C.S.Peirce’s Dialectics: The Labor of the Negative in
Pragmaticism
By E. San Juan, Jr.
Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines
By consensus, Charles Sanders Peirce laid the groundwork for pragmatism as a scientific theory, later vulgarized by psychologist William James so that
Peirce himself in 1905 rechristened his view “pragmaticism.” In 1878, Peirce proposed a way of ascertaining meaning. He said: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the ofject of our conception tohave. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.” James, however, misconstrued this as a theory of truth so that ideas prove their truth “just so far as they help us get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience,” resulting into an instrumentalist if not subjectivist, idealist notion. This is how the Soviet Union scholars treated pragmatic truth as valid on the basis of practical utiity which “understands not confirmation of objective truth by the criterion of practice, but what meets the subjective interests of the individual” (1967, 358).
For a long time, this tendency to foist all kinds of excesses on pragmatism ran wild. Peirce’s notion has been equated with diverse philosophical schools, among them: radical empiricism, irrationalism, meliorism, “apology for bourgeois democracy (John Dewey),” experimental naturalism, neopositivism, semantic idealism, operationism, etc. Assorted thinkers, aside from James and Dewey, were held complicit: F.C.S. Schiller, Sidney Hook, C.W. Morris, P.W. Bridgman, C.I. Lewis, R. Carnap, W. Quine, etc. While generally correct in summarizing Peirce’s early view, the Politsh philosopher Leszek Kolakowski wrongly labels Peirce a positivist, nominalist and scientistic. And so he ascribes to Peirce a rather ascetic, puritanical stance nowhere to be found in Peirce’s rich, wide-ranging speculations: for Peirce, “The world contains no mystery, merely problems to be solved” (1969, 154).
Convergence toward Truth/Reality
Not problem-solving but acquiring knowledge of reality by fallible means, is Peirce’s paramount aim. To anticipate doubters, truth for Peirce is knowledge of the real. In “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), Peirce formulated a convergence theory of truth/reality: “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 opnion is real” (1998, 155). In other words, “every intellligible question” will be answered provided it is “sufficiently investigated by observation and reasoning.” Our hypothesis about reality, articulated in language/discourse, can converged with the real in the long term, in principle and perhaps in practical terms.
This fallibilist stance is shared by a community of inquirers, so that the pursuit of knowledge/truth implies a collective, social responsibility (see Appel 1995). Moreover, in contradistinction to James and Dewey who subsumed the scientific quest for truth to the demands of human interests, ideals and problematic situations, Peircean realism dictates that these knowledge-claims or constructivist discourses are ultimately controlled by the structure of reality. As Hilary Putnam reminds us, for Peirce, “it is precisely by prescinding from all practical interests that science succeeds” (1992, 74).
Except as ancillary topic (validating truth-claims), my chief aim here is to investigate the presence of a dialectical logic in Peirce’s philosophical speculations. By dialetic here I refer to the application of a method or process of reasoning to understand the material world, its laws and principles, as well as the movement of society/history. In Hegel’s dialectic, the process of cognition occupies center-stage as a “grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative.” In this context, categories or forms of consciousness emerge from each other to constitute more inclusive totalities, whereby contradictions are resolved through their incorporation (by sublation) in fuller and more concrete universal conceptual wholes. The truth results from the unfolding of the whole dialectical process, making explicit what is implicit, articulating antagonisms into tense unities.
Roy Bhaskar notes that in contrast to reflective or analythical thought, Hegelian dialectics “grasps conceptual forms in their systematic interconnections, not just their determinate differences, and conceives each development as the product of a preious less developed phase, whose necessary truth or fulfillment it is; so that thereis always a tension, latent irony or incipient surprise between any form and what it is in the process of becoming” (122).
We stress the fact that this interpretation rejects the banal, mechanistic notion of a three-step procedure of thesis-antithesis-synthesis which Walter Kaufmann (1972) already refuted a long time ago. Of course, as everyone knows. Marx stood Hegel’s idealism on its head (the epistemic fallacy of reducing being to knowing), purging the mystical shell of the dialectical kernel, and unsettling the hypostatized, reified or eternalized realm of thought. Marx refuses the Hegelian Absolute, Idea or Spirit in favor of becoming, of an ontological stratification evinced in a complex, differentiated material history. Marx also emphasized causal, not conceptual, necessity; he also limited teleology to human praxis and its rational explanation. We cannot deal here with Engel’s version of dialectics as the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society, and thought, elaborated in Anti-Duhring and Dialectics of Nature.
Prolegomenon to Hermeneutics
As a scientist-philosopher, Peirce was concerned not just with an adequate theory of meaning, the meaning of ideas, for the terminology of conceptual thinking. He was grappling with the validity of scientific laws for which the nature of potentiality, possibility, is central in proving hypotheses. This demanded a whole metaphysics of being, of reality, and the status of universals, which would ground his pragmaticism. Thus he would be engaged in the formulation of categories necessary for substantiating science and knowledge. His ultimate position on the controversy between nominalism and realism is a moderate realist one in which general concepts found in our grasp of meaning are real, with a counterpart in the percept, the equivalent in consciousness of a firstness present in the perceive object. But this is to proceed ahead of our exposition, so let us review Peirce’s categories.
In December 1897, Peirce wrote to James about the Cambridge lectures he would deliver in which he mentions that his Categories—Quality, Reaction, Representation or Mediation—will show “wherein my objective logic differs from that of Hegel” (1992, 24). Peirce agreed with Hegel that the science of phenomenology is basic to the foundation of the normative sciences (logic, ethics, aesthetics). But Hegel “fatally narrow spirit” that gave it the nominalistic and “pragmatoidal” character. Peirce declared that his phenomenology will not just analyze experience but “extend it to describing all the features that are common to whatever is experienced or might conceivably be experienced or become an object of study in any way direct or indirect” (1998a, 143).
Toward the New Categories
Peirce claims that he arrived at his universal categories independently, although in his contempt for Hegelianism, the German philosopher might have exercised an “occult influence” on him. Indeed, Peirce admits that Hegel’s three stages of thought as “roughly speaking, the correct list of Universal Categories” (1998a, 148).
Firstness is “quality of feeling,” which is “the true psychical representative of the first category of the immediate as it is in its immediacy, of the present in its direct positive presentness.” The idea here is not actual but potential, a possibility. It cannot be compared to Plato’s hypostatized Forms, but it is not a thought in some mind; it is between a mere nothing and an existent, therefore a possitibility to become actual when it enters the mind by virtue of experience. For example, a possible sense expereince such as a color sensation, “blueness,” or sensation such as a toothache—possibilities that may become actual. The process of actualization transpires in the attention given to the sequence of the embodiment or realization of qualities apprehended by the experient.
Secondness is “the Idea of that which is such as it is as being Second to some First, regardless of anyting else and in particular regardless of any law, although it may conform to a law,…Reaction as an element of the Phenomenon.” An example of Secondness is the existing object, the embodiment of qualities (firstness)—not yet actualized until experienced by some mind, whereby the qualities become percepts, an image or feeling. This process of actualization is complex and the topic of ongoing psychological inquiry.
Thirdness is the “Idea of that which is such as being a Third, or Medium, between a Second and its First….Representation as an element of the Phenomenon,” containing the concept of “True Continuity.” (Peirce 150, 160). Thirdness designates a general concept, the universal idea abstracted from the percept, which Peirce also calls “generals.” According to Richard Robin, “Peirce’s metaphysical realism, then, consists in his view that the general concepts that go to make up meanings are real…They have a real external counterpart in the percept—which is the equivalent in consciousness of a firstness present in the perceive object” (1998, 11).
Every concept (thirdness) refers to a sense-percept (secondness) to bear some meaning (the real). No concept is meaningful unless it refers to sense-experience, which is subjected to attention and abstracting elements from the percept to generate concepts expressed in a judgement, such as “This orchid is crimson.” “Crimson” is not a fiction of the imagination but a quality possessed by things in the world. “Crimson” can be predicated of many other things, hence it is a real general, that is, the crimson of an orchid is not identical with the crimson of blood but they are similar. As long as there is something in the physical world that exemplifies particular qualities (not all of the particularizing determinations of generic and specific qualities ascribed to objects), the concept containing them is a real concept. This refutes all allegations that Peirce reduced everything to mind or rationality.
These three modes of reality, categories of being or three universes of experience provide the coordinates for Peirce’s epistemology as well as his singular theory of pragmaticism. From here we will proceed to investigate the inferential logic in Peirce’s understanding of what is involved in speculations on ethics, aesthetics and abductive, experimental inquiry..
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