The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

In two fairly early papers, Charles Sanders Peirce claims both that logic should teach us how to be "masters of our own meaning" (EP 1, 126) and that the meaning of a thought is "altogether something virtual" (EP 1, 42). For those of us still struggling to free ourselves from Cartesian subjectivism, with its "elusive and misleading ideal" of certainty (Lachs 1996, 20), these claims appear difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile. For Peirce, however, "modern science and modern logic" (EP 1, 28) show us that "the problem becomes how to fix belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community" (EP 1, 117). As a consequence, he will insist that "the existence of thought now, depends on what it is to be hereafter, so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community" (EP 1, 54).

My aim in this article, therefore, is to explore Peirce's analysis of cognition as essentially communal and historical in order to emphasize its political and epistemological value. Borrowing also from the insights of contemporary feminist science scholarship and art criticism, I will argue that, because of its potential to correct and enlarge upon our individual efforts at thought and meaning making, Peirce's appeal to the community of inquirers renders our attempts to reflect upon experience not just full of risk but a source of hope. I will illustrate this by considering Lucy Lippard's discussion of a failed feminist performance art piece from the 1980 "Times Square Show." (To anticipate, what makes this particular work of interest is the audience's reaction to its didacticism.) Before doing so directly, however, I must first offer a brief exploration of Peirce's early account of cognition.

Fueled by his distrust of introspection's claim to transparency, Peirce will begin his analysis by asserting that the only "permissible supposition" to make in this endeavor is that "the mind reasons" (EP 1, 30). In good pragmatic fashion, he will define reasoning as "find[ing] out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else which we do not know" (EP 1, 111) and will apply this understanding of the point and purpose of reasoning to his account of mental [End Page 127] activity. That is, Peirce will continually appeal to what has been established by anthropological and anatomical investigation—"what we already know"—in his efforts to explain cognition.¹

The result of such an appeal is that he is able to show that our awareness of all mental activity—from our recognition that the self is, in some sense, "private" to our ability to distinguish believing from conceiving and desiring from willing—is "derived from the observation of external facts" (EP 1, 22). For our purposes, this is perhaps most easily grasped by considering his arguments for the claim that our initial cognizance of agency and desire is due to an inference provoked by our experience with frustration rather than from the will's purported status as an innate, intuitively known, faculty. Peirce proceeds by considering the case of a very young child whom we would describe as desirous of moving a table. But because the child himself does not yet possess a conception of the self as separate and private, he cannot describe his situation as we would. As Peirce asks, "How when he wills to move a table? Does he then think of himself as desiring, or only of the table as fit to be moved?" (EP 1, 19). What provokes the child to assume the adult vocabulary of agency and desire and thereby to divide his awareness into perceptions and emotions is his emerging realization of the distinction between how the world appears to him and how it really is. This realization, Peirce maintains, only occurs with the acquisition of language: "A child hears it said that the stove is hot. But it is not, he says; and, indeed, that central body is not touching it, and only what it touches is hot or cold. But he touches it, and finds the testimony confirmed in a striking way. Thus...