Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) : by Jaime Nubiola
Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) : by Jaime Nubiola
Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) : by Jaime Nubiola
2, 481-487
Peirce considered abduction to be at the heart not only of scientific research, but of all ordinary human activities as well. Peirce's pragmatism may be understood as a method of sorting out conceptual confusions by relating the meaning of concepts to their practical consequences. Emphatically, this theory bears no resemblance to the vulgar notion of pragmatism, which connotes such things as ruthless search for profit or political convenience. In Modes of Thought, Whitehead notes that his own method of philosophizing is pragmatist in Peirce's sense: Thus deductive logic has not the coercive supremacy which is conventionally conceded to it. When applied to concrete instances, it is a tentative procedure, finally to be judged by the self-evidence of its issues. This doctrine places philosophy on a pragmatic basis. (MT VI; Lowe 1964, 453) Aware of possible misunderstandings, Whitehead highlights the exact sense in which he uses the term: But the meaning of 'pragmatism' must be given its widest extension. In much modern thought, it has been limited by arbitrary specialist assumptions. There should be no pragmatic exclusion of self-evidence by dogmatic denial. Pragmatism is simply an appeal to that self-evidence which sustains itself in civilized experience. Thus pragmatism ultimately appeals to the wide selfevidence of civilization, and to the self-evidence of what we mean by 'civilization' (ibid.).
Peirce was a deep admirer of Cantor's work on cardinal and ordinal numbers, but he rejected Whitehead and Russell's approach: I may add that quite recently Mr. Whitehead and the Hon. Bertrand Russell have treated of the subject; but they seem merely to have put truths already known into a uselessly technical and pedantic form (Peirce 1976 III, 347; MS 459, 1903). In a letter of the following year, sent to his former pupil Christine Ladd-Franklin, he complained of not having been able to prepare a review of Russell's Principles of Mathematics, and adds: I feel its pretentiousness so strongly that I cannot well fail to express it in a notice. Yet it is a disagreeable sort of thing to say, and people may ask themselves whether it is not simply the resentment of the old man who is getting laid upon the shelf. (Peirce L 237, 27 July 1904) In April 1906, in his On the System of Existential Graphs Considered as an Instrument for the Investigation of Logic, Peirce explains that the majority of those writers who place a high value upon symbolic logic treat it as if its value consisted in its mathematical power as a calculus, but Peano's system is no calculus; it is nothing but a pasigraphy [an artificial international language using mathematical symbols instead of words]; and while it is undoubtedly useful () few systems of any kind have been so wildly overrated (Peirce MS 499). Finally, for the mature Peirce, Russell and Whitehead are blunderers continually confusing different questions (Peirce 1976 III, 785; L 148, 8 May 1906). As Hawkins remarks, Peirce generally regarded neither Russell nor Whitehead in a very positive light (Hawkins 1997, 115). Despite these strong words of Peirce regarding the logistic movement of the first decade of the twentieth century, some historians of mathematics believe that Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (1910-13) is indebted to Peirce in important ways. Carolyn Eisele holds that many of the ideas to be found in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica were anticipated by Peirce, referring to Peirce's paper Upon the Logic of Mathematics (1867) (Eisele 1979, 12; see also, Lewis 1918, 85 and Wennerberg 1962, 21). In fact, the editors of the Collected Papers, when publishing Peirce's 1867 paper, made several notes on the striking similarities of Peirce's ideas to those of the Principia (Peirce 1939-1958, 3.42n and 3.44n). In recent years these connections have been widely acknowledged. For instance, we know that Russell learned the universal quantifier from Whitehead, and in turn Whitehead came to his knowledge of quantification through Peirce and his students Oscar Howard Mitchell and Christine Ladd-Franklin (UA 115-116; Putnam 1990, 258-259; Houser 1997, 5; Misak 2004, 25). On the contrary, Peirce's anticipation of the stroke function, which he first developed around 1880, was not known by Whitehead and Russell until its discovery by Henry Sheffer thirty years later, and was used in the second 1925-27 edition of the Principia (Fisch 1983, 16; Lowe 1990, 277). In addition, some of Whitehead's key notions were fully anticipated by Peirce. On the one hand, many of the characteristics of Peirce's category of Firstness strikingly anticipate Whitehead's 'eternal objects' (Stearns 1952, 200; Hartshorne 1983, 82); Peirce's Secondness is equivalent to Whitehead's 'prehension', or feeling of (previous) feeling, or sensing of (previous) sensing, and Peirce's Thirdness includes Whitehead's symbolic reference or more generally, mentality. As Hartshorne says in regards to this comparison, Whitehead is in some respects clearer than Peirce, in others less clear (1983, 85). On the other hand, when Peirce stresses the rational nature of the universe he is anticipating Whitehead's emphatic protest against the bifurcation of nature, the sharp Cartesian division between nature and mind which, in Whitehead's view, poisoned all subsequent philosophy (Stearns 1952, 196). In contrast to many modern and contemporary philosophers since the time of Descartes, the
thought of both Peirce and Whitehead can be interpreted as largely successful attempts to break out of the prison of our own subjectivity (Platt 1968, 238).
as he looks back at Peirce and Whitehead, he must then be ready to reconsider the significance of those similarities (Lowe 1964, 430). Both philosophers seek to discover relational structures, but their methods were quite distinct. Peirce looks for metaphysical laws founded on the laws of logic, phenomenology and mathematics, but this is very far from Whitehead's conception of metaphysics as a speculative theory of process. Convictions common to Peirce and Whitehead have been deservedly noticed by commentators, somewhat to the neglect of the first question of metaphysics: How shall metaphysics be pursued? As a science among the sciences, says Peirce. Not so, says Whitehead; it seeks truth, but a more general truth than sciences seek (Lowe 1964, 440). It remains true that Whitehead and Peirce agree in seeking modes of dependence and relatedness in the universe rather than absolutes, and as Kultgen suggested that in contrast to Kant both philosophers deny even a problematic distinction of noumena from phenomena: reality is wholly open to us (Kultgen 1960, 288; Lowe 1964, 445). In this sense it can be said that both philosophers are realists in the grand manner of Plato (Reese 1952, 225). The differences between their respective conceptions of particular metaphysical topics, for instance, time, continuity, contingence, and God, have been studied with attention by a small group of scholars (Hartshorne 1964, Martin 1980, Rosenthal 1996). In a letter to Charles Hartshorne of January 2, 1936, Whitehead writes that my belief is that the effective founders of the American Renaissance are Charles Peirce and William James. Of these men, W. J. is the analogue to Plato, and C. P. to Aristotle, though the time-order does not correspond, and the analogy must not be pressed too far (Lowe 1990, 345). Thirty years later, Hartshorne will rank Whitehead amongst the luminaries of speculative philosophy: While Whitehead's approach certainly does not exhaust the speculative possibilities open to us () yet he does, with Peirce, and on the whole probably more than Peirce, represent our greatest speculative model since Leibniz (Hartshorne 1961, 37). In a more sober tone, I prefer to say with James Bradley that the significance of Peirce and Whitehead resides in their defense of speculative reason against its critique by continental and analytical philosophers alike (2003, 447).
Bibliography
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1
I want to express my deep gratitude to Nathan Houser and Andre de Tienne for their hospitality in the Peirce Edition Project at Indianapolis where I could use the extensive files of Max H. Fisch, whose correspondence I quote here with their authorization. Also I am heavily indebted with Erik Norvelle and Ignacio Redondo for their help in the preparation of this article.