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

Rarely these days are philosophy books both bold and sweeping, but Maddalena’s The Philosophy of Gesture is both. Whether you think that is good will surely depend on your philosophical temperament. Personally, I consider it bad taste to criticize a philosopher for striking out on a new path. Philosophy, as any student of Peirce’s works will affirm, is an experimental science. Some of those experiments might well lead you to the hinterlands, but at least you will have a more detailed map. As with reading any book, the question to ask is not: What is wrong with it? But: What can I learn from it?

Reading Maddalena’s book, I had the distinct sense of reading something like James’s Pragmatism. Much is said, but much has also been left unsaid. Much is proposed and developed, but much more needs to be developed. Even Maddalena seems to have a sense of this. The conclusion of the book is less the close of a philosophical investigation and more a request for others to take up the project of “completing pragmatists’ incomplete revolution.” The last chapter begins, “conclusions are really an invitation for future investigation” (154).

In Chapter One, Maddalena argues that pragmatism qua philosophical tradition has been both anti-Cartesian and anti-Kantian, especially insofar as Kant “separates reality from knowledge, making ‘the thing-in-itself’ unknowable. . .and entrusting to the ‘I think’ the task to reconstitute the lost unity” (19). That Peirce, in particular, is heavily influenced by Kant but also departs sharply from the Kantian view is hardly disputable these days. In opposition to the Kantian view, the pragmatists develop a theory of signs, emphasize the continuity of thought and reality, and respect commonsense. Drawing on the work of Robert Hanna, Chapter Two argues that Kant’s attempt to provide an account of synthetic judgment is a failure and that Peirce, while he aimed to analyze thought, made an incomplete turn toward a theory of synthetic judgment. Accordingly, Maddalena aims “to supplement Peirce’s analytic project with the synthesis that mathematics already displays: a kind of synthesis in which universals are known in the particulars” (41). One might wonder just how incomplete Peirce’s turn was, especially since Maddalena draws heavily on his work in the remaining chapters. [End Page 662]

The heart of Maddalena’s project is found in Chapters Three and Four. In Chapter Three, he provides his account of synthetic judgment (which he does not clearly discriminate from reasoning). To grasp his account, an illustration is helpful. Imagine that some evening you spot an object in the distance. Since it is dark, you cannot quite grasp what shape or color it is. As you approach the object, you see that it is small, that it is about the size and shape of an American football. As you get closer, you are able to tell that it is brown and appears to be breathing. You step on a stick and the frightened animal runs into the woods, whereupon you realize it was a weasel. This is a process of thought in which, as you interact with the object, you make judgments about the object and recognize that all of the attributes you predicate of it—being small, being the size and shape of an American football, being brown, breathing, being frightened, being a weasel—are predicates of the very same thing.

This process of thought illustrates what Maddalena means when he defines synthetic judgment as a judgment that “recognizes identity through changes” (42). The “identity” Maddalena refers to is neither conceptual nor qualitative identity. Rather, it is the identity of an object of attention. The fact that it is an object of attention also explains why the identity is “recognized;” as Maddalena puts it, one “re-cognizes” that the object now attended to is the same as the object to which one previously attended. The “changes” to which Maddalena refers are the changes in the process of thought. James’ distinction between...