Placing Peirce A Study of the Theory of Knowledge of Charles Sanders
Placing Peirce: A Study of the Theory of Knowledge of Charles Sanders Peirce I. Introduction While the works of Charles Sanders Peirce have received a significant amount of attention since their publication, there seems to be a discrepancy between the focus that contemporary philosophers have when deciding which of Peirce’s contributions are to be taken seriously in a modern context (as opposed to those which are to be delegated to the realm of the ‘insightful but simply incorrect’) and the actual philosophical focus of Peirce himself. On the one hand, Nathan Houser claims in the introduction to The Essential Peirce, Volume I that “His work in logic…has come to be regarded as substantial for both its historical impact and its enduring importance…[and] in the rapidly growing field of…semiotics, Peirce is universally acknowledged as one of the founders, even the founder. ... ” was of paramount importance to Peirce, and that “Virtually all of Charles Peirce’s work…on logic, semiotics…and philosophy…was devoted to the question.” So why is it that when modern philosophers discuss Peirce they discuss not his theory of knowledge, but rather the specific aspects of his overall philosophical project meant to answer the epistemic question? Early readings of Peirce take a pessimistic view on his theory of knowledge. Ernest Nagel, in “Charles Peirce’s Guesses at the Riddle” claims of Peirce that “His reader gets an impression of someone packing and preparing for an important tour, but who somehow never crosses the gates of his own familiar city: we are shown the itinerary and given glowing promises of what is in store for us, but alas! ... ” In a similar vein, Thomas Goudge notes of Peirce that, in his opinion, “On the one hand there is a sense of genuine admiration for the acuteness of the author’s insight into the persistent problems of philosophy; and on the other hand, a sense of disappointment, not to say of bewilderment, at the loosely-integrated and frequently confused solutions which he presents.” What they present was the received view of Peirce for the majority of time since his publication, and though presented in the 1930’s, these two authors reflect the idea that Peirce, driven by conflicting impulses to accept tenets of contradictory theories, is unable to resolve two sides of the dilemmas he presents and instead ends up oscillating between two contradictory positions, never fully taking on the form of a consistent theory. It is not difficult to see, upon reading Peirce, where Nagel and Goudge are coming from with their views; as Houser claims, “The lifelong tension between nominalism and realism in Peirce’s own intellectual life is testament to the general importance he attached to it; in fact, if any single question can be said to have been viewed by Peirce as the most important philosophical question of his time, it is that of deciding between the two doctrines.” (Houser, xxv) While Peirce’s philosophical theory may be described as an attempt (whose success is debated) to solve philosophical anxieties such as the nominalist/realist debate—though as I will discuss in this essay, to describe Peirce’s epistemic worry as mainly one between nominalism in realism is slightly misguided; even so, describing Peirce’s theory in terms of other such tensions between two seemingly contradictory theories that Peirce wishes to accept may be viable—such an attempt is not necessarily a failure. ... Peirce’s philosophy is broad and subtle and appears to be able to accommodate results that would be incompatible in narrower systems of thought.” (Houser, xxix) While it may indeed be the case that Peirce’s theory of knowledge is not one fraught with inconsistency and thus useless beyond historical interest and the occasional insight, it is still not the case that the field of contemporary epistemology has been heavily influenced by—or even, arguably, looks to today—the theory of Peirce. The purpose of this essay is to examine the earlier works of Peirce’s (from 1868-1878, his tenure at Harvard) and consider whether or not they are of any merit to modern epistemology. To examine the main components of his theory of knowledge—mostly in the 1877 article “The Fixation of Belief” and the 1878 article “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” with some explanatory work in his 1871 review, “Fraser’s The Works of George Berkeley”—I contend that we must look at his theory as an answer to his specific philosophical anxieties. Therefore, we must examine what these anxieties are, and they are outlined in a pair of articles published by Peirce in 1868 titled “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man” and “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.” It is my point to demonstrate that Peirce maintains a theory that is not only internally consistent, but answers his personal philosophical anxieties in a way that is pertinent to modern epistemology. To help illustrate Peirce’s anxieties and subsequent theory as an answer to them, I will take note of a suggestion made by Richard J. ... Of McDowell, Bernstein says that “it is unfortunate that McDowell…is not better acquainted with…the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. He might then have realized how much he shares in common with Peirce.” While the two are very similar in many ways and divergent in some (and I will be sure to make note of which is which), the two, I contend are similar enough that, firstly, we can use McDowell’s work to better understand Peirce’s, and, secondly, that Peirce’s similarities with McDowell, whose work is significant to contemporary epistemology indeed, ought justify the discussion of Peirce as a philosopher of merit in terms of his theory of knowledge. ... ” Before seeing what McDowell takes from this remark, I will first explain it in Kant’s terms, as the work of Kant is essential to understand a starting point for not only McDowell, but Peirce as well. Kant begins his “Idea of a Transcendental Logic” in his Critique of Pure Reason by raising the epistemic question of “where does our knowledge com from? ... ” He says: Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations (spontaneity [in the production] of concepts). ... Intuition and concepts constitute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge. (Kant, A50/B74) So for Kant, for us to know something, we must have a representation in our mind, one that is the product of what he calls our ‘faculty of spontaneity’ of which he also says “the mind’s power of producing representations from itself, the spontaneity of knowledge, should be called the understanding. ... However, for our representation to be knowledge, it must be a representation that is veridical—one that corresponds to the object in the real world. ... We cannot have knowledge without our power to think, our faculty of spontaneity or understanding, because knowledge is, by definition, conceptual (of our thoughts, or in the words of Wilfrid Sellars, in ‘the space of reasons’). ... Only through their union can knowledge arise. ... ’ So in brief, Kant’s theory of knowledge is that our knowledge of the world is in virtue of having veridical representations—concepts, created by our understanding—that ‘match up’ with the world as it is given to us by our intuitions, products of our sensibility. ... ” The argument of Mind and World is that (the majority of) current epistemic theories describe (one of two main types of) relationships between our minds and the world that are not sufficient to call us justified in saying that our beliefs are true, that is the justification part of the Platonic tripartite conception of knowledge as justified true belief is lacking. It is not that our minds can accidentally relate to the world; to have knowledge they must necessarily do so. ... Davidson says ‘nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief’ (p310 [in A Coherence Theory of Truth]), and he means in particular that experience cannot count as a reason for holding a belief.” (McDowell, 14) So if our beliefs are not justified by experience—the only part of us that is constrained by or answerable to the real world outside—cannot justify our beliefs, then how can they have a rational relation to the world such that we can have knowledge? ... This type of theory, according to McDowell, is one “that cannot make sense of the bearing of thought on objective reality.” (McDowell, 23) This type of coherence theory lacks rational constraint from the world. On the other hand, the other type of theory, the Myth of the Given, according to McDowell “expresses a craving for rational constraint from outside the realm of thought and judgment [sic]. ... Hilary Kornblith, in “Beyond Foundationalism and the Coherence Theory,” makes the point that McDowell restricts to Davidson and certain followers of what he calls ‘the Myth of the Given.’ According to Kornblith, “Foundationalism and the coherence theory of justification may be viewed as two sides of a Kantian antinomy. ... So, in conclusion, McDowell’s philosophical anxieties stem from the Kantian remark that concepts and intuitions are both required for knowledge, and it is not just the specific examples that McDowell uses that fall into this dilemma but a good deal (if not the majority) of modern epistemology. ... “The original Kantian thought,” McDowell says, “was that empirical knowledge results from co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity…We can dismount from the seesaw if we can achieve a firm grip on this thought: receptivity does not make an even notionally separable contribution to the co-operation. ... In McDowell’s theory, the world is in conceptual shape because, as he argues: Modern science understands its subject matter in a way that threatens…to leave it disenchanted…The image marks a contrast between two kinds of intelligibility: the kind that is sought by…natural science, and the kind we find in something…in…’the logical space of reasons’…If we identify nature with what natural science aims to make comprehensible, we threaten…to empty it of meaning. ... ” Thus the idea that our mind could be so fundamentally detached from the world that nothing is real is foreign to McDowell’s theory. ... That the Cartesian problem of intentionality is not a problem for McDowell is precisely the fundamental concept underlying Mind and World that allows him to show why foundationalist and coherentist views of knowledge are both inadequate to explain how we have knowledge: they are theories trying to answer problem that for McDowell, doesn’t exist (and the reason it doesn’t exist, one might say, is what justifies McDowell in attempting to undermine the Cartesian thesis in the first place. ... Peirce A. Philosophical Anxieties/Motivations While I have undoubtedly gone into considerable detail on Kant and McDowell, especially McDowell, for an essay meant to be on Peirce, rest assured I have done so for a reason. Peirce is responding to Kant in a similar way to McDowell; they see similar problems and have not dissimilar solutions. Understanding the multitude of specific aspects of McDowell’s theory is important because Peirce’s work reflects thinking on the very same issues as McDowell, and their motivating philosophical anxieties have as many if not more parallels and similarities than the answers to the questions they pose. McDowell takes an anti-Cartesian stance because, in his opinion, any philosophical theory based on the Cartesian gap between mind and world will necessarily come up short in explaining how our thoughts can truly be justified or warranted true beliefs. ... In “Peirce’s Use of Kant,” James Feibleman, in a very McDowellian move, encapsulates the beginnings of Peirce’s anxiety by claiming: Kant saw the unity of pure reason and empirical knowledge in the mind, but never succeeded in making it hold because of his postulation of an essentially unknowable real world. ... Peirce and the Given Peirce indeed makes a very similar critique of the given, as Bernstein points out, “Peirce anticipates virtually every argument that Sellars and McDowell have developed against the myth of the given.” (Bernstein, 19) On the other hand, Feibleman claims of Peirce that “Interest in a given problem was often stimulated by a reading of Kant, yet Peirce’s own solution was always different, and often even diametrically opposed to that of his teacher.” (Feibleman, 365) What then, is Peirce’s critique of the given? Peirce’s 1868 article, “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” was the main body of his attack on the given, with some accompaniment by a related contemporary article (the two were in a series), “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.” With the sole exception being that Peirce uses the word ‘cognition’ essentially where Kant and McDowell use the word ‘concept,’ these two articles are attacking the idea of a Given, specifically, and the Cartesian framework in general. ... ” In other words, Peirce asks if we can know the difference between something directly presented to us by our perception and something already in conceptual shape. Peirce answers in the negative and his argument, in the general form, is that “when phenomena of an extreme complexity are presented, which yet would be reduced to order or mediate simplicity by the application of a certain conception, that conception sooner or later arises in application to those phenomena.” (Peirce, 16) So what we see is (and modern in cognitive science this point is well taken) not exactly what is out there, rather, our eyes instantaneously apply concepts to present it in an ordered manner. As an example, Peirce gives us “the perception of two dimensions of space. ... (Peirce, 15) The table that I am looking at right now exists, but a necessary condition for my seeing it as a table is that I conceptually restructure the various points of light I perceive from the table in my head into the form of a contiguous object. With the inability to determine whether a cognition is a perceptual one (which is caused by an intuition) or caused by another cognition proven, Peirce asks at the end of the paper “Whether there is any cognition not determined by a previous cognition.