Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 6. Charles S. Peirce

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СКАЧАТЬ as a philosopher, and the disagreements, though going much deeper, serve to highlight the difficulty in reaching consensus on the meaning of “nominalism” and “realism” and on what constitutes a significant change with respect to these two positions. But whatever labels they use, these scholars all agree that there was a significant development within Peirce’s thought and that the repercussions that followed his introduction of logical quantifiers in the mid-1880s clearly constitute one of his major periods of change. Another would come around 1897 when he accepted that there are generals external to thought, a change that would breathe new life into his slumbering pragmatism.

      Thus the present volume, most notably with “A Guess at the Riddle” (sels. 22–28), inaugurates a new period of philosophy for Peirce, one distinguished by a commitment to a thoroughgoing architectonic approach based on his categories. The difficult task of reforming his entire system of thought, always with an eye for improving it, would occupy Peirce for the remainder of his life. Having accepted the reality of seconds, Peirce could begin to build an account of perception that would make sense of direct acquaintance with reality and that would provide reason to hope that inquiry could be guided toward the truth by the obstinacy of reality rather than by a conception of it. In his definition of “real” for the Century Dictionary, Peirce distinguished between “real objects … external to the mind,” which are “independent altogether of our thought,” and internal objects which “depend upon thought,” though “not upon thought about them.” By 1903, this distinction became a basic feature of his semeiotic (EP2:276) and by 1906 it had turned into the now familiar dynamical object/immediate object duo (EP2:477).

      Among the other noteworthy ideas that seem to have originated or come much more clearly into focus during this period, we find in Peirce a growing conviction that instinct and evolutionary attunement to the laws of nature—to the “objective reason embodied in the laws of nature”—give humans a predisposition for guessing nature’s laws (sels. 8, 15) and explain the importance of common sense (sel. 44). Peirce’s intensive work on reduction of observational data and modeling of hydrodynamic effects for his gravity reports, and perhaps even his critique of the design of Gurney’s “experiment” to prove telepathic phenomena (sels. 16, 18), strengthened his conviction that probable reasoning is “the logic of the physical sciences,” as he proclaimed in his definition of “probability” in the Century Dictionary. We find Peirce placing more stress on regulative principles, perhaps a step toward his later recognition of the normativity of logic, and on intellectual hopes (see sel. 28 and W5:221–34). There is an indication in some of the W6 writings that Peirce has begun moving toward his later accommodation with religion and his innovative theological ideas (sels. 14, 22, 23, 44). In science, including even his work for the Coast Survey, Peirce’s interest shows a definite turn toward dynamic and process-oriented concerns and, also, toward foundational and cosmological questions (sels. 25–28, 31, 36). Peirce reveals a timely grasp of the crisis that was developing in physics at the end of the 19th century⁶⁶ and perceptively recommended that progress would depend on a better understanding of physical matter at the molecular level and on fruitful new theories (sels. 28, 31). Peirce offered his “guess” as a candidate for a new paradigm in physics and began a book intended to promote and justify its embrace (sel. 31).

      Peirce’s 1887 polemic against Herbert Spencer’s “mechanical notion of the universe” (sel. 14) provided his first occasion for stating his case against the doctrine of necessity,⁶⁷ and turned him into a public critic of necessitarianism, even a prophet of its doom. Peirce’s aggressive rejection of mechanical causation as adequate for the explanation of growth and development, forced him to defend a teleological form of evolution and moved him in the direction of a theory of sign action, or semiosis. Peirce’s “guess at the riddle,” as expressed about 1888, was that “three elements are active in the world: first, chance; second, law; and third, habit-taking”; there was not yet any explicit inclusion of signs among the basic components of the universe. But he was already committed to a close analogy between the growth of mind and the growth of physical law and he would make that connection explicit in 1892 when he proclaimed his tychistic thesis that matter is specialized or “effete” mind (R 972; see also, EP1:312). At least by 1907, Peirce would recognize that the end of semiosis of the highest kind is an intellectual habit, which realization may lead us to wonder whether the third basic element that is active in the universe, habit-taking, is a form of semiosis, and if that is what imparts the teleological current that Peirce finds in evolution.

      In 1887, in a sketch of his “A Guess at the Riddle,” Peirce noted that he wanted a “vignette of the Sphynx” placed below the title.⁶⁸ Then after stating his guess in Chapter VII, he added, “Such is our guess of the secret of the sphynx.” On 5 April 1890, almost two years after he had put his manuscript aside, Jem wrote to him from Egypt: “I am now passing a few days on the edge of the desert & directly at the base of the Great Pyramid. It is by far the most stupendous structure I have ever seen, and the Sphinx is more imposing than I ever thought possible…. no calm that living man can experience approaches the sublime sweet god-like serenity of the sphinx under the full moon.” Although Peirce’s Sphinx was no doubt the one of Greek mythology, Jem’s letter would have moved him, and it must have been difficult not to take up his manuscript again; but he was working on “Logic and Spiritualism” for The Forum, and was still hard at work as the Outsider trying to raise money to send to Juliette in Europe. In July, Cams would invite him to contribute to his new journal, The Monist, and Peirce would take that opportunity to turn his “Guess” into the six articles known as the “Monist Metaphysical Series.” That would appease his sphinx.

      Nathan Houser

      1. In writing this introduction, I have depended on the results of Max H. Fisch’s many years of research, contained in his files and data collections at the Peirce Edition Project. To reduce the number of footnotes, I do not give references for items that can be easily located by keeping the following in mind: all references to manuscripts and Peirce family letters, unless otherwise indicated, are to the Peirce Papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard University; correspondence with employees of the Coast Survey is in Record Group 23 in the National Archives.

      2. The Fisch Collection at IUPUI contains records of extensive research into Juliette’s origin, primarily conducted by Maurice Auger, Victor Lenzen, and Max H. Fisch, but no final conclusions were drawn. Elisabeth Walther’s Charles Sanders Peirce: Leben und Werk (Agis-Verlag, 1989), Joseph Brents Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Indiana University Press, 1993; revised ed. 1998), and Kenneth Laine Ketner’s His Glassy Essence (Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), each contain helpful discussions of Juliette’s origin but do not settle the question.

      3. See Thomas G. Mannings U.S. Coast Survey vs. Naval Hydrographic Office: A 19th-Century Rivalry in Science and Politics (University of Alabama Press, 1988), especially ch. 4, and his “Peirce, the Coast Survey, and the Politics of Cleveland Democracy,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 11 (1975): 187–94. Also see Brent, ch. 3, and the introduction to W5.

      4. See Francis Ellingwood Abbots Organic Scientific Philosophy: Scientific Theism (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1885) and Josiah Royces The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, A Critique of the Bases of Conduct and of Faith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1885). For Peirce’s reviews of these works, see W5: sels. 33,46. For a brief account of Peirce’s work for the Century Dictionary, leading up to 1887, see the Introduction to W5, pp. xliii-xliv. See also W5: sel. 57.

      5. For some background remarks on Peirce’s involvement with the scientific assignment of the Greely expedition, see the introduction to W4, p. xxxi.

      6. Greely to Thorn, 29 March 87. NARG 23.

      7. In his published report (sel. 30), Peirce СКАЧАТЬ