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Peirce in the 21st Century

Nathan Houser

Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal

in American Philosophy, Volume 41, Number 4, Fall 2005, pp.729-739 (Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

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s philosophy finds its footing in this newmillennium, there is some reason to sup-

pose that Peirce will play a larger role in setting

its course than anyone would have expectedduring most of the half-century that followedthe 1951 publication of Quines "Two Dog-mas of Empiricism." There are many reasons ~ \\ tnPfor this welcome prospect, not least of whichis the rising profile of pragmatism world- O 7 c. (^pyifai/v*,wideeven at home. It's hard to say what got ythings turned around. My favorite candidate is Nathan HouserArtificial Intelligence, that minor movement

within the now ubiquitous Computer Revolu-tion. Suddenly it became respectable again totalk about the difference between mind and

body (our software and hardware), to worryabout qualitative consciousness, to considerthe relation between "information," the AIanalog of beliefs, and procedures for certain

performances, to consider new logics forinformation acquisition and integration, andeven to investigate the apparent necessity thatinformation be situated in some specifiedworld and linked to it indexically. A curiousupshot of this late effort to understand howactual entities, whether artifactual or biologi-cal, could possibly develop into, or be designedto be, "thinking, believing beings," and whatthat really amounts to, soon had philosophers

like Dan Dennett and Paul Churchland, alongwith many others, working on problems thatconnect in deep ways they surely didn't foreseewith the concerns of the participants of theold Cambridge Metaphysical Club. Some ofour mainstream philosophers are beginning tounderstand that the old pragmatists may havebeen onto something. (The mainstream phi-losophy I have in mind is the American ana-

lytic tradition that counts Carnap and Quineamong its founding fathers, reveres figures likeSellars and Davidson, is carried on today by

TRANSACTIONS OFTHE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY

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1^ scientistic philosophers like Dennett and the Churchlands, and even acceptsZ neopragmatists like Putnam and Rorty as part of the family.)O The expanding common ground between contemporary American phi-J~~* losophy and early pragmatism may explain why Peirce's stock appears to be

^7 rising. More than any of the other first-generation pragmatists, Peirce seems^, almost to belong to the family of analytic philosophersthough only, Iy) would say, as a rather distant relative, a great uncle perhaps and one best notV mentioned in polite conversation. But close enough that parts of his work

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survival, let alone wide-spread acceptance, without dedicated and capable f4 '

promoters.

The story Margolis tells is largely concerned with the battles and in- g-trigues of recent philosophy in America, to some extent pitting the neoprag- g-

matists against their more scientistic brethren, as well as against themselves. ^0But in a curious sense it is the story of a battle of ideas being waged between *contemporary American philosophers and the classic pragmatists, whose Oideas refuse to give up the ghost. Margolis recognizes that early pragmatism in America, along with neo-Kantianism and Hegelianism in Europe, repre- ^sents a high-water mark for world thought. The defining characteristic of

pragmatism, he believes, is its anti-Cartesianism. But for Margolis, Carte- ^sianism is more nuanced than the usual dualism: as he puts it, "in the Amer- >ican setting, 'Cartesianism' is not dualistic," but is "usually materialisticallyinclined" (2002, p. 38). A sure sign of Cartesianism, on this view, is a com-mitment to a robust realism that purports to make a clean cut between cog- qnizers and the cognized. As such, and quite surprisingly, Margolis finds that American philosophy has been blindly creeping back to Descartes.

Another important feature of early pragmatism was its naturalism. Thisis a common understanding. But the naturalism of early pragmatism was a

pretty weak affair, on Margolis's view: "a conceptual scruple," shared withsuch heterogeneous doctrines as positivism and Marxism, amounting to a

refusal to admit non-natural or supernatural resources in the descriptive orexplanatory discourse of any truth-bearing kind" (2002, p. 6). Margolisseems not to have grasped how great was the impact of Darwinian natural-ism on the members of the Metaphysical Club and that the originality oftheir views grew largely out of their commitment to an evolutionary accountof intelligence based in actual experience. Margolis mistakenly attributesthis stronger Darwinian naturalism only to Dewey.

Of course Margolis understands that a lot of philosophical work hasbeen expended, following Peirce's original formulation of the pragmatic

maxim and James's popularization of it, to develop convincing pragmaticaccounts of meaning and truth, but he believes that the intent and importof the maxim can be pretty well summed up in four points: (I) "the rejec-tion of Cartesian and Kantian intuitionism, apodicticity, transcendentalism,and necessitarianism;" (2) "the social embeddedness of beliefs, perceptions,and judgments in a continuum of similar elements" (a holism of sorts); (3)"the methodological and practical linkage between thought and action,along with the effective determination of meaning and the assessment oftruth in terms of distinctions (consequences) grounded in shared experi-ence;" and (4) "the entirely open-ended, constructive, socially determined

process of judging what to count as knowledge and intelligence" (2002,p. 10). It is at this point that Margolis admits to having slanted his accountof pragmatism to favor Dewey.

It seems clear that Margolis thinks that American philosophy was on theright track before the brilliant Vienna Circle philosophers, in the 1930s, y-^j

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^ transported their neo-positivism, as well as many of themselves, to the- United States. Carnap arrived in 1936. Although pragmatism had notO played itself out, the pragmatists were no match for the European emigres*~~[ or their American disciple, Quine, and logical empiricism took fast root in

^T soil well tilled by half a century of pragmatist spade work. This Americanj form of analytic philosophy was soon transformed by Quine into whatyy Margolis calls "analytic naturalism" and, for the last fifty years, it has been*-7 the dominant American philosophy.

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dogmas: an unyielding commitment to reductive physicalism, at least, if not 3to eliminitive materialism; the doctrine of the causal closure of the physical; Rand, per impossible according to Margolis, the total rejection and even gabhorrence of any form of relativism. Today this approach finds itself EJ*

depending on latter-day analytic naturalists like Dennett and the Church- ^lands to discover in evolutionary biology or neurophilosophy the solutions ST1to traditional philosophical questions.6 Margolis argues that this is a hope- oless cause because the naturalizers have, paradoxically, rejected dualism only to embrace an equally mistaken extreme Cartesian realism. ^

Happily, as I have already noted, as the fortunes of American analyticphilosophy seem to be waning, the opposite seems to be happening in the ycase of pragmatism. Some twenty-five years ago Richard Rorty somehow ^managed, with sharply honed ideas, excellent timing, and great rhetorical *skill, to almost single-handedly revive interest in pragmatismfrom withinmainstream philosophy. Some may believe, and for good reason, that prag-matism, and American philosophy more generally, had already been rescuedfrom the hegemony of the dismissive analytic movement thanks to some dis- ^tinguished members of the Peirce Society and the Society for the Advance-ment of American Philosophy; but if pragmatism was rescued it wasspirited away to a safe place only to be visited by friends. It seems to havebeen Rorty, along with, if in dispute with, Hillary Putnam, who somehow

brought pragmatism into mainstream debates. That truly was a notableachievement, even if the pragmatism in question is one many of us wouldrather not own. In fact, as Margolis shows, Rorty 's efforts over the years havebeen as much in support of key dogmas of the analytic naturalists as theyhave been in support of what most avowed pragmatists would call pragma-tism. For example, Rorty has been a strong promoter of the Davidsonianview that what we can know about the world can, and must be, known with-

out the intervention of "interpretive tertia," without, that is, "conceptualschemes" that come between us and the world (2002, p.34). It has been with

Putnam that the original pragmatists found a voice to do battle with Rortyand to address mainstream issues. (Of course there are others besides Put-nam who have very effectively represented Peirce within analytic philoso-phyI note, for example, the impressive work of Susan Haackbut it isPutnam who Margolis identifies as the most notable opponent of Rorty,and it is their "running quarrel" that Margolis tags as "the very paradigm ofthe evolving effort to redefine pragmatism" (2002, p. 32).

Margolis, quite conviningly, details the quarter-century debate betweenRorty and Putnam that has brought us to where we are today, a point in timewhen pragmatism is regarded as a promising alternative to a possibly failinganalytic naturalism, even though pragmatism itself, in its second instantia-tion, is also failingfailing because neither Rorty's neo-pragmatism norPutnam's multiple versions of pragmatic realism allows adequately for therelativist and historicist alternatives that are necessary for a real recovery ofrealism (2002, p. 107). This is what Margolis believes and what he argues -,-.

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^ for in detail in his book, Reinventing Pragmatism. His companion book, TheZ Unraveling of Scientism, treats the fortunes and misfortunes of scientism.O Together these two books build a convincing case that the "single most""* important philosophical issue at the end of the twentieth century"now as

[Z we make our way into a new century and a new millenniumis the "con-^, ceptual adequacy or inadequacy of analytic 'naturalism'" and the contest chameleon-like character, has never altogether lost its appeal and, now,S because of the vitality of the Rorty-Putnam quarrel, is regarded by many tol_i be the philosophy-in-waiting. Margolis is convinced that the second pragma-

tism, the work of Rorty and Putnam, is only the opportunity and not theanswer. Pragmatism needs a third life to really recover its promise and to take

the reins from analytic philosophy. Margolis proffers a new pragmatism, areinvented pragmatism, that will reconnect with the critical intuitions of itsoriginators while avoiding lines of development from its second life that have

proved to be "self-defeating in the Cartesian way." Margolis is adamant thatthis revisioning of pragmatism "should not be pursued 'archivally,' as if thetexts of the early pragmatists might decide the newer questions" (2002, p. 3):"there can be no serious point to a revival [of pragmatism] that does nottake into account the half century of vigorous dispute that has, on any read-

ing, eclipsed its older energies" (2002, p. 12). I must say, this seems right tome if what Margolis means is that the revisioning of pragmatism should notbe pursued only by going back to the original pragmatists without takingaccount of subsequent developments.

But what is Margolis really proposing? Remember that he believes, per-haps not so unlike Rorty, at least in practice, that one is fully justified inconstructing an idealized pragmatism to meet some noble purpose. Margo-lis's purpose for pragmatism is to compete successfully with analytic natu-ralism, in fact to win out over it, by providing the long-sought answers to the

problems of scientific realism. What, then, must the new pragmatism belike? Very briefly, the new pragmatism must not dismiss relativism andincommensurabilism out of hand (91); it must "admit conceptual ["inter-mediaries" or] tertia... to make [its] realism constructivist from the start andthroughout . . . [with] no fallback objectivism to take for granted" (2002,

p. 51); it must not restrict its epistemology to causal explanations (2002,p. 20); and it must not allow dualisms of "subjects and objects," of "the sub-jective and the objective," and "between realism and idealism"(2002, p. 22).

It will help one get a sense of Margolis's vision if one considers the fol-

lowing: "We may," he says, " treat pragmatism in a bifurcated way, featuringthe 'idealist' tendencies in Peirce or featuring Dewey's tendency to focusrather on the management of the actual circumstances of life here andnow. . . Certainly Peirce's 'long run is a pragmatist invention that disallowsany fixed telos or truth or Tightness or any reliable invariances in the encoun-

J-.. tered world; but it is increasingly made to collect the best energies (and aspi-

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rations) of human societies in what cannot he secured here and now; and that, as we J?now understand these matters, is either not pragmatism at all or else an alternative utterly irreconcilable with it" (2002, p. 9). Clearly, even though 5 Margolis has great respect for Peirce and, especially, for Peirce's early insight g-

into the intrinsic link between meaning and action, it is not a Peircean prag- ^0matism that he has in mind for our new century. Instead, Margolis offers 51what he calls an "up-to-date reading of Dewey" (2002, p. 51). O

I want to be clear that I believe Margolis's proposal for a new pragmatism 3is a rich resource for pragmatists of all stripes as we prepare to meet the ^3challenge he convincingly prophesieseven though many of his views will

be quite provoking for Peirceans. But that may be all to the good. In what yfollows, I will try to set out in outline a single issue but an important one for Margolis's construction, the question of fallibilism, and then offer some *thoughts stimulated by Margolis's provocation.It seems that Margolis expects the new pragmatism to be built largely q"around the still unexplored possibilities of fallibilism" (2002, p. 133). He Ssays that, "Retrospectively, pragmatism's strength and widest influence lie *with the spreading forms of fallibilism and whatever concepts fallibilismilluminatingly transforms: notably, the theory of truth that James and Deweymore or less agree on, that James effectively invented, that was never ardentlyadopted but now seems so much more promising than it ever was in the best

days of the pragmatist protectorate" (2002, p. 132). He adds that, "thefuture of 'pragmatism' lies with the contest between the potentially irrecon-cilable forces of naturalism and pragmatism ..., particularly those involvedin reconstituting what to understand by realism and fallibilism" (133).

I assume that it is more or less evident that fallibilism ought to be con-genial to cultural relativism and incommensurabilism, doctrines dear toMargolis. But he correctly regards Peirce's fallibilism as a threat to his newpragmatism and tries to build a case against Peirce's doctrine and forDewey's. Peirce's emphasis on the "long run" is seen as a large part of the

problem: "It is precisely Peirce's veering off beyond the "here and now" that,retrospectively, signifies his departure from pragmatism's main tendency,"Margolis noted (2002, p. II). He goes out of his way to distinguishDewey's fallibilism from Peirce's:

fallibilism takes two entirely different forms in Peirce and Dewey. InPeirce it signifies the perpetual postponement of inquiry's ever arriving atthe "truth about reality". ... In Dewey it signifies the restriction of allcognitive claims within a thoroughly fluxive world, by means of practical

skills (on which science itself depends) that first emerge from certainnon-cognitive animal powers implicated in our survival and viability."(2002, p. 135)

The Peircean might well ask why Margolis thinks the view he attributes hereto Dewey would not also be accepted by Peirce. Let's look a little deeperinto Margolis's understanding of Peirce's fallibilism. j-,c

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^ In an earlier article in the Transactions (1998, Vol. 34) Margolis described/C Peirce's fallibilism as consisting of three "serially nested themes": (Infallibility,O the "thesis that, with regard to any proposition, it is humanly possible to

hold a mistaken belief," which is "tantamount to a denial of Cartesian indu-

bitability"; (2) self-corrective inquiry, the thesis that "it is both possible and^f, likely that, for any mistaken belief, a society of inquirers can, in a pertinentlyy-j finite interval of time, discern its own mistakes and progress toward discov-*~7 ering the true state of affairs"; and (3) a supporting metaphysics that marks

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He goes on: "I hold that there is an analogous incompatibility involvingeach and every one of Peirce's central notions and that the primary functionof the full doctrine of fallibilism is to interpret and reconcile the doubleinterpretation of all these notions. Effectively, the difference between the two

is what obtains in particular, determinate, and finite human actions and whatobtains in the single, all-inclusive ideal, evolutionary continuum viewed at the ST*limit of the infinite sequence of all such finite actions" (1998: 554). O

He concludes: "Thus: the 'real' is altered by action, in the sense of finite human life; but the 'real' is, also, what it is 'irrespectively of any mind,' at the ^jdeal limit of infinite inquiry. The Deweyan form of fallibilism jettisons tPeirce's third theme and holds to the first two themes. The price of such a yretreat is to replace the would-be legitimation of a realism in science with a ^

pious hope in favor of such a realism.... It's no good insisting that Deweyan fallibilism ever recovers objectivity and realism: it has no regulative principleto offer; but then neither does Peirce's fallibilism, since its regulative princi- qpie operates, per impossible, only at the ideal limit of inquiry. The dilemma cannot be overcome" (1998: 554). ^

Based on arguments like this, Margolis supports his own commitment toa Deweyian style fallibilism purged of Peircean idealisma fallibilism thatmakes no "pretention of progress, or approximation to the Truth" and thatreinterprets "realism and truth in terms entirely internal to a human praxis

that knows no independent or regulative or constitutive principle of Truthor Reality" (1998: 558). This view, which I find to be less uncongenial tothe views of Dennett, or even of Paul Churchland, than I believe Margolissupposes, will be part of the new pragmatism, if he has his way.

In dismissing Peirce's fallibilism in support of his own construction,Margolis has placed a lot of weight on the inconsistency of the claimsPeirce made in the so-called "paradox of the known object." It so happens,however, that Peirce did not make both claims. Margolis missed the irony ofthe paragraph that contains the purported first claim. Here is what Peirce

said: "It appears that there are certain mummified pedants who have neverwaked to the truth that the act of knowing a real object alters it. They arecurious specimens of humanity, and as I am one of them, it may be amus-ing to see how I think" (CP 5.555).

So, on a more careful reading of the text, this paradox disappearsitdisappears, anyway, assuming that Margolis is wrong in holding that ClaimI is required by Peirce's fallibilism (as Peirce obviously denies).

Frankly, I don't believe that any of Margolis's arguments against Peirce'spragmatism or his fallibilism succeeds or even fully hits the mark. (At a min-imum, Margolis would have to consider how Peirce's distinction betweenimmediate and dynamic objects of thought, viz. semiosis, informs his real-ism.) But his provocative treatment of Peirce does fully succeed in bringingnew focus on many critical questions that will have to be addressed beforePeirce's form of pragmatism can have a chance of succeeding in the coming

philosophical struggles. ^

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^ The role of fallibilism in Peirce's philosophy is an excellent example of aZ key Peircean doctrine still waiting for the attention it deserves. ObviouslyO some components of Peirce's fallibilism have been much examined and

debated, and have even entered mainstream thought, especially in connec-

tion with Popper's falsificationism. But in gathering in the name of Peirce's^, fallibilism all of Peirce's doctrines and principles that either directly or indi-yj rectly underwrite it, Margolis has done what Peirceans should have done"7 long ago. It gives a new sense to the meaning of Peirce's fallibilism and its

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would turn attention to abduction, the logic of perception, as another key Jpto understanding fallibilism. Margolis actually remarks that Peirce's account of fallibilism is "thoroughly metaphysical, fixed on the supposed underpin- gning of our abductive powers." In contrasting Popper's and Peirce's accounts g-

of fallibilism, Margolis even speculates that Popper's fallibilism rests on an ^0account of "human knowledge as 'a very special case of animal knowl- dege'which [Margolis notes] is (also) Popper's paraphrase of Peirce's abductive doctrine" (1998: 546). Curiously, however, Margolis doesn't sappear to have realized how this might absolve Peirce from the criticism that ^his case for fallibilism is built on the infinite postponement of the end of tinquiry. y

Obviously this is the merest suggestion of what a richer and deeper con- ^ception of fallibilism can offer in the way of preparing Peircean resources *for the coming decades when pragmatism will, again, take the reins ofAmerican philosophyif Margolis is right. Whether the pragmatism to qcome will favor the more nominalistic and relativistic views of Dewey and James, as reconfigured in Margolis's third way, or whether it will favor the "more realistic non-relativistic precepts of Peirce, will largely depend on howwell we prepare for the moment of opportunity.

Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis

nhouser@iupui.edu

NOTES

1. This paper was presented as my Presidential Address to the Charles S. PeirceSociety on 28 December 2003 in Washington, D. C. It has been modified only slighdy.

2. John Sowas research on applications of his EG-based Conceptual Graphs andKnowledge Representation is what I have in mind (see Sowa's website: www.jfsowa.com).

3. For example, see Robert Aunger's The Electric Mme; A New Theory of How We Think,The Free Press, 2002, pp. 232-34.4. This was the conviction of Horace Kallen: see his conversation with Corliss Lam-

ont, et al., in Dialogue on George Santayana, ed. C. Lamont, Horizon Press 1959, pp.89-90.

5. See R. L. Kirkham's article on the Correspondence Theory of Truth in the Con-cise RoutUdge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, p. 900.

6. See Kristin Andrews' "Walter's Neurophilosophy of Free Will: A Review," Philo,Vol. 6, 2003, p. 166.

7. Since presenting this paper in December 2003, I have tried to develop furtherthis broad account of fallibilism. My latest thoughts on this subject were presented on6 April 2005 at a conference in Milan and that paper, "Peirce's Contrite Fallibilism,"will appear in the conference proceedings to be published by Cambridge Scholars Press.

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