In this book, T. L. Short corrects widespread misconceptions of Peirce's theory of signs and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary analytic philosophy of language, mind and science. Peirce's theory of mind, naturalistic but nonreductive, bears on debates of Fodor and Millikan, among others. His theory of inquiry avoids foundationalism and subjectivism, while his account of reference anticipated views of Kripke and Putnam. Peirce's realism falls between 'internal' and 'metaphysical' realism and is more satisfactory than either. His pragmatism is not (...) verificationism; rather, it identifies meaning with potential growth of knowledge. Short distinguishes Peirce's mature theory of signs from his better-known but paradoxical early theory. He develops the mature theory systematically on the basis of Peirce's phenomenological categories and concept of final causation. The latter is distinguished from recent and similar views, such as Brandon's, and is shown to be grounded in forms of explanation adopted in modern science. (shrink)

W. B. Gallie's words about Peirce's cosmology—"the black sheep or white elephant of his philosophical progeny" (1952, p. 216)—have often been quoted, usually as a preface to giving a better account of the animal. That he attributed the view to 'contemporary philosophers' and did not assert it himself has usually been ignored. True, Gallie did argue that the "cosmology is a failure, and an inevitable failure" (p. 236), but he also said that Peirce himself "recognized … that his work in (...) this field was imperfect and sketchy" (p. 215), and he concluded the chapter, and his book, with an extremely sympathetic account of all that is nevertheless of enduring value in that failure. After studying Peirce's writings of his.. (shrink)

Two aspects of Peirce’s mature philosophy seem to me not to have been sufficiently appreciated. They are its empiricist method and its continuity with his scientific research. The research led to and justified the method.1Ground must be cleared before we can proceed. Simplistic ideas of the empirical must be swept aside and Peirce’s empiricism accurately identified. We must also distinguish two theories of meaning that have been associated with empiricist philosophies and show that Peirce combined them ; this will be (...) essential to Section 6. Only then can we get down to work. Peirce’s experimental and other studies of observation showed that a science of.. (shrink)

: This response to my seven critics is organized under five topics: 1. The book's scope and approach; 2. Physicalism, idealism, anthropomorphism; 3. Final causation; 4. Peirce's development; 5. Signs, objects, interpretants. No ground is ceded, but I have found the interchange clarifying and hope that the reader will find it so, too.

In empirical science, hypostatic abstraction posits an entity defined by its assumed physical relation to a known phenomenon. If the assumed relation is real, the posited entity is physically real and is not an ens rationis. The posited entity, being identified indirectly, by its relation to something else, may be the agreed-upon subject of mutually incommensurable theories, and this is a key to understanding the history of science. Natural kinds may be introduced by hypostatic abstraction, and this explains why, contrary (...) to received doctrine, concepts of natural kinds can never be vague in the sense of being fuzzy, though they can be vague in the sense of lacking specificity. Terms defined by hypostatic abstraction are rigid designators in Kripke's sense, but show how rigid designation is consistent with the Fregean theory of reference. (shrink)

Peirce earned his keep making measurements, mainly of gravity but also astronomical, and he made several contributions to the science of measurement. It has been said that his experience measuring had philosophical consequences: his adoption of fallibilism, his argument against necessitarianism, and his conception of inquiry as converging on the truth have all been mentioned. But not much attention has been paid to the curious episode of his making “the study of great men” part of a course in logic: students (...) were asked to rank a long list of men by order of greatness. That was at Johns Hopkins in 1883. I shall argue that that study, together with his reflections on pre-instrumental estimates of stars’ brightness, bears directly on the method of phaneroscopy formulated nearly two decades later. In each case, the problem is to show how objectivity is possible under conditions in which it must seem that objectivity is impossible. (shrink)

In this book, T. L. Short places the notorious difficulties of Peirce's important writings in a more productive light, arguing that he wrote philosophy as a scientist, by framing conjectures intended to be refined or superseded in the inquiries they initiate. He argues also that Peirce held that the methods and metaphysics of modern science are amended as inquiry progresses, making metaphysics a branch of empirical knowledge. Additionally, Short shows that Peirce's scientific work expanded empiricism on empirical grounds, (...) grounding his phenomenology and subverting the fact/value dichotomy, and that he understood statistical explanations in nineteenth-century science as reintroducing the idea of final causation, now made empirical. Those innovations underlie Peirce's late ideas of a normative science and of philosophy as a branch of science. Short's rich and original study shows us how to read Peirce's writings and why they are worth reading. (shrink)

Over many decades, Richard Bernstein has interpreted contemporary philosophy’s three traditions, roughly distinguished as analytic, pragmatic, and Continental, emphasizing their mutual affinities. Despite this reference to the continent of Europe, it would be wrong to identify any of these traditions geographically or linguistically; even to call them ‘traditions’ is stretching a point. Pragmatism originated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it has spread from there, transmogrifying in the process and claiming surprising allies, such as Heidegger; the label ‘pragmatist’ has even been affixed (...) to Hegel! That its day has come is the theme of this, Bernstein’s latest book. Its title is a play on Richard Rorty’s famous.. (shrink)

This book is remarkable for what it does not do. It purports to be about Peirce's opposition to nominalism, but it never states clearly what nominalism is and says little about Peirce's realist alternative. It contains no historical discussion of nominalism and thus does not explain the relation of Peirce's idiosyncratic use of that term to its original meaning. It ignores the secondary literature on that topic and does not even list Rosa Mayorga's highly relevant 2007 book, From Realism to (...) Realicism [sic], in its Bibliography. Nor, despite nominalism's alleged 'threat,' does it make reference to such important recent nominalists as Nelson Goodman or W.V.O. Quine. Indeed, after page one, there is hardly any.. (shrink)

This article revises a paper I read at the SAAP session in honor of my late friend, Richard Robin. The discussion that followed the paper was much better than the paper, and my present effort, I hope, has benefited from that discussion. What I say here is exploratory. I am more confident of my criticisms of other authors than of the alternative I propose. It is the mere sketch of an idea, its many obvious difficulties blithely ignored. I hope in (...) later articles to make up for present deficiencies.I begin by developing a suggestion of Robin's, that Peirce's idea of a normative science grew out of his work on the norms of science, and proceed toward an explanation of the possibility of a normative science, hence of.. (shrink)

Once upon a time a version of positivism prevailed in the philosophy of science. A key assumption made in positivism is that there is a class of observations - I will call them ‘basic observations’ - that are independent of theory. Basic observations are expressed in a non-theoretical or purely descriptive language: they refer to no postulated entities and presuppose no explanatory hypotheses or other logically contingent propositions. Theories, according to this philosophy, are admissible in science only if they are (...) capable of yielding some implications about the basic observations that would be made under various conditions. Theories that provide entirely different accounts of the physical world can be compared by comparing their implications for basic observation. And they are tested by comparing these implications to the basic observations that are actually made. As a general rule, if one theory is replaced by another, then all basic observations that confirmed the first must also confirm the second, but not conversely. Thus, despite revolutions even in our most fundamental theoretical conceptions, there is or can be a cumulative growth of our strictly empirical knowledge. (shrink)

Empiricism in philosophy is either a method or a theory. The two are separable: one might hold that all knowledge is empirical but that philosophy does something other than add to our knowledge, e.g., that it clarifies concepts; or one might hold that philosophy’s method is empirical and that one of the things known in that way is that not all knowledge is empirical, e.g., mathematics. And what is the empirical? If it is knowledge based on observation, then what is (...) it that can be observed? If philosophy is in method empirical, the range of the observable must be broad, perhaps including mental processes, human history, social institutions such as language, and even the difference between good and evil.In Peirce’s... (shrink)

But as you know... my style of ‘brilliancy’ consists in a mixture of irony and seriousness,—the same things said ironically and also seriously.Peirce’s philosophical writings are notoriously difficult. The reasons most often cited are the apparent contradictions, the long, inconclusive technical digressions, and the unfinished character of his thought. His champions instead emphasize his originality, arguing that his apparent contradictions often mark traditional dualisms subtly transcended; some discern strands of an uncompleted system. Originality, subtlety, and the need to reconstruct the (...) whole from its fragmentary expressions also pose difficulties, albeit ones rewarding. I think, however, that the problem... (shrink)

The following paragraphs were written not for print publication but for oral delivery on a celebratory occasion; their many unsupported assertions, some commonplace and some controversial, were made not to prove a thesis but to suggest a point of view—a perspective on Peirce's thought that might be taken, or not, as one wishes. The suggestion is that some difficulties are resolved and some things fall into place if we view his philosophy in its several relations to modern science. For that (...) purpose, his idea of science is of central importance and it is that idea only that I discuss here. Although drawn from the historical fact of modern science, Peirce's concept of science is unusual, radical, and difficult. In... (shrink)

Peirce persistently proclaimed both idealism and realism, terms that in philosophy's history have had varied meanings, in some of which they designate opposed doctrines; his use of them also varied in meaning. The aim of Robert Lane's important new book is to trace the evolution of Peirce's idealism and realism and to show that, in the end, whatever misadventures occur en route, these doctrines, in Peirce's version of them, are not opposed. Lane explores connections to other Peircean topics: truth, pragmatism, (...) modality, generality, vagueness, continuity. However, he retains his focus, which enables him to examine Peirce's idealism and realism with extraordinary care and thoroughness.Lane's method is, in the first... (shrink)

In May 1867, when he was twenty-seven years of age, Charles Peirce read a paper to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that was published in the next year under the title ‘On a New List of Categories’ (EP 1:1–10).1 It is remarkable for anticipating major features of his later thought: three categories relationally defined (bracketed, however, by two additional categories); a theory of signs, triadically conceived and triadically sub-divided, applied to thinking; the idea that every predicate is an (...) hypothesis; a form of abstraction named ‘prescision’; and a bold reconception of the Roman/medieval trivium. Prescision was used here to distinguish the categories and it was put to similar use much later in the.. (shrink)

This response to my seven critics is organized under five topics: 1. The book's scope and approach; 2. Physicalism, idealism, anthropomorphism; 3. Final causation; 4. Peirce's development; 5. Signs, objects, interpretants. No ground is ceded, but I have found the interchange clarifying and hope that the reader will find it so, too.

Much has been written on the pragmatic maxim introduced in the 1878 essay 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear'. It was not there so named, but a quarter century later, at the outset of his Lectures on Pragmatism delivered at Harvard in 1903, Peirce quoted it and named it.1 At the conclusion of those lectures occurs another statement named a 'maxim' and implied to be pragmatism's. This 1903 maxim is almost as well-known as the 1878 maxim but has received little (...) comment.2 Was it only a figurative expression of the original maxim? That view cannot survive a careful reading of it and of the lectures which it concludes.3Neither maxim states a theory of meaning, but each implies... (shrink)

Darwin'suse of final cause accords with the Aristotelian idea of finalcauses as explanatory types – as opposed to mechanical causes, which arealways particulars. In Wright's consequence etiology, anadaptation is explained by particular events, namely, its past consequences;hence, that etiology is mechanistic at bottom. This justifies Ghiselin'scharge that such versions of teleology trivialize the subject, But a purelymechanistic explanation of an adaptation allows it to appear coincidental.Patterns of outcome, whether biological or thermodynamic, cannot be explainedbytracing causal chains, even were that possible. (...) They are explicanda of aspecialkind. The form of their explanation, in statistical mechanics or by naturalselection, is not captured by statistical variants of the covering-law model orrelated models of explanation. In them as in classical teleology, types ofoutcome are cited to explain why there are outcomes of those types. But onlywhen types are explanatory by being selected for, as inexplanations of animal and human behavior as well as in Darwin's theory ofnatural selection, but not in statistical mechanics, is the explanationteleological. Darwin's theory is nontrivially teleological. (shrink)

Originally published in 1955. The Madhyamika philosophy is, in the author's view, the philosophy which created a revolution in Buddhism and through that in the whole range of Indian philosophy. This volume is a study of the Madhyamika philosophy in all its important aspects and is divided into three parts: Historical: this traces the origin and development of the Madhyamika philosophy. The second part concentrates on a full and critical exposition of the Madhyamika philosophy, the structure of its dialectic, its (...) conception of the Absolute and its ethics and religion. The last part of the book compares the Madhyamika with some of the well-known dialectical systems of the West (Kant, Hegel and Bradley) and undertakes a short study of the different absolutisms (Madhyamika, Vijnanavada and the Vedanta). (shrink)