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THE ENTANGLEMENT OF ETHICS AND LOGIC IN PEIRCE’S PRAGMATISM

Rossella Fabbrichesi

Hilary Putnam has often addressed what he defines as the entanglement of facts and values. He treated this question in The Many Faces of Realism and his recent The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, and Other Essays is entirely focused on it. It is one of the fundamental elements of his philosophy. I will dwell on this last work and use its conclusions as a starting point for my exposition. Putnam argues that even when value judgments about the soundness of a theory are only implicit, they usually become assumptions in scientific research. Consider, for example, judgments on the consistency, simplicity, plausibility, and order of a particular theoretical approach. These judgments are ethical – remember that the Greek word ethos designates the behaviors, customs, and social and moral habits with which one “inhabits” a certain way of living – but they often take on an objective aspect. Therefore, knowledge of facts always presupposes a knowledge of values. Moreover, Putnam maintains that facts and values or objective and subjective appear to be indistinguishable. The philosophy of science in the last century, however, can be seen as a struggle to escape from this principle. Philosophers attempted to do science using only a deductive logic (Popper), to justify induction deductively (Reichenbach), to reduce science to a simple algorithm (Carnap), and to select theories according to an enigmatic set of “observational conditionals” (Quine). To Putnam’s list we could add attempts to reduce every symbolic mediation to a formalism (twentieth-century logicism) or to equate the working of the human brain with that of a machine by discrete states(current computational cognitivism). All of these approaches attempt to elude, as Putnam puts it, the simple conviction that in every acknowledgment of a pure “fact” there is an implicit value judgment.I In every assumption of objectivity we can find the behavioral and “practical” habits of whoever understands it as such. This type of approach to the question is, as Putnam acutely notes, one of the mainstays of pragmatism: when, it asks, will we stop avoiding the problem and decide to give the pragmatist challenge the attention it merits?1 36 ROSSELLA FABBRICHESI

Turning from Putnam to pragmatism, we will look at the analyses of the founder of this current, Peirce, and at the definition of his pragmatic maxim. We may thus grasp the problem at the point where it was first formulated, and where it was formulated with the greatest philosophical discernment. I want to start from the Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism of 1903, leaving aside Peirce’s first formulations of pragmatism, which he characterized as too nominalist. The first lecture is entitled The Maxim of Pragmatism and in it Peirce reformulates his ideas through a full consideration of what he called the three normative sciences (aesthetics, ethics, and logic). In 1878, asked what a belief is and answered that “it consists mainly in being deliberately prepared to adopt the formula believed in as the guide to action.”2 A proposition to which one adheres thus functions as a criterion for conduct. But if what we think is to be interpreted in terms of what we are “prepared to do, then surely logic, or the doctrine of what we ought to think, must be an application of the doctrine of what we deliberately choose to do, which is Ethics.”3 Additionally, we must add the consideration of what it is that we are prepared to admire, and this is aesthetics. So, in its very formulation, pragmatism implicitly refers to the three normative sciences: aesthetics, ethics, and logic. The theme is better defined in the fifth Harvard lecture, The Three Normative Sciences. Here, Peirce reminds the listener what the profound significance of his pragmatism is: namely, that the meaning of a concept does not correspond with what we observe happening in given empirical conditions (literally, the effects that conceivably have practical bearings), but with what would be pursued under all possible circumstances, that is, in an “indefinitely prolonged course of action.”4 In his 1905 Issues of Pragmaticism, he expressly states that if the theory of pragmatism is a theory of meaning, it can only be a realist theory, in the sense of medieval scholastic realism, and hence be grounded on the concepts of generality, possibility, conditionality, and vagueness: “The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol.”5 What is Peirce trying to say in this convoluted language? That pragmatism does not teach me that the meaning of a concept can be read in the immediate, practical effect it produces, but that the meaning must be linked to the entire possible and conditional series of resolutions to act that I am willing to put into effect in order to demonstrate my understanding of that concept. Hence, it is not simple action that is referred to but the potential effectuation of habitual behavior, and “no agglomeration of actual happenings can ever completely fill up the meaning of a ‘would be’.”6 The example given is illuminating, and definitively separates Peirce from James and Dewey: if a diamond were formed and kept in cotton-wool without anyone ever trying to scratch it, could we still talk of the diamond’s “hardness”? Yes, answers