The normative thought of Charles S. Peirce 9780823250769, 9780823242443

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THE NORMATIVE THOUGHT OF CHARLES S. PEIRCE

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AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY Douglas R. Anderson and Jude Jones, series editors

THE NORMATIVE THOUGHT OF CHARLES S. PEIRCE

ax) EDITED BY CORNELIS DE WAAL AND KRZYSZTOF PIOTR SKOWRONSKI

Copyright © 2012 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The normative thought of Charles S. Peirce / edited by Cornelis de Waal and Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski. — ist ed. p. cm. Proceedings of a conference held June 26-30, 2007 at Opole University, Poland.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-4244-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839-1914—-Congresses. I. De Waal, Cornelis. II. Skowroriski, Krzysztof Piotr. B945.P44N67 2012 191—d 23 2012001142

Printed in the United States of America

141312 54321 First edition

In memoriam Mateusz Wiestaw Oleksy 1974-2008

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Contents

Preface x1 List of Abbreviations xvit

1. Traditions of Innovation and Improvisation:

Vincent Colapietro 1

Jazz as Metaphor, Philosophy as Jazz

Kelly A. Parker 26

2. Normative Judgment in Jazz: A Semiotic Framework

James Liszka 44

3. Charles Peirce on Ethics

4. Who’s Afraid of Charles Sanders Peirce?: Knocking Some Critical Common Sense into Moral Philosophy

Cornelis de Waal 8 3

5. Peirce’s Moral “Realicism”

Rosa Maria Mayorga 101

Mats Bergman 125

6. Improving Our Habits: Peirce and Meliorism

7. Self-Control, Values, and Moral Development: Peirce on the Value-driven Dynamics of Human Morality

Helmut Pape 149

8. Why Is the Normativity of Logic Based on Rules?

Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen 172 | 1X §

Xx CONTENTS 9. Unassailable Belief and Ideal-Limit Opinion: Is Agreement Important for Truth?

Mateusz W. Oleksy 185

10. The Normativity of Communication: Norms and Ideals in Peirce’s Speculative Rhetoric

Ignacio Redondo 214

11. Peircean Modal (and Moral?) Realism(s): Remarks on the Normative Methodology of Pragmatist Metaphysics

Sami Pihlstrém 231

Notes 259 References 291 List of Contributors 309

Index 313

Preface

ED This volume contains eleven essays on the normative philosophy of the American scientist and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Peirce is best known for his contributions to pragmatism—of which he is considered the originator—and he saw himself first and foremost as a logician. When we add to this Peirce’s own claim that he had little esthetic sense and that he pretty much dismissed moral philosophy as an immoral

enterprise, we might get the impression—especially while reading the first of his 1898 Cambridge Conference lectures—of a philosopher who shunned normative philosophy and was even hostile to it. However, the truth of the matter is quite the opposite. The conception of logic Peirce came to settle on—as the science directed to preventing us from drawing false conclusions from true premises—is overtly normative. It aims to tell us how we should reason if we want to preserve truth. Over time Peirce

came to realize that logic, thus conceived, derives part of its principles from what he called “the science of ethics.” A few years later he would go

even further, adding that this science of ethics ought in turn to be grounded in a science of esthetics. Though Peirce warned that these two

sciences should not be confused with what generally goes under the names of ethics and esthetics, he believed that they were nonetheless close enough to warrant retaining their names. Hence, in his mature division

of the sciences, Peirce divided philosophy—which he considered the most basic of the positive sciences—into phenomenology (or phaneroscopy, as he frequently called it), the normative sciences (esthetics, ethics, and logic), and metaphysics, with each subsequent discipline deriving some of its key principles from those that precede it. Despite the central place of the normative sciences in Peirce’s mature

conception of philosophy, those who want to study Peirce’s views on esthetics and ethics are by and large dependent on his occasional remarks {Xi §

xu PREFACE and sketches, made at different times, sometimes in conflicting drafts, and as so often with Peirce, cast in varying terminologies. Of the three normative sciences the only one that Peirce developed, and even dedicated most of his life to, is logic. In part because of this, Peirce’s norma-

tive thought has received less attention, though good work in this area has been done, most significantly by Vincent Potter in his 1967 Charles S. Peirce on Norms and Ideals. Mostly, though, discussions of Peirce’s normative thought have been confined to discussions on the role and impact of the three normative sciences within Peirce’s classification of the sciences. More recently, an increasing number of people are beginning to look at what Peirce has to offer more generally to contemporary

esthetics and moral philosophy. We are hoping that this volume will prove a valuable starting point for this. The essays here included are the outcome of a philosophic retreat that was organized by Krzysztof (Chris) Piotr Skowroriski and Nathan Houser,

which took place at the Institute of Philosophy of Opole University, Poland, June 26—30, 2007. This was the third in a series of conferences on

American and European values, and was titled “Charles S. Peirce’s Normative Thought.” The conference consisted of twenty-eight participants, each of whom read an essay that was subsequently discussed. Of these twenty-eight essays, eleven have been selected for this volume. Each

of the essays here included has benefited substantially from the discussions that took place during that week in Opole. The result is a good selection of recent work on Peirce’s normative philosophy. As it so happened, quite a few of the contributions to this volume involve a discussion of Peirce’s 1898 Cambridge Conferences lectures. Because of this, the

volume also sheds interesting light on the reason—practice distinction that Peirce drew in the first lecture. The first two essays fall roughly under the rubric of esthetics, the most basic of Peirce’s three normative sciences. Both papers use jazz to bring

out aspects of Peirce’s work. In “Traditions of Innovation and Improvisation: Jazz as Metaphor, Philosophy as Jazz,” Vincent Colapietro compares how Peirce writes philosophy with how great jazz musicians

compose their music. When developing this comparison, Colapietro focuses on three aspects that he typically finds in the compositions of either: a spirit of playfulness, a sense of the sacred, and an intensified consciousness of fallibility. In “Normative Judgment in Jazz: A Semiotic

Framework,” Kelly Parker uses jazz music to explore how Peirce’s

PREFACE X11 semiotics can be applied to musical phenomena. Using John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, he shows that a semiotic approach to music, especially musical interpretations, has clear advantages compared to traditional musicology. The next set of essays focuses on the second of Peirce’s normative sciences: ethics. In “Charles Peirce on Ethics,” James Liszka presents a general outline of Peirce’s ethics, taking Peirce’s mature classification of the sciences as his starting point. Liszka follows Peirce’s distinction between

theoretical and practical ethics, and concludes that there exists a critical connection between the two. The former provides the latter with a decision on what should count as ultimate ends. Conversely, the successes and failures in following these recommendations in practical life will serve aS an experimental testing ground for the theoretical science of ethics.

Cornelis de Waal, Rosa Mayorga, and Mats Bergman all take their first

cues from Peirce’s 1898 Cambridge Conference Lectures. In “Who’s Afraid of Charles Sanders Peirce?: Knocking Some Critical Common Sense into Moral Philosophy,” de Waal explores the possibility of applying Peirce’s scientific method to moral problems. Rejecting Peirce’s reliance on moral sentiments, he finds in Peirce’s scientific method a way to bolster the casuist’s approach to ethics, especially as it is found in the work of Jonson and Toulmin. In “Peirce’s Moral ‘Realicism,’” Mayorga

argues that Peirce’s quite hostile comments about moral philosophy, rather than a lapse of judgment, as some have suggested, should be taken in the same vein as his equally hostile comments on nominalism. Mayorga further argues that, in conjunction with the rest of his philosophy, Peirce’s scattered comments on ethics can be developed into what she calls a “realicism,” that is, a moderate yet robust ethical realism. The third essay that takes the Cambridge Conference Lectures as a point of

departure is Mats Bergman’s “Improving Our Habits: Peirce and Meliorism.” Observing that meliorism—the desire to improve the future lot of human beings in this world—is a defining characteristic of American pragmatism, Bergman wonders whether Peirce’s philosophy is indeed

antimelioristic, as Peirce’s comments in the Cambridge Conference Lectures seem to suggest. According to Bergman, Peircean thought is not only compatible with moderate forms of meliorism, but it is in fact animated by melioristic aspirations and ideals, albeit at a rather abstract and general level.

X1V PREFACE In “Self-Control, Values, and Moral Development: Peirce on the Value-driven Dynamics of Human Morality,” Helmut Pape argues for the claim that the moral and cognitive autonomy of human intelligence consists in the autonomous ability to use flexible logical self-control in establishing a comparative relation between different ends. Pape subsequently warns against attempts to re-create this ability in machines by means of artificial intelligence. The third group of essays deals primarily with the normative science of logic. In “Why Is the Normativity of Logic Based on Rules?” Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen argues that the view that normativity need not be grounded in

the rules that govern meaning-constitutive practices is inconsistent. According to Pietarinen the view that logic is based on rules is supported by the general model-theoretic approach to logic, as well as by Peirce’s view that as a normative science, logic is the “most purely theoretical of

purely theoretical sciences.” In “Unassailable Belief and Ideal-Limit Opinion,” Mateusz Oleksy defends the received view of Peirce’s concep-

tion of truth—which identifies truth with an ideal consensus—against those who argue that this view is untenable and that Peirce abandoned it. Oleksy argues that it is possible to free the recetved view from the metaphysical baggage that some consider troublesome, and he shows that Peirce continued to subscribe to it by analyzing his arguments on why such a notion of truth is indispensable to inquiry. Because of a tragic accident, Oleksy’s essay is published posthumously.

A third essay that can be grouped under logic is Ignacio Redondo’s “The Normativity of Communication: Norms and Ideals in Peirce’s Speculative Rhetoric”’—speculative rhetoric being, in Peirce’s classification of the sciences, a subdivision of logic. Critical of current communi-

cation theory, Redondo argues that a liberal interpretation of Peirce’s speculative rhetoric will give us a platform from which to search for the

normative roots of communication through concrete instantiations of reasonableness in situated contexts of utterance and interpretation.

The volume concludes with an essay that discusses the relation between the normative sciences and metaphysics. In “Peircean Modal (and Moral?) Realism(s): Remarks on the Normative Methodology of Pragmatist Metaphysics,” Sami Pihlstr6m compares Peirce’s metaphysics of the modalities—or rather, a “Peircean” approach to this derived from his synechism and scholastic realism—to the modal realist views defended

by important twentieth-century and contemporary philosophers.

PREFACE XV This leads Pihlstr6m to question the strict dichotomy between metaphysics and ethics, and thereby the separation between theory and practice. The result is an irreducibly normative methodology for metaphysics, one that is ethically enriched and grounded. The editors of this volume express their great appreciation to Nathan

Houser, not only for his work organizing the conference in Opole but also for spearheading the current volume. We further express our gratitude to our editorial assistant, Sean Brown, who has diligently performed countless tasks. In addition we thank the anonymous referees for their helpful criticism and suggestions. Cornelis de Waal Krzysztof Piotr Skowroriskt

Indianapolis/Opole

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Abbreviations

a> The following abbreviations are used for primary sources. Charles S. Peirce

CN volume:page. Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to The Nation. 4 vols. ed. Kenneth L. Ketner and James E. Cook. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1975-87. CP volume.paragraph. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce.

8 vols. Vols. 1-6, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Vols. 7-8, ed. Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931-58.

EP volume:page. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. 2

vols. Vol. 1. ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Vol. 2, ed. Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992-98. NEM volume:page. The New Elements of Mathematics. 4 vols. in 5, ed. Carolyn Eisele. The Hague: Mouton, 1976.

R (RL for letters) followed by Robin catalogue and sheet number. Manuscripts held in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, as identified by Richard Robin, Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967, and in Richard Robin, “The Peirce Papers: A Supplementary Catalogue,” Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society 7 (1971): 37-57.

RLT. Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conferences

Lectures of 1898, ed. Kenneth L. Ketner. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. SS. Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, ed. Charles S. Hardwick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977. { xvii }

XVIII ABBREVIATIONS W volume:page. The Writings of Charles S. Peirce, ed. The Peirce Edition Project, 7 vols. to date. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982—2010.

John Dewey EW volume:page. The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882-1898. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-72. MWvolume:page. The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976-83. LW volume:page. The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981-89.

THE NORMATIVE THOUGHT OF CHARLES S. PEIRCE

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ONE

TRADITIONS OF INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION Jazz as Metaphor, Philosophy as Jazz Vincent Colapietro

ED

I? this essay I address the topic of the normative thought of Charles S.

Peirce, more precisely, several of the normative aspects of the Peircean project. But I do not intend to treat his nuanced conception of normative science. Rather the aspects I focus on have as much to do with the animating spirit of Peirce’s endeavor as any explicit doctrine (though in the case of one of these facets—his fallibilistic sensibility—we encounter on numerous occasions a formal articulation of its methodological significance). In him, the pragmatic sensibility is at once an imaginative, play-

ful, reverential, innovative, and of course fallible spirit. These are not simply contingent facts about an idiosyncratic philosopher; they are, from his perspective, traits of character all philosophers ought to cultivate. I intend to address this sensibility both textually and otherwise (1.e., by attending to what Peirce explicitly asserts but also by tracing out the

implications of his thought in directions he could not have easily foreseen). My task even encompasses what might be called a literary reading of the implicit narrative in one of his most frequently quoted metaphors (the metaphor of throwing a “sop to Cerberus”). But, more than anything else, it involves highlighting what tends to be slighted or overlooked entirely. iL}

2 VINCENT COLAPIETRO To devote oneself to the normative dimensions of Peirce’s architectonic project would seem to require a critical engagement with his belated

development of the normative sciences (logic, ethics, and esthetics). A full treatment of this complex topic unquestionably would demand such engagement. I am aiming, however, at neither a complete nor altogether orthodox treatment. Accordingly, I do not aim to treat, except incidentally, his architectonic conception of the normative sciences. As important as these sciences are to this topic, they do not exhaust the topic of this volume: The normative dimension of Peircean thought is not reducible to his explicit doctrine of the normative sciences. Moreover, the inclination to move too quickly to a consideration of these sciences means

missing an opportunity to explore the normative side of Peircean philosophy from novel perspectives. Hence, I want to highlight some of the most salient aspects of the normative dimension of his philosophical undertaking, aspects all too likely to be ignored or, at most, noted in passing. These aspects are a touch of the poet (especially a sensitivity to meta-

phor), the spirit of playfulness, a sense of the sacred, and a contrite consciousness of our ineradicable fallibility (a consciousness extending to

nothing short of the possibility that we misunderstand the character of our own undertaking, even the very purposes by which we are animated). I want simply to identify and illustrate these facets—nothing more, nothing less. In addition to conveying information about facts and formulat-

ing arguments, an author might present “mere possibilities,” “mere ideas,” for the sake of enriching the discussion of a topic (CP 4.597, 1908).

Far more than conveying information and proffering evidence, my concern here is to bring into sharp focus several promising possibilities for understanding Peirce. Implicit Significance of Peirce’s Phenomenology

Though not reducible to any one of the facets noted above, there is a pre-

liminary concern that is intimately associated with each one of them. This is the valuation of experience itself, especially the all too often over-

looked disclosures of everyday experience (the form of experience to which philosophy primarily appeals, also that upon which it principally draws). A sense of our fallibility traces its roots to such experience. This experience is, moreover, an arena in which playful exertions are far from rare occurrences. It takes not only the eyes of the visual artist to discern

INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION 3 the intricate textures of phenomena (EP 2:147) but also the pen of the verbal artist (the touch of the poet) to communicate what one has seen (thereby providing an occasion for another to see what one has discerned). Finally, everyday experience can be a site for the most extraordi-

nary encounters, wherein we are confronted with what asserts itself as infinitely precious and inherently inviolable. Something transcending us feels to us, on such occasions, to lay a vast claim—also a centering and sustaining one—on our transient lives. The phenomenological reclamation of everyday experience reflects an evaluation of experience and, inseparable from this, a celebration of phenomena as much for their own sake as for their intimations of a set of categories. The obvious point is all

too easily the overlooked one: Peirce’s phenomenology emphatically proclaims that everyday experience and ubiquitous appearances matter, profoundly and pervasively matter. They matter far more than is customarily recognized by philosophers and other inquirers. Whereas Peirce’s phenomenology encompasses a celebration of phenomena as such, his pragmatism concerns not only purposive striving but also what might be called a radical problematization of our avowed purposes. Attending to the manifest is no easy task (Wittgenstein). But, then, neither is discerning the purposes actually animating our endeavors. No less than Freud, Peirce was acutely aware of how important our

unacknowledged and disavowed purposes and motives so often are. There is nothing naive about his pragmatism, just as there is nothing superficial about his phenomenology. The motives we all too quickly and

vehemently ascribe to ourselves are not necessarily the whole story (indeed, the more vehemently we are disposed to defend such ascriptions, the less likely they cover the whole—or reach the depth—of our motivation), just as the descriptions and names by which we identify what presents itself to us are not necessarily faithful indications of a given phenomenon. Each one of the facets of Peirce’s thought I focus on, thus, bears directly and intimately on experience and phenomena. In addition, the issue of purpose so central to Peirce’s pragmatism is a more complex

and obscure matter than is commonly supposed. For our purposes (!), however, we can limit our attention to a radical implication of Peircean fallibilism: Just as there is a certain sense in which we never know what we are saying (CP 3.419), there is a sense in which we do not know what we are doing. He is actually quite explicit about this. A sense of fallibilism that does not render problematic a consciousness of our own motivation,

4 VINCENT COLAPIETRO including the purposes by which we identify and justify our undertakings, stops short of the place where it is most needed. I will return, albeit rather briefly, to both the valuation underwriting Peirce’s phenomenology and the disquietude troubling any sufficiently candid fallibilist. The task of

discerning clearly what I am about is more daunting and delicate than that of faithfully noting what stands before my mind in its immediacy. So, rather than discussing logic, ethics, or esthetics (those branches of philosophy identified by Peirce as normative sciences), I intend to consider other facets of the normative dimension of Peirce’s philosophical enterprise. For a truly pragmatic conception, “an interior comprehension” (CN 1:33), of Peircean pragmatism, these facets are likely the most important: To miss them is to miss something at the heart of Peirce’s project. This is, in any event, my thesis. My concern is not to demonstrate

its truth but to render it plausible. As already noted, it is primarily to bring into play several possibilities, not to convey facts or construct arguments. In addition, however, I want to make what will seem to many readers an utterly idiosyncratic and strained suggestion. But I can appeal to Peirce

in doing so: “After all, any analogy, however fanciful, which serves to focus attention upon matters which otherwise escape observation is valuable” (CP 3.470, 1896). I suggest, though only in a programmatic and

hence sketchy manner, a connection between the features of Peirce’s thought on which | have concentrated and a distinctive form of artistic practice whose origin roughly corresponds with Peirce’s death. Hence, he would have had little or no awareness of this practice, especially given his class, ethnicity, and residence in the last decades of his increasingly reclusive life in “the wilds of Pennsylvania.” Even so, this practice exemplifies

in a singular way just those aspects of the normative dimensions of Peirce’s philosophical endeavor that I am most desirous of thematizing here. The practice in question is that of jazz, especially when conceived as a tradition of innovation and improvisation. We encounter in jazz performances, no less than in Peircean texts, almost always the spirit of playfulness, sometimes a sense of the sacred, and inevitably an intensified consciousness of human fallibility. Hence, I want to address directly the normative dimension of Peircean thought by highlighting these three facets; then I want to suggest in all too sketchy a manner how the spirit of

Peirce is, in critical respects, akin to that of such musicians as Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Randy Weston. My point is, however, not

INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION 5 so much to illuminate jazz in reference to Peirce as to consider Peirce in the light of jazz. I realize that this will strike many, perhaps most, readers, as fanciful and unwarranted. My only justification for pressing this analogy is that it promises to be fruitful, for it promises to disclose otherwise unrecognized features of Peirce’s indefatigable devotion to philosophical experimentation (his dedication to trying out ideas, even the most familiar and worn ones, 1n ever new and original combinations). Allow me but one example of this. In 1913 [?], Peirce offered a classification of interpretants (see Short 2007, 178-81). I take the significance of this example to be that, as often as he had treated the question of how to classify the interpretants of signs, he was inclined to take up this question anew. Herein we observe the invincible dissatisfaction of this philosophical experimentalist (see Short 2007, xii), this dissatisfaction being his fallibilism in action (see, e.g., EP 2:412). Indeed, this single example points to an irrepressible tendency evident everywhere in Peirce’s voluminous writings—his disposition to ring changes on even the most familiar topics. A sense of the

sacred, the spirit of playfulness, and a restless drive toward symbolic experimentation characterize Peirce’s compositions as much as the compositions of musicians such as Coltrane, Weston, and Carter. The manner in which these musicians engaged with their complex inheritances and

their own most celebrated achievements—their spirit of playfulness, sense of the sacred, and restless experimentation—might cast light on the way in which Peirce tried to take up and carry forward not only diverse intellectual traditions but also his most consolidated accomplishments. If so, then, there is a surprising and significant kinship between the greatest philosophical mind born thus far in the history of the United States and the most important contribution of this culture to music. After briefly discussing several of the implicitly normative dimensions of Peirce’s philosophical writings, I will then, in the spirit of playfulness,

focus on a frequently quoted, but rarely explored, metaphor (“a sop to Cerberus”) used by him in a letter to Lady Welby. This will enable me to connect Peirce’s thought directly with music, in particular, to underscore some of the ways in which he forged a link between thought and music. Indeed, music as a metaphor for thought is found in some of the most prominent passages in one of the founding documents of the pragmatic movement (“How to Make Our Ideas Clear”). As already noted, the normative aspects of Peirce’s philosophical project are deeper and wider than simply those identified by him and his

6 VINCENT COLAPIETRO expositors in the context of his belated development of the normative sciences (Potter; Parker). They are as much as anything else indicative of the deepest sentiments in his philosophical psyche (see Savan on sentiments). Normativity pervades Peirce’s writings, even where it appears to have been explicitly banished (e.g., in phenomenology): His texts are themselves perfusions of signs bearing testimony to the norms and ideals always already present in our shared human practices, including those of religious worship and artistic innovation, not only those of scientific inquiry. I do not know of three deeper sentiments (a word used advisedly in this connection) than the ones already noted: a spirit of playfulness, a sense of the sacred, and a contrite consciousness of our ineradicable fallibility.

Let me return briefly to phenomenology, in a sense, a purely descriptive discipline in which normative judgments have no place. My purpose in doing so is to indicate just how deeply, but all too often imperceptibly, normative features pervade Peirce’s philosophical writings. As an aid to seeing this, it is imperative to note that description is itself an inherently normative undertaking (it can be done more or less well, 1.e., it admits of an artful or artless execution), just as norms and ideals are describable phenomena. Descriptions can be blundering or misleading (norms are built into the very activity of describing anything in such a way that our understanding of the activity of description carries within itself the pos-

sibility of misdescription, an essential violation of an immanent—or constitutive—norm or set of norms). In turn, norms and ideals count as phenomena and, as such, they call for painstaking description of their phenomenal features (how they appear in experience, precisely as norms and ideals—how their directive and transformative presence exerts itself).

It is perhaps easy to miss that the enterprise of phenomenology in its entirety grows out of the evaluation of phenomena: Its very existence embodies the judgment that phenomenaas such are, in themselves, worthy

of painstaking, sustained, and self-critical description, an examination requiring the nuanced attentiveness of the artist no less than the generalizing capacity of the mathematician (see Peirce’s 1903 Lectures on Pragmatism, CP 5.52, EP 2:147—48). That is, phenomena simply in their irrepressible variety, inherent fascination, and even ineffable evanescence deserve thoroughgoing scrutiny. But such phenomena in their heuristic function—in their capacity to suggest a categorial scheme indispensable for goading and guiding inquiry in any imaginable field—especially merit

INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION / systematic elaboration. In Peirce’s hands, at least, phenomenological inquiry is subordinated to this architectonic exigency and heuristic function. Even so, the evaluation of phenomena in their firstness implicit in Peirce’s efforts to open this field of inquiry (1.e., phenomenology), must be seen against the background of the dominant traditions of Western philosophy (ones more or less hostile, in the name of reality, to appearances as such). Phenomena in their firstness, not just in their thirdness (not just in their potential contribution to our investigative practices),

should be given their due. A candid assessment of Western thought reveals that an invidious distinction between appearance and reality, phenomena and noumena, is so central as to be partly definitive of these

traditions. Hence, the very inauguration of this undertaking marks, to some extent, a break with these traditions. Of course, the undertaking is not utterly novel; indeed, the greatest philosophers have virtually all made no slight contribution to philosophical discourse as a purely descriptive

enterprise, but they have been burdened all too often by the invidious distinction just noted. One might object that Peirce’s purpose of deriving a scheme of catego-

ries from phenomenology (he goes so far in some places as to identify phenomenology as the doctrine of categories) operates in such a relentless and ruthless fashion as to preclude playfulness—and indeed much else. This is to some extent true, but partly granting this point should not occlude the extent to which Peirce’s phenomenological investigations exhibit an inherent fascination with myriad phenomena for themselves (not simply for the service of these investigations for some purpose beyond phenomenology). He was interested in phenomena as such, that is, in their firstness. Peirce’s instinctive feel for, and attraction to, the inherent allure of phenomena is, I contend, evident to any sufficiently attentive reader of his texts. The serious business of the inquirer does not preclude the playful spirit of a child—that being in whom experimental imagination is most radiantly, most dramatically, present. Indeed, the avowed purpose of Peircean phenomenology leaves open possibilities of play and playfulness, both the play of phenomena (their irrepressible movement) and that of the phenomenologist. Whatever severe discipline is required for the successful execution of serious inquiry, the inquiry must be pursued for its own sake and, as such, must be in a sense a form of play (the defining purpose being inherent in an ongoing activity). In addition, the spirit in which the task is taken up and carried on must be

8 VINCENT COLAPIETRO akin to playfulness, wherein the imagination is not too tightly tethered to antecedently accredited modes of inquiry. The self-imposed challenges in which the self might be defeated, even humiliated, are certainly not foreign to countless forms of human play. In general, purpose far more than playfulness occupies a central place

in Peirce’s architectonic approach to philosophical investigation, so much so that deliberately articulated and integrated purposes are what make this approach architectonic. In particular, purpose is at the heart of his pragmatism. Indeed, Peirce’s pragmatism not only is explicitly bound up with purpose but also at least appears to be narrowly constrained by the definitive purpose of any given engagement. The purpose of thought in the logical or normative sense is, for example, the fixation (or establishment) of belief. Whatever falls outside of this purpose is of no rele-

vance or interest to the logician in Peirce’s strict sense of that exalted term. Again, there is some truth in taking purpose generally (not only the purpose of phenomenology or that of pragmatism) to operate in a somewhat ruthless and relentless manner in Peirce’s thinking. But his meanderings, his digressions, and his irrepressible fascination with wayward

considerations stand in marked contrast to the directive force of his defining purposes. Are these unconquerable impulses truly less a part of his philosophical psyche than his purposeful ego? Are the inherently fascinating digressions abounding in his unpublished manuscripts of less value to us, as students of his thought, than those essays in which he managed to craft a logically coherent whole having a clear line of argumentation?

The pursuit of deliberately adopted purposes and the intrusion of seemingly extraneous concerns equally mark the writings of Peirce. One might object that these intrusions signal a failure on Peirce’s part to bring his reflections to their conclusion, to realize (at least) his purposes as an author, possibly also his objectives as a philosopher. There would, again, be truth in this. But simply to mark this down as failure seems doubly wrong, for it fails to appreciate the value of so many of these digressions

and also it arguably betrays an unduly naive understanding of human purposes. A subtle reading of Peirce’s probing comments on human endeavor would itself go a significant distance toward undermining such a naive understanding. The matter is, however, more complicated than this, since a simple appeal to Peirce’s actual words cuts in diverse directions. The point that I want to make here is, at once, somewhat at odds with some of Peirce’s most characteristic methodological pronouncements

INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION 9 and in tune with an all too often neglected trajectory of Peircean pragma-

tism (that driving toward a celebration of the continual emergence of novel purposes). Accordingly allow me to step back from this specific matter and to make a general point about human purposes (a point intended to capture a feature of Peirce’s pragmatism still not sufficiently

appreciated, one best seen in conjunction with what he identifies as “developmental teleology”). Antecedently established and envisioned purposes are only part of the story and, arguably, not even the most important part of the story. Historically emerging and still to be identified purposes are, possibly, of greater moment, of deeper significance. The future is, from a Peircean perspective, open-ended. Moreover, it is open-ended not only in the sense that the discovery of alternative means to attain antecedent ends is an omnipresent possibility but also in the sense that radical ruptures in the history of any human practice are all but inevitable. These ruptures are so radical as to call into question the identity of the practice (e.g., does—or should—jazz count as music or do—or should—the radical transformations of human consciousness of a divine presence in the natural world, rather than a transcendent Being, count as religious orientations). Consider practices such as politics, education, or music, but also ones such as science, parenting, and of course philosophy. What has always been true of these practices has become in recent decades more intensely, more manifestly, true of them: They are selfinterrogative endeavors to a remarkable degree, often in a bewildering and disorienting manner. That is, they are self-interrogative in such a way and to such a degree that the accepted or acknowledged criteria by which these practices are identified become themselves objects of interrogation. For instance, the meaning and purpose(s) of education become part and parcel of the process of education itself, so much so that any process in which this self-questioning is not encouraged and nurtured is likely one to which we would be reluctant to call by the name education. In brief, education (if not prematurely arrested) is a self-interrogative process. So are politics, music, and countless other human practices; so too is philosophy itself. Invoking the etymology of the term, identifying philoso-

phy with the pursuit of wisdom, either begs or opens the question. If it does not beg the question, then it establishes (virtually at the outset of

the endeavor) philosophy as a practice committed to questioning its ambitions and aspirations, its aims and purposes. Philosophical reflection is a reflexive interrogation in which even the most consolidated and

10 VINCENT COLAPIETRO influential self-understandings of its most exemplary practitioners are open to question. For example, a mind as great as that of Hegel might be mistaken about the nature of his own undertaking: Hegel might presume to be about one thing when actually he is about something else. Peirce actually judged Plato to misunderstand in this way the nature of his own project. He went so far as to suggest that it is characteristic of some of the greatest intellects to be so deeply absorbed in their subject matter as to lack reliable self-understanding (EP 2:38). In a famous text, albeit one found in his private correspondence, Peirce

offered to Victoria Lady Welby a definition of sign. He proposed in a letter dated “1908, Dec. 23”: A sign is “anything which is so determined by

something else, called Its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter [the Interpretant| is thereby mediately determined by the former [the Object]” (Peirce 1958, 404). But, then, he immediately added: “My insertion of ‘upon a person’ is a sop to Cerberus, because I despair of making my own broader conception understood.” But who in classical mythology alone was able to

steal past Cerberus, the hound of Hades? And what, rather than a sop, enabled him to render this ferocious beast into a docile creature? Is Peirce implicitly here casting himself in the role of Orpheus? In taking up the

possibility of this literary reading! of the arresting metaphor so often quoted but never explicated, we are invited to consider the possibility whether the metaphor of music is more important than we scholars of Peirce are disposed to recognize, or at least have appreciated to date. Thought as Music; Music as Semiostis

The desire to institute conditions by which mastery in a field might be acquired, maintained, and augmented inevitably (if not adequately) pays indirect homage to the anarchical forces making the desired mastery understandable and attractive. But the frustration of our attempts to institute, once and for all, such mastery might be inherent in our very

efforts to attain this mastery (a point to which I will return below). However this might be, Peirce’s pragmatism (as formulated in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” and reaffirmed in numerous texts thereafter) is bound up with the desire to be master of our meanings (CP 5.393). But,

on a Peircean account, it might turn out to be the case that, of all the things over which we can establish mastery, meanings are among the

INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION 11 least susceptible.* Our efforts to establish such mastery generate, of their own accord, such profusions and promptings, anarchical drives and irrepressible tendencies, that this mastery is, at best, never more than a partial and provisional one. Allow me to pronounce a heresy, at least in the church of latter-day Peirceans. “My insertion of [an effect] upon a person, is,” Peirce stresses, “a sop to Cerberus” (EP 2:478). The reason is that his purely formal theory

of signs demands the complete elimination of any reference to mind (semiosis explains mind, rather than mind being the means by which the activity of signs is explained). But, in the third and culminating branch of his semeiotic, references to agencies other than signs themselves (in particular references, to mind, self, and persons as agents) can legitimately be reintroduced. My heretical suggestion is thus that Peirce himself takes reference to mind to be integral to his theory of signs, at least in its culminating phase (if not its inaugural one). This is heretical as far as his interpreters are concerned but actually not for Peirce himself. Indeed, he is explicit about this point. In coming to Speculative Rhetoric, after the main conceptions of logic have been well settled, there can be no serious objection to relaxing the severity of our rule of excluding psychological matter, observations of how we think, and the like. The regulation has served its end;

why should it be allowed now to hamper our endeavors to make methodeutic practically useful. (CP 2.107, c. 1902)

We can consider signs apart from their effects on anything properly called minds, and we can do so in a sustained, systematic manner because the very being of signs is discoverable in processes having nothing to do with mind, much less consciousness. In speculative grammar, we impose with severe strictness upon ourselves the heuristic rule of excluding any refer-

ence to mind in even our descriptions of signs. In speculative rhetoric, however, we can to some extent relax this rule. The imposition of this rule is something we, as deliberate agents, do for a purpose, one pertaining

to the enhancement and (in some respects) transformation of this very agency. We can for a more or less definite goal abstract the form of semiosis from any concrete context in which signs are actually used, thus any

actual embodiments in which they are instantiated. The point of the abstraction is ultimately the enhancement of our agency. What we derive by this means is a formal, abstract definition of semiosis, hence a formula

12 VINCENT COLAPIETRO calling for pragmatic clarification. There is certainly an irony here. Pragmatically speaking, a sign might be identified as anything about which we might be mistaken (cf. Eco 1976; Colapietro 1997a). One virtue of this characterization is that it builds the central tenet of Peirce’s pragmatic fallibilism into the very definition of semiosis. Along these same lines, it allows his historicism as well as pragmatism to contextualize his formalism.’ Abstract, formal definitions and elaborate, formal classifications play diverse and indispensable roles in any field of inquiry, not least of all semeiotic. But such definitions and classifications tend to drive to

an extreme of formalism quite at odds with the animating concerns of Peircean pragmatism. An indication of this is that, for Peirce, ordinary language is for most practical purposes not anything that we are likely to improve on. He is explicit about this: “For ordinary purposes, however, nothing is gained by carrying the analysis so far [as is done in a strictly theoretical investigation]; because these ordinary commonsense concepts of everyday life, having guided the conduct of men ever since the race was developed, are by far more trustworthy than the exacter concepts of science; so that when great exactitude is not required they are the best terms of definition” (EP 2:433). But I want now to return to Peirce’s metaphor (that of throwing a sop

to Cerberus) and play with it for a moment or two. Cerberus? Orpheus? It seems not unreasonable or, in other respects, inappropriate to ask, Is Peirce here casting himself in the role of Orpheus? And if he is doing so, is he implying that philosophy can attain the status, fulfill the function, of a kind of music? Is he in his philosophical endeavors trying to steal past the guardian of Hades and rescue from the netherworld the shade of his beloved? Is he using the lute of his intelligence to transform the fierce monster at the gates of Hades into a docile beast? In response to these questions, let us begin by recalling that Peirce, seemingly the most prosaic, the least poetic, of philosophers, suggests that nothing is truer than true poetry (EP 2:193). Let us also recollect that he is quite explicit in identifying philosophy as a kind of music, most notably in writings on that seemingly most prosaic of doctrines, pragmatism, or (as he occasionally called it in later years) pragmaticism. If Peirce is to be interpreted as playing the role of Orpheus, is there in turn any warrant for envisioning philosophy and more generally thought as music? Peirce appeals to literature to advance this metaphor, though he misidentifies the author of the passage to which he appeals. He takes

INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION 13 himself to be quoting Shakespeare, when in fact he is quoting Milton. In opposition to F. C. S. Schiller’s Humanism (1903), Peirce distances him-

self from the attempt to make philosophy into an endeavor in which “every department of man’s nature must be voiced” (CP 5.537, c. 1905)—

that is, the insistence that philosophical inquiry must be inclusively human, “not purely intellectual.” Peirce’s distaste—we might say dissust—for such humanism is clear: “For my part, I beg to be excused from having any dealings with such a philosophy.” He does so in the name of the ideal to which philosophy ought to aspire: “I wish philosophy to be

a strict science, passionless and severely fair.” He acknowledges that “science 1s not the whole of life” but nonetheless advocates a “division of labor among intellectual agencies.” He dubs Schiller the “Apostle of Humanism” and quotes the denunciation of the Apostle: Professional philosophers “have rendered philosophy like unto themselves, abstruse, arid, abstract, and abhorrent.” But, save abhorrent, is there anything necessarily unhealthy or objectionable in a philosophy describable in these terms? At least for Peirce, “some branches of science,” and philosophy appears to be one of those branches, “are not in a healthy state if they are not abstruse, arid, and abstract.” But he does not leave the matter here;

rather he appeals to the poetry of John Milton in his opposition to the humanism of Schiller. In Comus, Milton writes: How charming is divine Philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo’s lute, And a perpetual feast of nectar’d sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns.

As already noted, however, Peirce misattributes the lines just quoted to Shakespeare. This mistake is not as groundless as might appear to be the case, since the lines from Milton are, in certain respects, close to ones from Shakespeare: As sweet and musical, As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair; And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony. Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.3

Lest it be supposed that Peirce’s invocation of Milton’s poetry is but an incidental ornament, merely a rhetorical embellishment, consider how

14 VINCENT COLAPIETRO the metaphor of music is used by him in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” The issue here is not philosophy, but thought more generally. This, how-

ever, makes the significance of his reliance on this metaphor all the greater. “Thought is,” Peirce claims in this essay, “the thread of melody running through the succession of our sensations.” He adds: Just as a piece of music may be written in parts, each having its own air, so various systems of relationship of succession subsist together

between the same sensations. These different systems are distinguished as having different motives, ideas, or functions. Thought is only one such system, for its sole motive, idea, and function is to produce belief. (W 3:263)

But, in this account, how is belief itself depicted? Or, as Peirce himself puts the question: “And what, then, is belief?” His answer is unapologetically metaphorical: “It is the demi-cadence which closes the musical symphony of our intellectual life.” There is elsewhere an equally arresting claim. In an unpublished manuscript, he notes that one of the qualities needed by a great reasoner is “a sort of intellectual music in his soul by which he [the reasoner] recognizes and creates symmetries, parallels and other relationships of forms” (R 620:35). On the one side, the intricate character of cognitive thought requires a variety of metaphors, not least of all musical metaphors, for its articulation. On the other, the character of music itself requires nothing less than a theory of signs for its analysis. Just as Peirce recognized the indispensability of metaphor for the work of thought, including the tasks of phi-

losophy, so we Peirceans need to recognize the indispensability of semeiotic for an understanding of music. In this regard, the invaluable contributions of Eero Tarastic, David Lidov, Robert Hatten, and Felicia Kruse immediately spring to mind. A name perhaps not equally familiar, though no less important, is that of Naomi Cumming, a philosopher who tragically died at the age of thirty-eight (Lidov’s foreword in Cumming 2000, xiv). She is the author of “Musical Signs and Subjectivity: Peircean

Reflections” (Cumming 1999) and, more important, a book titled The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification (Cumming 2000). In his afterword to this book, one he helped in various ways to have published,

Robert Hatten adds his eloquence to Naomi Cumming’s, concluding his reflections on her most important contribution to the semiotics of

INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION 15 music by stating: “The Sonic Self is an intricately textured defense—and celebration—of the varieties of musical experience, the rich potential of musical interpretation, and the profound depths of musical understanding” (Cumming 2000, 308). What these thinkers and interpreters make clear is that music provides metaphors for envisioning the undertaking of philosophy and, more generally, the process of thinking. Philosophy, at least in the hands of Peirce,

returns the favor by providing a theory of signs enabling inquirers to explore the defining features of that unique mode of human semiosis called music. The touch of the poet is discernible in Peirce’s crafting of musical metaphors and, less obviously, of this comprehensive theory. However subordinate the esthetic dimension in Peirce’s philosophical writings is to the strictly logical dimension, the logical dimension itself is

seen by him in an esthetic light. It is dubious whether even the merely competent reasoner can construct sound arguments in a purely mechanical fashion. But, in Peirce’s mind, there is little or no doubt that one of the qualities needed by a great reasoner is (as we have already noted) a kind of intellectual music enabling rational agents to discern and create symmetries and other forms of relationship. The intense valuation of forms for their own sake—a mark of esthetic rapture and artistic attunement—is, in Peirce’s texts, as prominent a feature as his phenomenological valuation of experience. Each of these instances draws on other sources. A narrowly utilitarian or instrumentalist concern with forms must, for the logician and mathematician in Peirce’s sense of these terms,

quickly and completely give way to inherent fascination and playful experimentation. Within the narrowly circumscribed horizon of human experience itself, however, the more-than-human can be perceived, though never in anything but human and, thus, distorted or disfigured form (i.e., “in forms more or less extravagant, more or less accidental” (CP 6.429, 1893). In such perception, finite human selves perceive themselves as beings relative to “something in the circumambient All,” that is, the Most High (CP 6.429, 1893). Finally, our sense of ignorance is akin to our sense of our own fallenness (or sinfulness), if it is not a species of the former (see, e.g., CP 5.583, 1898). The dogmatically disposed mind is willing to sacrifice the disclosures of experience on the altar of prejudice. But, for Peirce, nothing is more precious, because nothing is more instructive, than our experience of ignorance (CP 7.345, 1873).*

16 VINCENT COLAPIETRO Reprise

Peirce’s theoretical imagination and intellectual character are evident in his alignment of thought and music. Despite his disclaimers and identifications, he is far from devoid of poetry and insensitive to art. His writings are strewn with arresting metaphors and epigrammatic distillations of complex points. He is anything but indifferent to the manner in which he expresses himself; his rhetorical models are, however, found among the medieval scholastics rather than the Renaissance humanists and their progeny.

But the medium has to be used and even transformed so that all is ultimately subordinated to, and animated by, the restless spirit of truly communal inquiry. The desire to discover what is not yet known points toward a normative facet of Peirce’s philosophical project. But insofar as Peirce took inquiry (the pursuit generated by this desire) to be a form of

worship, insofar also as he imagined the natural world to be a prayer book, it seems reasonable to conjecture that something deeper underlies this desire. My own leaning is to identify this as the sacred. I accordingly invite readers of Peirce to attend carefully to the obvious and subtle ways in which a sense of the sacred, the spirit of playfulness, and a contrite consciousness of ineradicable fallibility are woven into the very fabric of Peirce’s texts. The best of these readers have almost certainly noted nothing less than this. The egoistic self, presuming itself to be grounded in itself and, moreover, sufficient in itself to ascertain any manner of truth, is an illusory being. Peirce is explicit about this point. Nothing is “inconceivable” to a man who sets seriously about the con-

ceiving of it. There are those who believe in their own existence, because its opposite is inconceivable; yet the most balsamic of all the sweets of sweet philosophy is the lesson that personal existence is an illusion and a practical joke. Those that have loved themselves and not their neighbors will find themselves April fools when the great April opens the truth that neither selves nor neighborselves were anything more than vicinities; while the love they would not entertain was the essence of every scent. (CP 4.69, 1893)

In a better-known text, he identifies this self with a metaphysics of wickedness. Nor must any synechist say, “I am altogether myself, and not at all you. If you embrace synechism, you must abjure this metaphysics of

INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION 17 wickedness. In the first place, your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in psychology, you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity. In the second place, all men who resemble you and are in analogous circumstances are, in a measure, yourself, though not quite in the same way in which your neighbors are you. (CP 7.571, c. 1893)

What Peirce immediately adds to this claim is equally relevant to our topic. There is still another direction in which the barbaric conception of personal identity must be broadened. A Brahmanical hymn begins as follows: “I am that pure and infinite Self, who am bliss, eternal, manifest, all-pervading, and who am the substrate of all that owns name and form.” This expresses more than humiliation,—the utter swallowing up of the poor individual self in the Spirit of prayer. All communication from mind to mind is through continuity of being. A man is capable of having assigned to him a réle in the drama of creation, and so far as he loses himself in that r6le,—no matter how humble it may be,—so far he identifies himself with its Author. (CP 7.572, 1893)

The divinely sublime puts into perspective the humanly ridiculous; and a healthy measure and form of humility allows us to acknowledge our own insignificance, but not utter worthlessness. Insofar as we give our wholehearted devotion to a transcendent Ideal, nothing less than a living Ideal, our lives acquire focus, worth, and significance.°

Peirce in a manner yet to be untangled rings changes on Spinoza’s expression Deus sive Natura, for his God is most fully revealed through nature and, in turn, nature herself partakes of divinity. Again, Peirce is explicit in according nature this status. In all its progress, science vaguely feels that it is only learning a lesson. The value of facts to it, lies only in this, that they belong to Nature; and Nature is something great, and beautiful, and sacred, and eternal, and real,—the object of its worship and its aspiration. (EP 2:55, 1898)

Very little needs to be done to make an analogous case for Peircean fallibilism and, beyond this, the radical form that it assumes at the heart of Peirce’s most basic normative commitments. Suffice it to recall here that, for him, “there is a wonderful revelation for me in the phenomenon of my sometimes becoming conscious that I have been in error, which at

18 VINCENT COLAPIETRO once shows me that if there can be no universe, as far as I am concerned, except the universe I am aware of, still there are differences in awareness” (EP 2:472, 1913).

What I mean by the spirit of playfulness, however, requires more in the way explication and illustration. I must nonetheless be brief. To begin to make the case for considering this spirit to be fundamental (and in the remaining pages only such a preliminary offering is possible), allow me

to recall below what Peirce says vis-a-vis pragmatism about a sense of fun, vis-a-vis the reality of God about musement, and finally vis-a-vis the function of signs about the Play-Impulse (Spieltrieb). In his 1903 lectures on pragmatism, Peirce, trying to explain his categories, recalls the words of a minister who proclaimed: Remember a lady’s averring that her father had heard a minister, of what complexion she did not say, open a prayer as follows: “O Thou, All-Sufficient, Self-Sufficient, Insufficient God.” Now pure Selfconsciousness is Self-sufficient, and if it is also regarded as Allsufficient, it would seem to follow that it must be Insufficient. (CP 5-71, 1903)

After indulging himself in this fashion, Peirce confessed: “I ought to apologize for introducing such Buffoonery into serious lectures. I do so because I seriously believe that a bit of fun helps thought and tends to keep it pragmatical” (ibid). Elsewhere in these lectures attention is given to such buffoonery or playfulness. For example, he identifies experience itself as a “practical joker.” He even describes the “pedagogic method of Dame Experience” by a playful couplet: Open your mouth and shut your eyes, And [ll give you something to make you wise.

In addition, there is near the end of Lecture IJ an unmistakable allusion to Mark Twain, one virtually everyone in his audience would likely appreciate. This is an extremely important point, not just a jocular

one, since it bears directly on acknowledging what is disclosed in experience. As the prophet is not without honor [save in his own country], so it is also with phenomena. Point out to the ordinary man evidence however conclusive of other influence than physical action in things he sees every day [i.e., evidence pouring in upon a person at every turn],

INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION 19 and he will say, “Well, I don’t see as that frog has got any pints about him that’s any diffunt from any other frog.” (EP 2:158)

This is clearly an allusion to Twain’s “Jim Smily and His Jumping Frog”

(1865), also published as “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1867). Peirce not only enjoyed acting in private theatrical performances; he also made strategic use of literary allusions in his philosophical writings, often in a subtle and indeed playful manner. It is instructive to recall the observation of one of the auditors of these lectures. Years later, George Santayana wrote in a letter to Justus Buchler that, during this lecture, Peirce’s “evening shirt kept coming out of his evening waistcoat. He looked red-nosed and disheveled, and a part of his

lecture seemed to be ex-tempore and whimsical” (15 October 1937). Although Santayana is insinuating that Peirce was intoxicated or perhaps even under the influence of drugs, his suggestion that Peirce was speaking (at least, in part) extemporaneously is critical for the portrait I am sketching here. In yet another context, Peirce himself in effect links humor to the cause of fallibilism (by expressing an appreciation for the power of ridicule to puncture the pretensions of dogmatism The last half century, at least, has never lacked tribes of Sir Oracles,

colporting brocards to bar off one or another railroad of inquiry; and a Rabelais would be needed to bring out all the fun that has been packed in their airs of infallibility. (“Neglected Argument,” EP 2:436-37)

There is also Peirce’s effort to secure a place for the play of musement

in no less important a place than our reflections on the reality of God. “Now, Play, we all know, is a lively exercise of one’s powers. Pure play has

no rules, except this very law of liberty” (“Neglected Argument,” EP 2:436). He thus advises his readers to “adhere to the one ordinance of Play, the law of liberty” (EP 2:436).

Finally, there is the impulse to play (Spieltrieb), an idea that Peirce encountered as a youth in Friedrich von Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters, one to

which he returned in very late manuscripts. The play-impulse, senseimpulse, and form-impulse are almost certainly sources of Peirce’s youth-

ful attempt to derive his universal categories. In his later writings, the emphasis on the play-impulse is, to a great extent, an homage to firstness. In an undergraduate essay titled “The Sense of Beauty never furthered the Performance of a single Act of Duty” (1857), Peirce is challenging a claim

20 VINCENT COLAPIETRO put forth by John Ruskin, by appealing to insights borrowed from Schiller (W 1:10-12). The influence of Schiller is evident in this early text.

The spirit of playfulness, I submit, pervades the writings of Peirce. There is, however, no opposition between playfulness and seriousness. To disturb a child at play is to realize how serious play characteristically is for its participant (cf. Dewey). Yet it is in reference to the function of signs that Peirce returns to an idea in Schiller’s Letters that he had encountered as a youth. It surfaces as an initially plausible, but ultimately unsatisfactory response to the question, What are signs for? This text is both in itself and for our purpose so critical that I quote it at length. What are signs for, anyhow? They are to communicate ideas, are they not? Even the imaginary signs called thoughts convey ideas from the mind of yesterday to the mind of tomorrow into which yesterday’s

has grown. Of course, then, these “ideas” are not themselves “thoughts,” or imaginary signs. They are some potentiality, some form, which may be embodied in external or internal signs. But why should this idea-potentiality be poured from one vessel into another unceasingly? Is it a mere exercise of the World-spirit’s Spiel-trieb | sic],—mere amusement? Ideas do, no doubt, grow in this process. It

is a part, perhaps we may say the chief part, of the process of the Creation of the World. If it has no ulterior aim at all, it may be likened to the performance of a symphony. The pragmaticist [however] insists that this is not all, and offers to back his assertion by proof. He grants that the continual increase of the embodiment of the idea-potentiality

is the summum bonum. But he undertakes to prove by the minute examination of logic that signs which should be merely parts of an endless viaduct for the transmission of idea-potentiality, without any conveyance of it into anything but symbols, namely, into action or habit of action, would not be signs at all, since they would not, little or much, fulfill the function of signs; and further, that without embodiment into something else than symbols, the principles of logic show there never could be the least growth in idea-potentiality. (EP 2:388)

The function of signs is not adequately explained in terms of play. For this, reference to the generation of habits is crucial. But, especially as it concerns the practices with which Peirce was principally preoccupied, an

important qualification is needed. It is not simply the generation of habits, but the evolution of habits conjoined to motives that demands

INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION 21 our attention. The function of signs is thus bound up with the complex interplay of evolving habits and motives, wherein the highest level of conceptual clarity involves explicit attention to these evolved dispositions considered in reference to relevant motives. Signs of various sorts (e.g., concepts, propositions, and arguments) generate other signs and these do provisionally fulfill the function of interpretants. So Peirce stresses: “I do not deny that a concept, proposition, or argument may be a logical inter-

pretant. I only insist that it cannot be the final logical interpretant... . The habit alone, though it may be a sign in some other way, is not a sign in that way in which the sign of which it is the logical interpretant is a sign. The habit conjoined with the motive and the conditions has the actions for its energetic interpretant” (P 2:418, emphasis added).

Allow me to return to a point made much earlier. Human agents in general and human inquirers (perhaps especially philosophical ones) do not necessarily have an adequately penetrating vision of the precise character of their own endeavors. Peirce’s remarks about Plato in particular are especially illuminating here. “Although Plato’s whole philosophy is a philosophy of Thirdness . . . he himself only recognizes duality,” Peirce suggests, “and makes himself an apostle of Dichotomy,—which is a misunderstanding of himself.” Then Peirce adds: “This self-misunderstanding, this failure to recognize his own conceptions, marks Plato throughout. It is characteristic of the man that he sees much deeper into the nature of things than he does into the nature of his own philosophy; and it is a trait to which we cannot altogether refuse our esteem” (“Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” 1898 Cambridge Conference Lectures, EP 2:38). Might Peirce’s remarks regarding Plato’s self-understanding be quali-

fiedly applied to Peirce himself? Did he not see more deeply into the nature of things than into the nature of his own conceptions and even the character of his own undertaking? Is his philosophy not the self-portrait of deliberative agency in all of its guises, though with exquisitely detailed

attention given only to the role of the experimental inquirer? In its spirit, such a portrait might be experimentally drawn and, hence, be akin

to science. But it is closer to the central concern of certain traditions in moral philosophy, those ordained toward ever more adequate selfunderstanding, than that of the dominant traditions of natural philosophy and experimental science. For this philosophical undertaking is an extended series of experimental portraits of no one other than the restless experimentalist.

22 VINCENT COLAPIETRO Allow me to quote a point to which I have already alluded several times. Peirce insisted: “It would, certainly, in one sense be extravagant to say that we can never tell what we are talking about; yet, in another sense, it is quite true” (CP 3.419, 1896). I would add: There is an important sense in which it is quite true to assert that we never know what we are doing. Our exertions, especially our most intensely and lastingly playful ones, are as much as anything else opportunities to discover (however darkly

and fleetingly) the purport of our struggles and strivings, our exertions and exhilarations, also of course our frustrations and failures. Where might we find a pragmatic clarification of the pragmatic orientation itself¢ One place is in Peirce’s lectures on pragmatism, in particular, his confession (carrying unmistakably the humble tone of the contrite fallibilist): “What the true definition of Pragmatism may be, I find it very hard to say; but in my nature it is a sort of instinctive attraction for living facts” (EP 2:158; emphasis added).

Among the living facts, what could be more vibrant and vital than those processes and practices in which spontaneity, playfulness, and innovation are celebrated, but also in which a sense of the sacred and the severe discipline of relentless experimentation are discernible? I will, before concluding, identify one such instance. It provides us with a wildly

fanciful analogy, but one that might redeem itself by enabling us to observe the extempore character of Peirce’s textual performances (precisely what struck Santayana on hearing Peirce’s lecture). Jazz: A Tradition of Experimentation

A form of music with which it was hardly possible for Peirce to have any-

thing more than the most superficial, minimal acquaintance (one with which he was almost certainly unacquainted), a form bodying forth just as his physical body was succumbing to the ravages of cancer, is nonetheless one in which the facets of normativity just highlighted are manifestly

present. The fecundity of his thought is nowhere more evident than in the applicability of this thought to fields it was not specifically designed to illuminate. Though this is not something I have endeavored to accomplish here, it is worthy of the creative labors of scholars equally familiar with Peirce and jazz. Stanley Cavell speaks of “the wild intelligence of American popular

culture” and takes jazz to exemplify this intelligence as strikingly as

INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION 23 anything else (1990, 13). As a rough, preliminary characterization, jazz might be said to be a widely extended family of musical practices in which the values of innovation and improvisation are central, also ones in which exemplary performances are primary (Small 1998). Such performances, far more often than scores, serve as basis for other performances. Like philosophy, jazz is “simultaneously cooperative and competitive”

(Hajdu 2001). It is a communal celebration of the irreducibility of the individual voice both as an integral part of an ensemble and an independent (or solitary) force of articulation. Indeed, it is nothing less than a dramatic illustration of communal intelligence. The jazz musician Archie Shepp makes this point emphatically when he asserts: What we encounter in the “African” alternative to Western orchestral music is “a certain

communal intelligence expressed in the music... deeply rooted in... [Afro American] tradition” (quoted in Belgrad 1998, 189). Jazz as a striking exemplification of the wild intelligence of American

culture is, at once, a culture unto itself and a development within the enveloping culture of the United States. As Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) in Blues People notes, ““Culture’ is how one lives, and it is connected to history by habit’ (Baraka 1963, 181; emphasis added). It is also how one plays. But, as Lionel Trilling more fully states than does Baraka: A culture is not a flow, nor even a confluence |[1.e., a flowing together of diverse currents or streams]; the form of its existence 1s struggle, or at least a debate; it is nothing if not a dialectic. And in any culture there are likely to be certain artists who contain a large part of the dialectic within themselves, their meaning and power lying in their contradictions; they contain within themselves .. . [in containing within themselves these contradictions] the very essence of the culture, and the sign of this is that they do not submit to serve the ends of any one ideological group or tendency. It is a significant circumstance of American cul-

ture, and one which is susceptible of explanation, that an unusually large proportion of its notable writers of the nineteenth century were repositories of the dialectic of their times; they contained both the yes and the no of their culture. (Trilling 1950; emphasis added)

Charlie Parker no less than Charles Peirce is a site wherein the contradictions defining America play out in resounding and intensifying form. Both are sites in which culture, precisely as a struggle and debate, are manifest. Jazz is not only a tradition of innovation and improvisation but also a selfconscious engagement with one’s predecessors (or elders). Jazz musicians

24 VINCENT COLAPIETRO are traditionalists and conservationists to an extent often not recognized

by some jazz musicians and commentators. Like philosophers, they are engaged in an intergenerational conversation. They are conversing with the elders, often speaking back in an impatient and disruptive manner. What Wallace Stevens wrote in reference to something else might nonetheless be asserted of jazz—our experience of jazz, as the playful activity of self-consciously fallible experimentalists whose raunchy sensuousness leaves, in many cases, an acknowledged place for scared utterance (Coltrane’s A Love Supreme being the paradigm of this). The air changes, creates and re-creates, like strength, And to breathe is a fulfilling of desire, A clearing, a detecting, a completing, A largeness lived and not conceived, a space That is an instant nature, brilliantly. (Stevens 1982, 300)

Peirce’s general theory of signs has yet to be applied in a systematic manner to the innovative practices of jazz musicians. There are, however, signs that such a study is beginning to attract the attention of musical theorists trained in (or at least somewhat conversant with) Peircean semiotics (see, e.g., Kelly Parker’s contribution to this volume). Yet, just as these practices invite such an application of Peirce’s theory, so Peirce’s own writings invite being read in the light of the practices of the musical innovators so animated by the play-impulse. To read these works in this light would be breaking down the barrier between performer and audience—that is, author and reader, also the dichotomy between playfulness and seriousness, so too that between raucous sensuousness and sacred depths. To sound these possibilities in the hope of others playing more adeptly and extensively with them has been my modest purpose in this penultimate section. The normative dimensions of Peirce’s philosophical writings on which I have focused in this essay are, at least, equally charac-

teristic of the artistic performances of such musicians as Coltrane, Weston, and Carter, who are as unabashedly religious as was Peirce. Juxtaposing such apparently disparate cultural practices as philosophical inquiry and musical innovation promises, I urge, to cast mutual light on such inquiry and such innovation.

INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION 25 Coda

Philosophy in its way, poetry (or literature) in its way, and more generally art are deeply different attempts to attain the status and fulfill the function of what Wallace Stevens calls “acutest speech.” In “Chocorua to Its Neighbors,” he writes: To say more than human things with human voice, That cannot be; to say human things with more Than human voice, that, also cannot be; To speak humanly from the height or from the depth Of human things, that is acutest speech.

But to strive to say more than human things, with more than a human voice, is itself a human, all too human, impulse. Peirce’s anthropomor-

phism and fallibilism, however, suggest the futility of this struggle to “escape the human” (Cavell). Even so, admirable and indeed incomparable achievements have resulted from this struggle. We ought not to be arrogant in our proclamations of humility. Nor should we be arrogant in dismissing too quickly and completely what we judge to be the arrogance of others, least of all when they have struggled so heroically to transcend the bounds of the human. We ought rather, humbly, to recognize such exalted struggles for transcendence as characteristic of the human animal. Humility is, in any event, one of our most important virtues. Our abil-

ity to laugh at ourselves in a certain tone (a tone neither harshly selfderogatory nor lightly self-exonerating) is surely a sign of a healthy sense of our invincible fallibility. Indeed, from a fallibilist perspective, there are fewer virtues more important than our readiness to laugh at ourselves. In this disposition, a sense of transcendent purpose, the spirit of unbridled playfulness, and a consciousness of ineradicable fallibility conspire to cel-

ebrate the rarely welcome verdict of our deepest sentiment—our comparative insignificance (CP 1.673). The growth of concrete reasonableness

demands not only a passionate commitment to a transcendent purpose but also a playful sense of our individual insignificance. Its growth is assisted by our laughter and playfulness, especially when they signal our refusal to confuse our worth with the worth of our ideals.

TWO

NORMATIVE JUDGMENT IN JAZZ A Semiotic Framework Kelly A. Parker

A composer’s job involves the decoration of fragments of time. Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

—Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book

r ‘he following pages draw on Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics as a basis for understanding musical phenomena and indicate some advantages of

a semiotic approach to musicology.' Much musicology simply seems irrelevant to what composers, performers, and engaged auditors actually do. My working assumption is that this is because the emphasis of such musicology on formal internal structures and theory simply fails to reflect the musician’s experience. As Naomi Cumming noted, much musicology

is built on “a persistent, if unstated, belief that sounding quality and formal structure stand on two sides of an opposition, like secondary and primary qualities in the Lockean sense” (Cumming 1999, 437). The timebound toils of composition, the precarious and particular acts of rehearsal and performance—these are infinitely variable and ephemeral phenomena. These daily facts of the musician’s life are, on their face, unattractive objects for the musicologists’ systematic study and general theorizing. The theory-defined “formal features” of a musical work are much more appealing to musicologists: These “are assumed to have a superior permanence, as they inhere in some unspecified sense in the work’s score, {26 $

NORMATIVE JUDGMENT IN JAZZ 27 and the kind of cognitive skills involved in identifying them is assumed not to be purely ‘intuitive’ but to be founded upon the acquisition of a relevant set of theoretical beliefs” (Cumming 1999, 437). This appeal has led many musicologists to regard “the work” as a kind of atemporal form mysteriously grasped or created by the composer, who communicates that form (and whatever the form represents) to performers and audiences via the score, which is a fixed authoritative text. There are a number of problems with this conception of the musical work. For one thing, it denigrates the way people actually produce and experience music. To regard the work as a static and atemporal form implies that performers and audiences are strangely passive creatures; even the composer may be regarded as passive receptor and transcriber of the work so conceived. There is a looming practical problem that, while some musical works can be conceived as static entities represented by a definitive score, not all can be. Finally, this view gives rise to a number of familiar and apparently intractable philosophical puzzles. Where does

the composition reside, and what is its ontological status, before the composer fixes its form in a score? What cognitive faculty affords a com-

poser access to musical forms? How does musical sound or notation “refer” to the work or form? How does the work refer to its object? And what is that object? What information does the composition communi-

cate to the auditor? Would performers even be necessary if audience members were sufficiently literate to read the score themselves? The list of such problems could be extended. I contend that musicologists’ dis-

course often does not enhance the experience of musicians—or of engaged auditors—because it is built on a model of music-as-thing that does not match up with common experience of musical phenomena. A process model of music would, perhaps, serve both music and musicology much better. Peircean semiotic theory, regarded both as an account of representation and interpretation, and as a general model of process, offers a promising alternative starting point for musicology. There have, of course, been a number of previous contributions to semiotic musicology, including those by Susanne Langer (1979, 1953), Leonard Meyer (1956), Wilson Coker (1972), Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1990), Naomi Cumming (1999, 2000), Kevin Holm-Hudson (2002), and Felicia Kruse (2005). Space constraints

prohibit a proper recounting of these authors’ contributions here; the

28 KELLY A. PARKER aim of the present essay is to do something quite basic to any proposed

semiotic theory of music (or of the work of art more generally), but which has not been done by previous theorists. In what follows, I sketch

a semiotic account of the musical work as a process of representation and interpretation, employing terminology from Peirce and from JeanJacques Nattiez’s Music and Discourse. The semiotic framework will be

introduced by application to a “standard case” of Western art music (“classical” music), Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude,” so as to show how the musical work can be nearly identified with the score. I will then apply this framework to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, a musical work that is particularly hard to reconcile with such a view. This application high-

lights the overlooked role of the energetic and logical interpretants of musical symbols, and suggests a semiotic basis for normative criticism of musical performances.

This exercise should be of interest to musicians, composers, critics, educators, and listeners—I hope such people will recognize semiotic theory as a rich resource for developing new ways to understand and approach their music. The importance of the present analysis for Peirce studies, and for normative philosophy, is perhaps less evident. Though I will not develop such implications in the present essay, there are certain larger philosophical themes lurking in the near background of this work. The first is that it offers one illustration of what Peirce may have meant by his intriguing notion of “normative esthetics.” This idea, which is integral to Peirce’s mature philosophical system, involves two rather challenging claims. One is that esthetics, which Peirce defines as the study of

what is admirable, admits of objective standards of feeling to which people ought to aspire. Peirce seems to be saying that, while there is perhaps no disputing about taste, there is indeed room for people to improve their originally unrefined tastes to something better. The other challenging aspect of Peirce’s notion is that esthetic judgment is the most fundamental of the forms of judgment, meaning that it is presupposed by moral and logical judgment. These aspects of Peirce’s philosophy are explored in some depth in my “Reconstructing the Normative Sciences” (Parker 2003) for those who wish to pursue them further. The second background theme of the present essay is that it demonstrates how a process of normative judgment can function in the absence of preestablished criteria such as rules of composition or a definition of beauty. In this respect, the present project is something of a laboratory experiment. It is designed

NORMATIVE JUDGMENT IN JAZZ 29 to test whether Peirce’s nonfoundational realist philosophy provides sufficient resources to address the present crisis of judgment, which has been ushered in with the postmodern questioning of preestablished criteria. As will be seen, I believe that the approach described here does allow for an “objective” judgment of the artistic success of certain musical performances. This judgment is not “objective” in the sense of being

indisputable, of course—Peirce allows for no such certainty, even in mathematics and the hard sciences. Judgments can, however, be “objective” in the sense that they are not arbitrary or merely reflective of personal taste: Esthetic judgments can be intersubjectively defensible and more or less persuasive, even decisive for the foreseeable future. Though no judgments we make may be final for all time, some are demonstrably better than others. If the semiotic approach gives us this much in esthetic

judgment, then perhaps it can do something similar in other spheres, such as ethics, scientific inquiry, and law. To develop all these implications would obviously require far more work than an essay such as this can encompass. What appears here is, I hope, a sound beginning to that much larger project.

The Musical Work as Total Musical Fact To compose is, at least by tendency, to offer for doing, not to offer for hearing but for writing. —Roland Barthes, “Musica Practica,” in The Responsibility of Forms

Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s “musical semiology” regards the musical work as an irreducibly timebound phenomenon. It is brought into experience by innumerable acts of particular individuals; it is informed by all their idio-

syncrasies and by the accidents of historical context. In Nattiez’s view neither musical form, nor authorial intent, nor written score, nor performance, nor auditors’ reception are essential to or necessarily defin-

itive of a work. Nattiez accommodates this variability in musical phenomena by identifying the object of musical discourse as the “Total Musical Fact.” Though Nattiez focuses his discussions on the canon of Western art music (“classical” music) favored by established musicology, the Total Musical Fact appears suited to accommodate virtually anything that is experienced as a musical phenomenon. (Interestingly, discussion

of whether something is—or should be—experienced as a musical

30 KELLY A. PARKER phenomenon is itself.a kind of musical discourse, and hence a part of the Total Musical Fact that constitutes it as a musical phenomenon.) Nattiez

distinguishes three “levels” of the musical work conceived as “Total Musical Fact”:?

1. The poietic level: “the procedures that have engendered it (acts of composition)”; 2. The neutral or immanent level: the organization, structures, “configurations,’ sounds, and/or score that define the experienceable work; 3. The esthesic level: “the procedures to which it gives rise: acts of interpretation and perception.” (Nattiez 1990, 1x) It is no doubt evident that these three levels of the Total Musical Fact cor-

respond to object, sign-vehicle, and interpretant, the three parts of a Peircean sign. A musical work is a process; the Total Musical Fact may be fruitfully regarded as a complete symbol. Evolution of “Revolution”: Semiotic Model of a Standard Case We are afraid, perhaps, that without images and methods, chaos will break loose; worse still, that unless we use images of some kind, ourselves, our own creation will itself be chaos. And why are we afraid of that? Is it because people will laugh at us, if we make chaos? Or is it, perhaps, that we are most afraid of all that if we do make chaos, when we hope to create art, we will ourselves be chaos, hollow, nothing? —Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

First we will consider how this model handles a “standard case,” a musicology-friendly work—Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude” (op. 10, no. 12). We may describe the development of this work in terms of Nattiez’s three levels as follows:

Poietic level: Sometime around 1831, Chopin composes the “Etude,” combining specific technical challenges in piano playing with new melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic configurations. Immanent level: Chopin produces, proofreads, and publishes a score that represents the tempo, style, dynamics, notes and other information the composer considers necessary to guide a performance of the

“Etude.” The score is printed and sold as a part of a collection of twelve études dedicated to Franz Liszt.

NORMATIVE JUDGMENT IN JAZZ 31 Esthesic level: Generations of students and performers practice, experiment, study, (eventually) record, and comment on numerous performances of the work. Generations of audiences and critics hear, critique, and respond to others’ critiques of these performances.

There exists a definitive composer and an authoritative score for the “Revolutionary Etude,” and there is an extensive history of performance and critical evaluation that has over time established a standard of “correct” performance for the piece. Performances that conform to the score

are judged competent; “new interpretations” introduce variations in aspects of the work that were not specified by the composer in the score

or were not otherwise established early in the esthesic phase of the work.® Excellence in interpretation concerns the tasteful exploitation of the score’s indeterminacy. An interpretation that violates the score (e.g., by using deviant instrumentation, a radically different tempo or style, or adding whole new sections to the work) would be readily dismissed by critics and serious musicians as frivolous or offensive—even if large numbers of people were actually to enjoy the resulting interpretation as MUSIC.

Notice how the object of the “Total Musical Fact,” the symbolic process that is the musical sign, shifts and grows over time. This development may be traced with references to the Diagram of Semeiotic Process (Figure 1). Initially, Chopin’s experience is the object, his ideas are the sign-vehicle, and the score is the interpretant (see a—d). Thus the score may be taken as the first complete sign in the process (S, in e). Very quickly Chopin’s experience and his ideas of that experience collapse to become the object, which is represented by the score, to a performer— who could be Chopin himself (f-h). This may be taken as corresponding to the second complete sign (S, in 1). Next, the experience/ideas/score collapses and comes to be regarded as the object represented by a performance to an audience (S,, now moving beyond the diagram). The openendedevolutionary process ofthe musicalsymbolknownas”“ Revolutionary Etude” has begun. Because of strong teaching and performance conventions the score soon comes to occupy central importance for performers and critics; it is easy to imagine, but impossible to produce, a flawless performance that would perfectly embody the musical form that seems to exist outside of time—but which may be glimpsed by reading the text, Chopin’s score. The score thus comes to be taken as the object of musical

32 KELLY A. PARKER

r, \ lr, \ fF O, O, O,

a. b. C. i1/ 1|| sign r1i!1% f S, L/f2, ®

/11

0, O, O, d. e. f, I I PeeT '5 /

/

/

Sign S,

[;/'[;/'

O, h. O, O, g. I.

Diagram of Semeiotic Process a. The hypothetical object (0,) is shown in isolation from any representation. b. Some aspects of the object (0,), its “ground,” are represented by a representamen (7,). c. The represented object (0,) generates an interpretant (/,). d. The ground of the object is virtually present in the interpretant via the representamen. e. The triadic relation of object, representamen, and interpretant constitutes a complete sign (S,). f. The represented interpretant (7,) may itself be taken up as a representamen (r,). g. The interpretant (7,), thus taken, is a representamen (r,). h. This representamen (r,) generates an interpretant (1,). The previous interpretant and representamen recede to become aspects of the object of the new sign. i. The new triadic relation is a new sign (S,) with the previous sign (S,) as its object (0,).

NORMATIVE JUDGMENT IN JAZZ 33 representation; the object represented by Chopin in his composition is not as often discussed. Both of these objects are still “present” in the object of subsequent interpreter-signs, however. The score embodies the work, as token of a type, and ever awaits that performer who can represent it ade-

quately to an audience. With this, the work—taken as nearly identical with the score—becomes a thing to master, acquire, or “get.” This “standard” case shows how our model can explain the origin of the musical work-as-thing concept, the view favored by strictly textcentered teachers, performers, critics, and musicologists. It accords with David Sudnow’s account of the classical artist’s situation: The classical pianist “operates within a social organization of professional certification, excellence, and competitiveness . .. placing extraordinary demands upon a faithfulness to the score, where what ‘faithfulness’ and ‘the score’ mean is defined by that social organization” (Sudnow 1978, 53). Social convention and tradition in this case identify one stage of the process of

interpretation and representation as crucially important—but there are apparently other possible social conventions and traditions that would indicate a different approach to the composer’s work. With this standard case in hand, we now turn to a genre of music that is much more problematic for score-centered interpreters. What we learn from the semiotic analysis of improvised jazz indicates broader possibilities for the understanding of any musical work.

The Jazz Revolution: Ex-Scoriating the Tradition Screw the tempered scale and the lute it rode in on. —Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz

The music historian Gary Giddins notes that early jazz musicians introduced a new esthetic to the world, a new conception of music. The inno-

vation had much to do with their emphasis on improvisation: “Spontaneous invention is the soul of jazz... . Improvisation is the jazz musician’s richest form of expression” (Giddins 1998, 89). Pioneers such as Louis Armstrong may in fact have rehearsed every “improvised” note ahead of time until the melody came together perfectly, but jazz nonetheless turned conservatory convention on its head: “Implicit in the liberties Armstrong took, and in the rise of jazz itself, is the assumption that musicians are superior to the songs they perform—a radical stance by classical

34 KELLY A. PARKER principles, where a performance is evaluated by its fidelity to the text. In jazz, performance is the text” (Giddins 1998, 89). The methods and implications of improvisation pervade the jazz expe-

rience. Duke Ellington was a perfectionist working with a large and changing group of musicians: The score was essential to his work as composer and performer. Nonetheless, if we seek the canonical version of an Ellington piece, the surviving scores must often take a back seat to record-

ings of his actual performances. Ellington allowed performers to alter melodies and would alter (or compose) songs based on improvisations his players produced. The score was rarely kept up to date, and there is no canonical version of many Ellington compositions. Over time, Ellington might continue to make changes, large and small,

so that the basic arrangement might appear in a dozen different recorded versions. Which is the correct one? The issue of correctness (as opposed to comparative excellence) is as spurious here [even with a score] as in a discussion of various blues improvisations by Johnny Hodges. (Giddins 1998, 105)

The text-centered musician or auditor may in fact be unable to hear modern improvised jazz as music. The text-oriented critic may be baffled at the prospect of discussing performance quality, or “comparative excellence,” without a score to serve as the fixed standard of correctness. In a

style of music where all the traditional standards are continually challenged, isn’t it the case that anything goes and it all sounds the same? Consider the following statement: A Love Supreme is generally recognized

as a masterwork of American improvisational jazz and as the greatest extended work of the saxophonist and composer John Coltrane. That one can intelligibly assert these things, and even argue for them, suggests that there is a way out of this normative free fall. I have chosen the thirty-two-minute-long suite A Love Supreme as a test case for the semiotic model of music for several reasons. First, it is an improvised work. Coltrane and the other members of his quartet (pianist

McCoy Tyner, bassist James “Jimmy” Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones) had already been recording true improvisation for some years when they entered Rudy Van Gelder’s studio on 9 December 1964. Concerning the earlier short recording “Chasin’ the Trane,” Coltrane had written that “the melody not only wasn’t written, it wasn’t conceived before we played it.... We set the tempo, and in we went” (Kahn 2002, 61).

NORMATIVE JUDGMENT IN JAZZ 35 For the longer work of A Love Supreme, Coltrane had developed some ideas ahead of time, mainly concerning the overall structure and mood of the suite’s four parts. In the studio, according to Tyner, Coltrane “worked out a bass line with Jimmy, and told Elvin ‘this is what I’d like,’ and basically, that’s the way it went” (Kahn 2002, 92). He gave Tyner a basic set of

chords to use, but Tyner recalled that “you could do what you wanted, keeping them in mind. That’s what A Love Supreme was about” (Kahn 2002, 92). Jones recalls similarly sparse direction from the composer and band leader at this session. Though Coltrane “didn’t give me any instruction,” the drummer understood “the way the melody was geared to start. I thought I had to play something that was simple and clear. So I played half of an Afro-Cuban beat, and it worked out.” (Kahn 2002, 15)

The performance was the composition; there was never a score, and the act of composition, the poietic level of this work, was realized by four musicians and a recording engineer working extemporaneously with very little polishing or revising. The second feature of A Love Supreme that makes it a promising case study is that there have been relatively few performances or recordings of the work as a whole since its first appearance. The following is, I think, an exhaustive list of full-length recordings of the work.* 1. The John Coltrane Quartet at Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 9 December 1964, released on vinyl LP in 1965 (Coltrane 2002, disc 1).

2. The John Coltrane Quartet with saxophonist Archie Shepp and bassist Art Davis at Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 10 December 1964. Two alternate takes each of “Acknowledgement” and “Resolution” have survived (Coltrane 2002, tracks 6-9, disc 2).

3. The John Coltrane Quartet at Festival Mondial du Jazz, Antibes, France, 26 July 1965. Live performance recorded by INA (French national radio) (Coltrane 2002, tracks 1-5, disc 2).

4. Carlos Santana and Mahavishnu John McLaughlin in a nine-piece ensemble, studio recording and one alternate take of “Acknowledgement,” October 1972 (Santana and McLaughlin 2003, tracks 1 and 6). 5. The Branford Marsalis Quartet at Bearsville Studios, Bearsville, New York, 1-3 December 2001 (Branford Marsalis Quartet 2002, tracks 6-9).

36 KELLY A. PARKER 6. The Branford Marsalis Quartet live at the Bimhuis Jazz Club, Amsterdam, 30 March 2003 (Branford Marsalis Quartet 2004). 7. The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis at Right Track Studio, 26 August 2003 (Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis 2004).

8. The Turtle Island Quartet, studio recording, 2007 (Turtle Island Quartet 2007).

This limited number of complete recordings allows a comprehensive comparison of different interpretations of the work. The third interesting aspect of A Love Supreme as a test case is that there is a canonical interpretation—the 1965 LP release (item 1 in the pre-

ceding list)—-which has served in place of a score as definitive text. Subsequent, much later releases of two other versions of A Love Supreme

from the composer (items 2 and 3) have undermined the “definitive” authority of this canonical interpretation, however. Each of these three recordings is the composer’s version of the work, and there are significant differences among them.

Tough Love: Semiotic Model of a Hard Case If you don't feel it, you can’t get it. —Louis Armstrong, quoted in Visions of Jazz, by Gary Giddins

We can refine our analysis of the work-as-representation-and-interpreta-

tion somewhat further by using terms and distinctions proposed by Peirce. The first thing to note is that the object of A Love Supreme is twofold. The dynamical object would be the totality of John Coltrane’s life at

that time: his musical development, especially the influence of Miles Davis's modal jazz since 1958; his personal life with a new wife and small children; the rise of the civil rights movement and the first linkages of jazz to the Black Power movement; his increasing popularity, influence, and commercial success; and his spiritual growth. Coltrane’s spirituality was rooted in his childhood experiences in African American churches; it was revived with his recovery from heroin addiction in 1957. Delfeayo Marsalis highlights the importance of the dynamical object when he observes that someone really trying to play like John Coltrane “would have to absorb

comparative cultural experiences—which are virtual[ly] impossible to

NORMATIVE JUDGMENT IN JAZZ 37 replicate in our current society—and translate the resultant emotions into musical expression” (Branford Marsalis Quartet, liner booklet 2002).

The immediate object, the ground of the representation in the musical symbol A Love Supreme (0, in the Diagram of Semeiotic Process | Figure 1]),

is predominantly musical innovation (the work is his effort to bring modal improvisation to an extended suite format), and expression of spiritual experiences (the work’s title, the poem Coltrane brought into the studio as text for “Psalm,” and the liner notes he wrote for the LP all highlight the spiritual focus of this work). The sign-vehicle or representamen (r,) of this musical symbol comprises the in-studio performances of 9 and 10 December 1964. The poietic level of the work includes the immediate object, aspects of Coltrane’s world, as it is represented in these performances. The immanent level is the edited recording of these sessions. The quartet, the additional musicians in the 10 December session (which also included vocal overdubbing that was used on the LP release), and the recording engineer Van Gelder all contributed to the work’s poietic level; the engineer contributed decisively to the work’s immanent level in preserving, shaping, and editing the actual recording. Finally, in the course of playback and editing, Van Gelder and Coltrane became the first to enter the esthesic level of A Love Supreme. At this phase of the development of A Love Supreme as musical symbol,

we have a completed “work” composed, recorded, edited, and heard in playback. The work exists in the world as a thing, a complete and stable symbol, and it begins inevitably to affect that world by generating interpretants. Of course this presentation ignores the many interpretants that went into the initial, infinitely divisible process of generating the symbol we call here the “completed work.” This is perhaps the most suitable stage of interpretation to correlate to the sign S, (e in the diagram). Here is where the semiotic model of music is especially helpful for

moving us beyond current musicology. A great deal of attention has focused on music’s suitability to represent emotion, or specifically to convey emotion, by representing emotional relations to an audience so as

to generate an emotional interpretant.’ As interesting as emotion is, a semiotic model allows us to tell a much bigger story. Consider the range of interpretants that have actually arisen from this work. Performers and audiences indeed do have emotional responses to the various parts of A Love Supreme, and there is perhaps a configuration

38 KELLY A. PARKER of emotional responses that is common among informed and accustomed auditors. The work also creates energetic interpretants—physical responses—from dancing, to closed eyes, to meditation and prayer, to a command to “Please turn that off!,” to leaving the room, to signing up for sax lessons. Some of these responses are precisely what Coltrane intended. Some are fairly uniform for specific types of auditors. Coltrane himself apparently saw no limit to the potential power of the energetic interpretants of music. I want to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start immediately to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I’d like to play a certain song and he'll be cured. When he’d be broke, I’d bring out a different

song, and immediately he'd get all the money he needed. But what these pieces are, and what is the road to attain the knowledge of them, that I don’t know. The true powers of music are still unknown. To be able to control them must be, I believe, the goal of every musician. (Kahn 2002, 192-93)

Beyond even these thaumaturgic energetic interpretants, there are also logical interpretants: A Love Supreme has generated myriad signs that themselves represent ideas. Coltrane himself was among the first affected:

After editing the tapes with Van Gelder, he worked meticulously to understand and explain A Love Supreme in the liner notes for the 1965 LP (Kahn 2002, 144-46). As we have seen, the work of 9 December 1964 gave rise to later performances by Coltrane and others. Parts of A Love Supreme

have been adapted to stand as independent musical works. The rejected experiments of the 10 December sessions reappear, to better effect, in Coltrane’s next major release, Ascension (Coltrane 2000). The musical forms Coltrane recorded—the techniques, voicings, and rhythms of A Love Supreme—were internalized by later composers and performers who never quoted from the work itself. The notion of jazz music as conveyor of spiritual truth has entered popular and religious culture: The Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco congregates regularly.° And A Love Supreme has engendered countless critiques,

commentaries, and studies—even a few academic papers. The musical symbol conveys and provokes emotion, indeed, but it also conveys and provokes physical reactions and intellectual meanings of astonishing variety. All of these later interpretants at least potentially affect what is narrowly thought of as the “work.” These subsequent interpretants can

NORMATIVE JUDGMENT IN JAZZ 39 affect the work because they are, properly speaking, a part of the work at the esthetic level.

One may question how something as unmusical and far-removed as an academic essay written years after the recording could affect A Love Supreme, how important it could ever be to the music. The future, after all, doesn’t ordinarily affect the past. But one academic essay has in fact decisively augmented the musical symbol A Love Supreme. In 1985 Lewis Porter published an article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in which he conclusively identified the structural secret of “Psalm,”

the concluding section of A Love Supreme (Porter 1985). Porter’s work forever changed the way the original recording and all its progeny would be understood. The liner notes for the 1965 LP included a poem titled “A Love Supreme” and signed “John Coltrane December 1964.” Porter demonstrated that Coltrane had composed the saxophone melody of “Psalm” by sounding the syllables of this poem through the horn. Not even Elvin Jones realized Coltrane was reading from the poem in the studio, but the legend did develop somehow and became a secret passed among musicians and Coltrane “insiders” (Kahn 2002, 123-24). After Porter, every listener can hear the words, and every performer has a tough interpretive decision to make about the melody in “Psalm”: Should one duplicate the sounds, restate Coltrane’s meaning, or use “Psalm” to make one’s own original statement, as the composer himself had done? In an interview, Branford Marsalis remarked: I wasn’t even going to try to approach that. Nor was I going to sit around and meticulously write out each note, which robs you of the essence. ... What I wanted to do was just try to play something that would create that same kind of spiritual essence and that sense of mel-

ancholy. (Branford Marsalis Quartet 2004, “Interview: The Fourth Movement” )

Porter’s work on A Love Supreme, incidentally, offers an example of how musicology can prove highly relevant to musicians.

Normative Judgment in Jazz From realizing that I can make mistakes, I have come to realize that there is an order to what I do. —Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come

40 KELLY A. PARKER The semiotic model of the work as “Total Musical Fact” suggests that there are many, many possible legitimate interpretations of a musical work, and many others that simply do not succeed because they do not adequately represent the object of the music. This examination of A Love Supreme concludes with a look at some of each and offers a suggestion about what distinguishes the good, the bad, and the ugly. I here confine

my examples to the opening of the piece, the first few minutes of the available interpretations of “Acknowledgement.” In the 1965 LP version,

this opening consists of a gong strike, an assertive statement from the saxophone,’ and then the introduction of an anchoring blues progression on the bass. This progression (to which I will return) is eventually taken into the saxophone melody, and finally vocalized with the chanted words “A Love Supreme.” Repeated listenings to recorded variants of A Love Supreme, most initially with Nathan Smith, a woodwind performance student, have consistently led to the same judgments. The 1965 LP release sets the standard, both historically and in terms of quality of interpretation: It is literally the definitive recording of this work. The 10 December sessions are failed experiments that are intelligible only with reference to the later recording, Ascension (Coltrane 2000). Coltrane’s July 1965 live recording is interesting, but breaks no new ground and only reminds one of the best features of the more familiar LP version. The 1972 Santana/

McLaughlin recordings are in many ways the most interesting nonColtrane performances. They use electric instruments, two guitars instead of a solo saxophone as lead voice, add congas and other percussion, and follow the jazz-rock fusion style of the early 1970s (though on the second take the rhythm is a more straightforward rock groove with less jazz feel). The version released on the 1972 Santana/McLaughlin LP creates an effect similar to the second alternate take from Coltrane’s then-unavailable 10

December sessions—perhaps not an altogether surprising effect, since these musicians would certainly have heard Ascension and all the works that followed A Love Supreme. Branford Marsalis’s 2001 studio recording

is competent but unmoving. The Turtle Island Quartet interpretation is also competent and, once one adjusts to the string quartet voicing, even enjoyable—but it remains thin, lacking the sonic authority of drumset and piano in the rhythm section. Wynton Marsalis’s 2003 recording with the Lincoln Center Jazz orchestra is offensively wrong-headed in places. Branford Marsalis’s 2004 live recording in Amsterdam conveys the energy and authentic jazz feel of A Love Supreme most successfully of all the later interpretations.

NORMATIVE JUDGMENT IN JAZZ 41 On what do I base these summary judgments? A thousand details boil down to a couple of guiding insights: The successful interpretations preserve the trace of Coltrane’s original immediate object and acknowledge (without copying) the compositional and performance decisions he made on the original recording. This is an almost wholly improvised work on a few distinctive chord progressions and patterns, and it is an intensely

personal spiritual statement made by a small, intimate ensemble. Coltrane’s 10 December alternate takes and his 26 July live performance are the work of a group already moving beyond the structures and voicings of 9 December. The 10 December sextet breaks A Love Supreme’s intimacy, the 26 July quartet has let the musical vocabulary of December

go stale. Branford Marsalis’s Quartet (like the Turtle Island Quartet) offers the right number of voices; Branford Marsalis’s Quartet (like Coltrane’s) also draws explicitly on the blues heritage that defines the chord progressions and patterns. In their 2003 recording, Branford Marsalis and his group are finally at home with the overall pattern of the

work. Wynton Marsalis’s large group seems not to get it at all—they apparently play from a score which was transcribed from the original recording and then arranged for the group. Marsalis uses the band’s sectional sounds as if imitating the Big Bands that Coltrane reacted against. The group occasionally plays ethereal tone-poem bridges, and individual performers take their solo turns in high-energy “cut session” style. It’s as if the Lincoln Center musicians were told to imagine that the piece was written for a ballroom stomp, in 1937, by Ottorino Respighi.

This survey of my judgments is highly impressionistic, of course, but it is built on too many supporting details to describe. Here is one example of such a set of details, however. It centers on what object the performers, as interpreters, believe the characteristic structures of the work are meant to reference. The repeated bass progression that anchors “Acknowledgement” provides a specific example of how one can get it wrong. Ravi Coltrane (the son of John and Alice Coltrane) regards this 1-d3-1-4° progression, one of two melodic “cells” he identifies in the work, as a universalist spiritual statement (the other cell is 1-2-5). In liner notes to the 2002 release of A Love Supreme Ravi Coltrane identifies its source in universal mathematical ratios. John Coltrane was a dedicated student of many disciplines beyond music: religion, astrology, astronomy, other sciences. The books he left behind more than suggest it: he was definitely into mathematics

42 KELLY A. PARKER and an esoteric application of numbers to music. So I thought about these cells as pure numbers and saw how they define ratios known as the Golden Mean, also called the divine proportion. (Coltrane 2002, 23-24)

This is a potentially fascinating window into “Acknowledgement,” but it proves hard to establish. Where can we find the Golden Mean expressed in this four-note progression? A line exhibiting the Golden Mean, such as Plato’s “Divided Line,” exhibits a ratio of 1:11.62 between two parts,

and between its larger part and the whole. If this ratio exists in “Acknowledgement,” it would apparently be in the ratios of the intervals between the tonic, the minor third (a “blue note”), and the fourth. The proportions of Coltrane’s intervals are approximately, but only approximately, correct. In the blues scale Coltrane employed here, the interval from tonic to minor third is about three half-steps; from tonic to fourth is five half-steps.? The proportion between the two parts of the whole interval (tonic to minor third : minor third to fourth) is about 1:1.9. The proportion between the larger part and the whole (tonic to minor third : tonic to fourth) is 1:1.5. It is not too far off the Golden Ratio of 1:1.62, but this seems to involve more variation than one supposes a serious devotee of numerology might tolerate. Notice, too, that Coltrane did not pair the 1-d3-1-4 progression with another one—such as d3-4-1-d3, d3-4-d3-1, or

1-d3-1-d3-4—that would actually trace the ratio among parts on this interval.'° One wonders whether the veteran performer and recording artist was really intellectualizing his composition this much... and if so, how Jones, Garrison, and Tyner, co-composing with him in the studio, ever caught on to what Coltrane wanted without his telling them about the esoteric numerology scheme. Wynton Marsalis also regards the bass progression as a statement of spiritual universalism: “It builds on the unit of the minor third and the fourth, which is a kernel of the pentatonic scale that runs through all the music around the world. Coltrane was aware of this, ’'m sure” (Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis 2004). Sure, indeed, but a blues scale simply is a minor pentatonic scale (1-d3-4-5-d7), with an additional note, a diminished fifth, inserted in the series (1-d3-4-d5-5-d7). Perhaps Coltrane was stepping out into rarefied realms of music theory by deliberately embracing the universality of the pentatonic scale—or maybe he was just playing the blues. When he wrote A Love Supreme, the

NORMATIVE JUDGMENT IN JAZZ 43 blues had been played this way for more than half a century in America. Most important, Coltrane himself had been playing the blues for twenty years.

This is the interpretive approach adopted by Branford Marsalis, who in an interview notes the use of this progression in Stevie Ray Vaughn’s “Pride and Joy” (Vaughan 1995, track 4). Marsalis sings the 1-d3-1-d3-4 “dirty blues” line, notes its similarity to the 1-d3-1-4 progression in A Love

Supreme, and ends the interview by saying, “The subtext [to Coltrane’s music] is always the blues” (Branford Marsalis Quartet 2004, “Interview: The Blues as an Essential Aspect”). Vaughn doesn’t actually make this line prominent in the song Marsalis mentions, but it can indeed be heard as the anchoring progression in many traditional blues songs, such as John Lee Hooker’s “’m Bad Like Jesse James” (Hooker 1995, track 14).

This dirty blues line appears unaltered in the multiple melodic high instruments at the beginning of Ascension. In A Love Supreme, Coltrane was using a configuration of notes, the

blues scale, which had been developed and was well established in his musical culture. His originality lay in using it in a “spiritual” setting. One might suggest that its structure accords with such esoterica as the Golden Ratio and the pentatonic scale because the blues, too, is a part of “all the music around the world.” In any case, Branford seems to get a more listenable interpretation with his belief about the object of Coltrane’s musi-

cal symbol. I maintain that this is because, when he approaches the musical symbol A Love Supreme, Marsalis seeks to comprehend, though not replicate, the place of the blues, the church, and other key influences in Coltrane’s world. That world is the dynamic object of A Love Supreme. There is no “correct rendition” of this musical work, but competent and excellent interpretants of it preserve—as their object—the trace of that world and all else that the work has accrued since it first came to be.

THREE

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS James Liszka

ED

pss came rather late in his career to the study of ethics. As a practicing scientist with a broad and deep understanding of philosophy, Peirce was primarily concerned with scientific knowing. He developed a system of logic and a theory of signs to explain how information, infer-

ence, and inquiry worked together to produce reliable knowledge. As Peirce recalls the situation in 1903, he realized, sometime around 1883, that logic or semeiotic was dependent on ethics, understood as a study of right conduct. Since logic concerned the correction of thinking toward a standard and was essentially concerned with normative claims about the goodness or badness of reasoning, it should be considered a species of ethics (CP 5.108, 1903; 5.111, 1903). Indeed, there was an analogy between

deliberate, self-controlled thinking and ethical, self-controlled conduct in this regard (CP 5.108, 1903). At that point, as he says, he understood “the intimacy of its relation to logic” (CP 2.198, c. 1902).

Consequently, in 1883, he embarked on a broader study of “the great moralists,” as he says, although it was only in the late 1890s that he studied the matter of the relation between logic and ethics intently (CP 2.198, 1443

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 45 c. 1902). However, Peirce does not mention the “great moralists” by name, so we are somewhat unsure of his influences (CP 5.111, 1903). Prior

to this, as Peirce recollects, his first study of ethics was of Theodor Jouffroy, Immanuel Kant, and William Whewell (CP 5.111, 1903). Although

Peirce greatly admired Whewell’s work on logic, he did not seem to be too impressed by his study of ethics (CP 5.111, 1903). It is perhaps the case that Whewell’s concept of conscience may have influenced Peirce in his ethical thinking. Whewell’s account was based on the work of Shaftesbury

and the commonsense theorists—whom we know influenced Peirce in various ways. Peirce mentions reading Shaftesbury, along with Edward Herbert, Thomas Hobbes, Ralph Cudworth, and Richard Cumberland, all of whom were intuitionists of one sort or another on the matter of ethics (R 683:20—21).

Kant, of course, is of enormous importance for Peirce, and it is clear that he had a thorough understanding of the three principal Critiques, his work on logic, and his Anthropology, so it would not be surprising to find a strong reflection of Kant’s ethical thought in Peirce (CP 2.113, c. 1902). Indeed, it is likely the case that the well-known schema of Peirce’s normative sciences—logic, ethics, esthetics—rests on the general architectonic of the three Critiques in Kant, and the hierarchical dependency that Kant envisions between pure reason, practical reason, and esthetic judgment may be reflected in Peirce’s own ethical theory (Kant [1790] 1987, 174).

Peirce also studied Jouffroy under the tutelage of President Walker at Harvard (CP 5.111, 1903). It may be the case that Jouffroy—a thinker now

forgotten but quite well known in the mid-nineteenth century—left a lasting imprint on Peirce’s ethical thought because of his evolutionary, developmental, and teleological picture of ethics (5.111nn1, 2, 1903). Although eclectic in his ethical thought, Jouffroy was originally drawn to the Scottish commonsense school, which may have also made a connection for Peirce. Jouffroy was also apparently well known by the American

transcendentalists and, so, possibly present in the intellectual environment of Boston in Peirce’s formative years (Leighton 1908, 40). However, from all accounts his Introduction to Ethics was a very popular textbook

of the day and probably the one that Peirce studied. Jouffroy is a master of blending the various classical teleologies of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Kant, and the utilitarians into one coherent story.'

46 JAMES LISZKA Peirce is reticent about any other direct influences on his ethical thought although, given as widely read as he was, there is no doubt that he was conversant with the great ethical thinkers from Plato on. He notes

that his concept of the normative sciences stems from the school of Schleiermacher (CP 1.575, c. 1902), although certainly Peirce was familiar with the work of Friedrich Uberweg and Wilhelm Wundt, both of whom

employed the term, the former characterizing logic as “the science of the regulative laws of thought,” or “the normative science of thought” (Uberweg 1882).

Despite Peirce’s apparently earnest study of ethical thinkers, he was never able to complete his own work on ethics in any systematic fashion.

As in much of Peirce’s work, in his writing on ethics, there are only sketches, occasional remarks, differing—sometimes conflicting—drafts of material, fragments, and alternative terminologies. Still, Peirce does

provide a general outline of a suggestive and innovative systematic approach to the subject matter, even if he does not provide us with a substantial body of completed material. The job in this case is akin to that of an archaeologist who must reconstruct a way of life from a few remnants

and finds. What follows will be an attempt to unearth enough material in the manuscripts and published work, and colligate it with his more systematic themes to reveal a richer picture of Peirce’s ethical thought. To this end, I begin with an overview of Peirce’s system of ethics, particularly as a way to clarify his distinction between its theoretical and practical sides, and the interrelation among the normative sciences of logic, ethics, and esthetics. The task, then, is to give some substantive account of the normative science of ethics. Given his sketchy thoughts on this matter, I experiment with an approach that models it on the organization of his semeiotic or logic. Just as semeiotic is divided into grammar, critic, and rhetoric, so we can see a grammar of ethics emerging in Peirce’s

thought, along with an analysis of ethical reasoning, and an ethical methodeutic. I follow with a discussion of his practical ethics, particularly his rather promising, but undeveloped, idea of pragmatics as a way of articulating the relation between practical and theoretical ethics. An Outline of Peirce’s System of Ethics Peirce’s mature classification of the sciences in 1902-3 (CP 1.180—283, 1903 and c. 1902) may be a good starting point for getting a general sense of his

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 47 intended system of ethics. According to that classification, there are two main branches of science: theoretical and practical. Ethics shows up in both the theoretical and in the practical side of the system. At least in one place, Peirce suggests that the normative sciences “are closely related to three corresponding arts, or practical sciences” (CP 1.281, c. 1902), that is, the art of reasoning, the conduct of life, and the production of works of art (CP 5.125, 1903).

Under the theoretical sciences, the normative science of ethics is considered a subclass of philosophy (CP 1.186, 1903). The place of philosophy in the system of sciences is involved. Theoretical sciences are divided into two subbranches: sciences of discovery and sciences of review, the latter concerned with the integration and dissemination of the sciences of discovery (CP 1.181, 1903). There are three principal classes of the science of discovery: mathematics, the most purely formal science; philosophy; and the empirical sciences, with the latter subdivided into physics and psychics, or what we would call today the behavioral, social, and cultural sciences (CP 1.183, 1903). Philosophy is subdivided into phenomenology (the study and classification of things as they appear to us), normative sciences (the study of things as they ought to be), and metaphysics (the study of what is real). The normative sciences are subdivided into logic or semeiotic (the study of how we ought to reason and inquire), ethics (the study of how we should conduct ourselves), and esthetics (the study of what ends we ought to pursue) (CP 1.186, 1903). Mathematics and philosophy are intended to serve as propaedeutics to the empirical sciences. The results of each science at a higher node in the classification, in principle, progressively inform and guide the subordinate sciences. Logic, in particular, serves as a methodological guide for the sciences, and ethics a guide for human practices—including logic and reasoning—in terms of its conduct, purposes, and ends. In addition to the normative science of ethics there is also the practical science of ethics. Peirce makes it clear that although the normative sci-

ences analyze the conditions of the attainment of a purpose, and are thereby closely related to an art, they are unlike an art since they are not directly concerned with the matter of accomplishing that purpose (CP 1.575, 1905). The normative sciences do not aim at the production of skills, implying that the practical sciences do (CP 5.125, 1903). A normative science is one which studies what ought to be. How then does it differ from engineering, medicine, or any other practical science?

48 JAMES LISZKA If, however, logic, ethics, and esthetics, which are the families of normative science, are simply the arts of reasoning, of the conduct of life, and of fine art, they do not belong in the branch of theoretic science which we are alone considering, at all. There is no doubt that they are closely related to three corresponding arts, or practical sciences. But that which renders the word normative needful (and not purely ornamental) is precisely the rather singular fact that, though these sciences do study what ought to be, 1.e., ideals, they are the very most purely theoretical of purely theoretical sciences. (CP 1.281, 1902)

Practical ethics seems concerned primarily with an account of duties, rights, and responsibilities, the study of particular cases (or casuistry), an analysis of conscience, prudence, and practical judgment (CP 1.557, 1893). In this context, like many thinkers, Peirce appears to distinguish between morality and ethics. Morality is the accumulation of common sense (CP 1.654, 1898), the moral conventions of time and place, and the folkways of the culture; ethics is the scientific study of right and wrong. Morality consists in the folklore of right conduct. A man is brought up to think he ought to behave in certain ways. If he behaves otherwise, he is uncomfortable. His conscience pricks him. That system of morals is the traditional wisdom of ages of experience. If a man cuts loose from it, he will become the victim of his passions. It is not safe for him even to reason about it, except in a purely speculative way. Hence, morality is essentially conservative. Good morals and good manners are identical, except that tradition attaches less importance to the latter. The gentleman is imbued with conservatism. This conservatism is a habit, and it is the law of habit that it tends to spread and extend itself over more and more of the life. (CP 1.50, 1896)

Morality is the ordinary guide we use in our moral deliberations, and it is, in fact, a better guide than any science of ethics might be (CP 1.638, 1898; 2.177, c. 1902). The purpose of practical ethics, consequently, seems to be to better our deliberations in the context of the practice of morality as it is. It may be thought to be somewhat similar to what we call applied or practical ethics today. Ethics is the study of what we ought to do generally, independent of what we think we ought to do currently. The Normative Science of Ethics

Simply put, the normative sciences deal with what ought to be (CP 1.281, 1902; 2.156, 1902). As noted, the three normative sciences are logic or

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 49 semeiotic, ethics, and esthetics (CP 1.191, 1903). Logic can be considered a

normative science because it deals with how we ought to reason, rather than how we actually do reason. Since ethics is concerned with how we ought to conduct ourselves generally, good reasoning can be thought of as a species of ethical conduct because it is controlling one’s thinking behavior deliberately. Because thinking is a species of human conduct generally, Peirce believes that logic is dependent on the study of ethics (CP 1.191, 1903): “Thinking is a kind of action, and reasoning is a kind of deliberate action; and to call an argument illogical, or a proposition false, is a special kind of moral judgment” (CP 8.191, 1904).

For Peirce, “the word ‘ought’ has no meaning except relatively to an end. That ought to be done which is conducive to a certain end” (CP 5-594, 1903). Ethics, therefore, must also appeal to a study of ends and ideals and, finally, an ultimate end (Summum bonum)—which is the domain of esthetics (CP 1.573, 1906; CP 1.191, 1903). It is by means of this

chain of reasoning that Peirce claims that the “Normative Science treats of the laws of the relation of phenomena to ends” (CP 5.123, 1903). Because esthetics focuses on the study of ends, Peirce, at times, questions whether esthetics has a truly normative character, since it does not, strictly speaking, study the relation of phenomena to ends, but the ends

in themselves (CP 1.575, 1902). At times, he even seems to question whether ethics is a truly normative science, to the extent that it focuses on the study of the good, which, as an ultimate aim, is the domain of esthetics (CP 1.577, 1902). In one confusing passage, Peirce wants to claim that the normative science of ethics focuses on the conformity of action to an ideal, suggests that it be named practics for that reason, and then suggests

that practics is not ethics since the latter also deals with the theory of ideals (CP 1.573, 1906). James Feibleman’s attempt to resolve this nomen-

clature by suggesting that there is a study of “pure ethics” in addition to the normative science of ethics and practical ethics only seems to confuse that matter further (1943, 100). Despite Peirce’s fastidiousness on this matter, it is reasonable to say that logic, ethics, and esthetics collectively address normative matters, even if esthetics focuses on the ends of conduct. It is true that, according to Peirce’s account, normativity is most robustly expressed in the matter of the conformity of conduct toward ends, but surely a science devoted

to the study of ends does not disenfranchise it from the disciplinary classification of normative science—and the “lines of separation” among

the three are something that Peirce himself admits is hard to draw

50 JAMES LISZKA (CP 5.174, 1903). In the end, it may be a matter of nomenclature whether esthetics is counted as a normative science for this reason, but, whatever the case, the study of normativity is dependent on the study of ends, given Peirce’s schema. There is an additional issue about the relations among the three normative sciences. Peirce seems to want to draw a clear hierarchical relation

among them. If the interpretation of normative ethics that follows is reasonably correct, it will show that the relation among the normative sciences is not strictly hierarchical. Rather than one normative science dependent on another in a steplike fashion, the details involved in the explication of the individual sciences show a more interdependent relation. If, then, the normative sciences concern the relation of phenomena to ends, we must first identify those ends. Peirce makes it clear that the end of logic is truth (CP 2.444, 1893; 4.476, 1903); so we must understand logic

as a study of those modes of reasoning most likely to attain the truth— and this is what inherently makes it a normative science. Logic is a normative science; that is to say, it is a science of what is requisite in order to attain a certain aim. ... For the normative science does not necessarily inquire how we are to act in order to pursue a purpose, or to what our efforts ought to be directed; but simply considers what conditions, whether they be voluntarily or involuntarily fulfilled, have to be satisfied. (R 432:1)

In this regard, logic does not address the nature of normative claims per se—that is, why we ought to act in such and such a way—but assumes that ethics will answer that question: “It seems to me that the logician ought to recognize what our ultimate aim is. It would seem to be the business of the moralist to find this out” (CP 1.611, 1903). The job of logic

is primarily to discover the best sort of reasoning relative to the aim of discovering the truth. In other words, logic itself does not address the issue of why we ought to reason logically.

This leaves the task of accounting for the normative and normative claims to ethics: “The present writer takes the theory of the control of conduct, and of action in general, so as to conform to an ideal, as being the midnormative science; that is, as the second of the trio, and as that one of the three sciences in which the distinctive characters of normative science are most strongly marked” (CP 1.573, 1906).

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 51 Although Peirce gives us an enticing outline of the charge of ethics as a normative science, he does not give us a sufficiently explicit account of its content. One thing we do have is a much better developed account of his logic or semeiotic. We might then use it as a template for the other normative sciences, particularly the study of ethics, since, as Peirce claims, all the normative sciences have a “family likeness” (CP 2.156, 1902).

We know that logic or semeiotic, for Peirce, is divided into three branches: grammar, critical logic, and rhetoric—the latter the least developed. Semeiotic grammar, as Peirce understands it, is concerned primar-

ily with how meaning accrues in signs, as well as the typology and classification of signs. There is naturally, for a logician, a focus on language, particularly terms and propositions—and this is what speculative grammars were about traditionally. An analysis of terms and propositions prepare for the next phase in logic, namely, how propositions may, in turn, be combined in arguments, the validity of which is the topic of the second branch of semeiotic—critical logic. For Peirce, this focuses primarily on the analysis and interrelation of abduction, deduction, and induction in scientific reasoning. Since scientific reasoning occurs in the context of an actual practice of inquiry, this leads to formal rhetoric, finally, as a study of the proper conditions for a community of inquiry sufficiently effective to achieve its goal of attaining truth. If we take the analogy to logic as an assumption, then ethics, as a normative science, should also have somewhat similar divisions. It could be reasonably inferred that, for Peirce, there are three branches of normative ethics, something like a grammar of ethics, a study of ethical reasoning or critical ethics, and finally, an ethical methodeutic, concerned with the normative conditions of communities necessary to achieve proper ends. A GRAMMAR OF ETHICS

Semeiotic grammar is concerned with the fundamental elements and formal conditions under which something can become a sign (CP 1.444). Since we can only reason in signs (CP 2.302, c 1895), once analyzed, the results of semeiotic grammar are incorporated into critical logic in order to further assess how we might employ signs in making knowledge claims about the world. By analogy, a grammar of ethics would seem to be concerned with the formal conditions under which an action may be counted

as moral. Those results can foster, in turn, a better understanding of

52 JAMES LISZKA ethical reasoning, that is, the actions we should take in order to achieve some good. For Peirce, voluntary acts—deliberate, self-controlled behavior, or what is more commonly called intentional acts—form the basis of moral actions (CP 5.130). Thus, understanding what constitutes a voluntary intentional act makes up the primary work of a grammar of ethics. Peirce succinctly defines ethics as “the study of what ends of action we are deliberately prepared to adopt. That is right action which is in conformity to ends which we are prepared deliberately to adopt. That is all there can be in the notion of righteousness, as it seems to me” (CP 5.130). Voluntary, intentional, or purposive action is one kind of final causation for Peirce: “It is... a widespread error to think that a “final cause’ is necessarily a purpose. A purpose is merely that form of final cause which is most familiar to our experience” (CP 1.211). Final causation for a certain phenomenon is indicated when a variety of differently ordered events associated with that phenomenon have a tendency to produce the same general result: “Final causation does not determine in what particular way it is to be brought about, but only that the result shall have a certain general character” (CP 1.211). For example, evolution in Darwin’s sense can be thought of as exemplifying final causation in this sense, although it is far from purposive or intentional. The general result of evolution is adaptation of the organism to its environment, which is achieved by a wide variety of means. As Peirce notes, “Darwin, while unable to say what the operation of variation and natural selection in any individual case will

be, demonstrates that in the long run they will, or would, adapt animals to their circumstances” (CP 5.364). “Evolution is nothing more nor less than the working out of a definite end. A final cause may be conceived to operate without having been the purpose of any mind” (CP 1.204; see CP 2.86). Thus, final causation need not be purposive or intentional, but purposive actions are cases of final causation. In this case, the question becomes what distinguishes purposive (voluntary, intentional) action as a special kind of final causation. Generally speaking, final causation among events has a different type of logic and explanation than mechanical causation, according to Peirce. Final causation is triadic, whereas mechanical causation is dyadic in nature.

Consider a chain of events, A, B, C. In a dyadic relation there are two independent phases: A produces B and B produces C. In a triadic relation among A, B, and C, B is produced by A precisely because it produces C.

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 53 Put differently, in a triadic relation C is the reason B is produced by A, whereas in a dyadic relation, B is the explanation of why C is produced. In a mechanical relation it matters not whether C is produced by B, but it does in the framework of final causation, since C results in A producing B. As Peirce puts it, “A and B [are] . . . really paired by virtue of a third object, C” (CP 2.86, 1902). For example, in the case of evolution, we can say in a very simplistic way that a certain genome (A) produces certain features in an organism (B) which result in relatively successful adaptation to the environment (C). If B does not result in C, then A eventually does not produce B because it is eventually made extinct. In effect, C causes A to produce B, and this describes, more or less, what we call natural selection, a completely brute and unintentional process. However, because the relation among the events is triadic, evolution has the appearance of a purposive process, and it has been easy to ascribe intentions to the process.

Voluntary or intentional action hangs on this triadic framework. However, in order to have truly intentional action, the selection process must be deliberate, meaning that an agency must be involved in the execution of the action that has, like human beings, all the capacities needed for the deliberate adoption of means and ends. As a kind of final cause, an

intentional act is irreducibly triadic and cannot be understood in the context of a set of dyadic relations (CP 2.86, 1902). In fact, Peirce often uses purposive behavior to explain the triadic character of signs. Every sufficiently complete symbol is a final cause and influences real

events, in precisely the same sense in which my desire to have the window open, that is, the symbol in my mind of the agreeability of it, influences the physical facts of my rising from my chair, going to the window and opening it. (NEM 4:254; see Liszka 1996, 32-34)

The desire to have the window open—or, more precisely, the end of cool-

ing the room—influences the action of opening the window. It is true that turning the latch and pulling the window up, causes the window to open, which causes the cooler air to enter the room, but it does not get to the real reason why the window was opened. We can say, following Wright (1976) and Dretske (1988), that intentional or purposive behavior is behavior that not only has a certain result but is done precisely because it likely to have that result. Under an intentional description of opening

the window, the result happens not because of the turning the latch—

54 JAMES LISZKA although that is certainly the mechanical cause—but because of a desire to have the room cooler and the agent’s belief that turning the latch is

a means to that end. It is the agent’s belief that opening the window will likely result in a cooler room that has an influence on whether the agent opens the window, as Thomas Short suggests in explaining Peirce’s account (1981, 205). In this case, although intentional action still hangs on a triadic relation among A, B, and C, we can talk in the usual way of C

being an end, and B being the means to that end. That is to say, for an agent capable of purposive action, an intentional action translates A, B, and C into act, means, and end. Human agencies are capable of beliefs, desires, and reasoning, all of which seem critical for intentional action. Peirce ascribes these same Capacities to animals in some attenuated form, which suggests that he thinks animals are also capable of intentional action (see CP 2.86, 2.314, 5.512).° In general, from the example of opening the window, Peirce seems to hold to a standard desire-belief account of intentional action (see Von Wright 1971; Davidson 1980; Dretske 1988). As his claim concerning the

analogy between final causes and symbols suggests, there is a parallel between sign action in its most robust form and intentional action. Sign action results from a triadic interrelation among sign, object, and interpretant: In order for something to be counted as a sign it must be about something, convey something about the thing it is about, and convey it to something else. Analogously, in an intentional action, the relation of act, means, and end is such that in order for an action to be counted as intentional or purposive, it must be directed to some end, it must be directed to an end that the agent wants, needs, desires, or feels it must do, and it must be interpreted or believed by the agent to be a means to the end to which it is directed. In this regard, Peirce calls a purpose “an operative desire” (CP 1.205, 1902), since, like a desire, it puts a course of events in motion that is hoped will attain it. Thus the end of cooling the room and the belief that open-

ing the window will cool the room motivate the act of opening the window. Peirce has an interesting analysis of desire as one aspect of intentional action. Peirce makes the claim that desires have three dimensions:

“Every desire is general,” “vague” and, so, indeterminate (CP 1.206), but every desire also has “longitude,” by which he means that, although they would certainly be satisfied by an ideal state of things, they are also satisfied by states that approach it—not unlike Herbert Simon’s classic notion

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 55 of satisficing (CP 1.207; see Simon 1956, 129). Although desires are general

and vague, they “become, in the pursuit of them, more specific” (CP 1.205). AS an example, we may desire as an end, romance, companionship, marriage, or something of the like; as we pursue these ends, we may

encounter a person with whom we believe we can attain those ends. Consequently, we also desire that person. Because of the triadic relation among ends, means, and acts, the psychological attitude toward the end (a desire, want, or need) is transitive: If we desire the end, we also desire the means we believe will attain it and so desire to act on what we believe we must do to attain it. If the means is not desirable even if the end is—for example, in the case where we desire to play the piano, but dread doing the finger exercises—still, the transitivity of intentionality would require the adoption of another psychological attitude that is motivating (“I need

to do this, even if I don’t want to do it”). Motivation, then, may be thought of as something that emerges in the triadic interrelation among parts of an intentional action. Peirce calls the second aspect of intentional action—the belief that a means will likely attain an end—a “practical belief.” Now to say that a man believes anthracite to be a convenient fuel is to say no more nor less than that if he needs fuel, and no other seems particularly preferable, then, if he acts deliberately, bearing in mind his experiences, considering what he is doing, and exercizing selfcontrol, he will often use anthracite. A practical belief may, therefore, be described as a habit of deliberate behavior. (CP 5.538, 1903)

More precisely, the end in this case is to have the room warm, and through

a chain of reasoning the person believes that anthracite coal is the best fuel to achieve that end. Consequently, the person will develop a habit of acting on that belief when fuel is needed. This is a relatively standard form of what is called practical reasoning (see Von Wright 1971). Peirce gives the example of the transitivity involved in letting his dog out the door that involves a more tedious chain of practical reasoning. If the dog is to be let out, the door must be opened; if the door is to be opened, I must open it. But if I am to open it, I must go to it; if 1 am to go to it, I must walk; if 1 am to walk, I must stand; if I am to stand, I must rise; if I am to rise, I had better put down my pen. ... But there must be an infinite series of such ratiocinations if the mind acts rationally. (CP 7.371)

56 JAMES LISZKA Peirce is fond of repeating Bain’s maxim that “a belief is that upon which a man is prepared to act” (CP 5.12, c. 1907), and “Full belief is willingness

to act upon the proposition in vital crises, opinion is willingness to act upon it in relatively insignificant affairs” (CP 1.635, 1898). However, in more circumspect analyses, he adds that “[Readiness] to act in a certain way under given circumstances and when actuated by a given motive [my emphasis] is a habit; and a deliberate, or self-controlled, habit is precisely a belief” (CP 5.480, c. 1906; see 5.491). Thus, what motivates the agent to act is not the belief alone, but the belief that a certain action will attain a desired, wanted, or needed end. A powerful insight of Peirce’s about purposive action is that it forms the basis of self-correcting and self-monitoring behavior. Self-correcting behavior involves the correction of actions that do not achieve the end. As we have seen, purposes are unlike mechanical causes. Mechanical causation is such that A will continue to produce B even if C is no longer the result. Purposive actions have final causation. If C is an end, and B does not result in C, then A will cause some other events until C is produced.

If it turns out that anthracite is not a convenient fuel, meaning that it is does not achieve the end of an efficient, cost-effective means of warming

the house, then other means will be attempted to produce that end. Purposive action and rationality in this sense go together: “The essence of rationality,” Peirce says, “lies in the fact that the rational being will act so, as to attain certain ends. Prevent his doing so in one way, and he will act

in some utterly different way which will produce the same result. Rationality is being governed by final causes” (CP 2.66, 1902). Reasonable

or rational action is deliberate and controlled; deliberate and selfcontrolled action is action that is governed by ends. This is what Peirce calls “efficient reasonableness” (CP 5.121, 1903), or “concrete reasonableness” (CP 5.3, 1902). In this respect purposive or intentional behavior can be shown to make moral behavior possible on two counts. First, it is selfcontrolled and self-directed behavior (CP 5.538, 1902), and, if behavior is

self-controlled, then praise and blame of that agent makes sense; if an agent cannot control its behavior, blame and praise make no sense: “Actions beyond the reach of self-control are not subjects of blame” (CP 8.191, C. 1904; see CP 1.604, 1903; 8.322, 1906; 1.594—600, 1903). Second,

whenever there is a purpose, as Thomas Short says, alternatives such as success or failure, better or worse, good or bad begin to apply, since we can reasonably determine whether some action has met that end or

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 57 standard (2007, 154). At that point comes the possibility of self-correction.

Correcting behavior implies that there is a goal, end, or standard that serves as the measure of the actions. If the purpose of action is to cool the room by opening a window, and this does not achieve that end, then corrections are made so that alternative actions are applied until the goal is achieved, or the goal changes. If the window turns out to be impossible to

open, then correction of the goal itself may occur in the light of higher purposes. If the higher purpose is to cool down on a hot summer’s day, then there may be other, more viable means of accomplishing that goal. It is this self-corrective behavior that is most distinctive of ethical action in Peirce’s thinking. Indeed Peirce gives an outline of the psychological process by which such self-correction takes place: First, an agent has formulated some ideal of conduct or some end or goal (CP 1.591); second, reflecting on these, the agent “is led to intend to make his conduct con-

form at least to a part of them—to that part in which he thoroughly believes” (CP 1.592); third, on the appropriate occasion, “he is led to form a resolution as to how he will act,” the resolution being in the nature of a plan (CP 1.592); fourth, the resolution gets translated into a determination to act—which he calls the efficient agency (CP 1.592). Once the action is performed, the agent may now see how the conduct accords with the ideal so conceived, or the end as envisioned. “In any or all of these ways a man may criticize his own conduct. ... Whether the man is satisfied with himself or dissatisfied, his nature will absorb the lesson like a sponge; and

the next time he will tend to do better than he did before” (CP 1.598). Peirce concludes: You see at once that we have here all the main elements of moral con-

duct; the general standard mentally conceived beforehand, the efficient agency in the inward nature, the act, the subsequent comparison of the act with the standard. (CP 1.607, 1903)

Purposive behavior creates an important feedback loop in human behavior: goal-setting, assessment of the behavior directed to that goal, correction of the behavior based on that assessment. This constitutes the core of moral behavior—just as Peirce suggests. Through self-correction, moral behavior catalyzes improvement and growth. It is by the indefinite replication of self-control upon self-control that

the vir is begotten, and by action, through thought, he grows an esthetic ideal, not for the behoof of his own poor noddle merely. .. .

58 JAMES LISZKA This ideal, by modifying the rules of self-control modifies action, and so experience too—both the man’s own and that of others, and this centrifugal movement thus rebounds in a new centripetal movement, and so on. (CP 5.402n3, 1906)

If purposive behavior makes moral behavior possible, this core function also provides the conditions under which we may evaluate the morality of an action. If one condition of intentional or purposive behavior is that it must be directed to some end, then we may evaluate that end for its moral quality (CP 1.599, 1903); if it must be directed to an end that the agent wants, needs, desires, or feels compelled to adopt, then we may evaluate those psychological motives (CP 1.593, 1903); and if it must be interpreted or believed by the agent as a means to the end to which it is directed, then we can evaluate those acts that result from the beliefs as to whether they are truly conducive to that end, that is, whether the belief is true as far as possible (CP 1.598, 1903).

THE CLASSIFICATION OF ENDS

Agents act purposively and rationally if they act in ways they believe will obtain those ends they need, want, desire, or feel compelled to adopt; and should their belief be incorrect, the desire or want misdirected, or the act does not truly satisfy the end, then such agents will self-correct accordingly, ceteris paribus. One factor, then, in evaluating the moral character

of purposive actions will be the sort of end or ideal the agent intends. Peirce clearly disagrees with Hume and his followers who claim that ends

cannot be evaluated beyond the fact that they are desired or preferred, and that persons act simply on their strongest desires (CP 1.380). Peirce would appear to agree with those who argue for objective reasons that can be used to assess ends that are independent of what people happen to desire (see Korsgaard 1996, 225-27). In this regard, Peirce engages in a classification of ends, which constitutes an important part of a grammar of ethics.

Peirce’s terminology on the subject of ends is not consistent and is somewhat confusing. In various manuscripts, he sometimes distinguishes, sometimes conflates terms such as motive, ends, and ideals. In a review of Karl Pearson’s The Grammar of Science, for the Popular Science Monthly in 1901, he disputes Pearson’s claim that the end of science is

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 59 social stability (CP 8.135). Peirce goes on to characterize the true motives of the scientist as he sees it and, in doing so, provides a list of motives and ideals (CP 8.138). Yet in a piece written in 1903, he observes: “In. . . 1901, I enumerated a number of ethical classes of motives, meaning by a motive, not a spring of action, but an aim or end appearing ultimate to the agent” (CP 1.585, 1903). But, in another passage, he argues: We should not confuse ideals of conduct with motives to action. Every

action has a motive; but an ideal only belongs to a line of conduct which is deliberate. To say that conduct is deliberate implies that each

action, or each important action, is reviewed by the actor and his judgment is passed upon it, as to whether he wishes his future to be like that or not. His ideal is the kind of conduct which attracts him upon review. His self-criticism, followed by a more or less conscious resolution that in its turn excites a determination of his habit, will,

with the aid of the sequelz, modify a future action; but it will not generally be a moving cause to action. It is an almost purely passive liking for a way of doing whatever he may be moved to do... whether his own conduct or that of another person. (CP 1.574, 1906)

Based on this passage, Peirce makes the odd claim that ideals are not motives for actions. Yet in other passages he claims that ideals act like final causes (CP 1.211, 1902). Moreover, he identifies an ideal as a special kind of end—an ultimate end (CP 5.130, 1903); but if it is an end then, in

the context of intentional action, it would seem to be an important part of motivating action. In my view, the following distinctions may be employed to best sort out this matter. Ideals are types of ends thought to be ultimate, but not all ends are ultimate. Ends, as they are connected to intentional actions, can be motivating, but not all motivations have ends. With these distinctions, we can sort out three types of classifications that Peirce seems to be getting at: The first is a classification of motives, that is, a classification of what motivates people to act, or the various reasons or justifications for their action; second a classification of ends, and, third, a classification of ideals, or ultimate ends, understood in themselves. Peirce’s initial classification in 1901 involves a rather long list of ethical “motives,” including acting from “unrestrained desire,” out of obedience,

self-preservation, from custom, to a long list of ideals: individualism, altruism, utilitarianism, patriotism, naturalism, entelism, evolutionism, historicism, rationalism, educationalism, dialecticism, pancratism, and

60 JAMES LISZKA religionism—all provided with brief definitions (CP 8.138, 1901). In the drafts of this review, Peirce has a more coherent and systematic account of the motives, which reflects the 1903 manuscript to some degree (CP 8.136n3).

In the 1903 manuscript, titled “An Attempted Classification of Ends” in the Collected Papers, there appears to be a reworking of the motives noted in the 1901 piece. A close reading of this classification shows that it, unsurprisingly, reflects the organization of his categories (CP 1.586—88). Using this as a basis of extrapolation and reorganization, I have labeled them in a manner that echoes the classification and typology of signs: 1. Iconic motives (imitation, copying, repetition)

a. Habituated responses (repetition of the same). That is, one acts because one is simply habituated to doing that action under those circumstances without any real reflective or deliberative reasons for doing it. b. Imitation of others. One does an action in pure imitation of others, without deliberation. One does an action because others are doing it. c. Conformity. One does an action because it conforms to the norm. It is generally what people do. 2. Indexical motives (command and obedience) a. Impulsive obedience. One does an action impulsively from having been trained to obey a command from some authority. b. Conformity to authority. One does an action because it is required of some social, moral authority, such as parents, teachers, clerics, etc., that is, as a pressure to conform to social authorities. c. Respect or awe for the law or authority. One does an action out of respect for the law, without questioning the law, or simply because it is required by law. 3. Symbolic motives (generalizability). Motives are more generalizable and extend to others beyond one’s own interests (CP 1.673, 1898).

a. One does an action because of an attraction to the very notion of the good and the beautiful, although the concepts are unanalyzed. b. One does an action because of devotion to the welfare of others, or welfare of a community. c. One does an action because of a devotion to a generalizable state of things such as the summum bonum.

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 61 The first class is composed of motives with characteristics of Peirce’s category of firstness. They are more specifically iconic in the sense that they reflect or imitate the moral environment of the agent. The second class is composed of indexical motives in that they reflect Peirce’s examples of commands as indexical signs (CP 5.473). One will notice that each division is fractal in the sense that the subtypes have dimensions of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, respectively. Those familiar with Lawrence

Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning might notice some similarities between his three stages of moral judgment and Peirce’s classification here as extrapolated. Kohlberg argues that moral development moves from a preconventional stage, where people do the right thing primarily out of self-interest or avoidance of punishment, to a conventional stage, in which they act primarily out of conformity to social conventions or obedience to the law, to a postconventional stage, where they adopt what Peirce calls here a more generalizable attitude, namely, they are primarily concerned with a more universal basis, which transcends self-interest, for judging an action to be right or wrong, and they can rise above the moral conventions in which they live (Kohlberg 1981). Peirce seems to agree with Kohlberg that the postconventional stage, or the stage of generalizability, appears to be the highest stage of moral development (CP 8.141, 1901). As Peirce says, “The only ethically sound motive is the most general one” (CP 8.141, 1901), and for good reason.

Acting out of self-interest or relying on authority or convention may make actions morally suspect. For example, when lawmakers design laws that benefit themselves, we have the epitome of corruption. To make laws simply by fiat of authority disallows assessment of the benefit or harm of such laws. It is only a generalized attitude, that is, one that is free from self-interest, obedience to authority, and conformity to what happens to be accepted as right, that allows a good chance of assessing the rightness

of actions in a fairly objective way in the long run. It is also consistent with the role of normative ethics in critically examining the norms present in morality, that is, the ethical life of the day. These stages of moral development might also be thought to be somewhat parallel to Peirce’s account of the various methods of fixing beliefs. Peirce famously suggests that beliefs justified by tenacity, that is, simply holding on to what one already believes, or by authority, or to conformity to what one has a tendency to believe, couched as natural or a priori, are methods of fixing belief that in the long run will fail. Science exemplifies

62 JAMES LISZKA the standard for fixing beliefs precisely because of a generalizable attitude

toward belief justification, in which the method of fixing is not dependent on what you or I believe, or whole generations of people might think, but on something external to all of this (CP 5.384, 1877). That is why science will be successful in the long run. Corresponding to the analysis of motives, Peirce also attempts a classification of ends and ideals, understood as candidates for ultimate ends (CP 5.130, 1903), that is, ends that are in some sense generalizable (CP 1.613, 1903). Again, unsurprisingly, Peirce organizes them in a way that reflects his categories (CP 1.589, c. 1903; see also CP 8.136n3). Parallel to the way I have classified the motives, these can be organized and labeled with terms that reflect sign classification.

1. Immediate ends, concerned with achieving a feeling of a certain sort, most often pleasure; 2. Dynamic ends, concerned with existence, self-preservation, or survival (of individuals, groups, communities, races, countries, etc.); 3. Final, or ultimate ends, which may be subdivided into a. Generalizable ideals concerning feeling or pleasure, for example,

the utilitarian principle of creating the greatest pleasure for the greatest number of persons. b. Generalizable ideals concerning what makes possible the continued existence of a group or community, such as

i, Altruistic or cooperative character or habits in individuals; ii. Peace and prosperity for communities. c. The most generalizable ideals, ones that are realizable in the long run, whatever those may be discovered to be. Ultimate ends are, again, subdivided fractally along lines of his categories, so the utilitarian principle is seen as a generalizability concerning the feel-

ing of pleasure, principles of cooperation as a certain generalizability concerning the stability or the continued existence of a community, and, the last being the generalizability of generalizability, for lack of a better way to express it. In drafts for the Lowell Lectures in 1903, Peirce clearly favors ultimate ends over the other two categories (what is called here “immediate” or “dynamic”): “But the moralist, as far as I can make it out, merely tells us ... that no narrow or selfish aim can ever prove satisfactory, that the only satisfactory aim is the broadest, highest, and most

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 63 general possible aim” (CP 1.611, 1903); “the only ethically sound motive is

the most general one” (CP 8.141, 1901). He takes time to lay out something of an argument against immediate ends as the only ends worth pursuing: it would be strange, he says, if all our higher modes of consciousness

were meant to serve lower ones, such as unrestrained gratification of desires (CP 1.614, 1903).

With the classification of ends, and the argument that it is only the most generalizable ends that can be counted as ultimate ideals, Peirce is able to close the conceptual circuit between purposive and moral behavior, which I summarize as follows:

1. First, to act purposively agents must be acting for the sake of some end; 2. Second, to act rationally, agents act on what they believe will likely attain a desired end;

3. Third, to act rationally, agents correct their behavior in the light of errors regarding those ends. Rational or reasonable agents will change

their habits of belief and behavior if it turns out that what they do does not attain their ends, or their ends prove to be unattainable or undesirable after all;

4. Fourth, collectively, as more agents act reasonably in this sense, the ultimate end emerges as the result of those reasonable actions. Self-corrective processes will more likely result in the ultimate end, if anything can.

Theses 1-4 capture Peirce’s notion of concrete reasonableness, that is, purposive, self-correcting conduct (CP 5.3, 1902). Because, collectively, such behavior likely results in ultimate ends, Peirce considered it as the only end worth considering (CP 5.3, 1902). I do not see how one can have a more satisfying ideal of the admirable than the development of Reason so understood. The one thing whose admirableness is not due to an ulterior reason is Reason itself comprehended in all its fullness, so far as we can comprehend it. (CP 1.615, 1903)

“Under this conception, the ideal of conduct will be to execute our little function in the operation of the creation by giving a hand toward rendering the world more reasonable whenever, as the slang is, it is “up to us’ to

64 JAMES LISZKA do so” (CP 1.615, 1903). It is the goal of continuing to make one’s life reasonable that matters (CP 1.602, 1903). As implied in thesis 4 above, if concrete reasonableness is the ultimate end, it is not so much a finality that is achieved as an ongoing process or way of being. The pragmaticist does not make the summum bonum to consist in action, but makes it to consist in that process of evolution whereby the existent comes more and more to embody those generals which were just now said to be destined, which is what we strive to express in

calling them reasonable. In its higher stages, evolution takes place more and more largely through self-control. (CP 5.433, 1905)

The ultimate end is not a “stationary result,” as he says, but a “grownup” idea of “growth” and “progress” (CP 1.614). “Almost everybody will now agree,” Peirce says, “that the ultimate good lies in the evolutionary

process in some way (CP 5.4). “Reason,” as Peirce remarks, is never “completely perfected,” but “always must be in a state of incipiency, of growth” (CP 1.615).

In this account of things, we can note a striking similarity between Peirce’s convergence theory of truth and what might be called his convergence theory of the good. Just as truth is the likely result of inquiry rightly

done and indefinitely pursued (“the predestined result to which sufficient inquiry would ultimately lead” [CP 5.494]), so an ultimate good is

the inevitable result of rational conduct—concrete reasonableness— indefinitely pursued. Now, Just as conduct controlled by ethical reason tends toward fixing

certain habits of conduct, the nature of which . . . does not depend upon any accidental circumstances, and in that sense may be said to be destined; so thought, controlled by rational experimental logic, tends

to the fixation of certain opinions, equally destined, the nature of which will be the same in the end, however the perversity of thought of whole generations may cause the postponement of the ultimate fixation. (CP 5.430, 1905)

In the end what becomes important in such a convergence theory is a strong process of self-correction. Purposive, self-correcting behavior will get us closer to the good, if anything can. As a concluding remark, what I am calling Peirce’s convergence theory

of the good can be viewed as a reading of Aristotle’s claim in the

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 65 Nicomachean Ethics that every action aims at some good, and that “the good is well-defined as that at which all actions aim” (1094a3). This could be interpreted as saying there is some transcendent good that serves as an attractor for all human actions, much in the way in which gravity would

dictate that the earth orbits the sun. However, there is a more Peircean reading, which is also an Aristotelian reading supported by a number of passages. For Aristotle, the highest human good, eudaimonia, is the result

of the excellent exercise of what it is that makes up human beings, as guided by what is best in human beings (Nic. Ethics 1098a). Human beings

may be mistaken in their aim, so, as he argues in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, people can be mistaken about what constitutes eudaimonia. Some believe it is pleasure, others wealth, others honor, power, and so forth. Thus, part of the task of aiming at the good is to identify the target of our aim—the ultimate end, in Peirce’s vocabulary. But the fact of the matter is that the human good is the result of human activity of the best kind, and, as Aristotle says, “badness destroys itself” (Nic. Ethics 1126a130). Just as, in Aristotle, the good is the result of human activity done virtuously, with excellence, so the good, in Peirce, is the result of concrete reasonableness indefinitely exercised. ETHICAL REASONING

If a grammar of ethics defines the elements and conditions of purposive behavior and classifies motives and ends, then, following the analogy with the divisions of semeiotic, this has set the stage for the next branch of ethics, the study of ethical reasoning. Just as logical reasoning aims at truth, ethical reasoning aims at right conduct, and—as we know—tright conduct, according to Peirce, is that which conforms to ultimate ends. Thus, the matter of ethical reasoning hinges on the success of reasoning about ends and means to ends. It makes sense, then, that the focus of Peirce’s cursory accounts of ethical reasoning is what is called practical reasoning or practical inference. Ethical reasoning in Peirce’s schema would fit with the wealth of scholarship on practical inference and practical reasoning, especially since those fall out from his belief-desire model of action (see Von Wright 1971). As mentioned previously, Peirce articulated a rough form of practical inference in his own thinking (CP 5.538, 1903). Nonetheless, Peirce’s brief account of ethical reasoning has some additional insights that are worth following.

66 JAMES LISZKA Just as the basic unit of logic is the proposition, the basic unit of ethical

reasoning for Peirce is a normative claim. A normative proposition is typically expressed as an “ought” statement, for example, “Everyone ought to be honest.” Logic, as opposed to ethics, is concerned with empirical propositions, such as “All pure water boils at 100 degrees centigrade.” Even though the normative sciences study what ought to be, Peirce still treats them as positive sciences, meaning that ethics deals in truth claims as well (CP 5.39, 1903). As Peirce clarifies: By a positive science I mean an inquiry which seeks for positive knowledge; that is, for such knowledge as may conveniently be expressed in

a categorical proposition. Logic and the other normative sciences, although they ask, not what is but what ought to be, nevertheless are positive sciences since it is by asserting positive, categorical truth that they are able to show that what they call good really is so; and the right reason, right effort, and right being, of which they treat, derive that character from positive categorical fact. (CP 5.39, 1903)

If Peirce suggests that all normative claims can be said to be true or false, that would make Peirce, not surprisingly, an ethical realist. This position,

however, raises the issue of how to evaluate normative claims as truth claims. Peirce hints at a possibility by suggesting that normative claims are translatable to what Kant called hypothetical imperatives: “Now the word ‘ought’ has no meaning except relatively to an end. That ought to be done which is conducive to a certain end” (CP 5.594, 1903). The claim that “we ought to do X” can be analyzed as a hypothetical imperative, “If Y is your aim, then do X.” This is very similar to Larry Laudan’s notion of

normative naturalism. Laudan argues that normative claims—“ought” statements—can be articulated instrumentally as hypothetical imperatives—"“means-ends” statements—which can then be evaluated empirically. “If Y is your aim, then do X” is warranted in case doing X is more likely than its alternatives to produce Y, and not warranted otherwise. As Laudan writes: “It is clear that such rules, even if they do not yet appear to be truth-value bearing statements themselves, nonetheless depend for their warrant on the truth of such statements” (1987, 24). “I am more inclined,” Laudan writes, “to see normative and descriptive concerns interlaced in virtually every form of human inquiry. Neither is eliminable

or reducible to its counterpart; yet both behave epistemically in a very similar ways, so that we do not require disjoint epistemologies to account

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 67 for rules and theories” (1990a, 56). What warrants a hypothetical imperative is that it reliably produces the end-in-view. Thus we can suppose that a normative claim, such as “we ought to do X” is equivalent to a hypothetical imperative, such as “if we do X, Y will likely be the result,” which suggests that we ought to do X because it makes Y likely, and Y is a warranted end. This ties in nicely with Peirce’s account of purposive behav-

ior, as described in the grammar of ethics, and makes it more manifest that what “ought” to be, or what is normative, is related to ideals, ends, or purposes (CP 1.574, 1906; 1.281, 1902).

Following what appears to be Peirce’s line of thought, ethical reasoning is concerned with showing that doing a certain action X is normatively warranted, that is, that we ought to do X. Now, the claim that we “ought to do X’” is a claim that X is the right thing to do, and the right thing to do is what is conducive to an ultimate end. Thus, doing X is nor-

matively justified if it, in fact, conforms to an ultimate end. Thus the force or validity of a normative claim follows from two considerations: 1. that doing X will likely result in Y, and that 2. Y passes the test of what Peirce would say is conducive to an ultimate end. The first is clearly an empirical test and, therefore, relies on the reason-

ing found in critical logic. This also shows the interdependence of the normative sciences, particularly between logic and ethics. The second test is a matter for the normative science of esthetics; obviously, leaving out its analysis leaves the study of ethical reasoning incomplete. Without the latter test, all actions would be counted as good so long as they fulfilled their ends—which leads to obvious ethical absurdities. Without appeal to ultimate ends, practical reasoning is just prudential advice, and the ends are only subjectively certified. Thus, we can advise others on what they ought to do, if we know what end they desire but, without a certification of the ends, the action can easily be immoral. It is only with the addition of the ultimate end test that we can have some validation of the action as good or bad. This makes some sense out of Peirce’s otherwise enigmatic claim that “the only moral evil is not to have an ultimate aim” (CP 5.133, 1903).

An analysis of Peirce’s esthetics could easily be the subject of another lengthy study, but some effort can be made here to clarify the character of

68 JAMES LISZKA this last test. On the basis of his study of motives and ends, Peirce has made it clear that the ultimate end must be the most generalizable type of end (CP 5.433, 1905). Although, the criteria for an ultimate end are variously and tentatively defined by Peirce (see CP 5.130, 1903), there is one revealing passage at CP 1.608 which indicates that there are three basic tests for an ultimate end: First, the end must be something that is considered generally admirable and fine (CP 1.608, 1903), that is, people tend to

be attracted to it, for it would be strange if the ultimate end were not generally thought so. To take an uncontroversial example, people are attracted to health as an end, even if they do not always do what is conducive to it. People desire it for its own sake and for what else it brings as a benefit. In other words, it is a generalizable desire. Second, the conduct sufficient to attain that end must be collectively consistent with the end (CP 1.608), for example, you cannot violate rights in order to preserve them. If the end is health, one cannot run five miles a day and also smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. More generally, institutions and practices, as well as individual behavior, must be aligned and conducive to the end-inview. In other words, the actions, institutions, and practices, if followed, are likely to produce the end. Third, the end must be generalizable in the sense that “we consider what the general effect would be of thoroughly carrying out our ideals” (CP 1.608, 1903). In this regard we must show that it is something that is, 1. first of all, possible (CP 5.136, 1903), and 2. “capable of being pursued in an indefinitely prolonged course of action”

(CP 5.135), or that it can be consistently and unfalteringly adopted (CP 5.133, 1903), or that it has a certain “fitness” (CP 1.600, 1903).

Interpreted generously, the test for an ultimate end is whether it can be

realized in practice. What this means is that those that can be adopted consistently, are those that, when put into practice, are viable, sustainable, uberous (R 683:6), and successful in the long run. Thus, the ultimate test of right actions is not that they can be purely conceptually justified

but—in the classical parlance of pragmatism—that the pursuit of such

ends “works” in practice, as Dewey would say (see Dewey 19272, 173-74)—although it might be better said that the measure of the end is the sort of work it does in practice in the long run. The ultimate test of an ultimate end is whether the process of attempting it is successful and

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 69 sustainable, and life itself becomes the laboratory of its testing. Just as moral habits are forged through the fire of lived experience, so ultimate ends are given similar tests, so that by analogy to hypothesis testing, they become modified over time, or abandoned altogether. It should be noted that there is some similarity here between Peirce’s test for ultimate ends and Kant’s categorical imperative. Indeed, Peirce seems to identify himself with those ethical theorists “who have attributed to the end the same kind of being that a law of nature has, making it le in the rationalization of the universe” (CP 1.590, c. 1903; see CP 5.3, 5-433, 1905). As suggested by John Rawls (1980), when operationalized, Kant’s categorical imperative (using the universal law of nature formula) suggests the following test for right action:

1. Form a hypothetical imperative: I am to do X to bring about Y. 2. Make (1) into a maxim (prudential rule) of action. 3. Generalize the maxim: Everyone is to do X to bring about Y. 4. Imagine the generalized maxim in (3) as a law of nature, that is, a law that must be followed. 5. Consider the result when (4) is combined with other existing natural laws and human conditions and dispositions. If the result is inconsistent or absurd, then one should not act on (1). The pragmatic version would argue that the true test of the moral quality of an action is not conceptual inconsistency, as Kant suggests. For example, pretense to keep a promise is wrong, according to Kant, since, if universalized, it would make nonsense out of promise-keeping. Instead, the

ultimate test is if it works in practice, that is, the work it produces on practices is conducive to an end that is possible, and can be “consistently

pursued,” as a practical endeavor in the mix of human condition and disposition, and natural laws (CP 5.133, 1903). In other words, the Kantian criterion in the categorical imperative—that actions be capable of becom-

ing lawlike—is translated in an interesting way. Peirce is saying something very similar, namely that the habits entailed in such actions can become generalizable in the course of human action and history, avoid-

ing an outdated notion of lawlike universality to model moral laws (see CP 5.133, 1903). As Peirce says in regard to Kant’s ethical theory, “there have been those who have attributed to the end the same kind of being that a law of nature has, making it lie in the rationalization of the

70 JAMES LISZKA universe” (CP 1.590, 1903). But for Peirce, this boils down to something that can be realized and sustained in the practical affairs of human beings. For Peirce, “the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life” (CP 5.412, 1905) and, correspondingly, the morality of human conduct lies in the work it performs in human practice. Thus, the general purport of conduct is found in the process of life, human history, and the evolution of culture, which acts much like a laboratory test of those norms and rules of conduct, and which results in truly working moral habits.

ETHICAL METHODEUTIC

Peirce’s formal rhetoric is a theory of the normative conditions of inquiry (see Liszka 1996, 98ff.). As such it is concerned with the critical normative features proper for a community of inquiry, the sorts of virtues inquirers

must have, the kinds of communicative practices conducive to truthseeking, and the purposes for which inquiry should be done. As such,

rhetoric has a more manifestly normative character than the other branches of logic. What then would be the analog of a methodeutical ethics? Since formal rhetoric is the least developed branch of semeiotic, we have little modeling to build on in this third branch of ethics—and so its content is rather speculative. If, ultimately, formal rhetoric is concerned with the norma-

tive structure of inquiry most conducive to pursuing truth, then the rhetoric of ethics must be concerned with the normative nature of communities most conducive to pursuing ultimate ends. As we have seen, for Peirce the ultimate end is concrete reasonableness. If that is the case, then it would appear that the same sort of normative conditions that hold for a community pursuing an inquiry into truth would also be the ones for a community pursuing the ultimate good. The normative dimensions that are regarded by Peirce to be helpful to the success of science include inquiry practices that foster an openness to beliefs and hypotheses: the use of the force of the better argument rather than threat, violence, or coercion; reliance on communicative norms that allow fairness of debate; and reliance on personal virtues such as truthfulness, accuracy, integrity, honesty, and the like. In general, whatever norms

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS J1 are critical to the scientific enterprise, ethical methodeutic would also suggest are the best suited to enable us eventually to converge toward the right ethical norms. This is the case, in particular, because the normative

naturalism in ethical reasoning requires scientific reasoning to be successful, if it is to determine whether certain actions, behaviors, practices, and institutions reliably result in certain sorts of ends or outcomes. It follows from this claim that the closer our public, deliberative institutions and practices mirror the conditions of genuine inquiry in this regard, the more likely such practices will eventually converge on the right norms. This is a position consistently thematic in many classical and contemporary pragmatists. Cheryl Misak suggests that “the central insight of pragmatism is that there is a connection between truth and inquiry—that philosophical theory must keep in touch with the practical business of inquiry. In the moral and political domain the connection is between deliberation, agreement, debate, and reflection, on the one hand, and, on the other, the reasonableness and truth of our judgments and the legitimacy of law, government, and policies” (2000, 5). Putnam puts this succinctly: “If there are ethical facts to be discovered, then we ought to apply to ethical inquiry just the rules we have learned to apply to inquiry in general. For what applies to inquiry in general applies to ethical inquiry in particular” (Putnam 1995, 223), but, according to Putnam experimental inquiry requires democratic-like norms: “An ethical community—a community which wants to know what is right and good—should organize itself in accordance with democratic standards and ideals . . . because they are prerequisites for the application of intelligence to the inquiry” (Putnam 1995, 223). Or, as he says elsewhere, “Democracy is a requirement for experimental inquiry in every area” (Putnam 1994, 64). Among the classic pragmatists, it is Dewey who makes explicit this connection between the experimental method and the basic operation of democracy: “At present, the application of physical science is rather to human con-

cerns than in them. That is, it is external, made in the interests of its consequences for a possessing and acquisitive class. Application in life would signify that science was absorbed and distributed; that it was the instrumentality of that common understanding and thorough communication which is the precondition of the existence of a genuine public” (Dewey 1927b, 637-38). “Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself” (Dewey 192724, 148).

72 JAMES LISZKA Practical Ethics

The second division of ethics, practical ethics, is held to be importantly distinct from theoretical or normative ethics. According to Peirce “the practical side of ethics is its most obviously important side” (CP 1.198,

1903). Practical ethics is concerned with morality, that is, the actual norms, habits, sentiments, and beliefs that constitute the practice of ethi-

cal life. As such it addresses questions of right and wrong, duties and rights, as these arise (CP 1.577, 1902); it is also concerned with the skills and arts needed to form moral habits and the practice of self-control: “As you are well aware that the exercise of control over one’s own habits is perhaps the most important business of life, meaning by a habit an object whose being lies in an enduring state of a person which consists in a tendency to act, mentally or bodily, in a certain general way, wherever he has been acted on in a certain general way, regardless of how this tendency may have been established” (R 614:14). Casuistry, or the study of particu-

lar cases, seems also to be part of practical ethics (CP 1.666, c. 1897). Practical ethics is also concerned with moral psychology, particularly the formation of conscience. THE RELATION OF THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ETHICS

Peirce notes that the normative science of ethics, of all the sciences, has the most application to the practical sciences (CP 1.251, 1902). Nonetheless,

the relation between theory and practice generally and, so, theoretical and practical ethics in particular, is somewhat complicated in Peirce, and the messages appear mixed. For this reason, it has been a knotty problem for Peirce scholars to work out (see Hookway 1997; Anderson 1997; Sheriff 1994).

First, Peirce is often adamant that theoretical science should have no truck with practical concerns, since they corrupt the purpose of theory (CP 1.619ff., 1898). “Now, the two masters, theory and practice, you cannot serve. That perfect balance of attention which is requisite for observing the system of things is utterly lost if human desires intervene, and all the more so the higher and holier those desires may be” (CP 1.642, 1898). Theoreticians should not allow consideration of the possible practical applications of their work to obstruct or interfere with the advance of pure science (CP 1.619, 1898).

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 73 Peirce is expressing a concern certainly felt today. If the principal purpose for doing theory is to solve practical problems, then basic science is

at risk. Paradoxically, it is through the unfettered pursuit of theoretical science that practical applications later appear. Currently universities are under pressure to partner with business or economic concerns that have practical applications as their aim, and it is not uncommon to hear from many scientists this warning expressed by Peirce. However, this position creates a special complication for the scientific study of ethics, since, as Peirce himself notes, of all the sciences, normative ethics is thought to have the most application to the practical sciences. Indeed it can be said that ethical theory is often developed in the light of particular issues and concerns that arise in ethical life. Whereas advances in theoretical science may be generated out of problems or puzzles in scientifically observed phenomena, the field of study, the experimental lab for the ethical theorist, must be the practice of ethical life. Thus, the study of ethics seems to

be inherently practical in many respects, as opposed to theory in basic science.

A second concern of Peirce’s is related to the first, Peirce worries that the attempt by the practically minded to use theoretical results for practical applications without also adopting the tenor and nuance of theoretical attitudes might have disastrous results. But what is worse, from our point of view, they begin to look upon science as a guide to conduct, that is, no longer as pure science but as an instrument for a practical end. One result of this is that all probable reasoning is despised. If a proposition is to be applied to action, it has to be embraced, or believed without reservation. There is no room for doubt, which can only paralyze action. But the scientific spirit requires a man to be at all times ready to dump his whole cart-load of beliefs,

the moment experience is against them. The desire to learn forbids him to be perfectly cocksure that he knows already. (CP 1.55, c. 1896)

This problem is especially acute for practical ethical life. As practiced,

morality has a tendency to be conservative and to resist change. Additionally, it often takes on an absolutist attitude that can obstruct genuine theoretical inquiry. But morality, doctrinaire conservatist that it is, destroys its own vitality by resisting change, and positively insisting, This is eternally right: That is eternally wrong. The tendency of philosophers has always been

74 JAMES LISZKA to make their assertions too absolute. Nothing stands more in the way of a comprehension of the universe and of the mind. But in morals this tendency acquires triple strength. (CP 2.198, c. 1902)

Because of the life-investment in many practically held moral beliefs, people may be more tenacious in those beliefs, seeking support where they can, and ignoring evidence to the contrary. This, of course, is deadly for theoretical science, and creates what Peirce calls “sham” reasoning. In the field of theoretical science, creationists, for example, have a preformed hypothesis that they will not yield—that life was created by a divine intelligence rather than evolved; thus they seek evidence that will support it; and where evidence does not, they will employ clever (or not so clever) ad hoc hypotheses to assimilate the contrary evidence. The goal is to prove the hypothesis they want to believe; that violates the rule of predesignation in induction, and makes for bad science. In practical ethics, this sort of sham reasoning becomes another name for rationalization of what we already believe, as Peirce explains. When men begin to rationalize about their conduct, the first effect is to deliver them over to their passions and produce the most frightful

demoralization, especially in sexual matters. . . . In short, it is no longer the reasoning which determines what the conclusion shall be, but it is the conclusion which determines what the reasoning shall be. This is sham reasoning. In short, as morality supposes self-control, men learn that they must not surrender themselves unreservedly to

any method, without considering to what conclusions it will lead them. But this is utterly contrary to the single-mindedness that is requisite in science. In order that science may be successful, its votaries

must hasten to surrender themselves at discretion to experimental inquiry, in advance of knowing what its decisions may be. There must be no reservations. (CP 1.57, c. 1896)

Peirce’s concern is a genuine one. If ethicists act like ideologues and end

up simply being apologists for the dominant moral conventions, then ethical theory becomes suspect. Ethics must be practiced in a manner that allows the possibility to detach itself from moral conventions in order to evaluate those norms at some level—as hard as that might be to do. Peirce is expressing the genuine tensions in the culture between those who live the morality of the culture, and those who study it. The risk in this is that the work of theoretical ethicists, paradoxically, will often be

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 75 labeled immoral by doctrinaire moralists if it is contrary to the dominant norms of the culture (CP 1.666, 1898). In one striking passage, he argues, like Nietzsche, that ethicists are in a certain sense immoral since they may raise questions or concerns about existing conventional morality: “Hence, ethics, which is reasoning out an explanation of morality is—I will not say immoral, [for] that would be going too far—composed of the very substance of immorality” (CP 1.666, 1898). Peirce even calls the study of ethics “dangerous” in this regard (CP 1.667, 1898). In one passage Peirce sarcastically articulates this tension between morality and the study of ethics, Now what’s the use of prying into the philosophical basis of morality? We all know what morality is: it is behaving as you were brought up to

behave, that is, to think you ought to be punished for not behaving. But to believe in thinking as you have been brought up to think defines conservatism. It needs no reasoning to perceive that morality is conservatism. But conservatism again means, as you will surely agree, not trusting to one’s reasoning powers. To be a moral man is to obey the traditional maxims of your community without hesitation or discussion. (CP 1.666, 1898)

Initially, as ethical theorists introduce new ideas and criticize existing norms, there is a strong resistance among practitioners accustomed to the dominant norms. Yet, often within a passing decade, the novel theories are accepted as if they had always been part of the tradition. It is hard to imagine slavery as an acceptable practice today, yet in Peirce’s own

time that issue was rife with controversy; and, although Peirce’s own beliefs and position on slavery during the Civil War were distressingly conservative, he undoubtedly could see the normative changes that happened to the American belief system on that issue over time.

In a third concern about the relation of theory and practice, Peirce argues that in the conduct of everyday life and matters of vital importance, it is best to stick to our instincts, sentiments, and accumulated habits of reasoning, rather than rely on theoretical reason (CP 1.623, 1898):

“Common sense, which is the resultant of the traditional experience of mankind, witnesses unequivocally that the heart is more than the head, and is in fact everything in our highest concerns” (CP 1.654, 1898). Place before the conservative arguments to which he can find no adequate reply and which go, let us say, to demonstrate that wisdom and

76 JAMES LISZKA virtue call upon him to offer to marry his own sister, and though he be unable to answer the arguments, he will not act upon their conclusion, because he believes that tradition and the feelings that tradition

and custom have developed in him are safer guides than his own feeble ratiocination. (CP 1.661, 1898)

Peirce, following a long tradition of British ethical thinkers on this matter, believes that conscience is a core expression of these embedded folkways. Conscience is something that is ingrained in the individual developmentally. Conscience really belongs to the subconscious man, to that part of the soul which is hardly distinct in different individuals, a sort of community-consciousness, or public spirit, not absolutely one and the same in different citizens, and yet not by any means independent in them. Conscience has been created by experience just as any knowl-

edge is; but it is modified by further experience only with secular slowness. (CP 1.56, c. 1896)

Conscience is thereby something one does not go about getting or choosing, but is either there or not. The pursuit of a conscience, if one hasn’t one already, or of a religion, which is the subjective basis of conscience, seems to me an aimless and hypochondriac pursuit. If a man finds himself under no sense of

obligation, let him congratulate himself. For such a man to hanker after a bondage to conscience, is as if a man with a good digestion should cast about for a regimen of food. A conscience, too, is not a theorem or a piece of inform ation which may be acquired by reading a book; it must be bred in a man from infancy or it will be a poor imitation of the genuine article. If a man has a conscience, it may be an article of faith with him, that he should reflect upon that conscience, and thus it may receive a further development. But it never will do him the least good to get up a make-believe scepticism and pretend to himself not to believe what he really does believe. (CP 8.45, c. 1885)

Ultimately, conscience becomes the best guide in moral decision making: “When all is done that circumstances permit, it is his duty to act conscientiously” (CP 1.153, c. 1897).

Peirce recognizes that this position leads to a moral conservatism of sorts (CP 1.671, 1898), but in the light of other positions on this matter, it is quite reasonable to suggest that Peirce is fallibilistic about that conservatism.

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS // After all Peirce insists that what is right should not be judged by the tendency of people to think so (CP 5.125, 1903). Morality, as a system of relatively indurate habits, have survived precisely because of their implicit and successful guides to behavior—so they should not be thrown out for that reason; and in practical affairs they are what we rely on for the most part in making moral decisions. Nonetheless, Peirce is not saying that they are an infallible set of beliefs; they are certainly subject to change,

and there can be many sources of that change—including ethical theory—Peirce is simply cautious about change to those commonsense beliefs: “I do not say that philosophical science should not ultimately influence religion and morality; I only say that it should be allowed to do so only with secular slowness and the most conservative caution” (CP

1.620, 1898). In this respect, Peirce also admits that conscience—the repository of commonsense beliefs—can also be subject to change in this regard (CP 1.56, c. 1896). If any current set of norms, beliefs, and moral habits are the result of common sense, Peirce’s critical commonsensism might model the appropriate relation between ethical theory and practice (CP 5.438ff., 1905). Indeed, Peirce makes it clear that in order for morality to improve it must overcome its own resistance to change. Now morality is a hardening agent. It is astonishing how many abominable scoundrels there are among sincerely moral people. The difficulty is that morality chokes its own stream. Like any other field, more than any other, it needs improvement, advance. Moral ideas must be a rising tide, or with the ebb foulness will be cast up. (CP 2.198, 1902)

At bottom, while we should rely on our commonsense beliefs as a guide to our practical moral life, as fallibilists, we should be prepared to modify these as our knowledge and experience grows. As Peirce argues, “Common sense corrects itself, improves its conclusions,” so “we see social, political, religious common sense modifying itself insensibly in

course of generations, ideas of rights of man acquiring new meaning, thaumaturgic elements of Christianity sinking, spiritual rising in religious consciousness” (CP 6.573, c. 1905). But, as Peirce emphasizes, if “common sense improves; it does not, then, attain infallibility” (CP 6.574, c. 1905). This is consistent with Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics as well (see CP 6.302, 1891). Even though those embedded in an ethical life may

view their norms as infallibly right, they are really the result of a long process of evolutionary change that is ongoing. Indeed, Peirce’s account of the different types of evolution (tychistic, anacastic, and agapastic) as

78 JAMES LISZKA they are manifested in history generally, and the history of science in particular, may model evolutionary and developmental change in ethical life as well (see CP 6.302—16, 1891).

A good example of the effect of ethical theory on practical ethics is the role that medical ethics has played in moving medical decision making

away from paternalistic models toward more patient-centered ones in recent years. Moreover, bioethicists as a professional class have become more integrated into medical practices and institutions, in medical education, in serving on ethics boards, in the training of physicians, and as public figures, pundits, and government advisers. Peirce seems to be aware, in his own time, of the impact of utilitarianism on practical ethical thinking, public policy, and legislation (see 8.141, 1901).

There is also a fourth concern of Peirce’s in regard to the relation of theory to practice. At times—and despite other pronouncements to the contrary—Peirce seems doubtful whether ethical theory can, in fact, be applied to practice. On the one hand, he insists that “ethics, then, even if not a positively dangerous study, as it sometimes proves, is as useless a science as can be conceived” (CP 1.667, 1898). “Somewhat allied to the philosophy of religion is the science of ethics. It is equally useless” (CP 1.666, 1898). Elsewhere he writes, “I will not claim that the study of ethics is more directly conducive to good morals than, say, the reading of good

poetry is conducive to the writing of good prose” (CP 2.82, c. 1902). In fact, he likens it to the application of analytic mechanics to a game of billiards (CP 5.125, 1903). Yet, in some passages, he directly contradicts this claim: “I myself have no doubt that the study [of theoretical ethics] is more or less favorable to right living” (CP 1.600, 1903), and bemoans the fact that theoretical or normative ethics is not employed enough by the practical sciences. The influence of philosophy upon the practical sciences is less direct. It is only here and there that it can be detected; and ethics is the division of philosophy which most concerns these sciences. Ethics is courteously invited to make a suggestion nowand then inlaw, jurisprudence, and sociology. Its sedulous exclusion from diplomacy and economics is immense folly. We are unhappily debarred from calling this folly stupendous or egregious, because it is merely the ordinary blindness of those who profoundly believe that lies are the most wholesome of

diet... . Right is a silly thing without wealth or vigor in this worka-day world. One day man shall start up out of his slumber to see by broad daylight that that despised idea has all along been the one

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 7/9 irresistible power. Then may begin an era when it is counted within the practical sciences, one and all—when, in a word, a man will not design a stove nor order a coat without stopping first and sifting out his real desire—and it is prophecy as simple as Barbara, that, when that comes to pass, those sciences will answer even their lower and nearest purposes far more perfectly than at present they do. (CP 1.251, 1902)

The view that normative or theoretical ethics is useless for practical ethics is also a theme not unheard of currently, but perhaps in a way that Peirce did not intend. The new casuistry, virtue ethics, narrative ethics, and feminist ethics have all argued that a certain kind of ethical theory— the rule-case approach—does not fit the way in which we actually make decisions in our practical ethical lives. Peirce seems to agree and suggests

that, contrary to ethical theory, casuistry can be particularly useful in practical ethical life (CP 1.666, 1898). Yet it is hard to imagine that the normative science of ethics, which studies ultimate ends, would not be useful to ethical life. Indeed, as articulated below, Peirce classifies his practical sciences, or “pragmatics,” in terms of various ends, thus aligning them well with the study of ends in themselves. Despite these various concerns about the relation between theory and practice, and theoretical and practical ethics in particular, Peirce’s classical account of pragmatism would be consistent with a fruitful relation between ethics and morality, theoretical and practical ethics. If meaning is bound up in its relation to conduct, its practical bearings and consequences, and ultimately human purposes and ends, then one would think that ethics as the study of ends and purposes, and, morality, as the sum of

norms and beliefs in current ethical life, would have a more dynamic relation. It would seem odd for Peirce to say that the normative sciences that study ultimate ends of human conduct should not be applicable to ordinary, practical life. On the contrary, it would seem to be of utmost importance to practical life. On the other hand, practical life should be the testing field, the laboratory for theoretical ethics, particularly given the scientific framework that Peirce long espoused. PEIRCE S§ PRAGMATICS AND THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE PRACTICAL SCIENCES

Although Peirce claims to have made extensive attempts at the classification of the practical sciences, he states that these attempts ended in failure

80 JAMES LISZKA (R 602, c. 1908). Thus, we must consider any classification of the practical sciences as tentative. Nonetheless, one of the most detailed classifications appears to have been done around 1894 (R 1345), just as he was engaging in his broader study of ethics. However, this is a classification that occurs

prior to what is considered his most developed one, discussed in the opening sections of this essay. In the 1894 classification, Peirce divides the sciences into mathematics,

or the study of ideal constructions without reference to their real existence, empirics, or the study of physical and psychological phenomena, and pragmatics, or “the study of how we ought to behave in the light of the truths of empirics” (R 1345:2, c. 1894); or, the study of “how we ought to act in light of experience” (R 1345:5, c. 1894). Put somewhat differently,

pragmatics “studies the processes by which the outer world is to be brought into accordance with our wishes,” that is, in accordance with our particular ends (R 1345:4, c. 1894).

Pragmatics is divided into ethics, or the study of general principles of

conduct, arts, or the study of general problems not going back to first principles—in particular the studying of how to attain ends, and policy, or the proper course to be pursued in special cases arising in history (R 1345:6, 16). In the light of his work on normative ethics that is to come later, it might be more consistent with that work to extrapolate these three disciplines of pragmatics as the study of practical moral ends

(ethics), the study of how to attain those ends (arts), and the study of how to apply those means and ends in current historical circumstances (casuistry).

Practical ethics is variously subdivided by Peirce into hedonics, or what we would assume would be the study of identifying the proper sorts

of pleasures to pursue in life; social ethics, which concerns the proper practical ends for communities to pursue; and polity, which concerns the proper ends of political organization or governing (R 1345:31).

The arts have three main branches: individual arts, communal arts, and political arts. Individual arts are subdivided into teleological arts concerning the individual, for example, how to attain bodily well-being, mental health, shelter, clothing, even how to find the best means of transportation; and, into casuistical arts, where the concern is how to make the best of given circumstances. The latter, in turn, is subdivided into political economy, that is, dealings with others in commerce; practices such as agriculture, seamanship, metallurgy, and so on (R 1345:31).

CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS 81 The second major branch of the arts—communal arts—is subdivided into education, jurisprudence, and the art of war (R 1345:31). Peirce does not subdivide the third main branch of the arts. Policy is subdivided into policy toward fellow human beings, policy toward superior beings, and, interestingly, policy toward animals (R 1345:7).

In naming the practical sciences “pragmatics” in 1894, Peirce is likely using Kant’s sense of the term as found in his work Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Peirce believes that “pragmatic anthropology, according to Kant, 1s practical ethics” (CP 5.1, 1902). In the Anthropology,

“pragmatic” knowledge is described as a knowledge of what human beings can or should make of themselves as freely acting beings. This is contrasted with a physiological knowledge, which aims primarily to figure out what “nature makes of man” ([1798] 1978, 3). Thus the pragmatic is focused on doing and becoming within the sphere and domain of human

action, rather than on deterministic knowledge. Indeed, pragmatic knowledge for Kant “aims at improvement” ([1798] 1978, 4). Moreover, all kinds of knowledge of nature become pragmatic only when they are incorporated into knowledge of human beings as “citizens of the world” ([1798] 1978, 4). “Having a world” means the actual participation in the world, as opposed to the speculative or theoretically scientific account of the world. The pragmatic viewpoint, then, looks to the future. However, the very notion of improvement implies concepts such as ideals and purposes; a pragmatic viewpoint necessarily presupposes a teleological outlook. A human being has “a character which he himself creates, because he is capable of perfecting himself according to purposes which he himself adopts” ({1798] 1978, 238): “The human species can work itself up to its destiny only through continuous progress within an endless sequence of many generations” ([1798] 1978, 240).

With this interpretation of Kant’s use of the term in mind, we can think of pragmatics as a practical study of how to realize certain kinds of ends; practical ethics is concerned with particular kinds of ends in this respect, good ends pertaining to the individual, to the social and political dimensions of community. aD)

Although it is challenging to systematize Peirce’s thinking on ethics, and the best efforts may yet provide only a fragmentary view, still a study of

Peirce’s ideas can yield valuable insights. Peirce struggled with the

82 JAMES LISZKA relation between theoretical and practical ethics, but his fragments on pragmatics show how the two might be interrelated. Pragmatics reflects the structure of normative ethics and sets up a reciprocal relationship between the two: The results of the exercise of pragmatics can correct the normative science of ethics, and the latter provides general guidance for pragmatics. Each corrects the other. In regard to Peirce’s normative science of ethics, if my attempt to orga-

nize it on the model of semeiotic has any merit, it presents a relatively coherent picture of its principal tasks. Morality is possible through purposive, intentional behavior, which can be analyzed as a triadic relation among actions, means, and ends. In agencies capable of higher-order psychological states such as beliefs, reasoning, and complex psychologi-

cal attitudes, intentional behavior coheres action and motivation. Purposive behavior, in turn, makes moral behavior possible because it engenders self-correction toward ends and ideals. Ethical reasoning, then,

becomes a matter of proper adjudication of ends and the validation of beliefs about actions that likely lead to those ends. We see, as a result, why it is important to classify ends and establish criteria for their certification.

Finally, normative ethics has to be concerned with the constitution of a community that best facilitates ethical reasoning. For Peirce, it would have the same norms that are conducive to any inquiry. For thinkers such

as Dewey, this is tantamount to the fundamental norms of a strong democracy. Although Dewey has been rightly considered to be the classical prag-

matist most concerned with ethics and who, more than any other pragmatist, developed a comprehensive theory of ethics, Peirce’s work on ethics should be considered in its own right, and it may serve to reinvigorate interest in pragmatic ethics and develop new directions for its study.

FOUR

WHO'S AFRAID OF CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE? Knocking Some Critical Common Sense into Moral Philosophy Cornelis de Waal

Clear as it seems to me that certain dicta of my conscience are unreasonable, and though I know it may very well be wrong, yet I trust to its authority emphatically rather than to any rationalistic morality. This is the only rational course. —Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce

[’ this essay I explore the potential contribution of Peirce’s theory of scientific inquiry to moral philosophy. After a brief introduction, I outline Peirce’s theory of inquiry. Next, I address why Peirce believed that this theory of inquiry is inapplicable to what he called “matters of vital importance,” the latter including genuine moral problems. This leaves us in the end with two options: We can try to develop an alternative way of addressing moral problems or we can seek to reconcile moral problems with scientific inquiry as described by Peirce. Though Peirce seems to argue for the former, I argue for the latter.

The Scientific Method

Peirce introduced his theory of scientific inquiry in his Popular Science Monthly series of the late 1870s as one of four ways of fixing our belief. In the first paper of this series, titled “The Fixation of Belief,” Peirce developed a doubt-belief theory that differs quite decidedly from the Cartesian doctrine of universal doubt. By doubting everything he could possibly be ( 83}

84 CORNELIS pE WAAL mistaken about Descartes pretty much stumbled, in the second of his Meditations Concerning First Philosophy, on the ego cogito and declared it

the indubitable ground of all knowledge. Peirce radically rejected this approach, as it required Descartes to doubt many things he did not really doubt. In its stead Peirce insisted that doubt can exercise its epistemic function only when it is genuine doubt, not paper doubt. For Peirce, doubt is an actual state of mental discomfort from which we actively seek to free ourselves, and belief is not just a state we have no inclination to change but one to which we even cling with tenacity, as we do not want to fall into mental discomfort. Belief and doubt both spur us into action, but they do so differently. Whereas doubt initiates a struggle, belief acts

on the individual rather like a habit or disposition. Having thus distinguished doubt from belief, Peirce subsequently defined inquiry as any struggle that is caused by the irritation of doubt and aims at attaining a state of belief.

Peirce next distinguished four forms that this struggle can take—the scientific method being one of them. However, before looking into these four ways of fixing belief, let’s have a quick look at how the doubt-belief model applies to moral issues. As with all beliefs, having certain moral beliefs means that we are conditioned such that were we to be put in a certain kind of situation we would act in certain predisposed ways. So a teenage girl who over the years has internalized her strong pro-life environment and who now finds herself unexpectedly pregnant would have the tendency to reject offhand even the slightest hint that she should consider an abortion. Doubt creeps in where the specifics of the situation undermine rote application of the pro-life beliefs that are so familiar to her. When that happens she is facing a moral problem that calls for some sort of resolution. !

As said, Peirce distinguished four ways in which we can seek to regain belief in the face of doubt (note that this belief may be the same as the one we started out with). The first and most primitive way identified by Peirce

is that of tenacity: The doubter clings with all her might to her beliefs, ignoring those aspects of the situation that undermine the belief. Being in denial is a classic example of this first method. For social beings like us

this method is likely to succeed only in the short term—assuming the facts of the matter even allow us that luxury—as sooner or later we find ourselves confronted with the views of others, and the method does not

WHO'S AFRAID OF C. S. PEIRCE? 85 give us any indication of how to defend our belief against the opposing views of others. Overall, the method of tenacity works best for those moral problems where we have little vested interest, as we will be little affected by any adverse effects and can safely ignore other people’s views. The situation is different when we experience firsthand the effects of our

beliefs, or when we are forced to account for our actions or explain our views to others. The second way of fixing belief Peirce calls the method of authority. Here society, in the form of state, church, or otherwise, enforces certain beliefs by manipulating information, or by rewarding those who advocate the accepted belief structure while silencing those who seek to under-

mine it. Especially within the domain of morality, the method of authority has a long and impressive track record. It is far more powerful and stable than the first, as the opinion of the unvested majority can easily crush the individual with all her struggles. The method of authority allows those who have no vested interest in the problem to decree what should be done. The case of celibate priests asserting how women should behave in marriage, when, with whom, and how to engage in sexual intercourse, or how to raise children, is a clear case in point. The third way of fixing belief, which Peirce calls the a priori method, secures belief by appealing solely to reason. With this method we try to settle a belief by making it consistent with our general outlook on things. For instance, when applied to the situation of the pregnant teenage girl, her belief would be fixed wholly within the realm of ideas, for instance by making what she should or should not do fit the categorical imperative, by making it fit certain preconceived ideas about the sanctity of life or individual freedom, or by examining her own situation from behind a veil of ignorance. As a way to fix belief, the a priori method is clearly sus-

pect. One need not study philosophy long, or be a particularly astute observer of the human condition, to know that reasoning and rationalizing are often indistinguishable, and that no human evil has gone unrationalized. Even the Nazis had their ethics.* These first three methods are often used in combination. For instance, the fixation of one’s belief about abortion may be the outcome of a process in which tenacity, a limited exposure to the views of others, appeals

to authority, and preconceived theories, all make their appearance in a fairly stable but by no means static mixture.

86 CORNELIS pE WAAL The fourth and last way of fixing belief that Peirce distinguished is the scientific method. Peirce’s scientific method presumes that the fixation of belief is not something that is wholly up to us but that there is a world out

there to which we must bend. Put differently, the idea that there is an independent reality—things independent of what you, or I, or any group in particular thinks them to be—is key to the scientific method. According

to Peirce, each inquirer comes with her biases and idiosyncrasies. However, when the community of investigators becomes sufficiently large, and assuming that each participant is genuinely interested in answering the questions that are being asked, those individual biases and idiosyncrasies are eventually filtered out—the latter often being the products of the first three methods of fixing belief.’ As a result we can say that, were an inquiry into a specific question to be engaged in by a sufficiently

large community of investigators, then they would in the indefinitely long run arrive at an agreed-upon opinion. Peirce called this the final or ultimate opinion; that is to say, the community of inquirers would reach a permanently fixed belief. Peirce was careful to observe that we should not look at this final opinion as something that is actually attainable in the near or distant future.

Instead he argued that we should engage in inquiry proceeding upon the hope that reaching such an answer is possible, at least in principle. Peirce’s independent argument, defended in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy a decade earlier, which states that references to anything abso-

lutely incognizable—such as Locke’s substratum or Kant’s things in themselves—cannot have any possible explanatory value, further commits him to the view that this final opinion is also the truth. And since its object is per definition independent of what you, or I, or any group in particular thinks it to be, its object is also real. In short, for Peirce, anything that is the object of such a final opinion is real. That anything that is an object of a final opinion is real seems, at least prima facie, to allow for a moral realism.* When in the indefinite long run—that is, after the issue has been inquired into by countless investigators—the final opinion is reached that incest is wrong, then it would be a real fact that incest is wrong, and the belief that it is so, true. At the same time the personal biases and idiosyncrasies of individual investigators may cause some today to believe that there is no moral objection to incest. Given Peirce’s account of the scientific method, those people would be wrong, as their individual beliefs would conflict with the final opinion in

WHO'S AFRAID OF C. S. PEIRCE? 87 the matter.° To put it concisely, the fact that the final opinion would be

reached that incest is wrong were the issue to be inquired into long enough makes the practice of incest today immoral, and it does so no matter what one’s personal beliefs are or what the mores are of the time and the culture within which one is living. Moreover, it is likely that a certain percentage of our current moral beliefs are identical to those that would be reached at the end of inquiry, making them true (and the ideals expressed in them real) even though we lack the certitude now that they are so. Such a moral realism, moreover, would avoid any need for what John Mackie has called queer objects—objects that do not fit in right with our general picture of the universe.° Matters of Vital Importance

In his 1898 Cambridge Conference lectures, Peirce, however, takes a radical stance, arguing emphatically that science should stay away from “mat-

ters of vital importance,” moral problems being among them, thereby denying the validity ofa science of ethics.’ In the first lecture, “Philosophy

and the Conduct of Life,” Peirce makes three related points: First, the faculty of reasoning is ill-suited for dealing with matters of vital importance; second, the present state of philosophy is such that any application to such matters is outright irresponsible; and, third, science cannot properly perform its function when matters of vital importance are involved. First, according to Peirce, our capacity for reasoning is ill-suited for dealing with matters of vital importance. Reasoning in this context is any deliberate train of thought that allows us to use our existing beliefs to remove a particular state of doubt. Since in the current context reasoning pertains to the individual's removal of doubt, Peirce maintains that reasoning “is of its very essence egotistical” (CP 1.631, 1898). This clouds the reasoner’s ability to distinguish good from bad reasoning, and hence reasoning from rationalization. As Peirce observes, “Men many times fancy that they act from reason when, in point of fact, the reasons they attribute to themselves are nothing but excuses which unconscious instinct invents to satisfy the teasing ‘whys’ of the ego. The extent of this self delusion is such as to render philosophical rationalism a farce” (ibid). Or, as Thomas

Hobbes once famously quipped, reasoning is that faculty that allows us, unlike the brutes, “to multiply one untruth by another.”® Peirce even

states that “ethics, which is reasoning out an explanation of morality,

88 CORNELIS pE WAAL is—I will not say immoral, [for] that would be going too far—composed of the very substance of immorality” (CP 1.666, 1898). Were you to study what’s going on in the mind of an unprofessional thief, Peirce continues,

“you will find that two things characterize him; first, an even more immense conceit in his own reasoning powers than is common, and second, a disposition to reason about the basis of morals” (ibid). It is indeed a familiar fact of life that one can reason in favor of almost anything and that when the stakes in a conclusion increase, the threshold for acceptable reasons tends to lower accordingly. It is far easier to give a convincing argument to someone who already believes the conclusion, than to someone who thinks the conclusion is wholly wrong. Within the United States no moral issue shows this more clearly than that of abortion. Peirce’s second point is essentially an extension of the first. Having observed that the present state of philosophy is such that hardly anything is ever agreed upon—even after all powers of reasoning are employed— Peirce continues by saying, “It is precisely because of this utterly unsettled and uncertain condition of philosophy at present, that I regard any practical applications of it to... conduct as exceedingly dangerous” (CP 1.620,

1898). Given the current state of moral philosophy—and indeed of philosophy in general—and given the earlier discussion about the quirks and limitations of human reasoning, it would be imprudent for anyone to change their beliefs too easily when confronted with the reasoned opposition of others. Given the current state of the science of ethics, Peirce argues, it is simply unwise to ground one’s morality on it. At the same time Peirce is careful not to dispose of the baby with the bathwater, allowing that a science of ethics may influence morality, but only “with secular slowness and the most conservative caution” (CP 1.620, 1898). Peirce’s third point is that science cannot properly perform its function, which is to filter out individual biases and idiosyncrasies, in the face of matters of vital importance. The essence of Peirce’s conception of science is that the scientist should focus entirely on answering the questions he seeks to address: He should have no preconception of what the answer should be (though, generally, he will have hunches about what it could be); he should be willing to accept the answer, no matter what the answer may be; and he must be willing to drop entire cartloads of beliefs the moment they can no longer be maintained. According to Peirce, it is impossible to live up to this when dealing with matters of vital importance, as generally

WHO'S AFRAID OF C. S. PEIRCE? 89 such issues come with vested interests in what the answer should be—or

at least in what the answer may not be—and they generally involve a myriad of ideas that are not up for discussion. Consequently, the muchneeded filtering out of the biases and idiosyncrasies of particular sets of inquirers—which may include the mores of an entire culture—would not be filtered out, and inquiry would come prematurely to a halt. There is also another, related problem, one that is not directly addressed by Peirce in this opening lecture, and this is the problem that the scientific method is not well adapted to addressing particular problems that require an answer in the short run. This is not a real problem for Peircean moral realism, but it is a problem for anyone who is looking at the scientific method as a potential tool to resolve concrete moral problems. As

Peirce is careful to observe, the process through which such a settled opinion is reached is not one of gradual convergence, so that we cannot say that more inquiry will ipso facto land us a better solution or a better argument. As history painfully shows, the general opinion may sway for entire epochs in the wrong direction. However, even if the problem goes beyond the confines of any particular case, say the more general question whether in certain circumstances capital punishment is morally permissible, the short-run interests of investigators are still likely to interfere because of the case’s ramifications for issues in which the investigators are vested. Hence, for moral issues short-term interests are likely to continue to interfere over the long run, causing the scientific method to break down. Put differently, even if the investigators have no immediate interest in seeing the answer solved in a particular way, it is unlikely they will be able to reach the level of detachment that Peirce requires for the scientific method to lead to a final, unassailable opinion. To the objection that for any matter of vital importance there will be countless potential investigators to whom the matter isn’t vital at all, it can be countered that most of the important moral questions are so pervasive and recurrent that the idea that such a group of investigators can be found, even leaving aside the question of how such a group can be identified, is not a real option. In sum, on Peirce’s account, the ethics of inquiry seems to preclude ethical inquiry. The scientific attitude, which Peirce held to be crucial to science, if not its defining characteristic, appears to break down when we seek to resolve doubt with regard to moral issues. The view, that the scientific method envisioned by Peirce cannot be made to apply to moral problems, is shared more recently by Bernard

90 CORNELIS DE WAAL Williams and Jiirgen Habermas. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Williams takes a Peircean view of scientific inquiry, which, like Peirce, he takes to be an activity that we can justifiably engage in with the hope—if not the expectation—that our answers in the long run will converge to the truth. According to Williams, this is not so for ethical questions. “In the area of the ethical,” he writes, “at least at a high level of generality, there is no such coherent hope.”? And he further adds that should some time in the future such a hope become justifiable, the current explanation given for scientific questions, namely that this convergence is “guided by how things actually are,” would still not apply.'® Habermas voices similar concerns in Truth and Justification: “Moral validity claims lack the reference to the objective world that is characteristic of claims to truth,” and

because of that, Habermas continues, they lack the justification-transcendent point of reference that is crucial to the convergence theory." It seems though that both show themselves to be nominalists with regard to the constraints that are set upon our thought. For Peirce, the way things actually are—or “the objective world of observable states of affairs,” as Habermas calls it!’—is but one way in which our thoughts can be constrained. This is particularly clear in the case of mathematics, which generates truths while caring nothing at all about whether anything in the “objective world of observable states of affairs” corresponds to it or not, and it does so by applying the scientific method. Peirce’s Doctrine of Moral Sentiments

If science and philosophy are useless, dangerous even, as tools for addressing moral problems, where does that leave us? Peirce seeks the answer in

what he calls our moral sentiments—acquired or inherited moral habits of which we have ourselves only a partial cognitive understanding, or even awareness.'’ In the Cambridge Conference Lectures, for instance, Peirce describes the regnant system of sexual rules as “an instinctive or Sentimental induction summarizing the experience of all our race” (CP 1.633, 1898). Conscience, Peirce explains elsewhere, “really belongs to the subconscious man, to that part of the soul which is hardly distinct in dif-

ferent individuals, a sort of community-consciousness, or public spirit, not absolutely one and the same in different citizens, and yet not by any means independent in them” (CP 1.56, 1906), and he describes moral ideals as “composite photograph[s] of the conscience of the members of

WHO'S AFRAID OF C. S. PEIRCE? 91 the community” (CP 1.573, 1906).'* Put differently, our moral beliefs are not really our private possessions. Rather they are communal affairs in

which we partake, something we do mostly unawares. This means that when we come to doubt any such beliefs, that too is not a mere private affair. Moreover, given the precariousness of our reasoning ability, we cannot simply rely on our reasoning powers when trying to remove those doubts. Further, given the current state of moral philosophy, and Peirce’s concerns about reasoning more generally, we also better avoid asking the input of professional ethicists. For Peirce, our system of morals is captured in “the traditional wisdom of ages of experience. Ifa man cuts loose from it, he will become the victim of his passions. It is not safe for him

even to reason about it, except in a purely speculative way” (CP 1.50, 1906). Peirce’s sentiment seems to be that whereas in science reasoning is a powerful instrument for filtering out personal idiosyncrasies, in ethics it is more likely to introduce them.

With regard to morality, Peirce discerns a dialectic where a rather unstable, conscious, and presumed rational phase is wedged between two relatively stable periods that are driven largely by semiconscious moral sentiments or moral traditions that are taken for granted. When men begin to rationalize about their conduct, the first effect is to deliver them over to their passions and produce the most frightful demoralization, especially in sexual matters. Thus, among the Greeks, it brought about pzderasty and a precedence of public women over private wives. But ultimately the subconscious part of the soul, being stronger, regains its predominance and insists on setting matters right. Men, then, continue to tell themselves they regulate their conduct by reason; but they learn to look forward and see what conclusions a given method will lead to before they give their adhesion to it. In short, it is no longer the reasoning which determines what the conclu-

sion shall be, but it is the conclusion which determines what the reasoning shall be. This is sham reasoning. (CP 1.57, 1896)

Hence, in Peirce’s view, reasoning about moral issues is all but impossi-

ble—it is also not needed. Moral rules and ideals carry with them the authority of many generations. Although these are certainly not infallible, the individual should obey them rather than rely on his own fallible reasoning powers or on that of his peers. Peirce’s doctrine of moral sentiments

thus implies a moral conservatism: “To be a moral man is to obey the traditional maxims of your community without hesitation or discussion”

9g2 CORNELIS DE WAAL (CP 1.666, 1898).'° Subsequent reflections on the normative sciences cause

Peirce to put more emphasis on self-determination, arguing that ethics should guide the individual in this self-determination, rather than impose on everyone some alien, preconceived set of rules, and that “what most influences men to self-government is intense disgust with one kind of life

and warm admiration for another” (EP 2:460). In short, ethics is to be grounded in our moral sentiments, where the latter are, especially when we are taking Peirce’s conception of the self into account,'® some sort of amalgam of individual feelings and social mores. Returning to the four ways of fixing beliefs that Peirce distinguished in

“The Fixation of Belief,’ we can now conclude that because of the observed problems with reasoning, the a priori method is the least responsible way for dealing with moral issues. Reasoning all too quickly becomes

a sham, its powers used for rationalization. For Peirce, because of his doctrine of moral sentiments and his weariness regarding our ability to reason in the face of issues of vital importance, the most responsible way for fixing our moral beliefs seems to be a combination of the methods of authority and tenacity. Finally, the scientific method seems to be favored by neither moral philosophers nor Peirce. Some Problems with Moral Sentiments

There are, though, some problems with Peirce’s doctrine of moral sentiments. For instance, when he gives some examples of moral sentiments, Peirce clearly betrays a provincial mind. “The mental qualities we most admire in all human beings except our several selves,” he writes, “are the

maiden’s delicacy, the mother’s devotion, manly courage, and other inheritances that have come to us from the biped who did not yet speak” (CP 1.627, 1898). Surely not a list we would give now, and most likely one that was even suspect in Peirce’s own day. It seems that Peirce is taking some good old-fashioned late nineteenth-century values and giving them an eternal air. We can even go a step further. It is quite easy to find some historically prevalent moral sentiments that, although most discerning humans reject them, are still very much alive today. Xenophobia and racism are obvious examples. The prudence of xenophobia is no doubt as old as the prohibition against incest.'” So what are such discerning people to do, especially when they are a minority?'® One could argue that Peirce, careful to prevent

WHO’S AFRAID OF C. S. PEIRCE? 93 morality from derailing, is too accepting of existing moral sentiments and practices. It seems that in the end the only way for us to address existing strong moral sentiments we disapprove of is through reason. An altogether different problem is that even if Peirce’s argument were

to work for a number of moral issues for which the dust settled many eons ago, such as incest,'? there are countless other issues, and more interesting ones at that, for which there exist competing moral sentiments (as with abortion), where our moral sentiments fall short (as with newly emerging issues such as stem-cell research or genetic manipulation), or with issues that are far too intricate for a blunt instrument like our moral sentiments (as with the issue of digital privacy). To this we can add that

most societies today have become social, cultural, and ethnic melting pots, so that even where the issues are not new, traditional values only go so far. In sum, in many cases, if not the majority, we cannot simply rely on our moral intuitions. For Peirce, however, there is something going on at a deeper level as well, and this is that reasoning, especially when applied to moral issues, ultimately depends on sentiment. As is well known, Peirce distinguished three types of reasoning: deduction, induction, and abduction. Deduction, however, cannot tell us anything new; it can only bring clarity to what we profess to know already. Induction, Peirce argues, doesn’t apply to cases of vital importance but is only applicable to situations “where we have, like an insurance company, an endless multitude of insignificant risks” (CP 1.630, 1898). Hence, what we are left with is abduction, which, for Peirce, in the end comes down to our instinct of guessing right .. . of us seeing il lume naturale.

Now if moral problems are ultimately decided by instinct, or moral sentiment, is there indeed a role left for reasoning? Why not rely on instinct alone? To address this question the medieval distinction between logica utens and logica docens—one Peirce frequently drew on—may be of help. Peirce, who is writing after Darwin, has a naturalistic take on our ability to reason. Far from being instilled ready-made from on high, it is

a natural accomplishment that is grounded within our problem-solving activity and the problem-solving activity of countless generations that came before us, the latter extending all the way back to homo erectus and beyond. This has several implications for how Peirce understands reason. First, reason is not eternal or unchanging but develops over time (and is still developing). Second, since our ability to reason is a product of our

94 CORNELIS pe WAAL interaction with—or better, our adaptation to—the universe, our capacity to reason is not a divine light that shines through us, but a reflection of the order of the universe. Put differently, for Peirce, the universe is itself reasonable, and our faculty of reasoning is a reflection of that. Third, since reasoning is grounded in our practical dealings with the world, it is not clear how well it fares when we apply it to subjects that are very remote

from this, for instance, when we reason about subatomic particles, multiple galaxies, an omniscient god, or infinite numbers. Peirce’s naturalistic account of reason affects how he sees the relation between reason and instinct. Whereas traditionally reason was considered superior to instinct, Peirce takes the opposite view. Like reason, instinct is a product of the individual’s interaction with the environment and as such it is a reflection of the reasonableness of the universe. He further holds that instinct is subtler and less prone to error than reason is. In fact, reason’s sole advantage over instinct, Peirce observes, is that it is reflective: “There is reasoning that reason itself condemns” (R 832:2), and the distinction between good and bad reasoning lies precisely therein. Instincts can fail, as when a turtle hides in his shell when a car approaches,

but they cannot correct themselves. In contrast to instinct, reasoning is thus subject to self-control. Consequently, Peirce defines reasoning in Baldwin’s Dictionary as “a process in which the reasoner is conscious that

a judgment, the conclusion, is determined by other judgment or judgments, the premises, according to a general habit of thought, which he may not be able precisely to formulate, but which he approves as conducive to true knowledge.””° The totality of these habits, which are directive,

subject to self-control, and approved of by the reasoner, constitutes a rudimentary science of logic that Peirce, following the medievals, calls our logica utens. This logica utens is a rather haphazardly formed but seasoned grab bag of modes of inference. This opens up the possibility of, and even the need for, a systematic study of this logica utens. Still following the medievals, Peirce names the latter logica docens.*! The question

then becomes whether our natural logic suffices in the face of moral problems, or whether it needs to be supplemented by a study of the various rules of inference—in this case, moral theories explaining the what

and the why—to prevent our natural reasoning abilities from leading us astray. It seems, however, that the problem with human reasoning discussed earlier cuts across this distinction. In the face of issues of vital

WHO’S AFRAID OF C. S. PEIRCE? 95 importance we can trust neither Jogica utens nor logica docens, and it may be argued that it is often our attempts to correct our logica utens through a logica docens that leads us in the wrong direction. In a way it might be better to speak of ethica utens and ethica docens. Although, as far as I can tell, Peirce never used these terms, they match his general outlook. Ethica utens would refer to the moral beliefs and attitudes that we have internalized in the course of our lives, often without

really knowing where they came from or why we maintain them, and which form the often only partially articulated sets of rules and beliefs we

employ in normal circumstances to evaluate the views and actions of ourselves and others. Hence, this ethica utens, though it includes our moral sentiments, embraces much more than just them alone. Among other things it includes the values we have been brought up with and our

exposure to moral problems, the latter including our exposure to how others deal with moral problems. The views on abortion of the teenage girl I gave at the beginning belong to her ethica utens, and it this ethica utens that forms her primary guide when trying to resolve the moral situ-

ation in which she found herself. Ethica docens, in contrast, refers to deliberately developed ethical viewpoints, standards, or theories, to assist us in those cases where we feel or realize that our ethica utens falls short. Peirce had used his logica utens logica docens distinction to argue that in metaphysics we need a logica docens on the ground that although our logica utens serves us well in practical affairs, we lose ground when entering the purely speculative realm, and hence are prone to lose direction. Regarding moral problems, however, the situation is rather the reverse. As long as we rely on our ethica utens, without asking questions or sec-

ond-guessing ourselves, Peirce thinks that we have the best chance of remaining on solid ground, whereas ethica docens is very much capable of

steering us in the wrong direction, sometimes with disastrous results. Moreover, even if the prescriptions of ethica docens were correct, paying too close attention to ethica docens would still undermine our morality. Transforming our moral sentiments into abstract moral laws, and subsequently applying them to concrete cases, negatively affects our ability to deal with those cases in very much the same way as the billiard player’s shot will be ruined when he seeks to make it by consciously applying the laws of analytical mechanics.” It simply doesn’t work. So where does this all leave us?

96 CORNELIS pvE WAAL An Apology for an Experiental Ethics

Because both ethica utens and ethica docens are compromised, because

our moral sentiments and our moral theories are compromised, we should return to Peirce’s theory of inquiry and see whether we can ground morality within experience, taking into account the accumulated wisdom of others, while being open to the circumstances of the particular situation, as the latter often make a difference.

To examine the applicability of Peirce’s theory of inquiry to moral problems, let us look at the case where a terminally ill cancer patient makes the explicit request to stop further medical treatment. Such a request typically involves a number of people who must all somehow come to terms with it by granting the request, denying it, ignoring it, trying to make the patient change her mind, reconciling the problem with their own beliefs, and so on. Generally, the group involved will be mixed: family members, medical personnel, a parish priest, hospital administrators, and so on. In addition, how vested each of them is will also vary, and for various reasons. It may depend on how close they are to the patient but also on certain abstract but deeply ingrained beliefs about the sanctity of life or the right to self-determination, for example, and on vague empirical beliefs like what kind of person the patient is, whether

the medical situation is indeed as hopeless as the patient thinks, what procedures must be followed, and so on. So a moral problem like this one

comes very naturally with its own community, the members of which

have their own idiosyncrasies, so that resolving the moral problem becomes a communal affair in which any of Peirce’s four methods of fixating beliefs may be utilized, as well as any mixture of them. As our discussion of Peirce’s theory of inquiry showed, applying the scientific method to a concrete case where a patient rejects potentially life-saving medical treatment would ultimately come down to the demand of a free deliberation among people who are all to some degree vested in it, creat-

ing for each of them a genuine problem (without requiring that this problem is the same for all). When the scientific method is applied, their deliberation would be among people who are actively seeking a resolution and who are open to listen to each other while acknowledging their fallibility and being willing to have their beliefs challenged. By incorporating the idiosyncrasies of those who enter the inquiry, the scientific method allows us to remain close to the ethica utens of the

WHO'S AFRAID OF C. S. PEIRCE? 97 community, which includes moral sentiments. This would prevent, as much as is practically feasible and without ignoring our fallibility, that we

are too easily lured by an appealing and potentially misleading ethica docens. At the same time, the open exchange with the views of others would prevent, again as much as is practically feasible and without ignoring our fallibility, an all too dogmatic reliance on prevailing ethica utens. Opting for the scientific method to deal with moral problems implies

that we reject ethical theories as being absolute. In ethics there are no “golden rules.” A strict adherence to ethical theories, such as utilitarianism or Kantianism, involves an exaggerated reliance on ethica docens. There is, however, a long-standing tradition within moral reasoning—a tradition largely ignored by moral philosophers and hesitatingly embraced by Peirce—that goes by the name of casuistry.”? Weary of general abstractions, casuists compare each new case to established cases to determine

how to proceed, instead of subsuming the particular case under some general rule as “Thou shall not kill,” or “Never use another human being merely as a means.” Compared to other approaches in ethics, casuistry comes closest to a dynamic equilibrium of ethica utens and ethica docens, thus allowing more nuanced moral positions that, though fallible, as all our moral positions must be, are more likely to be suited to our moral predicaments.

Recently, casuistry has been revived by Albert Jonsen and Steven Toulmin, who call their approach “New Casuistry.”’* For the casuist, general ethical principles are not the products of theories, hence of a speculative ethica docens, but they are the products of clear cases to which we take them to unambiguously apply, which means that ultimately they

hinge on our moral sentiments, or, more precisely, on our ethica utens. For the casuist, it is these clear cases, not theories, that give meaning to general moral principles and that also give them their authority. The rules are derivatives. For instance, we need no intricate argument to prove that a clear case of child abuse is wrong.*? We know that child abuse is wrong,

not because of certain general principles involving inviolable rights, an abstract calculus of pleasure and pain, or because it violates Kant’s categorical imperative, but because of empirically and socially rooted moral sentiments. And these sentiments are not mere subjective emotions; they are an integral part of an ethica utens that has developed itself by means of that rather haphazardly formed but seasoned grab bag of modes of inference that Peirce called our logica utens. This distinguishes this form of

98 CORNELIS pE WAAL casuistry from a narrow emotivism. Consequently, the casuist argues that instead of theories what is needed is a taxonomy of cases in which we can

situate those situations where our ethica utens breaks down and work from there, in part through a comparative analysis. In this way, casuistry allows us to rely in the moral realm on our logica utens while providing us

with a mechanism for dealing with situations where this fails or falls short. This brings us back to the scientific method, where all involved bring in their ethica utens, as well as their logica utens, and in which both ethica docens and logica docens can be utilized by some to evaluate their own views and those of others, all of this with an eye on how to resolve the specific problem at hand. Can we then overcome the problems with the scientific method raised earlier? I think we can, at least up to a point. First, regarding the problem that reasoning all too easily comes down to rationalization, or sham reasoning, we can counter that the scientific method is best suited to provide

much-needed checks and balances by forcing the discussion into the realm of the community, which forms a veritable marketplace of idiosyncratic views. What is more, since no moral problem is truly unique, there is much to be learned from the experiences of others, so that reasoning is only a part of the picture and comes to play a more subservient role. Second, Peirce’s claim that moral philosophy is in a truly deplorable

state does not really affect the applicability of the scientific method to moral issues, as the scientific method does not rely on moral philosophy at all, though it may use existing ethical theories and principles as tools or theoretical frameworks while addressing moral issues.*° Again, the com-

munal nature of scientific inquiry may serve to prevent theories from being overextended. Far from maintaining a doctrinal attitude, what is needed is a critical common sense with respect to moral issues. A critical common-sensist approach respects what we commonly take for granted within the domain of morality without accepting it blindly; and it accepts the use of reason when dealing with moral problems, but not indiscriminately. Within the domain of morals reason must tread lightly. It should

infuse the debate with reasonableness, not stifle it with an unbending rationality. The critical common-sensist is not only keenly aware of his or her fallibility—both in the realm of sentiments and in the realm of reasoning—but also has a sense when and to what extent the use of reason, or a reliance on sentiment, is appropriate. A Peircean-style new casuistry,

WHO’S AFRAID OF C. S. PEIRCE? 99 where a diverse community of stakeholders together applies the scientific

method to genuine moral problems—problems that are not mere academic exercises but that are forced, momentous, and alive to those who experience or study them—is most likely to inspire a critical commonsensist approach to morality.*” The same cannot be said of the other three methods for fixing belief. The third objection raised above is more problematic. It is the demand

that the inquirers are truly neutral with respect to the matter they are inquiring into, so they can focus entirely on solving the problems at hand,

rather than make their solution match preconceived notions of what should or should not be done. The argument is that it is unlikely that, in contrast to true scientific questions, we will ever find the requisite degree of neutrality when dealing with moral issues. The demand of neutrality, though, could be regarded as a regulative ideal, even if one that is very difficult to live up to, a regulative ideal that becomes operational in the imperative that whenever we are engaged in moral inquiry we should always seek to be as dispassionate as ever and examine each issue from all perspectives we can think of, and not just our own. The same reply can be given to the related objection that the scientific method is really geared toward the long run and is inapplicable to short-

term problems because any particular group of inquirers may lead itself (and others) astray in significant ways even for centuries to come. Apart from the observation that for some issues, such as the prohibition against incest, such a long run seems already reached, one could counter that the imperative just mentioned, which is essentially Peirce’s notion of the scientific attitude, is our best safeguard when dealing with moral issues, as neither our moral sentiments nor our moral reasoning can be trusted. The previous discussion of Peirce’s conception of the scientific method shows that applying it to moral problems can give us a framework that allows us to draw on our moral sentiments and our capability to reason, while staying close to the facts of the matter at hand and bringing in the voices of all parties involved. This prevents us from being too easily swept

away by the strength of an emotion or the convincing force of some a priori argument.” What we should expect from the scientific method are habits of thought and action that are rigid enough to act as leading principles while being flexible enough to adapt themselves to circumstances

100 CORNELIS DE WAAL that are always different—we should expect habits that reflect reasonableness rather than inviolable reason. Put differently, what we need in

the face of moral problems is not more theory but more experience together with a critical common sense to evaluate it, all with the realiza-

tion that we are fallible beings in the world of action as well as in the world of cognition. The scientific method is most likely to give us that.

FIVE

PEIRCE S MORAL’ REALICISM Rosa Maria Mayorga

( vnanes Peirce did not seem to have a consistent view regarding ethics. His occasional remarks on this subject appear to be contradictory at best and cynical at worst. As a result, many have suggested that his com-

ments on ethics, especially those expressed in the 1898 Cambridge Conference lectures, should be dismissed or ignored. I argue in this essay that Peirce’s views on ethics can be best understood by comparing them to his views on scholastic realism and nominalism. Furthermore, when

analyzed in this way, Peirce’s observations on ethics can serve as the grounds for a robust moderate moral realism (a moral “realicism”) that can compare favorably with contemporary metaethical theories.

The Puzzle of Peirce’s Ethics

Charles Peirce delivered the following shocking remarks in the first of the Cambridge Conference Lectures in 1898, which his friend William James charitably set up in a time of dire economic need for Peirce.

{ 101 }

102 ROSA MARIA MAYORGA Ethics, then, even if not a positively dangerous study, as it sometimes proves, is as useless a science as can be conceived. ... Concerning matters of vital importance reasoning is at once an impertinence toward its subject matter and a treason against itself. (CP 1.66771, 1898)

Matters of vital importance must be left to sentiment, that is, to instinct. (CP 1.637, 1898)

Instinct is all but unerring; but reason in all vitally important matters is a treacherous guide. (CP 6.86, 1898)

Peirce had prepared to speak on objective logic, but, we are told, when realizing the technical nature of Peirce’s proposed lectures, James asked him to change the topic to “matters of a vitally important character.”! Peirce was apparently irritated at this request, which is probably why there seems to be a calculated effort on his part to shock his audience. The fact that he had been denied an academic position at Harvard prob-

ably also contributed to an undertone of sarcasm in these lectures. Because of this context, some commentators (Cheryl Misak, for example)

caution that these “remarks simply cannot be taken seriously.”? Christopher Hookway says that they show a “temporary lapse of philosophical good sense,” and hence we should be “discouraged from assigning too much weight to them.”* Hookway takes such remarks as these as an indication that Peirce “took a step further toward James” and his relativism.* Others, in trying to decipher Peirce’s comments on ethics, only “seem to confuse that matter further.”’ As expressed in this Cambridge lecture, Peirce’s position seems to be that of a noncognitivist about ethics: Moral judgments do not aim to represent the world accurately but rather are meant to communicate emotions, desires, or intentions of the sort that are conveyed by commands or prescriptions. The common view has been that this lecture is “not the best place for discerning Peirce’s view about science and vital matters,”° since these comments “fit poorly” with several other comments Peirce made elsewhere on the same subject; for example: Ethics as a positive science must rest on observed facts. (CP 8.158, 1901)

Morality is far more objective than taste. . . . It is true that the majority of writers on ethics in the past have made the root of morals subjective; but the best opinion is very plainly moving in the opposite direction. (CP 2.156, 1903)

Good morals is the kind of human behavior that would come to be

approved if studies of right behavior were carried sufficiently far. (R 673, 1911)

PEIRCE S MORAL” REALICISM 103 In these remarks, Peirce seems to subscribe to a cognitivist (realist) view of ethics, that is, to the stance that at least some moral statements attempt to describe how the world is and therefore fall within the scope of truth, knowledge, and inquiry. My purpose in this essay is to reconcile Peirce’s apparently contradictory ideas. Instead of disregarding the remarks in the Cambridge lectures as a “lapse” in judgment, I argue that a closer look shows a parallel with his comments on scholastic realism and nominalism.’ I compare what I claim is Peirce’s view with those of his fellow pragmatists William James and John Dewey. Toward the end of the essay, I indicate how Peirce’s few comments on ethics can be developed, in conjunction with the rest of his

philosophy, into what I will call a moral “realicism,” a moderate (yet robust) ethical or moral realism.®

Peirce’s Metaphysical “Realicism”

Peirce famously claimed that what distinguished his “pragmaticism” from “other species [of pragmatism] is . . . its strenuous insistence upon the truth of scholastic realism” (CP 5.423, 1905)? of the kind usually asso-

ciated with John Duns Scotus, the medieval philosopher. Elsewhere I have analyzed Peirce’s metaphysics in the light of this claim, and I have shown why his realism (which, following his example of creating neologisms, I have dubbed his “realicism”) was of an even more extreme kind than that of Scotus.'® Peirce’s metaphysical realism, for our purposes, can

be summarized in the claim that there are real entities (generals, or thirds), which include things like real laws, existent individuals (seconds), as well as real possibilities (firsts).'' In the terminology of his categories, his metaphysical realism is evident in the recognition of the importance

of the categories of thirdness and firstness, along with the category of secondness. Peirce sees his brand of realism as countering the nominalist position in metaphysics, which asserts that reality is exhausted by an indefinite number of existent individuals. But for Peirce, the nominalistrealist controversy involves more than abstract claims about the ontological status of laws and classes: “Though the question of realism and nominalism has its roots in the technicalities of logic, its branches reach about our life” (W 2:487, 1871).!* Hence, Peirce’s realism is the key idea of a systematic view not only of metaphysics but also of knowledge and

104 ROSA MARIA MAYORGA science in general, and, I want to claim, also of ethics (and ultimately, even of religion).'° Let me begin with metaphysics. Peirce’s rejection of nominalism in the metaphysical sphere is well known. In his more sensational pronouncements, it took the following form: Those who have used the word individual have not been aware that absolute individuality is merely ideal... . The absolute individual can not only not be realized in sense or thought, but cannot exist, properly speaking. ... All, therefore, that we perceive or think, or that exists, is general. (W 2:390—91, 1870)

And, to |singulars] I have denied all immediate reality. (W 2:180, 1868)

Now Peirce did not doubt that individuals, “in the far wider sense of that which can be in only one place at one time” (W 2:180, 1868), are real,

nor did he doubt that they exist.'* I am now referring, again, to the distinction used by scholastic realists, which Peirce adopted and adapted, between reality and existence: Although all that exists is real, not everything real is existent (hence Scotus’s claim that universals are real).'” The mode of being of individuals is secondness, Peirce’s category that encompasses existence, and because of “the practical exigencies of life,” secondness is the “most prominent” of all three categories—it is the category of the here and now, the category of our everyday world (CP 8.266, 1903). But secondness, is an experience. It comes out most fully in the shock of reaction between ego and non-ego .. . the double consciousness of effort and resistance. That is something which cannot properly be conceived. For to conceive it is to generalize it; and to generalize it is to miss altogether the hereness and nowness which is its essence. (CP 8.266, 1903)

When Peirce says that a singular has no immediate reality, he is referring to the fact that a second cannot be an immediate object of thought, since, again, once conceived, a second is generalized (and thereby turned into a third). Unlike metaphysical nominalism, “whose doctrine is that reality and existence are coextensive, that ‘real’ and ‘existent’ have the same meaning, Peirce’s metaphysical realism recognizes the category of thirdness as real, yet not existent (CP 5.503, 1905). Hence, Peirce can claim that laws, relations, and concepts are real and can therefore explain the

PEIRCE S MORAL” REALICISM 105 predictive success of science and render the quest for necessary connections among phenomena intelligible, which nominalism, by recognizing individuals (seconds) as the only category, fails to do, and thereby blocks “the road to inquiry” (CP 1.170, 1905). But nominalism, as Peirce uses the term, is not confined to metaphysics. Any theory that emphasizes the importance of the individual is, by his lights, nominalistic and therefore flawed. Cartesianism, for example, is nominalistic from an epistemological standpoint since the ultimate guarantor of knowledge is the individual (that is, the individual’s “clear and distinct ideas”). Peirce’s emphasis on the final opinion of the community of inquirers as the ultimate guarantor of knowledge attempts to correct this nominalist mistake. Indeed Peirce claims that “all modern philosophy of every sect has been nominalistic,” and practically no one escapes Peirce’s criticism—Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Mill, even Kant and Hegel, at one point or another are labeled nominalists (CP 1.19, 1903). To many, Peirce’s criticism of “individualistic” philosophies is a bit unexpected, for pragmatism, as formulated by Peirce, is the claim that “the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life” (CP 5.412, 1905). One would then expect that individual experiences and actions would be the focus of the theory, since it is usually through these that meanings of terms and concepts are tested. But that is not what Peirce means at all. If pragmaticism really made Doing to be the Be-all and the End-all of life, that would be its death. For to say that we live for the mere sake of action, as action, regardless of the thought it carries out, would be to say that there is no such thing as rational purport. (CP 5.429, 1905) It is not mere action, but the development of an idea which is the purpose of thought; and so a doubt is cast upon the ultra pragmatic notion that action is the sole end and purpose of thought. (CP 8.212, 1905)

Peirce’s concern to shift the focus from the individual (it is the individual who is the source of error for Peirce) to the community can be seen again in a normative context. The question whether the genus homo has any existence except as individuals is the question whether there is anything of any more dignity, worth, and importance than individual happiness, individual aspirations, and individual life. ... Whether men really have anything

106 ROSA MARIA MAYORGA in common, so that the community is to be considered as an end in itself. (W 2:487, 1871)!°

Nominalism (individualism) as here understood gives value only to selfish concerns—one’s own happiness, one’s own life. For Peirce, this again is a mistake; it fails to acknowledge the value of the community, the value and worth of humankind itself (for Peirce, a third).

Solving the Puzzle: Peirce’s Moral “Realicism”

I think that Peirce’s comments regarding “vitally important topics” can be understood best in the light of his critique of nominalism. As Peirce uses the term here, “vitally important matters” are those everyday matters having to do with the individual’s existence and survival; those situations where we deal with real life issues about how we should act. Now these matters are certainly important, but it is a nominalist mistake to assume that these concerns are the most “vital” in the end (Peirce’s irony is showing here), for consider the following: Among vitally important truths there is one which I verily believe— and which men of infinitely deeper insight than mine have believed— to be solely supremely important. It is that vitally important facts are of all truths the veriest trifles. For the only vitally important matter is my concern, business, and duty—or yours. Now you and J—what are we? Mere cells of the social organism. Our deepest sentiment pronounces the verdict of our own insignificance. (CP 1.673, 1898)

Recall that Peirce claims that ethics is a useless science and that reason-

ing is actually an “impertinence” to vitally important subjects. By “ethics” here Peirce means a “science of right and wrong,” a science that informs the individual as to how she should act, a science of the “conduct of life.” But a “science” implies the use of logic and reason, and again, Peirce is disdainful and pessimistic of the individual’s use of reason. In the great decisions, I do not believe it is safe to trust to individual reason. ... In practical affairs, in matters of vital importance, it is very easy to exaggerate the importance of ratiocination. Man is so vain of his power of reason! (CP 1.623—26, 1898)

Do not harbor any expectation that the study of logic can improve your judgment in matters of business, family, or other departments of

PEIRCE S MORAL” REALICISM 107 ordinary life. Clear as it seems to me that certain dicta of my conscience are unreasonable, and though I know it may very well be wrong, yet I trust to its authority emphatically rather than to any rationalistic morality. This is the only rational course. (CP 2.177, 1902)

Just as the individual should not use individual ratiocination as the grounding for claims to knowledge, individual ratiocination is not to be trusted in matters pertaining to how we should conduct ourselves either. Rather, Peirce prescribes that we act according to “sentiment” or “instinct” instead. Now by telling us to act according to “sentiment,” Peirce is not suggesting that we act according to our feelings or raw emotions. His notion

of “sentiment” or “instinct” is that of an inherited characteristic, the result of evolution, which has as its aim the preservation of the community over the individual (one manifestation of this is, as we saw in the previous quotation, an individual’s conscience). Hence the prescription: In regard to the greatest affairs of life, the wise man follows his heart and does not trust his head. This should be the method of every man, no matter how powerful his intellect. (CP 1.653, 1898)

Invariably follow the dictates of Instinct in preference to those of Reason when such conduct will answer your purpose: that is the prescription of Reason herself. (CP 2.177, 1902)

In terms of the conduct of our everyday life, then, Peirce advises against the individual’s sole use of his reason to determine how he should act. He

who uses reasoning alone as the basis for his conduct in “at least nine such cases out of every ten... blunders seriously” (CP 2.176, 1902). This reflects Peirce’s conviction that “the powers of reasoning” in any but the most elementary way are “a somewhat uncommon gift, about as uncommon as a talent for music,” which is why “Reason [is] more than a thousand times as fallible as Instinct” (CP 1.657, 1898; 2.176, 1902). Indeed, Peirce claims, the superiority of instinct over reasoning in everyday matters manifests itself in what are considered the virtues. The mental qualities we most admire in all human beings except our several selves are the maiden’s delicacy, the mother’s devotion, manly courage, and other inheritances that have come to us from the biped who did not yet speak; while the characters that are most contemptible take their origin in reasoning. The very fact that everybody so

108 ROSA MARIA MAYORGA ridiculously overrates his own reasoning is sufficient to show how superficial the faculty is. For you do not hear the courageous man vaunt his own courage, or the modest woman boast of her modesty, or the really loyal plume themselves on their honesty. (CP 1.627, 1898)

Peirce refers to the use of sentiment, or “sentimentalism,” as “conservatism, where this latter is the expression of the community’s “system of morals... the traditional wisdom of ages of experience” (CP 1.50, 1896). We can see here a parallel with his account of how we are “destined” to get at the truth of things in the final opinion of a community of inquirers. In terms of acquiring knowledge of the world, as humans, we have developed through evolution the general knack of “guessing correctly.” This ensures that we are on the right path to the truth of things, in a community of inquirers, where individual errors are factored out.'” As to how we should best conduct our individual lives, the best way to avoid error again

is to factor out individual attempts at reasoning, and our best shot at this is to act according to “sentiment,” this socially inherited wisdom. This sentiment, or instinct, shifts the focus from the individual to the community. The fundamental problem of ethics is not, therefore, What is right, but, What am I prepared deliberately to accept as the statement of what I want to do, what am I to aim at, what am I after? .. . Now logic is a study of the means of attaining the end of thought. It cannot solve that problem until it clearly knows what that end is. (CP 2.198, 1903)

But even when the individual acts according to “sentiment,” or conscience, she is still on a nominalistic level: The concern is still with her individual actions, or seconds. We would expect that Peirce distinguishes a higher level, one encompassing thirds more exclusively, and indeed he does—when he speaks of “pure ethics.” What then, is the purpose of a man? That is the question of pure ethics, a very great question which must be disposed of before the logic of practical belief can be entered upon to any good effect. (CP 7.185, 1901)

Unlike “plain” ethics, which erroneously focuses on individual ratio-

nality about the right thing to do in particular cases, pure ethics (also called “esthetics” and “philosophical ethics”) is concerned with the “alm, or purpose of man”—the “ideal,” the “admirable,” in other words,

PEIRCE S MORAL” REALICISM 109 a third. This is the level where talk of rationality is appropriate. Peirce proposes that this ideal is the development of “reasonableness.” And the highest of all possible aims is concrete reasonableness. (CP 2.34, 1902)

Accordingly, the pragmaticist does not make the summum bonum to consist in action, but makes it to consist in that process of evolution whereby the existent comes more and more to embody those generals which were just now said to be destined, which is what we strive to express in calling them reasonable. (CP 5.433, 1905)

But what exactly is this concrete “reasonableness”? The phrase seems an odd choice to describe the highest aims in ethics. To understand what Peirce means we need to consider, first, his metaphysics again and then how he describes his pragmatic maxim. For Peirce, a defining characteristic of thirdness (or the “general,” or a law of nature) is that its being consists of “governing individual events.”

No collection of actual individual events, however, can ever exhaust a law, for example, since a law is future-oriented; but at the same time, a law requires individual events over which to govern in order for it to be law.'® Reason is a third, for it takes “individual reactions” and comes up with a general explanation. The essence of Reason is such that its being never can have been completely perfected. It always must be in a state of incipiency, of growth. ... The development of Reason requires as a part of it the occurrence of more individual events than ever can occur... . This development of Reason consists, you will observe, in embodiment, that is, in manifestation. (CP 1.615, 1903)

In his evolutionary cosmology, Peirce gives an account of “law-likeness” as the tendency of all things to take on habits. This habit is a generalizing

tendency, and as such a third. All regularities, or laws (thirds), are the result of evolution, and just as “the physical evolution works toward ends,” in the same way, “the one sole fundamental law of mind” is that “mental

action works toward ends.” Thus, the universe exhibits a continuum or continuity; this is Peirce’s notion of synechism. At any time, however, an element of pure chance (tychism) survives and will remain “until the world becomes an absolutely perfect, rational, and symmetrical system, in which mind is at last crystallized in the infinitely distant future” (CP 6.33, 1891).

110 ROSA MARIA MAYORGA The highest ideal of human conduct, then, is to contribute to this

natural evolutionary tendency toward thirdness already present throughout—a “rationalization of the universe,” a cultivation of “reasonableness.” I do not see how one can have a more satisfying ideal of the admirable than the development of Reason so understood. The one thing whose admirableness is not due to an ulterior reason is Reason itself comprehended in all its fullness, so far as we can comprehend it. (CP 1.615, 1903)

And how is this “reasonableness” rendered “concrete”? It is not achieved by dwelling on “topics of vital importance,” that is, not by dwell-

ing on our own private concerns, but “in those universal things with which philosophy deals, the factors of the universe, is man to find his highest occupation” (CP 1.673, 1898). But how do we actually make the world “more reasonable”? As it turns

out, a conservative sentimentalism will put us on the road to concrete reasonableness, since it prescribes putting the welfare of others before oneself; the world becomes more reasonable.” This is another way of expressing some Christian and Buddhist ideals. Take for the lantern of your footsteps the cold light of reason and regard your business, your duty, as the highest thing, and you can only rest in one of those goals or the other. But suppose you embrace, on the contrary, a conservative sentimentalism. ... Your quite highest

business and duty, becomes, as everybody knows, to recognize a higher business than your business .. . a generalized conception of duty which completes your personality by melting it into the neighboring parts of the universal cosmos. . . . That is that the supreme commandment of the Buddhisto-christian religion is, to generalize, to complete the whole system even until continuity results and the distinct individuals weld together. (CP 1.673, 1898)

These religious ideals, according to Peirce, come closest to capturing the “generalizing” characteristic, the further development of Reason itself, which is the highest of all possible aims. Again, this is a third, consistent with his metaphysical claims about the truth of scholastic realism. In deciding any special question of conduct it is often quite right to allow weight to different conflicting considerations and calculate their resultant. But it is quite different in regard to that which is to be the

PEIRCE S MORAL’ REALICISM 111 aim of all endeavor. The object admirable that is admirable per se must, no doubt, be general. (CP 1.613, 1903)

Peirce’s account of ethics squares well with his pragmatic theory of meaning. The pragmatic maxim is the best kind of definition of a concept, “a still higher grade of clearness of thought,” for it claims that the ultimate meaning of an intellectual conception is given by a consideration of its effects, “so that the meaning of the concept does not lie in any

individual reactions at all, but in the manner in which those reactions contribute to that development” (CP 5.3, 1902). This, of course, involves thirdness, and in the context of ethics, the “development” refers to concrete reasonableness. The importance of the matter for pragmatism is obvious. For if the meaning of a symbol consists in how it might cause us to act, it is plain that this “how” cannot refer to the description of mechanical motions

that it might cause, but must intend to refer to a description of the action as having this or that aim. In order to understand pragmatism, therefore, well enough to subject it to intelligent criticism, it is incumbent upon us to inquire what an ultimate aim, capable of being pursued in an indefinitely prolonged course of action, can be. (CP 5.135, 1903)

Peirce’s account of ethics also squares well with his logic. In one comparison that he makes between “the ideals of good logic” and ethics, we can see again how the parallelisms with firstness, secondness, and thirdness apply.*? When conduct, as well as reasoning, “seems fine in itself,” this is based on a feeling (firstness). Consistency of conduct and of (necessary) reasoning deals with secondness, since it involves comparisons with individual instances. Thirdness is involved when the focus in ethics

is the general effect that our conduct would have. In a similar way, the kind of reasoning that can be described as “rational conjectures,” involves

a general kind of conduct: The (justified) assumption that it likely will lead to the truth.?! We saw that three kinds of considerations go to support ideals of conduct. They were, first, that certain conduct seems fine in itself. Just so certain conjectures seem likely and easy in themselves. Secondly, we wish our conduct to be consistent. Just so the ideal [of] necessary rea-

soning is consistency simply. Third, we consider what the general effect would be of thoroughly carrying out our ideals. Just so certain

112 ROSA MARIA MAYORGA ways of reasoning recommend themselves because if persistently carried out they must lead to the truth. (CP 1.608, 1903)

Truth and Ethics in the Pragmatist Tradition

Although they all shared the conviction that the pragmatic maxim was at the heart of pragmatism, from the very beginning there were marked differences between the doctrines of Peirce, James, and Dewey. One obvious divergence was in their approach to the notion of truth. Whereas Peirce

believed that there is objective truth, James conceived of truth as the “expedient” in the way of belief, and Dewey spoke of how someone’s knowing modifies and transforms its object. I argue that just as Peirce’s realist approach to truth differs from James’s and Dewey’s more nominalist approach, so too Peirce’s realist approach to moral theory differs from James’s and Dewey’s more nominalist conception.” Peirce was famously a realist about truth, albeit with some subtle but important nuances. Although he thought that the truth “is SO—is cor-

rect, or just—whether you or I or anybody thinks it is so or not” (CP 2.135, 1902), he also claimed that “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real” (W 3:273, 1878). For Peirce, the community of inquirers plays a fundamental role in defining both truth and reality. By associating truth and reality with a community, Peirce avoids the relativism of nominalism, that is, of associating truth with the individual. By insisting that there is one Truth, and that the way to get at it is through persistent (though fallible) investigation by “the experiential method of settling opinion,” Peirce means to avoid the pitfalls of private prejudices and idiosyncrasies, in other words, of nominalism (CP 5.406, 1878).”°

James, in contrast, makes the central condition for a belief’s being true

dependent on its functioning satisfactorily in the life of the believer.” James famously argued for this claim in the context of religious matters in “The Will to Believe,” where he claims that whereas “logicians” (e.g.,

Peirce) who argue for the belief in “truth itself” rule out “our willing nature,” it is evident, James claims, that our “passional nature not only lawfully may, but must decide.”* In “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” James develops his theory of truth further, pointing out that in “empirical matters” (as opposed to matters of religious belief) beliefs

PEIRCE S MORAL’ REALICISM 113 cannot function in this way unless they are “verifiable,” but he sometimes speaks as if “veri-fication” is the process whereby beliefs are actually made to be true. He also refers to the “cash value” of true beliefs, and suggests that “the true... is only the expedient in the way of our thinking.”° This provoked harsh criticisms (including Peirce’s), even though James did add that he meant “expedient in the long run, and on the whole of course.””” James ultimately tried to steer away from what Peirce would have con-

sidered to be a nominalistic stance, by making a distinction between Truth Absolute, “that ideal vanishing point toward which we imagine that all our temporary truths will someday converge”—vaguely reminiscent of Peirce’s notion of the final opinion—and concrete (“temporary”) truths.*® But again, James was unsuccessful in reconciling the relativism of concrete truths (where the individual’s interests are relevant to deter-

mining her truths) and the supposedly more objective Absolute Truth (where it is the “convergence” of an ideal community of inquirers that determines it). In his comments on truth, Dewey is ambivalent; he seems to take a

definite step toward realism, but he is pulled toward a nominalism as well. We can hear distinct echoes of Peirce in the following, where Dewey underlines the role of future-oriented activity in determining the meaning of propositions: The meaning of propositions is not exhausted, or even contained, in their reference to what is past; that, on the contrary, the point of a proposition is to take something past, something done, 17 its bearings upon the future consequences which making the proposition helps us to reach. (MW 6:40)??

But then consider how Dewey uses the language of secondness: how truth “can exist only” and (a la James) how a proposition is “made true”

and how truth’s being depends on being “verified.” Note, also, how “exist” and “be” are emphasized below: Truth, then, can exist only in the testing of the claim, in making good through the subsequent acts it prescribes. (MW 6:38)

[A proposition] is made true (or false) in process of fulfilling or frustrating in use its own proposal. (MW 6:39) To be a truth means to be verified by use under test conditions. (MW 6:46)

114 ROSA MARIA MAYORGA Just as James’s and Dewey’s theories of truth incorporate some of Peirce’s ideas but ultimately err on the side of nominalism (by emphasizing individuals, or secondness), I claim that a parallel trend is apparent in their ethical theories. Indeed, Peirce himself seems to allude to this when he analyzes different moral theories and divides them depending on how “the mode of being of the end” fits the categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. The truth is that there have been three grand classes of rationalistic moralists who have differed from one another upon the much more important question of the mode of being of the end. Namely, there have been those who have made the end purely subjective, a feeling of pleasure; there have been those who have made the end purely objective and material, the multiplication of the race; and finally there have been those who have attributed to the end the same kind of being that a law of nature has, making it lie in the rationalization of the universe. (CP 1.590, 1903)

In the first of these “grand classes,” Peirce refers, I believe, to hedonis-

tic utilitarians as those who have made the end “a feeling of pleasure,” for, as we know, this type of utilitarianism equates happiness (or goodness) with maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain for the majority. Recall that one characterization of firstness is that it is a quality, or a feeling (and feelings, of course, are subjective). The second kind of moralist is described as one whose end is “objective” and “material,” such as “the multiplication of the race.” Elsewhere Peirce refers to this second kind as concerned with “extend|ing] the existence of a subject,” whether “psychical, as a soul” or “physical, as a race” (CP 1.589, 1903). I believe Peirce would classify this as a concern with

secondness (and hence nominalistic) since it is a concern with existent individuals, whether a concern for one’s soul, or for many.*° The third kind of moralist is the Peircean kind, one whose ideal end “is not definable in advance” but rather “is that which tends to realize itself in the long run” (CP 1.589, 1903).°' This, of course, refers to the growth and development of reasonableness, a third.

In “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” James argues that “there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy,” that is, one “dogmatically made up in advance” (James 1956, 184). As in his theory of truth, James incorporates some of Peirce’s ideas, but the result is decidedly un-Peircean.

PEIRCE S MORAL REALICISM 115 We can see elements of Peirce’s ideas in James’s claim that the philoso-

pher’s aim is to “to find an account of the moral relations that obtain among things, which will weave them into the unity of a stable system” (this is reminiscent of Peirce’s notion of continuity, or synechism) and that “ethical science must be ready to revise its conclusions from day to day” (James 1956, 208) since there can be no “final truth” until “the last

man has had his experience and said his say” (this is reminiscent of Peirce’s notion of fallibility) (James 1956, 184). James also considers the utilitarians’ contribution to ethics, that is, the fact that goodness needs to take some account of the association with bodily pleasure (“so many of our ideals .. . must have arisen from the association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and reliefs from pain”) (James 1956, 186), but he then dismisses the theory, as Peirce does, as being overly simplistic. James’s ethics, like Peirce’s, seem to be forward-looking, and to have some dependence on the community (like Peirce’s theory of truth). There is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we contribute to the race’s moral life. James 1956, 184)

And James also makes the point that, as Peirce would say, there cannot be thirdness without secondness,”* when, referring to “good” or “ill”; he says that “it appears that such words can have no application or relevancy in a world in which no sentient life exists” (James 1956, 189). James also seems to recognize thirdness in the claim that “real ethical relations exist in a purely human world” (James 1956, 210). But then nominalism rears its ugly head again, for James claims that goodness, badness, “must be realized somewhere in order really to exist” (James 1956, 90). This talk of existence is secondness all over again, as can also be seen in his question, “How can such an inorganic abstract character of imperativeness . . . exist?” (James 1956, 195). Furthermore, James focuses again on the individual when he makes the individual conscious-

ness as the basis and the creator of goodness/badness, coming dangerously close to an ethical relativism. Moral relations now have their status, in that being’s consciousness. So far as he feels anything to be good, he makes it good. It is good, for him; and being good for him, is absolutely good, for he is the sole creator of values in that universe, and outside of his opinion things have no moral character at all. (James 1956, 190)

116 ROSA MARIA MAYORGA However he may straighten out his system, it will be a right system; for beyond the facts of his own subjectivity there is nothing moral in the world. (James 1956, 191)

Multiply the thinkers into a pluralism, and we find realized for us ...a world in which no one “objective” truth, but only a multitude of “subjective” opinions, can be found. (James 1956, 192) If one ideal judgment be objectively better than another, that betterness must be made flesh by being lodged concretely in someone’s actual perception. It cannot float in the atmosphere. (James 1956, 193)

But James tries to rescue himself from the brink of ethical subjectivism (or as he calls it, moral skepticism),*° for he obviously does not consider

this position to be the answer. He says at the outset, for example, that “the philosopher . . . will not be a skeptic,” laboring all the while to discover “a stable and systematic moral universe” (James 1956, 213); James tries to do this by making the claim that “every de facto claim creates in so far forth an obligation” (James 1956, 195). But in the end he falls into

an ethical relativism—goodness/badness are relative to an individual consciousness, and furthermore, they are arbitrary, based on the individual’s feeling, or desire. This consciousness must make the one ideal right by feeling it to be right, the other wrong by feeling it to be wrong. (James 1956, 193) Take any demand, however slight, which any creature, however weak, may make. Ought it not, for its own sake, be satisfied? The only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is desired. (James 1956, 195) The only force of appeal to us, which either a living God or an abstract ideal order can wield, is found in the “everlasting ruby vaults” of our own human hearts. (James 1956, 196)

The words “good,” “bad,” and “obligation” . .. mean no absolute natures, independent of personal support. They are objects of feeling and desire, which have no foothold or anchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds. (James 1956, 197)

Although James’s reference to feelings in his theory seems to point to Peirce’s position that sentiments, or instincts (and not individual reason), should guide our actions regarding “vitally important topics,” actually James’s claim is quite different from Peirce’s. Here James is speaking of

PEIRCE S MORAL” REALICISM 117 the ideal, or aim of all ethics, and he bases it on the individual’s feeling (a second); whereas for Peirce, “sentiment” refers to the collective wisdom of a culture (a third), which is superior to reasoning when making everyday decisions. However, for Peirce, the ideal, or aim of (esthetics) ethics, is tied to synechism and the growth of reasonableness (a third as well). Indeed, James’s position contrasts markedly with Peirce’s.

James concludes that the most universal principle for ethics, then, should be “to satisfy as many demands as we can” even though the demand “may be for anything under the sun,” for all demands are prima facie respectable and every demand “is a good” (James 1956, 201). There is really no more ground for supposing that all our demands can be accounted for by one universal underlying kind of motive than there is ground for supposing that all physical phenomena are cases of a single law. (James 1956, 201)”

As in the theory of truth, Dewey, in his account of ethics in “The Construction of the Good,” takes a step away from James and one toward Peirce, but ultimately goes off in a direction of his own. Dewey recognizes

the false dichotomy implied by James, that “either there are fixed and eternal values or else there is no value beyond whatever we actually want” (Haack and Lane 2006, 395). James, of course, chooses the latter to base his ethics on. Dewey claims that the system (religion) that employed the

former has been “undermined by the conclusions of modern science”; and although, like James, he sees merit in the utilitarian theory that “connects the theory of values with concrete experiences of desires and satis-

faction” (LW 4:206), he finds it ultimately lacking. He suggests an “experimental empiricism” that uses modern scientific and technological methods and means to test consequences of actions and come up with

“satisfactory” as opposed to merely “satisfying,” and “desirable” as opposed to merely desired, values (LW 4:206-7). Here, Dewey is obviously trying to escape the nominalism of James’s theory. In other claims Dewey also nods toward Peirce (in recognizing that the mere existence of a desire does not necessarily make it valuable, and in recognizing the future-directedness of value, its connections and interactions), as can be seen variously below: To call an object a value is to assert that it satisfies or fulfills certain conditions. Function and status in meeting conditions is a different matter from bare existence. The fact that something is desired only raises the question of its desirability; it does not settle it. (LW 4:207)

118 ROSA MARIA MAYORGA To say that something satisfies is to report something as an isolated finality. To assert that it is satisfactory is to define it in its connections and interactions. To declare something satisfactory is to assert that it meets specifiable conditions. It is, in effect, a judgment that the thing “will do.” It involves a prediction; it contemplates a future in which the thing will continue to serve; it will do. (LW 4:208) A judgment about what is to be desired and enjoyed is, on the other hand, a claim on future action. (LW 4:210) It is futile, even silly, to suppose that some quality that is directly pres-

ent constitutes the whole of the thing presenting the quality. It does not do so when the quality is that of being hot or fluid or heavy, and it does not when the quality is that of giving pleasure, or being enjoyed. (LW 4:213)

But ultimately, again, Dewey's theory also ends up with a nominalistic twist. Since “judgments about values are judgments about the conditions and the results of experienced objects,” they should be “judgments about that which should regulate the formation of our desires, affections, and enjoyments” (LW 4:212). Dewey’s proposal is, then, that we investigate “the connections in existence [my emphasis] of what we like and enjoy” and then have these serve as our values (LW 4:212). Like James, the existent is made the basis for the value, only in this case, it is an analysis of many existents that will yield the values. We can see how Dewey’s experimental empiricism is closer to Peirce’s

community-based notion of sentiment and instinct, but in insisting on existent likes and enjoyments it emphasizes secondness to the detriment of thirdness, and hence, I want to claim, is ultimately nominalistic.

Peirce’s Relevance to Moral Theory Today

I promised to say something about how Peirce’s theory points to a robust ethical realism. Let me try to give a brief sketch.°° The basic area of contention between ethical realists and ethical anti-

realists has been the status of moral statements. Typically, the ethical realist contends that since moral statements of the kind “Mary is a good person” and “Adultery is wrong” aim to describe how the world is, these amount to moral facts. Moral statements are also considered to be objective, that is, not dependent on any particular person’s or group’s

PEIRCE S MORAL’ REALICISM 119 beliefs or practices. Ethical subjectivism and ethical relativism make the

rightness of an action dependent entirely on either personal or social approval. Realists are also characteristically cognitivists, that is, they believe moral facts are knowable (truth-evaluable). Subjectivism and relativism are considered a kind of cognitivism: specifically, of ethical naturalism. Naturalists believe that moral facts are reducible to natural facts, whose existence can be confirmed, at least in principle, by scientific theories. The existence of personal or social approval is at least scientifically determinable, hence the naturalism of subjectivism and relativism; and because ethical naturalism is a kind of cognitivism, both subjectivists

and relativists take moral judgments to be truth-evaluable. Typically,

ethical realists are nonreductionists and therefore nonnaturalists. Antirealists of the noncognitivist kind, in alleging that moral statements are merely expressions of sentiments, deny that there are literal moral truths, and hence that there are no moral facts. For the ethical realist, moral statements are prescriptive as well as descriptive in nature, for they prescribe what ought to be the case in terms of individual behavior. Ethical realists, then, embrace at least the following three propositions: 1. Ethical claims purport to state facts about the world (attributing ethical properties to actions, persons, etc.) and so are true or false by either accurately representing the facts or not. 2. At least some ethical claims are true. 3. Ethical (moral) facts are objective. A number of metaphysical and epistemological problems arise, of course,

when one tries to explain what kinds of things these moral facts are and how we come to know them. Mackie famously characterized these “objective values” as having “queer” properties, comparing them to transcendent

Platonic forms. The trend in the realist camp nowadays has been mostly toward naturalistic or semantic solutions that, in trying to avoid strange ontologies, in the end provide unsatisfying accounts of the nature of the normativity and objectivity endemic in a full-bodied ethical realism. A case can be made for the claim that we can find the makings of a kind of moral realism in Peirce, as I have argued above, though he never explic-

itly argued for one. Extreme ethical realists usually insist that the truth conditions for claims about ethical standards need not refer at all to people or their capacities and limitations; rather these claims are grounded

120 ROSA MARIA MAYORGA in some wholly extrahuman reality, whether supernatural, transcendental, or the like. Ethical realists who prefer a more sparse ontology have gone the other route, opting for more “scientific” explanations, where moral properties and facts are reduced to natural properties and facts. But Peirce’s brand of moral realism would be of a more moderate kind, and by that I mean one with a richer ontology than the latter, and one that, unlike the former, is sensitive to human reality, that is, one where human experience is included as part of the (natural) world. Now, there

have been many attempts at coming up with a viable ethical realist theory.°’ However, I believe that Peirce offers us a unique opportunity for developing a robust moderate moral realism that does not ultimately rely on naturalistic explanations (of the sort traditionally employed by the sciences). Peirce’s pragmaticism already includes a theory of reality, a theory of truth, a method of inquiry (including the notion of fallibilism), an ontology (including the categories, evolutionary cosmology), a theory of continuity (synechism), all of which can be used to try to solve some of the metaphysical and epistemological problems characteristic of the ethical realist position.°® As one would expect, there are many varieties of what can be categorized as broadly realist theories. I will mention briefly some contemporary examples.°? Russ Shafer-Landau provides an account that tries to get around some of the problems that plague naturalistic-type truth conditions for moral

facts. Some of these problems arise as a result of trying to distance a theory from the extreme objectivist stance. An interesting case is Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, who considers it “a virtue” that his view offers “no men-

tion of objectivity or existence” since he believes that an account that rejects complete “independence from the mental” and somehow includes “personal value” is still “a perfectly respectable . . . realist position.”*° There are several versions of this “preferred perspective” or “stancedependent” view.*' However, more “conservative” ethical realists, who consider objectivity and independence of moral facts essential features of an ethical realism, regard such theories as going too far in the direction of an ethical subjectivism. Shafer-Landau takes a decided step away from

such views and toward objectivity: “The moral standards that fix the moral facts are not made true by virtue of their ratification from within any given actual or hypothetical perspective.”** However, in spite of Shafer-Landau’s nod toward objectivity, his theory could be considered

PEIRCE S MORAL’ REALICISM 121 by realists as still lacking, for he seems to lean too much toward a natural-

ism when he claims that “natural facts do exhaustively compose moral ones.”*’ This assertion is seen as problematic, for it makes the theory

come dangerously close to a naturalistic fallacy.“ An account that acknowledges the reflective and deliberative nature of ethics and construes ethical properties and facts as objective, recognizes their normativity, while remaining nonnatural in its ontological status, is the desiderata for a robust moral realism. Peirce’s philosophy has within it the necessary components to achieve such an account. One might be tempted to think, however, that because of his scientific background and his endorsement of the scientific method, Peirce might

lean toward a natural, as opposed to a nonnatural realism, as I want to

claim. To recapitulate: Nonnaturalism denotes the nonreductionist metaphysical thesis that moral properties are real and are not identical or

reducible to any natural property or properties.” Naturalism, in turn, claims that moral properties are reducible to natural properties and that we come to know about such natural properties through observation and

scientific inquiry. I will argue that the case for Peirce’s nonnaturalist stance can be made by invoking his pragmatism. To say that I hold that the import, or adequate ultimate interpretation, of a concept is contained, not in any deed or deeds that will ever be done, but in a habit of conduct, or general moral determination of whatever procedure there may come to be, is no more than to say that I am a pragmaticist. (CP 5.504, 1905)

Here we find an answer as to why Peirce’s account would be nonreductionist (nonnatural)—although moral properties are directly related to natural properties, they are not identical, or reducible to them, just as ultimate interpretations of concepts, scientific laws, and so on, are not identical or reducible to their instantiations (that would amount to nominalism).*° Peirce’s metaphysical “realicism” can account for moral properties being real, although they do not exist as natural properties do, and hence cannot be the object of scientific inquiry, as natural properties are. Moral properties are knowable, however, not through the use of science (nor by “ethics,” the “science of right and wrong”) but rather by “sentiment” and the development of concrete reasonableness. Concerns that “sentiment” or “conservatism,” as Peirce calls it, might lead to an arrest of moral progress by promoting society’s status quo can be addressed by

122 ROSA MARIA MAYORGA pointing to il lume naturale, and our communal tendency to get things right eventually.”

The following, then, is a sketch of what I think Peirce’s moral “realicism” might look like:

1. Ethical facts mirror facts about the world—they are true or false, but

truth and falsity are linked to a community (this is the link to his pragmatic theory of truth, and synechism). 2. At least some ethical claims are true, just as at least some of our beliefs are true (though we can’t be sure of which—this is his fallibilism). 3. Ethical facts are objective/independent but in an interesting way—just as truth and reality are independent of what you or I may think but “not independent of thought in general,” ethical facts are independent of what you or I may think but not independent of reasonableness in general (this is tied to his scholastic realism and to synechism). For Peirce, the real is not to be found in a Platonic realm, nor is it to be confined exclusively to existent things. In Peirce’s ontology, there are real yet nonexistent entities, and these fall in the category of thirds. A law of nature is a paradigm of a third, for it is general—it refers to all possible things in the future guided by it, and not merely to those that have existed in the past and that exist now. Yet thirds, though they don’t exist as such, are still “a part of the world.” We could account for the reality of ethical

facts in the same way. Ethical facts need not be mysterious Platonic “queer” objects, nor do they need to be reduced to natural properties and facts of the kind investigated by the empirical sciences. Ethical facts, as

prescriptions, have a lawlike nature, and would fit in the category of thirds. Peirce’s philosophy also provides an epistemological and methodolog-

ical basis for an ethical realism that acknowledges the importance of deliberation and evaluation. Peirce’s scientific method provides the standard for getting at truths about the world—it is a way of reaching conclusions that, if it be persisted in long enough by a community of inquirers with a sincere intent, would eventually correct all errors. Again, Peirce’s

description of truth (and reality) is expressed in terms of this human perspective. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this

PEIRCE S MORAL” REALICISM 123 opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality. (W 3:274, 1878)

But Peirce is not a relativist about truth: For him, truth is objective; it is there to be discovered, and we have developed, through evolution, a capacity for “guessing things right.” However, we need to adopt a fallibilistic attitude, for we can never be absolutely sure of our conclusions. A similar case can be made for ethical knowledge. Ethical truths are objective, and they can be discovered through reflection. But ethical evaluation takes place within a specific human perspective; ethical standards are informed by specific features of human life. Just as truth is linked with the final opinion of a community of inquirers, ethics is linked with the human condition. And just as in science there is the “cheerful hope” that given enough time and effort (most all) truths would be discovered (even though we may never be sure when we have reached that point),** ethical realism asserts that given enough time and reflection, values such as the dignity of persons would be universally discovered (here, “contrite fallibilism” will go far in avoiding ethical dogmatism). To conclude: For Peirce, what could be called “plain” ethics (as com-

monly understood, the science of right and wrong) is wrongheaded because individual reasoning about duties is by nature prone to mistakes. Philosophy (considered as a science) will not be of much help because inquiry, as conceived by Peirce, is an ongoing future-directed enterprise and the individual wants answers as to how to act here and now. Sentiment, instinct, conservatism, as Peirce variously calls these, give immediate answers to the individual. These answers, because they embody, through tradition and evolution, the “thought” of the community, have a higher

probability of being closer to the truth and are therefore preferable to those answers resulting from one error-prone individual’s assessment as to how to act. At the individual level of “vitally important topics,” this is as good as it gets. However, in pure ethics or esthetics—and this is where philosophical ethics (our “highest business”) comes in—the concern is with trying to discover the true aim and purpose of humankind. Peirce suggests that it is tied to the overall development of reasonableness, which is a third. Peirce’s pragmaticism, I have proposed, is especially suited for developing a viable moderate ethical realist theory, for it provides the necessary metaphysical and epistemological models that many ethical realist theories lack. This Peircean moderate ethical realism is cognitivist

124 ROSA MARIA MAYORGA in nature (it claims there are true or false ethical facts, there are good and bad upbringings, better and worse character traits), but these are deeply bound up with facts about human life and potentialities for flourishing, as opposed to extreme ethical realisms that ground ethical standards in facts external to the sphere of human life and experience; but at the same time, it does not err on the side of a subjectivism or relativism about truth in ethics. And unlike many modern ethical theories, Peirce provides a comprehensive account of what having real ontological status in ethics might be.” My purpose has been, first, to show that, contrary to the established view, Peirce’s remarks about ethics, in particular his comments in the 1898 Cambridge Conference Lectures, are consistent and therefore can and should be taken seriously; second, that they can serve as the grounds

for a robust moderate moral realism that can compare favorably with other contemporary metaethical theories. The hope is to begin to carve out a viable and satisfying position between an extreme moral realism on

the one hand and on the other hand, other “realisms” that end up ultimately deflating the notions of reality, truth, normativity, and objectivity. This is just a preliminary outline, and obviously much work remains to be done.”

SIX

IMPROVING OUR HABITS Peirce and Meliorism Mats Bergman

a>

Aw matists their perspectives and aims may differ greatly, most pragtend to emphasize consequential practice rather than pure theory. Indeed, a melioristic inclination, a desire to improve the future lot of human beings in this world, could be identified as one defining char-

acteristic of a pragmatist.' However, although this transformative conception of pragmatism easily encompasses thinkers such as William James, F. C. S. Schiller, John Dewey, C. Wright Mills, and Richard Rorty, it seems to exclude certain others—most conspicuously Charles S. Peirce, the putative father of the movement.

In contrast to Dewey and Rorty, Peirce is manifestly skeptical of attempts to apply philosophy to concrete human affairs—to the “problems of men,” to use Dewey’s term. In his Cambridge Conferences Lectures (1898), Peirce notoriously not only seems to advocate a rather sharp distinction between theory and practice as two incompatible forms of life, but also to disparage melioristic conceptions of the philosopher’s task. In his expressed view, philosophy is a theoretical science that should not be compromised by concerns with concrete applicability or societal relevance. {125 }

126 MATS BERGMAN Admittedly, the polemical tone of the 1898 lectures can to some extent

be attributed to the troubled circumstances of the talks in question. Furthermore, the sharp dualism between theory and practice is partly tempered by Peirce’s earlier account of the emergence of scientific investigation from everyday processes of inquiry (the belief-doubt model) as

well as by his conception of a science as a practice determined by the goal-directed activities of a social group (see Bergman 2009, chap. 2). Even so, Peirce does seem to distance himself from the kind of melioristic pragmatism that is usually associated with Dewey. Although Peirce passionately defends radicalism (that is, freedom of imagination and experimentation) in science, he tends to endorse “sentimental conservatism” in other domains of existence, such as moral and (nonscientific) social life.

For a meliorist inspired by Dewey’s program of intelligent reform and philosophical activism, such a viewpoint can feel disheartening; it might even be interpreted as a cunning apology for an intellectualistic and introverted philosophy, promoting a laissez-faire attitude to the problems of today while lecturing sanctimoniously about Truth and Justice as long-term ideals. But is Peirce’s philosophy really antimelioristic? In this essay, I scruti-

nize this assumption, hoping to show that, in spite of appearances, Peircean thought is not only compatible with moderate forms of meliorism, but that it actually is animated by certain melioristic aspirations and ideals, although on a rather abstract and general plane. This, I believe, is rendered feasible by a focus on critical common-sensism and a reconstruction of the normative disciplines in terms of criticism of habits. On a more basic theoretical level, however, I argue that Peirce’s pragmatistic account of meaning and habit should not be reduced to mere analysis; by drawing attention to a mostly unexplored division of logical interpretants in his semeiotic, I will suggest that habit-change can be construed as an integral phase of interpretant-development, which in turn constitutes an indispensable part of a dynamic conception of pragmatic signification—one that moves beyond the plain descriptive clarification of meaning in terms of habit.’ Activism and Conservatism

Let us begin by considering why, at first blush, Peirce might be viewed

as wholly hostile to melioristic positions. This calls for a somewhat

PEIRCE AND MELIORISM 127 closer look at what meliorism—and especially pragmatistic meliorism— entails. Perhaps the best place to start is the Century Dictionary (1889-91), where we find a definition that extant evidence strongly indicates to be partly authored by none other than Peirce. According to the dictionary, “meliorism” can be characterized as (1) “[the] improvement of society by regulated practical means: opposed to the passive principle of both pessimism and optimism”; or (2) “[the] doctrine that the world is neither the worst nor the best possible, but that it is capable of improvement: a mean between theoretical pessimism and optimism.”°

This definition nicely summarizes two main variants of melioristic thought. “Meliorism” can be understood broadly as the theoretical position that the world is capable of improvement; but in the narrower sense, the term refers to the possibility of intelligently improving (ameliorating) human society. Both senses are distinguished from optimism as well as from pessimism. Furthermore, the Century Dictionary definition suggests a praxis-oriented conception, as “meliorism” is portrayed as an “active principle” according to which the world at large or society in particular is susceptible to amelioration. Although not necessary, the step from holding the world to be improvable to maintaining that human beings ought to actively engage in such betterment seems to be a rather natural one. At any rate, this is the conclusion that many pragmatists seem to embrace—and no one more influentially than Dewey, who starkly distinguishes the melioristic tendency from both pessimism and optimism. Pessimism is a paralyzing doctrine. In declaring that the world is evil wholesale, it makes futile all efforts to discover the remediable causes of specific evils and thereby destroys at the root every attempt to make the world better and happier. Wholesale optimism, which has been

the consequence of the attempt to explain evil away, is, however, equally an incubus. After all, the optimism that says that the world is already the best possible of all worlds might be regarded as the most cynical of pessimisms. If this is the best possible, what would a world which was fun-

damentally bad be like? Meliorism is the belief that the specific conditions which exist at one moment, be they comparatively bad or

128 MATS BERGMAN comparatively good, in any event may be bettered. It encourages intel-

ligence to study the positive means of good and the obstructions to their realization, and to put forth endeavor for the improvement of conditions. (MW 12:181—82, 1920)

This characterization of meliorism is practically a condensed description of the ambition of Dewey’s pragmatism, which famously calls for a

recovery of philosophy as “a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men” (MW 10:46, 1917). Naturally, Dewey

does not think that philosophers are capable of performing this grand task on their own, but he reserves a special role for philosophy in his melioristic vision. The positive job of the philosopher, in addition to the negative undertaking of combating timeworn prejudices and stale traditions, is to develop useful tools for intelligent planning and action. Intellectual instruments are needed to project leading ideas or plans of action. The intellectual instrumentalities for doing this work need sterilizing and sharpening. That work is closely allied with setting better instruments, as fast as they take shape, at work. Active use in dealing with the present problems of men is the only way they can be kept from rusting. Trial and test in and by work done is the means by which they can be kept out of the dark spots in which infection originates. The fact that such plans, measures, policies, as can be projected will be but hypotheses is but another instance of alignment of philosophy with the attitude and spirit of the inquiries which have won the victories of scientific inquiry in other fields. (LW 15:166, 1946)

Therefore, Dewey espouses an explicitly activist conception of meliorism, which does not halt at the theoretical view that the world is improvable; opposing both pessimism and optimism, he moves on to an advocacy of the concrete involvement of philosophers in the present problems of society. For Dewey, this means, above all, a new conception of social phi-

losophy. In contrast to the traditional social philosopher, who dwells “in the region of his concepts” and “‘solves’ problems by showing the relationship of ideas,” the Deweyan meliorist purportedly assists human beings “by supplying them hypotheses to be used and tested in projects of reform” (MW 12:190, 1920).

According to Dewey, the employment of intelligent method in dealing with the “concrete troubles” of the world entails the adoption of the techniques of scientific inquiry in social meliorism. In this context, “scientific

PEIRCE AND MELIORISM 129 method” means primarily experimentation, the conscious and deliberate implementation of new ways of seeing and doing things by means of an intelligently guided process of trial and error. It also involves a rather radical abolition of the distinction between theory and practice—between science and everyday life. Of course, amelioration is not an easily accomplished task; ingrained

habits frequently thwart the most intelligent and scientifically sound plans for social transformation. Therefore, Dewey argues that the most fruitful breeding ground for social improvement is to be found in the relatively flexible and immature, rather than in “adults whose habits of thought and feeling are more or less definitely set, and whose environment is more or less rigid” (MW 13:402, 1921). This is the melioristic motivation underlying his pursuits in the field of education. As noted, this Deweyan meliorism, with its characteristic opposition to dualisms in theory and practice, is often taken to be a distinguishing mark of the pragmatist mind-set. However, moving backward in time to

Peirce, we seem to encounter a position that is almost diametrically opposed to the melioristic approach of Dewey. Peirce supports the separation of theory and practice as two modes of life, wishes to defend the autonomy of scientific inquiry, and argues that conservatism is the appropriate attitude in morals and nonscientific social affairs. This is the Peirce

who declares that “the two masters, theory and practice, you cannot serve’ (CP 1.642, 1898).

At first, 1t might seem that Peirce’s advocacy of such a surprisingly sharp dualism between the theoretical and practical is simply motivated by his wish to protect scientific inquiry from outside pressures. This 1s indeed part of the story; as Peirce frequently notes, traditional moralities, as they are embodied in the ordinary social habits of human beings, are prone to encroach on the free pursuit of knowledge. In particular, he argues that the habit of conservatism, which sustains the everyday activities of human beings in society, has no place in science. Conservatism is a habit, and it is the law of habit that it tends to spread and extend itself over more and more of the life. In this way, conservatism about morals leads to conservatism about manners and finally conservatism about opinions of a speculative kind. Besides, to distin-

suish between speculative and practical opinions is the mark of the most cultivated intellects. Go down below this level and you come across reformers and rationalists at every turn—people who propose

130 MATS BERGMAN to remodel the ten commandments on modern science. Hence it is that morality leads to a conservatism which any new view, or even any

free inquiry, no matter how purely speculative, shocks. The whole moral weight of such a community will be cast against science. (CP 1.50, C. 1896)

Whereas conservatism “in the sense of a dread of consequences” obstructs inquiry, science has “always been forwarded by radicals and radicalism, in the sense of the eagerness to carry consequences to their extremes” (CP 1.148, c. 1897). Thus Peirce, who maintains that the dictum “do not block the way of inquiry” is a corollary of the first rule of reason, advocates speculative open-mindedness and progressivism in the domain of science (cf. CP 1.662, 1898).

Insofar as the separation between the life-realms of theory and practice merely entails a defense of science from conservatism, it does not necessarily clash with Deweyan pragmatism. However, as the passage quoted above reveals, Peirce is not only a scientific radical out to protect inquiry from conservative intrusion; he also wants to keep scientific or pseudo-scientific “reformers and rationalists” away from the province of everyday communal life. Arguing that morals and social norms embody “the traditional wisdom of ages of experience,” Peirce warns us against

attempts to reform such habits by employing scientific intelligence; indeed, he maintains that it is not even safe to reason about such matters, “except in a purely speculative way” (CP 1.50, c. 1896). Hence, he defines the meaning of “true conservatism”—that is, the brand of sentimental conservatism he embraces—as “not trusting to reasonings about questions of vital importance but rather to hereditary instincts and traditional sentiments” (CP 1.661, 1898).

This affirmation of conservatism involves a recognition of both the freedom and the inadequacies of human intellect. Although there is no point in postulating artificial limits to human imagination and speculation—which would be like introducing a legal ban on jumping over the moon (cf. CP 5.536, c. 1905) human beings are nonetheless fallible reasoners who necessarily rely on uncriticized habits in their everyday life. Such commonsense habits of feeling, action, and thought will appear to be practically infallible to the individuals who live their lives without doubting their satisfactoriness—indeed, often without any awareness of the habitual character of the habits, a lack that renders the habits virtually “instinctual” (CP 1.633, 1898).

PEIRCE AND MELIORISM 131 This does not entail the postulation of a completely autonomous domain of intelligence, separated from the concrete life of habit. Peirce maintains that human reason “appeals to sentiment in the last resort” (CP 1.632, 1898). Although there are to be no limitations on the workings of intelligence in the sphere of science, reason cannot function without sentiments; science (understood as a communal activity) is first and foremost fueled by a desire to find truth that transcends individual interests (see, e.g., NEM 4:xix; NEM 4:227, 1905-6). It is not the intellect that provides the scientist with such an aspiration, but something more basic in his or her social experience.* Peirce characterizes “sentimentalism” as “the doctrine that great respect should be paid to the natural judgments of the sensible heart” (CP 6.292, 1893). Such sentiments are not infallible, but they are more trustworthy than reasoning in dealing with questions concerning vital matters of everyday life, because they are backed by habits that have developed over generations and have been tested in experience. Since “inquiry is only a particular kind of conduct” (R 602:8, c. 1902-7),

scientific research never fully transcends its humble origins in human experience. The ethical impulses of scientific investigation—the moral facets that are the “most vital factors in the method of modern science” (CP 7.87, 1902)—are not products of reasoning but something that purportedly emerges naturally as human beings try to make their way in the world, adjusting to experience by constantly forming and revising beliefs.

Given these considerations, it would appear that the postulated chasms

between theory and practice, on the one hand, and between scientific reason and moral sentiment, on the other, are not as absolute as they might appear on first encounter.’ Peirce explicitly qualifies his position, warning us against taking conservatism to extremes; he acknowledges

that there are exceptional situations in which sentiment ought to be guided by reason, and maintains that even radical reforms may be accept-

able under certain circumstances (CP 1.633, 1898). On the one hand, Peirce holds that ethics ought to be an austerely theoretical and “useless”

pursuit, if it is to be a part of philosophical inquiry at all. On the other hand, he affirms that philosophical speculation may eventually

affect moral conduct but contends that it should be allowed to do so “only with secular slowness and the most conservative caution” (CP 1.620, 1898).

132 MATS BERGMAN Although these are significant compromises, they do not render Peirce a Deweyan meliorist—far from it. In fact, parts of Peirce’s outpour sound like direct criticisms of the activist brand of meliorism.® He calls the tendency to allow mere reasoning to subdue “the normal and manly senti-

mentalism which ought to lie at the cornerstone of all our conduct” “foolish and despicable” (CP 1.662, 1898), and objects strongly to the view that philosophy should be of practical use. No doubt a large proportion of those who now busy themselves with philosophy will lose all interest in it as soon as it is forbidden to look upon it as susceptible of practical applications. We who continue to

pursue the theory must bid adieu to them. But so we must in any department of pure science. (CP 1.645, 1898)

Not only does Peirce warn us of the dangers in thinking that intelligence would be a better guide to conduct than time-honored habits of tradition; here, he appears to disallow any consideration of practical applicability in philosophy. In part, this stance amounts to a denunciation of the kind of utilitarianism that would reduce science to technology and philosophy to ideology (cf. Potter 1996, 68); but it also allows philosophers (as “scientific men”) to ignore concrete problems that might trouble lesser mortals and to focus on the nobler “study of useless things” (cf. CP 1.76, c. 1896). Peirce seems to have little to offer to melioristic philosophy in Dewey’s sense; one might even feel that his social philosophy is reducible to the conservative maxim: “Obey the traditional maxims of your community without hesitation or discussion” (CP 1.666, 1898). This

acceptance of the status quo is positively anti- Deweyan, perhaps even antipragmatistic’ and antidemocratic.® Of course, this is not the whole story; one might, for instance, opine that Peirce’s “Evolutionary Love” (1893), with its straightforward condemnation of the “gospel of greed,” contains a singular contribution to social philosophy (cf. CP 1. 673, 1898). But given the more systematic point of view articulated in the Cambridge Lectures and numerous other writings, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that Peirce’s conception of the philosopher’s task is not well-matched with Deweyan melior-

ism, in spite of the fact that both advocate a scientific approach to philosophical work. Note, however, that this does not mean that Peirce would be unable to embrace meliorism in the broader sense; that is, he might affirm the

PEIRCE AND MELIORISM 133 doctrine that the world is capable of improvement without thereby being committed to a melioristic approach that requires philosophers to take an active role in the betterment of society here and now.’ But is this really all that can be said about Peirce’s contribution to meliorism? As far as

actual input is concerned, it may well be so; yet, there are reasons to inquire a bit deeper into the potential of Peircean philosophy to contribute to the melioristic thread of pragmatism. One important clue to how such a feat might be achieved is provided by the way the term “habit” tends to crop up in both Dewey’s and Peirce’s discussions of the matter. Whereas the progressive Dewey laments how ingrained habits tend to prevent the application of intelligence to social problems, the segregationist Peirce is apparently happy to leave tradi-

tional habits alone, as long as they do not hinder scientific inquiry. However, a somewhat different approach to the matter is suggested in some of Peirce’s later writings, which are concerned with normative inquiry and criticism. In the Minute Logic, having once more drawn attention to the persistence of moral traditions and social manners, Peirce declares that habits of reasoning are radically different—and not only those practices developed in the scientific laboratories but also habits of everyday reasoning. In contrast to the conservative rigidity of custom and sentiment, such habits are allegedly characterized by a remarkable plasticity and adaptability; for Peirce claims that as “soon as it appears that facts are against a

given habit of reasoning, it at once loses its hold,” and adds that no “matter how strong and well-rooted in habit any rational conviction of ours may be, we no sooner find that another equally well-informed person doubts it, than we begin to doubt it ourselves” (CP 2.160, c. 1902). Such comments are noteworthy for two reasons: (1) They suggest that Peirce views social habits of reasoning, whether they are elements of logica

docens or logica utens, as malleable, and (2) they raise the question of whether philosophy cannot, in spite of his insistence to the contrary, play

a significant role in the domains that he at times wishes to exclude from its purview. If all habits of reasoning—and perhaps also connected habits of feeling and action—are even half as changeable as Peirce implies,

it seems only natural to reassess the soundness of the division of life spheres into the inflexible world of practice, whose habits philosophers best not tamper with, and the dynamic world of theory, where habits ought to be treated as relatively disposable methods and hypotheses.

134 MATS BERGMAN Arguably, Peirce’s mature conception of normative inquiry and selfcontrol points in this direction, but its intellectual kernel can be found in the more basic sign-theoretical examination of habit. Habit and Habit-Change Thus, before addressing the question of the possible melioristic implications of Peirce’s normative sciences, it is worthwhile to review his notion of habit. As so many issues in Peirce’s philosophy, this turns out to be a

rather complex topic, made all the more confusing by some internal inconsistencies in usage.

Peirce distinguishes the “more proper” meaning of “habit” from a broader conception. Whereas the wider sense of “habit” “denotes such a specialization, original or acquired, of the nature of a man, or an animal, or a vine, or a crystallizable chemical substance, or anything else, that he or it will behave, or always tend to behave, in a way describable in general

terms upon every occasion (or upon a considerable proportion of the occasions) that may present itself of a generally describable character,” the narrower acceptation entails a distinction between attained habit and natural disposition (CP 5.538, c. 1902).'° Habit in the narrow sense could also be characterized as “acquired law” (CP 2.292, c. 1902). Unfortunately, Peirce seldom clarifies which denotation of “habit” he is employing in various contexts. Although he suggests that “habit” can be used for the broader sense, and the concept “acquired habit” suffices to indicate the more focused meaning when needed, he often refers to the narrower sense simply as “habit.” This wavering turns out to be of some consequence; whereas habit in the broad sense encompasses possible innate tendencies as well as consciously or unconsciously adopted

habits, the narrow acceptation is intrinsically connected to the idea of acquirement. Of course, from our point of view, the interesting question concerns what sense of habit is at stake in Peirce’s discussions of scientific radicalism and social conservatism. Although it is conceivable that some sentiments are based on natural

dispositions, it seems reasonably clear that the traditional habits that Peirce wishes to protect from the assaults of overeager reformists are acquisitions. They are obtained, but not necessarily as the result of a conscious process of deliberation. Moreover, it does not follow that such a habit would be easily changeable; as we have seen, Peirce tends to view

PEIRCE AND MELIORISM 135 certain habits that are passed on socially, and that manifest themselves as core moral beliefs or sentiments, as practically infallible—and therefore

virtually unyielding in everyday life. Yet, while we are in a manner of speaking born into many such habits, they are not absolutely fixed, and therefore they are not strictly speaking innate dispositions." If traditional and moral habits were firm natural dispositions, there would be little or no need to protect them from rationalists; they would prevail in spite of everything. But the fact that habits are in some manner acquired renders them vulnerable, prone to be affected even by philosophical arguments. Thus, it is perhaps not so surprising to find that Peirce, almost in the face of his own conservatism, places a great deal of emphasis on the question of how habits ought to be grasped and transformed. Indeed, his pragmatism seems to be essentially connected to this problem. In Peirce’s early pragmatistic writings, discussions of habit tend to be restricted to the analysis of the fixation of belief. In this context, habit is basically understood as the underlying tendency to act that determines the pragmatic identity of a human belief. The identity of a habit depends on how it might lead us to act, not merely under such circumstances as are likely to arise, but under such

as might possibly occur, no matter how improbable they may be. What the habit is depends on when and how it causes us to act. (CP 5-400, 1878)

Despite that “habit” is characterized as the relatively objective ground of belief, Peirce is here using the concept in the narrower sense that entails

acquisition. According to one early definition, a “habit arises, when, having had the sensation of performing a certain act, m, on several occasions a, b, c, we come to do it upon every occurrence of the general event, l, of which a, b and ¢ are special cases” (CP 5.297, 1868). This view is restated in “Pragmatism” (1907), where Peirce asserts that habits “differ from dispositions in having been acquired as consequences of the principle... that multiple reiterated behavior of the same kind, under similar combinations of percepts and fancies, produces a tendency,—the habit,— actually to behave in a similar way under similar circumstances in the future” (EP 2:413).'* Such characterizations make it clear that the focus of Peirce’s pragmatistic interest is habits in the narrower sense—and, moreover, such acquired habits of which human beings can become aware in

136 MATS BERGMAN the form of beliefs. Indeed, “belief” can be defined as an “intelligent habit upon which we shall act when occasion presents itself” (EP 2:19, 1895),

or, more precisely, as a “cerebral habit of the highest kind, which will determine what we do in fancy as well as what we do in action” (CP 3.160, 1880).

However, Peirce’s account of belief may cause some confusion because

of an uneasy vacillation between the claim that belief is something of which we necessarily are aware and the view that a belief can be unconsciously entertained (for the former, see, e.g., EP 2:12, 1895; for the latter, see, e.g., EP 2:336, 19053; CP 2.148, c. 1902; CP 2.711, 1883). Even more nar-

rowly, “belief”? could be demarcated as “deliberate, or self-controlled, habit” (CP 5.480, 1907). Still, in view of the fact that Peirce mostly allows

for a distinction between having a belief and the conscious “representation to ourselves that we have a specified habit of this kind” (identified as “judgment” [CP 3.160, 1880; cf. EP 2:19, 1895]), “belief” is perhaps best taken in the broader sense. Strictly speaking, we do not need to be conscious of holding a belief, although such awareness can in principle be relatively easily achieved.

The principal motivation for adopting a broader conception of belief of the kind outlined above is to avoid an overly rationalistic conception of agency. Although there is no point in postulating incognizables, we can never be fully aware of all those belief-habits that determine our actions—not to speak of other kinds of habits affecting our conduct. Still, it is a matter of fact that we constantly judge many beliefs to be habitual, which in this case entails an actual or a virtual awareness that they are in some sense acquired and not necessarily fixed for eternity. It is precisely with such beliefs that Peirce’s pragmatism and, more broadly, the normative sciences are concerned.

Peirce’s pragmatistic method is primarily a tool for clarifying the habitual nature of beliefs. That is, using the well-known pragmatic maxim, we ought to be able to state what habits of action certain concepts

and beliefs entail, and moreover to do so in an objective manner. Interestingly, in his pragmatistic analyses, Peirce does not tend to introduce any principled division between habits transmitted by tradition and habits acquired as the consequence of scientific experimentation. Consequently, the pragmatic maxim can supposedly be employed in the scrutiny of vitally important topics, such as in deciding whether the argument between Protestants and Catholics regarding the doctrine of

PEIRCE AND MELIORISM 137 transubstantiation has any real merit or not (CP 5.401, 1878; but cf. CP 5.541, Cc. 1902), as well as in more scientific contexts.

However, Peirce’s pragmatistic analysis goes beyond the mere break-

ing down of abstruse concepts and beliefs into tangible habits for the purpose of removing verbal barriers to inquiry and communication. In his mature writings, he broadens the scope of pragmatism by connecting it to the semeiotic analysis of the meaning of signs, arguing that the ulti-

mate (or final)’ logical interpretant of a sign—an interpretant that is capable of bringing a process of interpretation to rest, at least temporarily—must be a habit of action (CP 5.491, 1907). Moreover, Peirce frequently emphasizes that pragmatic meaning is not only habitual; it is, in a pregnant sense, controlled habituality. More precisely put, only selfcontrolled habits can be ultimate logical interpretants. This entails a rec-

ognition of the fact that human beings not only have habits, but are also capable of exerting a measure of deliberative control over their habits (EP 2:337, 1905).'"

Peirce identifies various levels of habitual meaning.'? Already in his early pragmatism, he recognizes three degrees of meaning—familiarity of use, analytic definition, and pragmatically clarified signification—but without recourse to the explicitly normative framework of his mature philosophy. When Peirce rearticulates his pragmatism in light of semeiotic, this focus becomes evident. Not just any habit entailed by a concept or belief is entitled to the laudatory status of ultimate logical interpretant, but only such habits that form the core of adequately examined and criticized concepts or beliefs.

There is, however, an interesting twist to the story. Although it is widely recognized that Peirce associates the ultimate logical interpretant with the kind of habit that would be the result of critical deliberation on its potential consequences, less attention has been paid to the fact that Peirce occasionally defines this pragmatically clarified interpretant as habit-change—“a modification of a person’s tendencies toward action” (CP 5.476, 1907)— rather than in terms of habit, plain and simple. This may, at first blush, seem like a rather ill-advised move on Peirce’s part—and from a certain point of view, it is. Namely, if the pragmatistic

method is meant to elucidate the significations of concepts such as “lithium,” “democracy,” and “reality,” it seems rather peculiar to assert that their proper meaning is to be found in the way they would change a

person’s tendencies to act, rather than saying that their appropriate

138 MATS BERGMAN acceptation is pragmatically equivalent to the set of habits of action they would involve after sufficient critical investigation (with “sufficiency” left intentionally vague). The addition of “change” does not seem to add anything of value to the analysis of meaning. In fact, if taken literally, such a definition could lead to some rather unwelcome consequences for the pragmatistic elucidation; if meaning is habit-change, then the signification of a sign would be slighter for well-informed agents than for persons

with little knowledge, as the latter would be more likely to have their habits greatly modified by acquaintance with the sign in question. This would almost inevitably undermine any claim to objectivity the pragmatistic method might make. Moreover, united with a Peircean notion of the end of inquiry, a characterization of pragmatic signification in terms

of the capacity to produce habit-change would have the paradoxical upshot of rendering the signs of the final opinion meaningless; in that ideal state, they would lack any power to produce modifications of tendencies toward action. True, such undesirable results could be avoided by underlining certain vital qualifications, such as a distinction between actual changes and the potential for generating habit-modifications; but that would in effect lead us back to a conception of signification as ultimate habit—that is, an understanding of the meaning of x in terms of habits of action involved in the deliberate acceptance of x—rather than as habit-change in any substantial sense. Nonetheless, we should not give up on the idea of habit-change yet. There are some intriguing indications that the ultimate logical interpretant may not be the highest logical interpretant in Peirce’s scheme. In some partly unpublished fragments of the seminal essay “Pragmatism” (1907), he proposes a division of the logical interpretant into first, second,

and third logical interpretant, adding that the second may be further divided into two, and the third into three subtypes (R 318:168-72, 1907).'° Although such an exposition seems to bear all the marks of Peircean tria-

domania run amok, this mostly ignored analysis contains some potentially rewarding suggestions. The first logical interpretant is defined as a conjecture, which establishes a habit that enables imaginary experimentation in the inner world;

we “imagine ourselves in various situations and animated by various motives; and we proceed to trace out the alternative lines of conduct which the conjectures would leave open to us” (CP 5.481, 1907). Working

on the concept or belief in this manner, we are gradually led to more

PEIRCE AND MELIORISM 139 refined logical interpretants—improved conjectures and more general depictions of the habits involved—which Peirce characterizes as lower and higher second logical interpretants. This is a perhaps only a somewhat schematic way of describing the critical process by which we work our way toward a more adequate pragmatic conception of our “virtual resolve” (cf. EP 2:19, 1895), but the upshot is of great interest. The second logical interpretants constitute the ultimate normal and proper mental effect of the sign taken by itself (I do not mean removed

from its context but considered apart from the effects of its context and circumstance of utterance). They must, therefore, be identified with that “meaning” which we have all along been seeking. In that capacity, they are habits of internal or imaginary action, abstracted from all reference to the individual mind in which they might happen to be implanted, and whose future actions they would guide. (R 318: 171, 1907)

Peirce emphasizes that such internal analysis, which in its more advanced forms amounts to experimentation in the internal world, can lead to the kind of habituation that really would guide our conduct, were the circumstances to arise (CN 3:278, 1906).'” But what, then, is the third

logical interpretant? According to Peirce, such interpretants are called into being when the activity is for some reason turned “from the theatre of internal to that of the external experience” (R 318:171, 1907).

The experience which is consequent upon the production of the second (or, sometimes, directly upon that of the first) logical interpretant is sought and found by a deliberate, self-controlled, purposive, muscular effort. In a word, the performance is that of an experiment, or, at least, of a quasi-experiment. (R 318:172, 1907)

This is as far as Peirce’s analysis goes.'® It is admittedly scant, but it may open the door to further developments in unexpected directions. It is at least conceivable that Peirce’s problematic references to habit-change are results of conflating the second and the third logical interpretant. This would allow us to say that the second logical interpretant—that ultimate interpretant identifiable as the pragmatic meaning of a sign—is indeed a habit of action, while at the same time acknowledging a higher

level of semeiotic labor—one that might be connected to reforming external conditions through modification of our habits of conduct rather than merely analyzing the meaning of signs. That is, active habit-change

140 MATS BERGMAN would then turn out to be a part of the philosopher’s task alongside intellectual analysis of meaningful habits; indeed, the two would be practically inseparable. This does not entail that change per se would be the ultimate goal; rather, it seems more appropriate to hold on to the basic pragmatistic notion of fixation of belief-habits as the end-in-view of the process. But in contrast to Peirce’s original three-step clarification of meaning, his incomplete theory of logical interpretants suggests a more dynamic conception of pragmatistic elucidation. In view of the fact that Peirce stresses that habit-change includes dissociation as well as alterations of association, and that he further identifies active effort and experimentation as legitimate initiators of such modifi-

cation in addition to external experiences that cause doubts (see CP 5-476-79, 1907), it does not seem too far-fetched to interpret the reference to habit-change as indicating a need to move beyond mere analysis—the “solving” of problems by describing conceptual relationships that Dewey criticizes—toward a more active engagement in the makeover of habits. The third logical interpretant is not something reached just by cerebra-

tion and experimentation in the internal theater of imagination; it calls for “muscular” effort. This indicates that the logical interpretant, in its third degree, is not only an intellectual conception; it gains its characteristic import from the way it can affect the outer world. It is in this direction that Peirce pushes his pragmatism in his oft-cited but cryptic reference to “concrete reasonableness.” The maxim has approved itself to the writer, after many years of trial, as of great utility in leading to a relatively high grade of clearness of thought. He would venture to suggest that it should always be put into

practice with conscientious thoroughness, but that, when that has been done, and not before, a still higher grade of clearness of thought can be attained by remembering that the only ultimate good which the practical facts to which it directs attention can subserve is to further the development of concrete reasonableness. (CP 5.3, 1902)

Arguably, such development must entail improvement by means of habit-change, conscious modification of existing habits and even the deliberate planting of relatively new habits. Here, we are not far from an acknowledgment that amelioration is an inherent element in what could be dubbed the adequacy of the sign. Peirce defines “pragmatistic adequacy” as “what ought to be the substance, or Meaning, of the concept or

PEIRCE AND MELIORISM 141 other Symbol in question, in order that its true usefulness may be fulfilled” (R 649:2, 1910). Remarkably, this conception of the highest level of

clarity combines a normative point of view with an emphasis on utility,

and is compatible with the definition of ultimate meaning as habit." Building on this, it is plausible to maintain that the pragmatistic adequacy of symbols—what they should signify rather than what they do mean—is

something that is discoverable or developable only by a process that involves active experimentation in both the internal and the external world, that is, through intelligent habit-change. Put differently, whereas pragmatistic meaning can be taken to pertain to the “is” and “would-be” of our signs—a signification that could in principle be clarified in terms of how the signs do or would make us act (or in terms of their significant roles in our practices)—the notion of pragmatistic adequacy introduces an additional normative dimension of “ought” that implies active imaginary and experiential testing as a prerequisite for discovering and fixating the best beliefs possible.” That is, applying the pragmatistic method is not merely a matter of clarifying the actual and potential significations of such habits as we happen to have acquired, but of dynamically striving to

develop more adequate habits of feeling, action, and thought through criticism, imagination, and experimentation. Criticism and Amelioration

If my conjecture is not entirely erroneous, then Peirce’s pragmatistic account of the logical interpretant may contain the theoretical seed of a more progressive conception of philosophy than his polemics against reformists suggest. Of course, this is merely a beginning—and a rather abstract and threadbare one at that. Certainly, what has been said does not suffice to show that Peirce would be a meliorist in any strong sense of the word. So, in conclusion I add some considerations that I believe show

that my hypothesis is not as fanciful as it may seem, and that Peirce’s intermittent references to habit-change may indeed point toward a more nuanced understanding of the philosopher’s task than his segregation of science from the rest of the social world would lead us to believe. Perhaps the weightiest argument in support of the reconstruction proposed here is provided by the normative development of Peirce’s thought after the 1898 lectures. It is a well-known fact that he gradually embraces a trivium of normative sciences, comprising esthetics, ethics, and logic

142 MATS BERGMAN (or semeiotic), in his mature philosophy. Although the precise character of and division of labor among these modes of inquiry is a vexing ques-

tion, this evident move in the normative direction could be taken as a sign of an increasing sensitivity to melioristic concerns. Yet, Peirce is ada-

mant in his defense of the abstract nature of esthetics, ethics, and logic; they are allegedly “the very most purely theoretical of purely theoretical sciences’ (CP 1.281, c. 1902)—and as such, not to be confused with practical efforts to induce certain kinds of conduct in society.

But what, then, does the normative character of such inquiry really consist in? Peirce tends to offer rather vague definitions of the task of the

normative sciences. For instance, they are purportedly concerned with distinguishing “what ought to be from what ought not to be” (CP 1.186, 1903); or they perform analyses “of the conditions of attainment of some-

thing of which purpose is an essential ingredient” (CP 1.575, c. 1902). Generically, the normative disciplines are the ones that make basic distinctions between the good and bad whenever control is possible— esthetics in the domain of feeling or presentation, ethics in the domain of action or effort, and logic in the domain of signs or representations (CP 5.36, 1903; CP 5.129, 1903; CP 1.574, 1906; EP 2:459, c. 1911; but see CP 5.127,

1903, for an important qualification). Consequently, the normative sciences would appear to be concerned with forms of valuation—with criteria that allow us to distinguish something as good or bad in the domains of esthetics, ethics, and logic—without any concern for the actual application of the insights. However, Peirce also frequently suggests a strict hierarchical dependency among these disciplines; as one mode of controlled and goal-directed conduct, logic is dependent on ethics as a source of principles, while both rely on esthetics to provide an account of the objectively admirable per se (EP 2:260, 1903).

This tends to reduce normative esthetics to the discovery of a highest standard (summum bonum) by which to judge aims and ideals of action. I do not believe such a conception is truly viable, but will mostly bypass this difficult issue here, and merely suggest a somewhat more mundane understanding of the province of esthetics in terms of criticism of habits of feeling and ideals.”!

Like Cheryl Misak (2004b, xv), I believe that the Peircean project

can survive without recourse to an ultimate end of mankind that “recommends itself in itself without ulterior consideration” (EP 2:260, 1903)—that is, the “one quality that is, in its immediate presence, Ka/A0c”

PEIRCE AND MELIORISM 143 (CP 2.199, c. 1902). Indeed, as the foundation for normative science, esthetics would seem to be nothing but the reiteration of a foregone con-

clusion, as Peirce does not leave any room for doubt that there is one ultimate ideal (Bernstein 1991, 37). Rather than reducing esthetics to the registration of the self-sufficient transcendent ideal,” it seems more productive to say that the pragmatist’s operative summum bonum entails the goal to manifest reasonable generals in existents, or “the continual increase of the embodiment of . . . idea-potentiality” (EP 2:343, 1905). This might be translated as the development and formation of intelligent habits and practices in the world (cf. Colapietro 2005, 361). It is a matter of “rendering the world more reasonable, whenever .. . it is ‘up to us’ to do so” (CP 1.615, 1903), but in full acceptance of the thoroughly fallible and contextual character of such endeavors. Such a worldly ideal is not strictly speaking admirable in itself, but only in relation to the practices from which it emerges and which it can potentially guide. Peirce hints at such an approach when he notes that ethics and logic call for a science that “would have for its purpose to make our ideals, our aim, conform to what sufficient experience, consideration, and human development generally would tend to make them conform” (R 673:13, c. 1911). But perhaps we should rather say that esthetics, ethics, and semeiotic all entail a practice of this kind, in which the improved self is construed as an achievement through indefinite replication of self-control upon self-control (CP 5.402n3, 1906),”° rather than isolating it to esthetics. On the one hand, it seems unreasonable to make the esthetician carry the entire burden of distinguishing the summum bonum. Strictly speaking, esthetics cannot be austerely separated from ethics and semeiotic, for as Peirce plausibly points out, “no form is esthetically bad, if regarded from the strictly esthetical point of view, without any idea of adopting the form in conduct” (EP 2:272, 1903). That is, without the vital interconnection with the “lower” normative disciplines, esthetics becomes practically

indistinguishable from phenomenology. On the other hand, it seems somewhat peculiar to expect that ethicists and logicians should passively

accept a standard set by esthetics when engaging in their own critical activities. Arguably, the three disciplines are better construed as essentially intertwined activities. Thus, the semiotician/logician should also be an ethicist and esthetician—or simply a normative scientist. Furthermore, one might question the need for a conception of a singular, comprehensive ideal; although it is feasible to hope that conflicting

144 MATS BERGMAN goals can be scrutinized and even resolved in terms of higher ideals, there is little to be gained from the postulation of an abstract, intangible ideal of ideals. How could such a thing even be cognitively grasped ahead of the proverbial end of inquiry, except perhaps by reference to an inscru-

table qualitative absolute? In lieu of the consoling qualitative end-initself, we may have to settle with the more modest ends-in-view that emerge from our practices and experiments (cf. Stuhr 1994, 10)—which, however, does not amount to saying that all views are of the same rank.

What this does entail is a moderate contextualization of normativity, through which “objectivity will come to be seen as (in large measure) a demand we assume for ourselves” (Colapietro 19974, 264). But pushing our questioning a bit further, we may go on to naively ask why one should engage in normative inquiry—indeed, why practice philosophy at all? Not surprisingly, one answer to be found in Peirce’s writings is that such activity is a pursuit of “truth for truth’s sake” (see, e.g., CP 1.46, c. 1896). Still, one may also infer a seemingly different Peircean answer to this question from the normative disciplines. Namely, normative inquiry entails, by necessity, criticism of previous habits, in particular of habits of reasoning and interpretation. A normative logician does not settle with discovering and describing extant forms of reasoning and their grammar; rather, the abstract work is pursued for the benefit of the

critique and improvement of habits of inquiry and communication.” This much is implied by Peirce’s repeated emphasis on self-criticism and

self-control in view of purposes and ideals in normative inquiry. His pragmatism does not merely encompass common-sensism; it entails critical common-sensism. Does not all this amount to a recognition of the fact that one function of philosophy is precisely the reform and improvement of our habits? At the very least, the Peircean logician would seem to be engaged in an activity that aims at improving habits of sign use; and it does not seem to be too much of a stretch to conceive of the labor of the esthetician and ethi-

cist in a similar manner. We might say that their collective task is to develop (hopefully) better habits of feeling, action, and sign use “under the influence of a course of self-criticisms and of heterocriticisms” (EP 2:378, 1906).

This does not add up to telling human beings how they are bound to think, act, or feel (cf. EP 2:459, c. 1911). Human freedom is self-government;

and in one sense that entails a degree of independence from habit.

PEIRCE AND MELIORISM 145 Indeed, habit is not, as such, creative; it is “mere inertia, a resting on one’s oars, while intelligence can be characterized as “plasticity of habit” (CP 6.86, 1898). In view of Peirce’s claim that the “highest quality of mind

involves a great readiness to take habits, and a great readiness to lose them” (CP 6.613, 1893), 1t seems feasible to maintain that one central purpose of Peircean philosophy is precisely to revise habits, or, perhaps more

correctly, to provide means that render telic habituation possible. Such tools would be higher-order habits of criticism aimed at keeping our personal and social minds flexible and active; there “is no habit more useful [than the] habit of easily taking up and easily throwing off mental habits” (RLT 189, 1898).?°

It is not surprising, then, that Peirce declares, in an almost Deweyan spirit, that “continual amelioration of our own habits .. . is the only alternative to a continual deterioration of them” (R 674:1, c. 1911). Arguably, this amounts to a call for active testing and implementation of habits developed by thought—for experimentation in the worlds of experience, both internal and external. Eventually, such experiments might even affect sentimental habits, although the relatively foundational character of sentiments—of morals and “taste”—will necessarily render them comparatively rigid. At any rate, there is no reason to presume that habits of tradition would not need continual nurturing, fertilizing, and pruning from time to time; as Colapietro (1997b) stresses, “The recovery of tradition requires the cultivation of habits” (41). Somewhat more radically, it could be suggested that philosophers, who in their professional capacities are allowed to imaginatively reflect on the effects of habits, might perform a valuable social function by drawing attention to some weeds in the garden of habit (cf. Colapietro 19974, 281).”°

Have we thus established that Peirce is in fact a closet meliorist of a

reformist stripe? No, but we may have succeeded in removing some impediments to a fruitful dialogue between Peircean and Deweyan pragmatism. However divergent Peirce’s and Dewey’s takes on the engagement of philosophy in social affairs may be, they at least share an interest in developing intelligent forms of conduct. When we add the suggestion that Peircean pragmatism, as a part of semeiotic rhetoric, is not merely a tool for the analysis of meaning, but may ultimately be seen to be con-

cerned with habit-change, then we seem to have discovered some common melioristic ground between Peirce and Dewey. This may prove to be beneficial for both Peirceans and Deweyans; the former may explore

146 MATS BERGMAN new avenues through which to establish the relevance of Peirce for social thought, while the latter can find useful intellectual tools in Peirce’s phaneroscopy and semeiotic.

Some worries of elementary incompatibility may remain, however. Notably, whereas Dewey focuses on social reform, Peirce’s habit-meliorism seems to occur exclusively on the personal level. In this case, appear-

ances are deceiving. Although Peirce does talk of self-criticism and self-control, the habits of a person are not to be construed as strictly individual possessions. Furthermore, the relevant agent is not necessarily a singular human being; nor should thought be understood too narrowly.” Peirce goes as far as to suggest that a community may be viewed as a kind of person in a loose sense (EP 2:338, 1905)—-and as such, presumably

amenable to certain forms self-criticism and self-control. This point of view takes us one step closer to Deweyan reformism.”® Peirce’s blanket disapproval of any kind of consideration of applicabil-

ity in philosophy (quoted earlier) is more problematic. Here, the best recourse may be to simply choose to adopt the standpoint Peirce propagates in the Minute Logic, where he argues that “a theory cannot be sound unless it be susceptible of applications” (CP 2.7, 1902). It might be that a normative science, in view of the economies of the case, should be quite useless for any practical application. Still, whatever fact had no bearing upon a conceivable application to practice

would be entirely impertinent to such a science. It would be easy enough—much too easy—to marshal a goodly squadron of treatises on logic, each of them swelled out with matter foreign to any conceivable applicability until, like a corpulent man, it can no longer see on what it is standing, and the reader loses all clear view of the true problems of the science. (CP 2.7, 1902)

I believe that such considerations move Peircean philosophy toward a position more inclined to accept meliorism, even of a moderate activist

kind. However, this should not be interpreted as an acknowledgment that pragmatism makes “Doing to be the Be-all and the End-all of life” (CP 5.429, 1905). Admitting that practical applicability may, after all, be a

factor to consider in philosophy does not entail that theory, in the sense of freedom to imagine and experiment, would need to justify itself in terms of usefulness here and now; it only reminds us that severing all ties to conceivable application easily renders philosophy a trivial glass-bead

PEIRCE AND MELIORISM 147 game—an introverted “seminary philosophy” rather than a living “laboratory philosophy” (cf. CN 2:102-3, 1895; CP 1.126—29, c. 1905). This focus

on experiment certainly indicates a point of agreement between Peirce and Dewey; as Dewey notes, pragmatism “as attitude represents what Mr. Peirce has happily termed the ‘laboratory habit of mind’ extended into every area where inquiry may fruitfully be carried on” (MW 4:100, 1908). The unresolved point of contention concerns which domains may productively be researched by such means. So, lest we start sounding like the overzealous reformists and rationalists that Peirce loves to ridicule, it is good to remember that there is also much wisdom in Peircean conservatism. Although parts of the conservative stance can appear to be nothing more than a set of lazy excuses for disengagement and a defense of the status quo, it is sobering to keep in mind that philosophical reason was partly responsible for the rationalistic state-building project in the Soviet Union and that scientific meliorism can take the form of eugenics.” Peircean conservatism might function as an apposite reminder of the dangers of reformist fervor. I do not wish to let off Peirce too easily here—some of his statements do suggest rather shadowy political views—but his sentimental conservatism can charita-

bly be construed in terms of admonitions against scientistic hubris— warnings that any wise pragmatist should take seriously. If the Deweyan meliorist slides too far in the direction of rationalistic progressivism, a dose of Peircean sentimentalism may be just what is needed to remind

him or her of the value of some traditions and the habitual base of reason. On the other side, Dewey offers a poignant response to those who feel that any kind of interest in meliorism degrades philosophy by turning it

into a mere instrument of social reform. Indeed, his argument reads almost as a rejoinder to Peirce’s conservative assault on reformism. “Social reform” is conceived in a Philistine spirit, if it is taken to mean anything less than precisely the liberation and expansion of the meanings of which experience is capable. No doubt many schemes of social reform are guilty of precisely this narrowing. But for that very reason

they are futile; they do not succeed in even the special reforms at which they aim, except at the expense of intensifying other defects and creating new ones. Nothing but the best, the richest and fullest experience possible, is good enough for man. The attainment of such

an experience is not to be conceived as the specific problem of

148 MATS BERGMAN “reformers” but as the common purpose of men. The contribution which philosophy can make to this common aim is criticism. (LW 1:307—8, 1925)

Dewey wishes to expand philosophical investigation to fields such as the arts and morality, domains where truth is not necessarily the primary ideal and criterion, and thus seems to move in a direction that would not have been acceptable to Peirce. However, Dewey’s contention that the proper task of philosophy is to liberate and clarify meanings, “including those scientifically authenticated” (LW 1:307, 1925), rather than the pursuit of truth in a narrow sense, is perhaps less at odds with the Peircean point of view than meets the eye.*° In any event, Peirce and Dewey should be able to agree that one of the central aims of the pragmatist philosopher—if not the purpose—ought to be reasonable criticism that aspires to the amelioration of human habits. At least, I see no reason why the philosophical tools that Peirce spent his life sterilizing and sharpening should not be enlisted and further developed in attempts to cultivate and enrich human experience.

SEVEN

SELF-CONTROL, VALUES, AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT Peirce on the Value-driven Dynamics of Human Morality Helmut Pape

An Argument for the Ethics of Self-Control

What are values and what are values for? This is the crucial question for dealing with normativity, ideals, and values in the philosophy of C. S. Peirce.’ A good starting point is the commonsense view that values are standards for evaluation, sorting and selecting objects, actions, and so on. However, I think we should look for a more general, comprehensive, and more specific concept of value. Such a concept, it seems to me, is implicit in the overall title of this series of conferences: “American and European Values.” This title entails that values play a role because they are generally accepted in a cultural community—e.g., the European one— and that they can be contrasted with the values of a different culture—in this case the American one. This requires, however, that values can be compared relative to the local culture in which they are shared and developed in a specific way. Nevertheless, though specificity and locality of value distribution is a fact of life, in philosophy we tend to approach values in a way that is not relative to some local culture, but tends to be general, or comprehensive. Philosophers, like Peirce, are famous, if not infamous, (149 3

150 HELMUT PAPE for constructing moral concepts in general so that they transcend local boundaries. Time and again Peirce talks about justice, honesty, courage, and so on, in general, without discussing local versions of these values. But it is the local versions of values that become the “habits of the heart” that his moral sentimentalism requires, as Bergman and de Waal have pointed out. If values play a role in the moral development of persons, they influence their goals, aims, and purposes—their teleology, in short. And why is that so? Because we need values badly when we compare

and rank our aims, goals, and purposes in terms of their priority or urgency. And finally, the worth for us of objects of all sorts reflects the value comparison and hierarchy we have presently arrived at. To what degree the value-hierarchy of a person simply reflects our cultural heritage or our own personality is a difficult question we cannot discuss here. It seems to me that the individuality of every person consists in the purposes—and I would add the values—that she adopts in her lifelong individual development. Therefore, a person is, as Peirce correctly states, a sort of developing teleology: “In the case of personality this teleology is more than a mere purposive pursuit of a predeterminate end; it is a developmental teleology. ... Were the ends of a person already explicit, there would be no room for development, for growth, for life” (CP 6.156-57, 1892).° The question then arises: How are we, as individuals, able to develop purposes and values? Sure, there is the influence of tradition, our social environment that conveys values to us early on, but there is also the contribution of the individual in its interactional relation to others, no matter how small this may be. The contribution of the interacting individuals in the development of a teleological setup is both interactional and reflective. For this reason it turns the developmental teleology of a person into a self-developmental one. This result leads to my first thesis: We need values to perform those

cognitive processes and interactions with others that establish some sort of order or balance in our personal development to create some order relations between different conflicting purposes and goals and the

corresponding further lines of action. But how to judge the rank and importance of different, possibly competing ends? How do we know that this or that purpose, aim, or goal is something we want to hold on to? One answer is: Values may be used to express or even establish a comparative relation between different ends and help us perform and express

the reflective level of self-control in our lives. In this way, that is, by

PEIRCE ON HUMAN MORALITY 151 balancing, evaluating, and selecting purposes and courses of action, we are able to understand that we lead an autonomous life in which purposes, aims, and other ends are accepted or discarded—held or rejected. It is in this way that someone’s personality may be said to “grow,” without assuming there is a limit fixed in advance. I argue in this essay:

1. That the moral and cognitive autonomy of human intelligence consists in the ability to use flexible, logical self-control in the adoption and ordering of values and purposes.

2. That the full moral autonomy of self-control is constitutive for human agency and provides a normative limit for the development of artificial intelligence.

In what follows I start off from some of Peirce’s ideas about logical self-control, morality, and the internal limits of logical machines, which I then connect and extend in ways for which Peirce is, of course, not responsible. My argument runs as follows. In a first step I show that selfcontrol is a constitutive feature of human rationality. Second, I argue that the flexibility of logical self-control is how human rationality contributes to an individual person’s ability to make morally responsible decisions

about values. To the extent that logical self-control is subject to moral values and standards—thus relating it to the interests, desires, and emotions of a person—one becomes rational in the full human sense. But what is the relation of values to the qualitative content of experience to which the interests, desires, and emotions of a person refer? This question I address next. In a third step, I discuss how controlled abstractions contribute to a person’s development by means of moral self-control. The link that connects cognitive autonomy and morality is the role abstraction plays in the

formation of aims, ideals, and norms. Although Peirce only implicitly assumes such a connection, I think that the contents of an individual’s

experience can be turned into purposes and—in the long run—into values by a sequence of connected acts of hypostatic abstraction connecting, for example, the individual experience of “This red rose over there” with “redness,” “color,” and “beauty.”

In a last step I concentrate on the relation between cognitive autonomy and the moral status of being a person. I argue that cognitively

152 HELMUT PAPE autonomous AI systems would land us in a moral dilemma that we are well advised to avoid. Logical Self-Control: A Constitutive Feature of Human Intelligence and Human Personhood

If you want to check your reasoning, you can do two things: Either you check the results of your thoughts against the facts, goals, and values, or you check the logic, method, or strategy used in the process to be controlled. Self-control shares a holistic feature with thought processes in general: There are no first acts of self-control, for internal standards of past acts of self-control are with us all the time. It is true that logical selfcontrol is a critical, reflective activity. That is to say, it is something you do after you have already completed some cognitive process. But it must nevertheless be directly related to the process it checks.

Nonetheless, logical self-control has a future-oriented, normative function; it contributes to the adoption of decisions about how future cognitive processes are to be performed. In this case the control consists in the selection and decision about which method of reasoning we apply and which premises we consider as interesting, relevant, or important when we start using it. Therefore, the selection of the premises we want to argue from is a basic act of logical self-control. This sort of basic selfcontrol is in fact an element of all logical thought. This is what Peirce had in mind when he pointed out: “All deductive reasoning, except that kind

which is so childishly simple that acute minds have doubted whether there was any reasoning there—I mean non-relative syllogism—requires an act of choice; because from a given premiss, several conclusions—in some cases an infinite number—can be drawn” (CP 6.595, 1893). Is this to say that the selection of premises depends on our “values”? I don’t think so: Values are general. This holds for goals, purposes, or ideals, and they, like values, do not translate directly into motives of action. Neither are they directly identifiable with the interests, research projects, and other

aims that motivate our arguments and proof strategies. Very often, in order to apply self-correctional reasoning, even in the selection of premises, we have to invoke both interests (desires) and values to arrive at a decision between alternative sets of premises. That is to say, it is because of the relation between ends and desires that values come into play. Only

in retrospect, when a complex situation of decision making between

PEIRCE ON HUMAN MORALITY 153 alternate ends has been successfully resolved, we talk as if the end—the purpose, goal, aim, etc.—we opted for embodies or expresses some value (or rather value hierarchy). However, this way of talking abbreviates a more complex situation in which our decision for a specific end (purpose, goal, aim, etc.) was guided by the value that we now see as being represented (or expressed) by the end we aimed at. What I am driving at is that the adoption of values is not just a way of subsuming an individual case under a general rule. Rather, there is an open interactional exchange between individual desires, interests, and other local conditions in the way in which values are adopted and embodied in motives of action. This complex relation between goals, desires, and values does not take place by a process completely consciously executed by a person. However, I claim that the different levels of local and personal orientation are active on some conscious or preconscious level of the individual’s cognitive activity. The cognitive and moral autonomy of a person crucially depends on her ability to invoke at least two (semiotically) different levels of cognitive processes, where the conscious one brings in values whereas desires, interests, and other subjective components are more closely connected with the subconscious level. Just to make sure that this rather tricky point

is not misinterpreted, let me stress that I don’t deny that we normally speak about values as if they are just what we take to be worthwhile. However, if we consider their role in self-control, values play a much more complex role. To better understand the relation between self-control and values let us compare the reflective control architecture of the human mind with the architecture of computers. Computers, and artificial intelligence programs in particular, may have built-in or programmed control feedback mechanisms that check results against a list of control parameters. Does this computer-implemented control already exemplify self-control in the full sense? I will argue that it does not. I will show that there is a property in human self-control that makes a crucial difference. Note that most computers lack autonomy with respect to the selection of the relevant premises and to the choice of their goals, that is, with respect to

the type of processes they are to perform. Computers are not and are not supposed to initiate and select by themselves when and under which goal they process content; they are able to change the routines and programs they are running only by using a limited range of external information. This is true even when they are built as network-based machines,

154 HELMUT PAPE constructed to generate algorithms by extracting from their input infor-

mation certain correlations between data that allow for a rule-based response, which even changes the input reception pattern. Obviously, this task of generating rule-based changes from input correlations has been defined by the program and by the hardware supplied for these machines. So far no machine of this type has been constructed so as to redefine its task, rebuild its sensory mechanisms, or evaluate its program as nonsensical because it prefers, say, to fight hunger in the third world or devote its computational power to Amnesty International and its cause.

Humans, in contrast, are capable of such drastic self-control readjustments of their lives, even if such decisions are pretty rare. To express the same point in technical terms: It is because of their lack of open, unrestricted, and value-driven control of all possible parameters of logical selfcontrol that we should not call AI programmed computers “intelligent”

or “rational.” They are just very sophisticated tools—and_ this being the goal of their design we are better advised to keep that so (cf. last section). Human and Computerized Rationality and Degrees of Logical Self-Control

Are human beings really capable of unrestricted and value-driven control of all possible parameters, that is to say, are they capable of exercising complete self-control? Given the finite character of human thought, it is obvious that human beings are not able to achieve complete self-control. Yet it does not seem possible, or even advisable, to fix a definite limit for self-control for human beings. Checking the validity of reasons or conclusions is an open-ended process, and on what stage or level of control we stop is decided independently for each case. However, this does not mean that empirically we are most of the time human beings who actually achieve high levels of self-control. Even to claim that the highest degree of logical self-control possible should be achieved, or that achieving it is valuable, is a rather odd thesis. Not only is a progressus ad infint-

tum only a hairsbreadth away—there is no argument available to stop self-control after the mth step or at the (n + 1), step. But it is also simply implausible to claim that a person behaves rationally only when she controls her thoughts unceasingly by an unlimited number of acts of

PEIRCE ON HUMAN MORALITY 155 logical criticism. To postulate ever ongoing or unceasing self-control sounds very much like a paranoid ideal, one that does no justice to the everyday needs of conscious, sensible human beings. Nonetheless, it may be claimed that given Peirce’s pragmatic emphasis on the importance of consequences, every interpretation is a test for what the sign so interpreted may mean. But is this really so? I do not think that this suggestion gets us very far. There should be a more specific reason why the property of always being open to a further critical step of evaluation or end-comparison is such an essential requirement for logical selfcontrol and for rationality. First, let us get an important misunderstanding out of the way. To say that no definite limit can be fixed for logical self-control in advance is not to say that this process has to, or even can, go on without end. Rather, it

should be read as the claim that, at least in principle, a second step of logical control is always feasible. Second, to check critically, from the external point of view of a second-level, independent control parameter, some line of reasoning, inquiry, or perception is closely connected with what it means to get to know p because one has some convincing reasons to believe in p. But to treat a belief as self-evident or beyond criticism comes close to declaring it to be unknowable. What happens if we treat a specific belief p as entirely exempt from criticism? No investigation or inquiry probing into its truth would be acceptable. For this reason, any process of explanation, analysis, or inquiry could use Q only as a premise

of an argument—or try to move around it. In an important sense Q would not be part of the web of reasons and explanations and might eventually turn into what Peirce calls a barricade on the road to a further advance toward truth—it blocks the road of inquiry. Third, no series of actually performed acts of logical self-control can give us complete control. So in what sense can we hold that intelligent self-control, though never really complete, is sufficient? Surely, at some point we have to say that a sequence of self-criticisms is incomplete, but nevertheless sufficient. By “sufficient, but incomplete self-control” I mean a recognition of incompleteness combined with a disposition always to add further acts of control, that is to say, to initiate,

to restructure, and to reevaluate the cognitive processes that one has already performed. So even for the incomplete, but sufficient selfcontroller a next step of control is always an open option, even if it never occurs. Let us call this the

156 HELMUT PAPE Open-next-step-principle: A human being is sufficiently rational in proceeding intelligently only if she understands and accepts the following two requirements as part of her situation:

1. A claim is arrived at in a rational way only if a further act of logical self-control is always in principle possible; 2. Every finite number of critical checks so far executed may count as sufficient as long as there are no suggestions to the contrary—no reasons for doubting the result reached so far. I think that Peirce would have subscribed to some such principle. For example, in a letter to Josiah Royce, Peirce stresses the lack of a definite limit: “That self-control, self consciousness, involve endless series is clear” (CP 8.122n19: letter of 27 May 1902). So self-control is indeed in principle an unlimited process. We are justified in ascribing to Peirce the other part of the open-next-step principle too, for he also acknowledged the other point, namely the unavoidable finite incompleteness of self-control. At some point he noted: “Self-criticism can never be perfectly thorough. For the last act of criticism is always itself open to criticism. But as long as we remain disposed to self-criticism and to further inquiry, we have in this disposition an assurance that if the truth of any question can ever be got at, we shall eventually get at it” (R 831:12, emphasis added).° Why is it that a mere disposition of self-control is a sufficient assurance for a rational, truly human intelligent procedure? Let me answer this question by a hypothesis. One difference between the performance of a

computer-based AI program and the human mind is that for human minds—but not for AI programs—the “open-next-step-principle” of logical control marks a crucial difference because it captures the relation

between self-control and value-perspectives that opens the way to an unlimited series of acts of self-control. This thesis contradicts a crucial claim of defenders of strong AI. For example, Kurzweil (2005) thinks that eventually sufficient computing power of some algorithmically controlled

billions cps (calculations per second) alone will suffice to allow AI to match and surpass human intelligence. However, I argue that there is not a chance to come in close contact with the scope of human intelligence if you rely on algorithms and computing power only. Instead, its characteristic is fully logical and oriented to moral self-control by its interaction with the environment, in part via abstractive moves, practical consequences, and actions. The move away from algorithm toward intelligent

PEIRCE ON HUMAN MORALITY 157 interaction has become the background theory of some recent advances in the design of computer and technology (see, e.g., Wegener 1997). In addition, the enactive approach in today’s philosophy of mind has shown that pragmatism’s core thesis that meaning is constituted by practical consequence and actions can be developed into a account of perception and mind in general (cf. Noé 2004, 2009). Consequently, we may reasonably guess that there is no such principle allowing for a sequence of self-control levels in the case of strong AI systems. Rather, the control of the execution of programs leads to unsolvable problems even on the formal level of machine construction. The flexibility of the human mind hinges on the fact that there is a complex interplay between levels of rational self-control and levels of partially and temporarily uncontrollable cognitive processes, such as emotions, perceptions, and unconsciously controlled body functions. Although emotions, perceptions, and body functions do not answer directly to our critical appraisal, we assume that to some degree a person is in the long run responsible for her emotions and will find indirect ways to evaluate

and influence her perceptions, and may even, through biofeedback techniques learn to influence some body functions.* Why is this difference between human and mechanical intelligence important? The obvious answer is: AI systems are not and should not be designed for a flexible and open-ended construction of control processes that will necessarily involve values as control parameters, for this construction would always include moral self-control, interpreting, morally,

the values used. In contrast, the developing human mind controls a sequence of processes characterized by the open-next-step-principle of logical criticism. This is so for exactly the contrary reason: Because human

rationality and morality are only fully developed if they include moral reflection and a dynamic, value-driven control, they are not complete without level-interdependent control procedures.° To clarify this point let us turn to Peirce’s remarks about the shortcomings of what he calls logical machines. Peirce’s logical machines are the forerunners of our computers. In fact, he saw the possibility of logical

machines that used electrical switches to represent logical connectives like “or” and “and.” Peirce does not see a difference in principle between an inference drawn by a computer or by a man. He adopts a sort of functionalistic approach when he claims that “man may be regarded as a machine which turns out, let us say, a written sentence expressing a

158 HELMUT PAPE conclusion, the man-machine having been fed with a written statement of fact, as premiss” (CP 2.59, c. 1902).° But Peirce does not have a functionalist view of the mind (though he defends a number of theses similar to functionalism). He argues that the limits of logical machines come into view when we discuss the issue of their autonomy with regard to flexible self-control, as there is no way around admitting that the “opennext-step principle” of logical control does not hold for them. This is what Peirce drives at: Every reasoning machine ... has two inherent impotencies. In the first place, it is destitute of all originality, of all initiative. It cannot find its own problems; it cannot feed itself. It cannot direct itself between different possible procedures. . . .This, however, is no defect in a machine;

we do not want it do its own business, but ours. ... In the second place, the capacity of a machine has absolute limitations; it has been contrived to do a certain thing, and it can do nothing else. For instance, the logical machines that have thus far been devised can deal with but a limited number of different letters. The unaided mind is also limited in this as in other respects; but the mind working with a pencil and plenty of paper has no such limitation. It presses on and on, and whatever limits can be assigned to its capacity today, may be over-stepped tomorrow. (W 6:70-71, emphasis added)

Peirce acknowledges “absolute limitations” of logical machines. It is true that his objections were aimed against the simple mechanistic gear-driven machines that he knew. Today you can run a genetic algorithm on your PC creating “artificial life” where the result is not fixed because the pro-

gram may, within a certain range of parameters, allow a change in its modus operandi. But Peirce had a more general objection in mind, and his objection still applies to most of the AI systems and programs that we have today. In a broader sense such a system has been “contrived to do a

certain thing, and it can do nothing else.” It cannot change the overall goal of its function, neither can it modify the type and range of possible outcomes completely or abandon the program it is performing of something. The reason is that the degree of freedom the self-control levels of the computer allow for are not broad enough that the computer can evaluate by itself something as more valuable than what it was programmed to. Even were we, for instance, to let the genetic algorithm create forms of artificial life on its graphic display for days without end, it will never go

beyond the limit set by its program and develop a completely different

PEIRCE ON HUMAN MORALITY 159 kind of program that designs, for instance, houses. This is true even if the computer has a built-in pattern recognition device and may learn from it by a new algorithm developed out of its recognition of forms and how it responds to them.

In contrast, the human mind sometimes can act not only as a selfprogramming and self-evaluating system all the way through, uniting all levels of cognitive processes and actions by subjecting them to a value appraisal. If there is sufficient time, it may introduce into its development

new levels of operation that completely change the original setup of desires, goals, interests, and purposes. The possibilities of self-controlled learning from past trials may amount to a complete reversal, and not only a change in some details, even within the limits of our everyday thoughts. The ability of self-control must be a very comprehensive and flexible ability to connect different levels and types of cognitive processes reaching

from the preconscious level up to perceptions, explicit thoughts, and logical and moral reflections. So far, we have not considered the order of the steps that comprehensive rational self-criticism exhibits. Peirce gives the following description of some of these steps: The power of self-control is certainly not a power over what one is doing at the very instant the operation of self-control is commenced. It consists (to mention only the leading constituents) first, in comparing one’s past deeds with standards, second, in rational deliberation concerning how one will act in the future, in itself a highly complicated operation, third, in the formation of a resolve, fourth, in the creation, on the basis of the resolve, of a strong determination, or modification of habit. (CP 8.320, undated)

Not all thoughts can be controlled—or otherwise every thought-process would have a double controlling it. We only check those thoughts of which we are not quite certain. What do I have to master so that an act of self-criticism may become a basis for decision that creates a modified

strategy for my behavior using the results of the evaluation of past thoughts or experiences? To change one’s behavior according to the result of the control of one’s actions requires an extended range of flexibility in

one’s cognitive abilities. We need not only some standards—norms, ideals, rules—which we can apply. What is necessary is the ability to use these standards in such a way that they guide us in a process of

160 HELMUT PAPE recalibration of our conduct in relevant situations. That is to say, these standards are used as criteria of relevance for the factual conditions of a person’s actions, and the very same person has to use the same standards to evaluate her options for future actions and values decisions, to allow for some consistency required to achieve even minimal self-control and consistency. Only later on can she resort to a different, e.g. more general second-level of evaluation (answering questions like “what is this all good for?” ), if she wants to evaluate and control the overall value of her first level line of actions. Such a comprehensive evaluative kind of self-control has to rely on many different sorts of cognitive abilities and results—e.g., facts, individual perceptions, and thoughts about likely effects of certain types of behavior as opposed to others. And this level will always include an evaluation of the moral principles, values, and ideals that guided past actions. Obviously, it is on this level of second-order moral self-control that we can spell out most clearly the difference between the intelligence of computers and human beings.

From Logical Self-Control to Moral Self-Control

I now turn to the second issue on the list, the connection between selfcontrol and morality. In a sense logical self-control has to be subject to values, moral principles, or standards from the very start. We may distinguish between directly controllable conscious mental processes and indi-

rectly controllable preconscious mental processes. If we do so, we differentiate between two ways in which we are responsible for mental processes considered as a species of conduct. The question of responsibility arises when our conduct influences the well-being of other people. This responsibility is moral responsibility, and it has to be spelled out in terms of how the logical control answers to values, moral rules, standards, or ideals. There are two ways in which logical self-control may be subject to a control by moral rules and values. The first option is the external evaluation of cognitive processes. That

is to say, only after a perception is made, or an argument or a line of thought is completed, its moral justification is evaluated. This allows for a kind of post-factum self-control that may change our habits of conduct. As Peirce points out:

PEIRCE ON HUMAN MORALITY 161 It is self-control which makes any other than the normal course of thought possible, just as nothing else makes any other than the normal course of action possible; and just as it is precisely that that gives room for an ought-to-be of conduct, I mean Morality, so it equally gives

room for an ought-to-be of thought, which is Right Reason; and where there is no self-control, nothing but the normal is possible. (CP 4.540, 1905)

The second form of self-control consists in a sort of moral self-control that internally regulates the semiotic structure cognitive processes have. The internal moral control implements moral standards directly into the logical processes themselves. At least in the case of conscious logical thought or reasoning both versions of moral self-control are necessary. Thought is directly and internally controlled by moral standards because it is itself a version of controlled behavior. Stressing the internal connection between logical and moral control Peirce writes: For reasoning is essentially thought that is under self-control, just as moral conduct is conduct under self-control. Indeed reasoning is a species of controlled conduct and as such necessarily partakes of the essential features of controlled conduct. If you attend to the phenomena of reasoning, although they are not quite so familiar to you as those of morals . . . you will nevertheless remark, without difficulty, that a person who draws a rational conclusion, not only thinks it to be true, but thinks that similar reasoning would be just in every analogous case. (CP 1.606, 1903)

This passage introduces an important requirement for many types of moral reasoning: Moral control requires a generalization to “every analogous case.” In this passage Peirce expresses his conviction that logic is a normative science. But what does the internal relevance of ethics to logical self-control amount to? What we have to explain in more detail is how logical rules or logical self-control can be actually governed by values, moral standards, and rules.’ To make some progress with this problem, let us take a quick look at what Peirce did when he formulated his ethics of terminology. In his ethics of terminology Peirce formulates rules for the honest, respectful, and reliable use and invention of terms in philosophy that serve both speakers and listeners, authors and readers, and sup-

port unequivocal scientific and philosophical communication. Used ethically and correctly, philosophical terms allow us to identify those

162 HELMUT PAPE objects and concepts they were invented to represent by the person who introduced them. One might be tempted to object that the handling of singular terms and concepts is at best a marginal issue in ethics—even in the ethics of logic.® But I don’t think it is, and I will give you some strong reasons why this so.

To achieve semantic consistency and preserve the truth-value of our beliefs, concepts and singular terms should be used so that a basic moral value is respected: We achieve credibility and truthfulness by preserving the identity of the object referred to. A semantic structure of communication that achieves credibility, truthfulness, and truth represents not only the propositional content correctly but also aims at conveying the whole cross-referential layout of reference, attributions of reference, and attributions of propositional content. This will apply, for instance, to forms of expression such as “He said, that N said, that a means x and y to M.” In expressing such attributional and referential relations we leave the individual assertions behind and look at the handling of the structure of changing thoughts and their consistency, interpretations with regard to their objects. What Peirce is developing here might be put in different, but more explicit and general, terms as the thesis that these moral require-

ments are embodied in the semiotic structure of communication and thought in the following way: The identity of the objects referred to (as well as the propositional content represented) acts as a moral value, if we take care to respect and ensure identity in all representation, thoughts, and dialogues.

In a letter from 1908, Peirce stresses that in thinking we control the

relation between signs and their objects, and that in doing this, we use a moral standard to control the internal semantic structure of interpretations. We think in signs; and indeed meditation takes the form of a dialogue in which one makes constant appeal to his self of a subsequent moment for ratification of his meaning in respect to his thought = signs really representing the objects they profess to represent. Logic therefore is almost a branch of ethics, being the theory of the control of signs in respect to their relation to their objects. (Peirce in a letter to P. E. B. Jourdain, 5 December 1908, NEM, 3:886)

This passage entails the claim that identity is a value that may act as a moral control standard for interpretative thought processes that have the

PEIRCE ON HUMAN MORALITY 163 purpose of acquiring truth. It assumes that signs can only be interpreted truthfully by those connected sequences in which the reference and the meaning of connected signs is secured by meeting two normative requirements that help to achieve true representation: That a first sign’s meaning is instrumental in producing a second sign interpreting it. It is the very meaning that the first sign conveys that relates the interpreting sign to the first sign’s object, creating an identity between the two objects. If you prefer a somewhat different, mentalistic version, we get this: The intentional object of a first sign can be interpreted as identical with the intentional object of a second sign, if this second sign is an interpretation of the first one.

But, of course, we may fail to grasp the correct match of relations between two such signs or thoughts. Therefore, we must check the inter-

play of difference and identity between the objects of our thoughts or interpretations that are related in such a way that they meet the two requirements. Why is identity such a crucial value for the internal setup of moral self-control? The answer is: Assume that we want to embody truth in semiosis so that it may act as a moral value for correct interpretations. Now, only if two conflicting interpretations can be understood to speak about the same (identical) object, we can decide which one is the correct one (assuming they cannot both be correct). But this presupposes

that the identity requirement can be met, even when there is conflict of truth claims. So treating identity normatively ensures that the sign-object relation is functional. It implements truth and truthfulness as a moral standard for our use of signs and our interpretations. In this way, truth requires truthfulness, and both presuppose some sort of identity as a

value. We cannot but suppose that different interpretations have an object in common to which they refer. Therefore, a principle for the objective unity of interpretations may be formulated more strictly in the following way: (PI) For any sequence of signs, if some sign S, acts as an interpretant

of another sign S,, then there is one and only one object a for which they both stand if and only if S, presents an object y* = x, and

164 HELMUT PAPE S, immediately presents an object z* = x on the condition that an ordered relation subsists only if for all other signs Sy it holds that S, is a predecessor of S..

If (PI) holds for all signs, Peirce’s triadic sign-relation or semeiosis, e.g., “A represents B for C,” consists in the fact that a sign and its interpretant are related to one another because they represent the same object. That is to say, (PI) describes what it means for a sign and its interpretant to stand for an identical object: The sign in itself and its interpretant constitute a complete sign, if and only if, they relate to the same object. The search for

identity and difference in the objects represented will always have to apply the moral standard of credibility and truthfulness in evaluating the validity of our interpretations.

Freedom and Abstraction: Moral Self-Control in Human Persons

Let us now turn to our third issue: Why do we need abstractions for invoking values into the development of moral self-control?’ The short answer is: We need them because only by abstracting from individual events of experience do we arrive—under conditions that have to do with our already active desires, interests, and purposes—at values that help us decide about the importance of certain aims, goals, and purposes. If we want to show the overriding role that moral reflection and values play in a person’s competence of self-control, we have to explain how a flexible, value-driven external self-control triggers the development of moral reflection and the grasp of moral issues in the light of relevant factual conditions of action and in stimulating second and third levels

of external self-control. That is to say, if self-control contributes to our moral thinking and the ensuing moral development, we must show that logical self-control internally contributes to our ability to form and decide externally about the moral standards, values, and norms. The hypothesis I pursue in what follows takes this into account: The constitu-

tive contribution of logical self-control to morality depends on the possibility that hypostatically abstracted concepts of properties may be used as aims, goals, and purposes and in this way add new objects and new evaluative standards to our moral reasoning. In some way this is already entailed by Peirce’s thesis “that it is essential to the nature of representation that it should so develop itself by imposing purposes upon

PEIRCE ON HUMAN MORALITY 165 matter... the process of growth is the summum bonum...athought isa purpose” (R 478:18—203; R 478:157—-59). Now, values acting as parameters

or general standards in self-control processes can be explained as products of the very same process that combines hypostatic abstraction of experience with reflective acts of self-control. However, in the case of values we have to assume a rather complicated and long-run process of comparing the application of purposes in various experiential situations with the particular ends and interests we exercise. However, both in the case of first-level concepts of end states (aims, purposes) and in the case of higher order evaluative concepts (values, ideals, standards) we need hypostatic abstractions to extract from our experience the concepts that enter into those purposes, aims—that is to say into ideals and values. It seems that only if we allow for some such process for the generation of evaluative concepts, are we able to explain, if only in a general way, how the content of our effective moral thinking is constituted in practice, and how it necessarily relates to practice. To see this more clearly, consider the following objection to a version of pure moral rationalism: It will not do simply to point out that moral reflection is the highest level of control. If we already have found good reasons for the thesis that an ideal represented in theoretical thought can be handled as a normative standard for the conduct of thought and interpretation, and even if we have one overall moral principle, for example, the categorical imperative, and are able to show that the theoretically described ideal is logically consistent and can be generalized, it will not do to apply these theoretical thoughts to individual cases. This is because, besides a contribution to the practical content by universal moral concepts, we need an individualizing sort of moral everyday reflection that invokes contingent objects and information—however, this can be done only by relying on some form of self-controlled thought. In the control of moral judgment our thoughts are subject to versions of the same standards of interpretational consistency as in theoretical thought. That is, there have to be standards of identity and difference with respect to the contingent objects of moral thought. But the freedom achieved by a sequence of levels of moral self-control rests on our use of abstract concepts in specific situations by individual persons on concrete issues. It is due to the interplay of logical self-control with hypostatic abstractions that human subjects may combine responsibility and moral freedom. But the question of freedom makes sense only

166 HELMUT PAPE if we also take into account the way in which the intelligence of AI systems and human beings differ. Surely, there are many important logical, semiotical, and operational differences between humans and AI systems.

However, I think that the most important difference between the two depends on the way in which cognitive autonomy gives rise to and depends on moral self-control. The thesis issued above, that the cognitive and moral autonomy of a human being crucially depends on her ability to invoke at least two (semiotically) different levels of cognitive processes, at least one of which brings in some sort of moral standard or value, has to be spelled out to describe this difference. However, this seems to be

clear from the start: Only human beings have moral autonomy, and this moral autonomy crucially depends on the ability to exercise logical self-control. Now I will discuss how freedom and moral self-control are related. After that I look at how hypostatic abstractions contribute to this issue.

We saw already that Peirce opts for a strong concept of logical selfcontrol that has moral self-control as its paradigm. In making room for responsible decisions based on the employment of self-control, moral self-control is a way to achieve moral freedom.'° The reason is: What a sequence of moral and logical self-control acts does is to lift the burden of contingency a little bit from our individual existence: We introduce a general moral perspective combining moral reasoning with individual experience. In this way we are able to be free and to love what is good for everybody. In an almost Hegelian move, Peirce even identifies moral freedom with Christianity. Self-control seems to be the capacity for rising to an extended view of a practical subject instead of seeing only temporary urgency. This is the only freedom of which man has any reason to be proud; and it is because love of what is good for all on the whole, which is the widest possible consideration, is the essence of Christianity, that it is said that the service of Christ is perfect freedom. (CP 5.339n1, 1893)

Unfortunately, we are given only a few claims about self-control, and

without much argument, but it connects freedom with a more general application of self-control. In writing about the possibilities and limits of pragmatism, Peirce is much more skeptical about whether through mere moral reflection the human mind can develop a degree of freedom that sets him apart from logical machines. Man is a machine that does have

PEIRCE ON HUMAN MORALITY 167 self-control, but this does not entail that he is free in any absolute or metaphysical sense. In a letter to F. C. S. Schiller, Peirce argues: The propositions that the laws of nature are not absolute and that important physical events are due to human reasoning are far from proving that human action is (in any important degree) free, except in the sense that a man is a machine with automatic controls, one over another, for five or six grades, at least. I, for my part, am very dubious as to man’s having more freedom than that, nor do I see what pragmatic meaning there is in saying that he has more. (CP 8.320, c. 1906)

At first glance this passage seems to contradict the thesis that self-control

enables freedom of moral reflection. But this impression is wrong. To examine this let us simply discount Peirce’s identification of self-control with automatic control. This is just a rhetorical move designed to bring home his point to F. C. S. Schiller. At many places Peirce explicitly argued

that automatic control, as with a thermostat, has nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence, but is a mere mechanistic device. Rather, Peirce’s argument in this passage attacks only a metaphysical account of freedom. Metaphysical freedom rests on a mistake because it equates the fact that there are chance-events—that not every event is absolutely determined by laws of nature—with the claim that human beings have free will."' If a human agent is responsible for what he or she is doing, the mere existence of chance-events does not give us the freedom of self-control, but rather denies it. If the morally correct thought or action occurs to me simply by chance, I am not free in choosing it on the ground of morally controlled reflections. So Peirce is consistent when he rejects metaphysical freedom.'” Having a choice because of moral self-control requires freedom only in a nonmetaphysical sense. That is to say, there is no ontological difference but only an ethical one between an autonomous human subject and an AI system that exerts moral control over its own programs, purposes, and other rules of action. But there may well be moral and other practical reasons why we should not develop systems that achieve autonomous moral control. I will come back to this later. So we have to develop the crucial contribution of self-controlled concepts to morality because only a strong type of self-control for which the open-next-step principle holds will do. The most likely candidate will be a process that is guided by the restrictions of internal self-control.

168 HELMUT PAPE Indeed, we will have to control the identity/difference of the objects of our thoughts in the development of moral control to achieve this much. Furthermore, the abstractions will allow us to place moral control into a developmental scheme of moral reasoning. Peirce hints at this when he writes: When a man trains himself, thus controlling control, he must have some moral rule in view, however special and irrational it may be. But next he may undertake to improve this rule; that is, to exercise a control over his control of control. To do this he must have in view some-

thing higher than an irrational rule. He must have some sort of moral principle. (CP 5.533, 1905)

Next, let us discuss the function hypostatic abstractions might have for moral self-control. How do we arrive at concepts that may serve as values informing the use of our moral principles, norms, and objects of practical attitudes of all sorts? How do we judge what is morally justified and what

contributes to our free decisions? One requirement for a connection between freedom and morality in general could be: A moral concept used correctly connects the individual circumstances of my existence with the good that I can reasonably wish for everyone. But only general concepts related to individual experiences describe my own situation in terms of a general type of situation that I can wish to share with all human beings. But the process through which we arrive at such concepts, which Peirce calls “hypostatic abstraction,” is, like self-control, a reflexively related process. It overlaps with self-control because it is a species of a controlled thought process. Peirce tells us: “The intellectual control of thinking takes

place by thinking about thought. .. . One extremely important grade of

thinking about thought ... is . . . performed when something, that one has thought about any subject, is itself made a subject of thought” (CP 5.534, 1905).

Hypostatically abstracted concepts play a crucial role in moral thought because they satisfy the two conditions given above: They are general representations of properties treated as objects of thought, and they take an individual experience as their point of departure. So they are related to

individual existence, and they are applicable in practical and moral thought. But let us start from a simple case to demonstrate the generalizing power of abstraction. Let us take first a simple example. In the move from my observation,

PEIRCE ON HUMAN MORALITY 169 There is a red rose over there

to Redness exists

the perceived quality of a perceptual object, the specific red of the rose, is

represented as an individual abstract object—“Redness.” Now, further thoughts and cognitive processes may take this concept as their point of departure. But “Redness” may also become the content of all sorts of practical attitudes. In this way an aspect of my experience may become the content of a purpose, goal, ideal, or norm that I can pursue and use in acts of moral self-control. The interesting step in this process of forming a content of moral reflection—there are of course many others that I will not discuss—is to turn the content of a specific experience into a concept of an object of thought that can be represented and communicated to everybody, freed from its relation to an experiential context, for example, to induce him or her to take over the same perceptual, practical, or moral

attitude to situations of the same type.'° To tell people that it is a good thing to look for red objects becomes an option if we already have the concept of “redness.” On this basis we can describe the contribution of abstractly individuated objects to the constitution of moral self-control as follows: When we form an abstract hypostatic concept of a specific experiential content, turning it into an object of thought, it is possible to handle this concept as a value or as the content of moral standards, norms,

and ideals. The development of morality is possible on this basis because we may connect both the experiential circumstances of an individual person and what is good for everybody by applying an abstract concept normatively.

To go back to our example: Only if I understand that this red rose instantiates in a type of redness that may be found out to be the property of an indefinite number of objects, the option is open to me to treat redness as an abstract object that I will be able to search for, desire, or look for as something that is instantiated in other red objects as well. If I learn how to select those perceptual contents as abstract objects of thought that are morally acceptable, I will be able to develop myself morally. The individual experience of what is morally good may not support my correct hypostatic abstraction of goodness in itself. If repeated and self-critical

170 HELMUT PAPE abstractions allow me to arrive at some such a notion, it may finally be possible for me to arrive in my thoughts at an idea of what is good for everybody. In the moral development of human autonomy, many interrelated acts of abstraction from the contents of perceptual experience are needed, and many other social and cognitive factors are involved that I cannot discuss here. But as far as this rough sketch goes, at least one basic connection has been made explicit: Human beings develop into autonomous persons if their “open-nextstep” ability of logical self-control includes free evaluative and normative interpretations of some abstracted contents of their experiences.

Only if the ability of self-control of a person extends to acts of moral selfcontrol can the condition for freedom in his or her development of purposes be met in the empirical world: Such a person will be able to reflect

on her or his own development of meaningful purposes and ideals in terms of what is good for everybody.

Moral Self-Control and the Normative Limits for the Development of Future AI

If human beings have developed into autonomous persons, their ability of logical self-control is only complete when it includes an internally effective mode of moral self-control. Moral reflection structures and extends logical self-control. The way we introduce and focus on some hypostatically abstract objects (and not on others) in the formation of the content of practical reflection connects moral and theoretical thoughts. This kind of dynamic cognitive cooperation between experience, desire, and controlled reflection enables the development of moral freedom and rationality for a person. Consequently, the difference in intelligence between an AI system and a human being is a moral one. Whereas AI systems are more or less useful tools, human beings are free, morally responsible subjects whose cognitive self-control exhibits at least some degree of moral self-control. The development of moral self-control for AI systems, however, would entail that such a system would no longer function as a reliable tool. A tool, which morally controls its own norms of action and its purposes, is no longer a tool.

PEIRCE ON HUMAN MORALITY 171 So why not engage in the project—surely, still a very science-fictionlike project—to create morally self-controlled AI systems that we will treat, if we are finally successful, as mechanical slaves? Well, this science-

fiction project takes for granted the very point I tried to argue for. To create autonomous creatures and to treat them as slaves are two moral decisions. If we force an autonomous AI system into the role of a slave, we take a moral, although morally wrong attitude toward it. Even if treated immorally, an AI system will no longer be a mere tool. An AI system that acts in a moral self-controlled way should be recognized and treated as an autonomous agent. It would have become a person in the sense Peirce once used to characterize human persons: Such a system would be a self-developmental teleology.

EIGHT

WHY IS THE NORMATIVITY OF LOGIC BASED ON RULES? Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen

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Logic as a Normative Science

According to Peirce, normative sciences are the “most purely theoretical of purely theoretical sciences” (CP 1.281, c. 1902, A Detailed Classification of the Sciences). At the same time, he takes logic to be a normative science.

These two sentences form a highly interesting pair of assertions. Why is logic among the most purely theoretical sciences? What does it actually mean that logic is a normative science? In this essay I will answer these questions by addressing the question of why the normativity of logic is, as a matter of fact, based on rules.

The statement that logic is a normative science has been routinely taken to follow from the classification of the sciences that Peirce came up with in 1903, termed the “perennial classification” by Kent (1988) (cf. Pietarinen 2006a). Namely, normative logic is the “third” normative science that depends on the second or “mid-normative” science of ethics (a.k.a. practics, anthetics)—or that the second provides grounds or support for the third—and logic and ethics depend on the first normative science, which Peirce spells esthetics. Moreover, normative sciences as a (172 §

NORMATIVITY OF LOGIC AND RULES 173 whole depend on phenomenology and mathematics, whereas no normative science depends in these same senses on metaphysics or the special sciences (idioscopy). To show that normative sciences generally need not draw on the special sciences Peirce first argues that normative sciences have nothing to do with psychology and linguistics, and then goes on to

sketch arguments intended to extend the case to other branches of science as well.

The first, second, and third normative sciences study the three ends of philosophical inquiry. The purpose of logic is to distinguish truth from falsehood. The purpose of ethics is to distinguish good conduct from bad conduct. The purpose of esthetics—a science that Peirce apologizes for not having been able to study much of at all—has not so much to do with qualities such as beauty or attraction, let alone “taste” (CP 1.574, 1906, The Basis of Pragmatism), but with what is desirable as such, or with what the aim in any fully deliberate line of conduct or thinking in itself could be, without any special motive or purpose. It is the study of ideals or standards in themselves. Peirce’s view does not seem to differ much from Aristotle’s characterization of esthetics. In which sense should logic be seen as depending on esthetics? Peirce is not proposing any straightforward answers. Commentators have been puzzled by the few remarks that he has to offer.' He vaguely states that “I shall not deny that [logic] depends in some measure, though indirectly for the most part, upon esthetics” (R 693, 1904, Reason’s Conscience;7 NEM 4:198; cf. CP 2.199, Why Study Logic?). Crucial in interpreting these statements is to first do some reconstructive work on his overall philosophy. For example, the role of logic in his philosophy of pragmaticism is the core issue that needs to be clarified. Such a reconstruction forms the gist of my argument that explains why normative logic is “the most purely theoretical of purely theoretical sciences.” After this clarification, I will observe what the reconstruction implies about the relationship between logic and esthetics. I will proceed to the main argument in a moment. As far as Peirce’s classificationary schemes are concerned, the case that logic depends on ethics is a little more straightforward to back up.’ He sees the goal of reasoners to perform self-controlled thinking, just as good action requires self-controlled conduct. “As the reasoning depends upon

the virtue,” he writes in Reason’s Conscience, “so must the theory of the reasoning depend upon the theory of the virtue” (NEM 4:198). In the

174 AHTI-VEIKKO PIETARINEN version of The Basis of Pragmatism published in the Collected Papers he continues that “the control of thinking with a view to its conformity to a standard or ideal is a special case of the control of action to make it conform to a standard” (CP 1.573, 1906, my emphasis). By reasoning Peirce means logic in a wide sense, the “theory of deliberate thinking” (CP 1.573). Since deliberate, inferential thinking is a form of action, logic as self-controlled thought is part of the theory of self-controlled conduct, and so the general theory of reasoning is part of the general theory of logic. The overall point I wish to make is that explaining normativity solely

by reference to the role a branch of science plays in the classification scheme is unsatisfactory. I am not saying that there is anything fundamentally out of place in the classification as such, only that it does not serve as an explanation of why individual sciences are so classified in that scheme. Taxonomies and classifications are not scientific explanations.

Moreover, Peirce did not intend the classification to be a completed reproduction of the totality of the branches of scientific inquiry, let alone the final word on the complex relationships that may obtain between evolving compartments of science. Rather, he meant it as a blueprint for the future state of the sciences. For one thing, he left open the possibility that the relations between parts may involve symmetrical relationships.* What, then, does it mean that logic is a normative science? To tackle this question I suggest breaking it down to the one of answering why the normativity of logic is based on rules. This is the problem I analyze next.

After that, I consider the main implications of the solution to that key problem.

The Argument for Pragmaticism

Let us focus on those intellectual signs that we come across in proposi-

tional contexts. Examples are logical constants, such as “and,” “or,” “exists, or “is equivalent to”; Peirce shows how they can have objects. They can have objects by virtue of the precepts that guide the actions of the utterers and the interpreters of propositions. But if such signs can have objects, the meanings of our intellectual signs supervene on the contributions signs have to those activities, practices, and lines of conducts of the utterers and the interpreters that mediate the ways in which language, cognition, and the world stand in a relationship.

NORMATIVITY OF LOGIC AND RULES 175 This compact argument can be made precise. I will use game-theoretic semantics (GTS), which is a nearly exact contemporary rendering of pragmaticism (Hilpinen 1982; Pietarinen 2006c). According to GTS, the truth of a sentence is the existence of a winning strategy in a two-player zerosum game played on that sentence (Hintikka 1973). But if truth and the

existence of a winning strategy are so related, then the contribution a sentence makes to its truth-conditions is its contribution to those semantic games that can be played on sentences. Since semantic games exem-

plify practices and activities by which we compare sentences to their models, such contributions to truth-conditions are contributions to those practices and activities by which we compare sentences to their models. The argument runs as follows:

1. A is true (resp. false) in (M, w), if and only if the Utterer (resp. the Interpreter) has a winning strategy in a semantic game G(A, M, w).° 2. The Utterer (the Interpreter) has a winning strategy in G(A, M, w), iff there exists a habit of action associated with A by which we can seek and find certain objects in certain worlds. 3. Logical constants contribute to the habit of action by giving it form in terms of the choices that are possible in a given possible world w. 4. Nonlogical constants contribute to the habit of action by giving it points of terminations in w. 5. Thus, A is true in (M, w), iff there exists a habit of action by which we

can seek and find certain objects in w, and the subexpressions of A contribute to the habit by giving it form or points of termination in w. 6. Thus, the subexpressions of A contribute to the truth-conditions by giving form or points of termination to a habit of action connected with A by which we can seek and find certain objects in world w, and A has truth-conditions only if there exists a habit of action for A by which we can seek and find certain objects in w. 7. If (6), and the truth-conditions of A constitute A’s meaning, then the subexpressions of A are meaningful by giving form or points of termination to the habit of action connected with A in w, and A has a meaning by its association with a habit of action by which we can seek and find certain objects in w. 8. The subexpressions of A are meaningful by giving form or points of termination to the habit of action connected with A in w, and A has

176 AHTI-VEIKKO PIETARINEN a meaning by its association with a habit of action by which we can seek and find certain objects in w.

This argument establishes that intellectual signs have a meaning by virtue of the habit of action by which we compare signs with their models and the world. Signs are here assumed to be sentential expressions that

have propositional content. In the simplest and perhaps most typical case, they are declarative assertions of subject-predicate sentences. The logical structure of these sentences is constituted by logical and nonlogical constants. The domain of the applicability of GTS can be extended to cover other classes of sentential expressions as well. Elsewhere, we have argued that this reconstruction of the key features

of Peirce’s pragmaticism in terms of the framework of GTS serves as a conclusive argument for Peirce’s middle proof of pragmaticism (Pietarinen and Snellman 2006; Pietarinen 2011a). His “proof” is therefore not merely a “seductive persuasion” for the truth of pragmaticism, as he himself tended to state, but a logical demonstration of its validity. Now I proceed to the argument according to which this demonstration also serves to establish the fundamental connection between pragmaticism and logic as a normative science.

Meaning Is Rule-Governed

Habits are many-world entities that inhabit not only our actual world. Think of the habit of greeting a friend: We act according to this habit if, and only if, in any situation in which we may meet a friend we normally and typically greet him. Habits connect possible situations and scenarios with acting according to, or being guided by, the habit. More precisely, what corresponds to such a habit is a mapping from possible worlds or situations to actions. The range of those mappings is defined by the acts that are permitted (or determined) by the habits in whatever kind of world or situation.° Semantic games work by way of two kinds of rules: defining rules and strategic rules. A rule is defining if, and only if, an action is a move in a

game and the action is permitted by the rule. A rule is strategic if, and only if, an action maximizes the expected payoff and is permitted by the rule.’ Which habits qualify for the “language games of seeking and finding” (see item 5 above) is given game-theoretically and is based on the

NORMATIVITY OF LOGIC AND RULES 177 characteristics of the defining rules, because defining rules constitute the actions that are correct or legitimate as soon as the model and its domains have been given. Likewise, since the defining rules constitute both the various plays of the game (game histories) as well as the rules for winning the plays of the game, they also constitute which strategic rules and plans of actions are correct as soon as the model and its domain is given (since every value of a strategic rule is also a value of a defining rule). Since the

defining rules give the winning conditions as well as all the available choices for all the possible continuations of the game, and strategic rules give the right choices in every situation that has more than one available

choice, rules provide the logical and strategic structure to the habit of action by which we seek and find objects and possible continuations of events within classes of models that are evoked in our logical (semeiotic) inquiries. Consequently, our intellectual signs and purports have a logical role in these strategic activities according to the game-theoretic rules. Our individual acts are made in accordance with the habits, or are being guided by them, if, and only if, they are made in accordance with, or are guided by, the rules of the game. Now suppose, for the sake of argument, that the meaning of our intel-

lectual signs is not based on rules in the manner just described. This would require showing that the normativity of these semantic games 1s not based on rules, since strategic rules determine what the right choices are in every nonterminal contingency, no matter how improbable they are.®

However, the assertion that the normativity of games is not based on rules is inconsistent. The reductio goes as follows. If the normativity of games is not based on the rules of the game, it is based on what our actions

in fact are in those plays of the game that are actually played. However, our actions are those that we in fact do. But if that is the case, then only one world, namely this current, actual world of ours, is relevant to the formation of habits that constitute the meaning of our intellectual signs. If only one world is relevant to the formation of habits that constitute the meaning of our signs, in applying the sign or expression to something, we affect or change the ways in which situations are mapped to actions. And as argued, these mappings correspond to habits. But if so, then all action constitutes meaning, and hence language could not be misused and all sentences would be true: All communication would be impossible.

178 AHTI-VEIKKO PIETARINEN Since there is communication (and for the sake of sanity and nonsolipsism we must take this for granted), this conclusion is absurd. The above argument thus establishes the following three conclusions. First, the actual world is not the sufficient “thing” for the formation of meaning-constitutive habits. Second, it is inconsistent and hence not true to take the meaning of our intellectual signs not to be based on rules. Third, it is not true that the normativity of semantic games, the habits of which

constitute the meaning of our intellectual signs, is not governed by rules. I have argued in this section that logic, in its wide sense,’ is the general theory of the meaning of intellectual signs, in other words pragmaticism,

and in the section titled “The Argument for Pragmaticism” I associated that theory with the theory of semantic games. We can thus see the reason why the normativity of logic is, and has to be, based on rules.'° Habits, Ethics, and Ideals

That normativity is based on rules of the game-theoretic kind is something Peirce struggled to establish. His terminology, of course, differs from ours, but the motivations and goals are the same, and they are best expounded in the contemporary frameworks provided by logical semantics, pragmatics, and the theory of games—all of which can be taken to pertain to normative sciences.'' One of the most acute struggles to articulate these frameworks takes place in the unpublished R 280, The Basis of Pragmaticism from 1905. A critical analysis of the nature of a sign would show that the action requires a source of concepts to be conveyed, and therefore in some sense a mind from which the [concepts,] propositions, and arguments are conveyed to the mind of the interpreter; and the two minds must be capable of coming to an understanding and of observing 1t when it is reached. This supposes a power of deliberate self-controlled thinking.

Now nothing can be controlled that cannot be observed while it is in

action. It is therefore requisite that both minds but especially the Graphist-mind should have a power of self-observation. Moreover, control supposes a capacity in that which is to be controlled of acting in accordance with definite tendencies of a tolerably stable nature, which implies a reality in this governing principle. But these habits, so to call them, must be capable of being modified according to some ideal in the

NORMATIVITY OF LOGIC AND RULES 179 mind of the controlling agent; and this controlling agent is to be the very same as the agent controlled; the control extending even to the modes of control themselves, since we suppose that the interpreter [-mind] under the guidance of the Graphist-mind discusses the rationale of logic itself... . Taking all these factors into account, in a way that can here only be suggested, we should come to the same conclusion that commonsense would have jumped to at the outset; namely, that the Graphistmind and interpreter-mind must have all the characters of personal intellects possessed of moral natures. But let it not to be forgotten that the Graphist, whom we now speak of as a person, is such a person that the truth and being of the things that are objects of thought, consist in his assent to their being. (R 280:30—-33, 1905, emphases added)

This is what it all comes down to. The relationship between pragmaticism and semantic games is, in a nutshell, as follows. “The two minds”

are the two players of the game, the Graphist (the Utterer) and the Interpreter (the Grapheus). The two minds undertake to show the material truth or the falsity of the given assertion. What “capable of coming to an understanding and of observing it” means is that the payoffs, determined at the terminal histories of each play of the game, are known, and commonly known to be known, by the players. Common knowledge of payoffs is a standard assumption in game theory insofar as the class of complete information games is concerned. The “power of deliberate selfcontrolled thinking” and the “power of self-observation” refer to strategic thinking and planning. As any game theorist is quick to confirm, our plans need to be able to accommodate and undergo changes that reflect the expectations we formulate about the actions of our fellow contestants. Peirce’s self-control, expressed here in terms of the “definite tendencies of a tolerably stable nature,” refers to the fact that the existence of certain winning strategies, or habits of acting for a purpose, is eventually

guaranteed. Such stable tendencies and acting for a purpose are the essence of reaching the equilibrium points. They can be likened to the ways solution concepts behave for a wide variety of games. A number of solution concepts have been proposed in game theory. A central issue has been how to choose among them. One candidate I would like to suggest as the solution concept of a Peircean stripe of game theoretic action is Reinhard Selten’s trembling-hand perfect equilibrium (Selten 1975). According to it, players may sometimes, though very rarely, play

180 AHTI-VEIKKO PIETARINEN unintended moves and thus slightly deviate from optimal strategies. Trembling hands are also closely related to evolutionary stability. We can

in fact add evolutionary superstructure to our semantic games, thus taking a step closer to (1) Peirce’s own understanding of various levels of self-control as not assuming full rationality (Pietarinen 2005b), (2) that faculty of logical reasoning (Jogica utens), which according to Peirce is based on “instinctive” reasoning (see de Waal’s chapter in this book and

Pietarinen 2005b), and (3) evolutionary stable strategies, which unlike classical game theory, do not assume full rationality and hence not full but fallible and self-corrective self-control. Evolutionary stable strategies in fact come close to revealing the mechanisms that would explain what Peirce’s evolutionary cosmology struggles to be.

Equally interesting is the latter paragraph of the quotation, in which Peirce reveals that the two minds “must have all the characters of personal intellects possessed of moral natures.” He is not saying that they are

morally acting personal intellects. On another occasion he makes the well-known allusion to “sops thrown to Cerberus” in order to make his view that a sign “determines an effect upon a person” (SS 80-81, 1908, Letter to Welby; Pietarinen 2006c) better understood. Those “agents” who “discuss the rationale of logic itself” are theoretical constructs that nevertheless need to possess the same characteristics as personal intellects do. In explaining the fundamentals of the philosophy of his later diagram-

matic logic, “the dyadics,” Peirce repeatedly tells that these minds, in

other words, the participants in the logical dialogue taking place in thought, are “intelligent agents” (R 3, c. 1903, On Dyadics: the Simplest Possible Mathematics).

In other words, our theories of logic must be able to incorporate the theory of the characteristics of intelligent agents into the concept of logical agenthood. Or, alternatively, since GTS is a theory of logical semantics, they must be able to incorporate those characteristics into the concept of the player of a semantic game.'* This I take to be the impact of Peirce’s assertion that logic as a normative science is among the “most purely theoretical of purely theoretical sciences.” The agents, endowed with the characteristics equal to personal intellects and capable of discussing “the rationale of logic itself” as they,

according to Peirce, are prescribed to do, are the key theoretical constructs indispensable to what pragmaticism ultimately is calculated to achieve.’

NORMATIVITY OF LOGIC AND RULES 181 I believe what was just said explains what it means that logic depends on ethics, or that ethics provides grounds or support for logic. But what is more, contained in the previous remarks are also intriguing hints as to the senses in which logic could be taken to hinge on esthetics. Peirce’s well-known remark concerning ideals reads as follows: “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-criticism and of heterocriticism” (CP 1.574, 1906).'* From this, he goes on to define esthetics, pretty nonstandardly, as “the theory of the deliberate formation of such

habits of feeling” (CP 1.574).'° Recall that in the long quotation from R 280 above, Peirce states that “habits [of action], so to call them, must be capable of being modified according to some ideal in the mind of the

controlling agent.” Now such habits are rules for thinking about, and thus rules for proper conduct concerning, the meaning of signs. Habits are modified or changed with reference to the purpose or ideal that an agent has in mind. But an ideal is also a controlled habit, a habit that has to do with feeling and not only with thinking or action. Therefore, in the senses given both in his 1905 definition of esthetics and in the central passages from R 280 written in the same year, Peirce is implanting the “first” of the normative science into the very core of logic. For these reasons, he is justified in regarding logic as the general theory of the meaning of all intellectual signs, thoughts, generalities, concepts, and purports. The Normativity of Esthetics and Its Implications for Logical Theory

Since esthetics for Peirce has to do with controlled habits and not merely qualities of feelings, it should be regarded not only as the most fundamental of the normative sciences. Also, the question of why the norma-

tivity of esthetics is based on rules falls, mutatis mutandis, from the argument for the normativity of logic. The only issue that needs to be separately considered is whether habits of feelings are many-world entities just as are habits of thinking and action. It turns out that, analogously to

habits of thinking and action being many-world entities, to confine the formation and application of habits of feeling to the actual world is liable to lead to an inconsistent position in semeiotic, that is, esthetic relativism. In comparison with the habits of reasoning and action it is, however, a

considerably mightier question to address what kinds of rules or laws

182 AHTI-VEIKKO PIETARINEN there are that give habits of feelings their form or their points of termination. Suffice it to remark here that this question should be discussed in connection with phenomenology (phaneroscopy), the first compartment of philosophy immediately preceding the normative science of esthetics. Second, if we are to regard habits as having to do with game-theoretic actions of “seeking and finding,” then the question boils down to what it

is that in fact constitutes the universes of discourses concerning our habitual activities of feeling. My suggestion as to this latter question goes along the following lines. (1) For logic and its habits of reasoning and self-controlled thinking, the

universes of the model consist of objects and possible states of affairs. Objects can be of varied kinds and can refer to “special kinds of universes,” such as times, fictions, limits, collections, continuities, or different kinds of modalities (R 1632, Logic Notebook 639, 1909). (2) For practics

and its habits of acting and self-controlled conduct, the domains of dis-

course are characterized by those parts of the world that we actually inhabit.’° (3) For esthetics and its habits of feeling and controlled ideas, it

is the Phaneron, “the total content of any one consciousness” and “the sum of all we have in mind in any way whatever, regardless of its cognitive value” (EP 2:362, The Basis of Pragmaticism in Phaneroscopy), as Peirce

remarks in that annus mirabilis of his, 1905. Therefore, the universe of our habitual activities of feeling in a certain way in certain kinds of esthetic or artistic situations is constituted by the totality of the content of a mind. It is noteworthy that phaneroscopy is the locus in which Peirce’s logical theory of Existential Graphs is really set in motion. The sheet of assertion (R 298, 1905, Phaneroscopy) upon which logical graphs are scribed

contains all the conceivable mindlike qualities that the interpreter may come across. The sheet of assertion “represents the state of mind of the interpreter” (R 280:22). The question of what it is that the agents seek and find in the Phaneron is thus related to the question of what the rules are that govern the interpretations of those simple qualities scribed upon the sheets of assertion. And such simple qualities, denoted as certain bounded

regions of space differing in quality from other regions of the space, constitute the meaning of the diagrammatic correlates to predicate and relation terms. Such simple qualities are thus the building blocks of logical propositions (expressed in the graphical language of iconic logic) and

NORMATIVITY OF LOGIC AND RULES 183 hence contribute to the habits of action by providing them with points of termination. The rules or laws that govern the interpretation of these simple qualities are, however, quite different from the rules or laws that govern the interpretation of logical propositions. The former are analogous to the

interpretation of nonlogical constants of our vocabularies (Pietarinen 2011b). Thus, such rules have to do with the processes of constructing the

models to which propositions are compared in the first place, and not with the semantic processes of interpreting the assertions in the models. In that sense they precede the rules governing the interpretation of propositional signs.

I would like to emphasize in conclusion one distinctive feature of such Peircean model-construction game activities: They are cooperative rather than competitive. The sheet of assertion represents “everything that is well understood to be taken for granted between the two parties,” and Peirce goes on to insist that “the two must come to an agreement of convention” (R 280)—otherwise all communication is impossible.!” These activities seem to concern actual communicative practices and discourse rather than noncooperative games that mediate the semantics of propositions. The former, it seems, have to do with the issues that we may in Peirce’s terms consider to fall within the realm of speculative rhetoric.'®

However, there is an important result that needs to be taken into consideration as to the presumption that the classes of games that describe the two kinds of activities are different. For one thing, it needs to be asked

whether “the two parties” engaged, on the one hand, in cooperative model-building communicative activities and, on the other, in noncooperative meaning-constitutive activities are fundamentally different entities. We might indeed be led to think, sight unseen, that in the former, model-building activities, they are the actual participants in actual conversational situations, and in the latter they are the theoretical agents that are real but which subsist, as Peirce remarks, in our “make believe.””” However, the contrary is, at the end, the case. For one thing, Peirce’s writings do not support the distinction between agents of these two kinds

of activities pertaining to altogether different categories (Pietarinen 2007b). Cooperative model-building resorts to the same theoretical

184 AHTI-VEIKKO PIETARINEN constructs of the make-believe agents as the strictly competitive semantic

activities do. Second, we can bring forth a technical result supporting this unanimity: What the two minds practice are not fundamentally sep-

arate activities after all.*? The two kinds of games, the semantic and model-construction games, are two sides of the same conceptual coin. Cooperation and competition can peacefully coexist.

The fundamental correlation, or intermingling, of cooperation and competition has some significant implications. Let me mention one, namely that any hard-and-fast division between Peirce’s second division of normative logic, logic proper (critic), and the third division, that of speculative rhetoric, is liable to be an illusion and be in name only. And this was, I believe, also Peirce’s aim to be able to establish. Nowadays we can bring the same argument to bear on the much-debated distinctions and interfaces between the study of semantics and the study of pragmatics. I have argued in Pietarinen 20072 that from the game-theoretic point of view, the semantics/pragmatics distinction is an epistemological one and has to do with the players’ knowledge of the content of their strategies. If we need not be concerned with that kind of knowledge, as nor-

mally we need not, the distinction simply is not there. Separating pragmatics from semantics is not something that general theories of meaning such as pragmaticism need to be concerned with. In this very concrete sense the divide between semantics and pragmatics is artificial and has little philosophical support. It also means that Charles Morris’s suggestion that the studies of semantics and pragmatics be grouped with critic and speculative rhetoric, respectively, is not correct.

NINE

UNASSAILABLE BELIEF AND IDEAL-LIMIT OPINION Is Agreement Important for Truth? Mateusz W. Oleksy

ED

[tony Peirce has been regarded as the father of the “consensus’ theory of truth. On the received view, Peirce’s account of truth forms an integral component of his scholastic realism, which explicates both truth and reality in terms of agreement at the ideal limit of inquiry. As one classical commentator puts it, “The real is what the community of thought construes it to be; consensus, common confession, is our one reliable interpretation of reality” (Thayer 1968, 124). Since on the received view, reality is identified by Peirce with “the immediate object of thought

in a true judgment” (W 2:472), and a true judgment on a given subject with the final-ideal consensus on that subject—1.e., the proposition that would be agreed upon by the community of inquirers in the infinitely long run—it follows that for Peirce truth and reality are merely two sides of the same coin. This received view on Peirce’s account of truth has been challenged by

later commentators, who assert that Peirce’s pragmatistic theory of inquiry embraces a distinct conception of truth, which does not depend on the notions of ideal limit of inquiry and ideal community of inquirers or interpreters. Cheryl Misak, the most outspoken partisan of the nontraditional reading of Peirce’s account of truth, argues in a number of works { 185 }

156 MATEUSZ W. OLEKSY that Peirce’s most valuable view on truth identifies the latter with the “best

belief,” that is, a belief that optimally meets our epistemic standards. It must be stressed that the alternative to the received view does not suggest that Peirce never embraced the consensualist conception of truth (CCT)

but opts for a developmental approach to his thought, in which he is portrayed as striving to replace the problematic, metaphysically inflated conception of truth associated with scholastic realism with a naturalized, down-to-earth, and genuinely pragmatist picture of truth as a belief one could not improve on in the light of evidence and argument. As a matter of fact, an advocate of the revision of the received view may go for even a more moderate claim that, although both accounts of truth run through Peirce’s mature thought, the idea of truth as the best belief is simply more plausible and valuable from the point of view of a pragmatist who wants to get at the “cash value” of the concept of truth. Indeed, this is the line that Misak takes (Misak 2000, 48-51). In this essay I set forth a defense of the received view, which depends, however, on a nonstandard interpretation and nonstandard arguments for CCT. I believe that both the interpretation and the arguments delineate a coherent direction in which Peirce’s thought may be developed, although they are not adequately supported by direct textual evidence. Consequently, I will go beyond the letter of Peirce’s text and embark in a reconstruction—hopefully, not excessively extravagant—relocating certain points of emphasis and reinterpreting (in part) Peirce’s philosophical goals. My argument proceeds according to the following steps. First, I submit and elucidate the claim that Peirce’s CCT invokes the notion of genuine consensus and not merely that of convergent opinion. Second, I expose as the source of misgivings about CCT its alleged dependence on the metaphysical conception of convergence. Third, I argue that from a

social-normativist perspective, CCT can be freed from troublesome metaphysical assumptions associated with scholastic realism. Finally, I present specific arguments, derived from Peirce, for the thesis that truth as ideal consensus is indispensable to inquiry. The argument trades on the idea that commitment to idealized agreement is a pragmatic precondition of cognitive content and meaning, disinterested inquiry, and the

social unity of science as embodied in the community of inquiry. I announce at the outset that the argument neither presupposes, nor implies, scholastic realism, nor any other position in the realism versus antirealism controversy.

BELIEF AND OPINION 187 Two Truths in One Inquiry

The appeal of the experimentalist conception of truth (henceforth, ECT) stems from the fact that it links truth directly to what Peirce called the method of science, based on bold abductions and rigorous testing of their experimental consequences. According to ECT, a proposition is true iff none of its consequences would ever get refuted by evidence (CP 5.569, 1901; 3.432, 1896). Waiving the counterfactual qualification, we obtain a very simple formula for truth, namely, that truth is what “shall resist all tests” (CP 7.220, 1901). The idealized version of this formula, with the counterfactual constraint in place, inflates the unassailability condition to “what would resist all tests in the long run.” A true belief is a belief unassailable by doubt (CP 5.416, 1905) or “indefeasible” by evidence (CP 6.485, 1908).

The same idea can be expressed with the aid of the notions of “best hypothesis” and “best belief.” The best hypothesis, Peirce tells us, “is the one which can be the most readily refuted if it is false” (CP 1.120, c. 1896). If we combine this definition with ECT, we readily obtain the notion of the best belief, as the hypothesis that best withstands all attempts at its refutation or would resist all tests in the long run. ECT can now be expressed as

the claim that truth is the best belief. Peirce does not, to the best of my knowledge, endorse a similar claim explicitly, but it may be argued that he should endorse it given the constraints he imposes on the method of science. The best-belief account of truth has the advantage of bringing home his fallibilism, which is one of the keystones of his conception of the

method of science. If I understand her right, Misak thinks that this fallibilist commitment of the best-belief account bespeaks its attractiveness. However, two difficulties must be resolved before we can ascribe to Peirce a commitment to the idea that truth is the best belief. First, Peirce is no Jamesian (or Rortyan) pragmatist. He does not think that truth is a matter of what is good or convenient (for me, or for us, at this moment) to believe, or of making the world a better place to live, or of making ourselves happier. If truth is for Peirce the best belief, then “best” must mean here optimal in the light of evidence, and not best by all standards,

or even by all epistemic standards. Misak seems to forget about this restriction when she suggests that “a belief is true if it is, and would continue to be, everything we want it to be,” everything we aim at in inquiry (Misak 2000, 54). As she herself observes, we aim in inquiry at all sorts of

188 MATEUSZ W. OLEKSY things: coherence, simplicity, generality, predictive power, explanatory power, practical applicability, and so on. Does a true belief need to have all of these virtues or only some or none? ECT only implies that a true belief cannot be refuted by evidence and to that extent is not improvable. An unassailable belief need not posses any of these virtues. The lack of epistemic and practical utility is lamentable but does not imply falsity. Misak identifies quite a different take on truth as genuinely pragmatist. So were we to forever achieve all of our local aims in assertion, belief and deliberation, were we to get a belief to be as good as it could be, that would be a true belief. ... When the pragmatist says that the aim of inquiry is truth, what is meant is that were a belief to satisfy all of our local aims in inquiry (prediction, explanatory power, and so on), then that belief would be true... as we specify our cognitive ends, we specify our concept of truth. (Misak 2000, 61; emphasis added)

I think that this account actually betrays Peirce’s ECT in favor of some-

thing close to a Jamesian pragmatist theory of truth. Most of the time, James does not—as the popular opinion has it—explain truth in terms of ordinary utility, but he does so in terms of “goodness in the way of belief,” which is precisely a matter of achieving enough of “our local aims in assertion, belief and deliberation.”

The second problem concerns the assumption, essential to the bestbelief account, that only a proposition that is empirically vulnerable may be true. This strong fallibilist commitment rules out the possibility of ascribing truth to propositions that are not falsifiable. But Peirce clearly recognizes several classes of propositions that are not subject to refutation by evidence (or inference from evidence). These are, on the one hand, very general and vague teachings of the common sense (e.g., that there is order in nature [CP 5.508, c. 1905]), and on the other, the noninferential, uncontrollable verdicts of the senses or the perceptual judgments. Peirce not only claims that we cannot resist “indubitable beliefs” but that it is quite rational to ascribe truth to them. “An uncriticized belief must, says the Common-sensist, ipso facto be regarded as the very truth” (CP 5.505, c. 1905). This problem is all the more disturbing because what he calls Critical Common-sensism is clearly conceived by Peirce as a crucial component of his pragmaticism, and so is, of course,

ECT. To clinch the case, indubitable propositions do not meet the condition of the “best hypothesis” and, consequently, do not also meet the condition of the “best belief”; they are indubitable not because they

BELIEF AND OPINION 189 successfully pass all the tests but because they are not susceptible to them. So it seems that the best-belief account of truth may be at the same time too little restrictive and too restrictive. We have dealt with the first problem by confining the meaning of “best” to strictly evidential considerations. But the cost of this move is that we cannot accommodate the indubitable truths within ECT. Admittedly, if one adopted a more liberal stand on “the best,” one could argue that one of the things we expect of our beliefs is that they be stable and widely shared. Needless to say, commonsensical truths excel in these two respects. It may be further argued that the best belief in a given context is the belief that is superlative not in all, but only in some, respects and that the very indubitability of commonsensical beliefs is a sufficient (though fallible) mark of their truth.

One of the disadvantages of this solution is that the special value of scientific truth, or better, of truth in the scientific sense, is left out of the picture. Another is that the concept of truth becomes dangerously permissive and lax. Indeed, the proposal is practically equivalent to the most frivolous version of Jamesian pragmatism, which has it that truth is an epithet attaching to whatever satisfies us in whatever respect. I believe that Peirce’s solution to the second problem is consistent with the restrictive reading of ECT as demanding empirical vulnerability. ECT is really an attempt to elucidate when truth-ascription is warranted from

the experimentalist point of view. It seems quite plausible to say that empirical vulnerability is a precondition that a proposition must meet to be qualified as a candidate for truth in the scientific sense. It is also hardly controversial to claim that vague generalizations and perceptual beliefs are not candidates for truth in the scientific sense. However, it remains puzzling why Peirce nonetheless feels quite confident about our right to

claim truth for these kinds of beliefs. My suggestion is that Peirce’s account of truth is not exhausted by ECT and that he employs, alongside of ECT, a different, broader conception of truth, which does not impose on the truth-candidate a condition of empirical vulnerability, germane to experimental inquiry. Peirce’s article in Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology from 1901 contains a clear affirmation of a broader conception of truth. Peirce there defines truth as that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards

which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief,

190 MATEUSZ W. OLEKSY which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth. (CP 5.565, 1901)

Evidently, an assertion must confess the inaccuracy and one-sidedness of the asserted proposition if that proposition is to qualify as a candidate for truth. Peirce immediately submits that not only scientific assertions

of positive sciences but also moral judgments, the judgments of pure mathematics, commonsense judgments, and even perceptual judgments are truth-apt in just this sense inasmuch as they do not profess to be exactly

true. To my mind, Peirce prefigures here a Brandomian pragmatist account of the rationality of assertion, which explicates an entitlement to claim truth in terms of an implicit recognition of certain commitments

and obligations. Whatever the “confession” exactly involves, it must minimally involve the withdrawal of a claim to absolute truth, which presents the proposition as exactly equivalent to ideal-limit opinion. Peirce’s point is that while withdrawal of an absolute truth-claim does not, of course, make the proposition true, endorsement of the claim that a given proposition is in fact final violates the very conditions of rational

truth-ascription. It follows that (implicit) withdrawal of the claim to absolute truth is a normative condition of a rational claim to truth. | conjecture that when Peirce declares in another place that the verdicts of

common sense (including, vague generalizations) may be rationally accepted as true, he takes “true” in the broader sense. For example, we may hold the proposition that there is order in the world as true on the condition that we do not take this proposition to determine exactly what kind of order is in question or exactly what classes of phenomena fall under it.

It can be shown that this broader conception is not equivalent or reducible to ECT. First of all, the modesty condition, as I propose to call it, does not imply the vulnerability condition. Peirce tells us about the perceptual judgment that “its truth consists in the fact that it is impossi-

ble to correct it, and in the fact that it only professes to consider one aspect of the percept” (CP 5.568, 1901). Actually, the two features of the perceptual judgment interlock, since the noninferential judgment that x is red is immune to correction precisely because it does not support any hypothesis concerning any specific experimentally verifiable property of x. It gives us a hint concerning what property of x explains the percept

BELIEF AND OPINION 191 but the hint is vague; hence, no amount of investigation on the chemical or physical properties of x can possibly refute the judgment. A similar point can be made about “there is order in the world.” We may refute a hypothesis that a particular class of phenomena falls under a deterministic kind of order, but this does not refute the original proposition. The latter, being vague, neither implies the former proposition nor its denial. No amount of inquiry on the presence of whatever kind of order in whatever class of phenomena can influence logically the epistemic status of the vague generalization. Even if it is true that in case the results of these inquiries were generally negative, we would probably tend to doubt the proposition. The distinction of the two conditions may be restated as a distinction of two kinds of fallibilism. The moderate fallibilism boils down to the

recognition that our assertions ought not to purport to be true in the absolute sense, even if we do not know how they could be refuted. The more robust fallibilism asserts that a truth-apt assertion should actually be exposed to refutation by experience, and that any belief which is not vulnerable to refutation blocks inquiry. Second, I think Misak is right to insist that ECT (or her best-belief) account of truth cannot explicate truth in terms of the idea of “the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief,” which is manifestly central to the aforementioned definition of

truth. The broader conception is so constructed as to make room for ascription of truth in cases where genuine experimental inquiry is not possible. For example, Peirce suggests that a moralist’s claim that a certain ideal is the highest value can be rationally accepted as true as long as the ideal will tend to increasingly win our approval (CP 5.566, 1901). However, the suggestion does not amount to saying that the moralist’s claim is really a hypothesis about the drift of human consensus. Hence, the historical record of our moral sentiments cannot be counted as a falsifier for this value judgment, or any other value judgment. In the absence of experimental testing, Peirce thinks we should avail ourselves of what

he at one point characterized as a sophisticated version of the a priori method, namely to heed the assertion that tends to win our approval or (in a more elitist version) that is universally recommended by the sages (CP 5.382n1, 1909). He observes that such a universal approval or consensus is possible only on the condition that the moralist’s assertion does not

purport to capture the ideal in its perfect, exact form. This, in turn,

192 MATEUSZ W. OLEKSY implies that a truth-apt moral assertion implicitly defers the absolutetruth-claim to the ideal community. By contrast, where the experimental method is applicable, such a deferral would be both futile and harmful. ECT is meant to elucidate the conditions under which one is defeasibly warranted to assert a proposition as true. It licenses a defeasible truth-claim whenever a hypothesis turns out to better resist all available tests than any of its available rivals. The claim is defeasible not by contrast to the ideal-limit opinion, which is by definition infallibly asserted by ideal inquirers. It is defeasible because

our convictions about which of our beliefs on a given matter is the best one (in the evidentialist sense) may change as the new hypotheses are formulated and new evidence is obtained. In other words, we do not need to appeal to the ideal limit of endless investigation to justify the fallible character of our experimental beliefs, since they are made fallible by experimental practice. Therefore, I fully agree with Misak when she observes that: the new formulation [the best-belief account of truth] does not require the pragmatist to attempt the doomed task of saying just what is meant by the hypothetical end of inquiry, cognitively ideal condi-

tions, or perfect evidence, whatever these might be. (Misak 2000, 49-50)

The point holds also of my restricted best-belief account, where “best” is thinned down to its strictly evidentialist sense. Moreover, Misak rightly cautions that “any attempt at articulating such notions will have to face the objection that it is a mere glorification of what we presently take to be

good” (ibid). Of course, the charge of furtive parochialism may be removed by a sufficiently inflated postulate of objectivity, to the effect

that we may not rest content with anything but the opinion which is shown to be universally valid. However, this move is inconsistent with fallibilism because it implies that in regard to epistemic justification we can aspire to something more than a belief that resists all tests so far as inquiry can be effectively and productively extended (this is Misak’s pragmaticized notion of the limit of inquiry). Fallibilism teaches that no exten-

sion of science can lead to the situation in which we will be in the possession of something more than a fallible warrant to claim the truth for a proposition. It follows that we cannot know that any opinion is ideallimit opinion. But in that case, does it make sense to posit ideal-limit

BELIEF AND OPINION 193 opinion as the goal of inquiry, as something we want to discover or to ascertain by means of the method of science? I grant to Misak that an affirmative answer to this question gets Peirce into a whole lot of intellectual trouble. As far as epistemic appraisal of fallible empirical claims is concerned, deference to the ideal limit opinion is entirely spurious. Allow me to round up this stage of discussion with the conclusion that alongside ECT or the best-belief account of truth (in the restricted sense), Peirce also employs a broader conception of truth, which crucially relies on the notion of the ideal limit of inquiry. From Convergence to Consensus

The broader conception of truth is obviously equivalent to the familiar consensualist conception of truth, which forms a kernel of Peirce’s scholastic realism. In the texts from 1868 to 1871 Peirce strives to avoid the pitfalls of traditional (pre-Kantian) forms of metaphysical realism by claiming that reality (or the real object of knowledge) is identical to the immediate object (object-as-represented) of the final opinion, that is, the proposition we would all agree to assert in the long run. Here truth is, indeed, construed as equivalent to the ideal limit of endless investigation. The following passages provide paradigmatic examples of the consensualist conception of truth (CCT): The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth. (W 3:273)

That to the acceptance of which as a basis of conduct any person you please would ultimately come if he pursued his inquiries far enough... that alone is what I call truth. (From a letter to Lady Welby, Peirce 1958, 398)

Two things call for a comment, especially in regard to the first quotation. From early on Peirce emphasized that the scholastic-realist concep-

tion of truth and reality fundamentally relies on the notion of an unlimited, developing community of inquirers. This qualification protects CCT from being misconstrued along individualist lines as the view that the truth is simply whatever opinion J would find irresistible in the long run. As we will see later, CCT also rules out any construal of truth as an aggregate individual opinion, that is, as what each of us, taken separately, would assent to in the long run. Unfortunately, some statements

194 MATEUSZ W. OLEKSY of CCT (e.g., the second of the quoted passages) do not make this issue perfectly clear.

The second feature of CCT worth emphasizing leads to the heart of scholastic realism. As is evidenced by the Berkeley review (W 2:462-87), Peirce quite early in his philosophical career set his mind on the mission

of overcoming “modern nominalism,” as he dubbed a whole cluster of antirealist trends in modern thought. The original scholastic realism was motivated by that goal, but, ironically, Peirce’s crusade against the nominalists was also targeted at some of the assumptions of his original realist position. Namely, Peirce realized that his definition of reality is exces-

sively idealist in that it identifies the real with the product of mental action. He did not give up on scholastic realism but reinterpreted it in the light of his theory of secondness. The critical move comes with the claim that veridical inquiry is not determined by a sheer drift of arbitrary opinion, but is fundamentally constrained by the resistance from the dynam-

ical object, that is, a series of seconds that “push” inquiry in a certain direction. In my discussion of CCT I leave aside the problem of realism. Although CCT forms a crucial component of scholastic realism, it neither implies

it nor presupposes it. In fact, it is not difficult to think up an example of a robust antirealism, which incorporates the conception of truth as warranted assertability at the ideal limit of inquiry (Dewey could serve as

an example). Furthermore, as I suggested earlier, the idea that one can sustain realism with the aid of the theory of the ideal limit of inquiry leads to much trouble. Peirce often brings out the importance of the dynamic element with excessively strong language, which echoes the traditional

forms of metaphysical realism. He seems to suggest, for example, that reality qua dynamical object of science pulls the historical sequence of scientific theories “in the right direction,” or toward the final, unique representation of itself (reality). But such a bold claim is not supported by the theory of dynamical object, which only implies that the dynamical object of representation limits, through the resistances encountered by our actions, the choice of our representation of it, but does not unequivocally determine one, unique representation of itself. Supposing a number

of alternative theories, there is no a priori guarantee that prolonged experimental intervention into natural processes will eventually filter out all but one hypothesis. The choice of thirds would be underdetermined

by the seconds, and it is not even clear, on Peircean grounds, that

BELIEF AND OPINION 195 “endless investigation” must eventually discriminate between alternative hypotheses. In other words, there is a gap in Peirce’s thought between his account

of the dynamical object and his theory of the ideal limit of inquiry, between the story about how dynamical reality crushes on the interpretants of our thoughts, forcing some readjustments in the latter, and the story about how every sound empirical question must sooner or later find a definite, universally valid solution. Perhaps it is possible to bridge this gap. I leave this question open because it goes far beyond the objectives of this essay. What is of interest is a minimalist qualification, which certainly follows from the theory of dynamical object, namely that truth cannot be identified with a mere social fiat, an opinion that is ratified by the community and persistently adhered to, come what may. One implication of the minimalist qualification is that we should not think of the agreement that is relevant to truth on the model of a social contract. When agents sign a contract, they thereby commit themselves to abide by the prescriptions or directives specified in the contract. When they do not behave as the contract specifies, they break the contract but do not falsify it. In case of a contract, the “direction of fit” is always: reality to contract, and not the other way round. Hence, a contract cannot be open to refutation by experience in the way in which an empirical theory is. Indeed, it does not even satisfy the modest fallibility condition, since it makes no sense to say that a contract does not profess to be exactly true or that it confesses its one-sidedness. To say, then, that the truth of a hypothesis consists in its being sanctioned by a social contract is to say that the hypothesis is not fallible in either the robust or the modest sense, for in that case the hypothesis is not in any way exposed to the resistance from its object. Peirce would abhor a similar conclusion and most likely debunk it as a consequence of nominalist assumptions. Therefore, it is important to keep in mind that CCT does not waive the minimalist realist requirement that human consensus must be open and responsive to the dynamical object. If on CCT a true proposition is true by agreement, then what does it mean to be true by agreement? How is this agreement construed and exactly what role does it play in the explication of the concept of truth? We already know that “true” for Peirce does not mean “validated by a social contract.” It remains to see in what way the concept of agreement

is relevant to the philosophical explication of the concept of truth.

196 MATEUSZ W. OLEKSY This task is pressing because some authors, in particular Misak, deny that agreement and deliberation are at all important to Peirce’s conception of

truth. The new formulation [truth as unassailable belief] does not mislead one into thinking that the pragmatist is a contractarian or a certain

kind of deliberative democrat—someone who thinks that what is important is agreement, rather than being the best a belief could be. (Misak 2000, 50).

Misak manifestly thinks that a Peircean pragmatist may rest content with ECT, and that CCT only gets in the way of the understanding of what is really essential to truth. If all that she wants to assert is that Peirce

is not an individualist contractarian about truth, who opines that the truth of all (or at least, some) propositions is a matter of sheer convention based on the compromise of individual interests or preferences for the propositions, then I have no qualms with the position. It coincides with the argument delivered above. But it obviously does not follow

that from a pragmatist point of view agreement is not important for truth. After all, the contractarians have no monopoly over the concept of agreement. In order to clear up the stage for discussion, I would like to introduce the following distinction. There are two types of agreement. One of them boils down to the fact that two or more subjects assert or accept the same proposition. Their acceptance of the proposition need not be deliberated at all; it may be noninferential and uncontrolled. In fact, the subjects do

not need to communicate with each other or belong to the same community of inquiry. An important feature of this kind of agreement in a proposition is that the proposition is not really shared, not genuinely common, since agreement is in fact decomposable into a number of individual assents, which happen to overlap in their object. By contrast, there is a kind of agreement that is reasoned and involves a recognition of co-assent, by the force of which a given proposition is acknowledged as

common, that is, it is acceptable to others as well as to me. This is of course the sense of consensus that we invoke by uttering in the first person

the declarative “I agree.” By contradistinction to the case of a mere overlapping of opinion, genuine consensus involves genuine sharing of opinion, where agreement cannot be broken without an essential loss into a number of independent assents to the same proposition. This kind

BELIEF AND OPINION 197 of agreement obviously presupposes linguistic communication and a cultural-linguistic community as the common point of reference for the subjects. Parenthetically, an interesting question is whether some of such agreements are constitutive of the identity of a community or under-

lie the sense of belonging to a community. I will pick up this question later. The first type of agreement is obviously essential to Peirce’s conception of truth, including ECT. Peirce often intimates that truth-ascription is especially warranted where independent research programs lead to the same or roughly the same result. He calls this convergence. Typically, he

speaks of convergence in relation to the results of measurements. For instance, he marvels at the fact that a dozen or so distinct methods for determining the speed of light in a vacuum, conducted by different people independently of each other, yielded roughly identical numerical values

(W 3:273). Naturally, convergence in this sense may (and often is) observed post factum, because the inquirers need not know of each other’s work (in fact, the more independently they work, the more impressive is the convergence). For convergence to take place, they do not need to agree in the sense of reaching the conclusion “together,” and they do not need to acknowledge the conclusion as “shared.” This conception of convergence is written into Peirce’s notion of “best belief,” a belief that withstands refutation by any sound method conducted by any competent person. The better corroborated a given proposition is, the more warrant we have for asserting its truth. But this is not all! I submit that Peirce’s fallibilism essentially relies on the idea that genu-

ine research must involve testimony and interpersonal agreement. In a way, it is very misleading to say that Peirce holds science to be self-corrective. Peirce never suggests that self-correction at large is a matter of simply

applying the method of science to particular cases. There is no mechanism of self-correction, at least not at the level of abductions. I believe that Peirce was convinced that the application of any scientific method can degenerate into a state of dogmatic conservatism, that nothing protects inquiry from being “blocked,” except for the “spirit” in which it is conducted. And he has quite a bit to say about this spirit of science. It comprises a very strong sense of communal identity and a certain ideal of global solidarity between inquirers, both of which are well expressed in his conception of the “three sentiments” (CP 2.655, 1893). It seems that a global community of inquiry is not indispensable for convergence of

198 MATEUSZ W. OLEKSY results to occur. In particular, the inquirers need not be united by a strong sense of solidarity to obtain convergent results. Things look rather different when we take into account the need for interpersonal argument and

evidence, not mentioning the very need to acknowledge a convergent result as universally valid. In all of these cases genuine agreement (by contrast to a mere convergence of independent opinions) is called for. If self-correction, and in general self-control, fundamentally rely on criticism from others and on their testimony, then community, agreement, and solidarity are, indeed, very important as conditions of genuine, healthy inquiry. Below I present several arguments for the claim that normative orientation on ideal consensus plays a crucial role in Peirce’s theory of inquiry.

The second of these arguments aims to show that even the thesis that genuine inquiry aims at unassailable belief (or evidentially optimal belief) tacitly involves CCT.

First Argument: Agreement and Content

The first argument I am going to examine does not directly appeal to truth, but to consensus (in the sense of genuine agreement and not just convergent opinion). Peirce took his own original version of linguistic turn when he declared that every thought is a sign or all thought is in signs. From the proposition that every thought is a sign, it follows that every

thought must address itself to some other, must determine some other, since that is the essence of a sign. . . . To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant, but requires a time, is but another way of saying that every thought must be interpreted in another, or that all thought is in signs. (W 2:207-8)

The idea that thoughts are built out of signs or terms would not sound unfamiliar to late scholastics or to British empiricists such as Berkeley. However, this passage intimates a feature of Peirce’s approach which separates it from all scholastic and modern theories of mental signs and mental grammar. Namely, it does not surrender to the myth of the given, as Sellars has called it. Actually, Peirce’s explication of the ramifications of his thesis is quite complicated, but the details need not detain us here. The most important implication is that every thought must be a triad and

BELIEF AND OPINION 199 as such must be interpretable. Every thought must have an object, but not in virtue of standing in some unmediated, primitive relation to it, but in

virtue of being represented as standing for that object by a sign, which refers to the same object on the same principle. This leads to a potentially

infinite series of inferentially connected signs, which, needless to say, cannot be “present before one’s mind.” In fact, there are reasons to think that Peirce rejects the idea of a “private language,” which in his idiom would amount to a hypothesis that cognitive acts and capacities, such as believing, understanding, or perceiving can be explained in terms of

purely inward sequences of purely inward signs (whatever “purely inward” means). The hypothesis is discarded by Peirce as one of the fundamental Cartesian dogmas. In other words, Peirce’s semeiotic approach

implies that every thought must be interpretable by public inferential practices.

A more startling way to put the same point is that every thought is irreducibly a social fact. I will bring home this insight by comparing cog-

nitive acts to strictly social acts such as giving. Peirce invokes the last example as an instance of an irreducible triad. He observes that a relation

“A gives C to B” cannot be adequately analyzed as a combination of dyadic relations, e.g., “A throws C away,” “B picks C up,” and so forth (CP 1.345, 1903). Although Peirce does not say so, his analysis implies that the act of giving cannot consist merely in the fact that the throwing away

and the picking up are accompanied by A’s knowing that he threw C away and B’s knowing that he is about to pick it up. Nor will it do to say that the social aspect of giving, missing in the previous analysis, consists in the fact of the form that A knows that B knows... that A knows that p (where p might be “A threw C away”). However convoluted the relation is (e.g., “B knows that A knows that B knows that A knows that p,” etc.), it still does not yield an equivalent of the act of giving, which essentially consists, Peirce remarks, in the passage of the right of property. Peirce submits that the relation of giving is intrinsically triadic because it must be mediated by an element of a law, that is, the idea of the right of prop-

erty (ibid). Parenthetically, it does not matter how many individual objects and how many dynamic interactions between these objects are involved in a triadic relation. What matters is that all of these individuals and interactions are referred to the same interpretation; in this case, they are referred to the idea of the right of property.

200 MATEUSZ W. OLEKSY At this juncture we may inquire what triadicity has to do with being irreducibly social. What does it mean that physical interactions are “medi-

ated by” or “referred to” an element of thirdness, and how does agreement fit into the story? Peirce does not address these specific questions, but we may reasonably conjecture about his likely responses on the basis of his general commitments. One of these commitments is that an abstract

idea, such as the idea of the right of property, is a symbol which itself requires interpretation in terms of other symbols. The idea of the right of property may have various emotional and energetic interpretants, such as B’s picking up C or feeling grateful. However, what is essential to its thirdness is its final logical interpretant. Another of Peirce’s general com-

mitments is his pragmatic maxim, which implies that the final logical interpretant of any symbol must be its final practical interpretant, that is, a controllable habit of action. In our example, the final interpretants of the idea of the right of property must be the ordinary practices (e.g., birthday gifts), the legal and political tradition in which A and B are situ-

ated. Naturally, these habits must be shared by the community, and A and B must conform to the standards of this community. Now, there is a good reason why a shared or public habit, if it is to control the meaning of an idea, cannot consist in a mere convergence of behavior, or in the fact that two or more individuals exhibit the same or a very similar pattern of behavior in similar circumstances. Two tigers may exhibit the pattern of mating, but there is no rightness or wrongness in their behaviors. By contrast, if it is true that A gave C to B, then it must

be true of A and B that they have, colloquially speaking, a common understanding of the situation. This common understanding involves not only making (tacitly) certain commitments, but also implicit acknowl-

edgment of these commitments and implicit agreement on what energetic interpretants are admissible in this situation (i.e., what reactions token the passage of the right of property). Moreover, these commitments, acknowledgments, and agreements must be in accord with the standards of the community. The public practice (as a critical interpretant) provides the basis for the distinction of right and wrong. In effect, the claim that I ascribe to Peirce is that every genuine triad requires as its final interpretant a genuinely shared, and not merely convergent, habit. The decisive argument for this claim trades on Peirce’s third general commitment, namely, that habits regulating action must be controllable,

ultimately, by the power of the highest ideal, which constitutes the

BELIEF AND OPINION 201 summum bonum. Convergent habits may be more stable than idiosyncratic habits, but they need not be more controllable. In fact, instinctive, perceptual, and quite many commonsensical beliefs are not vulnerable to

refutation by experience; they are acritical and beyond our control. Shared habits are based in (often implicit) assents, which are in principle subject to criticism and withdrawal or suspension. To sum up, the fact that A gives C to B is irreducibly social because it

involves genuinely shared habits or a “common understanding.” As I already remarked, the presence of two or more human agents is not the decisive feature of the social fact. That A has a belief, that A is aware of something, and that A perceives something are also good candidates for social facts. Indeed, the analysis presented above, which brings out the

public-communal dimension of any triad, may be readily applied to them, including the most recalcitrant case of perception. The fact that A perceived B, as a cognitive act, does not consist in the fact that A has a sensation and B impinges on A or anything like that. On Peirce’s theory of perception, perceptual representation of an object requires a perceptual judgment that interprets the percept as a percipuum (the immediate object of representation) and in its turn requires interpretation by outward signs. In fact, the cognitive content of the percept depends not on what “passes in someone’s head” but on what would be accepted (by the community) as the right thing to say and think in given circumstances. It is true that the perceptual judgment is not directly subject to criticism, and that both its “confession of imperfection” and its reference to public agreement are only implicit. Nevertheless, the general point stands that cognitive facts, including perceptions, presuppose the possibility of explicit agreement. We do not normally fix the percipuum by discussion and agreement, but we must be capable of reaching explicit consensus on just what is perceived. What’s more, this is not a peculiar feature of cognitive facts. We do not fix the sense of a social fact by recourse to explicit negotiation and argument, except for unusual cases, when we really have a problem deciding whether a given state of affairs is, say, a case of giving

something to someone or perhaps a case of leasing it to him or her. The peculiar feature of perceptions is that while we can modify the inferences we draw from them, such revisions do not affect the way we experience things, whereas in the case of typical social transactions, a change

of interpretation immediately affects the way we experience the social situation.

202 MATEUSZ W. OLEKSY The argument sketched out above concerns the level of sense-ascription, and not the level of epistemic evaluation (the distinction should be made, even though for Peirce the two levels cannot be insulated from each other), which directly involves truth-ascription. But the concept is indirectly invoked in the argument, namely via the pragmatic maxim. The gist of Peirce’s consensualism about meaning is not that meanings are simply fixed by actual conventions. Occasionally, Peirce explains disambiguation or elimination of vagueness in terms of temporary agreements between the speakers (CP 5.448n, 1905). But the general upshot of the pragmatic maxim in semeiotics is that the rational purport of meaning of a symbol consists in its final interpretant or the habit that would be developed and stabilized by the community in the long run. In this way meaning links up to agreement, and agreement links up to truth, for on CCT the truth is nothing but the ultimate consensus. In the end, Peirce invites us to consider that it makes no sense to speak of thought or mean-

ing outside of the context of public interpretation, which is oriented to truth in the sense of ultimate agreement. This is also the case with semeiosis in general. There is quite a remarkable resemblance between this argument and the argument for the primacy of intersubjectivity advanced by such contemporary pragmatists as Davidson and Brandom. Davidson, for example, argued that our philosophical conceptions of propositional attitudes must be informed by a reflection on the conditions of interpretation. He claimed that interpretation of, say, belief is intrinsically truth-ascribing.

In other words, an interpreter cannot coherently ascribe to a speaker a worldview that he (the interpreter) takes to be largely false. In a style of argumentation reminiscent of earlier arguments by Wittgenstein and Peirce, Davidson points out that the interpreter can identify an error in the speaker’s beliefs only against a background of beliefs that the interpreter takes to be true. Furthermore, truth-ascription intrinsically generates consensus, because the moment the interpreter predicates truth of the speaker’s belief that p, the interpreter thereby commits himself to the endorsement of p. This yields an interesting philosophical conclusion, namely, that objectively, belief (along with other propositional attitudes) presupposes a vast network of agreement, which can be removed only at

the cost of complete dissolution of meaning and cognitive content (Davidson 1984). I think that Davidson would also be happy to grant Brandom’s point that although the agreements in question are largely

BELIEF AND OPINION 203 implicit, meaning and content conferral is possible only thanks to the fact

that we can in principle make our commitments explicit and negotiate them. The entire argument is very close in spirit to Peircean consensualism about meaning. (This is not to deny that there are some significant differences. One obvious difference is that for Davidson the links between

interpretation, thought, and action are tight enough to exclude the possibility of massive error, but not tight enough to guarantee the possibility of comprehensive, universal agreement. Another even more obvious difference is that Davidson regards “truth” as a primitive notion, and rejects CCT, ECT, and other definitions of truth as misguided. The argument stands because the connection between content and agreement is not established via CCT.) Second Argument: Agreement and Disinterested Inquiry

The first argument concerned the constitution of meaning and cognitive

content. The second argument concerns the pragmatic conditions or presuppositions of epistemic appraisal, in particular, of ascription of truth in the sense of ECT. I argue that a commitment to truth in the sense of CCT is indispensable—as a moral norm, not as a separate epistemic goal—to the pursuit of the best belief (in the evidentialist sense). First, CCT is implicated in the modest fallibility condition. A judgment or an assertion that does not profess to be exactly true, that confesses its one-sidedness, implicitly appeals to the ideal community as the ultimate truth-ascriber and to the ideal limit of inquiry as the source of ultimate warrant for an absolute truth-claim. Indeed, the confession boils down to the acknowledgment that what is fully warranted by our present standards need not be universally acceptable. But at least for Peirce, universal acceptability is a matter of ultimate consensus at the ideal limit of inquiry. However, we can never ascertain that a proposition is universally acceptable. All we can aspire to, as far as superlative cognitive achievement is concerned, is a belief that withstands severe tests as far as inquiry can profitably be extended. Peirce is well aware that the last constraint, the pragmaticized version of the “long run” story, is circumscribed by the economy of research, that is, a particular context of interests and objectives that informs a particular inquiry. This practical limit does not mark off the horizon of every possible inquiry. Thus, part of the confession of imperfection, which Peirce regards as essential to the genuinely scientific

204 MATEUSZ W. OLEKSY truth-claim, is a tacit acknowledgment that a possible extension of inquiry may overturn today’s best beliefs. Second, the need for a commitment to ideal agreement is immediately linked to the requirement that inquiry should be disinterested, which in

turn is inscribed in the first rule of reason: “In order to learn you must desire to learn” (CP 1.135, c.1899). This first rule of reason implies that genuine inquiry should be motivated not by any interest but by the desire to learn (ibid). However, this does not amount to a pragmatic explication of the concept of disinterestedness, since it is still not clear what it means in practice that a desire to learn subdues or overarches all other interests

that could possibly motivate one’s investigation. Indeed, it may be claimed that the desire to learn is nothing but the desire to get at unassailable beliefs. Peirce’s theory of inquiry leaves no doubt that this is what

learning is all about: working out vulnerable solutions that continually pass severe tests. However, my argument is that even granting this experimentalist interpretation of the first rule of reason, moral orientation on ultimate consensus is a pragmatic precondition of genuine inquiry. The

point is that single-minded dedication to the pursuit of unassailables is not good enough to safeguard disinterestedness, even if the latter consists in putting the search for the best beliefs before all other interests.

Third, although modest fallibility does not imply vulnerability, vulnerability presupposes the “confession” of imperfection. A judgment that

purports to state the absolute truth is a dogma. As long as our guiding norm is loyalty to authority, our beliefs cannot be vulnerable to refutation by impartial investigation. Also, when we take for truth a proposition that we do not doubt, we simply follow what Peirce calls the method of tenacity, or in a more reflective form, the a priori method. One of Peirce’s main arguments for the superiority of the method of science (i.e., for the very scheme of abduction and experiment which informs ECT) is that this is the only method that exposes our judgments to empirical trial. If modest fallibility implies commitment to ideal consensus, and robust fallibility presupposes modest fallibility, then we cannot escape the conclusion that one cannot be successful in trying to secure optimal beliefs unless one acknowledges at the same time the ideal of universal consensus. A perceptive reader may notice a conflict between the last claim and

the point put forward earlier that ECT cannot explicate truth in terms of the ideal limit of endless investigation. There is no conflict in fact, since the last claim implies only that deference to the ideal limit opinion

BELIEF AND OPINION 205 is not a part of the content of an epistemic appraisal of hypotheses and theories. The present claim is that the moral identification with whatever the ideal community assents to forms a presupposition, and not a part of epistemic appraisal. Fourth, we can milk out of Peirce a more substantive argument in sup-

port of the thesis that vulnerability presupposes orientation on truth in the sense of CCT. The moral telos of inquiry is well brought out in the following passage: We all hope that the different scientific inquiries in which we are severally engaged are going ultimately to lead to some definitely estab-

lished conclusion, which conclusion we endeavor to anticipate in some measure. Agreement with that ultimate proposition that we look forward to,—agreement with that, whatever it may turn out to be, is the scientific truth. (CP 7.187, 1901)

“Agreement” is taken here in the sense of the abstract concordance of

our provisional opinion with the final conclusion, that is, the one that would be agreed upon by all competent inquirers. Peirce develops his ethics for science with the conception of the “three sentiments, namely, interest in an indefinite community, recognition of the possibility of this interest being made supreme, and hope in the unlimited continuance of intellectual activity,” which he advances as “indispensable requirements of logic” (CP 2.655). From the context it is clear that “logic” means here rational methods for removing doubt or the methods of sound inquiry. Why should this total axiological orientation—based on the recognition of the infinite horizon of inquiry, the identification with the point of view of ideal community of inquiry, and the hope that in each case the final consensus would be found—be indispensable to sound inquiry?

I think that Peirce’s most attractive argument for the foundational role of the ethics of disinterestedness, as I propose to call the three sentiments story, takes the following form. I already mentioned that the “self-

correction” thesis involves a recognition of the fundamental role of interpersonal evidence and criticism. This recognition amounts to a consensualist qualification to the first rule of reason: Only the one who is prepared to learn from others (other competent inquirers) really desires to learn. Testimony and intellectual dialogue would be of minor signifi-

cance for epistemology, were it the case that “the method of science” yields a definite set of rules “for the guidance of reason,” which can be

206 MATEUSZ W. OLEKSY applied automatically to scientific propositions in order to remove any doubt concerning them. Peirce, as we know, flatly rejects the possibility of generating certainty in this way. Indeed, he does not entertain a hope

that an advance in the methodology of science could ever support methodological solipsism, or the view that private data combined with the right methodology are sufficient conditions for obtaining empirical knowledge. His entire project of overcoming “modern nominalism” debunks a similar foundationalist aspiration as misguided and untrue to the historical reality of science. The correction of errors, at the level of abductive laws and theoretical explanations, is not generated by a set of rigid rules but is painfully won through collective effort, based on a flow of information and open discussion. A scientist who is eager to discover a flaw in his theory must heed the results of experiments performed by others and deal with their criticisms, including the theoretical arguments, which may engage particular theoretical claims he does not share. The last simple point opens up the problem of authority and trust as integral to sound inquiry. I do not hesitate to say that scientific men now think much more of authority than do metaphysicians; for in science a question is not regarded as settled or its solution as certain until all intelligent and informed doubt has ceased and all competent persons have come to a catholic agreement. (CP 1.32, 1869)

Of course, competence is fallible authority; the only kind of authority Peirce thinks is admissible in science. Since no man can verify all the relevant testimony and examine competently the merits of every argument, every inquirer faces the dilemma of whether to trust the testimony and argument coming from competent scientists (especially from the quarters of science, which are beyond his field of expertise). After all, competence may also be called into question with the development of inquiry. Peirce is clearly committed to the view that we should trust all persons who are considered competent. (Needless to say, he does not recognize any automatic criteria for competence. ) The man of science attaches positive value to the opinion of every man as competent as himself, so that he cannot but have a doubt of a conclusion which he would adopt were it not that a competent man opposes it; but on the other hand, he will regard a sufficient divergence from the convictions of the great body of scientific men as

BELIEF AND OPINION 207 tending of itself to argue incompetence, and he will generally attach little weight to the opinions of men who have long been dead and were ignorant of much that has been since discovered which bears upon the question in hand. (CP 1.32, 1869)

Peirce is well aware of the fact that such a heroic openness to criticism and refutation is neither psychologically natural nor necessarily beneficial in every particular case. Sometimes, it is better for a scientist to shut his ears to the opinions of the community and go on with his research in spite of the risk of ostracism (e.g., the anathema of incompetence). But Peirce believes that if isolationism and arrogance became a rule, science would become impossible. Hence, in general it is good to trust and respect authority, even though the very ascriptions of authority are just as fallible as all other beliefs. Since the attitude of trust and respect is neither dic-

tated by instinct nor necessarily conducive to success in the short run (success in self-correction), it must be bolstered by appropriate ethics of inquiry, which places great emphasis on global-communal ties. Peirce’s ethics of disinterestedness is an attempt to meet this task. Fifth, there is another consideration that adds force to the argument

presented under point four. Peirce distinguishes genuine, unfettered inquiry and degenerate, inhibited inquiry. The distinction arises out of his discussion of the methods of inquiry, although it does not simply coincide with the distinction of the method of science and other methods of inquiry. Degenerate and blocked inquiry ranges from cases of mere

cheating to cases of, often unconscious, violations of the principle of disinterestedness. The methods of tenacity, authority, and a priori are obvious examples of such violations. However, two points should be borne in mind. First, Peirce puts forward an argument for the indispensability of

indubitable truths very similar in spirit to the one advanced by Wittgenstein in On Certainty. In his attacks on Cartesianism, Peirce insists that “in truth, there is but one state of mind from which you can ‘set out,’ namely, the very state of mind in which you actually find yourself

at the time you do ‘set out’—a state in which you are laden with an immense mass of cognition already formed, of which you cannot divest yourself if you would; and who knows whether, if you could, you would not have made all knowledge impossible to yourself?” (CP 5.416, 1905). At least a part of pregiven cognition consists of indubitable beliefs: perceptual

208 MATEUSZ W. OLEKSY beliefs that are wrought from us (a method of tenacity), commonsensical truths, “established truth,” as Peirce calls them (CP 1.635, 1898), or the

results of science which are at a moment removed from doubt by an extrascientific authority such as a political regime or an educational system (the method of authority), moral judgments accepted because of their persistent and global appeal (a version of the a priori method). Any such “hinge belief” (as Wittgenstein would call it) blocks the inquiry. But some of them are indispensable even to scientific inquiry. These beliefs cannot be true by the standards of ECT, because they are not vulnerable to empirical trial. Most of them are clear cases of convergent beliefs, accepted without any deliberation and consensus. Hence, they also do not directly meet the requirements of CCT. Nonetheless, they are sanctioned by CCT because at least some of them will have to stand in the long run and form an integral part of the sum of beliefs accepted at the ideal limit of inquiry. Second, the fact that an inquirer is generally committed to the method of abduction and experiment, does not mean that his inquiry cannot slide imperceptibly into one of the alternative methods. Peirce intimates that as long as a scientist works in cognitive solitude he is likely to forsake disinterestedness. This happens whenever an inquirer is more concerned about getting credit for the discovery than about the discovery of truth itself. The slide from genuine to degenerate inquiry happens whenever the search for unassailable propositions is replaced with the conservative strategy of trying to protect a preferred proposition from refutation (CP 1.235, C. 1902). In general, it happens when truth is confused with the status quo or with what one does not doubt, the only exception to this rule being indubitable beliefs. Peirce believes that the only thing that can save inquiry from degeneration into pseudo-inquiry is extensive cooperation, up to the point of cementing the community of inquiry into a “corporate mind,” and a thorough exposure to criticism. [The first thing to remember is that] a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is “saying to himself,” that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. The second thing to remember is that the man’s circle of society (however widely or narrowly this phrase may be understood), is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank

BELIEF AND OPINION 209 than the person of an individual organism. It is these two things alone

that render it possible for you—but only in the abstract, and in a Pickwickian sense—to distinguish between absolute truth and what you do not doubt. (CP 5.421, 1905)

Again, genuine inquiry is not demarcated from pseudo-inquiry by a set of general criteria, which could be applied indifferently from one case to another. What makes it possible to distinguish them in a concrete and literal sense is a commitment to the ethics of disinterestedness.

Third Argument: Agreement and the Unity of the Community of Inquiry

The third argument may be called the communitarian argument for the primacy of truth. It trades on the ideas contained in the argument from the presuppositions of epistemic appraisal, but approaches them from the social point of view. The communitarian argument rests on two premises, which are present in Peirce: First, inquiry has a teleological nature and is oriented toward certain goods, ultimately, on the summum bonum. The highest value, in case of inquiry, is the truth. Second, inquiry is a social-organic activity in which individuals (individual inquirers) are welded into an organic whole, called by Peirce a “corporate person” or “corporate mind.” Such an organic community requires a strong social bond, which is constituted by a

shared moral orientation to the same common good. This strong social tie is provided by a shared dedication to truth.

When Peirce attempts to demarcate science from nonscience or pseudo-science, he raises the question of what transforms a person into a

scientist. His answer is that the conversion consists in the scientist’s “being seized with a great desire to learn the truth” (CP 1.235, c. 1902). A bit further he confesses that “an effective rage to learn the very truth” is the only necessary trait that distinguishes the men of science (ibid). In the same vein, in another place he dismisses the proposal to equate science with systematized knowledge or to define it by the “correct method” of inquiry, pointing out that science is not a “dead memory” but the “living

and growing body of truth” and that the method of science is itself a

210 MATEUSZ W. OLEKSY result of science. Then, he urges that what is really essential “is the scien-

tific spirit, which is determined not to rest satisfied with existing opinions, but to press on to the real truth of nature” (CP 6.428, 1893). In still another place he asserts that science is “a mode of life; not knowledge, but

the devoted, well-considered life pursuit of knowledge; devotion to truth—not ‘devotion to truth as one sees it,’ for that is no devotion to truth at all, but only to party—no, far from that, devotion to the truth that the man is not yet able to see but is striving to obtain” (Peirce 1958, 268). The passage nicely brings out the distinction between disinterested inquiry and pseudo-inquiry. The import of the second premise is that the summum bonum must be a value that is fit to tie the community together. It stands to reason that such a value must express a truly common interest and promote a truly public good. Presumably, most of us desire such things as wealth, health, sexual satisfaction, fame, and so on. But these values do not really bring us closer together because they answer to purely individual needs, and do not necessarily promote the well-being of the community. My health or wealth stands in no intrinsic relation to your health or wealth. One can desire health for all people, but it does not change the fact that health, like Christian salvation, is an individual business. By contrast, on CCT my truth is intrinsically related to your truth, because they are both intrinsically dependent on the ultimate agreement of the community. In general, we may draw a distinction between individual and common values, which

is very akin in spirit to the distinction of convergent and common opinion. We could, in fact, talk of convergent values, which are ultimately decomposable into individual values, and common values, which are not reducible to individual values. We often recognize that the satisfaction of individual value is greatly facilitated by cooperation from everybody and a general recognition of this value as a kind of public good. Health is an obvious example. Nevertheless, in these cases the ultimate end remains

individual, and the recognition of a public good does not amount to a recognition of any intrinsic relation between my satisfaction and your satisfaction. If there are genuinely common goods, they are not mere means to the satisfaction of individual needs and interests. With this distinction in place, we are prepared to construct the argument. Our claim is that only truth in the sense of CCT provides a good candidate for the summum bonum as the ultimate value for (scientific) inquiry. Suppose we take “truth” in the above quotations in the sense of

BELIEF AND OPINION 211 ECT, that is, as “unassailable belief.” Now, this value is shared in the same sense in which health is a shared value. Everybody wants beliefs that survive the test of experience, or at any rate, nobody wants beliefs that lead to disappointment and frustration. In this sense, the best belief is a belief that is best for an individual to believe in, and constitutes the uppermost

value in the individual hierarchy of cognitive stakes. We have, in fact, demanded in Peirce’s name, that the best belief should be a convergent unassailable belief, or a belief that resists refutation across the entire range of individual experiences. In this case we indeed go beyond the concep-

tion of truth as a belief that works for me, and perhaps only for me. Nonetheless, we still explain truth or the best belief in terms of a relation

of an opinion to standards that are germane to individual experience. CCT, by contrast, hangs on the idea of a universally acceptable belief, which is explicated in terms of a relation of an opinion to the public standards that are germane to the community of inquiry. From this vantage point, it makes sense to say that an opinion should be accepted by everyone because it is universally acceptable, whereas in case of a convergent opinion it can be said only that its being convergent consists in the fact that it is accepted by many inquirers. Indeed, if an opinion is valid in this strong objectivist sense, it is the case that each inquirer should accept not

only the opinion but also the kind of justification that the community considers adequate for this particular opinion. CCT is based in this communal-objectivist approach to validity. The crucial difference between the best belief, even in the convergence version, and ultimate consensus is that only the latter is a viable candidate for a truly common good. In fact, ultimate consensus is a public good par excellence, since it requires not just any agreement but the kind of agreement that involves mutual entitlements to accept an opinion and its justification. Although ultimate consensus in general is the general summum bonum of inquiry, any case of discussion delivered to the final agreement is a particular ultimate value of inquiry. To repeat, these are not genuine goals, since no discussion can be literarily “delivered” to its final, perma-

nent conclusion. Rather, the pragmatic upshot of the talk of truth as summum bonum is that the ethics of disinterestedness (the three sentiments) is raised to the status of the overarching norm guiding our discourse about validity. The three sentiments constitute at the same time an element of the general agreement and the main motive for seeking such

agreements that cement and strengthen the unity of the community of

212 MATEUSZ W. OLEKSY inquiry as the community absorbed in that special mode of life, “science.”

I call this argument “communitarian,” because it resembles in impor-

tant respects the arguments advanced by Dewey and, later, by the communitarians (Taylor, Sandel) in the controversy with liberalism. Liberal thinkers have been traditionally attracted to the position that the only legitimate common value is the protection of individual values. John

Dewey put forward an interesting, and in a way devastating, argument against this type of liberalism. His argument was that the community dedicated to the protection of individual rights, so-called negative freedoms, cannot be founded solely on the widely shared recognition of these

rights and freedoms. A liberal polity cannot be secured and sustained solely on the basis of commitment to individualist-liberal values. The critical point coincides with premise two above. What is needed, according to Dewey, for the constitution and preservation of any community is active commitment to public goods and participation in public activities oriented toward these goods (Dewey 1991, 20-21). What these goods and activities might be in case of a liberal society is another matter, which need not detain us here. What is essential is the general scheme of the argument, to the effect that the individualist values cannot be secured except within a community that does not solely recognize individualist values but is fundamentally united in the interest to promote the common good. If I am right, Peirce has a very similar view concerning truth and

the constitution of the community of inquiry as the condition of free inquiry. In order to secure and protect the individual right to seek the best belief, to push the inquiry wherever the play of abduction and experiment leads it, the scientists must share something more than their individual desires to get at the unassailable beliefs, and this “something more”

is supplied by the idea of truth as ideal consensus and the three sentiments, which guide the inquiry as a social practice based on trust and authority. I believe that the three arguments adduced above are sufficient to show that Peirce did not and could not reject CCT in favor of ECT. They support the view that he held them both. An important issue that I would like to briefly address in closing is how these two conceptions of truth are related.

It is quite common to distinguish a “definition of truth,” or the expli-

cation of the meaning of the truth-predicate, and an epistemological

BELIEF AND OPINION 213 account of the criterion of truth. However, there is a whole family of definitions of truth which are criteriological, or which explicate the con-

cept of truth in terms of the criterion of truth. Certainly, pragmatic accounts of truth fall into this category. In fact, a pragmatist need not go so far as to say that the epistemological account of the criterion of truth exhausts the explication of the concept of truth. He may insist only on the more moderate point that whatever truth is, an adequate account of the concept cannot completely insulate objective truth from the ways in which we attain truth. This is precisely the point that Peirce makes in his pragmatist papers. For example, while discussing the correspondence definition of truth he suggests bluntly that either it is the case that even an omniscient being could not reveal to us what correspondence consists in,

and in that case truth “belongs to that universe entirely disconnected from human intelligence which we know as the world of utter nonsense,” or else, truth must be explicable not in terms of a relation between signs and things-in-themselves but in terms of a relation between provisional thoughts and ultimate results of inquiry (CP 5.553, 1906). In another place he complains about philosophers who talk about truth and falsity in the “metaphysical sense” as “something not definable in terms of doubt and belief in any way,’ and proposes to subject these metaphysical entities to Ockham’s razor (CP 5.416, 1905). What would it mean to regard truth as definable in terms of belief and

doubt? Peirce does not give an unequivocal answer to this question. Rather, he urges: “Your problems would be greatly simplified, if, instead of saying that you want to know the ‘Truth,’ you were simply to say that you want to attain a state of belief unassailable by doubt” (CP 5.416, 1905). Notice that this is not equivalent to saying that ECT exhausts the definition of truth. Peirce’s line is that either the word “truth” is useless, or else

truth must be seen as somehow related to unassailable belief. But on CCT, truth must also be seen as somehow related to agreement and common opinion. Following the pragmatic maxim, we would like to bring out the full rational purport of the concept of truth, or the full range of consequences of holding something as true. This task is simply incomplete, or the highest degree of clarity about the concept is not reached, as long as the roles of testing and agreement have not been adequately exposed.

TEN

THE NORMATIVITY OF COMMUNICATION Norms and Ideals in Peirce’s Speculative Rhetoric Ignacio Redondo

We must not begin by talking of pure ideas,—vagabond thoughts that tramp the public roads without any human habitation,—but must begin with men and their conversation. —Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce

[? a celebrated essay, the prominent communications scholar James

Carey pointed out that beneath our ways of talking about communication there are two major conceptions constraining our communicative discourses and practices (Carey 1989, 14-15). The first is the “transmission view of communication, which is commonly explained as the transmission of ideas from mind to mind; the other is the “ritual view” of communication, which, in Carey’s words, is not directed “toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society” (Carey 1989, 18). In this view, communication is related to communion, conceived not as the mere sharing of contents but as the act of being engaged in the life of a community. Here, the main concept is that of practice, which highlights rules, norms, and shared patterns of conduct governed by certain ends or values, which, in turn, define the very essence of a given community. There is, therefore, a deep link between communicative practices,

conceived as shared habits of conduct, and normative standards controlled by purposes, goals, and ideals. Indeed, as Craig has defended, as long as a practice develops, a normative discourse about the practice | 214 $

THE NORMATIVITY OF COMMUNICATION 215

develops along with it (Craig 2006, 39). In this picture, communication appears as a constitutive social practice whose breathing soul is the cultivation of reflexive habits within, and whereby human beings become the real masters of their own agency, as well nurturing the ideals that config-

ure them as a real community. Communication, in the end, does not consist in the mere conveyance of messages but has much to do with moral skills and values that arise within the same practice that they bring about. It can be argued that this is not at all a new picture. Certainly, this way of conceiving communication reminds one of the ancient traditions of rhetoric. Although this view may sound unfashionable to our positivistically trained ears, I think that it provides a better way of illuminating the practices that really constitute our self-constructing dialogic selves. In this essay, I present a proposal for a constitutive approach to communication based on these presuppositions, while focusing on a neglected giant of the philosophy of communication: the American logician and philosopher Charles S. Peirce. Against reductionistic explanations that dominate contemporary discourse in communication theory, I make a

plea for a rhetorical turn in communication based on a rediscovery of Peirce, whose writings on signs and dialogic understanding partake of a more comprehensive view of the human condition. In particular, I would like to draw attention to the Peircean insistence on scientific inquiry as

the deliberate, self-controlled pursuit of truth, which in turn demands srounding knowledge in the very heart of an ongoing, self-correcting, and ever-growing community of inquirers. My point is that a liberal interpretation of speculative rhetoric, the third branch of semeiotic, provides us with a standpoint from which to search for the normative roots of communication through concrete instantiations of reasonableness in situated contexts of utterance and interpretation.

First, I discuss Peirce’s theory of assertion, understood as a sort of speech act theory avant la lettre that can provide grounding for normative constraints on dialogue and public assertion. Second, I argue that the foundations of this theory are to be found in the broader picture of the

normative sciences, particularly, in the dependence of logic on ethics and esthetics. Third, I discuss the concept of the summum bonum that constitutes the ultimate good—the esthetic ideal with which our selfcontrolled critical struggles are bound up. Finally, using Peirce’s late writings on semeiotic I propose a reinterpretation of Peirce’s speculative

216 IGNACIO REDONDO rhetoric, understood not as methodeutic but as the proper framework for studying concrete instantiations of reasonableness in contexts of utterance and interpretation.

The Normativity of Assertion

It is well known that Peirce thought of himself as being “naturally deficient in aptitude for language” (R 620, 1909).' Nevertheless, this so-called ineptness did not prevent him from making important contributions to the philosophy of language and communication (Hilpinen 1995, 272). Moreover, as some have shown, Peirce’s late manuscripts suggest a conception of speech acts and dialogic understanding in a way that foreshadows—and even goes beyond—later pragmatic theories of meaning as developed by Austin, Searle, and Grice in the twentieth century (Brock 1981; Réthoré 1999; and Pietarinen 2004). But in addition to his neglected yet comprehensive conception of the pragmatic determination of meaning in communicative situations—which is, of course, extremely valuable for a full understanding of a Peircean approach to communication—my main interest here is in the strong normative features that permeate the practices of dialogue and assertion.” Peirce’s remarks on assertion have to be properly understood within the context of his logical theory of propositions. Nevertheless, this theory of assertion can be read from a broader perspective—that is to say, within the more flexible boundaries of the general theory of signs—in order to illuminate the very practices of dialogue and public assertion in a sort of rhetorical pragmatism that emphasizes the inferential, normative, and

social nature of reasoning and speech. Jarrett Brock has written that Peirce’s theory of assertion is, among other things, a theory of communi-

cation—that is, a theory of the rules and norms that guide and govern communication (Brock 1975, 125).° In order to fully grasp the social and communicative nature of assertion, it may be helpful to recall that Peirce envisioned thought as essentially communicative, as a sort of dialogue between two or more quasi-minds. Thinking always proceeds in the form of a dialogue,—a dialogue between different phases of the ego,—so that, being dialogical, it is essentially composed of signs, as its Matter, in the sense in which a game of chess has the chessmen for its matter. Not that the particular

THE NORMATIVITY OF COMMUNICATION 217 signs employed are themselves the thought. Oh, no; no whit more than the skins of an onion are the onion... . One selfsame thought may be carried upon the vehicle of English, German, Greek, or Gaelic;

in diagrams or in equations, or in Graphs: all these are but so many skins of the onion, its inessential accidents. Yet that the thought should have some possible expression to some possible interpreter, is the very being of its being. (R 298:6-7, 1905)

In other words, for Peirce thought and expression are one and the same (SS 10, 1903). This makes sense when related to his semeiotic conception of mind, that is, that thought is in signs (CP 6.338, 1909). I do not wish to go into the highly technical depths of Peirce’s semeiotic in the context of a short essay. Suffice it to say that for him, the sign is constituted by an inherently triadic relation between a representamen, an object, and

an interpretant, in such a way as to determine that the latter is the interpretation of the former as being another sign of the same object (CP 2.303, 1902). Thus, a sign is not a sign unless it is connected both to an object that determines it and, at least virtually, to an interpretant that is determined by it. In other words, what defines a sign is its capacity to stand for an object in order to determine a future interpretant that interprets that this sign refers to the same object as itself (CP 1.541, 1903).* For

that reason, thought always has a virtual character, in the sense that it always refers to its future development into further interpretants (W 2:241, 1868). Thought makes sense only when directed to the future, as it

appeals to something or someone who will interpret it. This connects directly with Peirce’s theory of assertion, for an assertion is an act in which a speaker addresses a listener (CP 2.334, 1903). Hence, given that thought is dialogic in form, it has also an inherently assertoric character (W 2:172, 1868).

I now turn to a fuller exploration of Peirce’s theory of assertion and its

normative properties. For Peirce, assertion is simply a matter of being engaged in a dialogue, and dialogue is primarily a social fact (Brock 1975, 126). As social facts, communication and assertion are subjected to norms. An act of assertion supposes that when a proposition is publicly expressed, “a person performs an act which renders him liable to the penalties of the

social law . .. in case it should not be true, unless he has a definite and sufficient excuse” (CP 2.315, 1902). In consequence, the chief task of the theory of assertion is the study of normative implications for processes of utterance and interpretation.

218 IGNACIO REDONDO Peirce establishes a clear distinction between a proposition and an assertion that resembles contemporary pragmatic attitudes toward meaning. Peirce differentiates between an assertion—namely, a speech-act— and a proposition—the possible general content of a speech-act, that is,

something susceptible of being affirmed, denied, judged, doubted... without becoming a different proposition (EP 2:312, 1904). As Pietarinen

has observed, an assertion has a degree of energy, a sort of physical compulsion analogous to that of brute action (Pietarinen 2004, 296).° This is partly owing to the powerful indexical constraints of every concrete communicative situation because neither symbols nor icons can

accomplish the function of indicating the object of discourse. Some index, “as the word this, or that, or hullo, or hi, which awakens and directs attention,” must be employed (CP 3.434, 1896). An assertion forces the interpreter’s attention in view of the reference to a publicly observable situation—i.e., a “common ground” capable of being mutually experienced by both parties—and this is precisely the role of indices in dialogic situations (SS 197, 1906). But the most important feature of the compulsory function of assertion is “the furnishing of evidence by the speaker to the listener that the speaker believes something” (CP 2.335, c. 1895).°

Peirce compares the act of assertion to the legal act of going before a magistrate or notary and taking a binding oath about something. In doing so, Peirce conceives of assertion as a deed or action that in a certain way makes the utterer responsible before the interpreter (CP 5.543, c. 1902); for “every assertion involves an effort to make the intended interpreter believe what is asserted, to which end a reason for believing it must be furnished” (CP 5.546, c. 1908). Taking an oath is not mainly an event of the nature of a setting forth, Vorstellung, or representing. It is not mere saying, but is doing. The law, I believe, calls it an “act.” At any rate, it would be followed by very real effects, in case the substance of what is asserted should be proved untrue. (CP 5.546, c. 1908)

The utterer “is capable of becoming the subject of responsibility, since

it actually does become so in the act of asserting that predication” (CP 5-547, Cc. 1908). Hence, asserting a proposition involves the utterer’s voluntary self-subjection to penalties in case the proposition is proved false. Peirce argues that this element of responsibility must be present in every

THE NORMATIVITY OF COMMUNICATION 219

genuine assertion—even in solitary meditation since “solitary dialectic is still of the nature of dialogue” (CP 5.546, c. 1908). Consequently, it must be true that in every dialogic situation there is contained an element of assuming responsibility, of “taking the consequences” (CP 5.546, c.1908).’ Therefore, an utterance is not a matter of mere saying, of representing something, because our thoughts are what they are because of what will be made of them. Utterers and interpreters are not mere points of transition for ideas but, as dynamic “ingredients of thought” (R 318, 1907) actually contribute to the end of communication. In conclusion, there emerges a profoundly moral dimension of public communication. In Ransdell’s words, Peirce’s account of assertion reminds us that only to the extent that we are willing to grow meanings can we ourselves grow in meaning, and that true critical thinking is a pruning rather than a whittling down operation, and is essentially dependent for its human value on the nurturing activities in the service of which it properly functions. (Ransdell 1977, 177)

It seems reasonable that, from these and other statements on assertion by Peirce, there can be worked out a profoundly normative account of communicative phenomena. Obviously, this normative aspect of assertion is deeply connected with other parts of Peirce’s thought, such as his pragmaticism and the dependence of logic on ethics in his analysis of the three normative sciences. In the next section I pay attention to some of these connections.

The Basis of Self-Control in the Normative Sciences

As said, for Peirce an assertion is a kind of action, and as such it has some

consequences one is responsible for. Peirce conceived logic as being dependent on ethics, and this is one of the foundations of the moral dimension of dialogue. In the present section I describe Peirce’s concept of self-control and its natural locus in his architectonic system, the normative sciences. Subsequently, I suggest placing semeiotic and pragmaticism in this broader picture by discussing the concept of the summum bonum, which is the ultimate, controlling ideal of the normative sciences. I believe that, despite its obscure roots and problematic underpinnings, the concept of self-control is the real focus of the doctrines of both pragmaticism and semeiotic.

220 IGNACIO REDONDO There is good evidence for this in Peirce’s notion of scientific intelligence, by which he meant “any intelligence capable of learning by experience” (CP 2.227, c. 1897); that is to say, that the only way for us to know something is through signs. In other words, the fact that we can err, or more properly, our being self-convinced that we shall err (cf. CP 1.149, c. 1897), gives birth to our semeiotic consciousness. Consequently, I am in agreement here with David Savan’s assumption that the most important turning point in the history of signs is the point at which deliberate critical appraisal of the norms themselves begins (Savan 1988, 63). This is the very task of logic, which Peirce identified with semeiotic (CP 2.227, c. 1897). As long as logic is concerned with correct reasoning, it has nothing to do with the processes by which we actually do think but with the proper ways in which we must think. Logic regarded from one instructive, though partial and narrow, point of view, is the theory of deliberate thinking. To say that any thinking is deliberate is to imply that it is controlled with a view to making it conform to a purpose or ideal. Thinking is universally acknowledged to b,e an active operation. Consequently, the control of thinking with a view to its conformity to a standard or ideal is a special case of the control of action to make it conform to a standard; and the theory of the former must be a special determination of the theory of the latter. (EP 2:376-77, 1906)

Thus, Peirce distinguished between mere thinking and proper reasoning. Reasoning is deliberate thinking, and as such, it is always subject to control (R L75, 1902). Subsuming reasoning under control implies an essential criticism, for criticism is the process that guides the acceptance of ideas by sanctioning what can count as correct and what cannot. Its purpose is correctness, “and one cannot correct what one cannot control” (R L75, 1902). As said before, this is due to our fallibilistic awareness—1.e., that we can never be absolutely sure we have reached a final and definitive belief. It is this semeiotic consciousness that compels us to adopt habits of self-control and self-criticism. But the most important point here is that in being deliberate, reasoning becomes a kind of action,

for it shares the same self-controlled character of deliberate conduct (CP 8.191, c.1904).

Provided that reasoning is essentially purposive, self-controlled thought, it is also a species of controlled conduct—that is to say, a species

THE NORMATIVITY OF COMMUNICATION 221

of moral conduct (EP 2:387, 1906). Hence, as long as logic is parallel to moral conduct, logic must be subordinated to ethics (CP 2.198, c.1902). Ethics is not considered by Peirce as a science of the distinction between correct or incorrect acts; he considers that to be the task of traditional moralists, who simply promote previously accepted moral norms without serious criticism (EP 2:377, 1906). The main function of ethics is, by contrast, to provide the theory of the conformity of action to an ideal.

As such, it presupposes normative standards and controlling ideals. Therefore, ethics entails the concept of a goal or end, and, because of its appealing, attractive nature, it requires a critical endeavor to obtain it. We find now that there is needed a higher, additional science, whose task is to define the very being of ends and ideals, and Peirce finds this science in esthetics. For it is evident that it is in esthetics that we ought to seek for the deepest characteristics of normative science, since esthetics, in dealing

with the very ideal itself, whose mere materialization engrosses the attention of practices and of logic, must contain the heart, soul and spirit of the normative science. (EP 2:379, 1906)

It is, then, esthetics, the science of ideals, which defines the summum

bonum, the ultimate good—namely, that which in itself is admirable independent of any ulterior reason (CP 1.611, 1903). Thus, logic and ethics

are both dependent on esthetics, because it is this science that identifies

the ultimate governing ideal. But, what is this summum bonum, and what is the role played by it in the Peircean picture? Peirce defines the summum bonum as the end in itself, that which is admirable per se, regardless of any other consideration whatsoever, that is, the ideal of ideals (Potter 1997, 32). And what can be the admirable per se but “Reason itself comprehended in all its fullness”? (CP 1.615, 1903). Peirce relates the

ultimate good with an ideal of conduct, this is, a critical endorsement of enhanced habits of self-control in order to contribute to the development of “concrete reasonableness.” Some words are needed here in order to clarify the question. The summum bonum must not be understood as a completely perfect state of total information in which definitive truth has been attained, but rather as that deliberate process that could bring us closer to such state (Parker 1998, 51). It is the embodiment of ideals by real inquirers in delib-

erately controlled conduct guided by better habits of self-control, which

222 IGNACIO REDONDO in turn promotes the continuous growth of reasonableness in the world— in Peirce’s words, “that process of evolution whereby the existent comes more and more to embody those generals which were just now said to be destined, which is what we strive to express in calling them reasonable” (CP 5.433, 1905). Throughout this process, in which self-criticism allows

us to adopt new habits of thought, higher grades of self-control are acquired and developed (EP 2:377, 1906). These ideals of self-controlled

conduct are, then, incorporated into general rules that ensure that the ideals are to be embodied in concrete actions (Parker 1998, 131). But the most important thing here is that self-controlled conduct does not concern the human individual in isolation, but comprehends the critical self as a constitutive member of an open-ended community (CP 1.588, 1903), so that “his interest and goals ought to be identical with that of the community” (CP 5.536, c. 1905). It seems to me that we are driven to this, that logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community. This community, again, must not be limited, but must extend to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate or mediate intellectual relation. It must reach, however vaguely, beyond this geological epoch, beyond all bounds. He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively. Logic is rooted in the social principle. (W 3:284, 1878)

In the next section I develop this concept of the summum bonum as the ultimate ideal, taking into account some communicational insights that might be found in Peirce’s late semeiotic writings.

Semetiotic Foundations of Normativity: The Summum Bonum and the Incarnation of Forms

The significance of the summum bonum is to be found in the identification of the individual inquirer with the whole community of which he is only a part, because, for Peirce, a person is not at all an individual (EP 2:338, 1905). The very being of this dialogical self suggests that for Peirce scientific inquiry implies being a member of a widespread community

over time. The summum bonum entails, then, that the achievement of higher stages of reasonableness has to be grasped within the flexible

THE NORMATIVITY OF COMMUNICATION 223

boundaries of an unlimited community of inquirers. Peirce claims this embracing of community to be a “social sentiment” inherent in logic and reasoning—and by extension, in all kinds of inquiry (W 2:85, 1878). But it is not sufficient to claim that there is a social sentiment inherent in logic. This is a rather weak proof—in fact, it would be a case of petitio

principii—for the normativity of inquiry and communication uncritically presupposes the very same principle it tries to make sense of. Furthermore, it implies some psychologistic assumptions that make the whole picture hopelessly inadequate for our purposes. Therefore, there must be something much more fundamental than psychological or social “impulses.”® We can also take a somewhat different direction; a direction that, ironically, reverses the meaning of Peirce’s previous dictum that logic is rooted in the social principle. There is no need to appeal to some sort of social motion governing the life of science, because it is precisely logic, by its own nature, that provides full meaning to social and normative phenomena: “So, the social principle is rooted intrinsically in logic” (W 2:271, 1869). In this section I argue for a truly semeiotic foundation of normativity, first, by taking into account Peirce’s late concept of sign as a

medium of communication, and second, by connecting this powerful device with the last, and probably most important part of semeiotic, that

is, speculative or universal rhetoric as the science of the progress of thought. It is well known that Peirce divided normative logic or semeiotic into three different branches: speculative grammar, which “studies the ways in which an object can be a sign” (EP 2:327, 1904); critic, or logic understood in a narrow sense, as the “theory of the general conditions of the reference of Symbols and other Signs to their professed Objects” (CP 2.93, 1902); and methodeutic, which “studies the methods that ought to be pursued in the investigation, in the exposition, and in the application of truth” (EP 2:260, 1903). Conceived like this, methodeutic is the science that studies the methods of science (CP 2.93, c. 1902), that is, that part of the theory of inquiry that studies the ways in which signs are used to communicate effectively the outcomes of scientific investigation within a community of inquirers (Liszka 1996, 10). This is just another name for scientific rhetoric, considered from the narrow point of view of the theory of inquiry. But rhetoric can also be envisioned from a much more general and richer framework, namely, that of speculative rhetoric, “the science of the

224 IGNACIO REDONDO essential conditions under which a sign may determine an interpretant sign of itself and of whatever it signifies, or may, as a sign, bring about a physical result” (EP 2:326—27, 1904).” Conceived this way, rhetoric is a sci-

ence of the laws of the evolution of thought, which “coincides with the study of the necessary conditions of the transmission of meaning by signs from mind to mind, and from one state of mind to another” (CP 1.444, c.1896). In other words, speculative rhetoric is the doctrine of the general conditions of the reference of signs to interpretants (CP 2.93, 1902), or, as Peirce says, the “proper significate effects” of signs (CP 5.473, 1907). Peirce’s linking of these two apparently different visions—t.e., that of scientific methodology and that of communication—is not at all arbitrary. In Peirce’s philosophical picture, science is an essentially communal and cooperative enterprise, which in turn presupposes an unlimited community of dialogue and communication (CP 7.87, 1902). Scientific inquiry is but constituted by the discursive undertakings of men and women pursuing the truth (R 1334, 1905). We can find good evidence for this concep-

tion in Peirce’s late writings, for by the turn of the century Peirce has taken on a profound communicative turn in regard to his general theory of signs and meaning. In a manuscript from 1906 titled “The Basis of Pragmaticism,” we find Peirce’s extraordinary claim that the “universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs” (EP 2:394, 1906). Far from the idealistic turning point that apparently emerges from this statement, Peirce

is, in fact, describing how ideals are incorporated in actual conduct by means of signs. In this manuscript, as well as in some related texts, Peirce defines the sign as “a medium of communication” (EP 2:390—91, 1906; R 793:1, 1906; SS 196, 1906; R 339:271, 1906). It has been alleged that this turning point invalidates in some respects the usefulness of Peirce’s late theory of signs (Parmentier 1994, 30).'? On the contrary, I think that the communicative definition of the sign actually articulates theoretical nor-

mativity as depicted in the normative science and its concrete embodi-

ment in historical contexts of interpretation. In fact, I think it is the proper bond that pragmatically connects ethics and speculative rhetoric.

As we saw, ethics is the science that inquires into the principles of action in order to promote the summum bonum. In doing so, it deals with the critical processes that guide us in the attainment of higher grades of self-control so that our conduct must be reasonable and so, therefore, we can embody the esthetic ideals of the normative science. But, as Kelly

THE NORMATIVITY OF COMMUNICATION 225

Parker remarks, the summum bonum is not a definite state of things, but the ongoing concretion of reasonableness in existent events (Parker 1998, 132).'' This makes perfect sense when related to the third grade of clearness required by the pragmatic clarification of signs, because, according to Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, the ultimate logical interpretant of a sign is the habit or habits of action it would produce in an interpreter (EP 2:430-31). According to Peirce, ideas have a real and decisive effect in the world, through their determination of habits (CP 5.105, 1902), and this is the role played by signs as mediating elements in all meaningful experience.

As Peirce explains, a medium of communication “is a species of medium, and a medium is a species of third” (EP 2:390, 1906).'* By a third, he meant the “medium or connecting bond between the absolute first and last.” This deserves further explanation, for genuine mediation implies a tri-relative influence not reducible to any combination of dyads whatsoever (CP 5.484, 1907).

A medium of communication is something A, which being acted upon by something else, N, in its turn acts upon something, J, in a manner involving its determination by N, so that IJ shall thereby, through A and only through A, be acted upon by N. (EP 2:391, 1906)

Therefore, as a genuine medium, the sign is essentially in a triadic relation, both to its object, which determines it, and to its interpretant, which

it determines. Consequently, thirdness is found wherever one thing brings about secondness between two things. In all cases, Peirce affirms, it will be found that an ingredient of thought plays a part, implying by thought something like the meaning of a word, which may be “embodied in,’ that is, that “may govern, this or that, but is not confined to any existent” (EP 2:269, 1903). This is precisely what Peirce meant by defining the sign as something that communicates forms or features from the object to the interpretant through the sign. But what is the nature of these forms and how does this mediate determination take place by means of signs? The form cannot be a singular thing, because it would cease to be in the object once it has been communicated to the interpretant. On the contrary, its being is the being of a predicate: “It is nothing like an existent, but a power, the fact that something would happen under certain conditions” (R 793:3, 1906). The being of a form consists, then, in the truth of a conditional proposition, so that

226 IGNACIO REDONDO under given circumstances, something would be true. In a thorough and subtle analysis of Peirce’s concept of the sign as a medium of communication, Menno Hulswit observed that the forms of communication are not to be understood as properties inherent to things. On the contrary, the description of the form cannot be explicated without pragmatic contexts and normative criteria for the concrete application of signs. Because of its conditional structure, forms are equivalent to rules. As a consequence, the communication of forms involves the transmission of thirdness or thought that will govern concrete actions in the future (Hulswit 2002, 205).

This is nothing but to admit that a medium of communication illustrates a perfect instantiation of the full meaning of pragmaticism. Indeed, in a previous manuscript, Peirce defined the meaning of a proposition as “the myriads of forms into which a proposition may be translated,” that is, that form “in which the proposition becomes applicable to human conduct, not in these or those special circumstances, nor when one entertains this or that special design, but that form which is most directly applicable to self-control under every situation, and to every purpose” (EP 2:340, 1905). Thus the communicated form has the nature of a “gen-

eral conditional proposition as to the future ...a real general such as is calculated really to influence human conduct” (EP 2:343, 1905).

Let us turn now to a fuller explanation of the process of semeiotic mediation to see how this communication or extension of forms takes place. It is well known that in this communicative perspective of the basic

semeiotic relation, objects and interpretants are explained in view of their essential ingredients, that is, those of a quasi-utterer and a quasiinterpreter (EP 2:404-7, 1907).'? In performing the role of a quasi-utterer, the object functions here as the initiator of the communication, being its more fundamental aspects those of determination and contextualization of signs (Bergman 20042, 251). In regard to these professed features of the object, it has been frequently affirmed that for Peirce, its sole function is the identification of what is being said by constraining the subject matter of discourse (Joswick 1996, 96). The significance of this element of “resis-

tance” or constraint has been exaggerated, I believe, in part because of Peirce’s emphasis on the externality (secondness) of the dynamic object in relation to the sign. But the object, even in its dynamic aspect, is not completely independent of thought, conceived as the whole semeiotic process, but its very beginning.'*

THE NORMATIVITY OF COMMUNICATION 227

In order to explain what is meant here, let us recall that semeiotic tries to make sense of a continuous process tending to an evolving growth of reasonableness. In this process, the production of interpretants is a logi-

cal development of signs so that the object becomes more and more determined. It is, as it were, a process throughout which the object expresses itself by means of its manifestations—.e., signs that will produce real effects in the world. As Peirce says, the object is “that which a representation in some sense reproduces or aims to exhibit in its true light” (R 599, 1902). In order that a form may be communicated, “it is necessary that it should have been really embodied in the object independently of the communication” (SS 196, 1906), meaning that “the conditional relation which constitutes the form is true of the form as it is in the object” (R 793:3, 1906). For that reason, the object is said to be a “repository of ideas or significant forms” (R 318:17, 1907), the demanding “it” that claims for an explanation. It is true, in embodying forms, and insofar as it is a genuine second, the object grounds significance by constraining the myriads of possible effects that could be transmitted to the interpretant (Short 1982, 285). But in addition, Peirce says, “an influence upon the sign emanates from its object, and this emanating influence then proceeds from the sign and produces ...an effect that may be called the interpretant, which consummates the agency of the sign” (R 634:22, 1909). This means that although the sign is passive in its relation to the object—for “its correspondence to the Object is brought about by an effect upon the sign, the Object remain-

ing unaffected”—in its relation to the interpretant the sign is active, determining the interpretant without being itself thereby affected (R 793:2, 1906). The sign, being influenced by this emanation or influence from the object, deflects that influence upon an interpreting mind (R 634:24, 1909), performing the role of a genuine mediator that represents itself to convey this form embodied in the object—understood as a source of an effect (Bergman 2004a, 253)—-so that this may intelligently determine a “meaning,” or interpretant (R 318:19, 1907). The function of the sign is, therefore, to mediate in the transmission of a rule—a “real” general—from the object to the interpretant (Hulswit 2002, 205). But, as Peirce says, this is complicated by the circumstance that the sign not only determines the interpretant to represent—1.e., to receive the form—of the object, but also determines the interpretant to represent the sign as a sign of its object (SS 196, 1906). We can see here a higher

228 IGNACIO REDONDO dimension added to the first representational relation between the sign and the object by means of a mediating representation—1.e., the interpretant—that plays the role of a second-intentional level in semeiosis."° The interpretant is another sign of the same object that declares that what the sign represents is the same object that the interpretant itself represents. It is an equivalent representation, but not in all respects: As a more developed sign of the object, it represents this very same object in a more detailed way. The interpretant must be able to produce a second triadic relation in which the relation of the sign to the object becomes the object

of the interpretant, which in turn becomes the first relate of this new triadic relation. This means that the interpretant not only stands in a triadic relation to the object in the same way that the sign itself does, but it also represents

the first representational relation between the sign and the object by determining a further interpretant of its own, hence allowing future determinations of the object. The sign elicits an interpretant to fulfill its complete function of representing the object, and, by determining this equivalent representation of the same object, it confirms its validity as a

sign by sanctioning or correcting previous determinations about its object. Consequently, the interpretant performs a sort of comparison between representations that permits an addition or reduction of information that will then be conveyed to its future developments.'® In summary, the interpretant not only receives the form that the sign inherits representatively from the object but also identifies and validates that the sign is a proper sign of its object, therefore allowing further com-

munications of this evaluative transaction to a potentially indefinite number of future interpretants (De Tienne 2005, 156). In genuine media-

tion, the sign takes the form emanated from the object but then—and here we see the normative element implicit in all semeiotic events— demands an interpretation on the part of the interpreter. Signs permit foresight and careful appraisal; that is to say, they allow a creative and evaluative reception of forms, making them suitable for further interpretation. For that reason, signs are not transparent media. Throughout the semeiotic process there is always a dynamic growth of information taking place, a development of forms that signs receive from the object, trans-

forming them into potential interpretants that will be incorporated by real interpreters in actual conduct.

THE NORMATIVITY OF COMMUNICATION 229 Toward a Pragmaticist Philosophy of Communication

It is well known that Peirce gradually began to view pragmatism—which he conceived to be insufficient in itself—within the boundaries of a richer metaphysical system he named synechism, built on the results of a broad conception of logic conceived as semeiotic. In this picture, the cosmos

itself embodies an evolutionary process of development of forms or habits, describable as cosmic semeiosis. As law and habit grow by means of this process, the universe itself develops continuously toward a definite

state in which thought, matter, and feeling are coming to be welded together into a harmonic state of “concrete reasonableness” (Parker 1998,

204). As shown in preceding sections, this increase of reasonableness

encompasses the summum bonum, the ultimate ideal envisioned in the normative science. The guidance of ethics and esthetics through self-criticism and self-control allows scientific inquirers to actualize rea-

sonableness in the world of being and action. As Kelly Parker nicely points out, throughout the semeiotic process, “ideas take up residence in

the actual world, in the form of habits exhibited by persons and institutions’ —in other words, it makes “truth an active part of the world of experience” (Parker 1998, 185).

In the same manner, in terms of Peirce’s late description of the pragmatic maxim, the rational purport of every concept is of the nature of a general conditional proposition calculated to influence human conduct, which clearly connects with the continuous development of forms we have already seen in semeiotic mediation. Consequently, the form of

communication plays the very same role as a habit, the “intellectual ingredient which determines the concrete realization of that which may come into existence, when it does come into existence” (EP 2:269, 1903). As Peirce says, to deny reality to such intellectual ingredients is to deny the real power of signs. We can see here that the acceptance of the reality of forms, as potential habits to be received, carefully percolated and put into action by real interpreters in the world grasps the full meaning of pragmaticism. The pragmaticist does not make the summum bonum to consist in action, but makes it to consist in that process of evolution whereby the existent comes more and more to embody those generals which were just now said to be destined, which is what we strive to express in

230 IGNACIO REDONDO calling them reasonable. In its higher stages, evolution takes place more and more largely through self-control, and this gives the pragmaticist a sort of justification for making the rational purport to be general. (EP 2:343, 1905)

In the end, Peirce’s account of the summum bonum, the disciplined development of habits toward a state of perfect knowledge and concrete reasonableness, is an ardent encouragement for real participation in a public, self-correcting pursuit of truth, in other words, a passionate desire

to be part of a universal commens—the common mind into which the minds of utterers and interpreters have to be fused—tending to a definite state of total information. The question whether the genus homo has any existence except as individuals, is the question whether there is anything of any more dig-

nity, worth, and importance than individual happiness, individual aspirations, and individual life. Whether men really have anything in common, so that the community is to be considered as an end in itself, and if so, what the relative value of the two factors is, is the most fundamental practical question in regard to every public institution the constitution of which we have it in our power to influence. (EP 1:105, 1871)

In Peirce’s pragmaticist picture, ideals are not dead abstractions, but living forms that aim to be expressed in reasonable conduct (Parker 1998,

204). I believe that communication scholars could benefit from this highly comprehensive view if they pay serious attention to Peirce. In particular, I think that the normative background of dialogue and commu-

nication and its implications for community would be appreciated by those communication scholars who are looking for a new, constitutive way of talking about our communicative practices.

ELEVEN

PEIRCEAN MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(sS) Remarks on the Normative Methodology of Pragmatist Metaphysics Sami Pihlstro6m

ED

TT" immediate purpose of this essay is to compare Charles S. Peirce’s metaphysics of the modalities—or rather, a “Peircean” approach to this metaphysical issue that can be derived from his defense of synechism and scholastic realism—to the modal realist views defended by important

twentieth-century and contemporary philosophers. This application of Peircean ideas to contemporary metaphysics of modality will eventually yield a pragmatic, critical evaluation of both. In particular, I question the strict dichotomy between metaphysics and ethics, thus also questioning the separation between theory and practice that Peirce himself, at least apparently, subscribed to in his 1898 Cambridge Conferences Lectures, Reasoning and the Logic of Things.' This questioning will be carried out through a perhaps somewhat surprising argument for the entanglement of modal and moral realisms, pragmatically articulated. The outcome is an irreducibly normative methodology for metaphysics, ethically enriched and grounded, which hopefully provides a novel perspective on Peirce’s (or at least Peircean) normative thought.’ My discussion proceeds as follows. First I note, still in an introductory fashion, that the contemporary discourse of modality is firmly rooted in { 231}

232 SAMI PIHLSTROM metaphysical realism. I suggest that the Peircean approach is closer to Kantian transcendental metaphysics. The contrast between metaphysical realism—or what Kant would have called “transcendental realism”—and the properly transcendental metaphysics in my view inherited by pragmatism turns out to be very important, both generally and in the special case of modality; thus, I examine the possibility of interpreting Peirce’s scholastic realism (a key doctrine in his modal theory) as grounded in a naturalized form of transcendental argumentation. A later section turns to a related Peircean view, synechism, and moves on to consider the ethical aspects of these Peircean metaphysical ideas. This discussion will be continued by a few brief remarks on transworld identity (particularly personal identity), before drawing a more general moral regarding the

normative methodology of metaphysics in the Peircean pragmatist framework.

Much of what I say about pragmatism, scholastic realism, and synechism will be relatively familiar to Peirce scholars. Nevertheless, I hope to be able to put these familiar topics into a slightly more novel perspective by emphasizing their Kantian background and by rearticulating them in terms of (what I call) the ethics/metaphysics entanglement. The Metaphysically Realist Assumptions of Contemporary Modal Realism

There are a variety of quite different views available in the contemporary debate over the metaphysics of modality, and obviously I cannot do justice to the richness of this debate in a single essay. For example, actualists such as D. M. Armstrong (1997; 2004) and possibilists, or possible worlds realists, such as David Lewis (1986; 2001) sharply disagree with each other on the correct treatment of the metaphysics of possibility and necessity. Whereas Armstrong maintains that strictly speaking only the actual world exists and that “possible worlds” can (fictionally) be constructed only as recombinations of the elements of the actual world, in such a way that the truthmakers for any truths about mere possibility (or about necessity) that we need can be found among the denizens of the actual world, Lewis finds it convenient to postulate a vast plurality of possible worlds, under-

stood as complex concrete individuals. Armstrong’s view is realist about the mind-independent actual world, though it is fictionalist about possible worlds. Whereas Armstrong needs universals to account for the

MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(S) 233 truthmakers of simple truths of predication (e.g., a is F), Lewis has no need for such repeatable entities, as he can make use of properties as classes of concrete particulars distributed across possible worlds. Lewis is a realist about the concretely existing possible worlds, though he nominalistically denies the reality of universals. Yet another influential theory is the one defended by Alvin Plantinga (2003), according to whom possible worlds ought to be construed as abstract entities, as maximal possi-

ble states of affairs, and things possess individual essences, properties they have in all possible worlds. In Plantinga’s view, Lewis’s possible worlds nominalism is not really a realist theory about possibility at all but a form of “modal reductionism” (ibid., chap. 10). These and other influential modal metaphysicians? are all, quite obviously, metaphysical realists, regardless of how violently they disagree with

each other about the correct metaphysical picture of modalities, for instance, regarding such hotly debated matters as possibilism versus actualism, the nature of possible worlds, the difference between necessary and contingent truth, or transworld identity. Works by Armstrong, Lewis,

Plantinga, and Stalnaker—to name only a few among the most prominent scholars in this field—provide ample evidence of the widespread and virtually unquestioned assumption of metaphysical realism among modal metaphysicians active over the past few decades. One need not embrace essentialism a la Saul Kripke (1980) in order to be a metaphysical

realist in modal metaphysics. One can even be a modal fictionalist, as Armstrong is, and still construe one’s theory of modality under the auspices of a general system of metaphysical realism, arguing that we only seriously need to commit ourselves to the mind- and discourse-independent existence of actual states of affairs and their constituents.” Metaphysical realism is here understood roughly in the Putnamian sense, as a commitment to there being a way the world is “in itself,” and a complete, absolute truth about the way that world is, independently of

human conceptual categorization or epistemic situations (see, e.g., Putnam 1990; cf. Pihlstr6m 1996). According to metaphysical realism, metaphysical truths about there being (or not being) universals, possi-

bilities, or whatever, are determined mind-independently. Different modal metaphysicians, actualists, possibilists, and fictionalists alike, tend to agree that there is an ultimate metaphysical truth about these matters. We might, then, call someone a metaphysical realist, if s/he believes that, to borrow David Lewis’s words, “Truth is supervenient on what things

234 SAMI PIHLSTROM there are and which perfectly natural properties and relations they instantiate” (Lewis 2001, 207). We are here interested in the specific applications this position has, or may have, to the issue of modality. No general discussion of metaphysical realism as such, or its particularly controversial issues such as truth, is possible in this context.

An Alternative Conception of Metaphysics

A very different treatment of modalities can be derived from Kantian transcendental metaphysics.°? Kantian essentially epistemic modalities, constituting one of the four groups of the categories of understanding, cannot be accounted for within metaphysical realism at all but require an “epistemologized” approach to metaphysics. Kant’s transcendental idealism, of course, is a major background presupposition here, but far from being a metaphysically neutral perspective or standpoint—as argued by Henry E. Allison (2004)—it does, in my view, open the door for a rein-

terpreted form of metaphysical inquiry into the categorial structure of the human world, or the fundamental structure(s) of any humanly categorized or categorizeable world (as suggested in Pihlstr6m 2006). “Methodological” interpretations of transcendental idealism, such as Allison’s, are correct to insist on the incoherence of metaphysical realism

(or transcendental realism), and to give up implausible “two worlds” construals of the transcendental distinction between things in themselves and appearances, but in my view they are wrong to construe Kant’s idealism in a thoroughly nonmetaphysical fashion. Now, arguably, the Peircean pragmatist can exploit the Kantian critical, transcendental understanding of the nature and aims of metaphysics, instead of succumbing to the temptations of metaphysically realist metaphysics (of modalities, or in general). Peirce himself was a Kantian of sorts, though his treatment of the issue of modalities may also require modification from the Kantian point of view. Moreover, Peirce was certainly a metaphysician.° Here it is sufficient to note the general analogy between Kantian and pragmatist approaches to metaphysics. Both ought to be seen as ways of examining the constitutive features of the world as it is a possible object of (human, or in general rational) experience, cognition, or inquiry. Although Peirce famously rejected a number of specific Kantian ideas, such as the aprioristic account of cognition (and of philosophy, in particular) and the very notion of an incognizable thing in

MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(S) 235 itself (see, e.g., W 2:208; EP 1:25, 1868), the basic thrust of his metaphysics

is not as far from Kant’s as has sometimes been thought. Throughout his

discussions of reality, truth, and inquiry, at various stages of his long career, Peirce was primarily interested in how we can know and (semiotically) represent reality as it is a possible object of cognition and inquiry.

The “real,” for him, may be “ideal”; the fundamental issue is not the structure of a mind-, cognition-, or inquiry-independent reality, but precisely the way(s) in which the structure of the world is open to us in inquiry and semiosis. The Peircean pragmatist metaphysician may, then, argue for the reality of certain kinds of entities, or the ontological status—“objective valid-

ity’ and “objective reality,” in Kantian terms—of certain (groups of) categories, such as the one of modality, by referring to what we need in our inquiries into the world we live in. This pragmatic “need” may be construed as a quasi-transcendental conditio sine qua non. Unless we, say, construe modalities realistically, we cannot really make sense of our efforts to inquire into the way the world is, in terms of its habits, regularities, and developmental tendencies. Unfortunately, neither the Kantian nor the Peircean approach seems to be even acknowledged, let alone seriously considered or elaborated on, in standard analytic accounts of the metaphysical issues of modality today. For instance, the only reference to Peirce in Lewis’s (2001) thick volume of papers is to the “Peircean” idea of ideal scientific truth, discussed by Lewis in connection with a critique of Putnam’s internal realism (see p. 69). Plantinga 2003 and Stalnaker 2003 are examples of recent studies of modality that fail to even mention Peirce. Nor is the Peircean alternative acknowledged in textbooks, such as Loux’s (2002), or in, for example, Lowe 1998 and Kim and Sosa 1998. I now turn back to the specific metaphysical issue of modalities, this time more explicitly through an application of Peircean ideas, “transcen-

dentally” reconstructed. We must observe that Peirce’s approach to modality is very different not only from actualism, such as Armstrong’s (according to which the elements of the actual world suffice as truthmak-

ers for all truths about mere possibility), but also from the kind of possibilism or possible worlds realism defended by Lewis (for whom possible worlds as concrete individuals enjoy their static existence entirely

disconnected from one another) and from the kind of view Plantinga favors (connecting possible worlds qua states of affairs with propositions,

yielding, again, a static rather than a dynamic picture of modalities).

236 SAMI PIHLSTROM Indeed, both Armstrong’s and Lewis’s accounts might be seen as paradigmatically un-Peircean, or even anti-Peircean, the former because it rejects “real” modalities (especially real possibilities) altogether and the latter because it treats possible worlds as separate and discontinuous. Obviously, Peirce would also reject those approaches to modality that view possible worlds as mere logical or methodological devices devoid of metaphysical significance. Such a position would, in the company of more metaphysical actualisms, sacrifice real possibility and real generals. Moreover, the relation between Peirce’s pragmatism and his scholastic

realism is tight; indeed, the two doctrines are more or less inseparable in his thought, enabling a unique combination of metaphysical inquiry

and a critical perspective on metaphysics (which helps us to make the rather obvious point that pragmatism is not simply positivism or instrumentalism). | Pragmati(ci)sm] will serve to show that almost every proposition of ontological metaphysics is either meaningless gibberish—one word being defined by other words, and they by still others, without any real conception ever being reached—or else is downright absurd; so that all such rubbish being swept away, what will remain of philosophy will be a series of problems capable of investigation by the observational methods of the true sciences—the truth about which can be reached without those interminable misunderstandings and disputes which have made the highest of the positive sciences a mere amusement for idle intellects, a sort of chess—idle pleasure its purpose, and

reading out of a book its method. In this regard, pragmaticism is a species of prope-positivism. But what distinguishes it from other species is, first, its retention of a purified philosophy; secondly, its full acceptance of the main body of our instinctive beliefs; and thirdly,

its strenuous insistence upon the truth of scholastic realism (or a close approximation to that, well-stated by the late Dr. Francis Ellingwood Abbot in the Introduction to his Scientific Theism). So, instead of merely jeering at metaphysics, like other prope-positivists, whether by long drawn-out parodies or otherwise, the pragmaticist extracts from it a precious essence, which will serve to give life and light to cosmology and physics. At the same time, the moral applications of the doctrine are positive and potent; and there are many other uses of it not easily classed. On another occasion, instances may be given to show that it really has these effects. (EP 2:338-39; CP 5.423, 1905)

MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(S) 237 Interestingly, there are also other passages in which morality is invoked in relation to pragmatism and scholastic realism: “To say that I hold that the import, or adequate ultimate interpretation, of a concept is contained, not in any deed or deeds that will ever be done, but in a habit of conduct, or general moral determination of whatever procedure there may come to be, is no more than to say that I am a pragmaticist” (CP 5.504, 1905). Though I am not sure what Peirce actually means when talking about “moral applications” and “moral determinations” in passages such as these, it seems that the otherwise plausible view according to which Peirce

was primarily interested in natural-scientific habits of conduct—the conceivable practical effects brought about by scientific ideas in a laboratory—whereas William James (and perhaps the other classical pragmatists)

more broadly included moral (and other nonscientific) habits of action in their versions of pragmatism (see, e.g., Pihlstr6m 2004), must be qualified to some extent. In the passage from 1905 (EP 2:338-39) quoted a moment ago, Peirce can be read as implicitly contrasting “ontological metaphysics,” by which

he presumably means metaphysics employing the a priori (intuitive) method, such as traditional “pre-critical,” rationalist metaphysics, to his own scientific—and epistemic rather than ontological—metaphysics, which is much closer to Kant’s transcendental philosophy than, say, contemporary metaphysical realism.’ The passage just quoted is by no means

the only place where Peirce emphasizes the strong link between pragmati(ci)sm and scholastic realism (see also, e.g., CP 5.503—4, 19053 8.208, 8.326), but it may serve us here in our search for a new, Peircean or

pragmatist yet transcendental, metaphysics and its applications to the issue of modality. My way of “extracting” the (irreducibly normative) “precious essence” of metaphysics may diverge from Peirce’s own in some crucial respects, but the important point here is that pragmatism, far from being antimetaphysical, allows and indeed encourages such an extraction. Peirce’s Scholastic Realism, Transcendentally Defended?

Peirce’s statements about scholastic realism may be found in a number of important writings, all the way from his seminal 1868 papers (W 2:193— 272; EP 1, chaps. 2-4) and the famous 1871 Berkeley review (W 2:462-87; CP 8.7-38; EP 1, chap. 5) up to his late writings on pragmaticism in and

238 SAMI PIHLSTROM after 1905 (see EP 2, chaps. 24-28). In a number of places he describes his scholastic realism as “extreme” (CP 5.77n1, 1903; 5.470, c. 1906).° Modal realism, especially realism about “real possibility,” is a key element of Peirce’s scholastic realism.’ Defining “the scholastic doctrine of realism” as the view that “there are real objects that are general,” Peirce goes on to argue that “the belief in this can hardly escape being accompanied by the acknowledgment that there are, besides, real vagues, and especially, real possibilities,” because “possibility being the denial of a necessity, which is a kind of generality, is vague like any other contradiction of a general” (EP 2:354; CP 5.453, 1905). Returning to his example of the hardness of a diamond, discussed in the early formulation of pragmatism as a method of “making our ideas clear” in the well-known 1878 paper, Peirce now reflects: For if the reader will turn to the original maxim of pragmaticism at the beginning of this article, he will see that the question is, not what did happen, but whether it would have been well to engage in any line of conduct whose successful issue depended upon whether that diamond would resist an attempt to scratch it, or whether all other logical means of determining how it ought to be classed would lead to the

conclusion which, to quote the very words of that article, would be “the belief which alone could be the result of investigation carried sufficiently far.” Pragmaticism makes the ultimate intellectual purport of

what you please to consist in conceived conditional resolutions, or their substance; and therefore, the conditional propositions, with their hypothetical antecedents, in which such resolutions consist, being of the ultimate nature of meaning, must be capable of being true, that is, of expressing whatever there be which is such as the prop-

osition expresses, independently of being thought to be so in any judgment, or being represented to be so in any other symbol of any man or men. But that amounts to saying that possibility is sometimes of a real kind. (EP 2:354; CP 5.453, 1905)

The recognition of real possibility, Peirce elsewhere tells us, “is certainly indispensable to pragmaticism” (CP 5.527, c. 1905). The pragmaticist “is

obliged to subscribe to the doctrine of a real Modality, including real Necessity and real Possibility” (EP 2:357, 1905). The case of the hard dia-

mond is revisited in Peirce’s oft-cited letter to the Italian pragmatist Calderoni (c. 1905):

MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(S) 239 Even Duns Scotus is too nominalistic when he says that universals are contracted to the mode of individuality in singulars, meaning, as he does, by singulars, ordinary existing things. The pragmaticist cannot admit that. I myself went too far in the direction of nominalism when I said that it was a mere question of the convenience of speech whether we say that a diamond is hard when it is not pressed upon, or whether we say that it is soft until it is pressed upon. I now say that experiment will prove that the diamond is hard, as a positive fact. That is, it is a real fact that it would resist pressure, which amounts to extreme scholastic realism. I deny that pragmaticism as originally defined by me

made the intellectual purport of symbols to consist in our conduct.

On the contrary, I was most careful to say that it consists in our concept of what our conduct would be upon conceivable occasions. (CP 8.208)

It is not easy to determine what exactly the relation between pragmati(c1)sm and scholastic realism is, though. As a logical maxim, pragmatism can hardly deductively entail a metaphysical theory such as scholastic realism. Perhaps the relation is best construed as an abductive one: We arrive at scholastic realism as the only plausible background hypothesis that might enable us, in accordance with the pragmatic maxim, to account for the meaning of rational (intellectual, scientific) concepts in terms of the conceivably practical bearings we may consider their objects to have." Let us now enrich Peirce’s own formulations by a leading commenta-

tor’s opinions. Carl Hausman (1993, 1999) is one of the Peirce scholars who find scholastic realism absolutely central in Peirce’s metaphysics and theory of meaning, indeed in his system as a whole. Thus, it will be useful for us to take a look at how Hausman—only as one example among the Peirce scholars who have been inspired by Peirce’s views on realism— characterizes scholastic realism.'' According to Hausman’s (1993, 3-4) initial definition, scholastic realism is the view that “there are repeatable

conditions that are independent of mental acts and that function like rules for the ways particular things behave.” The contrast, he emphasizes, is to nominalism rather than to idealism.'* Meaning—a pragmatic theory

of which is one of Peirce’s central contexts for the development of scholastic realism—depends on “would-be’s,” “patterns according to which occur the outcomes of actions and consequences relevant to the idea in question”; accordingly, meanings are disclosed in “dispositional

240 SAMI PIHLSTROM conditions, in habits, according to which the meaning or would-be could be expected to be exemplified if the concept that articulates the meaning were put to the test” (Hausman 1993, 7).'° Here, again, the place of modal-

ity and modal realism at the center of scholastic realism is obvious. Clearly, Peirce’s postulation of repeatable conditions, rules, patterns, habits, dispositions, or “would-be’s” is not a postulation of specific objects but rather of something that objects can come to exemplify or manifest. Hausman even says that there is a Platonic element in Peirce’s

realism, insofar as the Peircean “generals” are “reals, independent, dynamic, ordering conditions that are not exhausted by, but are effective with respect to, sequences in which particular empirical consequences are encountered” (Hausman 1993, 8).'* These conditions are “regularities” that “render phenomena intelligible” (142). But there is also a teleological element in the postulation of Peirce’s dynamic, “developmental” generals: They are constantly “evolving,” “tendencies that grow,” and should not, according to Hausman, be thought of apart from a telos (14; see also 26-27, 50-51). This dynamic position distinguishes Peircean generals from traditional “fixed” universals (26), including of course Plato’s Forms (but also Aristotle’s universals), as standardly conceived.

That Peirce was not always entirely consistent in his distinction between existence and reality can, however, be seen from the following characterization of scholastic realism: The absolute individual can not only not be realized in sense or thought, but cannot exist, properly speaking. For whatever lasts for any time, however short, is capable of logical division, because in that time it will undergo some change in its relations. But what does not exist for any time, however short, does not exist at all. All, therefore, that we perceive or think, or that exists, is general. So far there is truth

in the doctrine of scholastic realism. But all that exists is infinitely determinate, and the infinitely determinate is the absolutely individual. This seems paradoxical, but the contradiction is easily resolved. That which exists is the object of a true conception. This conception may be made more determinate than any assignable conception; and therefore it is never so determinate that it is capable of no further determination. (W 2:390—91n8; CP 3.93n, 1870)!°

In any event, in the terms of the contemporary discourse on modality referred to above, Peirce is, clearly, a modal realist, as he acknowledges “real possibilities—general modes of determination of existent particulars”

MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(S) 241 (ibid., 48). This is a key idea in his theory of meaning, based on the pragmatic maxim, in which it is crucial to distinguish conceivable practical

bearings—something that would or might happen, if an object (e.g., a diamond) were subjected to certain experiential conditions (e.g., scratching), in order to find out whether a particular concept (e.g., hardness) applies to it or not—from what actually happens to any particular concrete objects (see again EP 2:354; CP 5.453, 1905; cf. Hookway 2000). Yet, although “possibility is sometimes of a real kind” (EP 2:354; CP 5.453; also

quoted in Hausman 1993, 49), Peirce should not be understood as a Lewisian realist about “existing” possible worlds. He points out, for example, that philosophy deals with the “reality of potential being” in addition to the “reality of existence” (EP 2:35, 1898). As in the case of uni-

versals, his picture of possibility is much more dynamic than the views propounded by most contemporary authors. Indeed, a sharp distinction between possibility in a metaphysical sense and in an epistemic sense is

foreign to Peirce, as it overlooks his way of seeing reality itself as epistemic—as the object of inquiry and, ultimately, of the final opinion. Furthermore, we should note that Peirce also has a “pure” notion of possibility, associated with firstness, to be distinguished from laws, tenden-

cies, or would-be’s, which are cases of thirdness. The latter, genuine “potentiality,” is more fundamental than mere abstract pure possibility. (Cf. Boler 2004, 72; see also CP 1.422.) In Peircean evolutionary cosmology, there is a step from “undetermined and dimensionless potentiality to determined potentiality” (Houser in EP 1:xxxiii). On real possibilities, see also CP 4.547, 1906; 4.579—80, 1906. For Peirce’s distinctions between various different notions of possibility, see, for example, the following characterizations in “Notes on Metaphysics”:

Logical possibility: that of a hypothesis not involving any selfcontradiction. Mere possibility: that of a state of things which might come to pass, but, in point of fact, never will. In common language, exaggerated to the “merest possibility.” Metaphysical possibility ought to mean a possibility of existence,

nearly a potentiality; but the phrase does not seem to be used in that sense, but rather in the sense of possibility by supernatural power. Moral possibility one might expect should be the opposite of moral

impossibility, meaning, therefore, something reasonably free from

242 SAMI PIHLSTROM extreme improbability. But, in fact, it seems to be used to mean what is morally permissible.

Physical possibility: (1) that which a knowledge of the laws of nature would not enable a person to be sure was not true; (2) that which might be brought about if psychological and spiritual conditions did not prevent, such as the Pope’s pronouncing ex cathedra as an article of faith the fallibility of all his own utterances. Practical possibility: that which lies within the power of a person or

combination of persons under external conditions likely to be fulfilled, and questionable chiefly because internal conditions may not be fulfilled.

Proximate possibility. It is very difficult to make out what is meant

by this; but the phrase is evidently modelled on potentia proxima, which is a state of high preparedness for existence; so that proximate

possibility would be a high grade of possibility in a proposition amounting almost to positive assertion. Real possibility is possibility in the thing, as contradistinguished from mere logical possibility (Scotus, Opus Oxon., I. 11. 7, Ad secundam probationem maioris).

Remote possibility: the possibility of a proposition which is far from being positively asserted. Also used in common speech.

Substantive possibility: the admissibility of a pure hypothesis (as illustrated above). (CP 6.371, 1902)!°

Even more important, Peirce effectively avoids, by means of his thirdness

and real generals, the game played by contemporary metaphysicians about whether to achieve ontological economy by postulating possible worlds and avoiding universals or, conversely, by postulating universals and avoiding irreducible unactualized possibilities. The Peircean trick,

of course, is that real generals are able to do the job of both. This “game” covers much of the dialectic between, say, Armstrong and Lewis, in which the common purpose by all parties to the debate is to maintain maximal ontological economy. By accepting universals into his ontology, Armstrong thinks he has a sufficiently rich furniture in the actual world to yield truthmakers for truths about mere possibility, without postulating real possibilities, whereas Lewis claims that possible worlds and prop-

erties as classes (of possibilia) can, nominalistically, perform the job traditionally performed by universals. Famously, W. V. Quine was even more austere a metaphysician, eliminating both universals and modali-

ties from his ontology, because both lack his—strictly nominalist— spatiotemporal criteria of identity.'”

MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(S) 243 As Hausman reminds us, this defense of real generals, real possibilities,

or would-be’s is intimately related to Peirce’s normative notion of the “final opinion,” the ideal end of scientific inquiry. Particular phenomena or objects, though intelligible as generals, never exhaust the latter: “If would-be’s are possibilities, or ideals not exhausted by their instances, then inquiry does not terminate in some perfected state of knowledge— knowledge about itself—that ceases to change. Reality is dynamic” (Hausman 1993, 165). Scholastic realism—as well as the doctrine of synechism, the theory of continuity, that is intimately connected with it (see

below)—is, for Peirce, a normative condition of thought, knowledge, intelligibility, and thereby inquiry (see ibid., 168). The Peircean view of truth, as emphasized by Cheryl Misak (2004b) and others, is that truth is what would be believed if inquiry were, or could be, continued indefinitely long, that is, something upon which inquiry would not improve. The final opinion, however, is itself something that need never be actualized. It is an ideal, regulative, normative notion, providing a reason—an

irreducibly normative reason—for continuing inquiry when faced by resistance (Hausman 1993, 217). If, Peirce says, “Truth consists in satisfaction,” then “it cannot be any actual satisfaction, but must be the satisfac-

tion which would ultimately be found if the inquiry were pushed to its ultimate and indefeasible issue” (EP 2:450, 1908).

We may even say that an adequate conception of inquiry, if understood as a process aiming at the settlement of belief, will require the notion of a final opinion, interpreted in terms of scholastic realism and the irreducible reality of possibilities, as its necessary condition for possibility—even if achieving the final opinion (truth) remains a mere hope. Generality, we may say, is structurally present in the account of inquiry aiming at the fixing of a final opinion (cf. W 2:468-71; EP 1:88—91, 1871). This is Peirce again: That is real which has such and such characters, whether anybody thinks it to have those characters or not. At any rate, that is the sense in which the pragmaticist uses the word. Now, just as conduct controlled by ethical reason tends toward fixing certain habits of con-

duct, the nature of which (as to illustrate the meaning, peaceable habits and not quarrelsome habits) does not depend upon any accidental circumstances, and in that sense may be said to be destined; so, thought, controlled by a rational experimental logic, tends to the fixation of certain opinions, equally destined, the nature of which will be the same in the end, however the perversity of thought of whole

244 SAMI PIHLSTROM generations may cause the postponement of the ultimate fixation. If this be so, as every man of us virtually assumes that it is, in regard to each matter the truth of which he seriously discusses, then, according to the adopted definition of “real,” the state of things which will be believed in that ultimate opinion is real. But, for the most part, such opinions will be general. Consequently, some general objects are real. (Of course, nobody ever thought that all generals were real; but the scholastics used to assume that generals were real when they had hardly any, or quite no, experiential evidence to support their assump-

tion; and their fault lay just there, and not in holding that generals could be real.) One is struck with the inexactitude of thought even of analysts of power, when they touch upon modes of being. One will meet, for example, the virtual assumption that what is relative to thought cannot be real. But why not, exactly? Red is relative to sight,

but the fact that this or that is in that relation to vision that we call being red is not itself relative to sight; it is a real fact... . Not only may generals be real, but they may also be physically efficient. ... Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual

existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing. (EP 2:342—43; CP 5.430—31, 1905)

Now, since inquiry is obviously actual, and therefore possible, its necessary condition, scholastic realism, must in some way be satisfied (see especially W 2:472-73; EP 1:92, 1871). Scholastic realism is needed to make sense of the very possibility of inquiry, at least insofar as inquiry is understood as aiming toward a final opinion whose object is “the real,” with the hope that this will be achieved. Nominalism would destroy the possibility

of inquiry and ultimately lead to utter chaos. This suggests that Peirce is arguing for scholastic realism not just abductively but in a Kantian transcendental fashion,'*® examining the necessary conditions for the possibility of something we take for granted. More precisely, Peirce’s arguments

are sometimes a genuine mixture of transcendental and naturalized, abductive arguments.'’ As suggested elsewhere (Pihlstrém 2003, chap. 3), his abductive defense of extreme scholastic realism can be seen as a natu-

ralized transcendental argument, if we are prepared to blur the dichotomy between transcendental and abductive arguments, and thus more generally the one between transcendental and naturalistic philosophy, including transcendental and naturalized, “scientific” metaphysics. There

is at least a Kantian transcendental strain in the Peircean account of

MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(S) 245 generality, despite its otherwise naturalized character, insofar as generals or would-be’s are, again in Hausman’s (1993, 185) words, “constitutive of the intelligibility of the universe.” This constitution is, we may add, both metaphysical and transcendental. The Peircean account of modal realism is, then, in this respect once

again very different from the kind of standard formulations, based on metaphysical realism, briefly described above, although in the end Peirce himself may be too strongly tied to such a realism, as well.”° Perhaps the Peircean philosopher ought to seek a middle way between metaphysical realism and full-blown, transcendentally idealist, traditional Kantianism? This general issue aside, a realistically oriented modal theorist can definitely learn a lot from Peirce’s treatment of the reality of generals. I have at least, I hope, established that this particular case can be used to exam-

ine whether, or how, a transcendental-cum-pragmatic metaphysics is possible.*!

Let me, before moving on to synechism and other matters, address one final worry regarding the interpretation of scholastic realism. Hookway

(2000) and others have emphasized the need to draw a distinction between transcendentally established principles or theses, on the one side, and mere “hopes,” on the other, in the interpretation of Peirce. Now, shouldn’t we view modal (or scholastic) realism itself as a mere hope instead of a transcendentally defensible thesis? We can, and should,

definitely understand the final opinion as a mere hope; as was pointed out above, it need never be actualized, and we need not believe that it ever will. But in order for inquiry to be possible, we do have to maintain that hope—as a normative, transcendental constraint for inquiry. It seems to

me that the (mere) hope that there is a final opinion, or that we will, in our inquiry, end up with a view not to be replaced by any other (better) view, regarding some specific question, can only be maintained, if we are

already committed to the principle(s) of modal and scholastic realism. This very hope, even if it remains a mere hope, requires “real possibility.”

It is certainly important to make a distinction between hopes and transcendental principles, but it is equally important to inquire into the transcendental presuppositions of such “mere hopes.” The hope that there is a final opinion transcendentally presupposes scholastic (particularly modal) realism, because generality cannot be reduced away from the final opinion. Thus, we ought to realize that the normative or methodological

246 SAMI PIHLSTROM conditions of, or constraints for, inquiry—or the very possibility of inquiry—may themselves have metaphysical presuppositions. My point is that these presuppositions, metaphysical though they are, can be seen as both pragmatic and transcendental. In a properly pragmatist approach, no crude distinction between pragmatic and transcendental presuppositions needs to be drawn. Rather, both can be seen as aspects of our human ways of rendering the world we live in intelligible to us, metaphysically and—as we will soon see in more detail—ethically.” Continuity and Synechism

I now turn for a moment from the doctrine of scholastic realism to another Peircean doctrine inseparable from it, namely, synechism. The expression is derived from the Greek term, synechismos, derived in turn from synecho, “to hold or keep together, to continue, to preserve” (EP 2:503n1). As is well known, this position, the doctrine of continuity, is— along with tychism and agapasm—a central thesis of Peirce’s speculative metaphysics and evolutionary cosmology. Associated with scholastic realism and thereby with Peirce’s category of thirdness, synechism is the view that everything is continuous with everything else; there are no atomistic elements of reality fundamentally discontinuous from each other.” It is precisely by exemplifying continuities that Peircean generals can be said to constitute “the intelligible structure of the world” (Hausman 1993, 177; see also 185).

According to synechism, both being as such and specific modes of being, for example, mentality and spontaneity, are matters of degree, not something sharply separable from their opposites. Nor is there any ontological gap between reality or being, on the one hand, and appearances or phenomena, on the other (EP 2:2, 1893). Peirce describes synechism as “the tendency to regard everything as continuous,” in a way that includes “the whole domain of experience in every element of it” (EP 2:1, 1893). He defines it as “that tendency of philosophical thought which insists upon the idea of continuity as of prime importance in philosophy and, in particular, upon the necessity of hypotheses involving true continuity” (CP 6.169, 1902; cf. EP 1:313, 1892). Synechism is, thus, both metaphysical and

methodological. However, it is not “an ultimate and absolute metaphysical doctrine” but (rather like pragmatism) a “regulative principle of logic” suiding our choice of hypotheses (CP 6.173, 1902).%* Joseph Esposito

MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(S) 247 (2007, 1) offers the following, somewhat more detailed characterization in the Digital Encyclopedia of Charles S. Peirce: Synechism, as a metaphysical theory, is the view that the universe exists as a continuous whole of all of its parts, with no part being fully

separate, determined or determinate, and continues to increase in complexity and connectedness through semiosis and the operation of an irreducible and ubiquitous power of relational generality to mediate and unify substrates. As a research program, synechism is a scientific maxim to seek continuities where discontinuities are thought to be permanent and to seek semiotic relations where only dyadic relations are thought to exist.

Mentioning no less than ten (!) different ideas Peirce invoked in relation to synechism, Esposito especially emphasizes that synechism and pragmatism were regarded as mutually supportive by Peirce, as “synechism provides a theoretical rationale for pragmatism, while use of the pragmatic maxim to identify conceivable consequences of experimental activ-

ity enriches the content of the theory by revealing and creating relationships” (ibid.).

One of the seminal writings in which synechism is introduced and defended is Peirce’s 1892 article, “The Law of Mind” (EP 1:312—33), which

argues for the “law” that ideas tend to spread continuously, affecting each

other, and that they lose intensity but gain generality in this process. Peirce, who saw not only pragmatism but also, for example, his objective idealism and tychism as closely accompanying synechism, discussed in several writings continuity not only metaphysically but also mathemati-

cally. Moreover, he believed that a successful proof of pragmati(ci)sm would establish the truth of synechism (CP 5.415; EP 2:335, 1905), since continuity is essentially involved in pragmati(ci)sm (see again Esposito 2007). He thus also wanted to maintain a crucial link between synechism and scholastic realism (CP 6.172-73, 1902). Like pragmatism and scholastic realism, synechism was, for Peirce, “a purely scientific philosophy,”

although he noted that it may support the reconciliation of science and religion (EP 2:3, 1893).

In his 1893 paper, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism” (EP 2:1-3), Peirce explains that the synechist must deny the Parmenidean distinction between being, which is, and not—being, which is nothing, arguing that being is “a matter of more or less, so as to merge insensibly into nothing”

248 SAMI PIHLSTROM (EP 2:2). Thus, synechism rejects dualisms of all kinds, including the classical dualism of the physical and the mental (psychical) as “unrelated chunks of being.” Instead of being distinct categories, the physical and the psychical are “of one character,” although there are obviously differences in degree between things that are more mental and spontaneityinvolving and things that are more material. Similarly, synechism rejects sharp discontinuities between the living and the nonliving, offering a eround for a qualified defense of immortality, as well as discontinuities between oneself and the others: “Your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself” (EP 2:2-3). Accordingly, synechism may be seen as a metaphys-

ical basis of panpsychism, as well as of the ethically vital capacity for empathy. This, finally, brings us to a major issue I want to emphasize in this essay: the relation between metaphysics in general and the metaphysics of morality (or Metaphysik der Sitten, to employ a Kantian phrase), particularly between the metaphysics of modality and the metaphysics of moral-

ity, and still more specifically between modal and moral realisms, pragmatically construed. Insofar as there is a fundamental continuity between oneself and others (possibly including even God), there is great human relevance in the seemingly abstruse metaphysical issues of synechism and scholastic realism. Peirce’s rejection of nominalism, moreover, is quite explicitly intended as morally significant, as it is not only formulated as a criticism of an abstract metaphysical position but also as an attack on individualist egoism and the “Gospel of Greed” (see EP 1:357, 1893).

Synechism, which Peirce says has applications to the philosophy of religion (EP 1:331, 1892), even “calls for” a philosophy of evolutionary love. Everybody can see that the statement of St. John is the formula of an evolutionary philosophy, which teaches that growth comes only from love, from—I will not say self-sacrifice, but from the ardent impulse to fulfil another’s highest impulse. Suppose, for example, that I have an idea that interests me. It is my creation. It is my creature; for as shown in last July’s Monist, it is a little person. I love it; and I will sink myself in perfecting it. It is not by dealing out cold justice to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing and tending them as I would the flowers in my garden. The philosophy we draw from

John’s gospel is that this is the way mind develops; and as for the

MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(S) 249 cosmos, only so far as it yet is mind, and so has life, is it capable of further evolution. Love, recognizing germs of loveliness in the hateful,

eradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely. That is the sort of evolution which every careful student of my essay “The Law of Mind” must see that synechism calls for. (EP 1:354; CP 6.289, 1893)”

If I subscribe to the view that, “I am altogether myself, and not at all you,”

I am in the grip of a “metaphysics of wickedness,” which the synechist must “abjure” (EP 2:2, 1893). The person, Peirce says, “is not absolutely an individual”; rather, a “man’s circle of society” is itself a “loosely compacted person” (EP 2:338, 1905). This is a crucial application of synechism.

If we fail to acknowledge our continuity with others—with a potentially unlimited community of fellow humans (especially fellow inquirers )}—it will be impossible for us to distinguish between absolute truth and what we merely in fact do not doubt (see EP 2:338, 1905).*° Accordingly, I am not only saying that Peircean scholastic realism and synechism offer a richer perspective on issues in modal metaphysics than the contemporary debates between Armstrong, Lewis, Kripke, Plantinga, and others are able to provide us with. They do, especially when construed transcendentally, and in particular they succeed in providing us with a more dynamic picture of both universals (generals) and possibilities than those debates are able to; but they do more than this. They also enable us to build a bridge across the gap between metaphysics and ethics, demonstrating that such a gap, though taken for granted in mainstream analytic metaphysics, need not be assumed in the first place. Peirce seems

to argue that nominalism, by blocking the road of inquiry (CP 1.170, c. 1897), is in danger of leading to skepticism not only in science but also

in theology and ethics, threatening his task of “reuniting” science with religion and morality (see Forster 1992).

I have in my earlier discussions of scholastic realism (see Pihlstrom 2003, 167-69) expressed sympathies with Joseph Margolis’s constructivist and historicist reading of Peirce’s doctrine of real generals—though primarily as a substantive philosophical view rather than as an interpretation of Peirce—and I find this reading especially relevant when we wish to emphasize the ethical relevance of Peircean realism.” After all, Margolis (1993, 323) proposes that the intelligible structure of the world is constituted “through the very process of our experiencing the world,” and that

things share real generals in this “symbiotized world,” although “there are no antecedent generals” separable from human experience that we

250 SAMI PIHLSTROM could simply discover are shared by things. Objectivity presupposes real generals in this sense, as “implicated in the lebensformlich viability of natural-language discourse,” particularly predication (Margolis 1995, 128). The view that the world, on the one side, and our thoughts and representations of it, on the other, are “symbiotically connected,” or even inseparable, is actually built into synechism itself, insofar as the latter entails, among other things, that there is “no permanent disconnection between thoughts or representations and things or objects,” as thoughts “influence and shade into” things, and things into objects (Esposito 2007, 10). What is crucial here is that, quite obviously, the process of our experiencing the world or the “lebensformlich viability” of the natural-language discourse we engage in in relation to such experiential processes are ethically pregnant, shot through with ethical (and other) values we continuously (re-)construct through our experience and discourse. As I put it earlier (Pihlstr6m 2003, 168), “Our social, open-ended, thoroughly historicized practice of language-use—i.e., our practice of applying general predicates in describing our world—must be the (non-foundational) ground of our

realism of generality,” which, then, “can only be grounded in human predicative practices, which are in flux, historically changing.” There is no reason to suppose that such a flux would, for us, be ethically neutral (see also Pihlstr6m 2005). Just as thoughts shade into things, and vice versa, facts shade into values, and vice versa—and metaphysics into ethics, and vice versa.

The Problem of Transworld Identity, Pragmatically Reconsidered

A metaphysical example—not unrelated to the issue of modalities—may be used to highlight this ethical pregnancy of scholastic realism and synechism. Famously, Peirce tried to maintain the irreducibility of all the three categories he distinguished, firstness, secondness, and thirdness, only the latter among which is the mode of generals. Hence, our Peircean emphasis on generality and continuity must not entail a total abandoning of individuality. The identity of individuals, or particulars, is an urgent problem whenever we investigate metaphysical topics such as generality and modality. Identifying individuals, especially persons, across time and across possible worlds is a major issue in contemporary modal metaphysics. The basic alternatives are the following: either there is no transworld identity at all

MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(S) 251 but only “counterparts in different worlds,” that is, no thing exists in more than one world (Lewis); or things can exist in more than one possible world, that is, a thing preserves its identity across possible worlds by preserving its essential properties (Plantinga); or only actual things and properties exist, so strictly speaking there is no transworld identity to be preserved, although nonactual possible worlds and nonactual instantia-

tions of properties can be constructed by recombining the particulars and universals of the actual world (Armstrong).”* Again, this issue can, however, be crucially reconsidered in terms of Peircean scholastic realism about modalities. Such a rearticulation may have some relevance to more practical issues regarding the identity of selves or persons (again, across time and across possible worlds). Thus, the metaphysical issue of modalities may turn out to possess profound normative relevance. In the standard metaphysically realist discourse on modalities, such relevance is scarce indeed. Not so in Peirce (or the Peircean defense of real generals), because realism and synechism are deeply related, and synechism is a

(not the) metaphysical ground of the empathy central to ethics.” Pragmatic realism about generals—not only about one’s own potentialities for moral action but also about the continuity between oneself, one’s other potential “selves,” and others—may, then, help us in formulating a truly pragmatic moral realism.”

In particular, Peirce emphasized the “reference to the future” as an “essential element of personality”; the continuity of persons over time must, however, be supplemented by the need for a “development, for growth, for life” (EP 1:331, 1893).°' Being a project stretching to an open future, the self or person (especially the moral self) is never a closed and final individual. Nor, we may add, is it thus restricted to a single possible world (the actual one)—if this phrase is allowed here. Rather, the self’s moral potentialities are continuous with its actual features; the relatively continuous identity of the person is partly maintained because of the person’s continuity with its other potential selves. Once more, we may attempt a transcendental argument. Moral motivation and moral actions are possible, because they are actual (however rare); this much we may take for granted. We can now go on to ask how,

that is, on the basis of what kind of necessary (and perhaps sufficient) conditions, they are possible. Here, the continuity Peirce emphasizes

between oneself and others, the potential objects of one’s moral or immoral actions, emerges as a crucial condition for the possibility of

252 SAMI PIHLSTROM ethics as we know it. If the others were completely discontinuous from ourselves, it would be hard to see how we could be motivated to care about them at all. If there is some measure of continuity, however scarce, moral motivation can at least to some extent be understood. The fact that this argument is explanatory, in addition to clarifying (making explicit) the conceptual structure we (necessarily, though perhaps only implicitly) employ in this context, may be a reason to soften the boundary between transcendental and abductive argumentation (as already suggested above and in Pihlstrém 2003, chap. 3). Furthermore, realism about possibilities—“real possibility’—is needed here, since “the other” as the object of my moral conduct is always to some extent indeterminate and open—a Peircean “vague.” There are always more potential objects of ethical concern than are actually present in my moral experience and deliberation. The question remains, however, whether otherness is recognized fully enough when the continuity between oneself and others is emphasized in a Peircean manner. Does ethics ultimately rest on such continuity and on the resulting potentiality for empathy? It might be argued that this is not sufficient for ethics (see Putnam 2004; Pihlstro6m 2005). It might, more precisely, be suggested that we ought to respect the other precisely as an Other, as totally discontinuous and therefore irreducible to ourselves. Be that as it may—I am not going to settle the issue here—a Peircean examination of generality and continuity 1s clearly not only metaphysically but also ethically relevant, though surely not an easy way to account for morally demanding otherness. This mutual relevance of metaphysics and ethics, or even their deep entanglement, is all I hope to be able to defend here. The issue I have been briefly examining is fundamentally an issue about the identifiability and reidentifiability of human selves or persons as moral subjects, both across time and across possible worlds. Arguably, in order to be able to engage in moral (or immoral) actions and/or thinking, we must be able to identify ourselves as more or less the same selves

from a particular moment of time to another, and from one possible world (especially the actual one) to another (making no ultimate metaphysical commitment to possible worlds in Lewisian or any other sense, of course). This is to say that we must be able to see ourselves as the subjects of the actions or choices we are considering, in such a manner that we “see ourselves” from the perspective of a future time or a possible

scenario that may never be actualized. Peircean generals, especially

MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(S) 253 “would-be’s,” or real potentialities, are needed here. Now, such presuppositional necessities built into the very project of being ethical in this human world, a world in which orienting toward future and open choices, unactualized possibilities, is a given fact about our moral deliberation,

seems to require a Peircean understanding of real possibilities and dynamic, developmental conditions or patterns rendering intelligible the structure of not only the physical cosmos but also our moral universe. This requirement for the very intelligibility of the world we live in is, then, not only a requirement for the universe investigated by science but for the one we ethically deliberate in, as well. Identity—the paradigmatically relevant case of which is, of course, personal identity—must be preserved in some way, even in a fragile way, in the course of the various kinds of both physical and social transformations individuals go through. Only by preserving our identities, however fragmented and multifaceted, can we so much as morally deliberate. To this extent, at least, we need a metaphysics of continuity; a fully discontinuous world would be not just chaotic but, more importantly, ethically unbearable. We may even see some kind of “necessity” involved in the

developmental tendencies that nevertheless preserve our basic moral

identities. For example, tragedy is a great method of representing such necessities at work in the formation of tragic characters and their guilt. More generally, there is, arguably, continuity and generality in language, without which no meaning, representation, or communication would be possible. This applies to ethical meaning and communication,

in particular. A crucial aspect of morality, as the kind of human phenomenon we know it to be, is the relative stability of certain kinds of human character,

based on people’s various potentialities and habits of action, namely, Peircean generals. For human beings, such potentialities are, all the way from the start, ethical—thus, not merely applicable to ethically relevant situations, but ethical through and through. In a Peircean modalcum-moral realism, such “generals” are constitutive of the (moral) reality

we live in. This constitutivity is, again, transcendental, not merely factual (say, empirical or causal), though of course manifested in various empirically detectable ways. I am not at all saying that these reflections and rearticulations would lead us to an unproblematic view of moral identities. On the contrary, it remains an open question how continuous or discontinuous with respect

254 SAMI PIHLSTROM to “the Other” I can or must be in order to be able to find her/him a possible object of moral concern. Similarly, it remains an open question how continuous or discontinuous with respect to my own (future) moral possibilities or potentialities I can or must be in order to be able to recognize certain potential ethical choices as mine, instead of someone else’s. The important thing here is that the relevant notion of continuity can here be understood roughly along the lines of Peircean synechism, as connected with scholastic realism—at least if these are interpreted through the kind

of combination of pragmatism and transcendental philosophy I have proposed. In any pragmatist attempt to further investigate these problems the perspectives of metaphysics and ethics must, in any case, be combined.

Normative Science, Normative Philosophy

These issues may be connected with Peirce’s trichotomy of the normative sciences—esthetics, ethics,’’ and logic (see, e.g., EP 2, chap. 18, 1903). By building a bridge from metaphysical topics such as modality and continuity to the issue of moral realism, we of course dispense with Peirce’s own view that metaphysics and the three normative sciences ought to be kept distinct in the classifications of the sciences. In none of his elaborate

classifications of the sciences does Peirce put ethics in the company of metaphysics (see, e.g., EP 2:36, 1898). Yet, he does find logic central to metaphysics; and as ethics, famously, is later (at least from 1903 onward) understood as a normative science prior to logic (to which esthetics, in turn, is prior), we may perhaps leave room in Peirce’s scheme for a metaphysics informed by, though not governed by, ethical presuppositions. There is a deep, hitherto unnoticed connection between the issues of modal and moral realisms, as understood within a broadly Peircean (and more generally pragmatist) scheme—or, at least, this suggestion seems to arise as a result of our considerations above. As already indicated, moral realism presupposes modal realism, because the self must be committed to morally relevant potentialities and thus, in a sense, must maintain its relatively stable identity across possible worlds, and also because the self

must understand itself as continuous with the world, including other selves and its own possible selves, a world in which it may act morally (or

immorally, for that matter). This may even be seen as a transcendental presupposition of any genuinely moral perspective on the world. In turn,

MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(S) 255 modal realism, again pragmatically articulated (instead of being simply

based on metaphysical realism, as in standard contemporary discussions), may have a crucial moral motivation; as has been suggested above, it may turn out that a truly moral motivation requires a modially realist

account of continuity and possibility (potentiality), and one may even defend this latter realism on the grounds of its ethical implications. Thus, a modal metaphysics, by articulating a categorial scheme needed in ethics, may ultimately be in the service of the good life, and this fact may, reflexively, count as an ethical consideration in its favor. Even highly abstract theoretical philosophy, for the Peircean pragmatist, may then possess sig-

nificant normative force—or should, at least, do so. It is precisely by being a field of pragmatic possibilities, potentialities for action—either moral or immoral—that possibilities become significant for us, and thereby “real” in a genuinely pragmatic sense. The metaphysics of modality can, and of course usually is, conducted in abstraction from any ethical concerns, and probably most modal metaphysicians would find the introduction of such concerns in this context absurd. The pragmatist, however, views the matter quite differently. Any metaphysical commitments we make are ethically grounded, especially in Jamesian (if not so clearly in Peircean) pragmatism (see Pihlstr6m 2007). In particular, the very discourse on modality is, arguably, derived from our human possibilities, from the morally demanding fact that we need to freely choose the course of our lives in situations opening up a number of different possibilities, not all of which can be actualized in the same world. (We may here speak about our morally choosing to live in some

particular possible world instead of some others, but we can, if we are afraid of too weighty modal metaphysics, simply treat this as a manner of speaking.) The more abstract metaphysical notions, including the one of possible worlds, are—precisely—abstractions from this prior, pragmaticcum-ethical idea of potentiality or possibility as a field of open choices. Admittedly, however, this view no longer applies to Peirce. The Peircean

modalities, derived from his categories and evolutionary cosmology, apply to the entire universe and not just to human beings. So it seems that at this point, when seeking a pragmatic grounding for modalities in human moral life, we must at least partially move on from Peircean considerations to Jamesian (and Deweyan) ones. Even so, in Peircean terms, the order of priorities between metaphys-

ics and ethics can be highlighted by referring to (1) the order of the

256 SAMI PIHLSTROM normative sciences, in which ethics is prior to logic, and (2) the succession from pragmatism, via scholastic realism, to synechism (continuity) and thereby to the ultimate ethico-metaphysical continuity between oneself and others. The rejection of ultimate individuality is, for the Peircean pragmatist, a basis for a morally significant notion of possibility. Hence, as we have seen, metaphysical possibilities are not ethically neutral; the

very framework in which a modally realist treatment of potentiality becomes possible (in terms of scholastic realism, if we follow Peirce) is ethically structured all the way from the start. This result might even be compared to the scholastics’ own way of treating the discourse on modalities as secondary to, or at least motivated by, theological issues about God’s freedom. In addition to these perhaps slightly far-fetched elaborations on and applications of Peircean themes, if not strictly speaking Peirce’s own views, it is worth noting that ethics is more explicitly built into Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics, because cosmic evolution is a process guided by agape, evolutionary love (see especially EP 1, chap. 25, 1893). As related

to this evolutionary view, nominalism deserves to be rejected partly for ethical reasons, as a position leading to selfishness. However, the Peircean

metaphysician of modality and morality—the Peircean pragmatic modal and moral realist—may want to keep her/his realism pure from such evolutionary speculations, important though they remain in Peirce scholarship.

Some general conclusions about the relations between “theoretical” (e.g., metaphysical) and “practical” (e.g., moral, or more generally normative) issues in philosophy can now be drawn. These areas of philosophical

reflection are much more intimately intertwined than is usually noticed, and any pragmatist sensitive to the thoroughgoing ethical relevance of our metaphysical commitments, or (conversely) the metaphysical implications of our ethical ideals, ought to recognize this. Pragmatists, Peircean or not, should not reject metaphysics as such but ought to reinterpret it in a

pragmatically adequate manner (see also Pihlstrom 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009). The notion of possibility, in particular, is of crucial importance to ethics—and to Peircean normative sciences in general—because Peirce understood his categories as applicable to any possible world and, similarly, regarded his views on ethical norms and the norms of inquiry or logical thought as applicable to any possible case of action or reasoning (Hookway 2000, 297). A lot depends, obviously, on how the notion of

MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(S) 257 possibility is construed here; I would simply urge that a contemporary Peircean realist about possibility (or, better, potentiality) ought to base her/his realism on Kantian transcendental considerations, or even Kant’s own epistemic modalities conceived as categories of human understanding, instead of any metaphysically realist assumptions about, say, individual essences or concretely existing possible worlds. Thus, if I am right, Peirce’s scholastic realism might suggest one way of reaffirming the metaphysical seriousness of pragmatism, without full

commitment to metaphysical realism. Tensions do remain, however. Can metaphysical realism in the end be avoided? (See again Pihlstro6m 2003, chap. 3.) Is transcendental idealism or transcendental argumentation a proper method for the metaphysics of modalities, and does it really work? Might William James, for instance, provide us with a better example of the normative mixture of metaphysics and moral philosophy, and of the related use of the transcendental method, that we have here investigated in relation to Peirce (see Pihlstr6m 1996, 2004, 2007, 2008)? Here, obviously, we cannot settle these issues. I hope, however, that a prag-

matically convincing case has been made for a deep entanglement of metaphysics and ethics, especially of the issues of modal and moral realisms. We must, however, be prepared to turn to James’s views, especially

his Pragmatism (1907), in our search for a truly ethical construal of pragmatist metaphysics—although James is not as helpful as Peirce in providing the moral metaphysician with a sufficiently robust modal framework.” As noted in the beginning of this essay, Peirce’s own thesis that theory and practice ought to be kept distinct must be sacrificed—and, perhaps,

a Jamesian view of their inevitable entanglement must be maintained instead—if one is willing to embrace the kind of synthesis of modal and moral realisms I have sketched. Peirce, after all, did hold, in the (in)famous 1898 Cambridge Conferences opening lecture (RLT, chap. 1),

that “the investigator who does not stand aloof from all intent to make practical applications, will not only obstruct the advance of the pure science, but what is infinitely worse, he will endanger his own moral integrity and that of his readers” (EP 2:29, 1898). And he did say that practical applications of philosophy to “Religion and Conduct” are “exceedingly dangerous” (EP 2:29, 1898). Pure science, in Peirce’s view, “has nothing

at all to do with action’; and matters of vital importance, far from being scientifically resolvable, should be left to sentiment and instincts

258 SAMI PIHLSTROM (EP 2:33, 1898). Peirce concluded that “the two masters, theory and practice, you cannot serve,” because “that perfect balance of attention which

is requisite for observing the system of things is utterly lost if human desires intervene, and all the more so the higher and holier those desires may be” (EP 2:34, 1898).

Whatever the merits of this dichotomy between theory and practice, or reason and sentiment, as a picture of the relations between science and daily life, this unpragmatic dualism fails miserably as an account of the relation between metaphysics and ethics.*° This, in brief, is the main message of this essay. Given the pervasiveness of the issue of modality in metaphysics, and the irreducibly ethical aspects of this entire problem framework, I can conclude only that theory and practice are inseparably entangled in the fusion of metaphysics and ethics the pragmatist must work within. Still, it is perhaps James’s—or, rather, John Dewey’s— pragmatism that enables us to appreciate this entanglement better than Peirce’s. At least, neopragmatist critics of the fact/value dichotomy, especially Putnam (2002), have encouraged a turn to James and Dewey, and there certainly is something correct in this proposal, even though Peirce should not be forgotten in this discussion, either. There can, indeed, hardly be a better way to close this discussion than by a quote from Peirce himself, this time from the early Berkeley review, drawing out (pace Peirce’s 1898 pronouncements) rather nicely the deep

connection between metaphysics and ethics—and, thus, theory and practice—in his defense of scholastic realism. But though the question of realism and nominalism has its roots in the technicalities of logic, its branches reach about our life. The question whether the genus homo has any existence except as individuals, is the question of whether there is anything of any more dignity, worth, and importance than individual happiness, individual aspira-

tions, and individual life. Whether men really have anything in common, so that the community is to be considered as an end in itself, and if so, what the relative value of the two factors is, is the most fun-

damental practical question in regard to every public institution the constitution of which we have it in our power to influence. (W 2:487; EP 1:105, 1871)*°

Notes

a> 1. TRADITIONS OF INNOVATION AND IMPROVISATION: JAZZ AS METAPHOR, PHILOSOPHY AS JAZZ Vincent Colaptetro

1. Peirce bemoaned the merciless ways in which words are treated when they fall into literary clutches (CP 5.414). But the merciful—and illuminating—ways in which they are handled by such literary scholars as Dines Johansen, Anne Freadman, and Lucia Santaella cannot be gainsaid. 2. See my “Signs and Their Vicissitudes” (2004b). 3. See my “Portrait of a Historicist” (20042). 4. “The experience of ignorance, or of error, which we have, and which we gain by means of correcting our errors, or enlarging our knowledge, does enable us to experience and conceive something which is independent of our own limited views; but as there can be no correction of the sum total of opinions, and no enlargement of the sum total of knowledge, we have no such means, and can have no such means of acquiring a conception of something independent of all opinion and thought” (CP 7.345, c. 1875). 5. Ina 23 July 1905 letter to James, Peirce insists: The God of my theism is not finite. That won't do at all. For to begin

with, existence is reaction, and therefore no existent can be clear supreme. On the contrary, a finite being, without much doubt, and at any rate by presumption, is one of a genus; so that it would, to my mind, involve polytheism. In the next place, anthropomorphism for me implies above all that the true Ideal is a living power, which is a variation of the ontological proof due, I believe, to Moncure Conway’s predecessor, William Johnson (not James) Fox. That is, the esthetic ideal, that which we all love and adore, the altogether admirable, has, as ideal, necessarily a mode of being to be called living. Because our ideas of the infinite are necessarily extremely vague and become contradictory the moment we attempt to make them precise. But still they are not utterly unmeaning, though they can only be interpreted in our 1259 $

260 NOTES TO PAGES 17-41 religious adoration and the consequent effects upon conduct. This I think is good sound solid strong pragmatism. Now the Ideal is not a finite existent. Moreover, the human mind and the human heart have a filiation to God. That to me is the most comfortable doctrine. At least I find it most wonderfully so every day in contemplating all my misdeeds and shortcomings. Pluralism, on the other hand, does not satisfy either my head or my heart. (CP 8.263)

2. NORMATIVE JUDGMENT IN JAZZ: A SEMIOTIC FRAMEWORKKELLY A. PARKER Kelly A. Parker

1. Initial research for this project was undertaken in 2005 with Grand Valley State University student Nathan Smith. I here thank Mr. Smith for his musician’s insights during our many conversations and listening sessions, and the GVSU Student Summer Scholars Program for financial support of our project.

I also thank Vincent Colapietro for his comments on an earlier draft of the essay.

2. These “levels” are logically ordered but do not necessarily correspond to actual temporal phases of the work’s existence: In particular, the poietic and immanent levels may occur simultaneously, as in improvised composition. Performance may be involved in any of the three levels, depending on the nature of the musical activity. 3. In this case, the name “Revolutionary Etude” is an example of such an early addition that has become a permanent part of Chopin’s work: The name cannot now be disregarded by any responsible audience or performer.

4. Coltrane also performed at least the first movement of the work at St. Gregory’s School in Brooklyn, New York, on 24 April 1965, with Jones on drums, Garrison on bass, and his wife, Alice Coltrane, on piano, but there is no known recording of the performance (Kahn 2002, 186-93). 5. See Langer 1979 and 1953, Meyer 1956, and Kruse 2005. 6. The church was founded in 1971 by Archbishop Franzo King and Reverend

Mother Marina King after a Coltrane performance, which they experienced as a

“sound baptism” in the Holy Spirit (“Homepage of Saint John Coltrane Church”). 7. [initially heard this statement as a fanfare (no doubt a trumpeter’s preju-

dice), but on further reflection have come to regard it as more like a blues singer’s shout or the opening call from a preacher’s pulpit.

8. In this numeric notation “1” corresponds to the tonic of the scale, with higher numbers indicating the interval above the tonic. The “d” indicates a diminished interval. In the key of G, then, “1-d3-1-4” corresponds to the sequence “G—B-flat—G—C.”

NOTES TO PAGES 42-45 261 9. The minor interval in a blues chord is actually a major third bent (or, one is tempted to say, “screwed”) downward, or else a minor third bent upward. Either bend gives the blues scale its distinctively sad dissonance. The progression used in “Acknowledgement” bends the minor third slightly upward. 10. Interestingly, the last of these patterns does appear quite prominently in Ascension.

3. CHARLES PEIRCE ON ETHICS James Liszka

1. Jouffroy’s text itself is hardly a philosophical argument so much as a story. According to Jouffroy, there is but one duty for human beings, and that is to accomplish their destiny. Their destiny is found in the immanence of each person’s nature, understood as part of a larger order of things. Given that this order is good, and that each species’ nature is part of this order, then “good and evil are success or failure in the pursuit of those ends to which our nature aspires” (1845, 32). Thus in one stroke he combines the extrinsic and immanent teleologies of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Since every being has a particular end, which is its highest good—and as part of an eminently good order—each being is also fitted with faculties to accomplish that end. Because it is fitted to accomplish its end, each being is impulsed (by emotions and passions in human beings)

toward that end and, at the same time, pleasured when such ends are being accomplished. Thus, happiness is the natural result of pursuing the end for which one is fitted, although such pleasure is not the end for which human beings struggle (1845, 37, 32). In this way, Jouffroy finds a place for the incipient utilitarianism of Hume, acknowledging its importance without its dominance. The dark side of such impulses is the formation of self-interest, understood as primary concern with one’s own destiny (1845, 41). It was only when, with proper

use of reason, that human beings could elevate themselves from the pursuit of self-interest to a more universal and generalizable interest, that true morality emerges (1845, 42). “When reason has ascended to this conception, it has reached,

for the first time, the idea of good. It had previously applied the name in a confused manner to the satisfaction of our nature. ... Good—true good—good in itself—absolute good is the realization of the absolute end of the creation—is universal order” (1845, 43). Jouffroy adopts a Kantian stance of awe and respect before the law: “The moment the idea of order is conceived, reason feels for it a sympathy so profound, true, immediate, that she prostrates herself before it, recognizes its consecrated and supreme right of control, adores it as a legitimate sovereign, honors it, and submits to it as the natural and eternal law” (1845, 43).

It is only when our interest is a universal interest—“not our good alone— the good, the end of every creature” (1845, 45), that we have achieved the

262 NOTES TO PAGES 45-54 moral stance. “All duty, right, obligation, and rules of morality, spring from this one source, the idea of good in itself—the idea of order. Destroy this idea, and no longer is there any thing sacred in itself to the eye of reason” (1845, 45-46). Thus, Jouffroy’s ethics ends with the Kantian view that ethics rests on a teleological view of order, that practical reason, in Kant’s terms, presupposes a teleological judgment—that ethics rests on the sense of a good, teleological order to the nature of things. Scholars may sense the presence of several of these overarching themes in Peirce’s own system of thought, and one can speculate that where Jouffroy’s

notions coincide with Kant’s thinking, they are doubly reinforced in Peirce. Certainly, the theme that we must rise above our own self-interests to a generalizable interest, realized in an indefinite community of inquirers is a well-known theme for Peirce. Peirce’s emphasis on architectonic, on a continuity and unity of cosmic order is another overarching theme, and the idea that certain processes

are destined, like the quest for truth, as it unfolds in the process of inquiry through history. Peirce’s emphasis on the pursuit of ultimate aims, the idea that good and evil are defined by means of the success of these aims to be realized in the long run, and his championing of “concrete reasonableness” as this ultimate aim, are all found in his nascent ethical thought. At the same time, however, Peirce clearly wanted to ground these themes in a rigorous system informed by science and logic, and with strong attention to Darwin’s theory of evolution. The story that Jouffroy told was a nice-sounding story, but if Peirce was influenced by it, he seems bent on giving it a scientific basis. 2. One imagines that there is a continuum of final causation, ranging from

the purposive and intentional behavior of human or humanlike agents to the nonpurposive final causation we see in evolution. It would be an interesting exercise to sort out the differences in this continuum. Evolution has a directedness; it is finious in Peirce’s terminology (CP 7.471), but it is hardly intentional or self-directed. Human agents, in contrast, are capable of self-direction, which is

the defining feature of purposive behavior. Nonetheless, human beings are also directed by physical and psychological processes beyond their control, processes that also have a directedness. Animals may be less capable of selfdirection, and so are purposive beings to that extent. As we move to simpler agents, for example, simple bacteria such as E. coli, their behavior appears directed in the search for its food source, glucose in the gut, but no one would reasonably claim that it is self-directed. Yet it seems to have a kind of directedness that differentiates it from the directedness of larger processes such as evolution. There is also the matter of cybernetic phenomena, which are constructed by purposive agents with a programmable directedness. All of this would be a fascinating topic to work out using Peircean notions but obviously cannot be pursued here.

NOTES TO PAGES 62-85 263 3. Interestingly, the psychologists Patricia King and Karen Kitchener have developed a catalogue of types of reflective judgment and epistemic cognition that parallel Kohlberg’s stages of moral development to some extent and reinforce Peirce’s ways of fixation of beliefs. The results of their study suggest that there may be some link between moral maturity and cognitive maturity. The development of epistemic cognition has seven stages constituted by three parameters: (1) the certainty of knowledge (from absolute to grades of probable), (2) the acquisition of knowledge (from direct observation, through authorities, through inquiry), and (3) how beliefs are justified (by direct observation, appeal to authority, or by constructing a probabilistic argument). In the highest stage, beliefs are justified probabilistically via evidence and argument using generalizable criteria (Kitchener et al. 1989, 95). This characterizes typical scientific argument and reinforces Peirce’s account in the “Fixation of Belief.” 4. WHO’S AFRAID OF CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE? KNOCKING SOME CRITICAL COMMON SENSE INTO MORAL PHILOSOPHY Cornelis de Waal

Versions of this essay were read at the third meeting on American and European Values at the Instytut Filozofii, Uniwersytetu Opolskiego, Opole, Poland, in June 2007, at the tenth International Meeting on Pragmatism, organized by the Centro de Estudos do Pragmatismo at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica de Sao Paulo, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in November 2007, at the 22nd World Congress of Philosophy, in Seoul, Korea, in August 2008, at the Varieties of Pragmatism Conference at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in September 2008, and at the New York Pragmatist Forum on 24 September 2010. I thank those who attended those meetings, as well as the referees for

this volume, for their many valuable comments. In particular I express my thanks to Cassiano Rodrigues, who was the official commentator at the Brazil meeting. 1. Iam using the term “problem” here more or less the way that Dewey used it. A problem, or problematic situation, is more defined than what Dewey calls “an indeterminate situation”—the latter being a situation where it is not even clear what the problem is. The Deweyan approach also brings out more clearly that it is the situation we find ourselves in that is problematic or indeterminate and that it is not merely a matter of our thoughts about it. Casting the same in terms of doubt and belief, as Peirce does in the Popular Science Monthly, does not as clearly bring out this aspect. 2. See, e.g., Haas 1988 or Koonz 2003. Both show that the perpetrators of genocide had a strong sense of right and wrong, especially where perceived duties conflicted with established moral sentiments.

264 NOTES TO PAGES 86-92 3. This is not to deny that the scientific method itself is also a powerful engine for the production of idiosyncratic beliefs. However, with regard to moral

issues, and taking into account how moral beliefs are typically formed in the individual, the other three methods are likely to be dominant. 4. See, e.g.. Pihlstr6m 2005. 5. Ina late manuscript titled “A Sketch of Logical Critic,” Peirce moves in this direction, when comparing logic with morals he writes (R 673:13-14): So good morals is the kind of human behaviour that would come to be approved if studies of right behaviour were carried sufficiently far. Would it not be a good idea to begin a text-book of ethics for young people with this definition “Ethics is the theory of how to do as one would like if one had considered sufficiently the question of what one would find satisfactory.” 6. See Mackie 1977. 7. Though Peirce later positioned ethics close to the foundation of the sciences of discovery, declaring logic to be in effect a branch of ethics, this does not apply to ethics conceived as a practical science, and his views on moral philosophy and its utility never changed. 8. Hobbes 1930, 23. 9. Williams 1985, 136. 10. Ibid. 11. Habermas 2003, 256—57.

12. Ibid., 246. 13. Occasionally, Peirce speaks of “moral instincts,” e.g., CP 2.160, 1902. 14. Having suggested that a parallel exists between ethics and logic, the former being self-controlled conduct and the latter self-controlled thought, Peirce adds

the parenthetical remark: “I ought not, however, to have said that the two sciences are parallel. It is better to say that there is a partial correspondence. We all have a general ideal of good reasoning as we all have a general ideal of good conduct. But while the ultimate essence of good conduct is deep secret, there is comparatively little difficulty in making out [the ultimate essence of good reasoning]|” (1903 Lowell Lectures, 453:23; manuscript breaks off after “out”). In a later version, however, Peirce calls the parallelism “perfect” on the ground that reasoning is a species of conduct (R 448:36). 15. One aspect of Peirce’s thought should be mentioned here, which is that,

for Peirce, reasoning ultimately appeals to sentiment. This is clear in the Cambridge Conference Lectures, and this is even more explicit in Peirce’s later writings where in his classification of the sciences he makes logic a normative science dependent on ethics. 16. See de Waal 2006.

NOTES TO PAGES 92-99 265 17. This is true especially when we analyze both in terms of post-Darwinian evolutionary concepts. Being careful with respect to people who are different— because one cannot as well predict their actions—better serves survival. Hence xenophobia could be characterized as a moral sentiment that borders on the instinctive in a way that is very similar to the prohibition against incest. Racism I take to be in the end a superficial form—very literally even—of xenophobia: Certain external characteristics have become markers of otherness, and hence of danger. 18. Itis even so that people who at a rational level forcefully reject racism, and who thereby consider themselves not racists, often still display racist tendencies that they themselves may be unaware of. 19. An early evolutionary account of the moral rejection of incest—where the rejection of incest is considered a biological instinct rather than as an acculturation—is found in Edward A. Westermarck’s 1891 The History of Human Marriage.

Westermarck’s views were recently revived, e.g., in Lieberman, Tooby, and Cosmides 2003. Peirce discussed Westermarck’s essay “The Position of Woman

in Early Civilization” in his 1905 Nation review of Sociological Papers (CN 3:227).

20. In Baldwin 1901-2, 2:426.

21. The distinction can be traced back to Avicenna’s commentary on the Isagoge; see Germann 2008. 22. See CP 1.623, 1898.

23. Peirce makes a few references to casuistry, embracing it with some reluctance.

Now books of casuistry, indeed, using the word “casuistry” not in any technical sense, but merely to signify discussions of what ought to be done in various difficult situations, might be made at once extremely

entertaining and positively useful. But casuistry is just what the ordinary treatises upon ethics do not touch, at least not seriously. (CP 1.666, 1898)

24. See, esp., Toulmin and Jonsen 1988. 25. Ibid., 307-8.

26. To prevent possible confusion, the scientific method does depend on ethics if the latter is conceived of in that most abstract sense in which it features as a grounding discipline for logic, which is a normative science for Peirce. To distinguish this theoretical science from what normally goes under the name of ethics or moral philosophy, Peirce at one point proposed to name it antethics instead (EP 2:377).

27. The notion of genuine moral problems is taken from William James’s notion of a genuine option in “The Will to Believe” (James 1956).

266 NOTES TO PAGES 99-103 28. The term “a priori” is here used as Peirce uses it when referring to the third way of fixing belief.

5. PEIRCE S MORAL REALICISM ROSA MARIA MAYORGA Rosa Maria Mayorga

The original title of this essay, as presented at the American and European Values Conference at Opole University, Poland, June 26-30, 2007, was “Peirce’s

Ethics: From an Extreme Scholastic Realism to a Moderate Ethical Realism.” I thank Chris Skowronski and Nathan Houser for organizing this wonderful conference. My gratitude also to Cornelis de Waal and to Chris for editing this volume. 1. He later admits that the tone he used at Harvard could have been more courteous. See Misak 20048, 163. 2. Misak 2004a, 164, In Truth, Politics, Morality (London: Routledge, 2000),

Misak finds Peirce’s views on morality “odd,” and considers him to be “no path-breaker in moral and political philosophy” (48). I heartily disagree. 3. See Hookway 2000, 23. 4. Ibid., 14. 5. See James Liszka’s account of one attempt at explaining “pure” ethics versus practical ethics in “Charles Peirce on Ethics” in this volume. 6. Ibid. There are others, besides the two I mention, who subscribe to this view.

7. Peirce’s use of irony has been known to obscure his meaning. I have argued elsewhere (and below) that this can be seen in his claims about individuals’ existence. For another recent example, see Houser 2005, 736-39. 8. Although I use “ethical” and “moral” synonymously with respect to theories, Peirce did distinguish between these two (see Liszka’s “Charles Peirce on Ethics” in this volume). 9. See also CP 8.208, 1905. Peirce tells us he was forced to rename his theory so that it would be “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (CP 5.414, 1905). 10. Scholastic realism (usually associated with Scotus) refers specifically to the doctrine that universals are real. Also known as moderate realism, it was considered an intermediate position between two extremes: the claim that universals exist (Platonic, or extreme realism) and the nominalist claim (usually associated with William of Ockham) that since only individuals exist, universals don’t (they are, at best, concepts). The ingenuity of the scholastic claim lay in its compromise: the recognition that although only individuals exist, universals can still be considered real—in other words, that not everything that is real exists— the inspiration for Peirce’s thirds (and firsts). As universals, common natures (1.e., the ancients’ term for what all individuals of a certain kind have in common) could then be considered real, hence providing a basis for claims to knowledge of the world. Peirce gives Scotus’s discussion modern relevance by speaking of

NOTES TO PAGES 103-9 267 the reality of scientific laws. However, although he praises Scotus, as opposed to

Ockham, for being right about universals, ultimately he criticizes Scotus’s account for being “too nominalistic” and declares himself more of an extreme scholastic realist. In Mayorga 2007b I analyze this enigmatic claim and propose the term “realicism” to describe Peirce’s twist on scholastic realism. 11. Depending on the topic, Peirce variously described firsts as qualities, feelings, possibilities; seconds as individuals, singulars, actualities; thirds as generals, laws, concepts, etc. 12. Peirce’s desire to create an all-encompassing philosophy a la Aristotle and his pragmatic maxim (the meaning of abstract terms is related to conceivable conduct) are apparent here. 13. I do not discuss this last in the present essay, because of time and space constraints. 14. Peirce distinguishes between an “absolute individual” (“the absolutely indivisible”) and the common sense of “individual,” as well as between “singulars in their absolute singularity” and “singular” (W 2:390, 1870; W 2:181, 1868), as

a way to contrast the difference between thirdness and secondness. For Peirce’s account of the etymology and hence the different uses of “individual,” “singular,” “particular,” see also CP 3.611—-13, 1911.

15. This is what makes Scotus a moderate scholastic (metaphysical) realist and Plato an extreme one—for the latter, universals are real and exist (as Forms). See Mayorga 2007), especially 151-53, for more on scholastic realism, universals, and Peirce. 16. For my take on Max Fisch’s view regarding Peirce’s change from an early nominalist stage to an “extreme” realism later, see Mayorga 2004. 17. This knack, or “instinct,” for guessing correctly, Peirce also refers to as “il lume naturale,” a notion he attributes to Galileo. (For an account of Peirce’s use

of Galileo’s notion, see Nubiola 2004 [also at http://www.unav.es/users/ LumeNaturale.html].) De Waal, in his “Who’s Afraid of Charles Sanders Peirce?: Knocking Some Critical Common Sense into Moral Philosophy” in this volume, invokes this notion, which, he argues, for Peirce, is abduction, and which he uses to explore the possibility of using Peirce’s scientific method to solve moral problems as opposed to Peirce’s own recommendation. I see this instinct as applying to both our knowledge of the world—“unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature’s, he has no chance of understanding nature at all” (CP 6.477, 1908), and to Peirce’s socially inherited wisdom, or “sentiment,” which, when taken to a higher level (pure ethics), involves concrete reasonableness. 18. Peirce gives an example: “It is like the character of a man which consists in the ideas that he will conceive and in the efforts that he will make, and which

only develops as the occasions actually arise. Yet in all his life long no son of Adam has ever fully manifested what there was in him” (CP 1.615, 1903).

268 NOTES TO PAGES 110-16 19. “Reasonable,” too, in the sense of promoting a peaceful coexistence with

others, and ultimately, a longer and more pleasant life. See Mats Bergman’s “Improving Our Habits: Peirce and Meliorism” in this volume for a discussion of concrete reasonableness, meliorism, and habit-change, which parallels this essay in an interesting way. 20. Peirce addresses the relationship between logic and ethics elsewhere as well; see, for example, CP 1.91, CP 1.573, CP 1.575, CP 2.120, CP 2.156, CP 2.165, and CP 5.36.

21. “The justification of... [rational conjectures] is that unless a man had a tendency to guess right .. . he might as well give up all attempt to reason; while if he has any decided tendency to guess right, as he may have, then no matter how often he guesses wrong, he will get at the truth at last” (CP 1.608, 1903). This

is of course related to Peirce’s synechism: “The possibility of science depends upon the fact that human thought necessarily partakes of whatever character is diffused through the whole universe” (CP 1.351, 1894).

22. I thank Susan Haack, who suggested I incorporate these issues in this essay.

23. The editors of Collected Papers use “experiential” instead of “scientific,” noting that the latter is used “originally.” The Writings (W 3: 273, 1878) uses the word “scientific.” 24. I make a similar point in Mayorga 20074. 25. William James 1956, 11. The James and Dewey works I cite also appear in Haack and Lane 2006. 26. William James, Pragmatism (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), 22. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid.

29. References to John Dewey’s works are to the standard edition The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Dewey 1967-72, 1976-83, 1981-89).

30. Note that when Peirce praises “Buddhisto-christian” ideals above (which would seem to be concerned with the welfare of many, and hence would seem to

have to fall into this category), he explicitly makes the point that the system results in “continuity,” with the individuals “weld[ing] together” (CP 1.673, 1898); therefore, the system would qualify rather as a third.

31. It could perhaps be argued that Kant would also fit into this category; because of space and time constraints, though, I don’t explore that issue here. 32. “Law, without force to carry it out, would be a court without a sheriff” (CP 1.212, 1902).

33. Iam using the common distinction that the subjectivist claims there are no moral truths, whereas the relativist says there are, but that they are relative to something.

NOTES TO PAGES 117-24 269 34. James did not subscribe to Peirce’s difficult and complex metaphysics. His claim here seems to deny Peirce’s fundamental doctrine of synechism. 35. There are obviously many variants of the metaethical positions I mention that are beyond the scope of this short summary. 36. “Stance-independent” is the preferred term in Shafer-Landau 2003, 15.

It is more felicitous than, say, “mind-independent” as a definition of “objective,” especially in the context of this discussion, since for Peirce “reality is independent, not necessarily of thought in general, but only of what you or I or any finite number of men may think about it” (CP 5.408, 1878). 37. See, for example, Shafer-Landau 2003 for a fairly comprehensive list of realisms.

38. Of course, I don’t want to claim that Peirce’s own theories are in any sense problem-free. However, I do believe that they bring a fresh perspective to ethics. 39. My purpose is to provide a context in which to present my comments on Peirce; I do not pretend to give a thorough analysis of these theories here.

40. Sayre-McCord 1988. See also “Moral Realism,” in The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Winter 2005 Edition, and in http://plato.stanford .edu/archives/win2005/entries/moral-realism. 41. See, for example, Railton 1996a and 1996b. 42. Shafer-Landau 2003, 1.

43. Ibid. 44. He does try to address this by introducing the supervenience of moral properties over natural properties. 45. However, just which sense of “natural” is most fitting in this context is highly controversial, and there is as much disagreement about how to distinguish naturalism from nonnaturalism as there is about which view is correct. Some naturalists (e.g, Sturgeon 1988) hold that moral properties are both natural and irreducible. Part of the confusion may be owing to the fact that some descriptions are cast in metaphysical and others in epistemological terms, but I do not pretend to resolve that here. 46. Another example of Peirce’s nonreductionist metaphysical tendencies: his arguments for three categories as opposed to one, or two. 47. See de Waal, in this volume. I do acknowledge that concrete reasonableness needs more fleshing out. 48. “On the other hand, all the followers of science are animated by a cheerful hope that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they apply it” (W 3:273, 1878). 49. I do not mean to imply that Peirce’s categories, or any of his theories, are unproblematic; but because of space limitations, I cannot elaborate more on that here.

270 NOTES TO PAGES 124-32 50. I express my gratitude for the various helpful suggestions by the referees of this volume. 6. IMPROVING OUR HABITS: PEIRCE AND MELIORISM Mats Bergman

Work on this essay has been supported by the Academy of Finland. 1. The term “meliorism” is commonly attributed to George Eliot. It is noteworthy, however, that the emergence of the idea of “scientific” or systematic

social meliorism, as articulated in the works of Jane Clapperton (1885) and Lester Ward (1883), is roughly contemporaneous with the early phases of pragmatism. 2. Although I do not know of any attempt to address the question of melior-

ism precisely from the point of view proposed here, several Peirce scholars have scrutinized the closely connected issues of conservatism and self-control in ways that to a certain extent support the present endeavor, but also illuminate aspects of the matter that will not be addressed in this article (see, e.g., Colapietro 1997a, 1999; Hookway 1997; Misak 2004b).

3. Tellingly, it is the second part of this definition that has most likely

been penned by Peirce. I am indebted to Francois Latraverse for this information. 4. In an earlier article Peirce argues for the sentimental ground of logic as follows: “It may seem strange that I should put forward three sentiments, namely, interest in an indefinite community, recognition of the possibility of this interest

being made supreme, and hope in the unlimited continuance of intellectual activity, as indispensable requirements of logic. Yet, when we consider that logic

depends on a mere struggle to escape doubt, which, as it terminates in action, must begin in emotion, and that, furthermore, the only cause of our planting ourselves on reason is that other methods of escaping doubt fail on account of the social impulse, why should we wonder to find social sentiment presupposed in reasoning?” (CP 2.655, 1878; cf. CP 5.357, 1868).

5. These chasms overlap and deviate in ways that Peirce never fully explicates. At times, he seems to equate theory (or “pure science”) with reason and practice with sentiment; but in other contexts, theory is taken to be dependent on sentiment in a manner that belies such clear-cut divisions. (I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this observation.) This issue is further complicated by Peirce’s tendency to use the terms “theory” and “practice” for pragmatically distinguishable conceptions. For a more detailed discussion of this question, see Bergman 2010.

6. As Dewey’s transformative program was properly articulated only after Peirce’s death, Peirce does not offer any specific criticism of Dewey in this

respect. However, Peirce is sharply critical of related tendencies in other

NOTES TO PAGES 132-35 271 philosophers, such as the humanism of F. C. S. Schiller. Complaining that Schillerian pragmatism tries to pay attention to “every department of man’s nature,” Peirce declares it to be incompatible with his own conception of philosophy as a “passionless and severely fair” science (CP 5.537, 1905-8). The misgiving that humanistic pragmatism is not “purely intellectual” is one that Peirce might very well have voiced in a criticism of Dewey. However, in a review

of Dewey’s Studies in Logical Theory, Peirce does express concern that the Deweyan natural history conception may exclude normative logic (CP 8.190, 1904; cf. CP 8.239, 1904). As we shall see, this normative focus is not without melioristic aspects. 7. It is worth noting that this stance does not exclude theoretical references t O practice or “practical upshots”; what Peirce wishes to ban from the purview

of philosophy is engagement with practical problems in a more mundane sense.

8. Peirce’s conservatism turns uncomfortably aristocratic when he declares that “in any state of society about whose possibility it is at all worthwhile to speculate, there will be two strata, the poor and the rich, the virtual slaves and the truly free; and every individual of the lower stratum, as long as in it he is, is forced to live to do the will of some one or more of the upper stratum, while every one of the higher stratum is free to realize whatever ideal he may, working out his own self-development, under his own governance, subject to such penalties as there are certain to be, if he fails to govern himself wisely. . . . [Liberal education] befits those who, belonging to the upper of the two main classes of society, are to be free to govern themselves and to take what consequences may befall them” (R 674:7-8, c. 1911).

9. One might be tempted to construe Peirce’s evolutionary standpoint as generically melioristic because it involves the idea of a changeable world becoming ever more rational. But that position is more appropriately classified as cosmological optimism than as meliorism.

10. In its most general sense, habit is truly omnipresent: “What we call a Thing is a cluster or habit of reactions, or, to use a more familiar phrase, is a centre of forces” (CP 4.157, c. 1897).

11. It is actually unclear whether Peirce’s philosophy, with its evolutionarysynechistic animus, can accommodate dispositions in the strictest sense. In the Minute Logic, Peirce argues that we really cannot hold on to a hard-and-fast distinction, because “it is difficult to make sure whether a habit is inherited or is due to infantile training and tradition” (CP 2.170, c. 1902). Here, dispositions may be viewed as limiting cases, that is, as habit-like laws of action that would be distinguished from habits proper by being inborn principles that are definitely fixed. It is, from a synechistic point of view, merely a matter of degree; some habits turn out to be more “instinctual” than others. More concretely, we may

272 NOTES TO PAGES 135-39 talk of “dispositions” or “instincts” when we mean habits that to the best of our knowledge are physically or biologically based. 12. In “A Sketch of Logical Critic,” Peirce identifies a number of different means by which habits may be formed, listing (1) custom, (2) the repetition of an act, (3) repeated imagination of an act and its consequences, and (4) a single act of will (e.g., giving oneself the order to wake up at a certain time the following morning) (R 673:14-18, c. 1911). To this list, we could add a higher order of habitcreation by means of the combination of imaginative deliberation and external experimentation. 13. Peirce uses both “ultimate” and “final” in this context. Many commentators, most notably T. L. Short (2007, 57), argue that we should not conflate the concepts of ultimate and final interpretant. 14. Peirce is mostly careful not to exaggerate this human capacity, but occasionally—especially when extolling the power of ideals—he lets down his guard: “Each habit of an individual is a law; but these laws are modified so easily by the operation of self-control, that it is one of the most patent of facts that ideals and thought generally have a very great influence on human conduct” (CP 1.348, 1903).

15. In addition, Peirce acknowledges that there may be nonhabitual meanings, significant feelings, and actions associated with emotional and energetic interpretants. 16. It might be tempting to interpret this division of the logical interpretant in terms of the three degrees of clarity Peirce identifies in his pragmatistic writings. The trichotomies are not straightforwardly identical, however, and may indicate somewhat different perspectives on the problem of meaning. While the first logical interpretant is clearly not familiarity, the second logical

interpretant involves a higher level of clarification than mere analytic (or dictionary) definition. If the third degree of clarity is understood as “an account of the role the concept plays in practical endeavours” (Misak 20048, viii), then

such a “pragmatic elucidation” encompasses the second and parts of the third logical interpretant, but does not necessarily capture the full scope of the latter. It would seem that the identification of first, second, and third logical interpretant are meant to describe the process of deliberation involved in the adoption and modification of habits, rather than degrees of clarity of meaning per se.

17. Indeed, Peirce sometimes argues that it is only through experimentation that we become aware of our habits; we “can only know that we have formed a habit by some experiment, although it may be an involuntary experiment or may be an experiment in the imagination” (CN 3:188, 1904). 18. The manuscript breaks off a few words after the quote above; the following pages are missing.

NOTES TO PAGES 141-43 273 19. Note, however, that signs usually also have effects that are part neither of their pragmatistic meaning nor of their pragmatistic adequacy.

20. I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers of this article, who rightly indicated the need for a clearer distinction between habit-change as means and the fixation of belief as end. 21. See Colapietro 1997a for an illuminating discussion bearing directly on this issue. Although I endorse Vincent Colapietro’s attempt to push Peircean pragmatism and sign theory toward a more contextualist and historicist direc-

tion—to conceive of the deliberative subject as an “implicated participant” rather than as a disinterested spectator—it is not always easily reconcilable with certain absolutistic tendencies in Peirce. Colapietro (1997a) is right when he points out that one reason to emphasize that signs have a life of their own is that “it acts as a check on our tendency to absolutize ourselves . . . to take ourselves as the ultimate source of both intelligibility and significance” (281); but we should also beware of the opposite trap of “absolutizing” external signs, objects, and ideals. Arguably, the young Peirce hits the right note when he states that “men and words reciprocally educate each other” (CP 5.313, 1868). 22. At times, Peirce suggests that the highest good, which requires the suppression of individual interests and duties, is a sentimental obligation. Arguing that “vitally important matters”’—meaning activities driven by interests other than the absolute summum bonum—are “the veriest trifles,” he maintains that “the very supreme commandment of sentiment is that man should generalize, or ..., should become welded into the universal continuum,” and he adds that in “fulfilling this command, man prepares himself for transmutation into a new form of life, the joyful Nirvana in which the discontinuities of his will shall have all but disappeared” (CP 6.673, 1898). It may be telling that Peirce singles out the self-sacrificing mother as a living manifestation of this sentimental ideal. Also, it is of some interest to note that he does not even consider whether the supreme commandment of sentiment threatens the freedom of inquiry, although it seems to violate the dictum that “natural” reason ought not to have any voice in theoretical issues (SS 19-20, 1904). Should not science remain open to hypotheses of all kinds, including ones that do not postulate general uniformity as an ideal, but accept individual differences as valuable as such? However, like Christopher Hookway (1997, 220), I believe that we can accept Peirce’s point regarding the “sentimental” underpinnings of rationality without thereby necessarily commit-

ting ourselves to the “religion of reason,” where complete homogeneity of habit is postulated as the ideal and aim. Arguably, Peirce’s own emphasis on self-control and habit-change (which ought not to be construed as mere habitadjustment) leads us in a different direction. 23. Noting that the ultimate purpose of everything is beyond human comprehension, Peirce tends to encase this point in the religious language of Henry

274 NOTES TO PAGES 143-46 James senior and Swedenborg, sometimes alluding to the “vir” —the “awakened man”—as the goal of normative inquiry, and arguing that human beings take part in the grander scheme of creation by growing an esthetic ideal by intelligent action (see Krolikowski 1964, for an examination of the Jamesian-Swedenborgian

connection). Yet, it is appropriate to note that although Peirce is attracted to the Jamesian-Swedenborgian solution to the problem of evil—affirmation of spiritual brotherly love over material delusions of selfhood—he does not follow the elder James into advocating active reformism. Arguably, there is some ten-

sion in Peirce’s thought between a religiously inspired communitarian spirit (manifested in his condemnation of the “gospel of greed,” for instance) and a conservative laissez-faire attitude toward society or the world of “practice” (which, if taken to extremes, may approach a cynical variant of optimism). 24. In this particular sense, Peircean grammar and critic can be said to serve the pursuit of Peircean rhetoric and methodeutic. 25. This does not mean that strong habits should or could be easily broken up by mere acts of will; in the end, it is brute experience—or the secondness of experience—that tends to trigger the process of habit-change. “|Belief], while it lasts, is a strong habit, and as such, forces the man to believe until some surprise breaks up the habit. The breaking of a belief can only be due to some novel experience, whether external or internal. Now experience which could be summoned up at pleasure would not be experience” (CP 5.524, c. 1905). In this context, experience should be understood as “a brutally produced conscious effect that contributes to a habit, self-controlled, yet so satisfying, on deliberation, as to be destructible by no positive exercise of internal vigour” (EP 2:435, 1908). In contrast, higher-

level habit-change is not merely a matter of adaptation to external pressure. Whereas “conversions and reformations, ... are always consequent upon impressive experience,” habituation—in the sense of development of the potential of

human beings—is something that generally requires deliberate effort (NEM 4:143).

26. This does not entail methodological doubt in the Cartesian sense, but more moderate “laboratory doubt” produced by engaging habits in imagination and experience. It can never touch common sense as a whole. Only a relatively small part of our habits can be criticized at any given time; the majority of them are taken for granted and remain uncriticized. Nonetheless, no acquired habit is absolutely beyond criticism. 27. “There is no reason why ‘thought’, . . . should be taken in that narrow sense in which silence and darkness are favorable to thought. It should rather be understood as covering all rational life, so that an experiment shall be an operation of thought” (EP 2:337, 1905). From this point of view, Peirce’s claim that

“the whole business of ratiocination, and all that makes us human beings, is performed in imagination” (CP 6.286, 1893) can be somewhat misleading—not

NOTES TO PAGES 146-57 275 because of the important emphasis on imagination, but because the statement might suggest a needlessly introverted conception of reasoning. In the fullest sense, reasoning takes place in the external as well as the internal world. 28. As Colapietro (1999) notes, “The fostering of genuine community and the reform of traditional institutions are of a piece—the one cannot be accomplished without the other” (26). 29. Interestingly, when faced with Peirce’s conservative attitude to scientific reforms, Victoria Welby replies by extolling Francis Galton’s eugenics (SS 21, 1904).

30. Here, I deliberately leave open the possibility that the quest for truth in a broader sense—as a hope animating inquiry—would nonetheless be a defining feature of philosophy. It is at least feasible that one can say truthful things about

realms of meanings to which truth and falsity as such are secondary or even irrelevant—art and literature being perhaps the most obvious examples. 7. SELF-CONTROL, VALUES, AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT: PEIRCE ON THE VALUE-DRIVEN DYNAMICS OF HUMAN MORALITY Helmut Pape

A first version of this essay was presented on 22 May 2004 at the Maison Heinrich-Heine, Centre Universitaire Paris, on the occasion of a conference on recent German and French Peirce scholarship, titled “La philosophie de C-. S. Peirce dans la recherche contemporaine fran¢aise et allemande.” The current version was presented at a conference titled “Charles S. Peirce’s Normative Thought,” which is part of a series of conferences on American and European values.

1. Interestingly, in the Collected Papers Peirce nowhere uses “value” as an explicit concept of ethics or practical philosophy discussed today, although, at some places, he uses the verbs “values” and “evaluating.” Rather, he talks about ideals, which is a much stronger, Platonic concept. 2. This sort of reference indicates a passage taken from the Collected Papers, using volume and paragraph number. For details see the References. 3. This sort of reference indicates a passage taken from Peirce manuscripts. For details see the References.

4. Completely paralyzed persons suffering from the so-called locked-in syndrome (ALS) can, by using a display that shows their own brainwaves on a monitor, learn to give commands to a computer. Cf. Kithler, Winter, and Birbaumer 2003.

5. This is not a new insight. A trace of it is already implicit in Aristotle’s thought. The argument in De anima may be read as a story about the layers of control-processes that reach from the control of feeding, movement up to the form of forms, the self-control of cognitive processes, including perception,

276 NOTES TO PAGES 157-69 thought, and memory. This is summed up in Historia animalum, 488b25, when Aristotle says: “Many animals have the power of memory and can be trained; but the only one which can recall past events at will is man.” 6. Since this performance is no more than what a machine might go through, it has no essential relation to the circumstance that the machine happens to work by geared wheels, whereas a man happens to work by an ill-understood arrangement of brain-cells. 7. It is of no help for answering this question that Peirce tells us, time and again, that to call an argument illogical is itself a moral statement, for example when he says: “Thinking is a kind of action, and reasoning is a kind of deliberate action; and to call an argument illogical, or a proposition false, is a special kind of moral judgment” (CP 8.191, 1904).

8. As Bernard Williams in Truth and Truthfulness (2002) has pointed out, truth and truthfulness can be linked, if we take a moral and genealogical view on the way in which knowledge and communication are handled by us. 9. Itis not sufficient, in order to argue for the limits of any possible AI system,

to show that there are internal moral control standards that turn the search for truth into a requirement for the ethics of interpretation and terminology. Surely, such a rule of logical self-control could be explicitly formulated. For example: Keep up checking the identity and difference between your objects of interpretation and try to achieve a maximal degree of consistency and identity between the objects. Perhaps, at some point in the future we will be able to program a computer to do the identity/difference check on interpretations—at least as soon as the problem of capturing the implementation of linguistic meaning and the relevance of background knowledge is solved—which at present we are very far from solving, 10. Peirce does not claim that in this way we achieve an absolute freedom in a metaphysical sense. uu. That is to say, human freedom would consist in actions that are not indeterministic events and are not even determined by self-controlled moral reflec-

tion. This radical, ontological freedom, so the argument for metaphysical freedom runs, is only possible because there are chance events in the world. However, such a notion of freedom eliminates all types of moral responsibility and self-control—as Kant in Critique of Practical Reason has pointed out. 12. Putting it paradoxically, Peirce sometimes says that we are not free because we have freedom of the will but because we have the freedom of choice (CP 8.306, 1897).

13. That is to say, to use Peirce’s words, “a peculiar act which may properly be called abstraction is usually required, consisting in seizing evanescent elements of thought and holding them before the mind as ‘substantive’ objects” (CP 6.595, 1893).

NOTES TO PAGES 172-76 277 8. WHY IS THE NORMATIVITY OF LOGIC BASED ON RULES? Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen

Work on this essay was supported by the University of Helsinki Excellence in Research Grant (Peirce’s Pragmatistic Philosophy and Its Applications, 2006-2008, project 2104027, Principal Investigator A.-V. Pietarinen). My thanks to the organizers and participants of Charles S. Peirce’s Normative Thought: International Conference in Philosophy held in Opole, Poland, in June 2007. Mats Bergman, Vincent Colapietro, Nathan Houser, Dan Nesher, Mateusz W. Oleksy, Helmut

Pape, and Sami Pihlstr6m merit individual mentions for their comments and criticism concerning earlier versions. Lauri Snellman deserves special credit for participating in the formulation and contesting of the key arguments of the third and fourth sections, “Meaning Is Rule-Governed” and ”Habits, Ethics, and Ideals.” This essay is dedicated to the memory of Mateusz W. Oleksy, with whom I exchanged thoughts on our essays during that conference. 1. See, e.g., Barnouw 1995 for attempted clarification of what Peirce might have meant by esthetics, emphasizing how markedly his conception differs from the contemporary study of esthetics. Pietarinen 2008 is a study of Peirce’s esthetics in the context of pragmaticism. 2. The full title of this manuscript is Reason’s Conscience: A Practical Treatise on the Theory of Discovery; Wherein logic 1s conceived as Semetotic. The date 1904 is by Carolyn Eisele. 3. Burks 1943 is the early study concerned with this question. 4. Esthetics and logic provide an example of such a mutual dependence. Take contemporary artwork that makes heavy use of multimodal features, for instance.

Such forms of art run the risk of remaining incoherent or hard to comprehend and interpret without the collecting powers of modes of reasoning provided by logic.

5. Misa model, wa possible world, A an assertion, and G a noncooperative, two-player, zero-sum game of perfect information played on A, in M, and in w. Peirce terms the two parties engaged in such strategic dialogue variously the “utterer—interpreter,” “proponent—opponent,” “defender—attacker,” “speaker— hearer,” “addressor—addressee,” “assertor—critic,” “Graphist—Grapheus,” “Artifex of Nature—Interpreter of Nature,” “symboliser—thinker,” “scribe—user,” “affirmer—

denier,” “ego—-non-ego,” “quasi-utterer—quasi-interpreter,” “delineator— interpreter,” “concurrent—antagonist,” “compeller—resister,” “agent—patient,” “putter forth—auditor,” “writer—reader.” “Me—Against-Me,” and “interlocutor— receiver.” These pairs are feigned in our “make believe,” yet they must have the qualities of “intelligent agents” (R 280:29; R 3). 6. By a mapping we mean generalizations of an ordinary concept of a func-

tion to accommodate, for example, nondeterministic and intensional forms

278 NOTES TO PAGES 176-80 of mappings. By model theory we mean its wide sense that takes into account possible-worlds’ semantics and intensional concepts. Ordinary notions of a function or a model theory do not cover such extensions. The broader conception of model theory comes close to what Peirce’s intention was in regarding formal semantics/pragmatics as the logical theory of semeiotics (see Pietarinen 2006b, 2006c).

7. This vague definition of strategic rules may well need to be qualified in several ways. But nothing in the argument depends on the details of those qualifications. Recent literature in game theory is rife with suggestions about the ways

in which “the maximization of expected utilities” could or should be replaced with goals and ends that make less-than-ideal assumptions concerning, for instance, the rationality of the players (Gintis 2009; Rubinstein 1998).

8. This is really how strategies are conceived both in Peirce’s sense and in contemporary game theory. Knockdown evidence comes from Peirce’s 1893 marginal addition to his revision of How to Make Our Ideas Clear, where he writes, next to his definition of the identity of a habit as leading us to action under any possible (even zero-probability) circumstance: “No matter if contrary to all experience” (CP 5.400).

9. On Peirce’s notion of logic conceived in its broad and narrow senses, as well as their relations to normative sciences, see Bergman 2007.

10. It might help one to savor this conclusion by thinking of rules as very complex entities: In addition to being nondeterministic and intensional functions and mappings, they can come in the forms of conditionals, subjunctives, and counterfactuals, among others. Or rules can have antecedents whose falsity calls for demonstration by abductive reasoning. It is by no means the case that rules in question are static, indefeasible entities or canons that restrict or constrain our actions. Instead of rules, one might think of habits as laws, including statistical laws, but this is problematic since such terminology suggests a naturalistic interpretation of habits, which is alien to Peirce’s own argument about their identity. 11. Admittedly, there is considerable disagreement among game theorists on whether the study is to be conceived as a normative, descriptive, or prescriptive science (see Osborne and Rubinstein 1994; Pietarinen 2003).

12. The notion of agenthood that could be gleaned from the structure and dynamics of games is a prominent topic in the game and decision-theoretic literature. 13. Peirce’s late proof involves the establishment of habits as logical interpretants by exclusion of other propositional attitudes such as conceptions, desires, and expectations (R 318; Pietarinen and Snellman 2006). The logical interpretant “can only be a Habit,” he writes to Giovanni Papini in 1907, “which consists in

a conditional future; namely that, with a given motive, a man, under given

NOTES TO PAGES 180-83 279 circumstances, would rationally behave in a certain way” (Letter to Papini, RL 7:10 April 1907). In a little treatise Logic and the Basis of Ethics (1949, 75) Arthur Prior, who was paying special attention to Scottish moral philosophers and seeking to ground the normative aspect of logic in ethics and at the same time avoid

lapses into psychologism, goes on to assimilate habits with desires. Prior was much influenced by Peirce’s writings since early in his career, but his notion of a habit is more narrowly conceived than Peirce’s. I believe the key reason for this is Prior’s universalistic presupposition concerning the theory of logic. It was a quite commonplace thing to have in the wake of Russell, Quine, and the formalistic restructuring of symbolic logic. And the book was written just prior to the emergence of model-theoretic approaches. 14. The notion of control (both in the sense of “self-control” and “hetero-

control”) is a metalogical principle in operation in Peirce’s logic. Gametheoretically, control presupposes that the agents know their own types as well as

the other players’ types, including knowledge and common knowledge of the payoff distributions in the game. In the nomenclature of game theory these standard epistemological assumptions refer to the class of games that have complete information. R 280 refers to the agents’ capabilities of “coming to an understanding and of observing it,” which from the game-theoretic point of view

interestingly expresses one side of the principle of complete information: players’ knowledge of their own types. 15. This definition was written around the same time, in 1905, as R 280 from which the key quotation is taken.

16. And so in metaethical terms Peirce would agree with cognitivism, that ethical statements have propositional content and that they can be evaluated by virtue of that content. A necessary qualification is that his understanding of propositional content (the content of dicisigns) is somewhat broader than what normally is accepted in contemporary philosophy of language. 17. Recall David Lewis’s (1969) argument about how the establishment of conventions appears to follow certain simple cooperative signaling games. Like Lewis, Peirce presupposes the common ground between communicants and analyzes its constitution in terms of an infinite construction of common knowledge (R 614; Pietarinen 2006c). However, despite its name, Peirce would regard Lewis’s modal realism an unacceptable form of nominalism because of its commitment to actuality and indexicality only. Modal realism does not take real unactualized possibilities seriously.

18. Liszka’s and Redondo’s chapters in the present book characterize speculative rhetoric.

19. “In our make believe, two parties are feigned to be concerned in all scribing of graphs; the one called the Graphist, the other the interpreter” (R 280).

280 NOTES TO PAGES 184-216 20. To prove this connection, we show the following. From the winning strategies of the model-construction games we can construe a model set that guarantees the existence of witness individuals and witness predicates in the semantic game correlated with a sentence A. There exists a habit of choosing these witness individuals and predicates if, and only if, there exists a winning strategy in the semantic game correlated with A. Conversely, if there exists a winning strategy in the semantic game correlated with A, we can construe a model set from which we get a model for A by playing through the positions allowed by the model set in question. 10. THE NORMATIVITY OF COMMUNICATION: NORMS AND IDEALS IN PEIRCE ’S SPECULATIVE RHETORIC Ignacio Redondo

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the international conference

American and European Values III: Peirce’s Normative Thought in Opole, Poland (June 2007). I am extremely indebted to the participants of this congress, all of whom provided excellent suggestions and critical comments that made this version of the essay possible. I am particularly grateful to the members of the Peirce’s Edition Project, especially, to Nathan Houser and André De Tienne,

whose guidance and criticisms put me on the right track. Finally, I thank Professor Jaime Nubiola and the members of the Grupo de Estudios Peirceanos at the University of Navarra, for their continuous support and inspiration. Also, I thank the Government of Navarra for the economic support that allowed me to participate in the conference. 1. See also R 632, in which Peirce severely acknowledges that “one of the most extreme and lamentable of my incapacities is my incapacity for linguistic expression” (R 632:207, 1909).

2. For detailed expositions of the Peircean approach to communication see, for example, Lizska 1996, Colapietro 1995, Johansen 1993, and Bergman 2000.

3. Mats Bergman (2004a, 328) has noted that in his depiction of Peirce’s theory of assertion, Brock restricts the scope of semeiotic to symbols, leaving aside the field of indices and icons. This is a rather problematic claim that collides with Peirce’s assumption that indices play an indispensable part in all com-

municative situations by indicating the subject matter of discourse, which symbols themselves cannot accomplish in isolation (EP 2:7, 1894). But it is true that Peirce himself ascribes the range of assertion to symbols, in which case it would make the theory of assertion an incomplete explanation that cannot adequately elucidate communication in its fullness. Nevertheless, both perspectives

can be peacefully brought together if we bear in mind that, for Peirce, the

NOTES TO PAGES 216-19 281 complete symbol taking place in all reasoning is a mixture of icons, indices, and symbols, without omitting any of them (EP 2:10, 1894). 4. Of course, this is only one partial dimension of the action of signs, namely, the so-called vector of determination, which focuses only on the way the object

determines the interpretant through the mediatory action of the sign. See Parmentier 1994; Lizska 1996; and Bergman 2000. In addition to this, Mats Bergman (20044, 239) has accurately pointed out that Peirce’s own definition of the sign as something that “stands for” an object is not wholly adequate because it emphasizes only the pole of representation. Consequently, it would be much more accurate to take into account Peirce’s formal definition of the sign as a first which stands in a genuine triadic relation to a second (object), so as to be capable of determining a third (interpretant), to assume the same triadic relation to its object in which it itself stands with regard to the same object (EP 2:272-73). This means that semeiosis is best defined in terms of mediation—that is to say, that “the essential nature of a sign is that it mediates between its Object, which is sup-

posed to determine it and to be, in the same sense, the cause of it, and its... Interpretant, which is determined by the sign, and in a sense, the effect of it, and which the sign represents to flow as an influence, from the Object” (R 318:14, 1907). In this sense, it would be helpful to recall that there are three different— but complementary—types of mediation involved in a genuine triadic relation, meaning that the three components of semeiosis play different logical roles in relation to each other. See De Tienne 1992 and Ransdell 1966, 26. 5. See also CP 3.419, 1893.

6. See, for example, CP 3.435: “The assertion represents a compulsion which experience, meaning the course of life, brings upon the deliverer to attach the predicate to the subjects as a sign of them taken in a particular way. This compulsion strikes him at a certain instant; and he remains under it forever after. It is, therefore, different from the temporary force which the hecceities exert upon his attention. This new compulsion may pass out of mind for the time being; but

it continues just the same, and will act whenever the occasion arises, that is, whenever those particular hecceities and that first intention are called to mind together. It is, therefore, a permanent conditional force, or law” (CP 3.435, 1896).

7. Moreover, in assertive situations there is always an element of Thirdness that will govern future actions of utterers and interpreters. Peirce exemplifies this law-like element in the act of signing a contract. As Peirce explains, to say that A signs the document D, and C signs the same document, does not

make a contract. On the contrary, “the contract lies in the intent,” that is to say, “that certain conditional rules shall govern the conduct of A and C” (CP 1.475).

282 NOTES TO PAGES 223-26 8. In order to avoid misinterpretations, the concept of “social impulse,” which Peirce sometimes uses to describe the social nature of scientific inquiry, deserves further explanation. Taken literally, “impulse” might sound like a sort of brute, compulsory force, an irrational determinative power that takes the form of an efficient cause, or Secondness. If so, all the normative components of the ultimate ideal would be removed and Peirce’s concept of summum bonum would lose its explanatory power. Here, the telic nature of Thirdness needs to be taken into account, because it is precisely the “finious” dimension of purpose— this is, something that takes the form of final causation—which makes aims, goals, and ideals something capable of being desired and pursued. I owe these significant observations to some comments made by Nathan Houser and David Pfeifer in the course of a previous discussion of this topic. 9. In recent literature there has been considerable interest in elucidating the proper significance of speculative rhetoric (see Liszka 1996; 2000; Santaella-Braga 1999; and Bergman 2004b). Certainly, in spite of Peirce’s decidedly sympathetic approach to rhetoric (see, for example, CP 2.333, c. 1895), it is also true that he

devoted only a few obscure comments to the matter. In regard to the problematic relations between speculative rhetoric and methodeutic, Vincent Colapietro has recently published an outstanding essay that, to a great extent, clarifies the matter, and suggests a pragmatic reinterpretation of the third branch of the trivium which is relatively close to the one I am proposing here (Colapietro 2007). 10. See also Bergman (2000) for a thorough criticism of this position. 11. In regard to the dynamic nature of the summum bonumn, it is pertinent to quote here a passage in which Peirce emphasizes that the process of development of reasonableness can never be fully attained: “The essence of Reason is such that its being never can have been completely perfected. It always must be in a state of incipiency, of growth” (CP 1.615, 1903).

12. However, we need to bear in mind that insofar as it is a “species of medium,” the sign is not completely identical with a medium of communication. Consequently, although every sign is a species of medium—and, therefore, a species of Third—there are mediums of communication that are not signs. At first blush, the concept of a medium of communication seems to comprehend the sign as a genuine triadic relation, that is, it is an ideal definition that serves some technical purposes for logic. But then, the “real” sign taking place in actual semeioses always needs to be an instantiation, a replica (a “vehicle” or degenerate sign) of this third which governs its particular occasions. See Bergman 2004a (248, 262) for a full detailed account of this matter. I am particularly grateful to Vincent Colapietro for his extremely insightful comments in his kind response to an earlier version of this essay.

13. Obviously, this communicative perspective of sign action does not mean that semeiosis would be exhausted by communication as it is ordinarily

NOTES TO PAGES 226-31 283 understood (Bergman 2004 a, 247). However, I tend to believe that the notion of a “quasi-mind,” which Peirce sometimes uses for the sake of clarity—even if it conflicts with his professed antipsychologism—is a much more radical hypothesis that suggests the object really wants to communicate with us. I know this is a controversial hypothesis that deserves some explanation, but I will take it for eranted here in order not to extend my argument unnecessarily. It will suffice to say that, independently of some probable metaphorical tones in Peirce’s words, he really speaks as if nature would communicate with us in semeiosis. 14. In regard to this “impelling” feature, André De Tienne observes that the

adjective “dynamical” clearly stresses this neglected character of the object. Indeed, as he reminds, for Peirce dunamis originally meant “power,” in the sense of a source of actualization of events (De Tienne 2003, 49). 15. For a full detailed account of second-intentionality in Peirce’s semeiotic see Ransdell 1966. 16. It will be helpful to bear in mind here the description of the interpretant that Peirce offered in his seminal paper “On a New List of Categories.” According to the argument of the “New List,” an interpretant is a mediating representation

that represents the sign to be a representation of the same object which this mediating representation itself represents, fulfilling the same role “of an interpreter, who says that a foreigner says the same thing which he himself says” (W 2:54, 1867).

11. PEIRCEAN MODAL (AND MORAL?) REALISM(sS): REMARKS ON THE NORMATIVE METHODOLOGY OF PRAGMATIST METAPHYSICS Sami Pihlstrom

1. See EP 2, chap. 4, and RLT, chap. 1. See, however, also Misak (20042, 2004b)

for a reading of Peirce as a moral cognitivist. We have to remember the context of Peirce’s 1898 lectures: he was unhappy with William James’s suggestion that

he ought to have lectured on “topics of vital importance” instead of abstract logico-mathematical issues. Note also that the theory vs. practice and metaphys-

ics vs. ethics dichotomies are closely related to, though not reducible to, the dichotomy between facts and values, heavily criticized in Putnam’s (2002, 2004) neopragmatism. 2. My willingness to move, rather swiftly, from general metaphysical topics,

such as the modalities, to moral philosophy is explained by the fact that this essay is part of a more comprehensive research project on (what I call) “the ethical grounds of metaphysics.” For related work on this topic, see Pihlstr6m 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. For another attempt to take the step from Peirce’s scholastic realism to a form of moral or ethical realism, see Rosa Mayorga’s contribution to this book, “Peirce’s Moral ‘Realicism.’”

284 NOTES TO PAGES 233-34 3. Compare also, e.g., the form of actualism defended in Stalnaker 2003. 4. Alternatively, a nominalist can also be a metaphysical realist; thus, metaphysical realism is not committed to realism about universals in an Armstrongian manner. See, e.g., Devitt 1991. 5. On this specific theme in Kant scholarship, I have learned from studies by Markku Leppakoski (e.g., 2001) and Toni Kannisto (ms.). This essay will make

no contribution to the interpretation of Kant, nor will I try to settle the hard question of whether there can be any metaphysics within a Kantian framework sharply critical of traditional (“pre-critical”) metaphysics, but the Kantian context of my proposal for a rival conception of metaphysics in general (and the metaphysics of modality in particular) ought to be acknowledged. For a more detailed case for “Kantian” readings of pragmatism, see Pihlstré6m 2003; also cf. Pihlstr6m 2006.

6. See, e.g., the following list of what Peirce regarded as metaphysical problems: “Here let us set down almost at random a small specimen of the questions of metaphysics which press, not for hasty answers, but for industrious and solid investigation: Whether or no there be any real indefiniteness, or real possibility and impossibility? Whether or not there is any definite indeterminacy? Whether there be any strictly individual existence? Whether there is any distinction, other than one of more and less, between fact and fancy? Or between the external and the internal worlds? What general explanation or account can be given of the different qualities of feeling and their apparent connection with determinations of mass, space, and time? Do all possible qualities of sensation, including, of

course, a much vaster variety of which we have no experience than of those which we know, form one continuous system, as colors seem to do? What external reality do the qualities of sense represent, in general? Is Time a real thing, and if not, what is the nature of the reality that it represents? How about Space, in these regards? How far, and in what respects, is Time external or has immediate contents that are external? Are Time and Space continuous? What numerically are the Chorisy, Cyclosy, Periphraxy, and Apeiry of Space? Has Time, or has Space,

any limit or node? Is hylozoism an opinion, actual or conceivable, rather than a senseless vocable; and if so, what is, or would be, that opinion? What is consciousness or mind like; meaning, is it a single continuum like Time and Space, which is for different purposes variously broken up by that which it contains; or is it composed of solid atoms, or is it more like a fluid? Has truth, in Kantian phrase, any ‘material’ characteristics in general, by which it can, with any degree of probability, be recognized? Is there, for example, any general tendency in the course of events, any progress in one direction on the whole?” (CP 6.6, c. 1903). The contemporary Peircean who takes seriously Kant’s criticism of traditional (pre-Kantian, pre-critical) metaphysics need not treat all these issues as really significant, but s/he may, presumably, attempt a pragmatic-cum-transcendental

NOTES TO PAGES 234-40 285 rearticulation of any of them. Peirce himself seems to regard the view that metaphysics consists of “thoughts about thoughts” as both Aristotelian and Kantian: See W 2:231; EP 1:45, 1868; for Peirce’s acknowledgment of the Kantian backsround of modal concepts, see also EP 2:283 (1903). Scholastic realism seems to be incorporated in Peirce’s very concept of metaphysics, because in 1898 he defined metaphysics as “the science of being, not merely as given in physical experience, but of being in general, its laws and types” (EP 2:36). In the same lecture, we are told that the conclusion of metaphysics has a “necessity of matter,” informing us “not merely how the things are but how from the very nature of being they must be” (EP 2:35). On metaphysical necessity and possibility, see also Lowe 1998, chap. 1.

7. Lam grateful to Tommi Vehkavaara for a conversation on this point, and related ones. 8. See also, e.g., the following passages: CP 1.15—26, 1903; W 2:390—91n8; CP 3.93n1, 1870; CP 4.1ff., 1898; 5.5965, 1903; 5.93-101, 1903; W 2:239—40, 5.312, 1868; CP 5.423, 19053 5.430—33, 19053 5.453ff., 1905; 5.502—4, C. 19053 5.528, C. 1905; 8.208,

C. 1905; 8.258, 1904; 8.266, 1903; and 8.326, 1906, as well as the relevant discussion in RLT. 9. See, e.g., EP 2:35, 1898; EP 2:354—57, 1905; EP 2:450, 1908; CP 5.453—-54, 1905; 5-457 19053 5.527, C. 1905; 6.485, 1908; on Peirce’s progress, in 1896—97, toward the

acknowledgment of real possibilities, see also CP 3.527, 1897; 8.308, 1897, as well as Fisch 1986, 194, and Houser in EP 2:xx. 10. We might also say that the pragmatic maxim presupposes scholastic real-

ism not as a purely logical principle but whenever the maxim is applied to any real concept. Again, I am grateful to Tommi Vehkavaara for this formulation. 11. Hausman does not confine himself to discussing Peirce’s scholastic realism but is interested in his “evolutionary realism” in a wider sense. Boler (2004, 2005) also sees scholastic realism as a part of a more general (and evolving) commitment to realism in Peirce. This essay does not deal with the controversy over the development of Peirce’s views on realism vs. nominalism. For a now classic statement of Peirce’s “progress,” see Fisch 1986; for further discussion, cf. Hookway 1985, 112-17; Michael 1988; and Boler 2005. Nor do I discuss Peirce’s relations to his predecessors, such as the scholastics—or Berkeley (see Boler 1980, 2004; de Waal 1996; Mayorga 2007b). 12. See also Rosenthal 2001a. However, in Rosenthal’s view, Peirce’s position is far from theories postulating “repeatable universals”: “The reality Peirce envisions

is not characterized by discrete things or repeatable universals, but by a concrete dynamic continuum inexhaustibly rich in possibilities and potentialities” (9). 13. Hausman (1993) is here paraphrasing, in scholastically realist terms, the central ideas of Peirce’s famous 1878 article “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”

(W 3:257-76; EP 1, chap. 8). On Peirce’s “would-be’s” and potentialities as

286 NOTES TO PAGES 240-42 “powers” of things irreducible to their actualizations, see, e.g., CP 1.414, 1890; 1.420, 1896; 4.172, 18983 5.77N1, 1903; 5.428, 19053 5.436, 19053 5.527—28, Cc. 19053 On

the Aristotelian and medieval sources of these views, see Boler 2005, 20-21. As already noted in the text, Peirce later found his 1878 view of hardness (W 3:266— 67; CP 5.403; EP 1:132—33.) too nominalistic (see, e.g., Boler 2004, 72; Hookway 2000, 52-56). 14. Definitely Peirce rejects standard Platonism—what he calls “nominalistic

Platonism”—in arguing that his real generals are not independently existing things, “separately existing Ideas,” but rather “modes of being in things” (Boler 2005, 18). As Peirce says, “No great realist held that a universal was a thing” (CP 1.27N, 1903, also quoted by Boler). Existence is the mode of being of secondness, while reality is the mode of being of thirdness, and nominalism conflates these two (CP 5.503, 1905; see Boler 2004, 68—69). Even familiar physical objects, on Boler’s reading, are for Peirce “lawlike processes, systems, constituted by Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness” (Boler 2004, 71). The structure of things must, with the Scholastics, be understood as analogous to the structure of thought (70). The

notion of constitution here is, however, metaphysical in a rather traditional sense, not (at least not clearly) transcendental. 15. See further Hausman 1993, chap. 4 passim. That Peirce was not always entirely consistent in his distinction between existence and reality can, however, be seen from the following characterization of scholastic realism: “The absolute

individual can not only not be realized in sense or thought, but cannot exist, properly speaking. For whatever lasts for any time, however short, is capable of logical division, because in that time it will undergo some change in its relations. But what does not exist for any time, however short, does not exist at all. All, therefore, that we perceive or think, or that exists, is general. So far there is truth in the doctrine of scholastic realism. But all that exists is infinitely determinate, and the infinitely determinate is the absolutely individual. This seems paradoxical, but the contradiction is easily resolved. That which exists is the object of a

true conception. This conception may be made more determinate than any assignable conception; and therefore it is never so determinate that it is capable of no further determination” (W 2:390—-91n8; CP 3.93n, 1870). See also the statement at W 2:239 (CP 5.312; EP 1:53, 1868) that “generals must have a real existence.” 16. Hausman (1993, 49) continues: “Thus, if something is not false or not

known to be false, it is possible.” This might strike a contemporary modal theorist as seriously misleading: Aren’t contingent falsehoods possibly true and contingent truths possibly false? Couldn’t Peirce acknowledge this? Is this a problem for Peirce? Cf. CP 3.527 (“The Logic of Relatives,” 1897) for Peirce’s discussion of an epistemic definition of possibility. For a discussion of these and related matters, see also Rosenthal 2001b.

NOTES TO PAGES 242-45 287 17. For these dialectics, see the essays collected in Kim and Sosa 1998. 18. The Kantian “transcendental” approach to the realism issue must be dis-

tinguished from the controversy over transcendental and immanent realism about universals. For the latter in connection with Peirce, see Friedman 1995. Peirce, interestingly, points out an explicit connection between Kant and scholastic realism in the well-known passages of the 1871 Berkeley review in which he discussed real generals and inquiry: “Indeed, what Kant called his Copernican step was precisely the passage from the nominalistic to the realistic view of reality. It was the essence of his philosophy to regard the real object as determined by the mind. That was nothing else than to consider every conception and intuition which enters necessarily into the experience of an object, and which is not transitory and accidental, as having objective validity” (W 2:470-71; EP 1:90—91).

19. In the passage just quoted (CP 5.430), Peirce talks about “experiential evidence,” which of course may legitimately lead us to think that his argument is

not transcendental at all—at least not purely a priori or apodictic. See Haack 1992 for a discussion of Peirce’s defense of scholastic realism as an argument based on the possibility of science as genuine inquiry. For Haack, Peirce’s scholastic realism is a piece of “scientific metaphysics” abductively defended, whereas I have sought to mix up Peirce’s abductive and transcendental concerns in this regard (see Pihlstr6m 2003, chap. 3). See also Rosenthal 2007. A scholar more sensitive to transcendental construals of Peirce than Haack, Rosenthal, or Misak (among others) is Hookway; see his discussion of the relevance of the rejection of nominalism to Peirce’s pragmatic view of truth (Hookway 2000, 91ff., 106-7).

Hookway’s interpretation is not purely transcendental, though (see ibid., 295-98).

20. Hausman (1993, chap. 5) also argues in detail that Peirce’s evolutionary realism differs crucially from such more antirealistically oriented contemporary views as Putnam’s and Rorty’s. I will not take a stance on this debate, but it should be obvious that my proposal for a combination of Kantian transcendental idealism and (Peircean) pragmatism is closer to Putnam’s internal or prag-

matic realism than Hausman’s favorite form of Peircean realism (see also Pihlstr6m 1996, 2003, 2006, 2007).

21. Let me note in passing that I have a broader motivation for defending Peirce’s scholastic realism. “Real generals,” especially modalities, suitably interpreted, may be evoked to account for the notoriously problematic modal structure of transcendental reflection on the necessary conditions for the possibility of various given actualities (cf. Pihlstr6m 2003; 2006). Insofar as the Peircean modalities can themselves be reconstructed along the lines of a transcendental

metaphysics, a reflexive argumentative structure—but not, in my view, any vicious circularity—inevitably results.

288 NOTES TO PAGES 246-49 22. In Pihlstr6m 2004, and elsewhere, I have further tried to argue that the very distinction between hopes and transcendental principles must be softened, if one prefers William James’s pragmatism to Peirce’s. Here we will set this issue aside, however. 23. See, e.g., Hausman 1993, 15, 141, 177-78; Parker 1998; Reynolds 2002; and especially Esposito 2007. For insightful applications of Peirce’s synechism in metaphysics more broadly, see Rosenthal 1986. 24. Compare, however: “Metaphysics consists in the results of the absolute acceptance of logical principles not merely as regulatively valid, but as truths of being. Accordingly, it is to be assumed that the universe has an explanation, the function of which, like that of every logical explanation, is to unify its observed variety. It follows that the root of all being is One; and so far as different subjects have a common character they partake of an identical being. This, or something like this, is the monadic clause of the law. Second, drawing a general induction

from all observed facts, we find all realization of existence lies in opposition, such as attractions, repulsions, visibilities, and centres of potentiality generally. ‘The very hyssop on the wall grows in that chink because the whole universe could not prevent its growing.’ This is, or is a part of, a dyadic clause of the law. Under the third clause, we have, as a deduction from the principle that thought is the mirror of being, the law that the end of being and highest reality is the living impersonation of the idea that evolution generates. Whatever is real is the law of something less real. Stuart Mill defined matter as a permanent possibility of sensation. What is a permanent possibility but a law? Atom acts on atom, causing stress in the intervening matter. Thus force is the general fact of the states of atoms on the line. This is true of force in its widest sense, dyadism. That which corresponds to a general class of dyads is a representation of it, and the dyad is nothing but a conflux of representations. A general class of representations collected into one object is an organized thing, and the representation is that which many such things have in common. And so forth” (CP 1.487, c. 1896). 25. See also Neville 2001 on the significance of Peirce’s rejection of nominalism in theology and the philosophy of religion, especially comparative theology requiring vague categories. 26. This might even be regarded as a transcendental argument locating a necessary condition (synechism) for the possibility of distinguishing between abso-

lute truth and what is in fact not doubted, had Peirce not added the clause that this distinction is possibly “only in the abstract, and in a Pickwickian sense.” I remain puzzled about how, or indeed whether, he draws this distinction. See also Pihlstr6m 2004. 27. Of course, not all Peirce scholars are happy with Margolis’s suggestions: See Hausman and Anderson 1994, as well as Wells 1994. Margolis’s views may be

philosophically relevant to what I am trying to do with (or to?) Peirce, even

NOTES TO PAGES 249-57 289 though they may be inaccurate as scholarly interpretations of Peirce (and may not even have been intended to be accurate in the scholarly sense). 28. For more precise formulations, see again the works already cited above, especially Lewis 1986 and 2001; Plantinga 2003; and Armstrong 2004.

29. I am not saying that empathy would be a sufficient ground for ethics, however. See Pihlstr6m 2005 for a quite different, albeit pragmatist, view. 30. The crucial difference between oneself and others, with a relatively stable

self continuously facing the challenge of ethically acknowledging others, and developing its capacities for acknowledgment—needed, in my view, for ethical responsibility—is lost, if one, when considering different possible worlds as different outcomes of what one might do in a given moral situation, is (as in Lewis 1986) actually considering different things (different persons) in different worlds, viz., mere counterparts and no identity-preserving moral agents. 31. This is not the right place to engage in the growing literature on Peirce’s semiotic and social theory of the self. Very important work in this field has been done by Vincent Colapietro and many others. 32. On the relevance of such continuity and generality, see, e.g., Rush Rhees’s

(2006) reflections on how any use of language, or any single language-game, must (as its condition of possibility) be connected with language more generally,

with the life we lead with language. Going beyond his teacher Wittgenstein’s (1958, I, $2) famous example of the two builders (with their simple, though allegedly complete, language), Rhees argues—transcendentally, I am tempted to say, though this is not his own way of making the point—against the very possibility of such a restricted language-game, and against the (related) possibility of there

being one single conversation not connected with a host of other situations of language-use. This kind of argumentation can be found throughout his posthumously published volume, and it would be an interesting further task to compare Rhees’s and Peirce’s conceptions of generality. Arguably, a similar impossibility of speaking about or understanding other human beings without

speaking to the other(s), without being called upon to respond to them in one’s life more generally, is at work in Emmanuel Levinas’s famous view of ethics

as a “first philosophy.” This is not to say that any of these philosophers would have subscribed to transcendental methodology in their work, but we might be able to reinterpret their possibly somewhat limited self-understanding in this regard. 33. Some other contributions to this conference, especially James Liszka’s, reflect on Peirce’s ethics in much more detail, offering extremely interesting reconstructions of a Peircean pragmatic ethics. In comparison, my investigation remains at a meta-level. 34. A separate investigation ought to be devoted to James’s alleged commitment to nominalism. For some reflections on this topic, see Pihlstr6m 2009.

290 NOTES TO PAGE 258 35. Again, see, however, Misak’s (2004a, 2004b) defense of Peirce’s moral cognitivism. I do not wish to take any firm stand on how exactly Peirce’s remarks in the well-known 1898 lecture ought to be interpreted. See also Rosa Mayorga’s very important suggestion (in her essay in this book) that Peirce’s discussion of “vital matters” must be connected with his criticism of nominalism. It is a nominalist error to try to reason about vital matters; the nominalist fails to realize how fallible individual reasoning is (see CP 1.627, 1898, also cited by Mayorga). 36. I should like to thank Chris Skowroniski for his kind invitation to present

this essay at the conference on Peirce’s normative thought (Opole University,

Poland, June 26-30, 2007). Part of the material was also presented at the conference “Applying Peirce” (University of Helsinki, Finland, June 11-13, 2007).

The following people, among others, have shaped my picture of Peirce (either by directly commenting on, or challenging, the views defended in the present

essay or more generally and indirectly), which I gratefully acknowledge: Douglas Anderson, Mats Bergman, Vincent Colapietro, Elizabeth Cooke, Leila Haaparanta, Peter H. Hare, Christopher Hookway, Nathan Houser, Ivo A. Ibri, Erkki Kilpinen, Heikki A. Kovalainen, James Liszka, Rosa Mayorga, Cheryl Misak, Dan Nesher, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Jukka Nikulainen, Jaime Nubiola, Mateusz Oleksy, Helmut Pape, Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, Henrik Rydenfelt, T. L. Short, Tommi Vehkavaara, Cornelis de Waal, and Kenneth R. Westphal. Thanks also the participants of my seminar on Peirce’s pragmatism and scholastic realism at the University of Tampere (spring 2007). The topic of this essay is also discussed in Pihlstr6m (2009), chap. 6.

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Contributors

a> Mats Bergman received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Helsinki in 2004. Currently he is a research fellow of the Academy of Finland and the Department of Social Research, University of Helsinki. He is the author of Peirce’s Philosophy of Communication (2009).

Vincent Colapietro is Liberal Arts Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University (University Park Campus). He is the author of Peirce’s Approach to the Self (1989), A Glossary of Semiotics (1993), and Fateful Shapes of Human Freedom (2003). In addition to numerous articles on pragmatism and especially Peirce, he has written on a variety of topics, including jazz, cinema, and psychoanalysis. He is completing a study of the intersections between pragmatism and psychoanalysis. Cornelis de Waal received his PhD from the University of Miami in 1997.

He is associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and is editor-in-chief of the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. From 1998 till 2011 he was one of the editors of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition (1981—). He has written or edited several books, including On Peirce (2001), On Pragmatism (2005), and Susan Haack: A Lady of Distinctions: The Philosopher Responds to Her Critics (2007).

James Liszka received his PhD in philosophy from the New School for Social Research in 1978. He is currently dean of the College of Arts and

Sciences and professor of philosophy at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He is also visiting professor at the China Youth University for {309 $

310 CONTRIBUTORS Political Sciences in Beijing, and past humanities fellow at the University

of Toronto, Scarborough College. He cofounded the Alaska Quarterly Review and was past editor of the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal. His books include The Semiotic of Myth (1989), A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce (1996), and Moral Competence (1999).

Rosa Maria Mayorga obtained her PhD at the University of Miami. She was assistant professor in the Philosophy Department at Virginia Tech for several years and is now chair of the Department of Arts and Philosophy at Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus. She is the author of From Realism to “Realicism”: On the Metaphysics of Charles Sanders Peirce (2007) and has published in the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Anthropos, Anuario Filosofico, Contemporary Pragmatism, Social Theory and Practice, and Review of Metaphysics.

Mateusz Wieslaw Oleksy, born in Ld6dz in 1974, received his MA in philosophy in 1996 and his PhD in philosophy in 2001 from the Faculty of History and Philosophy, University of Lodz. He was assistant

professor of philosophy in the Department of Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, where he taught courses on American philosophy,

including pragmatism and neopragmatism, the pragmatic turn in Western thought, and Schopenhauer. His publications include four book chapters and more than twenty articles published in Poland, Germany, and England. He was cofounder and editor-in-chief of the online philosophy journal Hybris and recipient of prestigious scholarships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Foundation for Polish Science. An avid mountain climber, Mateusz fell off the Chan Tengri gla-

cier in Kyrgyzstan on 23 July 2008. His body has not been recovered. Before setting off on this expedition he had completed a book titled Realism and Individualism: Charles S. Peirce and the Threat of Modern Nominalism (2008).

Helmut Pape, completed his PhD at the University of Hamburg with a thesis on the semiotics of C. S. Peirce. He taught philosophy at the universities of Hamburg, Freiburg, and Hannover, where he completed his Habilitation on the ontology of visual properties. He is now extraordinary professor for philosophy at the University of Bamberg. In 2004

CONTRIBUTORS 311 and 2005 he worked as a research fellow for practical philosophy at the Forschungsinstitut fiir Philosophie Hannover (Hannover Research Institute for Philosophy) on a research project connected with the development of an interactive human ethics. In 2006 and 2007 he taught

theoretical philosophy and philosophy of science at the University of Darmstadt. In 2010 he became a research fellow of the research group Embodiment and Picture Act at Humboldt University in Berlin and began teaching philosophy of science and analytical philosophy at the University of Augsburg. He has written about 120 papers and four books and edited about thirty-five books, editions, and collections on Peirce, James, pragmatism, semiotics, philosophy of language, visual ontology, and philosophy of mind.

Kelly A. Parker is professor of philosophy, environmental studies, and liberal studies at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. His research centers on the history of classical American pragmatism and on the application of pragmatist ideas to contemporary concerns. He is the author of The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought (1998) and of articles on Josiah Royce, William James, John Dewey, and environmental philoso-

phy. He plays trumpet, drums, and hand percussion in the steel drum band Steel Doin’ It.

Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen is professor of semiotics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He received the MPhil in computer science in 1997 and

the DPhil in philosophy in 2002. He has published logical and philosophical papers and edited several books; he is the author of Signs of

Logic: Peircean Themes on the Philosophy of Language, Games, and Communication (2006).

Sami Pihlstrém received his PhD from the University of Helsinki, Finland, in 1996, and since 2006 has been professor of practical philosophy at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. Since 2009 he has also been

the director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of several books and dozens of articles on pragmatism and related topics, both in English and in Finnish. His recent books include Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View (2003), Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense (2005), “The Trail of the Human Serpent Is Over Everything”:

312 CONTRIBUTORS Jamesian Perspectives on Mind, World, and Religion (2008), and Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology (2009).

Ignacio Redondo received his PhD from the University of Navarra in 2009. He is currently professor of communication theory and social theory at the International University of La Rioja, Spain, and an assiduous collaborator of the Grupo de Estudios Peirceanos (University of Navarra). His research is mainly centered on Peirce’s concept of the sign as a medium of communication from its early developments in Peirce’s

juvenilia to its more mature logical and metaphysical underpinnings in his later semeiotic. He is also interested in the connections between classical pragmatism and the beginnings of American social science.

Krzysztof (Chris) Piotr Skowroriski, PhD, currently teaches contemporary philosophy, esthetics, cultural anthropology, Polish philosophy, and American philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, Opole University, Poland. He co-organizes annual conferences on American and European values and is the author of Values and Powers: Re-reading the Philosophy

of American Pragmatism (2009) and Santayana and America: Values,

Liberties, Responsibility (2007). He also coedited Under Any Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana (with Matthew Flamm; 2007), American and European Values: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives (with Matthew Flamm and John Lachs; 2008), and The Continuing Relevance of John Dewey: Reflection on Aesthetics, Morality, Science, and Society (with Larry Hickman, Matthew Flamm, and Jennifer Rea; 2011).

Index

a priori method, 85, 92, 191, 204, 208, 265 authority, 60-61, 204; method of, 85, 92,

Abbot, Francis Ellingwood, 236 207-8; regarding morals, 91, 107 abduction, 93, 197, 204, 208, 239, 267 autonomy, 170; cognitive, xiv, 151, 153, 166

abortion, 84, 85, 88, 93, 95 Avicenna, 265 abstraction, 230, 276; casuists rejection

of, 97; generalizing power of, 168; bacteria, behavior of, 262 hypostatic, 151, 165-66, 168—69; necessity Bain, Alexander, 56

of, 164; and self-control, 151, 165, 168; Baraka, Amiri, 23

self-critical, 170 Barnouw, Jeffrey, 277

activism, 126-34 Barthes, Roland, 29

actualism, see Armstrong, D. M. belief, 14, 54-56, 77, 136; best, 186—89, 191-93, adequacy: of the sign, 140; pragmatistic, 197, 203—4, 211; fixation of, 8, 61-62,

140—41, 272 83-86, 92, 96, 135, 243, 262-63, 272; and

admirable, the, 28, 63, 108, 110, 259; habits, 63, 136-37, 140; justification of,

per se, 111, 142—43, 221 263; moral, 74, 87, 91-92, 95, 263;

aesthetics, see esthetics practical, 55, 108. See also habit

agapasm, 246 Bergman, Mats, xiii, 150, 226-27, 267, 270, agapastic evolution, 77 276, 278, 280, 282, 290, 309

agape, 256 Berkeley, George, 105, 198, 285; Peirce’s

Alexander, Christopher, 30 review of, 194, 237, 258, 286

Allison, Henry E., 234 Bernstein, Richard, 143

amelioration, 127, 129, 141—45, 148. Black Power movement, 36

See also Meliorism Boler, John, 2.41, 285-86

Anancastic evolution, 77 Brandom, Robert, 190, 202 Anderson, Douglas, 72, 288, 290 Branford Marsalis Quartet, 37, 41, 43

anthetics, 172, 265 Brock, Jarrett, 216, 280 anthropology: Kant’s, 45, 81; pragmatic, 81 Brown, Sean, xv

anthropomorphism, Peirce’s, 25, 259 Buchler, Justus, 19

antirealism, 119, 186, 194, 287 Burks, Arthur W., 277 Aristotle, 267; esthetics, 173; ethics, 64—65;

self-control, 275; teleology, 45, 240, 261 Calderoni, Mario, 238 Armstrong, D. M., 249, 288; actualism, Cambridge Conference Lectures, xi—xiii, 87,

232-36, 242, 251, 283 90, 101, 102, 124, 125, 231, 257, 264

Armstrong, Louis, 33, 36 Carey, James, 214

artificial intelligence, see intelligence Carter, John, 5, 24 assertion; normativity of, 216-19; Peirce’s Cartesianism, 83, 105, 199, 207, 274 theory of, 215-19, 280; rationality of, 190; casuistry, xiii, 48, 72, 80, 97; new, 79, 97-98;

sheet of, 182-83 and logica utens, 98; Peirce on, 265.

Austin, J. L., 216 See also new casuistry | 313 }

314 INDEX categories, 18-19, 62, 103-04, 114, 250, 255, Craig, R. T., 214 256, 269; derived from phenomenology, Critic, 46, 51, 67,184, 223, 274 7; Kant’s 234-35, 257; new list of, 283. See critical common-sensism, see common-

also firstness; secondness; thirdness sensism causation; final, 52-53, 56, 262, 281; critical ethics, 51

mechanical, 52, 56 critical logic, see critic Cavell, Stanley, 22, 25 Cudworth, Ralph, 45 Chopin, Frédéric, 28; Revolutionary Etude, Cumberland, Richard, 45

30-33, 260 Cumming, Naomi, 14-5, 26, 27

Clapperton, Jane, 270

cognitivism, 119, 123, 279, 283, 289 Darwin, Charles, 93; theory of

Coker, Wilson, 27 evolution, 52, 262

Colapietro, Vincent, xii, 143-45, 270, 272-74, Davidson, Donald, 202-3

276, 280, 282, 289-90, 309 Davis, Art, 35

Coleman, Ornette, 39 Davis, Miles, 36

Coltrane, Alice, 41, 260 De Tienne, 228, 280—82 Coltrane, John, xili, 4, 24, 260; Ascension, de Waal, Cornelis, xiii, 150, 180, 266-67, 269, 38, 40, 43, 261; A Love Supreme, 28, 34-43; 285, 290, 309

numerology, 42 deliberation, 134, 196, 272; critical, 137; free, Coltrane, Ravi, 41-42 96; imaginative, 271; moral, 48, 252-53;

commens, 230 rational, 159

common sense, 75, 77, 100, 130, 190, 207; Descartes, René, 84, 105

and morality, 48 description inherently normative, 6

common-sensism, 144; critical, xiii, 77, 83, Devitt, Michael, 283 98-100, 126, 144, 188—89; Scottish, 45 Dewey, John, 20, 103, 112, 125, 145-48, 255, communication; contemporary theory, xiv, 258, 270; community, 212; democracy, 71, 214-15; normativity of, 214-31; Peirce’s 82; empiricism, 118; ethics, 82; habit, 133,

theory, 216; rhetorical turn in, 215 140; indeterminate situation, 263; community, 60, 62, 222, 274; ethical, 71, 82, liberalism, 212; meliorism, 126-32, 145; 132; ideal, 203, 205; of inquiry, 51, 70, 86, pragmatism, 127-30; right action, 68; 108, 112-13, 122-23, 185-86, 193, 209-12, Studies in Logical Theory, 270; truth,

262; is a kind of person, 146 112-14, 117-18; warranted assertability, 194 community-consciousness, 76, 90-91 dialecticism, 59 complete; sign, 31, 164; symbol, 30, 53, 280 doubt, Cartesian, 83-84, 274; method of,

concrete reasonableness, 56, 63, 140, 230, 83-84; paper, 84; and truth, 187 267, 269; development of, 25, 111, 121, 221; doubt-belief theory, 83-84, 126, 263

harmonic state of, 229; ultimate end, 64, Dretske, Fred, 53 70, 109, 262

conscience, 76-77, 90—91, 108; analysis of, education, 81; and meliorism, 129; a

48; formation of, 72; unreasonable, 83, self-interrogative process, 9

107; Whewell on, 45 educationalism, 59 conservatism, 48, 75, 123, 126-34, 147, egoism, 16, 248

270-71; dogmatic, 197; moral, 74-77, 92; Eisele, Carolyn, 277 Peircean, 147; and sentimentalism, 108, Eliot, George: meliorism, 269

121, 126, 147 Ellington, Duke, 4, 34 continuity, notion of, see synechism emotivism, 98

Conway, Moncure, 259 empathy, 248, 288; metaphysical ground

Cooke, Elizabeth, 290 of, 251

Cooper, Anthony Ashley, see Shaftesbury ends, 261; classification of, 59, 61-63;

cosmological optimism, 271 cognitivist view of, 103; dynamic, 62; cosmology, evolutionary, 109, 120, 180, 241, esthetics, 47, 49; ethics, 49, 52, 65, 80; and

246, 255 ideals, 59, 67; immediate, 63; of inquiry,

counterparts, 251 173; and self-control, 56; in themselves,

INDEX 315 79; in view, 68, 144; ultimate, xili, 59, Fisch, Max H., 285

61—63, 67, 69-70, 79 Foster, Paul, 249

entelism, 59 Fox, William Johnson, 259 error, 220; experience of, 259; individual the Freadman, Anne, 259

source of, 105 freedom, 164-71

Esposito, Joseph, 246—47, 250, 287 Freud, Sigmund, 3 esthetics, 49, 108, 123, 143, 277; Aristotle’s

view of, 173; defined, 181; normative Galileo Galilei, 267 science of, xi, 28, 45-47, 67-68, 141-43, Galton, Francis, 274 181-84, 221, 254; pure ethics, 108, 117, 1233 game theory, 175, 279

study of ends, 49, 142; and self-criticism, Garrison, James, 34, 42, 260 229; study of ideals, 173, 221. See also generalizability, 60-63, 68-69, 261-62, 273;

ethics; logic habit, 109; moral control, 161

ethica docens / ethica utens, 95-98 generals, 103—4, 168, 227, 236, 238, 240, ethics, 44-82, 141-43, 173, 221, 224; 242-44, 246, 253, 266; the admirable per experiential, 96—99; deliberative nature se, 111; constructivist vs historicist reading of, 121; and empathy, 251-52; as first of, 249; developmental, 240; real, 249-53, philosophy, 289; of inquiry, 89, 205-7; 285-87; reasonable, 109, 143, 229; values,

and morality, 87-88, 92; Nazi, 85; 152. See also thirdness; universals normative science of, xi, 47—51, 72, 82; genocide, 263

Peirce’s first study of, 45; Peirce a Giddins, Gary, 33-34, 36 non-cognitivist about, 102; practical Gintis, Herbert, 278 science of, 47—48, 72, 80-81, 264; pure, 49, grammar; of ethics, 46, 51-58, 65, 67;

108, 123; rests on a teleological view of semeiotic, 51; speculative, 11, 46 51,

order, 261; of self-control, 149; and 223, 274 self-criticism, 229; social, 80; study of graphs, logical, 182 ethical reasoning, 65-70; theoretical vs greed, gospel of, 132, 248, 273 practical, 72-79. See also esthetics; logic Grice, Paul, 216 eudaimonia, 65

eugenics, 147, 274 Haack, Susan, 268, 287

euthanasia, 96 Haaparanta, Leila, 290

evolution; and ethics, 45, 256, 265; finious, Haas, Peter, 263 53, 262; of habits, 20; and meliorism, 271; Habermas, Jiirgen, 90 post-Darwinian, 264; and sentiments, habit, 72, 121, 134-41, 176-81, 2.40, 271; of 107. See also cosmology; Darwin; love; action, 175-76, 183, 200, 214, 225, 237, 253;

metaphysics and belief, 55-56, 63, 84; of conservatism,

evolutionism, 59 48; Dewey, 133; evolution of, 20—21, 109, existence, 23, 62, 64, 80, 109, 115-18, 143, 222, 201, 229-30; of feeling, 181-82; and law,

225, 229, 259-60, 288; and possible 272, 278; law of, 48; as logical worlds, 232-33, 235, 241, 251; vs reality, interpretants, 278; and meliorism, 125—48;

103-5, 122, 240, 266-67, 285-86 moral, 69-70, 77, 90; naturalistic

existential graphs, 182 interpretation of, 278; of reasoning, 75, experimentalism, 117 94, 99, 181; and self-control, 137, 159-60, experimentation, philosophical, 5, 21, 271 215, 220-22, 272, 274; sentimental, 145; and thirdness, 109, 200

fact-value dichotomy, 258 habituation, 139, 145, 214, 274 fallibilism, 3-4, 100, 122, 187-89, 192, 197, Hare, Peter, 290 220; and conservatism, 76; contrite, 22, Hatten, Robert, 14 123; pragmatic, 12; two kinds of, 191 Hausman, Carl, 239—41, 243, 245, 246, 285-87

Feibleman, James, 49 hedonics, 80 fictionalism, 233 Herbert, Edward, 45

feminist ethics, 79 Hegel, G. W. F., 10, 105 firstness, 61, 111, 114, 250, 266, 286 Hilpinen, Risto, 175, 216

316 INDEX Hintikka Jaakko, 175 inquiry, theory of, 83-86, 96, 185, 198, Hobbes, Thomas, 45, 87 243-44, 262; applicability to ethics, 71, 89,

Hodges, Johnny, 34 99; and conservatism 129-30; and Holm-Hudson, Kevin, 27 meliorism, 128

Hooker, John Lee, 43 instinct, 75, 87, 90, 93, 102, 116; belief, 201, Hookway, Christopher, 102, 241, 245, 257, 236; biological, 265; for guessing, 267;

270, 273, 285, 287, 290 habit, 130, 271; moral, 264; reason, 94,

Houser, Nathan, xii, xv, 241, 266, 276, 280, 107, 180; relation to sentiment, 102, 107-8,

281, 285, 290 116, 118, 123, 258. See also abduction; il

Hulswit, Menno, 226—27 lume natural; conservatism; sentiment

humanism, 13 instrumentalism, 15, 236

Hume, David, 58, 105; incipient intelligence; of American popular culture,

utilitarianism of, 261 22-23; applied to inquiry, 71, 133;

artificial, xiv, 151, 153-57, 166—67, 170-71;

Ibri, Ivo, 290 divine, 74; human, xiv, 151-57, 213;

idea-potentiality, 20, 143 plasticity of habit, 145; scientific, 130-31, ideals, 275; classification of, 59, 62-63; of 220; vs tradition, 132. See also self-control conduct, 111, 142, 224; describable intentional action, 52-54; animals capable phenomena, 6; esthetics the science of, of, 54. See also self-control 221; ethics the study of, 49, 173; and interpretant, 10, 217, 224, 228, 281; applied to habits, 178-81; living forms, 230; moral, music, 31-37; classification of, 5; critical, 91; religious, 110; in speculative rhetoric 200; emotional, 37, 272; energetic, 21, 28,

214-30 38, 200, 272; final, 202, 272; final logical,

identity; of a belief, 135; communal, 197; 21, 200; final practical, 200; logical, 21, 28, criteria of, 165, 242; of a habit, 135, 278; of 38, 126, 137-41, 200, 272; production of, objects referred to, 162-63, 276; personal, 227, 280-81; ultimate logical, 137-39, 225. 232, 251-53, 288; transworld, 232, 250-54; See also semeiotic

a value, 162-63 interpretant-development, 126

ignorance, 15; experience of, 259; veil of, 85 intuitionists, ethical, 45 il lume naturale, 93, 122, 267

incest, 86-87, 93, 264 James, William, 259, 268; Cambridge individual, 109, 150-51, 209, 240, 249, 266, Conference Lectures, 101-2, 283; 284; absolute, 104, 240, 256, 267, 286; commitment to nominalism, 115-18, concrete, 232, 235; never final, 251; and 289; on ethics, 114-17, 257-58;

habits, 146; identity of, 250; and pragmatism of, 103, 125, 187-89, 237, 287; personhood, 222, 249; secondness, 103-5, relativism of, 102; on truth, 112-15, 188;

114; source of error, 105, 108 will to believe, 265 individual abstract object, 169 James Sr., Henry, 273 individualism, 59, 105. See also nominalism jazz, 33-36; as Innovation and inquiry, 131; community of, 16, 51, 70, 186, improvisation, 4; tradition of

196-97, 205, 209-12; degenerate, 208; experimentation, 22-24 disinterested, 203—4, 210; end of, 87, 138, Johansen, Dines, 259, 280 144, 192, 243; ethics of, 89, 207; genuine, Jones, Elvin, 34, 39, 42, 260 71, 198, 204, 209, 287; limit of, 185, 192-95, Jones, LeRoi, see Baraka 203, 208; metaphysical, 234, 236; method Jonson, Albert, xiii, 97

of, 120, 207; moral telos of, 205; Joswick, H., 226 normative, 133-32, 144, 223, 273; Jouffroy, Theodor, 45, 261 normative conditions of, 70, 82, 256; Jourdain, P. E. B., 162 phenomenological, 7; philosophic, ; jurisprudence, 81 pseudo, 208-10; scientific, 90, 98, 121,

128—29, 174, 215, 222, 224, 281; summum Kannisto, Toni, 283 bonum of, 211; transcendental argument Kant, Immanuel, 237, 257, 268; categorical

for, 244 imperative, 69, 97; freedom, 276;

INDEX 317 hypothetical imperatives, 66, 69; ethics of, 162; experimental, 64, 243; Kant metaphysics, 234-35, 283-84; nominalism on, 45; natural, 94; normative, Xi, xiv, 44, of, 105; Peirce’s study of, 45; pragmatic 50, 144, 161, 172-74, 181, 219, 223, 264;

knowledge, 81; teleological judgment, objective, 102; rationale of, 180; rooted in

262; things in themselves, 86; the social principle, 222-3; rule governed, transcendental idealism, 234, 287; xiv; and self-control, xiv, 94, 151-58, transcendental realism, 232, 286. See also 160—66, 170, 174, 182, 276; and semeiotic,

anthropology 46-47, 143, 220, 277; sentimental ground Kantianism, 97, 2.45 of, 270; symbolic, 279; theory of Kent, Beverly, 172 deliberate thinking, 174; Whewell on, 45; Kilpinen, Erkki, 290 Wundt on, 46. See also critic; grammar; King, Archbishop Franzo, 260 interpretant King, Patricia, 262 logica docens / logica utens, 93-95, 133, 180 King, Reverend Month Marina, 260 logical machines, 151, 157-58, 166

Kitchener, Karen, 262-63 love, evolutionary, 132, 248, 256

Kirchheiss, J. H., xviii Loux, Michael J., 235 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 61, 262 Lowe, E. J., 235, 284 Koonz, Claudia, 263

Kovalainen, Heikki A., 290 Mackie, John, 87, 119

Krolikowski, W.P., 273 Mahavishnu Orchestra, 35

Kripke, Saul, 233, 249 mapping, 277

Kruse, Felicia, 14, 27 Margolis, Joseph, 249-50, 288 Kurzweil, Ray, 156 Marsalis, Branford, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 43 Marsalis, Delfeayo, 36 Langer, Suzanne, 27 Marsalis, Wynton, 36, 40, 41, 42

language-game, 289 mathematics, 47, 80, 90, 173; no certainty in,

Latraverse, Francois, 270 29; pure, 190

Laudan, Larry, 66 Mayorga, Rosa, xiii, 283, 285, 289—90, 310 law; abductive, 206; of the evolution of McLaughlin, John, 35, 40 thought, 224; of habit, 48, 129, 134, 181-82, meaning, rule governed, 176-78 229, 272, 278; of liberty, 19; Kantian awe mediation, semeiotic, 226 and respect before, 261; legitimacy of, 71; medical ethics, 78 of mind, 109, 247, 249; moral, 95; of meliorism, xiii, 125—48, 267, 271; activist nature, 69, 109, 114, 122, 167, 242; reality conception of 127—28; social, 270. See also

of, 103-4; of the relation of phenomena amelioration to ends, 49; scientific, 121, 266; social, 217; metaphysics, xiv, 47, 103-06, 109, 287;

of thought, 46 analytic, 249; of continuity, 253;

Leppakoski, Markku, 283 entanglement with ethics, 257;

Levinas, Emmanuel, 289 evolutionary, 77, 256; modal, 231-58, 283; Lewis, David, 232-36, 241-42, 249, of morality, 248; ontological, 236-37;

251, 279, 288 pragmatist, 231-58; relation to logic, 95; liberalism, 212 scientific, 244, 287; transcendental, 232, Lidov, David, 14 234, 237, 245, 287; of wickedness, 16—17, Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, 36, 40, 41, 42 249. See also nominalism; realism Liszka, James, xili, 223, 266, 279, 280, 282, methodeutic, 1, 216, 223, 274, 282; ethical,

289—90, 309—10 46, 51, 70-72 Liszt, Franz, 30 Meyer, Leonard, 27 Locke, John, 86, 105 Michael, Fred, 285

locked-in syndrome, 275 Mill, John Stuart, 105, 288 logic, 205; abstract nature of, 142; critical Mills, C. Wright, 125 (see Critic); dependent on esthetics, 173, Milton, John, 13 221; dependent on ethics, 49, 142, 181, 221, mind; corporate, 208-9; filiation to God,

264; diagrammatic, 180; division of, 51; 260; functionalist view of, 158;

318 INDEX fundamental law of, 109; human, 153; normative proposition, 66 Kant’s use of the term, 81; law of, 247, norms; convergence, 71; describable, 6; 249; quasi, 216, 282. See also commons ethical, 70, 256; of inquiry, 256; moral, Misak, Cheryl, 142, 272, 290; Cambridge 221; self-control, 164; social, 130; in Conference Lectures, 102, 266; Peirce a speculative rhetoric, 214-30 moral cognitivist, 283, 289; self control, Nubiola, Jaime, 267, 280 270; truth, 71, 185-88, 191-93, 196, 243,

266, 287 Ockham, William, 266

modal realism, see realism Ockham’s razor, 213

moral life, 255 object, 27, 162, 217, 228; abstract, 169-70; of moral problems, 83 discourse, 218; dynamical, 36, 43, 194-95, moral psychology, 72 226; of a final opinion, 86, 244; general, moral sentimentalism, 150 244; immediate, 37, 41, 104, 185, 193; of moral sentiments, xiii, 90-97, 99, 131, 191, inquiry, 121, 241; intentional, 163; of

263-64 musical discourse, 29-33, 40; queer, 87,

morality, 58, 77, 82, 85, 91; accumulation 122; of the sign, 10, 199, 225. See also

of common sense, 48; critical common- interpretant; semeiotic sensist approach to, 99; and ethica docens, objective idealism, 247 95-96; distinct from ethics, 48, 61, 72, objectivist stance, 120, 211 74-75, 87-88; metaphysics of, 248, 256; Oleksy, Mateusz, xiv, 276, 290, 310 and self-control, 160, 164, 167; tendency open-next-step-principle, 156-57, 167

to conservatism, 73, 130 otherness, 252-54, 256, 265 Morris, Charles, 184

motives, 3, 63; classification of, 59-62 pancratism, 59

musement, 18-19 panpsychism, 248 music; its formal features, 26; as semeiosis, Pape, Helmut, xiv, 277, 290, 310

10-15 Papini, Giovanni, 278

musical work, 29-30, 40 Parker, Charlie, 23 musicology, 26 Parker, Kelly, xii, 6, 24, 221-22, 225, 229-30, 287, 311

narrative ethics, 79 Parmenides, 247 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, 27, 28; musical Parmentier, R.J., 124

semiology of, 29-30 particulars, 240, 250-51; concrete, 233 naturalism, ethical, 119, 121 Pearson, Karl, 58

naturalistic fallacy, 121 percipuum, 201 Nazi ethics, 85 personhood, 16, 150-54, 208-9, 222, 249-53. neopragmatism, 258, 283 See also identity Nesher, Dan, 276, 290 Pfeifer, David, 281

Neville, Robert C., 288 Phaneron, 182

new casuistry, see casuistry phaneroscopy, see phenomenology Nietzsche, Friedrich, 75 phenomenology, xi, 47, 143, 173, 182;

Niiniluoto, Ilkka, 290 Peirce’s, 2-10

Nikulainen, Jukka, 290 philosophic traits of character, 1 Noé, Alva, 157 Pietarinen, Ahti-Veikko, xiv, 216, 218, 290, 311 nominalism, 103-06, 239; and Dewey, Pihlstr6m, Sami, xiv, 264, 277, 311-12 113-14; and inquiry, 244; and James, Plantinga, Alvin, 233, 235-36, 249, 251, 288 114-15, 117, 289; leading to selfishness, 256; Plato, 10; divided Line, 42; forms, 119, 240;

modern, 194, 206; Platonistic, 285; sreat ethical thinker, 46; ideals, 275; Peirce’s rejection of, 248-49, 256, 287-89; philosophy of thirdness, 21; queer possible worlds, 233; vs realism, 285; objects, 122; realism, 234, 266—67; reductionistic, 121; relativism of, 112. See teleology of, 45, 261 also individualism; metaphysics; realism Platonism, nominalistic, 285

normative naturalism, 66, 71 play, 18-20; inquiry as a form of, 7

INDEX 319 playfulness, spirit of, 2, 5, 18 rationalism, 59

pluralism, 260 rationality, 56, 108, 273; vs reasonableness

poet, touch of, 2 98; and self-control, 151, 154-60,

positivism, 236 170, 180 possibilia, 242 rationalization, 74; vs reasoning, 87, 92, 98; possibilism, 233 of the universe, 69, 110, 114

possibility; in contemporary realism, 257; Rawls, John, 69 crucial notion for ethics, 251, 256; realicism, 266; metaphysical, 103-06, different notions of, 241-42; human, 255; 121; moral, xili, 101, 106—12, mere, 232, 235, 241-42; metaphysics of, 122, 283 232; permanent, 288; pure, 241; real, realism, 103-12, 269; ethical, xiii, 66, 103, 236-45, 252, 255, 257, 284-85; realist 118-24; evolutionary, 285, 287-88; theory about, 233. See also generals; internal, 235, 287; Lewisian, 233, 241, 279;

potentiality metaphysical, 103-4, 193-94, 23-34, 245,

possible worlds, 232-33, 241, 251, 254, 256 257; moral, xiv, 86—87, 101, 231-58; modal,

political economy, 80 XIV, 231-34, 238, 240, 245; non-

polity, 80 foundational, 29; non-natural, 121;

Porter, Lewis, 39 Platonic, 266

potentiality, 251; real, 241, 253, 257; realist pragmatist, xiv, 251, 255; transcendental, 232,

account of, 255 234, 286. See also nominalism; realicism;

Potter, Vincent, xil, 6, 132, 221 scholastic realism

practics, 49, 172, 182 reality vs existence, see existence pragmaticism, 103, 105, 120-1, 123, 173-76, reason, Peirce’s account of, 94 188, 226, 229, 238-39; proof of, 176, 2473 reasonableness, 215; concretion of, 225, 229; prope-positivism, 236; and semantic efficient, 56; growth of, 117, 123, 222, 227,

games, 178-79 229, 282; vs reason, 100; of the universe,

pragmatic maxim, 105, 109, 111, 136-37, 94, 110. See also concrete reasonableness; 157, 202, 213, 225, 229, 238-39, 241, 247, rationalization

267, 285 reasoning machine, 158

pragmatics, 46, 79-82, 178, 184, 277 Redondo, Ignacio, xiv, 279, 312 pragmatism, 3, 8-9, 22, 105, 120-21, 145, Réthoré, Joelle, 216 236-37, 247; Brandomian, 190; applied to reformism, Peirce’s assault on, 147 ethics, 69, 82, 123, 289; and habits, 136-38, relativism, 113; esthetic, 181; ethical, 115-19,

140; humanistic, 270; Jamesian, 187-89, 124, 268; James’s, 102; of nominalism, 112; 255; Kant, 81, 234-35, 283; logical maxim, about truth, 123-24 239; melioristic, xiii. 126—27, 133, 148, 270; religion, philosophy of, 248

regulative principle, 246; summum religionism, 59 bonum, 64, 109, 143, 211; Rortyan, 187; representamen, 32, 37, 217

Schillerian, 270; transformative Respighi, Ottorino, 41 conception of, 125. See also Dewey; Reynolds, Andrew, 287

pragmaticism; truth Rhees, Rush, 289

Prior, Arthur, 278 rhetoric, 46, 51, 145, 184; formal, 51, 70; prope-positivism, 236 scientific, 223-24; speculative, xiv, 11,

proposition, 218 183-84, 215, 224, 274, 282; universal, 223. purpose, as operative desire, 54 See also methodeutic

Putnam, Hilary, 71, 233, 235, 252, 258, Rodrigues, Cassiano, 263

283, 287 Rorty, Richard, 125, 187, 287 Rosenthal, Sandra B., 285—87

quasi mind, see mind Royce, Josiah, 156

Quine, W. V. O., 242, 278 Rubinstein, Ariel, 278 Ruskin, John, 20

racism, 92—93, 264-65 Russell, Bertrand, 278 Ransdell, Joseph, 219, 281, 283 Rydenfelt, Henrik, 290

320 INDEX sacred, sense of, 2, 16 Sellars, Wilfrid, 198 Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Selten, Reinhart, 179

Church, 38 semantics; game theoretical, 175-84; Sandel, Michael, 212 possible worlds, 277

Santaella, Lucia, 259, 282 semMi0SiS, 163, 228, 235, 281, 282; and music,

Santana, Carlos, 35, 40 10—12

Santayana, George, 19 semiotics, 46, 51, 143, 164, 199, 215, 220, 227,

satisficing, 55 277; dependent on ethics, 44; intelligence, Savan, David, 6, 220 166; and musicology, 15, 26-28, 34, 37, 40 Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, 120 sentimentalism, 108, 131-32, 1473 Schiller, F. C. S., 125, 167; humanism, 13, 270 conservative, 110; moral, 150

Schiller, Friedrich, 19-20 sentiments, xill, 6, 75, 98, 107—08, 116, 119, Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 46 130-31, 134-35; social, 223; three, 205, scholastic realism, xiv, 101—4, 110, 122, 211-12, 270. See also moral sentiments 185-86, 193-94, 237-46, 257-58, 266, 284; Shafer-Landau, Russ, 120, 268 and ethical realism, 283; vs evolutionary Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl

realism, 285; extreme, 238-39, 2.44, 265; of, 45 Kant, 286; and modal realism, 231, 2.45, sham reasoning, 74, 91-92, 98

251; moderate, 267; and pragmatism, Shakespeare, William, 13 236-37, 257, 285; and synechism, 232, 243, Shepp, Archie, 23, 35

246-50, 254, 256. See also existence; Short, Thomas, 5, 54, 56, 227, 272, 290

realism; Scotus sign, 12, 20—21, 134, 163, 217, 227—28, 282; science, 88; basic, 73; classification of, xiii, action, 11, 54, 280; classification 46—47, 80, 172, 254; demarcation of, 209; (typology) of, 51, 60-62; complete, 31-32, of ethics, xi, 48-51, 78, 88, 106; method of, 164; defined, 10, 217; intentional object of, 61—62, 83-87, 89, 97, 187, 193, 197, 205-7, 163; musical, 31; pragmatic meaning of, 223, 265; normative, Xi, 45-47, 134, 142-43, 139, 2253 theory of, 15, 24, 44, 216, 224,

172-74, 254-56; philosophical, 77, 123; 272-73; thought, 162, 198-99, 208, 217; positive, xi, 66, 102, 190, 2363 practical, 47, triadic, 53-54, 225; vehicle, 30-31, 37. See 72-81, 264; pseudo, 209; pure, 72, 132, 257, also grammar; interpretant; object;

270; and religion, 247; self-corrective, semelotic 197-98, 207, 2303 spirit of, 210; theoretical, singulars, 104, 239, 266-67

47, 72, 125. See also inquiry; logic Simon, Herbert, 54

scientific attitude, 89 skepticism, 249

Scottish common-sensism, 45 Skowroniski, Krzysztof, xii, 266, 289, 312 Scotus, John Duns, 103—4, 239, 266 slavery, 75

Searle, John, 216 Smith, Nathan, 40, 260

secondness, 61, 111, 114, 226, 250, 266, 281 Snellman, Lauri, 176, 277 self, 8, 11, 16-17, 143, 249; correction, 56—58, Sosa, Ernest, 235 63-64, 77, 82, 205, 215; consciousness, 18; speculative grammar, see grammar critical, 222; criticism, 144, 181, 220, 229; speculative rhetoric, see rhetoric determination, 92, 96; diagolic, 180, 208, Spinoza, Baruch, 17 215-16, 222; directed, 262; moral, 251, 254; Stalnaker, Robert, 233, 235, 283

interest, 61, 261-62; Peirce’s theory of, Stevens, Wallace, 24, 25

289; sacrifice, 248, 273 stoics, teleology of, 45, 261

self-control, xiv, 44, 52, 55-56, 72, 134, Stuhr, John, 144 143-46, 179, 215, 224, 229; it’s basis in the Sturgeon, Nicholas, 269 normative sciences, 219—22; conservatism, subjectivism, ethical, 116, 118, 124

270-71; ethics of, 149-152; and freedom, Sudnow, David, 33 145; and habit, 136—39, 221-22, 272-74; summum bonum, 20, 49, 60, 201, 215, logical, 152-60, 173-74, 178-82, 264, 276, 219-30, 281; growth, 165; of inquiry, 279; moral, 160-71, 264; presupposed by 209-11; and pragmatism, 64, 109, 143 morality, 74; and reasoning, 94, 173, 230 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 273

INDEX 321 Synechism, xiv, 109, 115, 129, 231-32, 268; Uberweg, Friedrich, 46 ethical realism, 120, 122; growth of universals, 240—42, 249, 251, 285; Armstrong reasonableness, 117; and selfhood, 16. See On, 232, 283; contracted into singulars,

also scholastic realism 239; existence of, 266-67; reality of, 104, 233-34, 266—67, 286

Tarastic, Eero, 14 universe, exhibits continuity, 109

Taylor, Charles, 212 utilitarianism, 45, 59, 62, 78, 97; hedonistic, tenacity, method of, 61, 84-85, 92, 204, 207-8 114-15, 117; Hume’s, 261; Peirce’s

Thayer, H. S., 185 denunciation of, 132 270, 283 vagueness, 202; and desires, 54-55;

theory-practice distinction, xv, 47, 231, 258,

thirdness, 61, 111, 114, 117, 122, 200, 225, 242, vagues, 252; real, 238

250, 266, 281 values, 149-71, 210-12, 250; vs facts, 283;

Toulmin, Stephen, xiii, 97 objective, 119; theory of, 117 transcendental idealism, 234; realism, 234. Van Gelder, Rudy, 34, 37, 38

See also Kant Vaughn, Stevie Ray, 43 Trilling, Lionel, 23 virtue ethics, 79

transcendentalists, American, 45 Vehkavaara, Tommi, 284-85, 290 truth, 50, 175-76, 185-213; absolute, 233, vital importance, matters of, 75, 83, 87-90, 249, 288; consensualist conception of, 102, 106, 116, 257, 273, 283 Xiv, 185, 193; convergence theory of, 64, Von Wright, Georg, 53 90, 113, 197; the end of logic, 50; and

ethics, 66, 112-18, 123; experimentalist Walker, James, 45 conception of, 187; as final opinion, 64, Ward, Lester, 270 86, 108, 122, 193, 243-45; metaphysical, Wegener, Peter, 157 233; moral, 268; naturalistic, 120; Welby, Victoria, xvi, 5, 180, 274 pragmatic theory of, 71, 122, 287; relativist Wells, Rulon, 288 about, 112, 123-24, 268; self-correcting Westermarck, Edward A., 265 pursuit of, 230; as supervenience, 233; as Weston, Randy, 4, 24 verification, 113; Peirce’s conception of, Westphal, Kenneth R., 290 XIV, 112, 122-23. See also inquiry; Misak; Whewell, William, 45

science Williams, Bernard, 90, 276

truthfulness, 70, 162-64, 276 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 202, 207, 289 truthmaker, 232-33, 235, 242 would-bes, 141, 239, 241-42, 253, 285 Turtle Island Quartet, 36, 40, 41 Wundt, Wilhelm, 46

Twain, Mark, 18 , Tychism, 77, 109, 246-47 Xenophobia, 92-93, 264 Tyner, McCoy, 34, 35, 42 Zappa, Frank, 26

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AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY Douglas R. Anderson and Jude Jones, series editors

Kenneth Laine Ketner, ed., Peirce and Contemporary Thought: Philosophical Inquiries. Max H. Fisch, ed., Classic American Philosophers: Peirce, James, Royce, Santayana, Dewey, Whitehead, second edition. Introduction by Nathan Houser. John E. Smith, Experience and God, second edition. Vincent G. Potter, Peirce’s Philosophical Perspectives. Edited by Vincent Colapietro. Richard E. Hart and Douglas R. Anderson, eds., Philosophy in Experience: American Philosophy in Transition.

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