Why Peirce’s Anti-Intuitionism is not Anti-Cartesian: The Diagnosis of a Pragmatist Dogma

A close reading of Descartes’ works, particularly his Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii, calls into question the common interpretation of Peirce’s ‘Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’ and ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’ as being anti-Cartesian. In particular, Descartes’ conception of intuition differs from Peirce’s, and on one plausible reading of Descartes his intuitionism actually mirrors Peirce’s inferentialism in key respects. Given these similarities between Descartes and Peirce, the dogmatic status of the anti-Cartesian interpretation of Peirce becomes evident.     

Charles S. Peirce and the Medieval Doctrine of consequentiae

In 1898 C. S. Peirce declares that the medieval doctrine of consequences had been the starting point of his logical investigations in the 1860s. This paper shows that Peirce studied the scholastic theory of consequentiae as early as 1866–67, that he adopted the scholastics’ terminology, and that that theory constituted a source of logical doctrine that sustained Peirce for a lifetime of creative and original work.     

Peirce’s ‘Prescision’ as a Transcendental Method

Abstract

In this Paper I interpret Charles S. Peirce’s method of prescision as a transcendental method. In order to do so, I argue that Peirce’s pragmatism can be interpreted in a transcendental light only if we use a non‐justificatory understanding of transcendental philosophy. I show how Peirce’s prescision is similar to some abstracting procedure that Immanuel Kant used in his Critique of Pure Reason. Prescision abstracts from experience and thought in general those elements without which such experience and thought would be unaccountable. Similarly, in the Aesthetics, Kant isolated the a priori forms of intuition by showing how they could be abstracted from experience in general, while experience in general cannot be thought without them. However, if Peirce’s and Kant’s methods are similar in this respect, they reached very different conclusions.     

Autopoietic enactivism: action and representation re-examined under Peirce’s light

The purpose of this article is to start a dialogue between the so-called autopoietic enactivism and the semiotic pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, in order to re-examine both action and representation under a Peircean light. The focus lays on autopoietic enactivism because this approach offers a wider theoretical scope to cognition based on the continuity of life and mind, embodiment, dynamic and non-linear interaction between a system and its environment which are compatible ideas with Peirce’s semiotic pragmatism. The term ‘pragmatic’ has been introduced in cognitive science to reinforce the idea that cognition is a form of practice and to help action-oriented viewpoints to escape representationalism. In this paper, I shall try to demonstrate that Peirce’s semiotic pragmatism can be a meaningful methodological path to guide a reconciliation between not only anti-Cartesianism and representation but also representation and action. In order to accomplish this purpose, Peirce’s account to action, habit, thought and mind will be addressed through some of the guiding principles of his semiotic—sign and sign action. What follows is the re-examining of the problem of representation—as refuted by autopoietic enactivism—under the light of Peirce’s semiotic pragmatism.

     

Kidnapping an ugly child: is William James a pragmaticist?

Since the term ‘pragmatism’ was first coined, there have been debates about who is or is not a ‘real’ pragmatist, and what that might mean. The division most often drawn in contemporary pragmatist scholarship is between William James and Charles Peirce. Peirce is said to present a version of pragmatism which is scientific, logical and objective about truth, whereas James presents a version which is nominalistic, subjectivistic and leads to relativism. The first person to set out this division was in fact Peirce himself, when he distinguished his own ‘pragmaticism’ from the broad pragmatism of James and others. Peirce sets out six criteria which defines ‘pragmaticism’: the pragmatic maxim; a number of ‘preliminary propositions’; prope-positivism; metaphysical inquiry; critical common-sensism; and scholastic realism. This paper sets out to argue that in fact James meets each of these criteria, and should be seen as a ‘pragmaticist’ by Peirce’s own lights.     

Rascals,triflers, and pragmatists: developing a Peircean account of assertion*

While the topic of assertion has recently received a fresh wave of interest from Peirce scholars, to this point no systematic account of Peirce’s view of assertion has been attempted. We think that this is a lacuna that ought to be filled. Doing so will help make better sense of Peirce’s pragmatism; further, what is hidden amongst various fragments is a robust pragmatist theory of assertion with unique characteristics that may have significant contemporary value. Here we aim to uncover this theory, and to show that assertion for Peirce is not a mere corollary of pragmatic conceptions of truth, judgement, and belief, but is rather a central aspect of his philosophy.     

Peirce on facts and true propositions

Peirce maintains that facts and propositions are structurally isomorphic. When we understand how Peirce thinks they are isomorphic, we find that a common objection raised against epistemic conceptions of truth – that there are facts beyond the ken of discovery – holds no water against Peirce’s claim that truth is what would be believed after a sufficiently long and rigorous course of inquiry.     

Toward an objective phenomenological vocabulary: how seeing a scarlet red is like hearing a trumpet’s blare

Nagel’s challenge is to devise an objective phenomenological vocabulary that can describe the objective structural similarities between aural and visual perception. My contention is that Charles Sanders Peirce’s little studied and less understood phenomenological vocabulary makes a significant contribution to meeting this challenge. I employ Peirce’s phenomenology to identify the structural isomorphism between seeing a scarlet red and hearing a trumpet’s blare. I begin by distinguishing between the vividness of an experience and the intensity of a quality. I proceed to identify further points of structural isomorphism (a) between the experience of seeing a scarlet red and of hearing a trumpet blare and (b) between the qualities of those experiences. Lastly, I gesture towards how these distinctions can be an aid in describing what it is like to be a bat.     

Differentiation and infinitesimal relatives in peirce’s 1870 paper on logic: A new interpretation

The process of ‘logical differentiation’ was introduced by Peirce in 1870. Directly analogous to mathematical differentiation, it uses logical terms instead of mathematical variables. Here, this mysterious process receives new interpretations which serve to clarify Peirce’s use of logical terms. I introduce the logical terms, the operation of multiplication, the logical analogy to the binomial theorem, infinitesimal relatives, the concepts of numerical coefficients and the number associated with each term. I also analyse the algebraic development of ‘logical differentiation’ and consider in depth one application of the process     

How unexpected observations lead to new beliefs: A Peircean pathway

People acquire new beliefs in various ways. One of the most important of these is that new beliefs are acquired as a response to experiencing events that one did not expect. This involves a form of inference distinct from both deductive and inductive inference: abductive inference. The concept of abduction is due to the American pragmatist philosopher C. S. Peirce. Davies and Coltheart (in press) elucidated what Peirce meant by abduction, and identified two problems in his otherwise promising account requiring solution if that account were to become fully workable. Here we propose solutions to these problems and offer an explicit cognitive model of how people derive new beliefs from observations of unexpected events, based on Peirce’s work and Sokolov’s ideas about prediction error triggering new beliefs. We consider that this model casts light not only upon normal processes of belief formation but also upon the formation of delusional beliefs.     

Let Us Investigate! Dynamic Conjecture-Making as the Formal Logic of Abduction

We present a dynamic approach to Peirce’s original construal of abductive logic as a logic of conjecture making, and provide a new decidable, contraction-free and cut-free proof system for the dynamic logic of abductive inferences with neighborhood semantics. Our formulation of the dynamic logic of abduction follows the philosophical and scientific track that led Peirce to his late, post-1903 characterization of abductive conclusions as investigands, namely invitations to investigate propositions conjectured at the level of pre-beliefs.     

Iconic Representations and Representative Practices

I develop an account of scientific representations building on Charles S. Peirce's rich, and still underexplored, notion of iconicity. Iconic representations occupy a central place in Peirce's philosophy, in his innovative approach to logic and in his practice as a scientist. Starting from a discussion of Peirce's approach to diagrams, I claim that Peirce's own representations are in line with his formulation of iconicity, and that they are more broadly connected to the pragmatist philosophy he developed in parallel with his scientific work. I then defend the contemporary relevance of Peirce's approach to iconic representations, and specifically argue that Peirce offers a useful ‘third way’ between what Mauricio Suárez has recently described as the ‘analytical’ and ‘practical’ inquiries into the concept of representation. As a philosophically minded scientist and an experimentally inclined philosopher, Peirce never divorced the practice of representing from questions about what counts as a representation. I claim that his account of iconic representations shows that it is the very process of representing, construed as a practice which is coextensive with observing and experimenting, that casts light on the nature of representative relations.     

Self-doubt: One Moral of the Story

This essay focuses on the value of self-doubt in moral inquiry and in moral education. Using John Patrick Shanley’s play, Doubt: A parable, as illustration, it shows how self-doubt initiates and extends moral inquiry, highlights one’s epistemic fallibility and connects the inquirer to the virtue of humility. The essay draws on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, Hullett, Nussbaum, Thayer-Bacon and Elbow to support the idea that the question ‘Am I wrong?’ is important for moral inquiry and for moral education.     

The Cube,the Square and the Problem of Existential Import

One of the claims made for C. S. Peirce's existential graphs has been that they are a deductively complete formulation of first-order logic with identity. As Peirce presented them, this is true only for certain versions of first-order logic :those which do not include terms for individuals. I amend Peirce's rules here, showing, in particular, how they are capable of demonstrating that, for instance, ‘Jack is in the kitchen’ contradicts ‘Jack is not in the kitchen’     

Peirce on Truth as the Predestinate Opinion

Abstract: In 1878's ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, Peirce states that truth is the predestinate opinion, or that which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate. Later in his life, though, he would claim both (i) that truth is what would be believed if we could figure out the right method of inquiry and (ii) that, instead of affirming that truth is the predestinate opinion in 1878, he ought to have affirmed that truth is what would be believed if inquiry were carried sufficiently far. The aim of this paper is to provide an account of why the early Peirce endorses the claim that truth is the predestinate opinion and why the late Peirce is compelled to modify that position. I argue that Peirce's early statement that truth is the predestinate opinion is motivated by his theory that all mental action is of the nature of a valid inference and that the later modification of his view is partly motivated by his rejection of that theory.     

Seeing the Unseen: Pastoral Insights Drawn from James Turrell’s Artwork

According to Charles Sanders Peirce’s framework of semiotics, an individual’s life can be regarded as a work of art that as a sign continuously generates meaning by using various life experiences as its art materials. Here the individual plays a role both as an artist and as a viewer of his or her life. This semiotic implication of one’s life reshapes the general goal and function of pastoral care and counseling. In terms of art, the pastoral caregiver’s role is defined as that of a curator who facilitates the overall environment for aesthetic experience by helping an individual to see the unseen in his or her life as a work of art and does so in a didactic but unobtrusive way. As an example, a series of James Turrell’s art installations suggests how the role and function of the pastoral caretaker can be redefined. This aesthetic perspective also reflects the existential and psychospiritual dimensions of pastoral care and counseling.     

Neat,Swine, Sheep,and Deer: Mill and Peirce on Natural Kinds

In the earliest phase of his logical investigations (1865–1870), Peirce adopts Mill's doctrine of real Kinds as discussed in the System of Logic and adapts it to the logical conceptions he was then developing. In Peirce's definition of natural class, a crucial role is played by the notion of information: a natural class is a class of which some non-analytical proposition is true. In Peirce's hands, Mill's distinction between connotative and non-connotative terms becomes a distinction between symbolic and informative and pseudo-symbolic and non-informative forms of representation. A symbol is for Peirce a representation which has information. Just as for Mill all names of Kind connote their being such, so for Peirce all symbols profess to correspond to a natural class.     

C. S. PEIRCE,G. W. F. HEGEL,AND STUART KAUFFMAN'S COMPLEXITY THEORY: A RESPONSE

Stuart Kauffman's work on complexity and self‐organization echoes ideas found in writings of C. S. Peirce and G. W. F. Hegel. Included in these common threads are the understanding of science as historical narrative, the recognition of emergence as a phenomenon associated with complex systems, and the appreciation of agency as an emergent property that serves as both a creative and determining force in evolution.