sociological Review 74 (3), June, 358-79.
Halldén S., (2006), Intervju/Sveriges Radio (www.SR/filosofiskarummet/November
2006).
Lindstrøm M. D., (2014), On Being Helpful to the Debate. Design Dimensions of
OECD Economic Surveys, Copenhagen, Doctoral Dissertation/Sociology.
Martin J. L., (2011), The Explanation of Social Action, New York, Oxford University
Press.
Sonesson G., (1989), Pictorial Concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its
relevance to the interpretation of the visual world, Lund, Lund University Press.
— (2013), “The Natural History of Branching: Approaches to the Phenomenology of
Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness,” Signs and Society 1 (2), 297-326, (www.
sol.lu.se/en/person/GoranSonesson).
Swedberg R., (2012), “Theorizing in sociology and social science: turning to the
context of discovery,” Theory and Society 41 (1), 1-40.
—(2014a), Theorizing in Social Science. The Context of Discovery, Palo Alto,
Stanford University Press.
—(2014b), The Art of Social Theory, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Verran H., (2001) Science and African Logic, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.
— (2012), “The changing Lives of Measures and Values: From Centre Stage in the
fading ‘disciplinary’ Society to pervasive Background Instrument in the emergent
‘control’ Society,” Sociological Review 59 (2), 60-72.
Wennerberg H., (1962), The Pragmatism of Charles S. Peirce. En Analytisk Studie,
Uppsala, Almquist & Wicksell.
Zachariasson U., (1999), Religionsfilosofiska texter, Lund, Nya Doxa.
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COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Christos A. Pechlivanidis*
The History of Reception of Charles S. Peirce in Greece1
Despite the great interest on Peirce’s work in Europe especially from the 1960s
onwards, Peirce’s name in Greek literature could be found only in introductory books
of philosophy and in particular in those concerned with the theory of language.
An exception is Evangelos Papanoutsos’ Pragmatism or Humanism: Elaboration
and Criticism of the Theories of a Great Current of Contemporary Philosophy
(Papanoutsos 1924), which studies pragmatism as it had been shaped mainly by
F. C. S. Schiller. References to Peirce by the Member of the Academy of Athens
Evangelos Moutsopoulos and professor of philosophy Georgios Mourelos follow the
main trend which connects Peirce’s pragmatism with practical – and in many respects
– shallow thought. Undoubtedly, the first notable attempt to study Peirce takes place
in 1980 with Demetra Sfendoni-Mentzou’s doctoral dissertation titled “Probability
and Chance in C. S. Peirce’s Philosophy” (in Greek) with which she produced the
first systematic analysis of one aspect of Peirce’s work into the Greek philosophical
literature.
Her dissertation aims to provide a unitary reconstruction of Peirce’s scattered
writings on probability and chance. The goal of the author is twofold: (a) to show that
Peirce’s theory of chance is intimately related to his theory of probability and should
not be treated as belonging mainly to metaphysical and cosmological speculation and
(b) to study Peirce’s ideas on probability and chance in the context of contemporary
philosophy of science, so as to show the pioneering character of Peirce’s Tychism
in relation to the idea of indeterminacy of Quantum Mechanics (Sfendoni-Mentzou
1980).
The continuation of this valuable work can be found in D. Sfendoni-Mentzou’s
paper “The Dynamic Character of C. S. Peirce’s Pragmatic Theory of Meaning”
(in Greek) published in Philosophia in 1982. In this paper, the author explores the
formulation of Peirce’s late pragmaticism, in which the concepts of purpose and
possible outcomes become central. The author suggests that these two notions ascribe
to the theory of meaning a dynamic character, in which Thirdness, and in particular the
concepts of generality and potentiality, come to have a fundamental role (SfendoniMentzou 1982).
As a result, in the academic year 1982-83 she introduced courses on Peirce’s
pragmatic theory of meaning and truth in the program of the Department of Philosophy
of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Since 1996, she has claimed in her
* Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece [[email protected]]
1. This research has been co–financed by the European Union (European Social Fund – ESF) and Greek
national funds through the Operational Program “Education and Lifelong Learning” of the National
Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) – Research Funding Program: THALIS – UOA “Aspects and
Prospects of Realism in the Philosophy of Science and Mathematics” (APRePoSMa).
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introductory graduate course on “Theories of Knowledge” that Peirce’s pragmatism
represents a third and more fruitful solution to the traditional opposition between the
rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of the British empiricists.
In 1982, two of Peirce’s short essays are translated and published in Greek in the
journal Signum, i.e. the “Logic and Liberal Education” by Pantelis Nikolakopoulos
and the “Definition and Function of a University” by Konstantinos Antonopoulos.
Two years later, in 1984, D. Sfendoni-Mentzou publishes in Greek the first complete
study on Peirce’s pragmatism, under the title The Philosophy of C. S. Peirce’s
Pragmatism. How to Make Our Ideas Clear (Sfendoni-Mentzou 1984). This also
includes her translation into Greek of Peirce’s fundamental article, “How to Make
Our Ideas Clear.”
Another important paper on Peirce appears in 1986 by D. Sfendoni-Mentzou
under the title “C. S. Peirce’s Theory of Signs: Semiotics, Ontology, Hermeneutics”
(in Greek), Proceedings of the 1st Philosophical Workshop: The Philosophical
Hermeneutics. In this paper the author shows that Peirce’s theory of signs enters every
aspect of his work and investigates the emphasis given by Peirce to the “interpretation
community” as a “collective knowing subject” (Sfendoni-Mentzou 1986).
In 1989 Sfendoni-Mentzou participates in the C. S. Peirce Harvard Sesquicentennial
Congress with two papers. The first one is “The Role of Potentiality in Peirce’s
Tychism and in Contemporary Discussions in Quantum Mechanics and Microphysics”
(Sfendoni-Mentzou 1993a). In this paper, Peirce’s views on probability and chance,
which she studied in detail in her doctoral dissertation, are presented in relation to
Quantum Mechanics and Aristotle’s idea of potentiality. The second one is “A Response
to D. Savan’s ‘Peirce and Idealism’” (Sfendoni-Mentzou 1995). In her remarks on
D. Savan’s position on the issue of Peirce’s idealism as well as in her article, “Towards
a Potential-Pragmatic Account of Peirce’s Theory of Truth” (Sfendoni-Mentzou 1991),
one can find her over-all approach to Peirce’s theory of truth considered in close
connection to that of reality.
Since 1997 D. Sfendoni-Mentzou has published a variety of papers in Greek and
international scientific journals and collective volumes where she analyses her ideas
on Peirce’s pragmatic-realist philosophy. Her sophisticated version of realism is
enriched with Aristotle’s conception of the physical world and scientific knowledge.
In all these papers she argues for a more spherical and fertile picture of the scientific
enterprise as an answer to the anti-realist reading of science. Furthermore, her papers
on Peirce’s idea of abduction, the logic of scientific discovery, and such concepts
as theoretical entities, laws of nature and time, represent a groundbreaking work
in Greek language on the relevance of Peirce for the philosophy of science. This
work began with her “Is there a Logic of Scientific Discovery? A Pragmatic-Realist
Account of Rationality in Physical Theory,” which appeared in the Proceedings of
the First Greek-Soviet Symposium on Science and Society, and “Realism and AntiRealism in the Philosophy of Science” which appeared in the Proceeding of the
Beijing International Conference.
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In 2009 Stathis Psillos’ paper “An Explorer upon Untrodden Ground: Peirce on
Abduction” analyses Peirce’s two-dimensional approach to reasoning and focuses in
particular on that specific form of inference called abduction (Psillos 2009).
On this basis, my paper “The Abductive Character of Science and the Dynamics
of Discovery: Aristotle, Charles S. Peirce and Ernan McMullin” attempts to argue that
the method of abduction, already discussed by Aristotle, is developed on different
grounds and in a dynamic way by Peirce. This original form of reasoning has the
peculiarity of being explanatory and fertile, qualities strongly connected to innovation
in the scientific enterprise. Ernan McMullin borrows this idea from Peirce and goes on
to establish his sophisticated version of abduction, which he calls retroduction, a term
borrowed again from Peirce. McMullin explains that retroduction is the reasoning
moving from observed effects backwards to the unobserved and often unobservable
causes of the effects. This ampliative reasoning is the keystone of McMullin’s
retroductive strategy in his attempt to develop a fruitful method for finding what lies
behind the phenomena (Pechlivanidis 2011).
The ideas developed in this paper are included in my doctoral dissertation “Ernan
McMullin’s Scientific Realism and its Aristotelian Origins” published in 2013 in Greek
under the title Aristotle and Ernan McMullin: Tracking the Roots of Contemporary
Scientific Realism (Pechlivanidis 2013a).
Some years before, Aristides Gogoussis’ doctoral dissertation “The Problem of
Engineering Design of Operation in Philosophy of Technology and Contribution to its
Resolution” analyses Henry Paynter’s proposal and development of the bond-graphs
approach to system dynamics modeling. In his work, Gogoussis argues that Paynter
is deeply influenced by Peirce. In particular, he claimed that Peirce’s realization of
the importance of the triadic structural occurrence as a source of great potential for
variety in nature led Paynter to the conception of two complementary power nodes
(Gogoussis 2002). One year later, Grigoris Karafyllis publishes in Greek a paper on
Peirce’s and Dewey’s philosophical conceptions of educational theory (Karafyllis
2003).
In the same period there are also some significant studies on Peirce and language.
The linguist Tassos Christidis offers an important account of Peirce’s semiotics.
Maria Theodoropoulou remarks that “Peirce’s semiotic taxonomic distinction into
index, icon, and symbol, and the corresponding Peircean categories of Firstness,
Secondness, and Thirdness, serve among others as valuable sources from which
Christidis draws critically in order to demonstrate and support his own view about the
nature of language” (Theodoropoulou 2008). In Christidis’ words, “Peirce’s analysis
of signs has been the fullest and deepest account of the phenomenology of semiosis”
(Christidis 2001).
Finally, it is worth mentioning the appearance in 2012 of the 2nd edition of
D. Sfendoni-Mentzou’s book Pragmatism – Rationalism – Empiricism. Theories
of Knowledge (1st ed. 2004), perhaps the most important study on Peirce published
in Greek. The book focuses on Charles S. Peirce’s pragmatic theory of knowledge,
meaning and truth, on Peirce’s critic of traditional epistemological systems of
Rationalism and Empiricism, and on his contribution in providing a solution to
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the problem of knowledge. This book is an original and valuable contribution to
the Greek and international research on Peirce as it sheds light on Peirce’s realism
in its connection with his theory of knowledge and his deep affinity to Aristotle
(Pechlivanidis 2013b).
References
Christidis A. F., (2001), “The Nature of Language” (in Greek), in A history of Greek
Language: From the beginnings to Late Antiquity, Thessaloniki, The Institute of
Modern Greek Studies (Manolis Triandaphyllidis Foundation), 21-52.
Gogoussis A., (2002), The Problem of Engineering Design of Operation in Philosophy
of Technology and Contribution to its Resolution, Doctoral Thesis (in Greek),
Thessaloniki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Karafyllis G., (2003), “Philosophical Conceptions of Charles Peirce and John Dewey
for Educational Theory” (in Greek), Social Sciences Tribune 20 (36), 127-56.
Papanoutsos E., (1924), Pragmatism or Humanism: Elaboration and Criticism of the
Theories of a Great Current of Contemporary Philosophy (in Greek), Athens,
Grammata editions.
Pechlivanidis C. A., (2011), “The Abductive Character of Science and the Dynamics
of Discovery: Aristotle, Charles S. Peirce and Ernan McMullin” (in Greek),
History, Philosophy and Didactics of Sciences 23, 127-37.
― (2013a), Aristotle and Ernan McMullin. Tracking the Roots of Contemporary
Scientific Realism (in Greek), Thessaloniki, Ziti editions.
― (2013b), Review of: D. Sfendoni-Mentzou, Pragmatism – Rationalism –
Empiricism. Theories of Knowledge (in Greek, 2nd upgraded and enlarged edition,
Thessaloniki, Ziti editions, 2012), Philosophia 43, 487-88.
Psillos S., (2009), “An Explorer upon Untrodden Ground: Peirce on Abduction,” in
Handbook of the History of Logic, Vol. 10 (Inductive Logic), Amsterdam, Elsevier
BV, 117-51.
Sfendoni-Mentzou D., (1980), Probability and Chance in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce,
Doctoral Thesis (in Greek), Thessaloniki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
― (1982), “The Dynamic Character of C. S. Peirce’s Pragmatic Theory of Meaning”
(in Greek), Philosophia 12, 359-78.
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― (1984), The Philosophy of C. S. Peirce’s Pragmatism. How to Make Our Ideas
Clear (in Greek), Thessaloniki, Sakkoula Publications.
― (1986), “C. S. Peirce’s Theory of Signs: Semiotics, Ontology, Hermeneutics”
(in Greek), Proceedings of the 1st Philosophical Workshop: The Philosophical
Hermeneutics, Thessaloniki, Greek Philosophical Society & Department of
Philosophy-A.U.Th, 130-39.
― (1991), “Towards a Potential-Pragmatic Account of C. S. Peirce’s Theory of Truth,”
Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society 27 ( 1), 27-77.
― (1992), “Is there a Logic of Scientific Discovery? A Pragmatic-Realist Account of
Rationality in Physical Theory,” in Historical Types of Rationality. Proceedings
of the First Greek-Soviet Symposium on Science and Society, Vol. VIII, Athens,
National Technical University of Athens, 239-50.
― (1993a), “The Role of Potentiality in C. S. Peirce’s Tychism and in Contemporary
Discussions in Quantum Mechanics and Micro-Physics,” in Charles S. Peirce and
the Philosophy of Science: Papers from the 1989 Harvard Conference, Tuscaloosa,
The University of Alabama Press, 246-61.
― (1993b), “The Reality of the Unobservable in Physical Theory: An Account of
C. S. Peirce’s Pragmatic Realism,” Reflexαo 57, 103-18.
― (1995), “Peirce and Idealism: Response to Savan,” in Peirce and Contemporary
Thought. Philosophical Inquiries, New York, Fordham University Press, 329-38.
― (1996), “The Reality of Thirdness: A Potential-Pragmatic Account of Laws of
Nature,” in Realism and Anti-realism in the Philosophy of Science, BSPS, Vol.
169, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 75-97.
― (1997), “Peirce on Continuity and Laws of Nature,” in Transactions of the Charles
S. Peirce Society, Vol. 33, No. 3, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 591-645.
― (2008), “C. S. Peirce and Aristotle on Time,” COGNITIO. Revista de Filosofia
9 (2), 261-80.
― (2012), Pragmatism – Rationalism – Empiricism. Theories of Knowledge (in
Greek), 2st upgraded and enlarged edition (1st ed. 2004), Thessaloniki, Ziti editions.
Theodoropoulou M., (2008), Light und Wärme. In Memory of A. F. Christidis (in
Greek and in English), Thessaloniki, Centre for the Greek Language.
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COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Fernando Zalamea*
Peirce’s Reception in Colombia
As has happened in Latin America, and more generally in the Hispanic World,
pragmatism came to our countries mainly through William James and John Dewey
(particularly, through his influence in education). Studies in Spanish on Peirce were
scarce and superficial until the end of the 20th century. The situation in Colombia
follows that pattern. The first valuable Colombian study on Peirce came from Mariluz
Restrepo (1993), a fine introduction to Peirce’s semeiotics through the unfolding of the
categories, sign classifications, and connections with realism. The book nevertheless
remained isolated and not much emerged from it.
The slow development of a Colombian school on Peirce began with Fernando
Zalamea’s Peircean Seminars (1996-1999) given at the Universidad Nacional de
Colombia. Following the first specialized article on Peirce’s mathematical logic
produced in Latin America (Zalamea 1993), the Seminars gathered an important
number of young scholars which would foster the growth of Peirce studies in Colombia.
Zalamea centered his research on existential graphs (1997) and the continuum (2001),
converging finally in the first international monograph (2012) which studies the
mathematical entanglement of both the continuum and the graphs.
Meanwhile, Zalamea’s influence spread out (eleven dissertations have been
written on Peirce), and students and colleagues began their own path, with the crucial
appearances of Eugenio Andrade (1999, 2000) in biological thought, Douglas Niño
(2000) in semiotics, and Arnold Oostra (2001, 2004) in logic. Zalamea donated
his Peircean books and microfilms to the Universidad Nacional, in order to create
the Acervo Peirceano (acervopeirceano.org) (1999), possibly the largest collection
specialized on Peirce in Latin America. Further Seminars and Colloquiums were
organized since the creation of the Acervo Peirceano, with visits by foreign scholars,
as Jaime Nubiola, Giovanni Maddalena, Rosa Mayorga, Nicholas Guardiano, among
others.
The main Colombian Peirce scholars continued their work in the 2000-2010
decade along diverse paths. Zalamea (2000, 2006) profited from continuity and
triadicity to propose novel perspectives on Latin American cultural studies. Niño
(2008) wrote an extended chronological and critical doctoral dissertation on the
development of abduction, without doubt the deeper study available on the theme
at an international level. Andrade (2007, 2008, 2009) advanced in his construction
of a theory of biosemiotics based on Peirce’s categories. And, above all, Oostra
founded in 2007 his Seminario Permanente Peirce at the Universidad del Tolima
(where fifteen dissertations have been devoted to Peirce’s thought), where his school
on Peirce’s mathematical logic (2006, 2008) has flourished (binary connectives,
triadic logic, diagrams, intuitionism, existential graphs), to become the leading World
* Universidad Nacional de Colombia [www.docentes.unal.edu.co/fzalameat/]
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center specialized in Peirce’s graphs (Oostra’s 2010-2011, invention/discovery of the
intuitionistic existential graphs being a major breakthrough).
Time was ripe to organize the community and Zalamea created the Centro de
Sistemática Peirceana (CSP) in 2007. The CSP has oriented its main task to the
production of a yearly journal devoted to Peirce, the Cuadernos de Sistemática
Peirceana (pdfs available at acervopeirceano.org). The first five numbers of the
journal (Zalamea & Oostra 2009-2013) have been written in Spanish by the local
Colombian community of the CSP: Eugenio Andrade (biology), Gonzalo Baquero
(philosophy), Carlos Garzón (philosophy), Lorena Ham (linguistics), Richard Kalil
(philosophy), Jaime Lozano (economy), Alejandro Martín (mathematics), Douglas
Niño (semiotics), Arnold Oostra (mathematics), Roberto Perry† (phonetics), Laura
Pinilla (medicine), Miguel Ángel Riaño (philosophy), Edison Torres (philosophy),
Fernando Zalamea (mathematics). One can consider a small feat the organization of
such a multiverse community and its capacity to maintain a journal devoted specifically
to Peirce (a unique fact, since even the Transactions extends itself towards general
American philosophy). In contraposition with the initial local perspective, the next
five numbers of the Cuadernos will be oriented to articles by the global community
(many languages represented, not just English) around monographic numbers: Esthetics
(2014), Mathematics (2015), Existential Graphs (2016), etc.
Peirce would certainly have been intrigued to see a devoted community working
on his heritage in a remote country that he never would have dreamed of.
References
(selected Peirce Publications produced by Colombian scholars)
Andrade E., (1999), “Natural selection and Maxwell demon’s: a Semiotic approach
to Evolutionary Biology,” Semiotica 127 (1) (special issue Biosemiotica, eds.
Hoffmeyer & Emmeche), 133-49.
—(2000), Los demonios de Darwin: Semiótica y Termodinámica de la Evolución
biológicas, Bogotá, Unibiblos.
— (2007), “The Semiotic Framework of Evolutionary and Developmental Biology,”
Biosystems 90 (2), 389-404.
— (2008), “From a dynamical to a semiotic account of emergence,” Cybernetics and
Human Knowing 15 (3-4), 87-96 (http://acervopeirceano.org/articulos-en-linea/).
—(2009), La ontogenia del pensamiento evolutivo, Bogotá, Universidad Nacional de
Colombia.
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Niño D., (2000), “El enfermar como semiosis. Contribución para una crítica lógicosemiótica de la práctica médica,” M. A. Thesis, Bogotá, Universidad Nacional de
Colombia.
— (2008), “Abducting Abduction. Avatares de la comprensión de la abducción de
Charles S. Peirce” (Abducting Abduction. Vicissitudes in the Comprehension of
Charles S. Peirce’s Abduction), Ph.D. Thesis, Bogotá, Universidad Nacional de
Colombia.
Oostra A., (2001), “Simetría y Lógica: la notación de Peirce para los 16 conectivos
binarios” (with Mireya García – Jhon Fredy Gómez), Memorias del XII Encuentro
de Geometría y sus Aplicaciones, Bogotá, Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, 1-26.
— (2004), “La notación diagramática de C. S. Peirce para los conectivos
proposicionales binarios,” Revista de la Academia Colombiana de Ciencias
28 (106), 57-70, (http://acervopeirceano.org/articulos-en-linea/).
— (2006), “Peirce y la matemática,” Anthropos 212, 151-59, (http://acervopeirceano.
org/articulos-en-linea/).
— (2008), “Una reseña de la lógica matemática de Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914),”
REVISTA Universidad EAFIT 44 (150), 9-20, (http://acervopeirceano.org/articulosen-linea/).
—(2010), “Los gráficos Alfa de Peirce aplicados a la lógica intuicionista,” Cuadernos
de Sistemática Peirceana 2, 25-60.
— (2011), “Gráficos existenciales Beta intuicionistas,” Cuadernos de Sistemática
Peirceana 3, 53-78.
Restrepo M., (1993), Ser-Signo-Interpretante. Filosofía de la representación de
Charles S. Peirce, Bogotá, Significantes de Papel Ediciones.
Zalamea F., (1993), “Una jabalina lanzada hacia el futuro: anticipos y aportes de
C. S. Peirce a la lógica matemática del siglo XX,” Mathesis 9 (4), 391-404.
—(1997), Lógica topológica: una introducción a los gráficos existenciales de
Peirce, Reportes del XV Coloquio Distrital de Matemáticas, Bogotá, Universidad
Nacional de Colombia.
—(2000), Ariel y Arisbe. Evolución y evaluación del concepto de América Latina en
el siglo XX: una visión crítica desde la lógica contemporánea y la arquitectónica
pragmática de C. S. Peirce, Bogotá, Convenio Andrés Bello.
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—(2001), El continuo peirceano, Bogotá, Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
—(2006), Signos triádicos. Lógicas – literaturas – artes.
latinoamericanos, México, Mathesis.
Nueve
estudios
—(2012), Peirce’s Logic of Continuity. A Conceptual and Mathematical Approach,
Boston, Docent Press.
Zalamea F. – Oostra A., (2009-2013), Cuadernos de Sistemática Peirceana (Fernando
Zalamea – Arnold Oostra, editors), Vol. 1 (2009), Vol. 2 (2010), Vol. 3 (2011),
Vol. 4 (2012), Vol. 5 (2013).
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Shigeyuki Atarashi*
Peirce’s Reception in Japan
In Japan, the number of investigations of Charles Sanders Peirce’s philosophy has
recently increased. In this article, we can focus only on a few instances of the research
movement in Japan that has put Peirce’s ideas at its center. However, even such a
limited survey shows that Peirce’s work has affected various Japanese academic areas.
In this paper we talk about three types of Japanese studies of Peirce’s pragmatism:
1. discussions of Peirce’s theory of abduction,
2. examinations of Peirce’s theory of signs,
3. cosmological considerations of Peirce’s pragmatism.
1. Discussions of Abduction
Peirce regards not only induction but also abduction as a synthetic inference to draw
a conclusion concerning a fact not involved in the premises. Basically, researchers use
the following formula for abduction:
The surprising fact, C, is observed; But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true (EP2: 231).
This style of inference is the fallacy of affirming the consequent. On the other
hand, Peirce asserts a perceptual judgment is an abductive one. Then, a perceptual
judgment is an antecedent of some implication and followed by a surprising fact,
which is its consequent. But we cannot specify what kind of fact it is from the form
of the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Are we able to comprehend the nature of
an abductive inference only by means of the fallacy of affirming the consequent?
Japanese researchers, with this fundamental problem of abduction in mind, are
elucidating the logical structure of abduction by throwing light on the conditions that
enable abduction to fulfill its role in inquiry. Some researchers lay more stress on the
abductive function of adopting hypotheses to explain why observed facts occurred.
Others focus on a different formula for abduction:
M is, for instance, PI, PII, PIII, and PIV;
S is PI, PII, PIII, and PIV:
S is M. (CP1: 559)
According to this, we discover strong similarities between two objects and grasp
one with the concept applied to the other in abduction. This indicates the way in which
we form a perceptual judgment through an abductive process. (Atarashi 2011; Ito
1985; Murakami 2012; Yonemori 2007; Akagawa 2011; Muranaka 2006; Muranaka
2010; Muranaka 2012).
* Doshisha University, Japan [[email protected]]
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There are also studies that focus on how the notions of abduction can be applied
in particular fields. One of these aims to introduce abductive inquiries into learning
activities at elementary or middle schools (Sugita – Kuwabara 2013; Yunoki 2007).
In accordance with the above formula of abduction, first of all, children have to
be aware of surprising facts. The kind of facts that is surprising depends on the
child’s interest. The gaps between the child’s knowledge and the facts observed by
the child make them surprising. But in the Japanese system of education, teachers
must conduct classes with textbooks specified by their schools in fixed classrooms
(in Japan, children study in one classroom and do not move to other classrooms,
except for special subjects, for instance, music and physical education). It is necessary
for the teacher to direct children’s attentions toward particular facts that are worth
examining in terms of their curriculum. Because of this, the teacher, for example,
occasionally takes the children out of their classroom and stimulates them so that
they can concentrate on the facts being studied. By asking the children why a fact
occurred, the teacher encourages them to think about hypotheses to explain it, i.e.,
the antecedents of certain implications that would be followed by the fact as their
consequent. It is important to recognize that there are several possible antecedents. In
their classroom, children are divided in small groups, present their own opinions in
the groups, and take ideas that seem to be plausible from them. The teacher advises
that they should trace the processes of deriving the fact in question from their chosen
ideas step by step. Then, in front of the whole class, the children give presentations
about them to other members and discuss various possibilities with each other from
wider viewpoints, so they may arrive at a hypothesis with which all of them finally
agree. Here, it is crucial that they have the perspective of fallibilism. They examine
more closely the connection between a hypothesis and a fact and search for the other
consequences from the hypothesis to confirm its validity. If they do not successfully
accomplish this investigation, then they will find themselves in a situation where
they need to think of a new hypothesis for the fact. Such an abductive inquiry is
very difficult for children and takes a lot of time. But learning activities based on
abduction are meaningful especially in Japanese schools because the ways of teaching
adopted in most Japanese schools is basically indoctrination, which tends to suppress
children’s imaginative ideas. From an educational point of view, therefore, abduction
is the foundation of children’s heuristic learning activities, and children can cultivate
their abilities to create new ideas on the basis of acquired knowledge by studying the
structure of abductive inferences and using them practically.
2. Examinations of Peirce’s Theory of Signs
Other researchers are more interested in Peirce’s theory of signs (Arima 2014;
Yonemori 1981). Some of them compare Peirce’s conceptions of signs with Saussure’s
and reveal the features peculiar to Peirce’s theory of signs. Peirce’s classification of
signs is more exhaustive and comprehensive. According to one researcher, Peirce
did not introduce the distinction between langue and parole into his theory of signs
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(Maeda 2006). But this researcher regards Legisign as langue because a Legisign is
a sign that possesses a potentiality as a law. This researcher incorporates parole into
Peirce’s classification of signs by identifying Dicisigns that are propositions describing
facts as a realization of Legisigns through Symbols and Rhemes that represent certain
kinds of possible objects. He suggests that Peirce’s theory of signs provides us with
an important perspective on the treatment of difficulties which Saussure confronted
concerning the notion of langue.
Another researcher points out that one of the differences between Peirce’s theory
of signs and Saussure’s is as follows: Peirce’s conceptions of signs can be applied not
only to human activities but also to semiotic processes of other creatures and physical
phenomena, whereas Saussure’s semiotics focuses on the developments of human
languages and human cultures (Egawa 2011). Since Peirce terms his own position as
an evolutionary cosmology, Peirce’s theory of signs is a cosmological interpretation
of semiotic events occurring in the universe. This researcher concludes that Peirce
tried to characterize objects represented by signs as evolutionary realities by grasping
the dynamic aspects of the interrelations of signs, objects, and the interpretants that
combine them.
Other researchers scrutinize the effect of Peirce’s theory of signs on the theory of
the photograph. According to Peirce, a photograph is an index, and it is a sign that
represents its object by virtue of being connected with it as a matter of fact. In other
words, a photograph represents its object on the basis of the fact that it is the effect
of light reflecting from the object. But some photographs convey no information on
their objects and do not play the role as index any longer. Is Peirce’s understanding
of the photograph wrong? One researcher replies “no” and gives the definition
of a photograph as follows: a photograph is an image which retains the indexical
function (Ogura 2013). From this standpoint, we may say that digital technology
deprives photographs of indexicality. For instance, computer-generated images can
be produced without physical causal connections with the objects they represent
irrespective of whether such objects actually exist. Thanks to digital technology, we
are able to create computer-generated images as if they were photographs. In the
digital age, some photographs maintain no indexicality but work as icons: in fact,
Peirce characterizes an icon as a sign which denotes its object by virtue of its own
characteristics independent of the reality of the object. Since Peirce insists that an
index involves a sort of icon, an iconic computer-generated image is to be regarded
as a degenerated form of photograph. Thus, Peirce’s theory of signs still presents an
effective perspective on photographs and their surroundings in the digital age.
3. Cosmological Considerations of Peirce’s Pragmatism.
Peirce’s theory of the universe is interpreted as an evolutionary cosmology.
Researchers argue that Peirce’s view is characterized by 1) the plastic notion of
the universe as the product of growth, 2) tychism, which means that the growing
universe involves the action of absolute chance and is freed from complete regularity,
3) objective idealism, which equates matter with effete mind and identifies rigidly
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fixed habits as physical laws, 4) synechism, which asserts that the evolution of the
universe is the process of the growth of a continuum where a new continuum comes
to being through a discontinuity that occurs in the existing continuum by chance, and
5) agapism, which emphasizes the circular movement of creative love in evolution
where organisms live in harmony with other organisms by sacrificing their own
perfection to the perfectionment of other organisms (Atarashi 2011; Ito 2006). Hence,
Peirce’s evolutionary cosmology is the theory of the evolutionary growth of the
universe from its birth on the basis of the logic of the operation of absolute chance and
habits formation. As Peirce’s theory of categories is grounded in his logic of relatives,
Peirce stresses the logical structures of all events in the evolutionary universe. We
may call Peirce’s evolutionary cosmology the metaphysics of the logic of evolution.
Accordingly, in the light of Peircean cosmology, we may state that logic is not only
the process of reasoning but also the fundamental mode of being and the logic of
modality lies at the root of the evolutionary universe.
References
(all of the following books are written in Japanese)
Akagawa M., (2011), “The Logic of Abduction,” Journal of the University of
Marketing and Distribution Sciences: Economics, Informatics & Policy Studies
24 (1), 115-130.
Arima M., (2014), Peircean Thought: Semiotics and Cognitive Linguistics, Tokyo,
Iwanami Shoten.
Atarashi S., (2011), Peirce’s Pragmatism: The Logical Structures of Relation,
Evolution, and Argument, Kyoto, Koyo Shobo.
Egawa A., (2011), “On the Contemporary Significance of Peirce’s Semiotics,” Studies
in Critical Rationalism 3 (2), 4-14.
Ito K., (1985), Peirce’s Pragmatism: The Development of the Fallibilistic Theory of
Knowledge, Tokyo, Keiso Shobo.
Ito K., (2006), Peirce’s Cosmology, Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten.
Maeda H., (2006), “Saussure and Peirce,” Voyage into History, Literature, and
Thought 60, 108-114, Tokyo, Shinshokan.
Murakami T., (2012), Ethics of Abduction: Poe, Peirce, Heidegger, Yokohama,
Shumpusha.
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Muranaka T., (2006), “C. S. Peirce’s Argument on the Inquiry and Features of Logical
Abduction,” Socio-Environmental Studies 11, 129-139.
— (2010), “On the Strategy for Improvement of the Conventional Ways of Thinking,”
Kanazawa Journal of Philosophy and Philosophical Anthropology 1, 59-74.
—(2012), “On the Considerations That Should Be Balanced in the Process of
Abduction,” Kanazawa Journal of Philosophy and Philosophical Anthropology
3, 51-62.
Ogura K., (2013), “The Photograph That Loses Its Function as the Index: According
to C. S. Peirce,” Seijo Bigaku Bijutsushi 19, 63-77.
Okada K., (1998), Peirce, Tokyo, Shimizu Shoin.
Sugita N. – Kuwabara T., (2013), “Improving the Teaching Strategy of the Social
Studies Class of an Elementary School through Innovating of Setting up and
Examining the Hypothesis,” Bulletin of Center for Teacher Education and
Development 3, 107-116.
Yonemori Y., (1981), Peirce’s Semiotics, Tokyo, Keiso Shobo.
— (2007), Abduction: The Logic of Hypothesis and Discovery, Tokyo, Keiso Shobo.
Yunoki T., (2007), “A Consideration of Abduction as a Method of Inference for
Scientific Inquiry,” Journal of Research in Science Education 48 (2), 103-113.
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Catherine Legg*
Peirce’s Reception in Australia and New Zealand
An early Peirce enthusiast was Douglas Gasking, who taught from the mid-1940s
to the mid-1970s at University of Melbourne. Gasking was particularly interested in
applying Peircean ideas to epistemology, and his “Inductive and Deductive Arguments”
(delivered at the NZ Division of the Australasian Association of Philosophy conference
in 1972) discusses Peirce’s famous bean-in-the-bag examples in detail. Gasking was
also an early noter of Peirce’s influence on the later Wittgenstein through Ramsey (in
“Wittgenstein’s Influence” which alas remains unpublished). The introduction to a
posthumous Gasking anthology states, “In his last weeks Douglas was still reading
his beloved ‘Charlie Peirce’” (Gasking 1996, 13). Gasking’s interest in Peirce was
furthered at University of Melbourne through the 1970s and 1980s by his student Len
O’Neill, who consciously entitled his long-running, widely-esteemed second-year
epistemology course “Philosophy of Inquiry,” and published a discussion of Peirce’s
claim that hypotheses that predict new (as opposed to known) data are more valuable
(O’Neill 1993).
Meanwhile, the trail-blazing New Zealand philosopher Arthur Prior, who taught
at University of Canterbury from the mid-1940s until in 1958 he departed for the UK,
was one of the first English-speaking logicians to appreciate the true scope and depth
of Peirce’s logical contribution. The mere two published papers which Prior explicitly
dedicated to discussing Peirce (Prior 1958; 1964) belie his wide reading in Peirce’s
papers, which contributed much to the development of his innovative tense logic. In
particular, Prior saw his modal formalization of branching time as a way to work out
Peirce’s philosophical ideas on chance, necessity and human freedom.
Through the 1980s and 1990s Maurita Harney, who studied at University of
Melbourne before completing a PhD in philosophy of language at Australian National
University, took a pioneering interest in Peirce’s semiotics. She used it to explore
phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches to philosophy of mind, language,
and computing, and put it to innovative use teaching philosophy of management at
Swinburne University of Technology. Most recently she has been contributing to the
emerging area of biosemiotics, drawing inspiration from Peirce and Merleau-Ponty.
The 1990s saw the emergence of some dedicated Peirce scholars in Australia:
Anne Freadman, Professor of French at the Universities of Queensland and then
Melbourne, measured Peirce’s semiotics up against structuralist and post-structuralist
thought in her rich book (Freadman 2004). Music scholar Naomi Cumming became
fascinated by the application of Peirce’s semeiotics to the expression of personality in
performance, and published a fine book (Cumming 2000) before dying at the tragically
young age of 38. Meanwhile Catherine Legg, studying realism with “hard-headed”
Australian realists at Australian National University, became convinced that Peirce’s
scholastic realism could very usefully open up debates in this area, completing her
* University of Waikato, New Zealand [[email protected]]
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PhD on Peirce’s “Modes of Being” and since publishing a number of further papers
on scholastic realism and iconicity (Legg 2008). In the early 2000s a further Peirce
scholar was imported from the UK by Macquarie University: Albert Atkin, who
obtained his PhD under Christopher Hookway and has subsequently published on
Peircean philosophy of language (Atkin 2008).
Through the mid-1990s to the present day, Australia has seen a modest flourishing of
what is now known as neo-pragmatism, mainly centered around University of Sydney
and the Australian philosophers Huw Price (who became interested in pragmatism
through anti-realist musings about time) and David Macarthur (who wrote a PhD
on pragmatism at Harvard under Hilary Putnam). This has led to some discussion of
Peirce as part of broader engagements concerning representationalism, expressivism,
normativity and naturalism. Finally at University of Sydney one must also mention
Paul Redding, whose wide-ranging and impressively thorough work in the history of
modern philosophy, with particular focus on the 18th and 19th century figures of Kant
and Hegel, has inevitably led him to consider Peirce, most notably in Redding (2003).
Although I think it is far to say that in what natives of this part of the world call
“downunder,” Peirce is still a minority interest, appreciation of his work appears to be
growing slowly but surely.
References
Atkin A., (2008), “Peirce’s Final Account of Signs and the Philosophy of Language,”
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 44 (1), 63-85.
Cumming N., (2000), The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification,
Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.
Freadman A., (2004), The Machinery of Talk: Charles Peirce and the Sign Hypothesis,
Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Gasking D., (1996), Language, Logic and Causation: Philosophical Writings of
Douglas Gasking, I. T. Oakley – L. J. O’Neill (eds), Melbourne, Melbourne
University Press.
Legg C., (2008), “The Problem of the Essential Icon,” American Philosophical
Quarterly 45 (3), 207-32.
O’Neill L., (1993), “Peirce and the Nature of Evidence,” Transactions of the Charles
S. Peirce Society 29 (2), 211-24.
Prior A. N., (1958), “Peirce’s Axioms for Propositional Calculus,” The Journal of Symbolic Logic 23 (2), 135-36.
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― (1964), “The Algebra of the copula,” Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders
Peirce, Second Series, E. C. Moore – R. S. Robin (eds), Amherst, University of
Massachusetts Press, 79-94.
Redding P., (2003), “Hegel and Peircean Abduction,” European Journal of Philosophy
11 (3), 295-313.
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Essays
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Serge Grigoriev*
Normativity and Reality in Peirce’s Thought
The purpose of the essay is to explore some points pertaining to Peirce’s
conception of reality, with a special emphasis on the themes developed in his later
writings (such as normativity, common sense, and the logic of signs). The resulting
proposal advances a preliminary reading of some key issues (arising in connection
with Peirce’s discussions of reality and truth), configured with a view to the socially
sustainable, coordinated practices of inquiry that are intrinsically embedded in the
biological and cultural dynamics of the evolving sense of reasonableness in human
practical and cognitive enterprises.
When philosophers talk about “reality,” it usually helps to distinguish between
some customary senses of the term, so as to avoid the unnecessary confusion. The
following two conceptions deserve a mention here on the account of their customary
meanings: reality as the totality of all that is or may be, regardless of our ability to
experience it; and reality as the sum total of our actual and possible experiences – let’s
call it “phenomenal reality.” There is a third sense of reality, which is of principal
concern to us here – because it is the one most congenial to Peirce – namely, reality as
the aspect of the world represented in true beliefs which the inquiry ultimately aims
at. This brief essay will not bother much with the totality of what may be “out there,”
apart from all possible experience,1 hence, its primary task consists in clearing up the
distinction between the third sense of reality, which happens to be of a special interest
to pragmatists, and the phenomenal reality.
The latter may be conceptualized as a largely informal and abstract projection,
depicting the field of conceivably possible experiences based on the sampling of
actual experiences that have been registered thus far. Phenomenal reality presents
itself in the form of experiences, and is, therefore, always at least partially constituted
by thought. This thought, however, is usually neither deliberate nor rigorously
structured: experiences just strike us as being roughly of a certain kind. Because of
this, phenomenal reality is often simply thought of as “external reality” – that which
impinges, or is capable of impinging, on us by way of experience. As such, it is
determinable in countless ways, yet it is never fully determinate.2 Reality in the sense
pursued here, on the other hand, is something deliberately constructed in the light of
inputs from the phenomenal world, so as to produce the sense of a reasonable totality.
* Ithaca College, NY [[email protected]]
1. Peirce’s position is more radical in that he equates cognizability and being (W 2,208, 1868). The
upshot remains the same: namely that we need not and cannot concern ourselves with the uncognizable.
2. When Peirce says that what he means by the “real” is merely a demonstrative sign pointing back to
the familiar world (W 4,250, 1881), his use of “real” pertains to what is here designated as phenomenal
or external reality.
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Accordingly, when one uses the term “real” correlatively with this latter sense of
“reality,” one does not mean something merely external or perceptible; instead, the
meaning of the word “real,” here, can be more properly assimilated to that of “true,”
with the proviso that, because our grasp of reality and truth is never complete, what is
meant thereby is something like “roughly true.”
Reality, then, is a rationalization of the field of experience, represented in true
beliefs which together provide the direction for reasonable thought. Reasonable
thought, in turn, is the kind of thought that represents the world as intelligible or,
perhaps more precisely, hospitable to the purposeful existence of reasoning beings.
Such a view, moreover, is congruent with the positions advanced in the familiar
Peircean literature.
Peirce himself, of course, directly challenged the assumption that reality must
be understood as independent of thought (CP 5.430, 1905); in his view, we can
only know the “human aspect” of things, and that is “all the universe is for us”
(Peirce 1911, 43).3 That reality must be further understood as an intended product
of constructive thought is suggested, for example, by Rosenthal’s discussion of
the distinction between occurrence and fact (1994, 5-6), where facts emerge as the
result of a deliberate analysis of occurrences. Reality, then, as Rosenthal explains,
is constituted as a consistent system of facts (ibid., 2-3), i.e., reality is ultimately
existence as analyzed. When Rosenthal says that the “world is dependent upon the
meaning system that grasps in a way in which reality as independent is not” (ibid., 7)
and is, ultimately, the “ideal of a complete synthesis of possible experience” (ibid., 8),
she means by “world” what is here meant by “reality;” and by “reality,” what is here
meant by “phenomenal reality.”
Peirce’s view of fact as something abstracted from experience (CP 6.67, 1898)
is also emphasized by Hookway, who underscores the important and indissoluble
connection between the constitution of facts and the accepted practices of inquiry
in relation to which alone facts can acquire their proper meaning (Hookway 2000,
90-1).4 And a somewhat related point can be made in connection with Misak’s view
that “it is misleading to talk of the truth as being the complete description of the
world” (1991, 149). Moreover, according to Misak, a description merely aspiring to
completeness would not do at all, for not only should the eventually attained belief
“fit harmoniously” with the other parts of our knowledge (2010, 87), such beliefs must
additionally possess epistemic virtues such as “fecundity, simplicity, and the like”
(1991, 82).
Hence, the ultimate description of reality is less about comprehension understood
in terms of coverage, and more about generating a particular style of thought,
distinguished by a number of intellectual virtues. As Peirce puts it: “thought is of the
3. References to Peirce, for the most part, follow the standard format: CP for Collected Papers, W for
Writings: the Chronological Edition, and EP for The Essential Peirce. References to Peirce’s letters to
Lady Welby will be henceforth given as (Peirce, letter’s year, edition page number).
4. Since my choice of terms binds tightly the notions of reality and truth, it may appear to be at odds with
Hookway’s view that we can have truth without reality and reality without truth. (See Hookway 1992,
139.) However, from the context, it seems clear that what Hookway means by reality is phenomenal
reality. Hence he is right: our ultimate conception of reality may contain elements to which no external
experience corresponds (e.g. moral ideals), and there will be parts of our experience that will never
gain sufficient resolution to be counted as part of a determinate conception.
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nature of a sign. In that case, then, if we can find out the right method of thinking and
can follow it out – the right method of transforming signs – then truth can be nothing
more nor less than the last result to which the following out of this method would
ultimately carry us.” (CP 5.553, 1906.)5 Reality, then, may be usefully thought of as
the object of knowledge, with knowledge understood as properly functioning thought,
while the nature of what that means, or what it means to be that, is being worked out
continuously in truth-conducive inquiries.
At the same time, one must not be tempted to expect the eventual absorption of
phenomenal reality into thought. The view defended here is realistic in the sense
indicated by Hausman when he insists that what is real must be “to some extent or in
some way independent of mental construction” (1993, 144). The experience always
contains “the residue of what is never exhausted by interpretation in any finite time”
(ibid., 156). In other words, it always contains the real possibilities of the development
of our present experience in ways that we do not presently anticipate.
1.
Two further ideas need to be introduced at this point. The first is concerned with
the normative themes of Peirce’s later work. Some scholars find his reflections on
the topic too vague to be of any real use, yet Peirce himself considered them to be
incredibly important, and his system without them – radically incomplete (Maddalena
2010, 262). His position is understandable for, without these considerations, it is not
clear what the purpose of inquiry should be, nor what form its final fruits should take.
Logical consistency or rapport with experience may seem like self-evident desiderata;
however, on the one hand, they are insufficient to delimit the ultimately desirable
perspective, and on the other, they are (in turn) also vague – how much consistency
and at what price? What sort of rapport? It seems that such questions can only be
answered or even posed legitimately only in conjunction with some conception of
an ideal form of life, based on and conducive to a certain right manner of thought.
According to Peirce, the purpose of inquiry is to develop “degrees of self-control
unknown to primitive man” (CP 5.511, 1905-8), enabling us to develop appropriate
rules of conduct, and to improve these rules through subsequent criticism (CP 5.533,
1905-8). The end of inquiry, then, must consist in establishing a certain form of life,
a way of thinking and existing in the world in accordance with the best that we know.
But what is best? Self-mastery according to Peirce should be exercised to render
human life “beautiful, admirable” (Peirce 1909, 36). The ground of preference, then,
is ultimately esthetic (ibid.).
Peirce’s definition of esthetic ideal as that which is admirable in itself (CP 1.612,
1903; CP 2.199, 1902) is not immensely helpful; however, he provides us with a
more substantial clue when he describes the sense of esthetic fulfillment in terms
of “intellectual sympathy, a sense that here is a Feeling that one can comprehend, a
reasonable feeling” (CP 5.113, 1903). In fact, along with logic and ethics, esthetic
5. Italics are mine.
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sensibility bears witness to the intrinsic reasonableness of the world, confirming, in
the sensuous modality, our intellectual intuition that “general principles are really
operative in nature” (CP 5.101, 1903).6 Provided this much, it seems possible to credit
Peirce with something like a Kantian view of esthetic ideal.
According to Kant, the esthetic experience of beauty attests to the harmony between
mind and nature (CJ §42, 5:300),7 comprehended in explicitly moral terms. Human
beings want to see some evidence that the universe is responsive to their cognitive
and moral needs (CJ, Introduction, 5, 184), and these needs, in turn, are understood
by Kant primarily in terms of a consistent exercise of moral autonomy. To lead a
dignified existence, we need to act according to a set of rules, which would enable us,
without sacrificing consistency and integrity, to maximize the opportunities for acting
in accordance with our best judgment, instead of merely yielding to the brute force
of contingent circumstances. To the degree that we succeed in actively leading a life
instead of being pushed around by it, we can be said to be free. Accordingly, aesthetic
experience suggests to Kant that the lawfulness of nature may harmonize with our
pursuit of freedom or moral autonomy in accordance with the dictates of our reason
(CJ, Introduction, 5, 176). It is in this sense that nature, through esthetic contemplation,
shows itself to be reasonable. Is it too much of a stretch to think of Peirce’s esthetic
ideal of concrete reasonableness in terms of preconditions for the meaningful exercise
of rational autonomy? If not, then, we must reckon with the esthetic constraint thus
understood in thinking about the shape that our inquiries must take.
And this leads, rather naturally, to the second consideration. Peirce asks: “But what
is esthetically good? Perhaps we may say the full expression of an idea? Thought,
however, is in itself essentially of the nature of a sign. But a sign is not a sign unless it
translates itself into another sign in which it is more fully developed. Thought requires
achievement for its own development, and without this development it is nothing.
Thought must live and grow in incessant new and higher translations, or it proves
itself not to be genuine thought.” (CP 5.594, 1903.) The purpose of rational existence,
then, must be, in part, to create the conditions most favorable to the perpetuation and
development of thought.
Unlike a material object, consciousness per se has no staying power; it cannot
abide. Thought is the primary mode of the endurance of consciousness, and, through
its endurance, thought acquires reality: it begins to matter, begins to generate
consequences. The mode of endurance appropriate to a substance – namely, identity –
in the case of thought is replaced by the mode of endurance appropriate to an event –
namely, continuity (and a generative, dynamic continuity, at that). The mode of the
endurance of thought, and the constitutive condition of its reality, is the mechanism
of representation, which, if understood properly, includes interpretation as one of its
constitutive moments. To continue to exist, in other words, a thought needs to be
carried on, it needs to be put forth, and picked up, and bounced back: the thought
remains real only so long as the thought, or one of its derivations, is in play. This
6. For discussion see Magada-Ward (2003, 220).
7. References to Kant are given by work and section number, following the Academy edition. Critique
of Judgment is abbreviated as CJ, and follows the translation by Werner Pluhar (Hackett, 1987).
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is, in fact, what Gallie once called Peirce’s “most characteristic and fundamental
philosophical insight:” that thought and the sign that expresses it, be it a formula or a
sentence, “is essentially something to be developed, something that requires or calls
for development” (Gallie 1966, 46). To stay alive, a thought needs to be repeated, and,
to be repeated effectively, it needs to be challenged, corrected, amplified, retold…
“There is no exception,” says Peirce, “to the law that every thought-sign is translated
or interpreted in a subsequent one, unless it be that all thought comes to an abrupt and
final end in death.” (W 2,224, 1868.)
The proper business of philosophy, then, is logic broadly construed – that is, the
study of the methods for properly developing the pertinent consequences of signs or
thoughts. Thoughts, in the non-psychological sense of the word, exist in the form of
signs, and a sign, according to Peirce, is “an object which is in relation to its object
on the one hand and to an interpretant on the other in such a way as to bring the
interpretant into a relation to the object, corresponding to its own relation to the
object.” (Peirce 1904, 11.) In other words, the logic of representation that governs the
genesis and circulation of signs incorporates essentially two distinctive yet intertwined
functions: a referential function, insofar as a sign always points to its subject matter,8
and a communicative function, insofar as a sign is always addressed to someone,
calling for a response. Hookway expresses a similar point when he says that there are
two questions with which semiotic concerns itself: how can thoughts and sentences
represent reality, and how can inquirers collaborate within a community (1992, 119)?
2.
The communicative aspect of the problem must be dealt with in the context of what
Peirce calls his “social theory of reality” (CP 6.610, 1893). It is in being corrected
by others that we first encounter the notion that reality is independent of one’s
private opinion, learning, consequently, to associate the idea of truth with that which
“would stand in the long run” in the course of critical public deliberation (W 2,239,
1868). Participation in rational discourse, i.e., in the only form of life that assures to
thought a stable prospect of orderly development, requires an assumption that one
may be willingly compelled to come to an agreement when presented with sufficient
argumentation. Acceptable forms of argumentation, of course, are governed by public
norms; but so are the acceptable forms of evidence. Discourse, as Misak rightly
claims, can only remain rational so long as it remains evidence-sensitive (1991, 60);
and evidence is always evidence not only of something but also for someone prepared
to recognize it as such.
The notion of agreement attained in the process of rational inquiry, in turn, is related
to the distinctly problematic notion of convergence. Thus, Peirce declares: “Different
minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the process of investigation
carries them by a force outside themselves to one and the same conclusion… No
8. My use of the term “subject matter” is meant to closely resemble what Gadamer means by Sache,
i.e., the thing that we are talking about, the shared topic of a communicative episode.
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modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural
bent of mind even, can enable man to escape the predestinate opinion.” (W 3,273,
1878.) Such language is liable to give rise to an idea of an invisible universal guiding
order, which may be interpreted, for example, in terms of a “teleological tendency”
towards “lawfulness and consistency” and “away from fragmentation” (Hausman
1993, 33) – or, say, in terms of “increasingly unified information” (DeMarco 1971,
26) collected by the inherent movement of evolutionary process (Mahowald 1973,
180). It is clear that Peirce was continuously drawn to something of this sort, even
though it may appear as a piece of indefensible cosmological speculation. Some
scholars are more sanguine about accepting Peirce’s view for what it is. My own view
is closer to that of Hookway, who points out that, since Peirce’s “treatments of the
topic generally have a throwaway character” (2000, 4), presented in a grand fashion
as the predetermined destiny of thought, convergence remains “simply a metaphysical
mystery” (ibid., 50-1).
Fortunately, Peirce occasionally approaches the issue in a more cautious spirit.
Thus, as some scholars have convincingly argued (Misak 1991, 149; Sokolowski
1997, 82-3), it is ill-advised to confuse the contention that we should hope to find an
answer to any well-formed question with the notion that we may ultimately arrive at
some all-encompassing final vision of the universe. Peirce himself makes a similar
point: “We must look forward to the explanation, not of all things, but of any given
thing whatever.” (W 6,206, 1890.) Later he qualifies this with a cautionary warning
that we should not even expect an answer to every specific question, because there are
“real vagues, and especially real possibilities” (CP 5.453, 1905). Construed in terms
of the success of concrete inquiries, the notion of convergence begins to sound much
more promising. It becomes even more so, when we take into account the fact that
Peirce frequently refers to the prospect of convergence even with respect to particular
inquiries as merely a “hope” (W 3,273, 1878, CP 6.610, 1893, CP 8.113, 1900), which
prompts us to press on with our research. Hence, one may be warranted, after all, in
provisionally setting the prospects of grand convergence aside, focusing instead on an
analysis of particular episodes of convergence.
Thus, when two travelers set out for the same destination, assuming that it is a real
destination and not a fruit of their fantasy, their search should terminate in a meeting,
and the place of this meeting can be said to be preordained in virtue of their intentions.
This terminus ad quem is that which corresponds to the declared purpose of their
journey, in the same way that the correct answer corresponds to a well-put question
– i.e., by constituting a response that conclusively fulfills the aspiration declared at
the outset. This meeting, of course, need not necessarily take place: the travelers may
fail to reach their destination for various reasons. Yet, even if they meet, the fact of
meeting by itself does not signify that the right destination has been reached. Mere
agreement does not constitute the rightness of the answer; instead, the right answer
serves as the basis of warranted agreement. Chance meetings abound, and so do
gratuitous alliances of opinion.
Part of the reason to insist that the place of our meeting is determined beforehand
by the nature of our search is to secure the sense that there is a place we ought to
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meet, so as to come together independently to an agreement of a very special sort
– i.e., a rational agreement. One reason we may cherish the hope that this type of
agreement is possible is that it testifies to the ability of our thought to pick out what
is independently intended by the thoughts of another; in other words, it shows that we
can truly share thoughts – which is a tad bit more than warmly holding hands. Would
one be right to conclude, then, that rational thought aims at fulfilling the imperative
of the social impulse? No, if by this is meant an increase in the sense of unity and
belonging owing to the eliding of all disagreements and tensions. If rational thought
is to serve the interests of sociality, its functioning must be understood in terms of
transforming the kind of community that we strive for. It cannot be a community
of universal assent, for in such a community, thought would cease. It cannot be a
community preoccupied merely with the accumulation of certified results, because in
accepting the same formula, people do not need to share the same thought; in fact, to
accept and use a formula, one need not have any pertinent thoughts at all. Instead, it
should be a community that pursues the development of reliable methods of inquiry
and inference, promulgates the standards and strategies of effective argumentation,
cultivates the skill of selecting and finding relevant evidence, and continues to improve
its standards of what counts as a responsible and meaningful response to whatever
conditions our shared experience. A community of this sort would progressively
secure for its members the possibility of seeing what another person means, thereby
securing the possibility of rational agreement or disagreement. Formation of such a
community is, of course, in the interest of thought, because it assures the best chances
of thought’s continuous perpetuation and fruitful development.
What of convergence, then? As a hope or a regulative ideal (Hausman 1993, 134),
it appears to mark the conditions under which the intentionality of thought can have
public standing – meaning that others9 can grasp the content of one’s thoughts, what
one’s thoughts are about, as opposed to, say, one’s psychological states, or the words
running through one’s head. The idea of convergence, in other words, secures the
conceptual possibility of several thoughts sharing the same subject matter, even in
cases where this subject matter is not present but merely anticipated or suggested in
actual experience. Furthermore, in guiding our inquiries, the putative (or idealized)
projected convergence supplies the conceptual possibility of a sense of failure or
success with respect to what we ought to think, allowing us to distinguish, at least
provisionally, between better and worse modes of reasoning and research practices,
laying thereby the potential foundations for a transition to a more rational type of
community.
The notion of eventual convergence accomplished through the sheer accumulation
of experience, as nature nudges us along, may seem attractive in theory, but in theory
alone. To manage things is not to understand them; and, of its own accord, experience
merely reminds us what we must cope with, not what we must learn from it. Yet,
thinking of convergence in purely transcendental terms is also hardly satisfactory. We
can attempt to think of it, then, as a theoretical projection based on the experience of
9. Or even oneself at a later time.
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what, for lack of a better term, may be called the experience of apparent convergence:
i.e., a perfectly routine experience of two or more investigators arriving at the same
result, with this result withstanding further examination by other investigators, at least
for the time being. Thus, when we agree that it is raining outside, anyone who cares
to check is bound to concur with our view. We could turn out to be wrong: provisional
convergence is merely apparent, and as such, it is more of a convergence-effect. Its
genuineness is intrinsically defeasible. Yet, it is quite enough to give one a concrete
sense of what a genuine convergence would be like – to hope that it may, in fact, be
attainable through pursuing the inquiries that scholars are engaged in, and to foster a
preference for research strategies that tend to consistently produce such episodes of
apparent convergence. We need no more, provided that we are prepared to admit that
our trust, here as elsewhere, may well be misplaced.
3.
Returning to the topic of the relationship between representation and reality, it is
possible to broach the issue by considering Peirce’s distinction between immediate
and dynamical objects. The dynamical object corresponds roughly to the subject
matter of thought; the immediate object is the way in which the subject matter is
represented in the sign or thought. A dark cloud on the horizon is the immediate object
of my thought, but the dynamical object, or the subject matter, of my thought is not
a dark cloud but whatever presently appears to me as a dark cloud; should it turn
out to be a swarm of locusts, the immediate object of my thought would change, but
the dynamical object, or subject matter, will remain the same – for, all along, my
eyes and thoughts were fixed on the swarm, which in my thoughts got provisionally
assimilated to the image of a cloud. The dynamical object is that to which our thought
is directed; yet it is always directed under some more or less specific guise, under a
concept, a designation, in short, a sign. Our interpretation is always directed at the
dynamical object (the subject matter), but it always attaches to an immediate object (a
provisional identification).10
Provisional identification, to invoke Donnellan’s distinction, to some degree
performs primarily a referential rather than an attributive function. My mention of
a dark cloud, despite being descriptively mistaken in the end, still pegs the subject
matter under consideration, since it succeeds in directing your gaze towards the
phenomenon intended. The immediate object is a “hint” or mark by which the
dynamical object is indicated (Peirce 1908, 31), while the dynamical object itself
cannot be predicatively specified, and can only be grasped by the interpreter with
the help of “collateral experience” (CP 8.3 14, 1909). The reason for this is that the
dynamical object (the subject matter of our inquiry) is the object “regardless of any
aspect of it, the object in such relations as unlimited and final study would show it to
be” (CP 8.183, undated), while predication is necessarily restricted to some specifiable
10. Peirce uses the expression “subject of discourse” to mark that which is designated by an index
(W 5,224, 1885). My use of “provisional identification” is intended to resemble what is sometimes
referred to as a “passing theory.”
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aspect of the subject matter under consideration. That is precisely the sense in which
the dynamical object (or subject matter) “is exactly that about which more can be
learned” (Short 2007, 199); it is never exhausted by our present understanding of
it. Provisional identification, from this perspective, merely aids us in designating or
hypostasizing the object of inquiry (Cf. ibid., 268).
On the other hand, it is necessary to note a contrary point: namely, that the
function of the provisional identification is never merely referential, for it is also,
in an important sense, attributive. Thus, while a provisional identification may fail
to rightly specify the appropriate attributes of the dynamical object, it nonetheless
directs our inquiry along a certain path, which may be more or less promising. The
immediate object may be just a handle by which we attempt to pick up the object, but
the object itself is, in the end, just so many handles by which we may try to pick it
up. As Hausman points out, one cannot think of the goal of our inquiries as an “extraconceptual condition of interpretation” or a thing-in-itself (1993, 27). It can only be
thought insofar as it is already related to thought – through a provisional identification
that both points to the object and suggests a direction in which further determinations
may be gainfully sought.
Is there a point at which the interpretive process can be said to have reached its
terminus? If we started out by observing a fast-moving dot and, having tracked it
consistently, identified it as a car, we may be entitled to reject all further skepticism
as contrived. External reality has forced its verdict on our senses: the car has proved
itself to be a car. This sounds convincing, but such predominance of brute externality
unfortunately underplays the role of thought in constituting its subject matter: the
car would reveal itself to be a car no matter what one previously thought about it.
Suppose, instead, that from the rapidly advancing cloud of dust emerged a slowmoving turtle. We must accept the turtle for what it is – it crawls right past our feet;
but would we not be plagued by a suspicion that the subject matter (the dynamical
object) of our attention has changed, that we were really tracking something else? It
seems quite plausible that, on such an occasion, we would be asking ourselves what
it was, in fact, that we have been tracking, instead of blissfully accepting the turtle as
the whole answer.
Thoughts are occasioned by something external, yet the identity of an external
condition is predicated on our ability to intelligibly reconstitute the continuity between
the provisional identifications of what it was that our thoughts have been about. A
radical discontinuity in one’s provisional conceptualizations of dynamical object
tends to undermine one’s faith in the continuity of reference. The external counts as
the real only with the proviso that there is some hope of such (conceptual) continuity
being restored – for example, through an attribution of an intelligible perceptual error.
A radical and unexplainable discontinuity in perception suggests a breakdown of the
ordinary apparatus of reference. If my cat turns into a palpable elephant upon eating
some cereal, the sorry state of my mental faculties is really the only elephant in the
room.
This brings up an important point: external is only real (potentially) insofar as
we are entertaining some hope of successfully (and, better yet, reliably) directing
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our own and (better yet) one another’s thought towards it. External reality, then, is
not something that merely forces itself upon us, but whatever forces itself upon us in
ways that are, at least in principle, amenable to reason. In this sense, the true mark of
the real is not, contrary to the ordinary view, that we are ineluctably responsive to it
(we are responsive to delirium and madness), but that it is responsive to our attempts
at reasoning about it. The sociable nature of intelligible thought works, here, as a
check against the brute force of individual experience. External reality, in short, is
that element of the external that tends to respond to our purposeful mental efforts
– by either reinforcing or frustrating them in roughly intelligible ways. It is not the
universe, but merely the element of reasonableness within it.
Concern with the enduring continuity of reference sheds light on yet another
interesting subject: the function of vagueness in reality-oriented discourse. A vague
sign, unlike a general sign, does not by itself specify the criteria of its correct
application; it intrinsically calls for further conceptual elaboration (CP 5.447, 1905).
As such, it merely waves in the direction of its intended object without providing
us with a secure grasp on it. Yet, Peirce insists that vagueness is not a defect in
thinking (CP 4.344, 1905), and “is no more to be done away with in the world of
logic than friction in mechanics” (CP 5.512, 1905). Part of the point is pragmatic:
“perfect accuracy of thought is unattainable,” and overstrained efforts at rigor and
clarity routinely result in greater confusion (Peirce 1903, 4). But more importantly,
vagueness has a distinctively positive function in the conceptual economy of research.
By being intrinsically indeterminate, a vague designation invites contextually sensitive
co-determination, wherein we exercise our judgment in light of realistically obtaining
pragmatic considerations (Hookway 2000, 58-9). Since such specific determinations
are never fully binding and, at least in principle, infinitely revisable, the evolution of a
vague term may continue indefinitely, with each new permutation seen as an extension
of its originally intended meaning, intrinsically related to and at least partially implied
in the things that have been already said about it. Development of meaning over time,
as Putnam observes, is capable of reflecting not merely a change in the use of words,
but changes in interpreting our ways of life (1995, 302).
The significance of this point emerges when one compares the development
potential of a vague versus a general term. A general term is surely capable of evolving
as we gain a progressively better understanding of its area of proper application. The
key distinguishing feature of a vague term in this regard is merely the fact that it can
simultaneously support a number of incompatible developments or determinations.
This is why most logicians find vague terms to be particularly troublesome. One
must, then, think of some positive function that can be served by courting such
conceptual confusion. It does not seem implausible to claim that such a function
may be related to the sheer versatility permitted by allowing the proliferation and
coexistence of partially incommensurable interpretations. Such versatility, of course,
introduces considerable slack into the system, inevitably loosening the sense of what
counts as an appropriate interpretation of the same subject matter. The sacrifice of
clarity results somewhat paradoxically in the increased stability of discourse: we are
permitted ample resources for continuously improvising connections that establish
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a sense of intelligible continuity between the new determinations forced upon us
by the new experience and changing practice and earlier provisional determinations
through which the subject matter of our discourse has been fixed thus far. Vagueness,
in other words, permits one to retain a sense of the continuity of reference through a
series of radical conceptual innovations. This point is ostensibly related to the point
made by Rosenthal when she says that common sense provides “the vague criterion
of the shared meaningfulness and sense of workability of incommensurable scientific
theories” (1994, 16). The essential vagueness of common-sense concepts is their most
remarkable logical characteristic; yet, within the framework of Peirce’s commonsensism, such concepts provide an indispensable foundation for inquiry.
Philosophers have long tended to think of externality in terms of correspondence,
and present observations may shed some light on how the meaning of this term can be
most gainfully construed.11 External reality to which we are answerable cannot be seen
as thought-independent. In fact, its distinguishing mark qua intelligible externality
consists in its responsiveness to reasoning and reason-guided action. It need not
pander to our preconceptions, yet, even in frustrating them, it needs to leave some
traces from which the intelligibility of our error may be, in principle, restored. What
matters then is not so much the clarity of vision, but a sense of continued interaction
and contact – a retention of the sense of a long-inhabited conceptualized space that
supports a particular field of practice by supplying its subject matter, which, however
vaguely and changeably specified, in virtue of this very vagueness and imprecision,
never leaves us for long with the feeling that it has completely eluded our grasp or
receded beyond it. Through all the permutations of “matter,” despite false starts and
enduring aberrations, physics never entirely loses touch with it subject matter – the
material world – at the crudest level of understanding.
Relating the idea of externality to the inventive maintenance of a field of
practice grounded in the common subject matter belonging to the realm of shared
experience (possible or actual) provides one with a number of advantages that the
classical view of correspondence sorely lacks. Most importantly it allows one to
avoid the idea of correspondence or confrontation without interpretation, wherein
the lucky propositions home in on some mysteriously pre-conceptual data to claim
a destined match. Instead, one can simply talk of sentences (say, of atomic theory)
rightly interpreted in accordance with a set of established discursive practices (of, say,
physics), suitably announced in conjunction with certain experiences (say, instrument
recordings), elicited through some coordinated procedures belonging to the field of
practice, and interpreted in accordance with the standard reporting protocols of this
practice. The sense of correspondence here is an artifact of successfully coordinated
practices, which mediate a sense of effortless continuity within the specified theoryexperience complex. One could, then, hazard a guess that metaphysical intuitions
about correspondence are merely an extrapolation of the concrete instances
of correspondence effects, which tie together and result from the successfully
11. Peirce thought that correspondence may be useful in producing a sense, however, vague of what
approximately may be meant by truth (CP 8.100, 1900). However, when taken literally it does result in
useless obfuscation (CP 1.578, 1902; CP 7.370, 1902; CP 5.553, 1906).
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coordinated practices of the sort we have described. Effects of convergence, then,
can be further explicated in terms of correspondence thus understood: two practices
converge whenever they succeed in systematically eliciting some results or predictions
recognized as equivalent in accordance with the standard interpretive procedures of
both practices.
The approach outlined here, with respect to both of these key notions, can be
underscored nicely by Skagestad’s suggestion that truth or reality is “beyond any
actual experience; still it can be given a meaning by extrapolation from the experience
of that finite process by which scientists have so far reached agreements, and of
experimental procedures involved in that process.” (1981, 83.) Hence, it stands
opposed to the transcendental approaches, such as Apel’s, whereby one thinks of truth
as the “idealization” worked out from the viewpoint of an “an indefinite and unlimited
community of researchers” (2004, 45-6). The danger of the latter type of approach,
in my opinion, is that we may find ourselves engaged in the pointless project of
determining “what the relationship between truth and inquiry would be if inquiry
were something it is not” (Misak 1991, 154).
4.
While the considerations discussed thus far suggest some pointers with respect to
the likely conditions of rational inquiry, they are somewhat too general to provide a
sense of the governing dynamics of inquiry in the long run. To attempt a little clarity
on this front, one may want to look at the conditions of inquiry that are, in a qualified
sense, extra-logical. Specifically, one may want to think about the role of the common
sense, as the ground for the routine confidence that we do have a basic grip on our
experience, as well as the conception of the aesthetic impulse, which urges the inquirers
to seek the types of explanation possessing certain architectonically desirable traits.
There is something distinctive about the role that our common-sense beliefs
perform in providing us with a feeling of groundedness in the shared world. Yet,
ordinarily understood, our common-sense beliefs are too varied and too disorderly
to provide any definitive clue as to why that actually is the case. One may want to
look instead for some deeper shared common-sense structures and, unless one does
so, it may not be easy to make sense of Peirce’s contention that there may be a “fixed
list” of common-sense beliefs “the same for all men” (CP 5.509, 1905). If, however,
one were to agree to make an assumption that our ordinary common-sense beliefs
could be seen as modified and particularized expressions of an underlying set of some
(nearly) universally shared beliefs, then what Peirce had in mind becomes readily
apparent. Those common-sense beliefs would, indeed, “vary a little and but a little
under varying circumstances and in distant ages” (CP 5.444, 1905).
One can further note that, according to Peirce, common-sense depends on “the
total everyday experience of many generations of multitudinous populations” (CP
5.522, 1905). Hence, common sense can change and grow: it does not simply arise
at one point as a new characteristic feature of our biological endowment. However, it
changes but little, suggesting either a biological mode of transmission or the presence
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of a very strong empirical constraint on the prospects of the viability of alternative
theoretical conjectures that can be plausibly made at this level of cognitive operation.
The difference at stake is one between a genetic and a cultural mode of transmission:
in either case, however, universally shared common sense must be seen as a product
of an externally constrained convergent development.
Apel believes that common sense in Peirce is intended to replace Kant’s apriorism
(2004, 40), without speculating about the exact genesis of common-sense beliefs.
Hookway, meanwhile, is inclined to trace them to some innate conceptions such as
space, time, and force, accounted for, in turn, by the work of natural selection (2000,
167). This approach may appear to be promising, in part because Peirce’s one-time
friend, evolutionary philosopher Chauncey Wright, had articulated precisely such a
view – known in the pertinent literature as “functional apriori” – wherein the primary
categories of thought emerge as the product of the action of natural selection upon
subsequent generations of human beings aiming to fruitfully cope with experienced
environment. Peirce himself mentions that we have “from birth some notions, however
crude and concrete, of force, matter, space, and time,” as well as “some notion of what
sort of objects their fellow-beings are, and of how they will act on given occasions.”
(W 4.450, 1883.) Misak further cites some textual evidence suggesting that we could
rightly describe both abductive reasoning (1991, 98) and the “generalized ideal of good
reasoning” or “instinctive logic” (ibid., 91) as products of evolutionary adaptation.
The evolutionary conjecture is further confirmed by Peirce’s view that as we
depart ever further from natural conditions that influenced the growth of the mind,
the guiding force of natural suggestion progressively wanes (W 8,100, 1891). As we
abandon conditions resembling the “primitive mode of life,” our vague commonsense beliefs cease to be indubitable (CP 5.445, 1905) and, one would imagine,
become increasingly unreliable. This is, of course, one of the reasons why commonsensism always has to be critical, taking its cue from common sense, but scrutinizing
it rigorously and setting conventional beliefs entirely aside when necessary (Hookway
2000, 179). Furthermore, generally, one can expect the helpful direction from commonsense beliefs to be limited almost entirely to the sphere of practical adaptation (Short
2007, 344), where selective pressure can exercise its influence.
The picture, however, is somewhat more complicated for, even as he acknowledges
the diminished usefulness of “natural light” as we “advance further and further into
science,” Peirce maintains, nonetheless, that its glimmer, however faint, remains
indispensable in recommending to us hypotheses that “make upon us the impression
of simplicity” since “the existence of a natural instinct for truth is, after all, the sheetanchor of science” (CP 7.220, 1901). Perhaps one should say “nothing new:” in fact,
we have “a natural bent in accordance with nature’s,” because our interactions with
nature over generations, have so to speak, bent us that way (CP 6.477, 1908, and CP
1.121, 1896). One could even explain how an instinctive mode of thinking, developed
under the conditions of practical struggles for survival, could be of help in the most
exquisite theoretical reaches of science.
Think of a painter, for example, whose eye is trained by looking at the polymorphous
abundance of natural forms. Now set before her eyes an abstract composition. It is not
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of nature; it is contrived. And yet, the painter may judge it as being natural, as having
life, or as being strained and lifeless. What “naturalness” designates here is a sense
of a prevailing mood, which sets the proportions of various defining relationships,
in such a way as to endow the manifold with a definitive type of complex unity,
so as to make it feel “right,” “simple,” or plausible. Failure to capture a sense of
natural qualitative order, then, would be experienced as a disturbance of sensibility, as
somehow awkward, difficult, or poorly digestible. Construed thus, the intuition that
gives us a sense of what theory is more worth pursuing would have to be understood
in negative terms, producing a vague sense of awkwardness and disturbance whenever
we are presented with something that violates the natural composition to which we
have become unconsciously inured.
While all this may indeed be so, it is also clear that, for Peirce, the truthinstinct also has a positive, actively guiding, enticing, or beckoning role. It is the
element of reasonableness in the universe “to which we can train our own reason”
(CP 5.160, 1903), and the active voice here seems to indicate that this element is
positively perceived and sought, rather than being gradually forced upon us through
instinctive avoidance of physical or intellectual distress. There are at least two sound
considerations for why a demand for such an “attractive” element, preceding punitive
selection, may plausibly make sense.
One is that natural selection has to operate on something: being a selection, it
cannot invent and is, therefore, powerless to promote adaptation unless favorable
variations continue sporting in a relatively frequent and sustained fashion. In the
sphere of thought, mistaken possibilities are endless, while the effects of truth and error
(under primitive conditions) are considerably shielded from the selective pressure.
(Being wrong and fast would normally be better than being right but slow.) The mind
cannot evolve adequate conceptions of even the most fundamental categories, unless
it happens to be from the start more or less apt to form conceptions of a potentially
successful sort. We must start with something like a “scent for the truth” (CP 6.531,
1901) before we can be pressed to develop the very rudiments of the mental apparatus
that makes our concern with truth, however unconscious, an operative element in the
struggle for survival.
Hence, there is a clear point to Peirce’s worry that if “there be nothing to guide us to
the discovery,” we would “have to hunt among all the events in the world without any
scent” (W 3,317, 1878) – a futile undertaking and, potentially, a dangerous one. The
tendency to make the right connections, of the sort that is required for the productive
work of natural selection to take off, need not be anything elaborate. We merely need
a tendency for the mind not to wonder aimlessly for too long, spinning connections ad
libitum, capriciously, or in accordance with the order of stimuli that has little relation
to causal order. Once such a tendency is there, the natural selection can refine its flow
over time; without such a tendency, it is not clear that we are entitled to speak of a
mind in the first place.
The second consideration is of an historical sort, and pertains to the development
of philosophy and science, both of which have largely been driven by an interest in
reality as a rational structure, rather than a mere setting of the struggle for prosperity
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and survival. In fact, very frequently, concern with the more mundane interests was
believed to obscure the greater philosophical truth, to result in a sense of intellectual
myopia. Meanwhile, if one does construe common sense largely as a product of gradual
adaptation, it makes sense to think of it as comprising strategies and notions designed
to manage practical conundrums, and management requires bracketing things off and
smoothing them over, reducing risks and clinging to the familiar. In other words,
reliable management of external pressures encourages, to some degree, a closure of
conceptual horizons, resulting in a warranted attitude of suspicion and distrust towards
radical possibilities. Common sense, then, is theoretically conservative. Therefore,
an interest in radical theoretical exploration must be guided by some other instinct,
some other drive, which urges one to forgo practical considerations for the sake of
intellectual or aesthetic satisfaction.
One could actually suppose that the very same primitive attunement to the scent
of truth that lies at the origin of the evolution of common sense continues to operate
independently in theoretical inquiries, wherein it is refined and elaborated not in
accordance with the demands of external pressure, but in conformity with a sense of
its own intrinsic normativity. One can think of it, for example, on the analogy with
the language acquisition faculty, which, although incapable of generating a formed
language on its own, enables the learning of language within a time-frame that would
be unimaginable without such innate capacity.
One may also be warranted in following Peirce when it comes to identifying
the input of this instinctual capacity in terms of feeling: a conceptual response to
secondness in the areas where the established structures of thirdness provide no
determinate guidance can only be based on a qualitative sense that certain ways of
configuring the relationship at hand feel less right than others. It is also plausible
to suppose that the dictates of this feeling are worked out most systematically and
immediately in mathematics, regarded by Peirce as the first science requiring no
foundations (Hookway 2000, 183). So mathematics would, then, be the prime discipline
of developing one’s aesthetic sense, giving concrete form to one’s premonitions of
reasonableness.
Peirce’s interest in normativity in his later work, when read in this key, appears
quite natural, as does his estimation of his prior work as radically incomplete without it
(Maddalena 2010, 262). Reality, as a view of the world suffused with reasonableness,
cannot simply be informed by the external pressure of experience – it requires instead
an active reconstruction of this experience in accordance with the progressively
articulated ideals of reasonableness developed in the light of considerations that
can only bear a tangential relationship to the business of practical management and
survival. This is why ideal norms “alone raise Humanity above Animality” (EP2:
465; 1913). Peirce’s conception of aesthetic ideal also has to be understood in this
context. Its foundation is not pleasure, but a kind of intellectual empathy with the
world, which assures us that “general principles are really operative in nature” (CP
5.101, 1903) generating what Peirce calls “a reasonable feeling,” i.e., a feeling that
“one can comprehend” (CP 1903, 5.113). It is easy to see why Bernstein is inclined
to draw an analogy between Peirce’s conception of aesthetic and Plato’s conception
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of Good (1971, 193-4), for, here the notions of beauty, goodness, and reason are all
brought together, in the conception of the admirable or ideal. Attainment of this ideal,
in turn, would permit “free development of the agent’s own esthetic quality” (CP
5.136, 1903), thus giving a concrete sense to the idea of a free rational life admirably
lived.
The aesthetic feeling, apparently, relates to the arrangement of parts within the
whole (CP 5.132, 1903), so it is related to a sense of measure and proportion, to a
sense of intellectual prosody, qualitatively experienced. My own preferred term for
what is thus experienced is the “mood” of the presentation, deriving from Peirce’s
comment about the poetic mood “in which the present appears as it is present” (CP
5.44, 1903). Other designations are used by different commentators: “feeling tone”
(Rosenthal 1994, 100), “suchness” (Hausman 1993, 126), and, most descriptively,
the “firstness of a thirdness” (Hookway 1992, 174). Peirce, on one occasion, refers
to this as “flavor sui generis” (CP 1.531, 1903). The problem with endorsing such
a feeling, as Hookway justly observes, is to “understand how standards adopted
without justification can have objective validity” in such a way that they are “not
psychologically determined but hold for all rational agents” (1992, 59). As Peirce
observed with respect to logic, the (occasionally) felt compulsion may have its place,
but it would be a grave error to reduce logicality to this compulsion (CP 3.432, 1896).
The same would hold for an aesthetic ideal that, insofar as it belongs to the universe
of firstness, is plagued by the additional problem of never being capable of “perfect
actualization on account of its essential vagueness if for no other reason” (Peirce
1908, 30).
Peirceans are fortunate in that they do not have to be stumped by questions of
this sort. One simply needs to ask what habits of thought and action the adherence
to a particular ideal involves, and to appraise the consequences of such habits within
their proper field of application. Pragmatism, then, provides a clear meaning for the
notion that an ideal can be tested, supplying, in the bargain, a sense of what it may
mean for an ideal to be compromised or improved. To the degree that my penchant for
symmetrical structures leads me to significant discoveries that otherwise could not be
made, my aesthetic feeling remains on the right track. To the degree that it makes me
overlook significant effects of asymmetrical structures, my unconditional preference
for it requires adjustment and curtailment.
One must not think, however, that our normative intuitions are not accountable to
anything beside the theoretical consequences of their systematic deployment. Reality,
as an ideal, is not only characterized by reasonableness, but also by sharedness, i.e.
by its public character; hence, the consequences that we consider are always, at least
in part, social consequences. Considerations pertaining to the conditions of social
coexistence must have a due effect on one’s reflexive musings about the appropriateness
of her feelings. As Peirce puts it, “If conduct is to be thoroughly deliberate, the ideal
must be a habit of feeling which has grown up under the influence of a course of
self-criticisms and of hetero-criticisms; and the theory of the deliberate formation of
such habits of feeling is what ought to be meant by esthetics.” (CP 1.574, 1906.) Our
feelings, then, are jointly answerable both to the sense of inner satisfaction and to the
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practicalities of social interaction, under the obtaining external conditions. Therefore,
common sense has a rightful bearing on the continued appropriate development of the
aesthetic instinct of reasonableness, which, in the course of evolutionary history, must
have stood at its source.
This brings up, in turn, an important question about the permeability of the
instinctive foundations of thought to cultural influence. On this score, the expression
of aesthetic sentiment can be expected to be more malleable than common sense. This
is so because it is a mere feeling or sensibility that has not undergone any specific
determinations in the course of evolution; common sense, on the other hand, involves
the formation at the biological level of some relatively specific structures or thoughtcategories that, like anything biological, must display a considerable resistance
to modification and change. Biological evolution operates on the scale of at least
thousands of years, so appreciable modification to the innate structures of common
sense could be only affected by a fundamental change in conditions of existence,
lasting over a sufficiently long period (biologically) to exert sufficient selective
pressure. In that regard, the deep structure of common sense may well be shared
between ourselves and our preliterate ancestors.
The trade-off here is between development and stability. The base categorical
framework of common sense provides us with a tried foundation for managing
our ordinary interactions with external reality. As Peirce points out, “Our innate
mechanical ideas were so nearly correct that they needed but slight correction” (W
4,450, 1883). At the same time, this foundation does not suffice for the purpose of
drawing precise distinctions valued by science, nor does it give us much direction in
the areas far removed from the natural conditions of life. It can be virtually unerring,
but only within its proper area of application; yet that is the foundation on which
all other scientific inquiries are built (CP 5.522, 1905). The categories of common
sense provide us with a structure that proved itself workable through the thick of
evolutionary time: yet, it is only that – workable. It is by no means the final instance
of truth. Yet, in functioning as our instinctive point of departure, it serves as a safety
net for our theoretical and experimental enterprises; should they fail, we return to
the ordinary frame of reference, where we are never completely at sea. Hence the
curious dynamic between critical inquiry and common sense, involving “a complex
interplay of intellectual reflection and trusting acquiescence in habitual judgments and
sentimental responses” (Hookway 2000, 260). There is in culture a kind of biological
inertia, ensuring that our relationship to experience at no point may end up entirely
unworkable. There is a sense of reasonableness and aesthetic instinct, ensuring that
we venture beyond what is necessary for mere comfort and survival. There is also the
historically accumulated cultural capital of a given society at a given time, on terms
of which these natural proclivities get filled out and fine-tuned within the span of an
individual generation.
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References
Apel K. O., (2004), “Sense-Critical Realism: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Interpretation
of C. S. Peirce’s Theory of Reality and Truth,” in J. De Groot (ed.), Nature in
American Philosophy, Washington, DC, Catholic University of America Press,
37-52.
Bernstein R., (1971), Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human
Activity, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.
DeMarco J., (1971), “Peirce’s Concept of Community: Its Development & Change,”
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 7, 24-36.
Gallie W. B., (1966), Peirce and Pragmatism, New York, Dover Publications.
Hausman C., (1993), Charles S. Peirce Evolutionary Philosophy, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
Hookway C., (1992), Peirce, New York, Routledge.
— (2000), Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce, Oxford,
Clarendon Press.
Maddalena G., (2010), “The Belief Story: Peirce’s Anti-Kantian open Perspectives,”
Revista de Filosofia 11, 257-266.
Magada-Ward M., (2003), “As Parts of One Esthetic Total: Inference, Imagery, and
Self-Knowledge in the Later Peirce,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17, 216-223.
Mahowald M., (1973), “Peirce’s Concept of Community: Another Interpretation,”
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society (9), 175-186.
Misak C., (1991), Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth, Oxford,
Clarendon Press.
— (2010), “The Pragmatic Maxim: How to Get Leverage on a Concept,” The Harvard
Review of Philosophy 17, 76-87.
Peirce C. S., (1932-1958), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press.
— (1953), To Lady Welby, New Haven, Graduate Philosophy Club.
— (1984-2009), Writing of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Bloomington,
Indiana University Press.
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— (1998), The Essential Peirce, Vol. 2: Selected Philosophical Writings: 1893-1913,
Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
Putnam H., (1995), “Pragmatism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95, 291-306.
Rosenthal S., (1994), Charles Peirce’s Pragmatic Pluralism, Albany, NY, SUNY Press.
Short T. L., (2007), Peirce’s Theory of Signs, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Skagestad P., (1981), The Road of Inquiry: Charles Peirce’s Pragmatic Realism, New
York, Columbia University Press.
Sokolowski W., (1997), “The Structure of Peirce’s Realism,” Prima Philosophia 10,
77-88.
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EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PRAGMATISM AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Oliver Belas*
Popular Science, Pragmatism, and Conceptual Clarity1
Introduction
One of popular science’s primary functions is to make what would otherwise be
inaccessible, specialist knowledge accessible to the lay reader. But popular science
puts its imagined reader in something of a dilemma, for one does not have to look very
far to find bitter argument among science writers; argument that takes place beyond
the limits of the scientific community: witness the ill-tempered exchanges between
Mary Midgley and Richard Dawkins in the journal Philosophy in the late seventies
and early eighties; or, from the mid-nineties, the surly dialogue of Stephen Jay Gould,
Daniel Dennett, and others in The New York Review of Books (see below and Works
Cited). These writers, communicators, and educators have played a significant part in
the dissemination of evolutionary theory among non-specialists; they have shaped the
understanding and use of genetic and evolutionary theory in non-scientific areas of
academic study and cultural theory. Such vociferous disagreements as they have had
are, then, of some public significance.
This article is not concerned primarily with the issue of influence, however. Rather,
given the influence these and other writers have – and given their disputes with one
another – I want to ask: when stark disagreement arises, how is the interested lay
reader to make sense of such disagreement, when it is to these writers she looks for
her scientific knowledge in the first place? How are we to engage with and evaluate
the contributions of our teachers, when our teachers are engaged in fierce argument
with one another?
To anticipate some of what is to follow: one problem for us “lay” readers is that
some science writers get sidetracked by questions of who among them is “right” or
“wrong.” Such an eristic attitude, I suggest, mistakes just what is undertaken – and
just what is at stake – in populist theorizing (as opposed to populist reporting in, say,
the pages of New Scientist or Scientific American). In the context of pop science,
questions of who is “absolutely right” or “absolutely wrong” are less interesting, and
in many ways less important, than questions of who is most theoretically coherent and
most convincing; of who, to use Nelson Goodman’s vocabulary, offers us an account
that seems to provide a “right fit” (Goodman 1978). The lay reader has little choice
but to take the expertise of the science writer on trust (although this does not rule
out the possibility of an expert being disavowed by most or even all of his scientific
* Chingford Foundation School, London UK, [[email protected]]
1. My thanks to Professor Robert Eaglestone (for the informal conversations and friendly disagreements
that marked the beginnings of this paper) and Professor Vincent Colapietro (for his invaluable advice
during the essay’s later stages of development).
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community, on scientific grounds). But, as we will see, the terms in which a science
writer couches her narrative have little to do with scientific practice, per se. It is with
these terms – what I shall call the concept metaphors of science writing – that the lay
reader can engage critically; and it is here that pragmatism enters the stage.
My thesis is not that readers do not have to be scientists to make either heads
or tails of popular science, so long as they are well versed in the various dialects of
pragmatism. Rather, a pragmatist approach to our problem will help ground and justify
not only my readings of Dawkins, Dennett, and Gould, but also my larger claim that
there is plenty of critical space, as it were, in popular science for non-scientist readers.
If one aim of popular science is to educate Joe Public, then the genre aims to
speak across boundaries – from the province of Professional Expertise to that of
General Interest. Surely, then, such speech should not be one-way, but, rather, part of
a conversation;2 surely, the occupants of General Interest’s territory should find a way
of taking their conversational turn. This article is just such an attempt.
I first establish a theoretical framework – which draws heavily on pragmatist
philosophy – for the investigations of Dawkins, Dennett, and Gould that follow. Here,
I also attempt to clear up what I think are some misapprehensions about our chosen
mode of popular science and its appropriate disciplinary reach. A detailed concluding
section explores the reasons for favouring the pop-science work of Gould over that of
Dawkins. These “case studies” are shaped by the pragmatist framework outlined in
earlier sections.3
“Mission Creep:” Generic “Purity” and the Function of Pop Science
Robert Eaglestone (2005) has argued that popular science is characterized by an
inbuilt “mission creep,” whereby the claims of the genre, which by definition aspires
to popular appeal, cease to be strictly scientific and encroach on the realms of the
philosophical. Writers make their narratives attractive to lay readers “by showing why
the subject […] is relevant and meaningful for everyone, and this is usually done by
making much bigger claims. […] It is the very need for these more general claims that
makes these popular science books unavoidably ‘philosophical’ in that they perforce
and explicitly address ‘what it is to be’.” The issue here, then, is perhaps not so much
the extra scientific pretensions of science, but the necessary pretensions of these books
to address a wider readership.
Eaglestone refers several times to Dawkins, who states in The Selfish Gene that,
thanks to Darwin (and the neo-Darwinist synthesis of genetics and evolutionary
theory), “[w]e no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep
problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we here for? What is man?” However,
despite evolutionary theory’s triumphs, students of the biological sciences tend to miss
2. The model of conversation, and my privileging of it, here, over argument, is drawn from Oakeshott
(1991).
3. In what follows, I have generally avoided argument rooted in favour of or discomfort with the
supposed cultural politics of the writers in question. Not that such questions are unimportant; but such
arguments have been made before, and look unlikely to be settled.
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Darwin’s “profound philosophical significance. Philosophy and the subjects known as
‘humanities’ are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.” (Dawkins 2006, 1.)
The “extra-scientific pretensions” of these early remarks are clear enough, as are
Dawkins’s intentions to appeal to a “lay” as well as specialist readership (see Dawkins
2006, xxi, xxii); with Dawkins as our model, then, Eaglestone certainly seems to be
right. But Eaglestone’s comments are less true of the popular science genre per se than
of Dawkins particularly. The problem with Dawkins, in the lines quoted above, is not
that he falls foul of popular science’s inbuilt “mission creep” (which for Eaglestone
seems to be a problem of genre); the problem is Dawkins’s disciplinary reductionism.
As Dawkins imagines things, the humanities sit further up the disciplinary hierarchy,
and are therefore logically dependent on the natural sciences for their foundations.
Dawkins assumes that science, dealing with “bare facts,” is more fundamental than
the humanities, and that, consequently, other academic fields are somehow reducible
to science (or, rather, his branch and brand of it): it is neo-Darwinism that can
now answer the “big” questions, because it sits at the base of Dawkins’s imagined
disciplinary hierarchy.
But to be dissatisfied with Dawkins’s hierarchism and reductionism is not to say
that the blurring of boundaries between science and philosophy amounts to a real
problem. For Quine, indeed, philosophy and science sat on the same continuum;
philosophy simply operated to a greater degree of generality and abstractness (see,
e.g., Quine 1963). For Richard Rorty (2009b), one of the oddities of philosophy is
that it seems to exhibit, simultaneously, the hallmarks of what many would consider
the arts and the sciences. And Daniel Dennett writes, with a certain commonsense
directness, that “there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science
whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.” (Dennett 1995,
21.) Turn, say, to John Dewey, and we find just the sort of grand philosophical claim,
extrapolated from scientific theory, of which Eaglestone is so wary. For Dewey,
Darwinism marks something very much like what we would now call, post Kuhn,
a paradigm shift. But this paradigm shift completes a general conceptual shift to a
perspective from which all our cultural life looks as though it is constantly in flux, as
though it rests on foundations that are neither sure nor fixed (Dewey 1997).
In sort, “big” philosophical claims seem hardly to be avoided in works that deal
with “big” scientific theories. (Note, too, that the examples given above are all made
of science from the side of philosophy; would we be concerned to challenge these
thinkers’ extra-philosophical pretensions?) The injunction that pop science keep
to itself and not mingle with philosophy is unrealizable; the careers of science and
philosophy have been entwined for too long.4
The problem, then, is not that Dawkins, or indeed any pop-science writer, dares
to make grand philosophical claims. The questions to be asked, rather, are: (1) are the
disputants’ grand claims clear, convincing; do they offer a “right fit;” or, to paraphrase
Goodman (and to pull him out of context), do they manage to sell their ideas rather
4. For an accessible, speculative overview of the relationship between the arts, sciences, and philosophy,
see Rorty (2009b). On the impossibility of separating genres from one another, of keeping them “pure,”
see Derrida (1992).
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than prove them?5 (2) How is the non-specialist who relies on pop science for her
scientific literacy to address (1)?
As we will see, arguments – often heated – between the neo- or ultra-Darwinist and
Radical Science camps sometimes hinge on the terms in which the camps’ respective
arguments are couched. One prong of Dennett’s attack on Gould, for example, is shaped
by an attempt to “prove” Gould and Lewontin’s notion of “spandrels” (summarized
below) a nonsense; in Dennett’s view, “spandrels” is an unworkable theory because
it is founded on a duff analogy. I will argue, though, that Dennett misses his mark
because the relationship between Gould’s evolutionary theory and the architectural
structure to which it is supposedly analogous does, in fact, hold good: it is, to borrow
again from Goodman, a good fit, convincingly sold.
Before we turn to particular case studies, though, we will need to give some time
to the idea of metaphor generally, for while both Midgley and Dawkins discuss “gene
selfishness” as a metaphor, we will see that it is necessary to qualify with some care the
sort of metaphor we are likely to be dealing with in popular science. Some detail will be
needed; in the readings of Dawkins, Dennett, and Gould that follow, the problems and
disputes we will tackle are very much over conceptions of metaphor itself, and writers’
metaphorical language use. First, then, let us spend a little time on just some of what has
been said of metaphor in general, as well as some of the sticking-points of these general
accounts. I will turn briefly to remarks made by Rorty, Davidson, and Goodman.
Rorty, Davidson, Goodman; Language and Metaphor6
For Rorty, the ways in which we understand the world are constituted by language,
which is fundamentally metaphorical: language does not take us closer to or further
from things as they are “in themselves;” rather it makes and remakes the world as
we understand or interpret it (Rorty 1989, 16).7 Language, as Rorty understands it,
constitutes our hermeneutic relationship with a real world that is “out there,” but
is neither more nor less “really” or “truthfully” represented in, say, Einsteinian or
Newtonian terms.
On this view, then, a metaphor does not disguise yet somehow “contain” its literal
meaning; it consists in the use of “familiar words in unfamiliar ways” (Rorty 1989,
18). Similarly, literal words are not transparent windows onto the world; they are
simply metaphors that, through repeated and therefore increasingly comfortable use,
have gained general currency. “Literal” words are metaphors, the metaphoricity of
which we have forgotten.
Metaphors, in Rorty’s sense, introduce new concepts or conceptual frameworks.
The difference between literal and metaphorical language, then, is that the “literal
5. In the passage to which I allude, Goodman makes the point that one does not argue for the truth of a
categorial system, “since it has no truth-value, but for its efficacy in world-making and understanding.
[...] For a categorial system, what needs to be shown is not that it is true but what it can do. Put crassly,
what is called for in such cases is less like arguing than selling” (1978, 129).
6. This section draws heavily on arguments developed in greater detail in Belas (forthcoming).
7. On this point, Rorty (1989) and Goodman (1978) are close to one another.
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uses of noises and marks are the uses we can handle by our old theories about what
people will say under various conditions. Their metaphorical use is the sort which
makes us get busy developing a new theory.” (Rorty 1989, 17.) Rortyan metaphor is
determined by its effects; but because language, for Rorty, neither moves us closer to
nor further from the world in itself, metaphorical effect is measured by whether or not
a new concept forces us to start re-theorizing or redescribe the world.
Rorty, of course, draws heavily on Donald Davidson, whose 1978 paper “What
Metaphors Mean” has attained a level of notoriety among philosophers of language and
theorists of metaphor. Metaphor is commonly understood, Davidson summarizes, as
language that encodes “hidden” meanings, that says one thing while meaning another.
But, he argues, “[w]e must give up the idea that a metaphor carries a message, that
it has a content or meaning (except, of course, its literal meaning)” (Davidson 1978,
45). From the get-go, Davidson maintains that “metaphors mean what the words,
in their most literal interpretation mean, and nothing more” (1978, 32). Metaphor,
in Davidson (1978, 33), is not language that runs on the “dual tracks” of literal and
hidden meanings, or of the said and the meant; it is an issue not of language and
meaning, but of language in use.
A proper account of metaphor, Davidson believes, is simple enough. It requires
not the formulation or discovery of rules for decoding metaphorical “meanings;”
there are, in this account, neither such rules nor such meanings. What we might call
the standard theories of metaphor – the dual track accounts – “mistake their goal,”
Davidson writes.
Where they think they provide a method for deciphering an encoded content, they
actually tell us (or try to tell us) something about the effects metaphors have on us. The
common error is to fasten on the contents of the thoughts a metaphor provokes and to
read those contents into the metaphor itself (Davidson 1978, 45).
Davidson insists that metaphors belong to the “domain” of use, not of meaning.
The unfamiliar, jarring quality of a well-chosen metaphor will lead us to make various
associations, but there is no rule as to what these associations will be, and no necessary
end to the stream of associations: “When we try to say what a metaphor ‘means,’ we
soon realize there is no end to what we want to mention.” (Davidson 1978, 46.) Here,
a metaphor can denote no more than it does literally, but it can connote endlessly;
metaphor functions in non-determinate, metonymic fashion.
Goodman versus Davidson on Metaphor
If it is hard, perhaps impossible, to specify in advance the limits of so-called
“metaphorical meaning,” then there is a sense in which Davidson is absolutely
right about there being no necessary end to the associative power of metaphors.
Nevertheless, it surely is possible objectively to misconstrue metaphors. There are
boundaries to metaphorical meaning, but these boundaries are often unmarked; they
may not be noticed until we are either up against or have strayed clear across them.
While certain paraphrases, interpretations, explanations of a particular metaphor
are accepted as plausible, others are eventually rejected. This might be because: (1)
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some interpretations of metaphor seem to lead us more than reasonably far from an
author’s apparent or likely intentions. (2) We might reject interpretations because the
literal, or “first,” meanings of the metaphorical terms have been misunderstood.8 (3)
A metaphor may be misconstrued because the object or referent under metaphorical
description is not clearly known.9
In short, although one can never say with absolute certainty what the meaning
of a metaphor is, few people object to the principle that some interpretations of
metaphors are better, more reasonable, more plausible, or more useful than others.
Just how apt our understandings or interpretations of metaphors are deemed to be will
depend, in part, on linguistic communities – or, to put it in terms closer to Goodman
(1978), the symbolic worlds10 – of which we find ourselves part. Synchronically or
diachronically, the individual, of course, may operate in more than one community
or world. Regardless, the point is this: in practice, metaphorical utterances – despite
their infinite possibility – are unlikely to be quite so open-ended as Davidson suggests,
as certain meanings, uses, interpretations will have greater or lesser sway in certain
linguistic communities.
The logical conclusion of Davidson’s metaphor paper is the loss of any line
between literal and metaphorical meaning. Yet this is a line which seems, in most
accounts – Davidson’s included – to be presupposed. Goodman makes the forceful
point that if Davidson is even half-right to suggest that as metaphors pass from “life”
to “death” their meanings do not change, then there must be something akin to a
literal/metaphorical difference that marks metaphors as such upon first utterance. If
this is true, then it would seem to be the case that for Davidson, even as he argues
against this distinction, metaphorical figures do mean otherwise than literal ones
(Goodman 1979, 127).
Goodman, by contrast, wishes to guard the metaphorical/literal distinction that
he believes Davidson fails to give up; indeed, he seems to take it as essential to the
constitution and very possibility of metaphor. Goodman would have us use something
like the following definition:
“The lake is a sapphire is literally false but metaphorically true” is true if and only if
“The lake is a sapphire is metaphorically true” is literally true.11
There is a significant difference for Goodman between an utterance being literally
false but metaphorically true, and an utterance being merely false. Metaphorical
utterances, then, require listener-interpreters to sort through permutations of literal/
metaphorical truth/falsity, just because metaphor involves the reassignment of labels
(a claim close to Rorty’s): “a metaphor is an affair between a predicate with a past and
an object that yields while protesting,” Goodman writes. “Where there is metaphor,
8. “First meaning”, as more or less synonymous with “literal meaning,” is taken from Davidson (1986).
9. (3) differs from (2) in that it is not a case of misunderstanding, but rather of obscurity, ellipticality,
ambiguity etc. on the part of the writer.
10. This idea, commensurate with Goodman (1978), is broad: it allows for someone who is bilingual or
polyglot, and also for someone who is, say, both a scientist and an artist.
11. See Goodman (1976, 68-74; 1979).
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there is conflict [...] Application of a term is metaphorical only if to some extent
contra-indicated.” (1976, 69.) Goodman’s definition also allows, for example, the
possible literal and metaphorical truth of Frost’s verse, “Two roads diverged in a
yellow wood.”
Goodman and Davidson are not so incompatible as may at first appear, however, if
we turn from Davidson’s account of metaphor and meaning, to his Tarskian conception
of truth and meaning (see Davidson 1967, 1983). In Ways of Worldmaking (1978),
Goodman’s central claim is that our various symbolic systems – be they linguistic
or not – structure our worlds in very real (one is tempted to say “very literal”) ways.
In claiming this, we can view Goodman as offering a sort of Davidsonian pluralism.
Davidson’s Tarskian definition of truth might hold good for both metaphorical and
literal utterances, provided we know, pace Goodman, what symbolic world or system
we are “in.” Goodman’s definition, as summarized above, can be restated as:
“The lake is a sapphire” is true in a given symbolic system if and only if in that system
the lake is a sapphire.12
But if we take it for granted that all utterances occur in some given context (and
possibly more than one context simultaneously),13 then we can further restate the
above in Davidson’s terms. The difference between definitions closer in form to
either Goodman’s or Davidson’s is the difference between making the fuzzy notion of
context explicit in the definition or taking it out and, therefore, for granted:
“The lake is a sapphire” is true [in a given symbolic system] if and only if [in that
system] the lake is a sapphire.
In short, if we know “how” a sentence is intended (as metaphor, for example),
then we will be able to determine its truth or falsity.14 Another way of putting this:
provided that interlocutors understand and interpret the context of utterance in
broadly overlapping ways, then Goodman’s explanation of metaphor accommodates
Davidson’s theory of truth, and vice versa. Goodman does not cancel out Davidson’s
theory of metaphor; he simply does not go near it.
In a sense, then, metaphor is a matter of use, but not in the way Davidson suggests.
Our ability to perform the literal/metaphorical truth-sortings suggested by Goodman
depends on us rightly interpreting the context of use (that a sentence has been
intended metaphorically and/or literally); but this does not mean that, in the context
of a linguistic community or symbolic world, the meaning-effects of metaphors are
indefinitely “open.”
12. On symbolic systems, or worlds, see Goodman (1978).
13. On the importance of context, or “background assumptions” (Searle), to meaning, see Davidson
(1986) and Searle (1978).
14. Of course, metaphorically or literally are not the only ways in which sentences might be said or
intended. The point here is to do, again, with this fuzzy notion of context. Communication succeeds if
we realize that a sentence is uttered ironically, metaphorically, angrily, and so on; it fails if we do not
realize such ways and styles of utterance.
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What may seem like a digression from our primary task should stand us in good
stead for what is to come. The possibility for non-scientists’ critical engagement lies
in a recognition that science writers, as science writers, are writers first, scientists
second. Of course, there are many science writers who are scientists; but science
writing, as we will see, is open to the same aesthetic, hermeneutic and logical
criticisms and debates as is almost all narrative or so-called “creative” writing. We
will also see that so much of the animosity among competing pop-science theories
and pop-science writers is not, in fact, over the science itself, but over the metaphors
and theoretical frameworks that have been built around common scientific “facts.”
The disagreements, in other words, are not fundamentally scientific, but aesthetic and,
primarily, interpretive.
Despite much impressive philosophical work on metaphor, there is no one theory
that can specify either the necessary and sufficient conditions of metaphor as such,
or all the ways in which metaphors might mean. Where science writers argue over
the appositeness of a particular metaphor, we will find that more thought needs to be
given to just what metaphors are thought to be and how they are thought to function
in the context of popular science. In light of the foregoing discussion, it will emerge
that what is needed is not the theory of metaphor, but occasional theories for certain
contexts of metaphorical occurrence. We will have reason to distinguish, in a rough,
schematic way, between passing metaphors and concept metaphors, and between
metaphors (or poetic metaphors) and models (or scientific metaphors).
Metaphors and Models
The problems of metaphor are particularly pertinent to the type of popular science
that concerns us. Consider Richard Dawkins’s and Mary Midgley’s arguments over
the notion of the selfish gene. The argument was, in one sense, over theory, but it
hinged on the understanding of metaphor – what metaphor is, how it functions, how it
is to be used – not on the understanding of what genes are.
Midgley objects to the use of “selfishness” as a metaphor for explaining gene
activity. She objects because Dawkins himself characterizes his special, theoretical
use of “selfishness” as a metaphor, but does not – to use one of Midgley’s metaphors
– sufficiently “prune” this figure of its unusable branches (Midgley 1979, 447-48). A
little more care with just how metaphors operate is needed, she argues. Note that in the
following passage, context is all. Midgley begins by talking about metaphors in science
writing; we must not take what follows as a commentary on metaphor in general:
To understand how metaphors can properly be used in scientific writing, we must get
straight a fundamental point about the relation between metaphors and models. Every
metaphor suggests a model; indeed, a model is itself a metaphor, but one which has
been carefully pruned. Certain branches of it are safe; others are not, and it is the first
business of somebody who proposes a new model to make this distinction clear. Once
this is done, the unusable parts of the original metaphor must be sharply avoided; it
is no longer legitimate to use them simply as stylistic devices. (Midgley 1979, 447;
emphasis in original.)
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Clarification is needed of the metaphor/model relationship to which Midgley
refers. With The lake is a sapphire as our example, Midgley would seem to be saying
that sapphire suggests some sort of model for lake, and that, as a model for lake,
sapphire may also function as a metaphor “for” lake. This is fine, as far as it goes,
but it takes us in a circle that adds little to any theoretical understanding of metaphor.
Let us take another sentence – one that may or may not, depending on the context
of use, contain a metaphor – and let us call again upon Goodman, this time on his
analysis of denotation and exemplification (Goodman 1976, 45-67): He is a murderer.
He refers to (denotes) a particular man, who in turn exemplifies that pronoun. Similarly,
murderer denotes our man, who stands, again, in a relationship of exemplification to
that label. In this sentence, then, he and murderer are coextensive, but not identical,
terms. The difference between denotation and exemplification is more helpful than
Midgley’s metaphor/model relationship; denotation/exemplification makes explicit a
distinction Midgley seems only to gesture towards, and it pulls us out of Midgley’s
circularity. Treating The lake as a single lexeme (The-lake), the same relationships of
denotation, exemplification, and coextensiveness obtain for The-lake and sapphire (in
the metaphorical figure) as they did for He and murderer (in a figure that may or may not
be metaphorical).15 In this context of occurrence, a-sapphire denotes simultaneously
any sapphire and the lake (this is not the same as saying that a-sapphire now “means”
our particular lake); but a-sapphire is also exemplified by the lake (or some of its as
yet unspecified quality or qualities).
Whereas Midgley vaguely suggests, but does not explicate, some sort of equivalence
between metaphors and models, denotation and exemplification in Goodman are
logically by asymmetrically related: “while anything may be denoted, only labels
may be exemplified” (Goodman 1976, 57). Here, then, is what exemplification adds
to our understanding of metaphor: labels can be exemplified by the things they denote,
but they are not exemplified exhaustively (see Goodman 1976, 52-57). Replacing
Midgley’s metaphor/model relationship with that of denotation, exemplification, and
coextensiveness, we can see that Midgley is quite right about metaphors, in the context
of science writing, needing to be pruned. The possibilities for the metaphorical truthsorting of the ways in which our imagined lake might exemplify the various qualities
of is a sapphire are broad; too broad, certainly, for the purposes of most, if not all,
science writing. Genes are selfish, for example, must surely mean something rather
well specified if it is to be scientifically instructive in the ways Dawkins wishes it to be.
Both Goodman and Davidson believe that metaphor has its role in the advancement
of knowledge (scientific or otherwise) (Goodman 1979, 125; Davidson 2006a, 210);
but in the context of popular science and science writing, metaphors can hardly be left
open to either the truth-/falsity-sortings of Goodman, or the individualistic meaningas-affect formulation of Davidson.16 Equally, though, there is clearly something more
15. In Macbeth II.ii, following the murder of Duncan, Macbeth reports his imagined hearing of “Sleep
no more! | Macbeth does murder sleep.” In this context, the claim “Macbeth is a murderer” might
be considered both literally and metaphorically true. Things are not complicated by the fact that
Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a fictionalized character (on this, see Goodman 1976, 21-26).
16. See also Wilson (2011) on the difference between causation and content in metaphorical expressions.
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than dealings in “dead” or “frozen” metaphors going on in the most interesting popscience texts.
Before moving on, let us sketch some rough terminological distinctions.
(1) Elsewhere, I have sought to replace the binary of dead and live metaphors with
the non-binary distinction of passing and concept metaphors (see Belas, forthcoming).
Passing metaphors are those the understanding of which requires little work, while
concept metaphors are those on which understanding, or successful communication,
depends, and which require some interpretive work.
Passing metaphors often, though not of necessity, take the form of verbs or
adjectives: when, for example, Goodman writes that a metaphor that no longer excites
interest or wonder “wilts” (1979, 127), he offers no sort of explanation of his metaphor;
the presumption seems to be that none is needed. Similarly, Midgley, writing about
science writing, does not feel compelled to explicate the meaning of “pruned,” qua
metaphor, even though she is writing of the importance of the metaphorical pruning
of metaphors in science writing.
Concept metaphors are often, though not of necessity, nouns. Concept metaphors
do require interpretive effort, and may evoke interest, wonder, even confusion.
For concept metaphors to function appropriately in science writing, much of the
interpretive work is done for the reader (see, for example, the analyses of selfish
gene, gene selfishness, and spandrels below); that is, they are – or, pace Midgley,
should be – sufficiently pruned. Concept and passing metaphors are distinct from
so-called “frozen” or “dead” metaphor and their – by extension – “liquid” or “live”
counterparts for the simple reason that one speaker’s idiom or cliché may – at least
on first encounter – be another’s metaphor, full of wonder, confusion, and possibility.
(2) Where Midgley presupposes but does not fully explain the difference between
models and metaphors, I propose that “model” be understood as a certain use or
application of metaphor. “Models,” for our purposes, are the metaphors characteristic
of science writing – those carefully “pruned,” specified, or narrowed figures that
Midgley seems to have in mind, the purpose of which is to clarify and illustrate.
Models can be distinguished from the metaphors characteristic of poetry, which
compress possible meanings into single figures and invite a wealth of interpretations.
Poetic metaphor is not only to be found in poetry, but it is one mode by which Pound’s
notion of “language charged with meaning” is enacted (Pound 1934, 28).
Call the difference I have outlined the difference between metaphors, as such, and
models; or, the difference between the metaphors (characteristic) of science, and those
(characteristic) of poetry. The differences between these may not be categorical; but,
like the metaphors most obviously characteristic of and appropriate to science writing,
they offer a useful conceptual shorthand. With this rough difference in mind, we can
ask questions like, how well does the notion of evolutionary “spandrels” fit, or map
to, the model of architectural spandrels?; or, what refinements need to be made to the
everyday meaning of “selfishness” in order for “gene selfishness” to do any useful
theoretical work?
The following analyses of Dawkins and Gould are analyses not of poetic metaphor
but of models. Our job is to assess the cogency of special, theoretical terms (such as
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“spandrels” and “selfishness”) as models. The conceptual models used by Dawkins
and Gould can ill afford, in the first instance, the free-associative openness of
Davidsonian metaphor, or even the latitude of partial exemplification and truth-sorting
of Goodman. However, while we are dealing with models, not poetic metaphors, I want
to show that models can still have Rortyan redescriptive force. Models (or science
metaphors) are not “dead” metaphors, but a variety of concept metaphor; they are not
a different “species” of concept metaphor (different, say, from the concept metaphors
encountered in poetry), but rather concept metaphors with generic conventions of use
– namely, that their applicative range is tightly specified and explicated in advance;
such is generally not the case with poetic metaphors. Indeed, by distinguishing
between poetic and science metaphors, or metaphors and models, we are pointing to
this generic-conventional distinction in concept metaphors. Later, we will see that one
of the reasons Dawkins’s concept of “gene selfishness” comes unstuck is a deficient
understanding of metaphors and models; by contrast, we will find that Gould’s model
of evolutionary spandrels is far more clearly mapped to its architectural “original”
than Dennett realizes.
Dawkins and his Critics
First and foremost, Dawkins’s critics are exercised by his “metaphorical” choices,
the effects of which are twofold: firstly, Dawkins’s language has, for many, a political
resonance which seems commensurate with a rugged individualism, a sense of society
as an “arms race,”17 an all-against-all competition in which things just are the way they
are and are no better than they can possibly be, for evolution always works towards
optimal fitness.18 Secondly, the image of gene science itself which Dawkins’s language
presents us has been criticized. I will focus primarily on the second criticism, though
one cannot avoid the first entirely; for a theorist of science like Rose (1997), language
can both have ideologically invidious effects and be scientifically misleading.
With Dawkins’s focus, particularly in his earlier works, almost exclusively on
the gene as the fundamental unit of natural selection, both Midgley and Rose argue
that Dawkins and other “ultra-Darwinists” misleadingly present a picture of the
gene as atom-like – an indivisible and ubiquitous basic unit – whereas, in fact, genes
are variable in size, and are best understood in holistic, rather than atomistic, terms
(Midgley 1979, 449, 450; Rose 1997, 216).
Rose also emphasizes the influence of expert or professional perspective on our
preferred narratives (Rose 1997, 10-11). For example, rather than thinking in terms of
one-to-one correspondences between single genes and their phenotypic expression, the
biochemist will think in terms of genetic pathways and the emergence of characteristics
(such as eye colour) due to the interactions of many chemical agents. This, claims
Rose (1997, 115), is “the distinction between a developmental and genetic approach.”
17. See chapter 4, Dawkins (1999, 55-80); Dawkins and Krebs (1979). For critiques, see Rose (1997);
Rose and Rose (1976); Haraway (1991, 217-21); Midgley (1979), (1983). For statements and defences
of Dawkins’s position, see especially Dawkins (2006), (1981), (1999).
18. This is the “Panglossian Paradigm” (see Gould and Lewontin [1979]; Rose [1997, 230-37]).
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Indeed, he states that “all biologists know” that this biochemical perspective is the
more accurate description of genetic makeup and “behaviour,” and that talk of a single
gene “for x […] is merely a convenient shorthand” (Rose 1997, 115). Rose dislikes that
Dawkins recognizes this fact while insisting it does not matter “provided the system
behaves as if such ‘genes for’ existed” (Rose 1997, 116).
Dawkins presents an idea of a federation of more or less independent genes doing
what they are meant to do for their own good; so the very idea of “gene selfishness”
is tied up with talk of “one gene for x.” However, Midgley, like Rose, argues that
Dawkins fails to acknowledge that in fact many genes are involved in indivisible
phenotypic phenomena; this being the case, gene behaviour is surely better described
as cooperative (Midgley 1979, 448-49). Already, then, we can discern what in our terms
is a simplistically Rortyan programme, directed at the public rather than specialist
sphere. Rose and Midgley attempt to spur a public shift of imagination, a thinking
otherwise, from “genes are ‘selfish’ atoms” to “genes are cooperative networks.”
Along still similar lines to Rose, Midgley complains that Dawkins appears
to acknowledge the variability of the gene while all the time writing about its
immutability and permanence through space and time (Midgley 1979, 450): surely
he cannot have things all ways. However, to accuse Dawkins, as Rose and Midgley
do, of disseminating the gene-as-indivisible-atom image is somewhat misleading.
Drawing on George Williams, Dawkins actually defines the gene as “any portion of
chromosomal material which potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a
unit of natural selection” (Dawkins 2006, 28). And, responding directly to Midgley’s
criticism of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins attempts to clarify and correct: “I am not
searching for an ideal, indivisible, atom-like unit. I am searching for a chunk of
chromosomal material which, in practice, behaves as a unit for long enough to be
naturally selected at the expense of another such fuzzy unit.” (Dawkins 1981, 569,
emphasis added.)
The disagreement between Dawkins, on one flank, and Rose and Midgley, on the
other, is not really over basic definitions of the gene. Both Rose and Midgley believe
that Dawkins shares – with them and the scientific community – the same basic
understanding of what the gene is. But they believe, too, that this basic understanding
and its clear expression are obscured by Dawkins’s language. The points of contention
are over: 1) whether or not the gene really is the basic unit of natural selection; 2) the
most appropriate linguistic figures used to discuss this supposed unit. For Dawkins
the basic unit is the single gene; for Rose and Midgley it is the organism, as talk of a
single gene for x may be convenient in some situations, but is ultimately inaccurate,
even nonsensical (Midgley 1979, 448-49). Rose rejects Dawkins’s revised dualism
(the digital gene now takes the place of the “soul,” travelling in the analogue husks we
like to think of as our corporeal selves [see Rose 1997, 212-14]). His insistence on the
language of cooperation (pressed, too, by Midgley) encapsulates his characterization
of the organism as just that: a complex, integrated, cooperative system; a unit, rather
than a federation of individual, and individualistic, genes. As examples, Rose looks to
human sexual reproduction and the overproduction of sperm, and to the overproduction
during brain development of neurons and synapses. The success of one (one sperm
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fuses with the ovum; one neuron-synapse connects with the dendrite of the target
cell) in the face of vast overproduction might be interpreted in competitive terms. But
the chances of one neuron and synapse, or a single sperm, succeeding if it were the
only one may be slight (Rose, 1997, 143-53): if this is so, “cooperation,” rather than
“competition,” may be a better model.
“Competition” may be misleading, particularly if not shorn of its demotic and
economic connotations, for it fails to convey the sense of organismic harmony Rose
wishes to promote and which he believes is the case. From Rose’s perspective, to say
that systems behave as if there is a gene for x is to fudge the issue; systems do not
operate as if this were the case; they cannot, because there is no such single gene for
x. “Thinking of genes as individual units which determine eye colour may not matter
too much,” Rose (1997, 116) worries, “but how about when they become ‘gay genes’
or ‘schizophrenic genes’ or ‘aggression genes’?” (Such one-to-one gene-phenotype
reductionism, it is worth noting, also fails to explain sufficiently many of the most
serious genetic illnesses [see Rennie 1994].) Note that we are talking here not of the
cultural-political resonances of science metaphors, or models, but of cultural-political
positions into which particular styles of the sciences’ dissemination might play.
So, although one gene for x may be a convenient façon de parler, if it has clouded
scientific thinking it is reasonable to think that in the context of popular science it
will mislead many readers, who, as non-experts, may be particularly receptive to the
models offered us.
The Intentional Stance, Conceptual Clarity, and Selfish Genes
For Midgley, “gene selfishness” is unworkable because genes are personified and
treated as conscious agents. Even though, Midgley argues, Dawkins stresses several
times that personification and talk of selfishness are just metaphorical conveniences,
“selfish” can not impute conscious motives to genes. Even though Dawkins attempts
to restrict and specialize the meaning of “selfish” as it extends to genes, he defines the
gene as “[t]he fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest” (Dawkins
2006, 11, emphasis added). Midgley (1979, 451) responds, “he has linked the notion
of self-interest quite gratuitously to a kind of subject for which it can make no sense
at all. The only possible unit of self-interest is a self, and there are no selves in the
DNA.”
Midgley’s argument is not entirely successful if one adopts the “intentional
stance,” from which we view a system “as if” it were “a rational agent” (Dennett
1997, 35-54). “Intentionality in the philosophical sense,” Dennett summarizes, “is just
aboutness. Something exhibits intentionality if its competence is in some way about
something else.” (1997, 39, 46-47; emphases in original.) Adopting the intentional
stance, no necessary problems of selfhood, as posited by Midgley, arise from calling
genes “selfish;” we are treating genes “as if” they are rational agents in order to make
predictions about their “behaviour.” Nevertheless, there are fatal problems with
the selfish gene that have nothing to do with intentionality. There is a fundamental
conceptual confusion, towards which Midgley gestures when she criticizes Dawkins
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for “mov[ing] from saying ‘genes are selfish’ to saying ‘people are selfish’” (Midgley
1979, 448).
When Dawkins calls genes “selfish,” he means to restrict and specialize this
term. His “definitions of altruism and selfishness are behavioural, not subjective;”
his definition of gene selfishness “is concerned only with whether the effect of an act
is to lower or raise the survival prospects of the presumed altruist and the survival
prospects of the presumed beneficiary.” (Dawkins 2006, 4.) Earlier, however, Dawkins
suggests, “a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless
selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual
behaviour.” (2006, 2.)
Genes’ “selfishness,” then, is to be stripped of any moral or broadly cultural
baggage; Dawkins is simply adopting the intentional stance. And as Rose points out,
we must realize that Dawkins means to describe the behaviour of genes; he is not
talking about genes for selfishness (Rose 1997, 201). But that he is not so speaking
is, in a way, odd; the sociobiological perspective, with which Dawkins aligns himself
(see Dawkins 1985), would seek or speculate as to the genetic bases of universal
behaviours (see Wilson 2004). Here, the suggestion seems to be not that there are genes
for selfishness, but that human selfishness is an extension of the special “selfishness”
attributed to genes. Having restricted the meaning of gene selfishness, to suggest that
the special selfishness of genes is somehow mirrored by humans’ observable everyday
selfishness is surely to upset the distinction, on which Dawkins insists, between the
word’s special and everyday meanings.
A “human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness
would be a very nasty society in which to live,” writes Dawkins. “Let us try to teach
generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.” (Dawkins 2006, 3.) But Dawkins
should not need this disclaimer, for it makes little sense if one takes seriously the
conceptual distinction between the two selfishnesses (special, gene-level selfishness;
everyday human selfishness). There need be no direct link between gene and human
selfishness, but things get messy because Dawkins’s denial that the two concepts
are intrinsically linked – gene selfishness is “behavioural, not subjective” (Dawkins
2006, 4) – comes after two statements which suggest the opposite – “gene selfishness
will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour” (Dawkins 2006, 2); “[l]et
us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”
Dawkins, then, suggests that his two selfishnesses are distinct, while moving
between them as if the phenomenon of everyday, human selfishness were extrapolable
from special, gene-level selfishness. At the same time, to add to the confusion, it
would seem that “everyday selfishness” is supposed to provide the material from
which the “gene selfishness” models is built and is made comprehensible:
At times, gene language gets a bit tedious, and for brevity and vividness we shall lapse
into metaphor. But we shall always keep a sceptical eye on our metaphors, to make sure
they can be translated back into gene language if necessary. (Dawkins 2006, 45.)
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Dawkins fails to distinguish clearly between two quite different concepts for
which he uses the same word.19 “Gene selfishness” is not adequately theorized, not
rigorously enough separated from human selfishness, to be a sensible model. But, in
a crucial sense, neither is everyday human selfishness clearly enough defined to be
either a helpful point of contrast for, nor a basis from which we might model, “gene
selfishness.” Indeed, how could an emotivistic, and therefore rather fuzzy, notion –
one, that is, determined by cultural mores – provide such material or a benchmark,
without a good deal of linguistic topiary?
Although the intentional stance vindicates, to some extent, Dawkins’s talk of genes
as if they are conscious agents, Midgley’s dissatisfaction with “gene selfishness” as a
metaphorical figure (or, in our further refined terms, model) still stands. In constructing
our models, we must surely begin with literal, or “first,” meanings, but the literal
or everyday meaning of “selfish” is just what Dawkins is attempting to distinguish
“gene selfishness” from. Dawkins needs a model by which something about gene
“behaviour” and genetic phenomena can be specified and illustrated. What I am
suggesting is that Dawkins’s terms are still not sufficiently clear in and of themselves,
nor has he sufficiently clarified and specified them, for this to be achieved. “Gene
selfishness” is not cogent enough a model for us to determine what difference it makes
to theory’s conceptual store; it cannot, therefore, offer much in the way of Rortyan
redescription: too much work remains to be done on what the concept is “about,” what
it means, in the first place.
The influence of The Selfish Gene, both as a work and for the central metaphor it
introduced, cannot be gainsaid. “Three imaginary readers looked over my shoulder
while I was writing,” explains Dawkins: “the layman,” “the expert,” and “the
student, making the transition from layman to expert.” (Dawkins 2006, xxi, xxii.)
Undoubtedly, The Selfish Gene and selfish genes have had a profound effect on
the public understanding of genetics and evolutionary theory, and on “professional
experts” in various fields. And Dawkins’s first book has certainly created a great deal
of debate among science commentators. This in itself is not insignificant, for it will
remind those who read widely enough that science is creative, dynamic, and in many
cases far from settled. But the cultural importance and influence of The Selfish Gene
has nothing to do with its theoretical utility, and on this count, unfortunately, it does
not offer much.
Stephen Jay Gould: Adaptationism, Extrapolationism, Pluralism
Dawkins and Dennett speak from and for what Gould calls the “adaptationist
programme” – the view that natural selection is the only mechanism of change, and
that all change is gradual and adaptive, conferring ever greater fitness on the organism.
“We would not object so strenuously to the adaptationist programme,” wrote Gould
and Richard Lewontin in 1979, “if its invocation, in any particular case, could lead in
19. That Dawkins also views the use of metaphor as a (metaphorical?) “lapse” contrasts informatively
with the more serious views of metaphor taken by Rorty, Goodman, and Davidson.
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principle to its rejection for want of evidence.” Pervasive adaptation being virtually
an article of faith, however, the possibility of non-adaptive change is not considered,
and theorists are satisfied merely with “consistency with natural selection” (Gould &
Lewontin 1979, 588).
Interestingly, the demand for the possibility of falsification here is much like
Popper’s (2002) principle of demarcation of science and metaphysics: Gould and
Lewontin’s (as well as Rose’s) aim has been to challenge what we might call the
metaphysics of pervasive adaptation and natural selection. The mere fact that an event
can be made to fit the theoretical mould prescribed by adaptationism does not mean
that adaptationist theory is absolutely true – in the crude way that “true” is often used
– or the best possible “fit” in all possible situations (or worlds). That events can be so
moulded to theory merely illustrates Goodman’s maxim that “Truth, far from being a
solemn and severe master, is a docile and obedient servant.” (1978, 18.) On occasion,
Gould cites instances where writers of the adaptationist mindset admit that evidence
supporting their views is wanting, and so assume that we simply haven’t found the
evidence yet; it must be there, somewhere, because we know adaptationism to be true.
Much of Gould’s energy was spent arguing that where such evidence is lacking, it is
so not because we have missed it, but because it is not and never has been there at
all (e.g., Gould 2007d; Gould & Lewontin 1979). Gould’s point at such moments is
close to one made, in a different context, by Goodman: that, “[u]fortunately, dramatic
violations often fail to disturb dogma” (Goodman 1978, 73).
For Gould, the “adaptationist programme” is one with the belief that natural
selection is the only mechanism of evolutionary change worth considering. The idea that
evolution consists in the accumulation, through natural selection, of micromutations
leading to ever greater fitness – an asymptotic approach towards perfection – has led,
Gould argues, to the conflation of the mechanism of natural selection with received
notions of fitness, complexity, and progress.20 “Adaptationism,” then, is closely allied
with “extrapolationism,” the belief that, natural selection being the only evolutionary
mechanism worth studying, we can extrapolate from findings at one evolutionary
level – the genetic – to all others.
In opposition to “adaptationism” and “extrapolationism,” Gould introduced
several concepts in support of a pluralistic general theory of evolution. Evolution,
Gould argued, is hierarchically ordered into several “tiers” of geological time, each
tier with corresponding, dominant evolutionary mechanisms. Before we look closely
at one or two key models in Gould’s work, however, we need to consider just what the
differing accounts of evolution are over which Gould and Dennett/Dawkins disagree.
Adaptationism is one; but what of “extrapolationism,” mentioned briefly above
Gould’s is a theory of the severally tiered structure of evolution and its various
mechanisms. Because he seems to decentralize natural selection (at the gene level
especially), Gould has been accused of being anti-Darwinian (see Dennett 1995, 262312). However, he emphasizes:
20. Gould makes this and related rguments often. See, for example, Gould (2002), (1980), (1994),
(2007b); Gould and Lewontin (1979). Sections II and III in Gould (2007a) provide an excellent
overview of Gould’s evolutionary theories.
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I […] do not deny either the existence and central importance of adaptation, or the
production of adaptation by natural selection […] I do not deny that natural selection
has helped us to explain phenomena at scales very distant from individual organisms
[…] But selection cannot suffice as a full explanation for many aspects of evolution; for
other types and styles of causes become relevant, or even prevalent, in domains both far
above and far below the traditional Darwinian locus of the organism. (Gould, 2007b,
441-2, emphasis added.)21
At issue for Gould, then, are units and levels of selection: at levels other than that of
the organism, mechanisms other than natural selection may play dominant roles. This
is Gould’s critique of “extrapolationism,” the doctrine that all evolutionary change
takes place first and foremost at the gene level, and that higher-level changes are
simply “extrapolations” from there. This idea he aims to displace with his “Darwinian
pluralism.”
As far as Gould himself is concerned, then, no denial of Darwin, nor of the “central
importance” – scientific or philosophical – of natural selection and adaptation. Neither
does he see himself as being in disagreement with Darwin; one of Gould’s favourite
passages from Darwin is that in which the great man himself reminds his reader that
“natural selection has been the main, but not the exclusive, means of modification.” 22
What Gould disagrees with is that natural selection is both the exclusive mechanism
of evolutionary change and sufficient explanation of all life’s complexity. Instead, he
offers a hierarchical and pluralized model of evolutionary theory in which micro- and
macro-evolutionary levels and mechanisms are “decoupled” from one another (Gould
1980b, 126): different mechanisms of change operate as the prime (but not necessarily
exclusive) mover at each level. Think of Gould’s attempt to offer several “decoupled”
mechanisms as an attempt to offer a Goodman-esque model of many worlds within
the universe of evolutionary theory; or, if one prefers a smaller scale, think of him
as pointing to a plurality of languages spoken within the evolutionary world. Gould
proposes “a general model of several rising tiers of time – with conventional Darwinian
microevolution dominating at the ecological tier of short times and intraspecific
dynamics; punctuated equilibrium dominating the geological tier of phyletic trends
based on interspecific dynamics […]; and mass extinction […] acting as a major force
of overall macroevolutionary pattern[.]” (Gould 2002, 88.)
You cannot extrapolate from gene to individual organism, Gould maintains,
because “organisms are doing the struggling” (qtd Brockman 1995, 62). “Selection
simply cannot see genes and pick among them directly,” in significant part because
organisms exhibit “emergent properties,” the results of complex interactions of genes
which are not, therefore, explicable in terms of single genes for x (here, we return to
Rose’s territory) (Gould 1980a, 90).23 Natural selection, then, “must use bodies as
an intermediary” (Gould 1980a, 90). Furthermore, argues Gould by means of a neat
passing metaphor, we must not confuse “bookkeeping” and “causes.” Because genes
21. For criticism of Gould, see Maynard Smith, Dennett, and Gould (1993); Dennett (1997b).
22. Darwin (2008, 8). See, e.g., Gould (2007b, 438; 1994, 85; 2002, 147, 254), Gould & Lewontin
(1979, 155).
23. For Gould on emergent properties, see Gould (1980b).
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constitute the lowest evolutionary level, they will “record” all changes; higher-level
selection will, of course, affect gene frequencies. But not all genetic changes will be
felt at higher levels. So-called “neutral” substitution – molecular changes that are
neither advantageous nor disadvantageous – is a case in point here. On this view,
genes should not be portrayed (as they appear to be by Dawkins, Dennett, and other
extrapolationists) as the only causal agents of evolutionary change.24
But, argues Gould, one cannot extrapolate from local populations of organisms to
species, either. “The decisive step in evolution,” he argues, is the macroevolutionary
step from one species to another (Goldschmidt, qtd Gould 1980b, 125). This, he
suggests, cannot be explained by gradual adaptation; species, to be recognizable
as such, must achieve stability for an extended period of time, while speciation
occurs over thousands rather than millions of years, a mere “moment” in geological/
evolutionary time (Gould 2007d, 265). The geologically instantaneous break between
species “requires another method than that of sheer accumulation of micromutations”
(Goldschmidt, qtd Gould 1980b, 125). For speciation to occur, Gould insists,
“reproductive isolation comes first and cannot be considered as an adaptation at
all” because it is a random and unpredictable event (1980b, 124). “There is,” Gould
concludes, “a discontinuity in cause and explanation between adaptation in local
populations and speciation; they represent two distinct, though interacting, levels of
evolution.” (1980b, 124.)
In Gould’s evolutionary structure, no one level is reducible to another. In contrast,
the extrapolationist account sees gene-level selection as the root of all change.
But, to recap, Gould sees the adaptationist account as a confusion of causes and
“bookkeeping:” all change will be recorded at the gene level by changes in gene
frequency, but this does not prove that genes are the units being selected. Each of
Gould’s levels “interacts,” as he says, with those above or below, but each level
remains distinct, particularly as each tier is viewed not just in terms of the size of its
units (the gene, the organism, the species, and so on), but also temporally; intra- and
inter-species change, as well as change at even higher levels, occur at different speeds.
“Greedy” Reductionism
While Gould’s theory does have plenty of room for the neo-Darwinist narrative,
Gould does not believe that this gene-level, gene-centric narrative is sufficient to account
for all evolutionary change at all levels. “The Darwinism of the modern synthesis,”
Gould writes, is “a one-level theory” that reduces all change to consequences caused
by “struggle among organisms within populations” (2007c, 224). From the Dawkins/
Dennett perspective, all evolutionary phenomena should be traceable back (or down)
to the gene level – a level even lower than that of the organism.
For Dennett, Gould’s accusation of “reductionism,” levelled at the neo-Darwinists,
misses the point. Dennett (1995, 80-83) distinguishes between “greedy” reductionism
24. See Gould (2007c, 233); Smith, Dennett, & Gould (1993). Kimura’s (1968; 1983) theory of
neutralism is crucial to Gould’s critique of genetic fundamentalism.
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– the sort of short-sighted, sloppy reductionism of which, he thinks, we should
be wary – and the sort of reductionism characteristic of, even necessary to, good
theorizing (where the job of theory is understood as simplification, and assisting in
increasingly accurate prediction). It is, believes Dennett, this second reductionism
that good neo-Darwinism practises, but which Gould does not. Dennett’s distinction,
however, between reductionisms does nothing to clear up the dispute between our
warring camps. It is easy enough to accuse Gould of being blinkered in his use
of “reductionism;” but, with their staunch faith in the gene’s-eye-view account of
evolution, it is equally easy to accuse Dennett and Dawkins of precisely the “greedy”
reductionism against which Dennett cautions us. As far as reductionism goes, both
sides in the dispute may have identified chinks in their opponent’s armour, but none
big enough to admit a fatal blow.
Hopefully, all this will seem straightforward so far. But all I have done is to
summarize some points of disagreement between two warring factions on the
battlefield of evolutionary theory. This has been necessary because we need to know
just what is being disputed, but also because, as we will see, Dennett fails to discredit,
because he misreads, Gould.
We can, then, discern easily enough on what our warring factions disagree; but we
lay readers are still no closer to being able to say who is right. Nor, though, are we
likely to get much closer. Just why will become clear by article’s end. First, we need
a slightly closer consideration of some of Gould’s key concepts, the supporting pillars
on which his grand, pluralistic theory rests.
Exaptations, Spandrels, and “Spandrels”
“Exaptations” and “spandrels” are forms of “secondary” adaptation, modifications
that arise not for present purpose (Gould & Vrba 1982; Gould & Lewontin 1979).
“Exaptations” are adaptations that arose for one reason and were later coopted for
another (such as the emergence of feathers for thermo-regulation; their later cooptation
to flight) (Gould 2007c, 231-33). “Spandrels” are the necessary by-products, due to
organisms’ structural constraints, of adaptive changes that are themselves later used
adaptively (the use by some but not all snail species of the shell’s umbilicus for a
brooding chamber, for example) (Gould 1997b). Dennett rejects the sense and use
of “exaptations” and “spandrels:” even if one cannot say that particular features
arose “for” their current use, surely it makes little sense to say that such features
are not adaptive if one can say that the current uses to which the features are put are
advantageous (Dennett 1995, 275-76). Further, Dennett (1995, 281) argues, secondary
adaptations are accounted for by orthodox theory; adaptations always develop from
prior structures that were once advantageous but are now obsolete.
Dennett goes to great lengths to dismiss “spandrels,” in particular, by exposing
what he sees as the idea’s figurative deficiency. In architecture, spandrels are the
triangular areas left over when an archway is built into a rectangular wall. In their
famous spandrels paper, Gould and Lewontin begin by limning the ornately decorated
structures that draw visitors to the Basilica di San Marco. Though these structures
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attract many visitors, the writers argue, they are there, in the first place, out of
structural necessity: they are the unavoidable result of placing a circular-based dome
on rectangularly arranged arches.
Dennett first argues that, strictly speaking, the structures to which Gould and
Lewontin refer are pendentives; spandrels proper are the approximately triangular
spaces left between adjacent archways running in line with one another. Dennett goes
on to argue that pendentives are not necessary; other structures are available, such as
the squinch (constructed by filling a square room’s upper corners, thus forming an
octagonal ceiling base) (Dennett, 1995, 271-73).
It is, of course, perfectly fair to scrutinize metaphorical “fitness.” Midgley (1979)
does just this when she criticizes Dawkins; and my criticisms of Dawkins have been
based on what I see as the incoherence of his “gene selfishness.” This incoherence
arose in no small part because Dawkins seemed to want to distinguish gene selfishness
from human selfishness, while all the time running the two together. But no such
conceptual elision occurs with Gould and Lewontin’s “spandrels.” Odd though this
suggestion may sound, there is a sense in which the word itself used to denote the
concept Gould and Lewontin wish to introduce matters relatively little; for, if the
concept of adaptation’s necessary by-products is made both recognizable and definable,
we can surely take our pick of shorthands: we are, after all, dealing with “spandrels”
as a model in need of deliberate specification, rather than as a poetic metaphor. In our
current context, the question to be asked is whether necessary structural by-products
– call them “spandrels,” “pendentives,” or “squinches” – can actually be identified in
biological structures, to which Gould answers “yes” (see Gould 2002, 1179-1295;
Gould 1997b). As far as Dennett’s criticisms go, we are talking about the difference
between imperfect, even sloppy, terminology – on which count Dennett’s criticisms surely
stand – but a nonetheless coherent conceptual model – on which count they do not.
Strangely, too, there is a sense in which Dennett seems actually to make Gould’s
case for him. A dome placed on a circular base consisting of rectangularly arranged
archways will produce pendentives. (In this model, the dome and the archways are
“adaptations,” the pendentives “spandrels” – necessary structural by-products later
used “adaptively” as surfaces for decoration.) Squinches will produce an octagonal
base; so they will necessarily produce a different structure.25 Architectural spandrels
are indeed evolutionary spandrels in Gould’s figurative sense, resulting unavoidably
from the consecutive arrangement of arches in a wall. But so too are pendentives and
squinches figurative, Gouldian spandrels. They, too, are structurally forced, necessary.
Moreover, when Dennett (1995, 281) argues that secondary adaptation is
accounted for in his adaptationist orthodoxy, he appears to be playing to a dubious
double standard: he rubbishes, on the one hand, Gould’s concept of non-adaptive
change; but on the other, where he can find a space, however small, for Gould’s
ideas, he suggests that adaptationism has already taken care of things. In doing this,
Dennett simply ignores Gould’s attempt to challenge the image of constant, gradual,
progressive change. “Exaptation” and “spandrels” are key to a view of life in which
25. See Rose’s defence of spandrels (Rose, 1997, 235-57).
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success is marked by stability and is enjoyed by simpler rather than ever more complex
organisms – a view very different from the one espoused by Dawkins and Dennett.
Dennett, then, has failed to demolish Gould’s concept of evolutionary “spandrels.”
This evolutionary concept metaphor has been very clearly specified; so as a model –
or science metaphor – the term is rather stable, regardless of any infelicities as far as
first, or literal, meaning goes. With this concept, lay readers with scientific interests
are hardly disadvantaged; they might, however, end up red-faced if, with Gould and
Lewontin’s paper tucked under their arms, they were to pronounce upon architectural
matters at an architects’ convention.
This case of evolutionary spandrels is informative: it shows us that models, or
science metaphors, can be made to mean quite clearly even if labels’ first meanings
have been misapplied; but this can only be done if models’ extensional ranges are
carefully and precisely delimited before their free and easy use.
Gould’s model of “spandrels” is coherent in a way that Dawkins’s “gene
selfishness” is not. A good thing, too, for it is one of the pillars on which Gould’s
grand view of evolution, one vastly different from what he sees as the reductionist
orthodoxy of neo-Darwinism, rests. Take “spandrels” away, and you have a much
smaller, less sturdy theory. “Spandrels” encapsulates and – if they are identifiable in
nature, as Gould and Lewontin believe they are – evidences non-adaptive change,
itself a key theoretical feature of Gould’s grand evolutionary theory.26 Indeed, nonadaptive change is posited in direct opposition to the neo-Darwinist narrative of
untrammelled, gradual, “progressive” change. It is by chipping away at Gould’s key
concepts that Dennett hopes to discredit Gould.
Take “gene selfishness” away from neo-Darwinism, however, and you remove a
decidedly unclear concept, but nothing more; you do not disprove the neo-Darwinist
narrative. Indeed, Dawkins himself saw The Selfish Gene as adding to, or further
clarifying, neo-Darwininst orthodoxy, not as launching a brand new evolutionary
theory (see Dawkins 2006, xv, Ch.1). At most, he hoped that experts reading his book
might find in it “a new way of looking at familiar ideas” (2006, xxi); but at base,
claims Dawkins, “[t]he selfish gene theory is Darwin’s theory” (2006, xv). I have
not taken issue with Dawkins over his preferred grand narrative, but over the clarity,
coherence, and theoretical utility of one of his key concepts.
Punctuated Equilibrium
Another Gouldian mechanism over which there has been much griping is
“punctuated equilibrium,” identified by Gould and Niles Eldredge (1977) as the
phenomena of rapid change at the species level, followed by extended periods of
stability. Although evolution is often thought of, diagrammatically, as a more or
less smooth line representing constant, adaptive change through time, in fact, Gould
26. The importance of non-adaptive change to Gould’s grand theory, as Gould himself understood it, is
indicated by the space it gets in his formidable Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002): chapters 9, 10,
and 11, which deal with mechanisms and phenomena of non-adaptive change, take up some 550 pages
of this roughly fourteen-hundred-page work.
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argues, success is marked by overall stasis; lack of fitness forces rapid change and/
or leads to rapid extinction. That the diagrammatically step-like pattern of punctuated
equilibrium is dominant at the species level is, Gould contends, empirically supported:
gradualists (those who believe in constant, gradual, micromutational change) are
led, by virtue of the perspective they already have, to believe that apparent “jumps”
between species suggest gaps in the fossil records. Gould argues, by contrast, that
reliable records suggest that interspecies jumps or “saltations” (in terms of geological
time) are precisely what we are dealing with (Gould & Eldredge 1977; Gould 1980b;
Gould 2007b).
Dennett rejects punctuated equilibrium on bare scientific and theoretical/
conceptual grounds. In certain respects, he argues, punctuated equilibrium is just
bad science. But where it does work, punctuated equilibrium can still be dismissed
because the neo-Darwinists got there first. For example, the step-like pattern Gould
wishes to substitute for the smoother lines of the gradualists is already recognized
by and implicit in the gradualists’ representations: under higher “magnification,” the
gradualists’ lines reveal themselves to be staircases (see Dennett 1995, 285-99). It
is all a matter of scale; the gradualists’ smooth lines represent overall change; the
punctuationists’ steps the small, logically necessary jumps between adaptations.
But far from containing it, this inverts the punctuated equilibrium model.
Punctuated equilibrium is a keystone in Gould’s pluralized and hierarchical theory of
evolution; punctuational patterns are the dominant pattern of evolutionary change at
relatively high levels, not the necessary micro-structure of constant micromutation.
“Punctuated equilibrium” is the name – call it a metaphor if you will; “model,” given
the foregoing discussion, is better – that Gould and Eldredge give to the phenomena
that produce these patterns; it names a mechanism operating at a relatively high level
of evolutionary unit and time.
So different are the Dennett-Dawkins and Gould positions, in fact, they do not
theoretically cancel one another out. Certainly, Dennett’s account – that punctuations
can be seen in the fine-grained structure of the gradualist diagram – does not meet
Gould head-on. Dennett changes the game, but does not beat Gould at his own. Gould
wishes to incorporate ultra-Darwinism’s basic tenets while rejecting what he sees as
its reductionism, while Dennett wishes simply to dismantle Gould’s theory. He fails
to do so, however, because he either misses or dodges Gould rather than blocking or
cancelling him.
It seems disingenuous, and a little crude, to suggest that the usable bits of
punctuated equilibrium are already part of “orthodoxy,” while bits deemed unusable
are simply bad science. To do so is to suggest that one’s opponent was partly right,
but only because one got there first. To say this is to credit one’s opponent with, at
best, reiterating what has been said before, but less effectively than before. More
importantly for us, though, such an approach as Dennett’s ignores that Gould, in this
case, has added to the language of evolutionary theory. It does not make sense to say
of someone’s coinage, “We developed that concept, we just didn’t name it.” It does
not make sense because there can be no unnamed concepts. And yet, this seems to be
Dennett’s strategy with the element of “punctuation” he will allow into his narrative.
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Dennett does not, overall, like the idea named by “punctuated equilibrium,” but he
has not really shown us what is wrong with it – what about it is confused, incoherent,
or nonsensical – because he has argued around it. Moreover, the “punctuations” that
Dennett does allow are so distant from Gould’s that it makes little sense to say that
Gould is simply making explicit in his work what is implicit in others’. Precisely
because we are talking about new theory, models, concepts, it is equally senseless to
suggest that “punctuated equilibrium” contributes nothing because it somehow lay
dormant but unacknowledged or unnamed in orthodox theory. Dennett and Gould
are talking about vastly different phenomena; but if we are to talk of “punctuated
equilibrium,” we can hardly do so while suggesting that those who conceptualized it
have contributed nothing. Dennett’s criticisms of “punctuated equilibrium” seem to
rest on a misreading of Gould and Eldredge’s model – what and how it means, what
it names or denotes. It is easy enough to defend Gould and Eldredge, as I do, because
they have, in Goodman’s terms, “sold” this model in pretty clear and precise terms.
Conclusion
This article began with a problem: if a primary function of pop science is to take
the scientific word to the masses (who do not have access to primary research and are
not themselves research-active scientists), then how are engaged lay readers to choose
between contradicting science narratives? Another way of phrasing this question is:
given that pop science is written for the lay reader, how is this intended reader to gain
a point of critical entry into the genre?
One way, I have suggested (and an important way at that), of taking part in a
critical dialogue with pop science is to scrutinize the coherence and theoretical utility
of particular works’ central terms and concepts. This necessitated a consideration
of the difficulties of theorizing metaphor, at the end of which a rough schematic
was drawn up, in which science metaphors and poetic metaphors (or models and
metaphors), and passing and concept metaphors were distinguished. A concept model
or metaphor is theoretically useful if it offers something in the way of what Rorty
calls “redescription;” or, it encourages, even forces, us to “think otherwise,” to start
reshaping our theories about the world.
My arguments against Dawkins’s concept of “gene selfishness” turned on an
attempt to show that it is too confused a concept model to be theoretically useful. If we
cannot say with any certainty what a model models (that is, what a metaphor names or
denotes), then it can offer little to our conceptual storehouse.
Crucially, my argument against Dawkins is an argument against the clarity, and
therefore the utility, of his most famous term; it is no argument against the coherence,
nor the “rightness” or “wrongness,” of neo-Darwinism itself. To say that Dawkins’s
terms are not useful, then, is to say this: take away the concept of “gene selfishness,”
and the integrity of the neo-Darwinist narrative is hardly in danger. Quite the opposite,
in fact, as you remove a decidedly confused, and therefore confusing, idea.
In this article, I have come down, unapologetically, in favour of Gould, precisely
because those concepts of his that I have considered do have utility in the sense outlined
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above. “Punctuated equilibrium” and “spandrels” are keystones in his grand view of a
pluralistic evolutionary structure. Without them, his edifice will crumble. These terms
encapsulate structures (spandrels) or mechanisms (punctuated equilibrium) around
which Gould’s image of a “tiered” evolutionary structure is built. I have also defended
Gould on the count of coherence: Dennett fails, I have suggested, to show how or
why Gould’s concepts do not work. All he manages to do – but this he does with
great clarity and vigour – is tell us what his view of evolution is, and that he heartily
disagrees with Gould (among others).
Why the pragmatist theoretical framework in all this? Firstly, it is not my suggestion
that, in order to engage critically with popular science, one does not have to be a
scientist so long as one is a pragmatist. Pragmatism – or, rather, the pragmatists on
whom I have drawn – makes sense of the linguistic-metaphorical terms in which we
might engage with popular science and a critique thereof. A pragmatist understanding
of metaphor, and the difficulties of theorizing metaphor comprehensively, helps shine
a spotlight on the central point of disagreement between science commentators like
Midgley, Dawkins, Gould, and Dennett. As we have seen, the disagreement is rarely
over scientific knowledge, per se, or definitions of such terms as “gene;” rather, it is
over the models used to explore the organization and/or behaviour of such terms. The
pragmatists I have turned to in this paper help justify the approach to popular science
that I am advocating; but one does not have to be well-versed in Rorty, Goodman,
and Davidson in order to take this approach – hence the structure of this paper, with a
fairly stark division of theory and “case studies.”
Secondly, as I conceive things, Rortyan redescription is an invitation to critical
conversation. Gould, I maintain, does ask us to think otherwise; his models are
coherent and clearly specified – they are well “sold” – and the theory of which they
are integral parts does stand in marked contrast to a view of evolutionary change that
he, along with Rose, Dawkins, Dennett, and others, acknowledges as having achieved
the status of orthodoxy.27 It is in creative response to the gaps in orthodox theory that
Gould offers his models, which, pace Rorty and Goodman, re-make the linguistic
world of evolutionary theory. Dawkins’s lack of clarity does nothing to diminish
the neo-Darwinist narrative, but it cannot be said to have truly added to it or our
conceptual storehouse.
I have outlined a way by which non-experts, those not fluent in the language of
evolutionary science, can join a critical conversation, rather than be captive to a genre
written, supposedly, for them. I have skirted the question “who’s right?” by asking,
instead, “who’s coherent and theoretically useful?” But what of this first question:
who’s right?
In one of several exchanges between himself and Gould, and responding to an
unfavourable review from Gould, Dennett (1997b, 64) writes: “John Maynard Smith
praises my book [Dennett 1995]; Stephen Jay Gould attacks it. They are both authorities,
but they can’t both be right, can they?” This comment nicely encapsulates what has
27. See, passim but especially Part III, Gould (2007); Rose (1997, vii-xii); Dawkins (2006, xv, Ch.1);
Dennett (1995, passim).
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too long diverted some of pop science’s better known disputants; indeed, it is just
one comment in a protracted argument between the neo- or ultra-Darwinists and the
Radical Science movement.28 I now want to make the perhaps unwelcome claim that,
in a certain sense, there is very little for either the neo-Darwinists or Radical Scientists
to be “right” about, in the context of pop science. I mean this in the following sense:
assuming that the reader is a non-scientist, reliant on pop science for their scientific
“literacy,” the reader starts with the presumption that the pop-science writer believes
the version of science they are offering. The reader is not in a position to do otherwise
than start with the presumption that the “basic” science of a particular texts is “right”
(think, for example, of the overall theoretical disagreement Midgley and Rose have
with Dawkins, despite the three agreeing on the basic definition of “gene”).
Coherence and utility, rather than “rightness,” are, then, a more appropriate focus
when engaging with popular science specifically. The writers we have been considering
– writers whose works are read as populist educational texts and as exercises in
science theorizing/philosophizing – should not make the mistake of thinking that their
job is to tell us how the world just is. Their job, as popularizers and theorizers, is to
clarify, and point out the pitfalls of, the best theories the scientific community has to
offer about how it believes, to the best of its knowledge, the world just is.
Our best theories are those which seem to best, or better, describe and make
predictions about the world; but, of course, it remains among scientists, philosophers,
and other interested parties, a matter of contention as to how we decide the bases on
which one theory is pronounced better than another.29 Clearly, this line of conversation
lies outside the scope of this essay. But surely the contingencies and disputes that
shape specialist fields of enquiry should equally shape and be present in discussions
in the popular arena. To be “wrong” in the pop science arena, then, is to have failed to
offer coherent second-order reports and clarifications of the sort mentioned above. Our
interests in the utility of certain pop-science texts, and the basis of the disagreements
we have considered, are then interpretive and, in a sense, aesthetic.
My view of what popular science texts, written in the theoretical mode, should
understand themselves as doing, then, and of what they have to offer their readers, is
rather close to both Rorty’s and Oakeshott’s views about philosophy. Like philosophy,
pop science can offer second order criticisms or clarifications of clusters of ideas,
concepts, problems; but it must give up the idea that it is in the business of stating or
discovering anything like firm, unassailable, immutable truths (Rorty 2009, 357-94;
Oakeshott, 1991).
28. The literature on the ideological, philosophical, and scientific disputes between the neo-Darwinists
and Radical Science movement is substantial. However, refer to the following: Dawkins (1981;
1985; 2006, especially the final endnote, page 331-32); Dennett (1995, especially the chapter on
Gould; 1997b); Gould (1997a; 2007b; 2007c), and the editors’ introductions to Gould (2007); Rose
(1997), throughout but especially his introduction; Rose and Rose (1976); Rose, Lewontin, Kamin
(1990); Smith (1995); Smith, Dennett, Gould (1993). For a warning against the uncritical, wholesale
“culturalization” of science, see, of course, Sokal (1996).
29. This dispute hinges, in part, on debates between realists and anti-representationalists, and arguments
as to how or if language hooks onto the world. The issue is complex, but good introductions may be
found in a number of Rorty’s (1998) essays, especially his extended commentary on Dennett (98-121).
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One option for the critically concerned reader of pop science is that we attempt to
test the coherence and utility of certain arguments. As non-scientists, we are unlikely
to be in a position where we can dispute the fundamental rightness or wrongness of
certain theories. But we can chip away at the theories and models offered us, to see
how robust they are. We might not be able to prove or disprove the neo-Darwinists’
gene-centric view of life, but we can find problems in so influential a notion as the
selfish gene without having to retrain as geneticists.
The view I offer of pop science, and, particularly, theoretical works in the genre,
is that it is part of a conversation that takes place across boundaries of discipline
and expertise. When not distracted by arguments over who was “right,” Gould was
perhaps better at this conversation than Dennett and Dawkins: rejecting the naturalistic
fallacy, he would “draw no somber conclusions” from either neo-Darwinism or his
own evolutionary theories, for he “[did] not believe [...] that the answer to moral
dilemmas about meaning lies with the facts of nature, whatever they may be” (Gould
2007c, 235). (This contrasts markedly with Dawkins’s claims about neo-Darwinism’s
capacity to answer the “big questions.”) Repeatedly, Gould argued for “pluralism
in guiding philosophies,” for he accepted that “[g]radualism sometimes works
well” (Gould 2007d, 266). However, given that “[w]e live in a world of enormous
complexity,” it is possible that more than one theory of evolutionary change might be
needed if we are to avoid a “simplistic caricature and distortion of [Darwin’s] theory.”
For Darwin, Gould reminded his readers, “cut to the heart of nature by insisting so
forcefully that ‘natural selection has been the main, but not the exclusive, means
of modification’.” Accepting this, Gould asked, “[w]hy should such a complex and
various world yield to one narrowly construed cause?” (Gould 2007b, 459.) Across
Gould’s work there is space for several theories of evolutionary modification; there
must be if he is to make good his stated pluralism.
The concept metaphors and models characteristic of popular science can add to
our common conceptual storehouse in profound ways, but the meanings of science
writing’s concept models must, in the first instance, be sufficiently specified and
narrowed. If this is done, the way is prepared for later metaphorical and/or paradigmatic
applications and extensions of those terms (cast your mind back, for example, to our
earlier, passing mention of Dewey, who saw in Darwinian evolution a ready metaphor
for the dynamics of cultural change). Midgley’s pruning must take place initially, so
that these arborescent things we call metaphors can grow all the more strong in later
life, and withstand these later, broader – what we might call secondary – uses.
In this article, I have attempted to show that, without recourse to specialist
scientific knowledge, readers of pop science can ask – and perhaps even answer –
questions about the coherence and utility of particular works. (This, I hope it is clear,
is entirely different from simply asking whether works are difficult or not.) To ask
such questions of pop science is of public importance, because – with the genre’s
defining function, the education of an engaged but non-expert readership, in mind – if
a work is not coherent and theoretically useful in the ways we have been pursuing,
then what good can it be to its intended reader?
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COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Let Me Tell You a Story: Heroes and Events of Pragmatism
Interviews by Roberto Frega and Giovanni Maddelena*
* The interviews are part of the project “Strengthening the relevance of the American Philosophy to
Contemporary Philosophia in Europe and America” sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of
Amercian Philosophy and University of Molise.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PRAGMATISM AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Interview with Richard J. Bernstein
Can you recollect what the situation was concerning the study of pragmatism
when you were in college?
I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1951. At the
time the “Hutchins College” was an unusual institution. The entire curriculum was
fixed and it was organized around reading many of the great books of the Western
tradition. From the time I arrived, I was reading Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Darwin,
Herodotus, Thucydides and many other great books. In the undergraduate college
there was a negative attitude toward pragmatism. I don’t recall ever reading any of
the classical pragmatic thinkers. Undergraduate education in the United States is
very different from European education. I had a general liberal education – not a
specialized philosophical one.
What was the University of Chicago like when you were a student there in
1949-51?
I was an undergraduate and I had no contact with the graduate philosophy
department. But if you consider the careers of those who were students at Chicago, it
is an extraordinary group. For example, Susan Sontag, Richard Rorty, George Steiner,
Philip Roth – and even Mike Nichols were at Chicago. The faculty too was very
distinguished. It was an exciting intellectual and creative environment. The University
of Chicago was one of the most exciting intellectual institutions at the time when I
was an undergraduate.
What was your first encounter with pragmatism?
The first encounter that I had with pragmatism was when I went to study at
Columbia University. I enrolled in a course with Justus Buchler. This is the first time
that I read the writings of Peirce. But I wasn’t interested in pragmatism at the time.
I started my graduate studies at Yale in 1953. John E. Smith (who was then a young
assistant professor) organized a small reading group dealing with John Dewey’s
Experience and Nature. This was a revelation for me. I discovered that Dewey was
a far more interesting thinker than I had been led to believe. At the time there was
a prevailing prejudice that pragmatism was little more than a fuzzy anticipation of
logical positivism. I decided to write my dissertation on “John Dewey’s Metaphysics
of Experience”. One of my earliest publications was an anthology of Dewey’s writings
that dealt with metaphysical issues, On Experience, Nature and Freedom. This was a
time before we had a critical edition of Dewey’s works.
Paul Weiss, one of the editors of the Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce was
on the Yale faculty. So there was also great interest in the work of Peirce. My book,
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Interview with R. J. Bernstein
Perspectives on Peirce was based on a series of lectures given by members of the Yale
faculty.
What was studied at other universities? Positivism and early Analytic
Philosophy?
During the period just after World War II, a quiet but radical revolution in
philosophy in America was taking place. There was an enormous influence of the
émigré philosophers who came to the United States during the 1930s. Many of them
were associated with the Vienna Circle including Hans Reichenbach, Rudolph Carnap,
Herbert Feigl, Carl Hempel, Alfred Tarski – and many others sympathetic with logical
empiricism. They had a growing influence on graduate philosophy curriculum. In
addition, this was also the time of the highpoint of Oxford ordinary language
philosophy as well as the work of Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. Many prestigious
graduate departments were reshaping themselves into analytic departments heavily
influenced by the linguistic turn. Interest in classical American pragmatism was at an
all-time low.
Did you expect pragmatism to be different?
Before I read Dewey and Peirce seriously I had assimilated the common
prejudice that positivism and logical empiricism were more “sophisticated” forms of
pragmatism. But the more I studied classical pragmatism the more I realized that it
was very different from logical positivism. My first teaching position was at Yale and
I met Wilfrid Sellars when he joined the Yale faculty. I attended many of his seminars.
Sellars taught me to respect the best work in analytic philosophy, and I was also struck
by how Sellars’ philosophic writings were also close in spirit to pragmatism.
Did you consider yourself to be a pragmatist at the time?
Frankly, I have never considered myself to be any kind of “ist” although of course I
have been greatly influenced by the pragmatic thinkers. I have always been interested
in a variety of thinkers both in the Anglo-American and Continental traditions.
Because I have written on the pragmatists as well as Wittgenstein, Arendt, Habermas,
Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault (and many others), some people think that
I set out to build bridges between different traditions. But from the time that I was
a graduate student I have thought that there is only good and bad philosophy (and
there is plenty of both on both sides of the Atlantic). When I first started working on
the pragmatic thinkers, I thought that they were actually ahead of their time. And I
think this is evident today. Many of the themes that were fundamental to the classical
pragmatic thinkers have become central in philosophy today.
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Interview with R. J. Bernstein
So you are saying that understanding philosophy as a sort of “constellation”1
was not only typical of your work but also typical of Yale philosophy because it
was pluralist?
I appropriated the idea of a constellation from the work of Adorno and Benjamin.
But I do think the pluralist approach to philosophy at Yale had a great influence on
me. I remember being as excited and stimulated by Hegel as I was by Wittgenstein.
At the time there was a prejudice in many American philosophy departments that
the “linguistic turn” completely transformed philosophy and that there was no need
to study the history of philosophy. I never shared this prejudice. What made Yale
so distinctive at the time was an open pluralist approach to philosophy (although
there was a bias against analytic philosophy) and the talent of the graduate students
– including Richard Rorty. It was Dick Rorty and his first wife Amelie Rorty (I knew
both of them at Chicago) that convinced me to pursue graduate studies at Yale.
What attracted you to the classical pragmatic thinkers?
I was originally attracted to Dewey’s rich conception of experience and his
commitment to radical participatory deliberative democracy. Dewey led me to see
the importance of Hegel for understanding pragmatism. Recently Jeffrey Stout has
written an excellent and perceptive comprehensive critical review of my work and
he labels me a “Hegelian pragmatist.”2 I read Experience and Nature as Dewey’s
attempt to naturalize Hegel in light of Darwin’s approach to evolution. There is an
anecdote that I would like to tell about my early interest in Dewey’s metaphysics of
experience. My first professional philosophical paper that I presented at the American
Philosophical Association was based on my dissertation. I criticized Dewey for not
reconciling two strands in his work – a more naturalistic and a more phenomenological
strand. John Herman Randall was the chair of this session and he had already written
about Dewey’s metaphysics. I thought he would severely criticize my paper. But he
liked my paper (even though we disagreed) and he published it in the Journal of
Philosophy. As you may know that paper is still being discussed and criticized by
Dewey scholars – right up to the present. “John Dewey’s Metaphysics of Experience”
(1961) was my first publication in a philosophical journal.
Do you still think there is any room for metaphysics in pragmatism?
“Metaphysics” is a term which has had a bad press in some circles. It suggests the
possibility of a “transcendent metaphysics” – the study of what is ultimately real. And,
of course, there is a great popularity of the expression “post-metaphysical.” Clearly
1. The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizon of Modernity/Postmodernity (1991).
2. Jeffrey Stout “The Spirit of Pragmatism: Bernstein’s Variations on Hegelian Themes,” Graduate
Faculty Philosophy Journal 33/1 (2012).
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all the classical pragmatic thinkers opposed “transcendent metaphysics” and what
Dewey called the “quest for certainty.” Pragmatists are some of the sharpest critics of
traditional metaphysics. But there is another more open generic sense of metaphysics.
All philosophers have some sense of what there really is – of what reality is like (even
if they don’t speak of metaphysics). Dewey intended to identify what he took to be the
generic traits of existence and experience. He did not claim finality or some special
philosophic knowledge of reality. Nor did he accept a fixed distinction between
appearance and reality.
I might also mention that I was editor of the Review of Metaphysics – a journal
founded by Paul Weiss. I was appointed as the successor to Weiss. What was
distinctive about the Review is that it was a genuinely pluralistic journal. We published
translations of Heidegger as well as Quine, Sellars and Rorty and Leo Strauss.
How long were you editor of the Review of Metaphysics?
When Paul Weiss appointed me editor he told me to edit it as long as I was
learning something and enjoying the experience. The Review functioned in a very
unique way. The editor read all the submitted manuscripts and made all the decisions
about publication. And the editor also wrote a personal letter about each manuscript
submitted. I was assistant editor from 1961-1964 and editor from 1964 until 1971.
I was reading almost 400 manuscripts a year. I decided to give up the editorship in
1971 because I followed Paul’s advice. I was not interested simply in the prestige
and power of being the editor of a philosophical journal that had one of the largest
circulations. I enjoyed being editor and learned a great deal from the experience but I
went on to other projects. In 1981 I became a founding editor of Praxis International.
If you don’t call yourself a pragmatist, what is your place in the pragmatic
tradition?
I have been inspired by the classical American pragmatic thinkers. But I think that a
pragmatic orientation requires openness to other approaches and other traditions. I have
tried to practice this openness in my encounters with thinkers in the Anglo-American
tradition as well as the Continental tradition. In my book, The Pragmatic Turn (2010) I
argued that pragmatic themes have become fundamental in much of philosophy today.
Pragmatism is more widely discussed today than at any time in the past.
Some people say that there is a canon in American philosophy. And the canon
is formed by seven thinkers: Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, Royce, Whitehead,
and Santayana.
Although I think all of the above have made interesting philosophical contributions,
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I strongly object to the idea of a fixed canon. The truth is that from its very origins there
have been arguments about who is and who is not a pragmatist. Furthermore, close
analysis of the seven philosophers mentioned above shows how radically different
they are from each other. There have been arguments about what – if anything –
is distinctive about American philosophy. What is mistaken about “canon” thinking
is that it leaves out many important figures such as Jane Addams and Alain Locke
who have made important contributions to American philosophy. It also leaves out
important figure such as Quine, Sellars, Rorty, and Brandom. If we are to be true to
what is best in the American tradition, then we should be skeptical about any fixed
canon and to be open and sensitive to new developments. Or you might say that the
“canon” is always being rewritten in light of new developments.
What do you consider to be pragmatic in your philosophy?
At different times in my career I have attempted to identify characteristic themes
in the pragmatic tradition that I share. For example in the presidential address that I
gave to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, “Pragmatism,
Pluralism, and the Healing of Wounds”3 I listed the following interrelated themes
that characterize the pragmatic ethos: anti-foundationalism; fallibilism; the nurturing
of critical communities of inquirers; radical contingency; and pluralism. Different
pragmatic thinkers have approached these themes in different ways. I have developed
all of these themes in my work. In the prologue to The Pragmatic Turn, I argue that
we can detect pragmatic themes in Wittgenstein and Heidegger. I also subscribe to
Dewey’s idea of radical democracy as a way of life in which all share and all participate.
The conviction that seems to be at the heart of your work is the ability to
open pragmatic traditions to all kinds of multiple conversations. It is still an open
question whether the twentieth century can be characterized as The Pragmatic
Century – as you claim. For some thinkers there is a dialectical tension between
pragmatist and the pragmatic. Do you think there is a distinctive contribution of
pragmatists to the pragmatic tradition?
If I understand the gist of your question, I want answer that the classical pragmatists
have something to contribute to a larger pragmatic tradition. The classical pragmatists
were all robust non-reductive naturalists. They were all influenced by Darwin. We
also need to realize that the philosophic writings of Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead
include far more than their focus on specific pragmatic theses. I think it is an accident
of history that we use the label “pragmatic” to identify these thinkers. We should
recall that Peirce did not even use the expression “pragmatism” until James published
his famous essay “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” in 1898. And
3. “Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Healing of Wounds,” in The New Constellation (1991).
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Dewey thought of himself primarily as advocating an experimental philosophy. I have
suggested that “pragmatism” is like an accordion expression. Sometimes it is used
in a very broad sense to label these thinkers. Other times it is used more narrowly
to focus on their theories of meaning and truth. The classical pragmatic thinkers did
not see any fixed distinction between philosophy and science. Furthermore, they did
not see any sharp ontological breaks in the world. Now if we consider the European
phenomenological tradition going back to Husserl there is a critique of naturalism.
But the naturalism that Husserl criticizes is a reductive naturalism. I consider my own
work in the pragmatic tradition of robust non-reductive naturalism. I am also skeptical
of those who want to draw a sharp distinction between science and philosophy. At
different times in history there have been important differences between science and
philosophy, but the boundary is fluid and changing. Philosophy should always be open
to what it can learn from new developments in all the sciences – both the natural and
the social sciences. Although I have my disagreements with Robert Brandom I am
sympathetic with his attempt to show the pragmatic motifs in Hegel, Heidegger and
Wittgenstein. I don’t think there is a set of fixed theses that establishes the essential
core of pragmatism. The pragmatic tradition is a dynamic one that includes a variety
of different voices. Philosophers who identify themselves as pragmatists have always
argued about what constitutes the meaning of pragmatism. And these debates are still
very much alive.
Do you think that pragmatism (even Peirce) is more Hegelian than Kantian?
We need to distinguish different strands in the pragmatic tradition. There is a strong
Kantian strand. We see this in Peirce, Sellars, and Putnam. And recently Habermas
has characterized himself as a “Kantian Pragmatist.” Dewey, of course, was much
more influenced by Hegel. And he shares Hegel’s critique of Kant. But even Kantian
pragmatists reject many of the fundamental distinctions that we find in Kant such as
the distinction between phenomena and noumena. They also reject Kant’s table of
categories as fixed and permanent. They basically accept many of Hegel’s criticisms
of Kant. And like Hegel they emphasize the interaction of history and philosophy.
My own sympathies are with a Hegelian approach to pragmatism. But we should
not forget that Hegel himself begins with appropriating Kantian themes – and then
moving beyond them.
Many themes in your work are connected with the Jewish tradition. What has
been the impact of this tradition on your work?
I find it difficult to give a clear answer to this question. I am a Jew and I am proud
of it. I grew up in a second generation Jewish immigrant family in New York. I have
never felt any conflict between being a Jew and an American (and a philosopher).
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At a certain point in my career I became fascinated with twentieth century Jewish
intellectuals. I wanted to understand how their Jewishness affected their intellectual
work. I wrote two books dealing with this topic: Hannah Arendt and the Jewish
Question (1996) and Freud and the Legacy of Moses (1998). Both Arendt and Freud
were secular Jews. I argue that Jewish questions are central to their work. Although
I am interested in the Jewish tradition, I am not a scholar of the Jewish tradition.
Furthermore, I am very skeptical and critical of the recent fascination with political
theology.
You say that you are skeptical about political theology. Are you skeptical
about religion in general?
No. I do not consider myself to be a militant atheist. I am really more agnostic. All
of the classical pragmatists appreciated the role of religion in human life. They were
anti-authoritarian and anti-dogmatic not anti-religious. We need to take account of the
significant role of religions in the contemporary world. I am however distressed about
the recent influence of Carl Schmitt’s conception of political theology. I strongly object
to those who think that all politics does or must presuppose religion or theology.4 Of
course the problem of world religions and the way they influence politics has become
a global issue today.
Concerning democracy, what is your position about the debates concerning
communitarianism and liberalism?
I think that the dichotomy between liberalism and communitarianism is a
misleading one. My position is close to Dewey who was a radical democrat, a radical
liberal and who also appreciated the significance of public communal debate for a
creative democracy. Much of contemporary liberalism has been a rights obsessed
liberalism. Dewey was well aware that liberalism, which once was a radical doctrine,
has become rigidified and frequently used as a defense of the status quo. And Dewey
also thought that a “business mentality” was undermining democracy. From his earliest
work he attacked (in a Hegelian manner) the “liberal” idea of the isolated individual.
Individuality is an achievement and the quality of individuality is itself dependent
on the type of communities in which we live. Dewey’s vision of what democracy
can become overcomes the division between liberalism and communitarianism. And
I agree with him.
4. For my critique of Carl Schmitt, see my Violence Thinking without Banisters (2013). For my critique
of political theology see “Is Politics ‘Practicable’ without Religion?,” in Social Research 80/1 (2013).
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What has been your relationship with other contemporary philosophers who
identify with the pragmatic tradition?
I have been in active discussion with many other pragmatic thinkers including
Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Robert Brandom, and Jürgen Habermas. I discuss all
of these thinkers in The Pragmatic Turn—and I have had personal friendships with
them. I knew Dick Rorty for more than fifty years. Habermas has been a close friend
since the early 1970s. We have had intellectual differences and public debates but
we share much in common. I believe that philosophic discussion is based upon and
cultivates deep friendship.
What do you think has been the most significant debates that you have had
with other philosophers?
Rorty and Habermas have been close intellectual and personal friends. Concerning
Rorty we have had many public exchanges on a variety of issues. I have sometimes
said that there are two Rortys – the reasonable Rorty with whom I mostly agree – and
the outrageous Rorty who loves to provoke. My deepest disagreement with Rorty
concerns our different views of democracy. Rorty emphases “ironic liberalism” and
I favor a more active participatory deliberative democracy. Concerning Habermas, I
detect a pragmatic and a more transcendental strain in his thinking. We have debated
these issues for forty years and I have sought to “detranscendentalize” him. Habermas
is a bit too Kantian for my taste and I have sought to press Hegelian and pragmatic
critiques against him.
What do you think about the current state of philosophy in America and
the future of philosophy in America? Isn’t there still a strong predominance of
analytic philosophy?
Frankly I find the general situation of philosophy in America today a bit
depressing. Much of this is due to the excessive professionalization of academic life.
Rorty was right when he suggested that academic philosophy is becoming more and
more marginal to human life – and even marginal to the humanistic disciplines. Even
among analytic philosophers I see a sharp difference between the initial stages of
this movement and the way it is practiced today. Whatever one’s critical evaluation
of Carnap, Quine, Sellars, and Davidson one must acknowledge that they were bold
thinkers. And their views have important ramifications for a wide range of philosophic
issues. But much of today’s philosophic writing is so specialized that it is difficult to
see its significance or relevance. There are of course some notable exceptions. Even
among pragmatic thinkers there are now divisions. We should remember that for all
the differences among Peirce, James, and Dewey they were engaged in conversation
with each other.
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Do you think this situation has resulted from the specialization in analytic
philosophy?
I think this part of a larger problem – the professional specialization of academic
life. And it seems to be getting worse and worse. When I was a graduate student,
one had a sense of outstanding thinkers who would have a significant impact
on philosophy – regardless of one’s orientation. I was a graduate student when
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was published and when J. L. Austin was
widely discussed. In Germany, Heidegger and Gadamer were influential. And one
knew about the importance of Habermas even when he was a young man. In France
there was Ricœur, Derrida, and Foucault. Perhaps I am a bit jaded but I do not see
many philosophic thinkers of their caliber today. I am not completely pessimistic. For
I see many younger philosophers and pragmatic thinkers who are not happy with the
current situation. I don’t want to predict the future, but I hope that the bold speculative
imaginative spirit that was characteristic of the early pragmatic thinkers will reassert
itself.
You mentioned “conversation” and “dialogue” as a distinctive mark of your
philosophy and your epoch. I wonder if you think this dialogue and conversation
is still possible on the contemporary philosophic scene.
You may recall the last sentence of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:
“The only point on which I insist is that philosophers’ moral concern should be with
continuing the conversation of the West, rather than with insisting upon a place for
the traditional problems of modern philosophy within that conversation.” I basically
agree with Rorty although I don’t think the conversation should be limited to the
“West.” Intellectually we are now living in a global world. During my lifetime, I have
had the good fortune to be in conversation with many philosophic friends including
Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida,
and Jürgen Habermas. We have had our disagreements but the conversations have
always been civil and fruitful. And I see many younger philosophers yearning to
engage in such conversations. I deeply believe in engaged pluralism. My hope is that
this spirit of engaged agonistic friendly dialogue will mark the future of philosophy.
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EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PRAGMATISM AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Bookreviews
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PRAGMATISM AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Gabriele Gava*
I. Levi, Pragmatism and Inquiry: Selected Essays, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2012.
Isaac Levi is a central figure in contemporary pragmatism, who, drawing
extensively on the philosophy of classical pragmatists like Charles S. Peirce and John
Dewey, has been able to successfully develop, correct, and implement their views, thus
presenting an innovative and significant approach to various issues in contemporary
philosophy, including problems in logic, epistemology, decision theory, etc. His books
(just to mention a few of them) Gambling with Truth (Knopf 1967), The Enterprise of
Knowledge (MIT Press 1980), Hard Choices (Cambridge University Press 1986), and
The Fixation of Belief and Its Undoing (Cambridge University Press 1991) propose
a solid and elaborate framework to address various issues in epistemology from an
original pragmatist perspective. The essays contained in Pragmatism and Inquiry
investigate ideas that constitute the core of Levi’s philosophy (like corrigibilism, his
account of inquiry, his distinction between commitment and performance, his account
of statistical reasoning, his understanding of credal probabilities, etc.), but they do so
by putting these views in dialogue with other important philosophical figures of the last
and present century (like Edward Craig, Donald Davidson, Jaakko Hintikka, Frank
Ramsey, Richard Rorty, Michael Williams, Timothy Williamson, Crispin Wright,
etc.), thus providing a renewed entry-point in his thought. The collection contains
11 essays which have been all published already. It is good to have these articles
collected together, because they are very interrelated and they present a systematic
view. However, it would have been useful to have a longer introduction (the one
in the book is just 3 pages long), which guided the reader among the conceptual
relationships between the chapters, and which identified their relevance in the current
philosophical context.
Insofar as there is much interrelation and overlap among the articles, I will avoid
commenting them singularly one after another. I will rather identify some of the
central themes that run through the book and point out where relevant ideas about
these themes are presented in the collection. The first topic I wish to focus on is
Levi’s original account of the tasks and purposes of epistemology. According to Levi,
epistemology should not be understood as a discipline that identifies the principles
according to which we can decide whether our beliefs are justified or not. He takes
from the classical pragmatist (in particular from Peirce and Dewey) what he calls
the principle of doxastic inertia, or doxastic infallibilism (cf. 32, 231), according to
which we have no reason to justify the beliefs we are actually certain of. The task
of epistemology is thus not that of justifying our current beliefs, but rather that of
justifying changes in beliefs (cf. 165-71). In this context, Levi develops an interesting
and original perspective which associates infallibilism and corrigibilism. We should
be infallibilist about the beliefs we currently hold as true (according to Levi, it would
be incoherent to hold them to be true and stress that they could be false as fallibilists
* Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Deutschland [[email protected]]
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do). Nonetheless we can be corrigibilist about our beliefs, because we can held them
to be vulnerable to modification in the course of inquiry.1 This means that we cannot
but regard our current beliefs as true, even though we can consider them as open to
correction in the course of future inquiry (cf. 120). At this point, it is interesting to
refer to Levi’s discussion of the claim, advanced for example by Rorty, that we should
aim at warranted assertibility and not at truth. According to Levi, this claim could
be understood in different ways. On the one hand, it could be read as implying that
we should increase the number of beliefs that are acquired through well-conducted
inquiry (133). This would be contrary to the principle of doxastic inertia proposed
by the classical pragmatism, because we would require a justification for beliefs
we already had. Consequently, if we read Rorty’s claim in this way, his pragmatism
would abandon one of the central views of this very tradition. On the other hand, if
warranted assertibility is understood as a specific aim of inquiries we actually pursue
(where we thus need a justification because we are trying to introduce changes in our
beliefs), the simple contention that we should aim at warranted assertibility remains
empty if we do not specify which are the proximate aims of the inquiry in question
(and if we do so, it seems that a central aim of at least some inquiries should be the
attainment of new error free information: a goal that Rorty would probably reject as
an aim of inquiry) (cf. 130, 133).
From this account of the role and purposes of epistemology, it is clear how the
analysis of the structure and procedures of inquiry plays an essential role in Levi’s
theory of knowledge. This is the second topic I wish to address. Levi often recognizes
his debt to Peirce and Dewey in his account of inquiry (cf. 1), but he also insists that
we should develop their views further in order to attain a consistent position. He agrees
with Peirce that inquiry is the process which allows us to pass from a state of doubt
to a state of belief (cf. 83), but, following Dewey, he criticizes Peirce’s psychological
description of these states (1-2).2 However, he does not endorse Dewey’s strategy to
avoid psychologism, that is, his description of inquiry as a process starting with an
indeterminate situation and ending with a determinate situation (2, 84-5). Rather, he
understands changes in states of belief as changes in doxastic commitments, where
states of belief understood as commitments are to be distinguished from states of belief
understood as performances. Accordingly, a doxastic commitment identifies the set of
beliefs we commit ourselves in a state of full belief. It could be totally different from
the views we consciously endorse, which identify our state of doxastic performance
(cf. 106). A state of belief understood as commitment has then a normative component,
because it describes what we should believe and not what we actually believe. Besides
identifying the beliefs we are committed to endorse, our state of full belief also decides
which are the possible views and theories, on which we might rationally have doubts
about (48). In other words, a state of full belief (understood as commitment) decides
the space of serious possibilities we can rationally inquire about (169). Accordingly,
1. However, one might argue that this is exactly what many fallibilists contend, but this
would just be a matter of definition.
2. Peirce himself later criticizes the psychological account of the principles of inquiry that
he gave in “The Fixation of Belief.”
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inquiry should not be understood as a process that generates changes in doxastic
performances (which would concern our psychological dispositions and states), but
rather as a process which results in changes in doxastic commitments (108).
Changes in doxastic commitments can concern either the extension or contraction
of our state of full belief. Levi offers us a detailed analysis of the ways in which these
changes can be justified.
Extension can be justified by either routine expansion or deliberate expansion,
where routine expansion identifies a “program for utilizing inputs to form new full
beliefs to be added to X’s state of full belief K” (235). Levi refers here to a “program”
because he wants to distinguish this kind of expansion from a conclusion obtained
through inference, where, for example, the data would figure as premises of an
induction (236). The difference here is that the “program” tells us how to use the
data before the data are collected, whereas in inductive inferences there is no such
identification in advance. He reads Peirce’s late account of induction as developing
some elements along these lines (72-3) and he finds some affinities with Hintikka’s
account of induction as a process “allowing nature to answer a question put to it by
the inquirer” (204).
Our state of full belief can also expand by means of deliberate expansion. In the
latter “the answer chosen is justified by showing it is the best option among those
available given the cognitive goals of the agent” (236). “The justified change is the one
that is best among the available options (relevant alternatives) according to the goal of
seeking new error-free and valuable information” (237). However, when we expand
our state of full belief we can inadvertently generate inconsistencies among our beliefs.
When we are in this inconsistent state of belief, we cannot but give up some of our
beliefs in order to avoid contradictions. In contracting our state of full belief, we have
basically three options. We can give up the new belief that generated the inconsistency
or we can give up the old belief with which it is in contradiction. Alternatively, we can
also suspend judgment between the two. In all these cases we have a contraction of the
state of full belief. Levi describes the criterion which should be followed in deciding
between these three options as follows: “In contracting a state of belief by giving up
information X would prefer, everything else being equal, to minimize the value of loss
of the information X is going to incur” (230). In deciding weather to give up either the
new or the old belief, X should then take into consideration which retreat would cause
the smaller loss of information. If the loss of information would be equal in the two
cases, then X should suspend judgment about the two (181, 229-30). This account of
inquiry and of the way in which it justifies changes in doxastic commitments is part
of an elaborate and original approach to epistemology. It draws its basic insights from
Peirce’s and Dewey’s account of inquiry, but it develops their views in an extremely
original and detailed view, which constitutes the core of Levi’s philosophy.
Levi’s book contains also interesting reflections on the concept of truth. He argues
that, from a pragmatist point of view, we should not be interested in giving a definition
of this concept, which clarifies what we do when we use the predicate “is true” in
sentences and propositions. Rather, we should be interested in how the concept of
truth is relevant for understanding the way in which we change beliefs through inquiry
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(124-5). Levi criticizes those accounts of inquiry which claim that inquiry should not
aim at truth but at warranted assertibility (e.g. Rorty, Davidson, sometimes Dewey)
(ch. 7). Against these views, he maintains that a concern with truth is essential to
understand at least some of our inquiries, that is, those inquiries which aim to justify
changes in full beliefs. It seems essential that these inquiries should try to avoid error
(an aim that should be associated with the purpose of attaining new information) and
this seems to have an indirect connection with the aim of finding out the truth (1356). On the other hand, Levi rejects Peirce’s account of truth as the final opinion that
we will reach at the end of inquiry. According to Levi, proposing this understanding
of truth as the aim of inquiry would result in insoluble inconsistencies with the kind
of corrigibilism that Levi endorses and that he also attributes to Peirce (138-40).
Levi’s view seems to be the following: if in my current state of belief I believe h is
absolutely true, then I should regard it as an essential part of the final opinion I aim
to reach “in the long run.” Thus, I should not be prepared to give up h (which would
contradict Peirce’s corrigibilism), insofar as at further steps in inquiry I could end up
believing the contrary view (which I now believe is false). Levi concludes that at any
determinate time in inquiry we should not be concerned with making the best move
in order to contribute to the attainment of the truth intended as the final and definitive
description of the world. On the contrary, we should just try to obtain new errorfree information in the next proximate step of inquiry. I do not think that this way
of presenting Peirce’s views is fair to his actual position, for two main reasons: (1)
Peirce’s account of truth as the final opinion can be read as identifying not substantial
theses about reality or the ultimate aims of inquiry, but the commitments we make with
respect to a proposition when we asserts that it is true: that is, we commit ourselves to
the view that it will hold in the long run;3 (2) even if we identify the attainment of truth
as the ultimate aim of inquiry, it seems possible, within Peirce’s model, to maintain
that we can be corrigibilist about the views we currently consider true. Of course it
would be irrational to doubt or give up these views as long as we still believe in them
(this is basically what Levi calls Peirce’s principle of doxastic inertia). This does not
imply that we cannot consider those views as corrigible, given that we could incur
in circumstances (like new evidence gained through experience, or the identification
of inconsistencies in our set of beliefs, etc.) that justify the emergence of a doubt on
those views. If we were in these circumstances, it would not be problematic to give
up those views, insofar as we would not be any more completely certain that they
are true. If our aim were thus the attainment of truth in the long run, we would be
justified to give up those views insofar as we would not be any more certain that they
contribute to the attainment of the final opinion.
Levi’s book also contains important scholarly contributions on Peirce and
Dewey. It is undeniable that his approach to the writings of both Peirce and Dewey
is strongly influenced by his own views and interests, but Levi is surely distinctive
among the central figures in contemporary pragmatism for reading these classics with
3. On this reading of Peirce’s account of truth see: C. Hookway, The Pragmatic Maxim,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, 69.
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the attention they deserve. Chapter 4 “Beware of Syllogism: Statistical Reasoning
and Conjecturing According to Peirce” presents a reconstruction of the evolution of
Peirce’s account of induction and hypothesis. Levi shows how Peirce later abandons
his early attempts to define these kinds of inferences by means of a permutation of
the structure of a categorical syllogism. In his later writings Peirce first begins to
regard these inferences as permutations of statistical deductions (75), and he then
abandons this strategy in favor of a description of deduction, induction and abduction
reflecting their roles in inquiry (77-8). Chapters 5 “Dewey’s Logic of Inquiry”
and 6 “Wayward Naturalism: Saving Dewey from Himself” contain interesting
considerations on Dewey’s theory of inquiry and the kind of naturalism we should
associate with it. Insofar as the two articles overlap in many respect (unfortunately
sometimes the overlap is not only relative to the topics, but textual!, which makes
one wonder if it would not have been better to include only one of the two in the
collection) I will discuss them together. With respect to chapter 4 on Peirce, these
articles are less scholarly and more concerned with a correction of Dewey’s views
along the lines Levi suggests. In these chapters, Levi discusses a multiplicity
of issues, but I will limit myself to the consideration of his criticism of Dewey’s
naturalism (cf. 85-8, 111-16). Accordingly, Levi claims that “activities like believing,
evaluating, inquiring, deliberating, and deciding are resistant to naturalization”
(105), if the latter is understood as an explanation of these activities by means of
psychological or behavioral dispositions. In his attempt to show continuities between
the way in which humans rationally conduct inquiries and the way in which animals
respond to the challenges posed by their environment, Dewey commits exactly this
naturalistic fallacy (cf. 85, 111). However, states of full belief, understood as doxastic
commitments, involve a normative element that cannot be reduced to dispositions
(106). Endorsing an approach to inquiry based on commitments is equal to endorsing
a better naturalism, which Levy calls wayward naturalism (cf. 103-4), and which does
not substitute old supernatural entities with new ones (according to Levi, the appeal to
dispositions as universal means of explanation in epistemology introduce a new kind
of supernaturalism). Following Levi, if we read Dewey properly, it becomes evident
that we cannot but develop his account of inquiry in this way (108-9).
To conclude, it is surely good to have these essays collected together, insofar as
they offer a new perspective on some of the central insights of Levi’s philosophy
thanks to a fruitful discussion with recent developments in epistemology. Even
though sometimes the overlap between the articles is so significant (as in the case of
chapter 5 and 6), that it would have been advisable to avoid redundancies, the texts
here presented are surely of interest for any scholar who believes that the classical
pragmatists’ account of inquiry has still a lot to offer to the current philosophical
debate.
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COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA
Alicia Garcia Ruiz*
J. Ryder, The Things on Heaven and Earth, New York, Fordham University Press,
2013.
I. On philosophical education
To many philosophical sensibilities the expression “Pragmatic Naturalism” may
sound like a sort of oxymoron. We have a good news: it is not. John Ryder’s new
book The Things on Heaven and Earth will not persuade perhaps the most reluctant
partisans of both sides, but it certainly shows how “pragmatic naturalism” is not
necessarily a contradictio in adjecto, but rather an exciting theoretical approach. After
reading this book, one acquires the confidence that pragmatic naturalism can be a
valuable tool to deal satisfactorily with a good number of issues debated in virtually all
fields of contemporary philosophy. This remarkable defense of pragmatic naturalism
is also an instance of the best pragmatic legacy in terms of methodological fluidity
and theoretical openness while using a convincing and clear style of argumentation.
Ryder’s approach to pragmatic naturalism is not an unspecified appeal to
methodological plurality. On the contrary, he shows that different disciplinary
approaches to any subject-matter produce “virtuous circularities.” According to
Ryder, these circularities have the merit of allowing for a sound critique of many of
the habitual, academic prejudices. Many times these academic prejudices unnaturally
force students to choose between apparently opposing teams. This book should be
received as a healthy invitation to cultivate a different attitude. Ryder successfully
demonstrates how an encompassing approach can be well structured, clear and
productive at once. In sum, this book should be carefully read in many introductory
philosophy courses.
However, The Things on Heaven and Earth also has further merits. John Ryder is
determined to demonstrate the plausibility and usefulness of combining pragmatism
and naturalism. Despite the book deals with a considerable number of topics, its very
precise structure covers a wide range of interests in an accessible and effective way.
In Part I, Ryder articulates the fundamental tenets of his proposal, as he provides
a general framework to stress the contrasts and connections between the naturalist
and the pragmatist perspective, along with a clear elucidation of the current debates
on this issue. Part II develops the ontological and epistemological consequences of
pragmatic naturalism, dealing with different areas of experience such as scientific
research, religious views, and artistic practices. Finally, Part III accounts for the social
and political relevance of his proposal. In particular, Ryder focuses his attention on the
problems of contemporary democracies and international relations, while showing in
what way pragmatic naturalism can be a helpful instrument to inform contemporary
cosmopolitism.
The purpose that pervades this work is outspoken by the initial quote, the moment
when Hamlet admonishes Horatio’s “epistemic dogmatism:” “There are more things
* University of Barcelona, Spain [[email protected]]
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on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The question
will be to decide whether the genuine “naturalist” is Horatio or Hamlet. Following the
lines of the traditional pragmatist attempt to elucidate practical contexts of knowledge,
Ryder rightly affirms that the ultimate philosophical endeavor is to address the actual
complexity of human experience. To pay due account to all the “things on heaven
and earth” means here to study those regions of experience neglected during the
20th century, as the result of a reductive materialist interpretation of the concept of
“nature.” Although Ryder does not refer explicitly to a phenomenological conception
of “nature,” it is worth mentioning how his themes and perspectives keep a familiar
resemblance with both Husserl’s research on “regional ontologies” and with the
phenomenological dispute on reduced conceptions of naturalism.1 In any case,
pragmatic naturalism is intended to fill the void left by artificial, clear-cut divisions of
experience as sketched in radical materialist interpretations of experience and nature.
Notwithstanding its high scope and its breadth of interests, The Things on Heaven
and Earth does not fall into a flabby pluralism but provides a solid outlook where
“the point is not to talk about everything but to articulate a philosophic perspective
through which it is possible to make sense of whatever experience and thought reveal
or generate, however they reveal or generate it” (9). With this aim in view, Ryder
consistently claims for a rebuttal of two common epistemological assumptions with
regard to metaphysical issues. In the first place, he affirms that conceptualizing the
“existence” problem in terms of deciding that ‘this’ or ‘that’ “exists” is unnecessarily
reductive and insufficient to cope with the complexity of human experiences.
Secondly, Ryder suggests that the ambition of making a sort of “reality list” in a
Quinean style eventually entails more epistemological problems than it solves. Thus,
the book proposes a totally different task for epistemology, i.e. the exploration of the
variety of conditions under which our very frames of understanding are constructed.
Therefore, Ryder’s approach is not to regard metaphysical issues as misleading
philosophical problems and, consequently, to discard them. On the contrary, problems
that stem from these metaphysical issues should be confronted through an extensive
understanding of epistemology, specifically connected to ontological inquiry. This
would allow for a satisfactory elucidation of the meaning of existential propositions:
“The metaphysical – or, better, the ontological – question is not whether this or that
exists but rather how we might understand whatever it is what exist” (1). In this sense,
a distinctive trait of pragmatic naturalism would be a certain “ontological tolerance”
towards the vast domain of the real that would make possible to identify a good
number of candidates as suitable “sources of knowledge,” in contrast to the prejudicial
attitudes displayed by other understandings of ontology. However, Ryder rightly
specifies that his ontological tolerance does not equate to a rejection of naturalism.
The challenge is to construct a solid bridge between pragmatism and naturalism that
can provide a more encompassing approach to the varieties of human experience.
1. See Husserl E., (1952), Ideen I, Hua. IV, Den Haag, ed. Marly Biemel, § 149, and Rosenthal S. B.,
Bourgeois P. L., (1980), Pragmatism and Phenomenology, Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing.
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II. A pragmatic naturalist point of view
This book undertakes a reconciliation of pragmatism and naturalism on the basis
of their respective accounts of the concepts of “experience” and “nature.” As Ryder
observes, “in a nutshell, for pragmatism nature is understood in terms of experience,
and for naturalism experience is understood in terms of nature” (22). In order to
prove how both views can come together, Ryder settles a preliminary framework
for pragmatic naturalism by clarifying three main tenets. First, he explains how the
conceptual struggle between objectivism and constructivism can be avoided through
the recognition that both perspectives can be justified without the need of a mutual
exclusion. Interestingly, Ryder relocates this debate along the lines of the split between
modernism and postmodernism. Ryder’s account of this debate is summarized in four
plain and precise propositions: 1) Natural Phenomena have objective, determinate
traits; 2) the traits of natural phenomena are knowable; 3) the process of inquiry is
necessarily conditioned and perspectival; and 4) human interaction with the rest of
nature, cognitive or otherwise, is active and creative. According to Ryder, points
1 and 2 would define the modern perspective while points 3 and 4 correspond to
the postmodern view. In order to connect these contending positions, the author
exposes a painstaking and convincing argumentation on how the four propositions
are simultaneously true, which is possible when we endorse a relational perspective
on nature.
Second, Ryder reinterprets Dewey’s relational ontology by complementing it with
the ordinal naturalism of Justus Buchler. This combination is found at its best in the
theoretical work of the so-called Columbia School. The recovery of this pragmatist
legacy is one of the most appealing achievements of the book. The author suggests
that the original, naturalist trait of pragmatism can be re-appropriated in order to
overcome the prevalence of Rortyan extreme relativism and rejection of objectivism.2
The basic ontological idea underlying this stress on relationality is that “all ‘things’
are constituted by constituents and their relations, and that no constituent is atomic”
(41). In other words, nature as we experience it is not divided into simple pieces of
information or empiria in the materialist sense; on the contrary, nature is absolutely
relational. Interestingly, Ryder remarks that absolute relationality does not mean to
assume the necessity of an Absolute since this would be to claim for non-relational
entities. For this reason, even though relational ontology of “constitutive relations”
opposes to reductive materialism, it needs not to be a form of idealism either.
Third, we find that pragmatic naturalism constitutes a rebuttal of the hegemony of
deductive argumentation in contemporary philosophy. Mathematical language is just
but one form of reasonable activity among others. If pragmatic naturalism possesses
its own specificity in relation to pragmatism, then there is no point in prescribing only
one mode of valid argumentation: “Nature is complex, and there is no good reason to
insist that any one way at it has a monopoly on access” (8).
2. Along the same lines, see Bernstein R., (1983), Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, Philadelphia,
University of Pennsylvania Press.
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The reader is led to see the remarkable and coherent versatility of this perspective,
in relation to a considerable variety of philosophical subjects, through the defining
features of pragmatic naturalism as stated by Ryder. In short, the analytic potential of
pragmatic naturalism can be described in the following way: “pragmatic naturalism
is a relational philosophy; it is a philosophy for which nature is a category sufficient
for all things; it holds that nature consists of more than material objects; it proceeds
as if natural science is one of several sources of knowledge; and it is a philosophical
perspective that expects to be evaluated by its usefulness and value in philosophical
and other contexts” (43).
III. The practical value of philosophy
The third part of The Things on Heaven and Earth focuses on the practical value
of philosophy. If the value of ideas is to be found in the function they accomplish, as
Ryder affirms, they can be therefore evaluated in light of how many philosophical
deadlocks they help to avoid and in the number of regions of experience that they
help to elucidate. The list of virtues of pragmatic naturalism singled out by Ryder
simultaneously represents a declaration of purposes and an assortment of criteria for
judging the success of his proposal as a whole. First, pragmatic naturalism rejects
to support philosophical dualisms – mind and body, self and world, objectivity and
subjectivity, etc. – in a way that each one becomes a problem for the other. Each
counterpart makes a compelling claim that calls our attention, so it is artificial and
unfruitful to tear apart in clashing theoretical pieces a world that is in fact coherently
experienced.
Second, pragmatic naturalism can be considered as the contemporary expression
of a tradition that stays away from reductionism in the above mentioned sense. The
pragmatic naturalist perspective allows us to accept the multiplicity of nature without
dissolving some of its features. The relational understanding allows us to recognize
and to acknowledge the diversity in nature while at the same time accounting for
specific relations existing among constituents of this diversity.
Third, pragmatic naturalism permits to recover the dimension of objectivity in
experience, which has been greatly neglected in the postmodern trends of contemporary
pragmatism. This move makes it possible to connect perspectivism and objectivity in
a satisfactory way. As Ryder points out, the absence of absolute knowledge does not
preclude objectivity, either epistemological or ontological. Perspectival epistemology
and objectivist ontology are not mutually exclusive.
A fourth virtue, Ryder affirms, shows how a non-dogmatic interpretation of the
idea of “nature” permits to regard multiple dimensions of our experience (art, music,
poetry, etc.) as cognitively significant activities. None of these insights are produced
by science but they constitute judgments that make available to us important traits of
the world.
The fifth contribution of pragmatic naturalism rests on its capability to neutralize
the “logical” shift of much of historical and contemporary philosophy. Deductive
reasoning is not the only valid form of evaluating an idea or proposition. Though
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pragmatic naturalism is not antifoundationalism, it does not pretend to provide the
world with unshakable foundations.
Finally, pragmatic naturalism constitutes a good resource to deactivate dogmatic
positions in the social-political realm. A “pragmatic ethos,”3 which is essentially
an assortment of practices and attitudes like experimentalism, self-correction, and
fallibilism, can be productively interpreted along democratic lines. After reading the
last part of the book, one gets the vivid impression that pragmatic naturalism really
opens the path for an interesting set of political applications, in line with Dewey’s
perspective on democracy as an intelligent and creative activity. A wise use of
indeterminacy and fluidity, as depicted by Ryder, allows the cultivation of common
interests between individuals and communities with different backgrounds, which is
an appropriate challenge to the current state of affairs of global international relations.
In sum, the contemporary increasing interest4 in pragmatic naturalism and the
acuteness of the arguments exposed by Ryder reveal The Things on Heaven and Earth
as a timely and constructive contribution to the field. However, not only academic
debates or scholarly contentions are addressed here. The book also exhibits a fruitful
effort to connect philosophy and life. Ryder’s pursuit of commonalities is perhaps one
of the most attractive points of the book, insofar as it is symptomatic of an ethical
shift that pervades our current societies. The need for neutralizing the adverse effects
of centuries of individualism is paving the way for a reappraisal of the meaning we
give to the fact (and challenges) of living together. Philosophy can provide valuable
instruments of rationality for these new horizons and this book is a good proof of it.
3. For the idea of a “Pragmatic Ethos” see Bernstein R., (1991), The New Constellation: The EthicalPolitical Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity, New York, Polity Press, p. 324.
4. See Shook J., (2003), Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism, Armherst, N.Y, Prometheus Books.
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