PEIRCE AS A PHILOSOPHER
Charles S. Peirce called
himself, in his later years, simply a logician. That he was a philosopher he
fully recognized. But the term logician seemed to him more apt for a person
engaged in the researches to which he was most devoted. For Peirce, rightly,
logic would constitute the best possible foundation for a sound philosophy. But
most philosophers, as he very correctly saw, were not logicians and would not
be likely to become such until some very great reform occurred. Peirce united
very wide knowledge of the history of philosophy with a generally fair-minded
disposition to a discriminating criticism of philosophers, and with a
capricious, though generally very well restrained interest in philosophical
polemic, whose arts he regarded with a general skepticism and pursued with a
usual moderation. But all the more he felt that the name logician stood rather
for what the philosopher ought to be than the name philosopher for what a well-trained
logician was most likely to be. So it was as logician that he wanted to be
judged.
Nevertheless he was a
philosopher. Like a good many other recent philosophers, he desired his
philosophy to be what is so often called scientific. He desired that the
methods of the various natural sciences, and in particular of the most exact
natural sciences, such as physics and chemistry, should be the models of his
philosophical speculations. He had a better right to use the term scientific
philosopher than is customarily the possession of those who use this term. His
early training here in Cambridge, in his
father’s house and in the Lawrence
Scientific School,
was, first, in mathematics (since his father, Professor Benjamin Peirce, the
elder, was one of the greatest American mathematicians). Peirce was fond of
saying that he grew up in a laboratory. Later, he did some good work in the
observatory. Still later, he was busy with the conduct of a good many
statistical researches in connection with the Coast Survey. He was early and
long familiar with exact measurement, and with the theory and practise of the
determination of the errors of measurement in the measuring sciences. So, when
he spoke of being a scientific philosopher, he was not without a really close
knowledge of what scientific method in philosophy ought to mean. That in
addition he did not fail to appreciate some at least of the great historical
thinkers was due to his wide, manifold, and in some respects, very thorough
erudition – an erudition that remained, like many other of his personal
possessions, somewhat capricious, despite its frequent thoroughness. At any
rate, whether he worked in any one of his publications rather as logician or as
general philosopher, Peirce had no interest in founding a school, belonged to
none of the existing schools, had a wide range of appreciation for other minds,
and a very great disposition to bind inductive methods with speculative
interests.
That Peirce should be
classed amongst the evolutionists is, for many reasons, natural. His early
education was finished, and his maturer scientific work begun, in the great
decades of the modern evolutionary movement. His principal contribution to
fundamental logical theory, that is, his own highly technical definition of the
three categories or modes of being,<1>
which he made fundamental in all his speculations, was published in the year
1867 in the “Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in
Boston.” His essays on scientific method in the Popular Science Monthly were
printed in the early seventies, – I believe from 1873 to 1876. “The Studies in
Logic,” by the members of the Johns Hopkins University,
a book composed partly by himself and partly by his advanced students in logic
at Baltimore,
was published in the early eighties. Thus, his work brings him into close
contact with the formative period of the modern doctrine of evolution.
But Peirce was never a
follower of Spencer, whose relation to natural science was not such as seemed
satisfactory to a mind of Peirce’s type and training. Nor was Peirce very
prominently influenced by Darwin, although, of
course, he knew Darwin
well. For Peirce was, once for all, a man rather of physical and chemical
training and of practise in the use of various instruments of precision, than a
man at all carefully trained in the biological sciences. His interest in human
nature was wide and varied, and, in his fragmentary way, he contributed notably
to the study of various psychological problems – in particular, to problems
relating to the threshold of sensation, and to various other problems of the
psychology of perception.
The “evolution” of Peirce
was therefore no variation of the evolutionary philosophy of Spencer or of
Spencer’s disciple, Fiske. Such minds left him uninterested. History,
and especially the history of thought, and in particular of the various natural
sciences, interested Peirce deeply. But his mind, when he thought of evolution,
turned its attention to the matters which most fascinated him as a logician. He
wanted to know not merely about the evolution of any one group of physical
phenomena, whether stellar or terrestrial, whether organic or inorganic. He
wanted to know about how the laws of nature came to be what they now are. For
him the doctrine of evolution was to be, if it should succeed at all, a
doctrine of the evolution of the laws of nature, a doctrine regarding how the
world came to acquire not the plants, nor the animals, nor the solar systems,
nor the Milky Way, that now it has, but how the laws of nature came to be what
they are at all.
Peirce’s speculations
upon these topics were very highly original, were continued over a period of
very many years, were perhaps the most characteristic
productions of his whole personal character and mental interest which, apart
from his technical logical researches, we possess. These speculations very
greatly interested William James and played their part in the formulation of
that whole “philosophy of change” on which William James’s latest interests
were most centered. Yet to James the principal illustrations of this doctrine
of the evolution of natural law always remained unfamiliar and somewhat too
technical, so that James listened, in company in which I was sometimes
privileged to be present – listened, I say, to these aspects of Peirce’s
philosophy with an interest which certainly did not follow Peirce’s thought
into precisely those regions which Peirce himself most valued. The ideas here
in question are so manifold and complex that I can not hope to give you any adequate
idea of them. Let me simply indicate a few of them.
Most philosophers, if
they concern themselves with the laws of nature at all, begin by regarding
certain fairly simple laws, as, so to speak, the only examples of canonical and
legitimate sorts of natural law that we ought to recognize. Mechanical laws or
exactly quantitative laws or formulas capable of precise natural formulation, these such philosophers regard as the reasonable sorts of
law. In case a man does not believe that these types of law are universal, are
pervasive, or are canonical, his philosophy is usually likely to be some sort
of teleology, or some doctrine that freedom, or that spiritual significance
rules the world, and that exact law is subordinate to more or less
sentimentally conceived ideals.
But Peirce’s philosophy
was dominated by quite other modes of thinking whose origin lay partly in his
experience in dealing with the problem offered by the efforts of science to
eliminate or to reduce to rule the errors which are encountered in the actual
measurements which the physical sciences endeavor to make. Partly his ideas on
these subjects were due to still more general logical considerations which
influenced him greatly from the time they first met his notice. The laws of
nature that we actually confirm – so Peirce was accustomed to say – are laws
which, so far as we can verify them, are approximately true. All measurements
are inexact, and have to be corrected by further measurements. The moon which
astronomers observe, especially if the observations extend over many centuries,
as, by the study of the records of ancient eclipses we can make them extend –
the moon of observation – never agrees precisely with the ideal moon which the
astronomical theory demands. Of course as astronomical knowledge grows toward
perfection, the discrepancy between theory and fact grows less. That is simply
because the better we know nature, the more we can
discover how to adjust theory and fact, one to the other. But if we extend our
survey of nature from the instant to the year, from the year to the century,
from the century to the geological period, or to the evolution of a stellar
system, we get evidence that natural laws which hold with appreciable exactness
and within the errors of probable observation, during short periods of time, no
longer hold with such precision for very long periods of time. There is a reasonable inductive evidence that the laws which nature
follows are themselves only approximately true and are subject to evolution, so
that Newton’s
law of gravitation is presumably very nearly true at the present time for the
present moon and planets, for the present stellar systems. But it is equally
probable that this law is even now only a close approximation, not an
absolutely necessary order of things. For similar inductive reasons, it becomes
probable that, in so far as Newton’s
law of gravitation now holds true, it did not always hold true, and that this,
like all other laws of nature, is a product of evolution.
What an inductive study
of nature makes probable, Peirce was accustomed to regard as what the rightly
trained mind of the logical student of nature would regard as that which would
be likely to be characteristic of a nature in which evolution has taken place.
For Peirce rejected, upon logical grounds, the doctrine that the natural world
or any other portion of the universe known to us, must necessarily be subject
to any a priori laws, except the purely logical ones, or to a perfectly exact
law of causation. Regularity, as Peirce was especially fond of saying, is not
necessarily a self-evident type of any real world which is known to us.
Regularity, where it exists and in so far as it exists, is precisely that
aspect of the world which most stands in need of explanation. If you find a pack
of cards lying in confusion, you suppose that to be the natural result of their
having been thrown down in a chance way by somebody whose dealings with them
were governed by no necessary, rigid, or precise law. That is, the chance
disorder of the pack of cards thrown down at random needs, on the whole, no
explanation. But if you find the cards in some precise order, as, for instance,
in the order required by a certain hand in a certain game, then you stand in
the presence of a fact which needs explanation. You very properly and logically
ask why they came to be in this order.
Precisely so the
relatively chance order of the starry heavens in the region of the Milky Way
calls for no scientific explanation. But if the planets conform to Kepler’s
laws, if the moon of astronomical theory approximately agrees with the moon of
observation, it is, logically speaking, a fair question to ask why the planets
and the moon behave thus, or, in evolutionary terms, how they came to do so.
Precisely so Newton’s laws of motion,
in so far as they are approximately true of the physical world, demand an
explanation and an evolutionary explanation. If such can be hypothetically
furnished, we thereby come to see why and how the Newtonian natural laws have
come to characterize the real world.
Thus every sort of
natural law, precisely in so far as it is approximately exact law, logically
demands, if possible, an explanation in terms of the theory of the evolution of
natural law. And, empirically speaking, as Peirce was never weary of insisting,
there is a wide range of empirical evidence that the present laws of nature are
the products of an evolutionary process. In this thought consisted the
evolutionary theory of Peirce. A brief mention now of
some of his other leading ideas must close this essay on his philosophy.
The second of Peirce’s
leading ideas dominated his highly remarkable and original version of inductive
logic. I have sometimes ventured to call this doctrine by a name which Peirce
himself, in some of his early papers, suggests by his illustrations, though I
believe that he had never formally used it. This name is the “Insurance Theory
of Induction.” I have no time to expound it here. It was originally set forth
in the series of articles in the Popular Science Monthly entitled
“Illustrations of the Logic of Science.”
The third leading idea of
Peirce’s philosophy to which I wish to direct attention results from his theory
of the evolution of natural law, and expresses the result of his most synthetic
survey of cosmological problems. This is the theory according to which chance
is objective, and the whole universe expresses a process that has two extremes,
with chance as a limit towards one end and rigid necessity as a limit at the
other end of an endless temporal process.
The fourth of Peirce’s
leading ideas relates to the teleological and mental aspect of the world, that
is, to the idealistic tendency which formed a motive in Peirce’s thought, but
which never became amplified in a dogmatic idealistic metaphysics. This idea
had a certain similitude to ideas which Bergson has recently made interesting,
though there is never very close agreement between Peirce’s ideas and those of
Bergson. But Peirce has his own theory as to the part which intuition plays in
the work of the human mind and in the guidance of scientific research. Peirce’s
thoughts on this subject are fragmentary. Indeed his entire life work may in a
certain sense be called fragmentary. Yet it is my belief that his ideas will
amply repay study. As he himself says in the conclusion to that brilliant
essay, “The Architecture of Theories,” – “may some future student go over this
ground again and have the leisure to give his results to the world.”
THE PEIRCE MANUSCRIPTS
All the remaining papers
of Peirce have now been placed under the joint care of the Harvard department
of philosophy and of the Harvard library. The papers are in many ways
fragmentary, but may be regarded with confidence as containing some very
important things. We have also in our possession copies of his various
published essays, which are also somewhat fragmentary and which in their
original publications were pretty widely distributed in various journals and
learned transactions. A word about these seems in order before passing on to a
description of Peirce’s unpublished papers and manuscripts.
Of Peirce’s published
works the most important from a purely scientific standpoint was a photometric
research upon a group of stars selected for that purpose by Professor
Pickering, the results of this research being still valuable, despite the
changes in modern methods which have taken place in the field.
Another contribution of
Peirce’s to the world’s storehouse of scientific knowledge is none the less
valuable because it is generally unknown. I refer to the scientific vocabulary
of the first edition of the Century Dictionary, of which Peirce was the author
in so far as that portion of the Century Dictionary had any one author at all.
Peirce’s vast erudition is the history of science and particularly his
familiarity with scholastic philosophy to which he was long devoted made his
work as a dictionary-maker exceedingly valuable.
Nearer to philosophy one
comes perhaps when one speaks of Peirce’s researches on the algebra of logic
and in particular on the logic of relatives. Many of the most recent
researches, including those of Bertrand Russell, are still due to his
influence, although Russell, as I think, has a somewhat inadequate sense of his
own generally indirect indebtedness to Peirce’s work in this field. The logical
essays of Peirce which deal with synthetic logic and with the logic of
relatives were collected and brought into a sort of a synthesis by Schroeder. A
list of them can be found in Schroeder’s “Algebra der Logic” (Appendix to Vol.
1).
Distinct from these
researches in exact and, in general, in deductive logic are Peirce’s manifold
contributions to the logic of induction. The most important essays of Peirce in
this field appeared in the early seventies of the last century in the Popular Science
Monthly under the general heading of “Illustrations of the Logic of Science.”
Of the researches of Peirce on this subject, I do not hesitate to say that they
are still very imperfectly appreciated and are of enormous importance.
As is well known, William
James considered Peirce as the father of pragmatism. Yet what little Peirce
published on this subject will go to bear out the remark that there is little
in common between his pragmatism and that of James. Peirce’s Monist article entitled “The Issues of
Pragmaticism” was written for the express purpose of maintaining the
independence of his thought from either the pragmatism of James or the humanism
of Schiller. The word practicism
seemed to him best to describe the philosophy of these two thinkers. As for
Peirce himself, when he saw his pragmatism threatened with too much popularity
he found it easy to take refuge in a new word, namely, “pragmaticism,” which,
as he liked to say, “seems ugly enough to escape the kidnappers.”
It is not always easy to
understand Peirce. He never regretted the fact that most people found it hard
to follow his ideas. He deliberately chose that most of his researches should
be concerned with highly technical topics and should be secure from the
intrusion of the uncalled. Upon occasion he could be brilliantly clear in his
expressions of highly complex and recondite problems, although this clearness
was a capricious fact in his life and in his writings, and was frequently
interrupted by a mode of expression which often seemed to me to be due to the
fear, after all, that in case mediocre minds found themselves understanding too
many of his ideas, they would be led to form too high an impression of their
own powers. One finds this tendency towards what might be called “impenetrability”
especially evident in his manuscripts. Too often, the reader meets with a
thought of surpassing brilliancy and follows it eagerly, only to have it
disappear like the cuttlefish in an inky blackness of its own secretion.
The most complete
manuscripts of the Peirce collection include copies of the “Lectures on
Pragmatism” which were delivered privately to a circle of friends in Cambridge and of the
Lowell Lectures on Logic of 1903–4. It was these latter which James described
as “flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness” –
“darkness” indeed to James as to many others must have seemed those portions on
“Existential Graphs” or “Abduction.” Yet it seems strange that the very
striking lectures on “Induction,” “Probability,” “Chance,” and “Multitude”
should have attracted nothing more than a passing notice.
The two works, which, if
they could ever have been completed, were intended by Peirce to be the proper
fruits of his studies, were a “History of Science” and a “Comprehensive
Treatise on Logic.” Both of these remain unfinished; and the value of his
fragmentary manuscripts will largely depend upon the extent to which future
editorial work can bring into unity the very considerable fragments which his
remains contain of the studies which were intended to form part of these works.
So far as his erudition and inventiveness were conditions for the writing of
these two intended books, Peirce possessed both these characters most
abundantly. No greater mind has ever appeared in America in respect of the powers
needed for the writing of these two projected works. No more ample erudition
has ever existed amongst us regarding the topics which were here in question.
Of especial importance
from an historical standpoint are the writings of Peirce which deal with
Aristotle and with the scholastic philosophy. Aristotle, Peirce read in the
original carefully and for many years, and his manuscripts contained many
original expressions of his independent opinion about the problems connected
with the interpretation of the Aristotelian philosophy. For the scholastic
philosophy Peirce always had a very great interest. Duns Scotus was among his
favorites, both as logician and as metaphysician. He was not attracted to the
Scholastics by any of their theological relations, but by an interest in their
skilfully devised vocabulary, and in the beautiful array of their word
conceptions. A treatise which I recently found among his manuscripts entitled
“Duns Scotus and Occam” sets forth very clearly the issues of realism and
nominalism in the light of modern thought and goes far towards showing that
many contemporary philosophers, as, for instance, Bertrand Russell, are not so
far away from scholasticism as the calendar might indicate:
The following constitutes
a list of the titles of the more important among the Peirce manuscripts. It is
far from being complete, yet it may serve to suggest the varied and in many
respects original nature of Peirce’s philosophical and scientific researches.
“On Retroduction, Induction, and Abduction.”
“Minute Logic.”
“Treatise in Logic”:
Chapter I, “Prelogical
Ideas”;
Chapter IV, “Ethics”;
Chapter VI, “The Three Kinds of Signs”;
Chapter VII, “The
Aristotelian Syllogistic”;
Chapter VIII, “The
Algebra of the Copula”;
Chapter XI, “On Logical
Breadth and Depth”;
Chapter XIII,
“Simplification of Dual Relatives”;
Chapter XIV,
“Quantification of the Predicate”;
Chapter
XV, “Existential Graphs.”
“Synechism.” “Lectures on the British Logicians.”
“Positivism.”
“Aristotle on Categories.”
“Molecules and Molecular Theory.”
“Prospect of Air Sailing.”
“On Representation.”
“On small Differences in Sensation.”
“Notes on Royce’s World
and Individual.”
“Illustrations of Dynamics.”
“Theory of Numbers.”
“Refutation of Transcendentalism.”
“A Priori and A
Posteriori.”
“The Seven Systems of Metaphysics.”
“Quantity and Quality.”
“On Multitude and Number.”
“Logic of History.”
“Lectures on Kant.”
“On Mind and Matter.”
“Logic of Continuity.”
“On the Associations of Ideas.”
“Spinoza.”
“Hume – a Critical History of Logical
Ideas.”
NOTES
<1> (1) Things, that is, individuals; (2)
objects of conception, that is, universals; and (3) signs. Peirce often
mentioned, in conversation, these “three sorts of being” as the essential
feature of his philosophy.