Philosophical Writings

"Peirce is cited and recognized as the founder of pragmatism. He’s the one who coins the term and spends his career, in a way, trying to give a proof of pragmatism. But he’s also a tragic and very intriguing figure as a man. He never secured a regular academic position. He was, by many estimations, America’s brightest mind. He writes about an impressive array of topics and you don’t have to look too hard or scratch the surface away in many of the areas of 20th century philosophy — philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, metaphysics, semiotics, aesthetics even — to find some innovation that traces back to Peirce. For example, he was the first person to draw the distinction between types and tokens. The word ‘good’ has four letters in the token sense, g-o-o-d, but in the type sense it has only three letters, because there are two letters of the same type (‘o’). It seems like an obvious logical distinction that would be important in all kinds of areas of enquiry and Peirce is the first one to give that distinction the name that all philosophers now recognize. The reason I chose Peirce is not only because he’s the founder of pragmatism, but he is the author of two essays, published in 1877 and 1878 respectively, that are by almost all accounts the two documents that found the pragmatist lineage, tradition, trajectory or whatever it shall be called. Interestingly, these two papers — the first of which is called “The Fixation of Belief” and the second of which is called “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” — don’t contain the word ‘pragmatism’ in them. They were published originally in an odd venue, Popular Science Monthly , but they are generally taken as the inaugurating documents. These two essays outline two central themes in pragmatism that get traced out in all subsequent versions of the view. It’s a behaviouristic, humanistic, practice-based conception of epistemology, what Peirce called a theory of enquiry and a theory of meaning. In “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Peirce develops and promotes a conception of meaning which has come to be called “the pragmatic maxim” or sometimes just “Peirce’s principle” or “the pragmatist conception of meaning.” That conception of meaning says this: if we want to understand the meaning of a sentence, or a statement, we look to see what impact on experience and behaviour it would have if we were to act on it. So if I say, “this knife is sharp” what I am doing is predicating the sharpness of that object. I’m saying it will cut things, you should be careful rubbing it against your skin; if you want to see blood, run it across your arm. The pragmatic maxim says the meaning of a sentence ultimately has to be cashed out in terms of a series of behaviouristic proposals. What would happen if you interacted with things in certain ways? If you do a particular kind of act, or perform a particular kind of action, what will be the result? Note that this is a conception of meaning that is fully naturalistic, it’s not talking about the property of sharpness somehow attaching to this particular instantiation of knifehood… Yes, the Aristotelian conception, and many conceptions are like this. They are metaphysical: you start talking about properties and the objects in which they inhere. Once you start talking in that way, all kinds of metaphysical challenges and questions start developing, about “What does it mean for a property to inhere?” and so on and so forth. Pragmatists are very suspicious of metaphysics. That’s part of the naturalism. This is why pragmatism is a kind of empiricism that is a close cousin to logical empiricism and logical positivism with an anti-metaphysical bent. So one branch of pragmatism we get in Peirce is this conception of meaning. But it’s connected to his view about enquiry… Yes. Pragmatism rejects the thought that epistemology is, centrally, the analysis of knowledge. The pragmatist thinks that epistemology is a normative enquiry: it’s interested in how something should be, how we should form beliefs. This is a very, very interesting development, and a unique feature of pragmatism. Epistemology is understood by the pragmatist as part of the theory of right, rational, self-controlled conduct."