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

Michael Raposa's long career as a preeminent interpreter of Peirce's writings on religion has taken a surprising turn and he has done what Peirce, in his most famous essays from 1877–78, suggested could not be done. Though Peirce early on cautioned against construing thought as having any legitimate function beyond the fixation of belief and the production of "thought at rest," and warned explicitly against thinking as a form of amusement,¹ throughout Theosemiotic Raposa highlights an additional dimension of thought as "something more than doubt's removal, much more than the fixation of belief " (p. 262). Thought as musement need not, according to Raposa, be so linear and singularly directed towards the ends of solving determinate problems or addressing determinate doubts and fixing belief that its own unique functions and joys are treated as byproducts. Exploring these unique functions of musement and detailing the myriad ways in which musement is entangled with semiosis 'all the way down,' is the primary undertaking of Theosemiotic, and the reader is treated to a thorough examination of the thesis that religious life is more richly construed as the practice of playful semiosis than as the more serious task of inquiring after right belief. But readers familiar with Raposa's earlier work on Peirce should know that Theosemiotic is not a book about Peirce, nor is it a linear argument that progresses stepwise toward a determinate theological recommendation. It is more an evocation and invitation to musement as a practice.

While Raposa's text is not explicitly about Peirce, and he goes to great lengths to recruit authors like Ignatius of Loyola, Jonathan Edwards, Josiah Royce, and Simone Weil to flesh out his project, two Peircean themes dominate the text: the development of Peirce's philosophy of inquiry beyond its early formulations in the 1870s and a focused examination of the logic of musement as a form of playful and fecund interpretation. Though they are intertwined throughout, I treat them separately here.

As Raposa observes, Peirce's corpus contains two "quite different stories about the roots of inquiry." The first and more widely known is found in his essays from 1877–78, but a later story traces inquiry's "gradual emergence as rigorous science from out of the womb of playful [End Page 292] thinking" (p. 107). Raposa concentrates on the later portrayal and in so doing is drawn to The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God, not as a theistic apologetic, but as an illustration of the distinctive logic of musement. What marks musement as worthy of such focused attention is its progenitive character, its capacity to birth novel meanings and interpretations through eschewing any serious purpose, and its refusal to allow itself to be taken as a means to a scientific end or merely an initial step in an instrumental process of belief production. Per Raposa, this is also why musement lies at the root of so much religious practice for it is in the reading and rereading of signs that both novelty and depth of engagement are found. This is not novelty for novelty's sake, however, but rather something akin to a kind of religious practice or spiritual discipline (Raposa makes this connection explicit) that trains the muser, over many years and through long practice, to receive what the universe has to give.

If read as an analysis of Peirce's evolving philosophy of inquiry Raposa's treatment is not radically new, and in fact follows closely his 1989 text Peirce's Philosophy of Religion.² What is new, however, is his careful study of the ways in which musement, especially insofar as it contains "proto-deductive" clarifications of attractive hypotheses and "vaguely inductive" appeals to experience,³ is its own kind of inquiry. As an iterative process musement acts as a proving ground for sympathetic interpretation that simultaneously trains and habituates the careful student to closer and closer readings of whatever signs are available. Raposa...