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European Journal of and American

VIII-2 | 2016 Pragmatism and the Writing of History

Roberto Gronda and Tullio Viola (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/611 DOI: 10.4000/ejpap.611 ISSN: 2036-4091

Publisher Associazione Pragma

Electronic reference Roberto Gronda and Tullio Viola (dir.), European Journal of Pragmatism and , VIII-2 | 2016, « Pragmatism and the Writing of History » [Online], Online since 31 December 2016, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/611 ; DOI : https://doi.org/ 10.4000/ejpap.611

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Author retains copyright and grants the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy right of frst publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Symposia. Pragmatism and the Writing of History

Pragmatism and the Writing of History Roberto Gronda and Tullio Viola

The Historicity of Peirce’s Classification of the Chiara Ambrosio

The Historical Past and the Dramatic Present Toward a Pragmatic Clarification of Historical Consciousness Vincent Colapietro

“I Have To Confess I Cannot Read History So,” On the Origins and Development of Peirce’s Alessandro Topa

The Anticipated Past in Historical A. O. Lovejoy, C. I. Lewis and E. Wind on Accounting for of the Past Within a Pragmatist Theory Stefan Niklas

History and Social Progress Reflections on Mead’s Approach to History Daniel R. Huebner

Development and Pragmatism and the Social Process Andrew Abbott

Dewey, Mead, John Ford, and the Writing of History Pragmatist Contributions to Narrativism Verónica Tozzi

Toward Truthlikeness in Historiography Oliver Laas

The Need for Quinean Pragmatism in the Theory of History Jonathan Gorman

Historical and Philosophical Stances Max Harold Fisch, A for Historians David L. Marshall

Reading Allan Marquand’s “On in the Study of Art” C. Oliver O’Donnell

On Scientific Method in the Study of Art Allan Marquand C. Oliver O’Donnell (ed.)

Interviews

Genesis and Geltung An Interview with Hans Joas Tullio Viola and Hans Joas

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Histoires pragmatiques A Conversation with Simona Cerutti and Yves Cohen Roberto Gronda, Tullio Viola, Yves Cohen and Simona Cerutti

Book Reviews

Francis CHATEAURAYNAUD & Yves COHEN (eds.), Histoires pragmatiques Paris, Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2016, 385 pages Bruno Settis

Essays

Josiah Royce Influenced Charles Peirce David E. Pfeifer

Logical Theatrics, or Floes on Flows Translating Quine with the Shins Joshua M. Hall

Interviews

What is happening to the Peirce Project? Interview with André De Tienne, director of the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana and Purdue University at Indianapolis, by Michelle Bella and Giovanni Maddalena Michelle Bella, Giovanni Maddalena and André De Tienne

Book Reviews

Massimo A. BONFANTINI, Rossella FABBRICHESI, Salvatore ZINGALE (a cura di), Su Peirce. Interpretazioni, ricerche, prospettive Milano, Bompiani, 2015, 316 pages Claudia Cristalli

Carlin ROMANO, America the Philosophical , NY, Random House, 2012, 688 pages Giovanni Maddalena

Ulf ZACKARIASSON (ed.), Action, and Inquiry: Pragmatist Perspectives on , Society and Religion Nordic Studies in Pragmatism 3, Helsinki, Nordic Pragmatism Network, 2015, 320 pages Ángel M. Faerna

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, VIII-2 | 2016 3

Symposia. Pragmatism and the Writing of History

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, VIII-2 | 2016 4

Pragmatism and the Writing of History

Roberto Gronda and Tullio Viola

1 The contributions presented in this symposium explore, from different perspectives, the relationship between pragmatism and history, that is, the empirical study of the human past. These connections run deep, and may be assessed on several counts.

2 First of all, many pragmatist philosophers have devoted a great deal of attention to investigating the of historical knowledge and its relevance to philosophy. Classical pragmatists such as Peirce, Dewey and Mead laid a strong emphasis on processuality and as fundamental philosophical . At the same time, they rejected intuitionist or a-priorist conceptions of knowledge, advocating instead a continuity between philosophy and empirical inquiry. This approach was also sustained by their general towards overly closed systems, and by a keen interest in individuality and the unexpected consequences of . In this sense, it is not an accident of their intellectual biographies that they also painstakingly reflected on the methodology of historiography, and dedicated themselves in first person to concrete historical studies (in particular, of science).1 3 In continuance of the original insights of the classical pragmatists, so-called neo- pragmatism is significantly concerned with the issue of historicity. , , Hans Joas, – to name some of the most prominent figures – have all contributed to the ongoing discussion over history’s relevance to philosophy, although in ways that are certainly not subsumable under a single perspective. At the same time, some major representatives of recent discussions in the philosophy of history have recognized pragmatism as a crucial interlocutor, in particular with regard to the philosophical puzzles that concern the nature of our knowledge about the past.2 4 The interest of pragmatist philosophers in history is accompanied by a complementary interest of professional historians in pragmatism. Such interest dates back to the first decades of the twentieth century, with the work of influential historians (almost all based at , where pragmatism was exerting a strong intellectual

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influence) such as James Harvey Robinson, Charles and Mary Beard, Merle Curti, John Herman Randall Jr., Carl Becker and Richard Hofstadter.3 But it still endures today, both in America and Europe, in new and original forms. Some recent historians have even greeted the advent of a new “pragmatist” or “pragmatic” turn in their discipline: an attitude that combines some original pragmatist tenets with insights coming from different traditions.4 By so doing, they have also contributed to a larger debate that is taking place among social about the spatial and temporal situatedness of human action. And, indeed, the role of the social sciences must not be underestimated. Starting with Dewey and Mead, the reflection on pragmatism and history has gone hand in hand with a broader reflection on the status of the social sciences. 5 In the attempt to take seriously this diversity of approaches, the present symposium is directed both to philosophers who approach history with a distinctively philosophical agenda in , and to historians or historically-minded social scientists who have seen in pragmatism an important source of clarification, conceptual or methodological alike. 6 The essays, interview and reviews that make up the symposium aspire to depict different aspects of our central question. A first block of papers offers interpretive approaches to the thought of classical pragmatists. Ambrosio, Colapietro, and Topa focus on Peirce’s interest in both the philosophy of history and history as an empirical discipline; Niklas looks at the debate on historical knowledge that has involved many pragmatists of the early twentieth century; Huebner analyzes Mead’s work as a historian and philosopher of history. A second block of papers considers some crucial insights of classical pragmatism in relation to more encompassing debates about the relevance and purport of historical knowledge. Andrew Abbott investigates Dewey’s and Mead’s understanding of temporality in the context of a processual approach to social theory; Laas’ and Tozzi’s essays reflect on the relevance of Peirce, Dewey and Mead to actual discussions about narrativism and realism; and Jonathan Gorman looks back at his own intellectual path as a philosopher of history influenced by pragmatist . Finally, David Marshall explores the work of Max H. Fisch, a twentieth-century intellectual historian who found a major source of inspiration in his monumental study of Peirce. 7 The essays are followed by some further material. Oliver O’Donnell publishes here for the first time (and supplies with an introductory essay) a manuscript by Allan Marquand, the Princeton art historian and ancient student of Peirce’s who, in the text here presented, is shown to seize on Peircean philosophy to articulate the tasks of art history. Finally, two interviews complete the symposium: the first is with Hans Joas, who has repeatedly written about pragmatism’s ability to reconcile genetic and systematic (or normative) approaches to the study of concepts and values; and the second is with Paris historians Yves Cohen and Simona Cerutti, two major proponents of a “pragmatist” approach to history (see also Bruno Settis’s review). 8 As is easy to see from this brief survey, we have explicitly eschewed a systematic approach to the topic of pragmatism and history – an approach that would have forced the exchanges we aim to reconstruct into the procustean bed of pre-established categories. Nor have we tried to suggest that pragmatism enjoys some sort of “special relationship” to history. We are well aware that, on the one hand, there have been pragmatist philosophers who were not especially interested in history; and on the other, there have been other philosophical traditions (such as phenomenology or

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Marxian thought) which had an even stronger impact on historiographical practice than pragmatism. 9 We do believe, however, that pragmatism has been, is and likely continue to be an important interlocutor for historians and philosophers of history, in of some profound theoretical motives that are inscribed into its very roots. From a variety of angles, all texts presented here shed light on this basic conviction. Our task will be achieved if we contribute to furthering the exchange between pragmatism and historical studies, by inviting scholars to address the purport of a dialogue that, more or less implicitly, has been going on for decades.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANKERSMIT F., (2005), Sublime Historical Experience, Stanford, Stanford University Press.

DEWEY J., (1986 [1938]), : The Theory of Inquiry, in . The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 12, ed. by J. A. Boydston, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press.

GALLIE W. B., (1952), Peirce and Pragmatism, Harmondsworth/Middlesex, Penguin.

GALLIE W. B., (1964), Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, London, Chatto & Windus.

KLOPPENBERG J. T., (2004), “Pragmatism and the Practice of History. From Turner and Du Bois to Today,” , XXXV/1-2 (Jan.), 202-25.

MEAD G. H., (1932), The Philosophy of the Present, ed. by A. E. Murphy, Chicago, Open Court.

MEAD G. H., (1936), Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by M. H. Moore, Chicago, Press.

PEIRCE C. S., (1985), Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science. A , ed. by C. Eisele, 2 vols, Berlin/New York/Amsterdam, Mouton Publishers.

NOTES

1. See in particular Peirce 1985; Mead 1932, 1936; Dewey (1938: Ch. 12). 2. See Ankersmit 2005. For an earlier reception, see Gallie 1952 and 1964. 3. See Kloppenberg 2004, whose title is intentionally echoed by that of the present symposium. 4. See the conversation with Yves Cohen and Simona Cerutti in the symposium.

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AUTHORS

ROBERTO GRONDA

Università di Pisa roberto1gronda[at]gmail.com

TULLIO VIOLA

Humboldt Universität zu Berlin tullio.viola[at]gmail.com

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The Historicity of Peirce’s Classification of the Sciences

Chiara Ambrosio

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I am grateful to Tullio Viola for the suggestion to participate in this much needed project on Pragmatism and the Writing of History. His enthusiasm, scholarly dedication and precious commentary genuinely helped this article come to life. A version of my initial thoughts on Peirce’s classification of the sciences was presented at the Sixth Conference of the Society for in Practice at Rowan University. I am grateful to my co-panellists Matthew Lund, Jouni Matti Kuukkanen, Hasok Chang, as well as to the audience present at the session “In Pursuit of History: Philosophy of Science and the Practice of Historiography” for their lively and collegial comments on this work. Alex Csiszar kindly shared with me his thoughts on the classification of the sciences, as well as some precious chapters of his PhD thesis. My PhD student Claudia Cristalli read an early draft of this piece and provided extensive and thought-provoking comments, of the kind that made me question the direction of our supervisor- supervisee collaboration. Two anonymous referees provided invaluable suggestions to improve the quality of the arguments I present in this article, and I am deeply indebted to their constructive comments. Last but not least, Niall Le Mage put up once more with the domestic and emotional consequences of my obsession for Peirce. For this – and much more – I am grateful. A large part of this article was written in the summer 2016 at the Houghton Library in Harvard, in the days leading up to the results of the Brexit referendum. As an European academic based in the UK, I was deeply affected by the outcome of the vote. I sat outside Peirce’s house in Cambridge on the day following the results, thinking that Peirce’s Pragmaticist invitation to evaluate the conceivable consequences of adopting certain conceptions matters today more than ever. We are still a long way from releasing Peirce’s from our ivory tower and letting it out in the world, and it is my hope that the theme of this special issue will be a first step in this direction.

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Introduction

1 Decoding and systematising Peirce’s classification of the sciences has been a central concern for Peirce scholars. At least since Beverley Kent’s landmark study Charles S. Peirce: Logic and the Classification of the Sciences (Kent 1987), Peirce’s classification has been regarded as the key to solve some of the most complex puzzles surrounding his approach to logic, and . From its relation to Peirce’s ‘architectonics’ to its function in supporting his broader, thoroughgoing anti- , from its crucial role in articulating and defining the limits and scope of the normative sciences to its interconnections with the development of the three categories, the classification of the sciences has been the backdrop against which scholars have tested their broader claims about the most fundamental aspects of Peirce’s philosophy.

2 In this article, I want to explore the early life of Peirce’s classification, and propose an alternative account of its role and function in Peirce’s philosophical thought. More specifically, I want to suggest – somewhat controversially – that Peirce’s classification of the sciences is characterised by a distinctive historicity, a feature that aligns Peirce’s project with what Vincent Colapietro (1998: 129) has defined as the “historical thickness” of the Pragmatist outlook more broadly. I use ‘historicity’ in two complementary senses in the course of my discussion. On one hand, I aim to re- contextualise Peirce’s classification and investigate it as a quintessentially nineteenth century pursuit. In doing this, I highlight a glaring limitation in the scholarship on Peirce – a limitation that is particularly evident in the case of the classification of the sciences, but has rippling effects on the ways in which Peirce’s philosophy has been read and interpreted more broadly. Even the rare and isolated accounts that somehow place Peirce’s classification in context (see for example Kent 1987: Ch. 2), do so in a distinctively internalist manner, thus segregating and separating Peirce’s project from the hundreds of attempts at classifying the sciences that occupied the scientific community throughout the nineteenth century. Peirce himself, in a later note which will turn out to be quite important for my argument, admits to have examined “upward of a hundred attempts to classify the sciences” (R 1597: 5396 verso). Thus my first question – a question that Peirce scholars do not seem to have asked yet in regard to Peirce’s classification – is: why would Peirce as a scientific practitioner and a philosopher, but most importantly as a historical actor in a precise historical context, worry about classifying the sciences? 3 The second sense in which I stress the historicity of Peirce’s classification follows directly from the point I raised above. Establishing that Peirce’s project did not develop in a void should lead us to consider the consequences of a historical account of his classification on its very content and systematisation. Here what I propose is to look at Peirce’s project from the viewpoint of historical epistemology, and flesh out the contingent and contextual nature of his classification as well as the historical and dynamic approach that he develops, from his classification of the sciences, to the issue of classification more broadly. The classification of the sciences, in this sense, becomes a paradigmatic example of the importance of a historical reading of Peirce for the purpose of understanding Peirce’s own historical works.

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4 Historical epistemology, I will argue, casts new light on several characteristics that Peirce attributes to his classification. For example, it renders quite unsurprising the fact that Peirce insists on wanting to develop a ‘natural’ classification: he is certainly not alone in using this qualification, and an important line of inquiry consists precisely in spelling out how this characterisation relates to, or departs from, the widespread rhetoric around producing ‘natural’ classifications of the sciences in the nineteenth century. 5 An important part of my argument will revolve around an apparently curious detail that has remained so far unnoticed in the early history of Peirce’s classification of the sciences. An early version of the classification appears as the preface to the first Lowell Lecture in the history of science, which Peirce delivered in the autumn of 1892 (R 1274a: 2). This is not a mere coincidence, I will argue, nor should it be taken as a simple historical curiosity. One of Peirce’s main concerns is indeed to highlight the temporal dimension of his classification: the fact that classification is inevitably bound to the present state of science, at best “looking forward just a little” (R 1597: 5396 verso). As a preface to what would eventually become Peirce’s larger project of a (never published) history of science, the classification of the sciences occupies a central methodological and historiographical function – one that is still of crucial importance to historical practice today: that of reminding the historian of the inescapable presentism that characterises the very starting point of historical inquiry. Examining this apparently puzzling consideration from the standpoint of historical epistemology, however, is a way of turning this aspect of Peirce’s thought from a potential limitation to a historiographical strength. Peirce’s placing a version of the classification of the sciences as the starting point of his history of science is a significant epistemic move aimed at recasting the function of classification as the (contingent) starting point of historical inquiry, and as the very “angle of vision” (Colapietro 1996: 137) that allows the historian to frame and refine her/his hypotheses about the past.

Disciplining the Sciences in the Nineteenth Century

6 The scholarship on Peirce’s classification of the sciences usually concentrates on the form his classificatory system displayed in the early 1900s. Beverley Kent’s discussion of the diagrammatic nature of Peirce’s scheme, for example, takes the 1903 version of the classification as a turning point, labelling it as Peirce’s ‘perennial’ classification (Kent 1987: 121ff). Douglas Anderson’s (1995) examination of Peirce’s classification similarly privileges the 1903 version, and investigates in particular the place of philosophy in Peirce’s system. Helmut Pape (1993) focuses instead on the 1902 version, to show the relation between what Peirce defines as ‘natural classes’ and his account of final causes. More recently, Richard Atkins (2006) has proposed a critical comparison between the 1902 classification presented by Peirce in chapter 2 of the Minute Logic and the 1903 version contained in “An Outline Classification of the Sciences.” His argument revolves around Peirce’s mature formulation of the categories as a guiding classificatory principle, and shows that by 1903 Peirce realised that, along with found in the sciences, “the categories may also be used to classify the sciences” (Atkins 2006: 484). This body of literature has cast substantial light on the metaphysical, epistemological and logical implications of Peirce’s classificatory scheme. Questions such as the role of logic amongst the normative sciences, as well as its relation with

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mathematics (De Waal 2005) and its dependence on (Legg 2014; Bellucci & Pietarinen 2016), have taken centre stage – and rightly so, as they form the core and the culmination of Peirce’s mature philosophical system.

7 Most of the accounts of Peirce’s work on classification outlined so far, however, have as a primary focus the internal consistency of Peirce’s scheme with key developments in his logic, epistemology and metaphysics. This also explains the emphasis on Peirce’s 1902-1903 versions of the classification of the sciences: it is at this point that Peirce’s phaneroscopy and his three categories mark an important development in his entire philosophy, with crucial consequences on his distinctive formulation of (specifically renamed, and reframed, in opposition to James’ version of Pragmatism). My account of Peirce’s classification, on the other hand, starts from different, historical premises. My aim is not to argue against the achievements of Peirce’s scholarship so far, nor do I want to propose a radically alternative interpretation of the development of Peirce’s classificatory system. What I intend to point out, however, is a common omission in the literature, an omission that can be easily rectified by paying more attention to Peirce’s place in the history of science. A historical approach, I contend, might hopefully open up new avenues of inquiry compatible with the current philosophical literature on the classification of the sciences. More specifically, I want to suggest the possibility that Peirce’s work on and with the classification of the sciences was as much an effort toward internal consistency as it was a response to external constraints and pressures directly related to the social organization of the sciences in the nineteenth century. I hope to show that the classification of the sciences, far from being a philosophical pursuit conducted in isolation, is more productively investigated as Peirce’s effort to balance and reconcile the internal consistency of his scheme with broader, external trends to reconfigure the sciences and their relationships as a conduit to social order. 8 The nineteenth century saw a proliferation of classifications of the sciences. From Jeremy Bentham to André-Marie Ampère, from William Whewell to August Comte, , and Karl Pearson (to name only a few figures well known to Peirce), classifying the sciences became a distinctive nineteenth-century pursuit and a scientific and philosophical genre in its own right. Arguably, attempts at mapping and ordering knowledge date at least as far back to (a fact that Peirce himself recognises – see for instance R 1336, a manuscript to which I shall return later). But in the nineteenth century, and specifically from the 1820s onward, the pursuit of classifying the sciences acquired a distinctive epistemological significance in relation to the growing specialisation of science and the of disciplines (Schaffer 2013). Most of the classifications of the time open with an attack to the traditional Baconian organisation of knowledge on the basis of the three faculties of memory, imagination and reason, as well as its legacy in the eighteenth century. “Such scales as those of Bacon and D’Alembert are constructed upon an arbitrary division of the faculties of the mind,” wrote August Comte in presenting his own classification (Comte 1853: 18), pointing out their inadequacy to the present state of the positive sciences. Negotiating the relationship between the sciences in the nineteenth century was in line with broader efforts toward standardisation and the politics of scientific measurement, as well as with political discourses around the internationalisation of science and the need of communicating scientific results through an emergent international network of scientific periodicals.1 It is indeed rather odd that even

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historians of science have paid little attention to such a widespread trend in the nineteenth century.2 The most up-to-date study on this issue is an extensive discussion of the “classifying moment” in nineteenth-century science by Alex Csiszar (2010). Interestingly, Peirce features as a key player in his narrative – a detail I shall return to in the next sections. 9 Csiszar (2010: 350ff) distinguishes two related aims behind the impulse to classify the sciences – a bureaucratic aim and an epistemic aim. Philosophical attempts to classify the sciences emerged in parallel to a more general reorganisation of scientific knowledge, one that was dictated by a growing bureaucratic need to survey and index all existing publications for a complete picture of the scientific landscape of the time. Led by the Royal Society in England, this proposal was as much a bibliographical exercise as it was an exercise in diplomacy: indeed, the Royal Society sought the collaboration of similar international institutions, such as the Académie des Sciences, the Smithsonian Institution and various German state . The First International Catalogue Conference, held in London in 1896, was the culmination of this international effort, with the launch of the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature in 1901. “During this period,” Csiszar claims, “scientists, politicians and bibliographers became close collaborators and competitors in the race to classify the world’s scientific literature” (Csiszar 2010: 352). This is the time in which Melvil Dewey’s now famous decimal indexing system emerged as the golden international standard for the efficient organisation of offices and libraries (Csiszar 2010: 366); it is also a time when similar indexing projects were extended to the classification of people, as in the case of Alphonse Bertillon’s system of index cards to classify criminals and Francis Galton’s system to record and retrieve the fingerprints of repeat offenders (Sekula 1986; Csiszar 2013). 10 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Csiszar argues, the bureaucratic need to survey the sciences merged with a distinctively epistemological urge to give a philosophical foundation to what thus far had been a quest for efficiency in international coordination. Indexes of the scientific literature were initially arranged in alphabetical order, but this was found inadequate for the purpose of classifying scientific knowledge. Finding a system of epistemological categories that would govern the relationships between the sciences became an essential task to legitimise philosophically the place and authority of science in nineteenth-century society. Mapping the current state of knowledge was ultimately aimed at producing an empirical image of science, in a movement that Csiszar interprets as simultaneously social and epistemological (Csiszar 2010: 370). It is at this point that bureaucratic classification joined forces with the proliferation of attempts at producing philosophical classifications of knowledge, guided by distinctive philosophical categories, that had emerged in philosophical discourse at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 11 The philosophical drive toward classification, at least in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, went hand in hand with educational reform. A version of the classification of the sciences appears in the fourth appendix of Bentham’s Chrestomathia (1817), and it is specifically tailored to the ‘useful knowledge’ that Bentham’s educational proposal was supposed to instigate in the British middle classes.3 In a long opening preamble to his classification, Bentham revises D’Alembert’s ‘Encyclopaedial Tree’ from the Encyclopédie (modelled, unsurprisingly, on Bacon’s classification) and

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reorganises the sciences on the basis of their utility. Mapping the current state of knowledge was for him also aimed at distilling which subjects qualified as most useful: knowledge of Latin and Greek, which Bentham himself mastered, was considered dispensable, for instance, whereas the natural sciences, mathematics and ‘technology’4 were considered most fundamental. Bentham’s Chrestomatic project was directly related, and indeed specifically tailored to his proposal for a monitorial school which would accommodate up to a thousand pupils at a time. Bentham’s school, the educational version of his Panopticon, was planned so that older students would teach younger ones, in a system where everyone could monitor and be monitored (Bentham 1983: 104). The ultimate control would be in the hands of a single teacher-master. The monitorial system fulfilled perfectly Bentham’s principle of maximising utility, being a way of saving time, money, and of increasing the “relative aptitude” of the pupils themselves (Bentham 1983: 102). 12 In one of the most detailed studies of Bentham’s Chrestomathia, Elissa Itzkin (1978) has shown that proposals for monitorial schools were popular in England well before Bentham’s. They initially emerged as a measure to cope with the shortage of teachers and the increase of the population, but soon acquired a distinctive social purpose: to apply the division of labour to intellectual and educational life. “Like the steam engine or spinning machinery, [the monitorial school] diminishes labour and multiples work,” wrote Andrew Bell, one of the initiators of the monitorial project, assimilating the enterprise to the construction of an “intellectual and moral engine” (Bell 1808: 36).5 It is therefore not a surprise that Bentham’s classification of the sciences is aligned with criteria of utility and control that were inextricably related to the demands of a new industrial society. In several respects, Itzkin concludes, Bentham’s envisaged school “was reminiscent of scenes from Dickens’ Hard Times” (Itzkin 1978: 315). 13 Bentham died in 1832; only two years later, in an article in the Quarterly Review, William Whewell described the current scientific landscape as “a great empire falling to pieces” (Whewell 1834: 59). The image of science and its place in British culture was changing rapidly, and so was the role of the classification of the sciences. Whewell had coined the term ‘’ in 1833 precisely as a remedy to the fragmentation of the ‘commonwealth of science,’ a concern he shared with the members of the newly- founded British Association.6 As Richard Yeo (1993) has pointed out, the early Victorian period was a time in which the social and intellectual conditions of science invited a public ‘metascientific’ reflection on its status as a distinctive form of knowledge. Whewell’s classification of the sciences, published in the second volume of his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, is part of a much larger project, one aimed at securing the legitimacy of a field that was still strongly in competition with natural on one side, and the classics on the other. Famously conversant in all these fields,7 Whewell was uniquely positioned to serve as a mediator as well as an indefatigable advocate of the necessity of a distinctive space for science and a distinctive identity for its practitioners in society. 14 Whewell’s classification is explicitly framed as following from his earlier History of the Inductive Sciences (1857 [1837]). Indeed, history is a central classificatory criterion, which allowed Whewell to differentiate his scheme from others primarily in light of its focus on a historicised notion of ideas: The Classification thus obtained depends neither upon the faculties of the mind to which the separate parts of our knowledge owe their origins, nor upon the objects

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which each science contemplates, but upon a more natural and fundamental element; namely the Ideas which each science involves. (Whewell 1847: 278) 15 Ideas regulate and connect facts, and form a ‘natural’ foundation for reasoning in each science. To each fundamental or conception corresponds a particular science – thus for example the fundamental conception of Space corresponds to Geometry, which is then grouped by Whewell under the “Pure Mathematical Sciences” (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Whewell’s Classification of the sciences (1847: 281)

The British Library

16 By making his system ‘naturally’ led by ideas, rather than objects, Whewell also fulfilled another important aim: that of accounting for the diversity of what qualifies as a ‘fundamental conception’ for each science. His classification is thus profoundly anti- reductionist, in the sense that it aims at distilling the distinctive uniformity in which knowledge is achieved in each field. Thus, Whewell explains, it may be that the idea of Number, fundamental to the science of Arithmetic, is but a modification of the idea of Time; or the idea of Force is a modification of the idea of Cause. The purpose of classifying the sciences, however, is not to find an absolute measure for deciding which of these ideas or conceptions is more fundamental, and subsequently arrange the sciences on the basis of that absolute parameter. On the contrary – and here it becomes clear that ‘natural’ for Whewell is a qualification that aims to validate the distinctive identity of scientific practitioners – fundamental conceptions are contingent upon the specificities and needs of each science. This particular sense of ‘natural’ classification is one that Peirce will adopt and articulate in detail in his own classificatory system.

17 While British classifications reflected the emergence of specialisation and the concerns arising from the division of industrial labour, the politics of the French system were closely aligned with the aftermath of the Napoleonic era. The end of the empire in 1815

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saw Paris reawakening to literary and philosophical influences, especially German , which had been heavily censored under Napoleon. Power remained centralised in the capital, which also became a node at the intersection between literary and philosophical movements, social reform and industrial and technological developments. It is in this context that André-Marie Ampère and Auguste Comte developed their own classifications of the sciences, two examples of the distinctive form that the interaction between philosophy and science took in the French national context. 18 Ampère’s classification formed a central part of his two-volume Essai sur la Philosophie des Sciences (1834-1843). He regarded the Essai as the culmination of his work as a scientist as well as a philosopher, and indeed his classification reflects more broadly his strong Kantian commitments. Here the sciences are classified on the basis of the opposition between world and mind: the most fundamental distinction Ampère outlines is between sciences cosmologiques, or cosmological sciences, engaged in the study of the material world, and sciences noologiques, or sciences of the ‘understanding’ (Ampère 1834: 28). Each of these realms was then further divided in sous-règnes and embranchemens: the sub-realms of cosmological science, for example, were ‘proper ,’ which branched out into mathematics and physics, and ‘physiology,’ which branched out into natural and medical physiology. Each branch was subsequently divided into sub-embranchemens and then sciences of ‘the first order’: for example, arithmetic and geometry were sciences of the first order deriving from the sub- embranchement of mathematics ‘properly construed’ (see fig. 2). Lastly, first order sciences were even further distinguished into second and third order sciences: arithmetical analysis, for example, was classified as a third order science deriving from the science of elementary arithmetic.

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Fig. 2. André-Marie Ampère (1834), Classification des Connaissances Humaines, in appendix to the Essai sur la Philosophie des Sciences

The British Library

19 In one of the very few detailed studies of Ampère’s classification, John Tresch (2012) shows how the system outlined in the Essai is itself the culmination of Ampère’s long- standing reflections on the unity of nature. Tresch reverts the standard image of Ampère’s scientific research on electromagnetism as a triumph of and reason, and relates it instead to his immersion in German Naturphilosophie, which he absorbed primarily via the electromagnetic research of Hans Christian Oersted, as well as the unity of mind and nature outlined in Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy of nature. While Ampère did maintain the distinction between mind and matter in his research on electromagnetism (and to a certain extent this distinction remains visible through his separation between sciences cosmologiques and sciences noologiques in his classification), Tresch shows that he simultaneously built an “activist epistemology” (Tresch 2012: 54) that served as a bridge between empiricist and romantic ideals. “The conceptual malleability and ubiquity of the ‘cosmic substance’ of electricity,” Tresch claims, “made it analogous to his efforts to form a classificatory system that would contain the entire cosmos: a single taxonomy uniting all fields of knowledge” (Tresch 2012: 32). The theme of unity – unity of the sciences as well as unity of nature – is absolutely central to a range of efforts to classify the sciences in the nineteenth century, and will play a crucial role in Peirce’s own system.

20 The strongest influence on Peirce’s classification of the sciences was Comte’s scheme, famously presented in the Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830-1842). 8 Overshadowed by the neo- of the 1920s (a movement that never quite expressed a precise position regarding its relationship with Comte’s positivism, perhaps because it did not quite have one),9 Comte’s philosophy is only recently enjoying a revival. The most

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striking aspect of his original formulation of positivism is the marriage of positive philosophy and positive polity: his contributions to philosophy of science cannot be fully appreciated unless they are placed in relation to his ideas about social and political reform. In a similar vein, the Comtean classification of the sciences, far from being a reductionist attempt at grounding sociology in the natural sciences, was part of a broader project of educational reform specifically aiming to oppose the intellectual division of labour, at the same time doing to the increasing complexity of the sciences in their relation to each other (Bourdeau 2015, np). Thus understood, the pursuit of classifying the sciences was for Comte an explicit response to the apparent fragmentation of the scientific landscape of his time, in a manner that renders his work quite close in spirit and aims to Whewell’s. 21 Comte saw his classification of the sciences as a development of his law of the three stages. His key idea was that the development of human thought was marked by three successive stages: the theological – where the final causes of phenomena are explained by an appeal to the supernatural; the metaphysical – a transitory stage where the appeal to the supernatural is replaced by an appeal to abstract entities; and finally the positive stage – where the mind refrains from looking for ultimate causes and limits itself to the observation and description of the laws and regularities that govern nature. “What is now understood when we speak of an explanation of facts,” Comte maintains, “is simply the establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts, the number of which continually diminishes with the progress of science” (Comte 1853: 2).10 While the three stages marked – dynamically – the progress of the human intellect in the constitution of the sciences, the classification offered a picture of their order, which also served to recapitulate their dynamic progress (Pickering 1993: 203). 22 Comte’s classification placed the sciences on a ladder in order of abstractness or generality (as I will show later on, this was a contentious point, which triggered a heated polemic with Herbert Spencer). It started from mathematics, the most abstract of the sciences, and continued with astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and social physics or sociology. More concrete sciences depended on more abstract ones, but for Comte this did not entail a form of (or , as he referred to it). The way Comte justified his anti-reductionist standpoint with respect to the relationship between the sciences was by underlining their irreducible diversity, but also through an explicit appeal to history, which he regarded as the primary method to conduct the positive science of sociology. On one hand, he clearly specified that each of the sciences in his scheme was characterised by distinctive objects, concepts and methods. On the other, while the tendency toward reductionism might appear itself historically motivated by the sciences capitalising on each other’s findings, Comte maintained that this was counterbalanced by each science resisting invasion in order to secure and maintain the distinctiveness of its subject matter (Bourdeau 2015). 23 The most adamant critic of Comte’s classification at the time was the British biologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer. Comte and Spencer’s classifications have been regarded as complementary attempts at generating a ‘grand synthesis’ of knowledge, in a tradition that dates back at least to George Sarton’s tribute to Spencer, written for the centenary of his birth (Sarton 1920). But Spencer himself also spent most of his later career distancing his own philosophy from Comte’s positivism, and the classification of the sciences became the contentious ground over which he fought this intellectual

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battle.11 The essay The Classification of the Sciences, to Which are Added Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of M. Comte (1864) outlines in detail the main points of Spencer’s disagreement with Comte. A contentious issue, for Spencer, was the supposed linearity of Comte’s classification. Spencer found Comte’s ladder artificial and arbitrary: its serial arrangement of the sciences offered no evidence of the natural relationship of filiation between them. This was already outlined in Spencer’s 1854 essay “The Genesis of Science,” in the course of a long digression on Comte’s classification. The Classification of the Sciences took up Spencer’s earlier criticism and supplemented it with additional arguments and an alternative classificatory system. A ‘true’ classification, Spencer explains, should be based on likenesses amongst the objects grouped in each class: “If […] the Sciences admit of classification at all” Spencer explains, “it must be by grouping together the like and separating the unlike” (Spencer 1864: 4). ‘Like’ and ‘unlike,’ in turn, are defined in terms of ‘essential attributes’ shared by the members of a certain class, in a quasi-essentialist argument about classification: For things that possess the greatest number of attributes in common, are things that possess in common those essential attributes on which the rest depend; and, conversely, the possession in common of the essential attributes implies the possession in common of the greatest number of attributes. (Spencer 1864: 4) 24 An immediately related criticism is that Comte uses interchangeably ‘abstractness’ and ‘generality’ in his discussion of the organisation of the sciences. For Spencer this is evidence of the fact that Comte’s classification arranged the sciences in a purely subjective, artificial order: “Abstractness is detachment from particular cases,” whereas “generality means manifestation in numerous cases” (Spencer 1864: 7). In conflating the two, Spencer argued, Comte neglects the fact that abstraction requires paying attention to essential attributes, separated from “the phenomena which disguise [them]” (Spencer 1864: 7). In open response to Comte’s supposed conflation, Spencer used ‘degrees of abstraction,’ thus redefined, as the fundamental criterion for his reorganisation of the sciences. Thus, ‘Abstract sciences’ deal with the forms in which phenomena are known to us: these are logic and mathematics. ‘Abstract-concrete’ sciences treat phenomena themselves in their elements – they “generalise the laws of relation which different modes of Matter and Motion conform to” (Spencer 1864: 14). Physics, mechanics, chemistry fall within this second class. Lastly, entirely concrete sciences treat phenomena themselves in their totalities: “the subject-matter of these Concrete Sciences is the Real, as contrasted with the wholly or partially ideal” (Spencer 1864: 18). Astronomy, geology, biology, and sociology are all concrete sciences in this sense.

25 The Comte-Spencer controversy is indicative of the many issues at stake in the debate around the classification of the sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century. What is often portrayed as a clash of characters – a then already profoundly spiritual Comte, not particularly receptive to Spencer’s criticisms, versus a stubborn Spencer, irritated by the constant references to Comte in reviews and reactions to his work, even by his close friends George Eliot and George Henry Lewes – was in earnest a clash of worldviews on how science should be conducted. This aspect of the debate emerges in a particularly forceful way in a letter from Spencer to Lewes, himself a persistent advocate of the commonalities between the two philosophers: What is Comte’s professed aim? To give a coherent account of the progress of human conceptions. What is my aim? To give a coherent account of the progress of the external world. Comte proposes to describe the necessary, and the actual, filiation

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of the ideas. I propose to describe the necessary, and actual, filiation of things. Comte professes to interpret the genesis of our knowledge of nature. My aim is to interpret, as far as possible, the genesis of the phenomena which constitute nature. The one end is subjective. The other is objective. (Spencer 1904: 570) 26 Where Spencer saw his classification as an objective matter, in alignment with the order of nature, Comte’s system assumed the limitations of human knowledge as the starting point – and defining characteristic – of any attempt to systematise the sciences. Indeed, by arranging the sciences on a scale of increasing complexity, Comte aimed to reconnect general phenomena (as those studied by astronomy) with the variability and complexity of phenomena that were closer to humans, as those studied by sociology.

27 Yet, interpreting Comte and Spencer’s classifications exclusively as a standard instance of the scientific polarisation around the categories of and subjectivity will not do full justice to what they, along with Bentham, Whewell, Ampère, and many other nineteenth-century classifiers (including Peirce!) were trying to achieve with their classifications. The appeal to objectivity in defence of the superiority of a particular classificatory system, well exemplified here by Spencer’s curt statement, is a rhetorical gesture that needs to be contextualised in the broader conceptual and cultural space of nineteenth-century attempts at coordinating knowledge more broadly. These attempts were at once social and epistemological, and ultimately converged into what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2009) have characterised as the image of ‘a many-headed knower’: the kind of scientific self emerging from the realisation of the distinctively collective nature of scientific objectivity as a virtue and a guide to the scientific enterprise. “This is a problem of the division of labour and the multiplication of knowers” Daston and Galison claim, “akin to any other such problem in the organisation of work: how to analyse a complex inquiry into modular parts, finding willing and able hands to undertake each part, and efficiently integrate the results” (Daston & Galison 2009: 297). Among the examples of this impulse toward coordination they refer to the Internationale Grandmessung, an attempt at a complete measurement of the shape and dimensions of the Earth – a grandiose project to which Peirce himself contributed while employed at the US Geodetic and Coast Survey. Nineteenth-century classifications of the sciences add an additional layer to the picture about coordination provided by Daston and Galison, as they offer a ‘many-headed rationale’ for adjudicating how labour should be divided without compromising the fundamental unity of the scientific enterprise, and a clear view that this process of adjudication was primarily marked by irreducible disagreements of the kind that saw Spencer against Comte, or Whewell against Bentham’s . Fighting over the superiority of a classification was as much an epistemological, meta-scientific matter, as it was a statement about the national and international politics of science, and who should be allowed to enter that debate. Peirce joined this discussion relatively late, but it is precisely for this reason, I claim, that his classification demands to be reconnected to the broader external context in which it was produced – a context in which he played the role of witness as well as that of a directly involved practitioner.

Peirce’s Classification, c1892

My own classification is a direct reformation of that of Comte. I imitate Comte in making chemistry follow directly after general physics, as a specialization of it, in

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making biology a specialization of chemistry, but on a ground that was not understood at Comte’s time, namely that biology is merely an account of the properties of protoplasm which is a class of chemical substances. I also imitate Comte in making sciences of organizations and organisms follow after sciences of classifications of individuals. But I separate from Comte, in making pure mathematics a science, in making philosophy a science, in recognizing the psychical sciences as a series parallel to the physical sciences, in recognizing the descriptive sciences in general, and not merely astronomy, and in transposing them from the first to the last place and in recognizing the practical sciences. (R 1336 c1892: 4) 28 Thus Peirce characterised his project of compiling a classification of the sciences, in a manuscript entitled “Philosophy in Light of the Logic of Relatives” (c1892). The manuscript, briefly discussed by Kent (1987), is by no means his earliest attempt at classifying the sciences.12 Kent dismisses it rather quickly, qualifying it as one of the several instances in which Peirce reflects on the place of philosophy in his classification, and concluding that it offers evidence of how “exhibiting the relations of a given science to various other sciences indicates some of the conceivable effects of that science” (Kent 1987: 52). Hidden between the lines, however, there is a far broader set of claims advanced by Peirce in this particular piece of writing, claims that are not in contradiction with the pragmaticist relevance – that is, the ‘conceivable effects’ – of singling out the role of philosophy amongst the sciences.

29 I want to argue that this manuscript is important in the context of Peirce’s classification, partly because it is one of the instances in which Peirce openly discusses the relationship of his proposed system to Comte’s, but primarily because the rhetorical strategy he pursues in articulating such relationship is a clear attempt at positioning himself, as a philosopher and as a scientist, within the broader late nineteenth-century philosophical and institutional debate around the status and current shape of scientific knowledge. “It is incumbent upon every philosopher in order to make himself understood,” Peirce states only a few lines earlier, “to explain in what way he came up with his ideas. For we must all submit to be classified and ultimately to be pigeon-holed” (R1336: 3). This is an initial indication of a point that has been overlooked in the literature on Peirce’s classification: Peirce is here using his classification of the sciences as a form of ‘currency’ to secure his identity and status in the very community of classifiers to which he is offering his contribution. He also shows to be well aware that offering a classification is itself a pathway toward being pigeon-holed: along with their objects, classifications classify classifiers. Peirce’s statement, however, does not imply an absolute inevitability in this process: by making his commitments explicit (however rhetorically coated they may be, or perhaps precisely via this rhetorical move), he is steering the recipients of his classification toward including him into a particular pigeon-hole rather than others. This becomes even clearer a few lines later where, for example, he takes a precise position in the Spencer-Comte dispute: “Herbert Spencer attempted to reform Comte’s classification, but in my opinion not with sufficient power to repay study” (R1336: 4). 30 Contrary to Spencer, Peirce finds Comte’s idea that the sciences should be classified according to their degrees of abstractness sound and quite unproblematic. He does not dwell upon the distinction between abstractness and generality, but this may be because the distinction for Spencer was an opportunity to advance a quasi-essentialist view of classification, which Peirce did not endorse.13 Peirce reads Comte’s emphasis on ‘degrees of abstractness’ in a distinctively differential way:

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We desire to have our classification as significant as possible. That is to say, we desire that, over and above, those characters of the different classes of science which serve to delimit them and to discriminate from one another, they should have as many interesting extra points of distinction as possible; for the value of a classification lies precisely in that. (R1336: 5-6) 31 A classification of the sciences should be ‘significant’ first and foremost to scientific practitioners. It should reflect differences, rather than similarities, between diverse fields of inquiry, for it is through difference that each field defines and delimits itself. As I will show later on in this section, here Peirce starts articulating a point that will become essential to his subsequent definition of a ‘natural’ classification: the fact that a significant classification should reflect the order of, and relations between, the various sub-communities that constitute science. Peirce expands on this point even further: We find the different sciences are separated to a great extent into different circles of men who have comparatively little intercourse with one another. What makes the specialist of one of these circles more competent to conduct certain than a man not in that circle is that he is trained to that sort of inquiry, and especially that he is competent to make a kind of observation that ordinary men cannot make. He has the necessary apparatus and the necessary experience. Hence it is that sciences are separated from one another largely by virtue of the different kinds of observations upon which they are based. (R1336: 6) 32 What Peirce is articulating here is precisely what Csiszar (2010: 370) defined as an attempt at delineating an ‘empirical’ image of science, typical of nineteenth century classifications. As practices and practitioners form the empirical content of a classification of the sciences, it is to these that Peirce directs his attention. He singles out observation as the discriminating factor not only to distinguish the sciences from each other, but also to demarcate science from non-science. In stating that scientists are ‘competent to make a kind of observation that ordinary men cannot make,’ however, he is not unquestioningly attributing authority to the field. Instead, he proposes that the justification for the distinctive epistemic position attributed to science is to be found in the extensive training that scientific practitioners must undergo in order to earn their access to the community to which they aim to contribute. “Those who do not make a given kind of observations,” Peirce continues, “are segregated from those who do; and this segregation tends to encourage the growth of different sets of ideas, and those different sets of ideas will give special characters to methods of study and to the they discover” (R1336: 6). Scientists have a privileged perspective upon a certain range of phenomena only insofar as they train themselves and each other to observe in particular ways. This in turn is shaped by, and shapes, the conceptual and methodological direction that different kinds of scientific inquiry take. The ‘segregation’ that Peirce mentions in his statement is not a shortcoming of the specialisation of observation, but a crucially enabling factor that allows different sets of ideas to grow. Peirce’s emphasis on observation is thus clearly different from the ‘received view’ of positivism, a view he did not endorse, even though he was familiar with its most sophisticated forms. However sophisticated Comte’s account of observation might have been (see Laudan 1971), for example, his version of positivism featured observation as antithetical to metaphysics: indeed the transition from the metaphysical to the positive stage was characterised for Comte by a renewed role for the observational component of science as the precondition to the identification and description of regularities in nature. Peirce, on the contrary, saw

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observation and metaphysics as complementary, insofar as metaphysics was construed itself as a science and conducted via experiment and reasoning (Haack 2007).

33 The contrast with positivist accounts of observation is visible in other writings by Peirce, roughly contemporary to the discussion of the classification of the sciences contained in R1336. An illuminating example is a passage from the “Reply to the Necessitarians” (1893),14 which includes a targeted response to ’ claim that Peirce’s logic of science appears to be articulated in a positivistic spirit (CP 6.404). Peirce’s reply to Carus’ charge starts with a tongue-in-cheek statement about where his supposedly ‘positivistic’ influences might have come from, and ends with an appeal to history that turns Carus’ statement on its head: Were I to name those of my teachers who were most positivistic in theory a smile would be excited. My own historical studies, which have been somewhat minutely critical, have, on the whole, confirmed the views of Whewell, the only man of philosophical power conjoined with scientific training who had made a comprehensive survey of the whole course of science, that progress in science depends upon the observation of the right facts by furnished with appropriate ideas. (R1336: 6; emphasis in the original) 34 Here Peirce is referring to Whewell’s classification of the sciences, and specifically to the view that ideas are the guiding principle of classification. Just like in the case of the organisation of the sciences, ideas offer a ‘natural’ guiding rationale for what should be deemed worthy of attention and selection by a community of inquirers. This is reminiscent of a version of what philosophers of science, following (1958), would now define as the ‘theory-ladenness of observation’; however, Peirce’s account is both broader and richer.15 A clarification of the sense in which Peirce construes observation emerges, for example, in his 1898 lecture on “The First Rule of Logic.” This particular passage is revealing because here Peirce treats the role of observation in the context of a discussion of Whewell’s account of induction and its differences from retroduction: For what is observation? What is experience? It is the enforced element in the history of our lives. It is that which we are conscious of by an occult force residing in an object which we contemplate. The act of observation is the deliberate yielding of ourselves to that force majeure, – an early surrender at discretion, due to our foreseeing that we must, whatever we do, be borne down by that power, at last. Now the surrender which we make in retroduction is a surrender to the insistence of an idea. (EP2: 47) 35 Observation for Peirce is always interpretative – interpretation does not intervene upon it as an add-on, but is built into it. Thus, the factual component of observation (‘the enforced element in the history of our lives’) is not separate from the ideas that lend observation an element of generality.16 In referring to Whewell’s appeal to ideas, Peirce is therefore also accounting for the deep historicity that characterises modes and methods of observation within a particular community. For a fundamental consequence of building ideas into a theory of observation is that, construed in this way, observation becomes itself an inferential and semiotic process that unfolds through time. Interestingly, this aspect of Peirce’s account emerges far more clearly from passages in which he outlines his disagreements with Whewell, which deserve a brief digression.

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36 One point on which Whewell should be corrected, Peirce explains in a manuscript written for one of his 1892 Lowell lectures on the history of science, is that he remains hopelessly vague on “the mode of origination of these ‘appropriate ideas’” (R1274a: 5): Whewell would say they spring from the nature of the mind. But the nature of the mind is something itself due to an evolutionary process; and we want to know just how these ideas came to be implemented in the nature of the mind. Besides, these ideas have most of them grown up during the course of scientific history, and we want to know just how they have grown up and under what general . (R1274a: 5) 37 What attracted Peirce to Whewell’s views on science was that, along with their explicit emphasis on history, they ran against the dominant ‘vulgarisation’ of Baconian empiricism which was dominant in nineteenth century America.17 As Peter Novick explains: “to the great majority of American philosophers and scientists Baconianism meant in the first place a rigidly empirical approach: ‘observations’ were sacred” (Novick 1988: 34). This was accompanied by a meticulous avoidance of hypotheses: “it was unscientific to go beyond what could be directly observed, to ‘anticipate nature’” (Novick 1988: 34). What Peirce found in Whewell was an alternative to this rather crude form of empiricism, one in which the chaos of empirical facts could be made meaningful through the imposition of general ideas upon those facts. On the other hand, however, Peirce points out that what Whewell seems to ignore is that ideas themselves undergo a process of refinement and growth: the iterative complementarity of ideas and observations is at the very basis of the historicity of both. “Whewell’s theory in its general statement,” Peirce claims in the same manuscript, “is that to make a scientific discovery two things are needful, 1st, facts drawn from without, and 2nd ideas drawn from within, appropriate to the interpretation of those facts” (R1274a: 3). Whewell falls into the trap of separating (external) observed facts from (internal) ideas, with the result of relegating observation to a passive, subordinate affair. This has the paradoxical effect of rendering his approach (at least to observation) remarkably close to the ‘vulgarisation’ of Baconian empiricism which he purported to reject. Stating that ideas ‘grow’ is for Peirce at the same time a way of avoiding the intuitionist connotations which he saw as implied in Whewell’s views,18 and at the same time proposing a richer sense of observation, as consisting of an active process of judgment and as a central part of the self-corrective nature of science. Indeed, his critique of Whewell continues with a biological analogy, which clarifies even further the distinctive historicity and complementarity of ideas and observations thus construed: One of the great questions in biology is whether acquired characters are ever transmitted. If we speak of acquired mental and moral qualities, it is the question of whether training is of any use except to the individual. Whether, for instance, the conception of space is a pure result of breeding that is of the survival of those who possessed it early at birth, or whether it is in some measure the result of the inheritance of the intellectual earnings of our forefathers. No direct investigation can afford a satisfactory answer to this question. It can only be resolved by studying out the general modus operandi of intellectual development. (R1276a: 5-6) 38 It is not a coincidence that Peirce’s evolutionary example revolves around the role of ‘training’ (which is of paramount importance for Peirce’s classification of the sciences) as the contentious middle-ground between biologically and intellectually acquired characters. Along with a useful example, the reference to ‘training’ here invokes skills and habits that are developed and cultivated through observation as a primary vehicle of ‘the intellectual earnings of our forefathers’. A direct investigation of our biological

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characteristics, Peirce remarks, will not set the balance between elements drawn ‘from without’ and elements drawn ‘from within,’ because that line is by its very nature blurred. The only way to answer the question, Peirce continues, is via historical inquiry: One thing, as it seems to me, the history of science renders abundantly clear, it is that man’s native, or natural and apparently innate ideas in the early stages of intellectual development, were far from being accurately true. They have to be subjected to a process of correction. (R1276a: 6-7, emphasis mine) 39 What Whewell took to be ‘natural’ or ‘innate’ ideas are themselves constantly evolving – and as I will show below this adds a central tile to the puzzle of Peirce’s definition of a ‘natural’ classification of the sciences, too. Ideas grow as they are enriched and corrected by observations, just as much as observations are by their very nature imbued with ideas.

40 The complementarity of ideas and observation is an important point where Peirce’s philosophy crosses paths with the tradition of historical epistemology, a tradition to which he has been thus far associated only very loosely and in indirect ways. The reference to Whewell’s historical works (even in the form of Peirce’s criticism to his account of ideas) is particularly relevant here, as it shows that Peirce recognised the value of scientific observation as a historically located practice and as a mode of inquiry worthy of investigation in its own right. This is a theme that has been revived only recently in the history and philosophy of science, precisely by scholars working within the framework of historical epistemology (Daston 2008; Daston & Lunbeck 2011). Lorraine Daston’s idea of ‘collective empiricism,’ for example, offers an account of observation as a practice that was highly discussed and theorised by scientific practitioners at least since the seventeenth century, to the point that it became a scientific genre with its own distinctive connotations and methodological guidelines. “Even when observation was demoted to the status of handmaiden to experiment in mid-nineteenth century philosophy of science” Daston points out, “it continued to be a fundamental scientific practice – and arguably the one most likely to generate novelties, including new ” (Daston 2008: 102). This reformulation of observation, constructed as an active way of “furnishing the universe” (Daston 2008: 100) with new ontologies, is what Peirce is drawing from Whewell and applying to his own characterisation of the practices and methods of delimiting the scope and boundaries of the sciences. More importantly, Peirce’s criticism of Whewell points to a distinctive conceptual preoccupation that renders his work particularly relevant for contemporary debates in historical epistemology. In separating ideas ‘from within’ and observations ‘from without’ Whewell seems to display (admittedly in a peculiarly counterintuitive way) some of the traits that would characterise the later, post-Kantian separation between (subjective) knowers and (objective) world. As Daston points out, the quest for a neutral observation language, or (before that distinctive development in the twentieth century) the construction of observation as a mere registration of sense data “were Kantian dreams, made possible only after the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity had established itself as the great epistemological divide among scientists as well as philosophers” (Daston 2008: 99). Peirce himself sensed a Kantian flavour coating Whewell’s discussion of the divide between ideas and observations: “Whewell’s statement [i.e. that discovery in science consists of ideas drawn from within and facts drawn from without] is Kantian in its form, more Kantian than anybody” (R1274a: 4). Placing ‘innate’ or ‘natural’ ideas as guides for observation

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hides an implicit view that the observation of facts remains an inherently ‘dumb’ and brute affair in the absence of a separate and higher set of conceptual skills. This is precisely the view of observation that Peirce is trying to overturn by insisting on the historicity and growth of ideas. In a similar vein, stressing the ‘innate’ and natural character of ideas as guides to observations will not result in rendering observations, in turn, more ‘natural’ in a strictly reductive biological sense. On the contrary, Peirce seems to be claiming that Whewell’s lesson becomes far more effective when the line between (passive) observations and (active) ideas is challenged on historical grounds. When it comes to complex human affairs, ‘natural’ and ‘historical’ lay on a continuum, and this is the case not only for the iterative complementarity of ideas and observations, but also for the relevance of this complementarity within Peirce’s broader account of the classification of the sciences. 41 It is precisely this historicised and practice-specific notion of observation that Peirce places at the core of his idea of a ‘natural’ classification of the sciences in R1336, the manuscript that reflects the status of Peirce’s classification in the early 1890s with which I opened this section. When the sciences are classified in respect to the characteristics of their objects,” Peirce claims in a crucial passage, “those which depend upon different kinds of observations are better separated and more according to nature than in any other way” (R1336: 7, emphasis mine). Recall that earlier on in the manuscript Peirce presents a differential view of classification: for a classificatory system to be significant, it should contain “as many interesting extra points of distinction as possible” (R1336: 6) between different kinds of sciences. But what exactly determines this difference? A first step could be to tailor classification around the objects of investigation of a particular kind of inquiry: this would also be an intuitive way of justifying the status of a classification as ‘natural.’ This move, however, would not exhaust the empirical content of a classification of the sciences. For objects themselves depend on the particular respects in which a certain community of practitioner is trained to observe them: practitioners, rather than objects, are the most ‘natural’ content of a classification of the sciences, and form its very empirical content. Classification is observation-dependent not in the sense of being relative to the whim of particular scientific practitioners (Peirce would reject this approach as a form of ), but because observation, possessing an element of generality, is itself the most ‘natural’ foundation upon which the order of the sciences can be built. 42 The idea of ‘natural’ classification persists in Peirce’s system, and is indeed a trait that will be maintained all along, until his ‘perennial’ 1903 version of the classification of the sciences. But it would be a mistake to consider this as a distinctive and unique feature of Peirce’s classification. Nor is the comparison with Whewell’s account of how ideas furnish a ‘natural’ guide to classify the sciences an isolated influence on Peirce. All nineteenth-century classifiers subscribed to the conviction that a rational organisation of the sciences should be ‘natural.’ The trend was to model ‘natural’ on biological taxonomy, a field that had been undergoing a revival at least since the previous century. As Csiszar points out, each nineteenth century classifier had his own preferred taxonomer as a point of reference: Against the nominalism of the Encyclopédistes’ Buffon, Comte preferred the functionalist approach to taxonomy of Cuvier, Bentham championed the methods of Linnaeus, while Ampère sang the praises of the Jussieu family’s natural method of botanical classification. Each of them believed that their chosen naturalist had

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finally provided them a method that would make it possible to invent a classification of knowledge that was truly natural. (Csiszar 2010: 383) 43 For Peirce such a fundamental point of reference was Louis Agassiz, whose lectures he had attended in 1860. The relationship between natural classification and Agassiz’s approach to taxonomy is something that Peirce discusses in detail in the 1902 Minute Logic, in a projected chapter entitled “On Science and Natural Classes” (EP2: 115-32). Along with providing important details of the sense in which a classification of the sciences should be ‘natural,’ this particular piece lends substantial evidence to my contention that Peirce used his classification as a form of ‘currency’ to enter the broader nineteenth-century debate on how the sciences should be organised. The chapter starts with a reference to Ernest Cushing Richardson’s 1901 Classification. Theoretical and Practical, a work Peirce had reviewed for the Nation at the beginning of 1902 and found theoretically poor, but practically useful.19 Richardson’s extensive appendix, containing 146 classifications of the sciences alongside to 173 archival systems for indexing subjects, is an illuminating example of the merging of epistemic and bureaucratic motivations behind the impulse toward classification, as outlined by Csiszar (2010: 350). Each of the 146 scientific classifications presented by Richardson, Peirce claims in his chapter on “Science and Natural Classes,” aspires to be “the one and true classification” (EP2: 116). But what is meant by a ‘natural’ class? Peirce notes that many of the previous classifiers have assumed that referring to zoology and botany may be sufficient to justify the metaphysical connotations of their use of the term ‘natural.’ However, “if botany and zoology must perforce rest upon metaphysics, by all means let this metaphysics be recognised as an explicit branch of those sciences and be treated in a thoroughgoing and scientific manner” (EP2: 116). It is here that Agassiz offers a prime model of ‘natural’ classification. Peirce does not embrace his system in full – he specifically claims that his classification “was put forward at a somewhat inauspicious moment” (EP2: 128n), so that it was almost born out of date in light of the impact of Darwin’s ideas about evolution. Nevertheless, at least Agassiz made his metaphysical commitments clear, explicit, and somewhat ‘testable’ in contrast to his critics, whose classifications “are saturated with metaphysics in its dangerous form – i.e., the unconscious form” (EP2: 128n).

44 From Agassiz Peirce borrows two fundamental points. One is the subdivision of science according to categories that Agassiz proposed for the natural world: branches, classes, orders, families, genera and species. A classification should, for Agassiz as well as for Peirce, account for what sort of characters distinguish branches from branches, classes from classes and so on (ibid.). There is then a more fundamental point that Peirce borrows from his former teacher: the notion that natural classifications should offer an arrangement of its objects “according to the ideas from which their results” (EP2: 128n, emphasis mine). Once again, ideas creep up in Peirce’s discussion of a natural classification, but here Peirce adds an explicitly metaphysical layer to the characterisation of ideas as a criterion for classification that he borrowed from Whewell in the early 1890s. The claim that natural classes owe their existence to ideas, Peirce claims following Agassiz, amounts to stating that natural classes are defined by final causes. Indeed Peirce openly claims that a lasting legacy of Agassiz’s classification consists precisely in “directing our attention to the supreme importance of bearing in mind the final cause of objects in finding out their own natural classification” (EP2: 129). Much has been written on Peirce’s account of final causes (Short 1981; Short 2007; and Pape 1993), and an in-depth exegetic analysis of this particular aspect of his

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philosophy is well beyond the scope of my discussion. It is important to point out, however, that in this particular context Peirce differentiates clearly final causes from ‘purposes.’ A purpose is “merely that form of final cause which is most familiar to our experience” (EP2: 120), whereas the of final cause Peirce is advancing with reference to a natural classification of the sciences relates precisely to “objects of [a] class deriving their existence from an idea” (EP2: 123). It is in fact from ideas that the sciences derive their genealogy: just like cellulose affords opportunity for the beauty of a rose, Peirce claims, so ideas afford opportunity for a natural organisation of the sciences (EP2 122). This is a crucial connection that allows Peirce to establish a direct link between a ‘natural’ classification and science as a living entity and as a pursuit carried out by its practitioners. Peirce expresses this connection in a crucial passage, which presents a distinctive pragmaticist flavour: What I mean by the idea’s conferring existence upon the individual members of the class is that it confers upon them the power of working out results in this world, that it confers upon them, that is to say, organic existence, or, in one word, life. (EP2: 124) 45 A natural classification is thus neither the “exudation of living science” (EP2: 129) nor is it the projection of an ideal image of science “such as the classifier hopes may sometime exist” (EP2: 129). Instead, a natural classification of the sciences should afford the living members of the scientific community the opportunity to work out results in the world. This adds to Peirce’s classification a generative dimension, which is directly related to its distinctive historicity. The two are complementary angles arising from Peirce’s claim that all natural classification is “an attempt at finding the true genesis of the objects classified” (EP2: 127). By genesis Peirce means “not the efficient action which produces the whole by producing the parts, but the final action which produces the parts because they are needed to make the whole” (EP2: 127). Thus construed, classification is at the same time real and ever-evolving: “genesis is production from ideas,” and as ideas grow so do our classifications of the sciences. The historicity of Peirce’s classification derives precisely from this constant articulation of ‘parts’ (that is, individual sciences) as they are needed to make the whole of science, in a process that is both prompting practitioners to reflect on how the sciences got where they got, and disclosing questions that still await for a scientific answer.

Peirce’s Classification, and the Writing of History

46 Along with the writing of R1336, the year 1892 is also the time in which a version of Peirce’s classification of the sciences appears as the preface of the first Lowell Lecture in the history of science (R 1274a [fig. 3]). The lectures were commissioned in late 1891, after the geologist and member of the US Geological Survey George Ferdinand Becker recommended Peirce to Augustus Lowell as the ideal person who could cover the subject of science and its history “with so much knowledge and acumen” (W8: ix). Peirce started working on the lectures in February 1892 (W8: lxvii). This also coincides with a draft, dated 13 February 1892 and composed on paper from the Century Club, of a classification of the sciences organised “in their order of generality” (W8: 275 [fig. 4]). The two schemes do not present substantial conceptual differences and are themselves variations of the classification that had appeared in the Century Dictionary entry on “Science” a year earlier, in 1891.

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47 Peirce’s reflections on how ideas can serve as a guide for a ‘natural’ classification of the sciences, as outlined in my discussion of R1336 in the previous section, offer a powerful and overlooked commentary to the practical use of his classificatory scheme in the early 1890s. This is especially important in light of the intense historical work that would characterise Peirce’s production in those years, and which culminated in 1898 with the drafts for a history of science in one volume for the editors Putnam’s Sons. The manuscript for the first Lowell Lecture prefaces Peirce’s classification with a somewhat laconic statement: “It will be convenient for the purpose of these lectures to use the classification of the sciences shown in Diagram I” (R1274a [fig. 3]). Peirce does not expand further in this particular manuscript. In W8, the editors of the Peirce Edition Project suggest that a further draft of the first Lowell Lecture (R 1337) could be viewed as a commentary to the classificatory schemes Peirce developed in 1892 (W8: 447).

Fig.3 R 1274a, Lecture I from Peirce’s Lowell Lectures in the History of Science

The Houghton Library,

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Fig 4. R1347, The Sciences in their Order of Generality. Reprinted in W8: 275.

The Houghton Library, Harvard University

48 But while the annotations in W8 follow primarily how Peirce justifies the position of each science in his scheme, I would like to draw attention to a contextual explanation that Peirce provides in R1337, and which he sets as the background for the particular organisation of the sciences in his classification: “All science is a development of primitive ideas connected with growth” (R1337: 1, emphasis mine). This is an important qualification, one that brings the lectures on the history of science explicitly in dialogue with the discussion of the classification of the sciences outlined in R1336. The basic distinction Peirce outlines between the sciences, at least in this particular draft, is between the two primitive ideas of self-preservation, guiding the physical sciences, and reproduction, guiding the psychical sciences. “This dichotomy,” Peirce continues, “is the most fundamental division of the sciences, Physics the knowledge of things and their mutual forces; Psychics the knowledge of and their mutual influences” (R1337: 1).20 At a very fundamental level, Peirce is here articulating the insight, developed from Whewell, that ideas offer the most natural principle for a classification of the sciences. He is also beginning to articulate it in accordance to the ‘genetic’ approach he would delineate more precisely a few years later, in the 1902 Minute Logic: ‘genesis is production from ideas’ (EP2: 127). Placing the primitive ideas of self- preservation and reproduction as the rationale for his distinction between physical and psychical sciences, Peirce is here once again delineating his classification in continuity with Whewell’s historical legacy, and he is explicitly doing so in the context of his historical writings.

49 A further important question arises from Peirce’s use of his classification of the sciences as the preface of his Lowell Lectures. The continuity between Peirce’s writings from the early 1890s helps us tracing precise connections as far as the context of his

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early versions of the classification is concerned. But this does not quite explain why he deemed it important to present a classification of the sciences in the opening of his lectures on the history of science in the first place. Here my account departs from the narrow details of Peirce’s text to move toward a historiographical hypothesis with broader implications. I have argued in the previous section that one of the ways in which Peirce’s classification qualifies as ‘natural’ lies precisely in its tracing the configuration of various sub-communities of inquirers at a specific point in history. Transposed in the context of historical inquiry – which is exactly how Peirce approaches the history of science in his 1892 Lowell Lectures – this entails that an account of the organisation of the sciences is not construed as a mere leftover of history, emerging only once progress has been accomplished. Instead, Peirce’s placing a classification of the sciences at the very beginning of his history is a rhetorical move with a clear epistemological significance, a reminder that the historian’s starting point is always a more or less internalised classification of the present state of knowledge, a classification that functions as the entry point and the springboard for the historian’s hypotheses about the past. A classification of the sciences as the preface of a history of science is thus also an open invitation to acknowledge that the present is not only the inevitable starting point of any historical inquiry, but also all the historian ultimately has at her/his disposal to begin that investigation in earnest. Rather than a historiographical limitation, however, Peirce’s rhetorical gesture has the effect of turning that awareness into a critical, fallibilist tool at the service of the practice of history. As Vincent Colapietro has highlighted, the broader, thick historicity of Peirce’s theory of inquiry is itself a powerful conceptual device not to obliterate, but “to establish the present as the meantime, the time between an indefinite past and an equally indefinite future – to secure the present as a segment of time whose relationship to antecedent and subsequent stretches of time makes the present itself, in effect, a ” (Colapietro 1996: 136). I claim that this view applies equally well to the case of Peirce’s classification in the broader context of his historical writings. Caught in the meantime of her/his current classificatory schemes, the historian is not a prisoner of the present, but the responsible holder of a particular critical angle on the past: “Perspectives are not prisons in which we are condemned to dwell in darkness,” Colapietro writes, “but truly angles of vision” (Colapietro 1996: 137). What Peirce is providing by prefacing his first lecture on the history of science with a classification of the sciences is precisely his angle of vision, a statement of identity but also an acknowledgment of the responsibility that historians face in investigating the past from the perspective of a present they cannot escape. 50 My historiographical hypothesis is partly substantiated by a statement that Peirce himself makes, and which can be found in the form of a handwritten annotation in a rather surprising place. Possibly in parallel with his mature formulation of the ‘perennial’ classification, Peirce revisited his Century Dictionary entry on “Science”. His own copy at the Houghton Library contains a long handwritten extract (fig. 5), in which Peirce provides an extensive, critical account of how his classification has changed since the publication of the entry in 1891. But while the distinctively trichotomic articulation of his classification clearly starts betraying the use of his categories as a principle to classify the sciences (Atkins 2006), the historiographical significance of his classification, and his emphasis on classification as a product of the present seem to have remained fairly stable.

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Fig. 5 Peirce’s annotations to the entry on Science in the Century Dictionary. R 1597: 5396v.

The Houghton Library, Harvard University

51 In the annotations, Peirce starts by referring to Coleridge’s definition of science in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana as “systematised knowledge,” which he contrasts to the older meaning of or scientia as knowledge by metaphysical principles. The definition offered by Coleridge, who was himself one of the many nineteenth-century classifiers, is what Peirce adopts as it reflects the fact that “scientific men, when they speak of ‘science,’ mean the life devoted to the single-minded pursuit of the ” (R1597: 5396v). Here Peirce is setting the ground for his (by then fairly well established) argument that a classification should reflect the practices of its living practitioners. But it is the immediately following paragraph that summarises possibly two decades of Peirce’s study of the classification of the sciences, and that conveys the historical and historiographical continuity of his investigation, independently of the changes he made to the logical form of his classification. Peirce states: I have carefully examined upwards of a hundred attempts to classify the sciences. The majority of them attempt to say what sciences are possible, which is a little presumptuous. I am convinced that we can only form a natural classification of science in its present state, looking forward just a little. The scheme of Comte (whoever originated it) must be the basis. I divide all theoretical science into sciences of discovery, sciences of review (like Humboldt’s Cosmos, Comte’s Philosophie Positive and (in the main) the synthetic philosophy of H. Spencer. The classification of sciences itself, belongs in this division) and thirdly Practical Sciences whose purpose is to subserve some other purpose than that of knowing. (R1597: 5396v, emphasis mine) 52 Behind the distinctive trichotomic character of the classification Peirce discusses in his annotations, this statement lends support to the two alternative main lines of inquiry into Peirce’s classification I have pursued in this paper. One is the historical claim that Peirce used his classification as a sort of ‘currency’ to enter the broader debate of how

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the sciences should be organised, and who was entitled to have a say in that debate. As a philosopher as well as a scientific practitioner, Peirce was naturally led toward a minute dissection of the details of that discussion, a discussion in which his own identity was at stake. The careful examination of ‘upwards of a hundred attempts to classify the sciences’ is at the same time an intellectual pursuit in its own right and an act of responsibility that Peirce performed toward the community of inquirers that formed the very recipient of his philosophy and his science, and without which neither his philosophy nor his practice as a scientist would be possible in the first place.

53 At the same time, Peirce reiterates, perhaps more forcefully, the fact that a natural classification is always a result of being “caught in the meantime,” to return to Colapietro’s (1996: 136) powerful metaphor: “We can only form a natural classification of science in its present state, looking forward just a little,” he claims. This is in line with the second line of inquiry I have pursued in the course of this paper, one that fleshed out how Peirce’s classification aimed to furnish an “angle of vision,” at the same time serving as the very starting point of inquiry – historical (how science got where it is, why here rather than anywhere else) as well as scientific (what questions are still being generated by the current configuration and evolving relations between the sciences). Drawing on a metaphor that Peirce perhaps would not have endorsed – but one that capitalises on an insight from his close friend – his classification of the sciences, reframed in these terms, takes on the function of the historian’s specious present: not a “knife edge” – to use James’ (1983: 574) lucid phrasing – separating an imperfect past from the glorious future of science, but “a saddle back with a breadth of its own,” upon which the historian sits perched, looking simultaneously in two directions into time.

Conclusions

54 In pointing out the fracture between Peirce’s 1903 classification of the sciences and his earlier efforts, Peirce scholars miss an important opportunity to follow a range of crucial historical and historiographical insights deriving directly from the contextualisation of such an important part of his philosophy. This seems to be in line with the internalist treatment that Peirce’s philosophy has been subject to more broadly, and that has occasionally generated the distorted image, at least outside the immediate realm of Peirce scholarship, of an isolated and genial thinker, whose points of reference were mainly to be found in an extensive and dusty library of classics. Peirce was certainly in part this, but he was also much more. He was a prolific writer immersed in the most lively scientific debates of his time, and his classification of the sciences is evidence of how much his philosophical concerns were shaped by the social context and social debates that surrounded and permeated his philosophical views. While it was not my aim in this paper to offer a complete social history of Peirce’s classification of the sciences, I have tried as much as possible to show that there is much to gain from reconciling a sustained historical contextualisation of his work with a careful analysis of its epistemological message.

55 The account of the early life of Peirce’s classification I have presented in this paper has hopefully delineated two possible new avenues of inquiry into Peirce’s classification of the sciences. Both revolve around the distinctive historicity of Peirce’s project. In recontextualising Peirce’s classification as a quintessentially nineteenth-century

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pursuit, I have tried to reconcile a traditionally internalist account of Peirce’s classificatory scheme with broader externalist attempts at investigating the debate around the order of the sciences in the nineteenth century. Peirce was a key actor in that debate, with precise views on the coordination of the scientific enterprise, ‘natural’ classification, and the limitations of alternative classificatory schemes. More importantly, Peirce’s sources and his own writings on the subject place him precisely in that transitional area where the bureaucratic impulse driving classification merged with the epistemic quest for a rational organisation of knowledge. Being versed in both fields, Peirce had a great deal to add to the whole enterprise, and as I argued he used his classification as the ‘currency’ to gain access to the debate. 56 But the historicity of Peirce’s classification emerged also in my investigation of the uses of his scheme as a preface to his historical writings of the 1890s. It is not a coincidence, I argued, that a classification of the sciences, almost with no additional elaboration, was offered to the audience of his Lowell Lectures in the history of science. Here Peirce’s main achievement is to show that historical inquiry is by its nature inevitably bound to an inescapable presentism: historians somehow always start from a classification of the sciences as their ‘angle of vision.’ Interpreting Peirce’s work through the framework of historical epistemology has however offered the possibility of turning this inherent limitation into a virtue of historical practice: by prefacing his history with a classification of the sciences Peirce explicitly took responsibility for the inherent contingency that inevitably characterised his own view of the organisation of knowledge, thus turning it into a critical and fallibilist tool. 57 Peirce’s classification of the sciences has still much to offer, beyond what emerged in my initial, tentative overview. Far from being an ‘antique bijoux’ (to use one of Peirce’s most felicitous tongue-in-cheek expressions) to be consigned to the dust of our archives, the vicissitudes of the classification of the sciences in the nineteenth century are one of the richest fields of investigation we have inherited from history. That Peirce was right at the centre of this debate is itself one of the many contingencies of history; that he deliberately decided to have a say in it is an opportunity that Peirce scholars should embrace in full.

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SPENCER Herbert, (1864), The Classification of the Sciences, to Which are Added Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of M. Comte, New York, D. Appleton and Company.

SPENCER Herbert, (1904), An Autobiography, vol. 2, New York, D. Appleton and Company.

TRESCH John, (2012), The Romantic Machine, Chicago and London, Chicago University Press.

VIOLA Tullio, (2012), “Pragmatism, Bistable Images and the Serpentine Line,” in F. Engel, M. Queisner & T. Viola (eds.), Das Bildnerische Denken: Charles S. Peirce, Berlin, Academie Verlag, 115-34.

WHEWELL William, (1834), “On the Connexion of the Sciences,” Quarterly Review 51 (March), 54-68.

WHEWELL William, (1847), The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History, vol. 2, London, John W. Parker.

WHEWELL William, (1857 [1837]), History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time, 3rd Edition, in two volumes, London, John W. Parker.

YEO Richard, (1993), Defining Science. William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Victorian Britain, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

NOTES

1. The nineteenth century was a century of standardisation, which ranged from units of measurement (Schaffer 1992 and 1998) to taxonomic practices (Bonneuil 2002) to time (Galison 2003). 2. Two frequently cited, albeit rather outdated, sources on this particular issue are Dolby 1997, which views the emergence of classifications as distinctive of the systematic scientific spirit of the nineteenth century, and Kedrov 1964, which traces the origins of the trend toward classification in dialectical materialism. 3. It is in Bentham’s Chrestomathia that the terms coenoscopy and idioscopy appear, terms that were used by Peirce in his own classification of the sciences to refer respectively to philosophy and the special sciences. 4. As Simon Schaffer notes, Bentham’s Chrestomathia is one of the first texts in which ‘technology’ is used in its modern sense “as the aggregate body of the several sorts of manual operations directed to the purpose of art” (Schaffer 2013: 66). 5. On Bell’s “Madras System,” as a distinctively colonial, as well as industrial, educational pursuit see Schaffer (2013: 68ff). 6. Whewell introduced the term in a discourse presented at the 1833 meeting of the British Association. See Yeo (1993: 110-1).

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7. For a wide-ranging account of Whewell’s intellectual engagement in the cultural, theological and scientific climate of the Victorian period see Fisch & Schaffer 1991. 8. A standard complete translation of Comte’s works does not exist at present. In what follows, I will cite from Harriette Martineau’s (condensed) English translation. 9. On the relationship (or lack thereof!) between Comte’s positivism and twentieth-century positivism see Laudan 1971; Tresch (2012, esp. 255-6); and Bourdeau 2015. 10. An important clarification is that, for Comte, different sciences may be at different stages of development at a given time in history. Thus, for example, astronomy was a prime case of a science which had firmly reached the positive stage in Comte’s time, while sociology, being the youngest in his series, was still on its way to fully ‘positive.’ 11. Spencer insisted that he was barely aware of Comte’s works at least until as late as 1852, however some commentators have advanced the hypothesis that he was more familiar with Comte’s writings than he claimed to be, primarily via George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, both strong admirers of Comte. See Eisen (1967: 48-9). 12. Kent notes that Peirce’s classifications start at least as early as 1866, although she reconstructs many of his early schemes from the text as they were not presented in a tabular form (Kent 1987: 90ff). In the course of my discussion, I will prioritise tabular or diagrammatic arrangements of Peirce’s classification. The PEP now marks R1347 (1892) as ‘his most mature diagrammatic development of disciplinary classification,’ as well as ‘a datable and significant milestone in the development of Peirce’s classification of the sciences’ (W8. 646). As far less work has been produced on Peirce’s classifications of the 1890s, and as these classifications interestingly relate to Peirce’s works on the history of science, in what follows I will use that particular decade as the starting point of my discussion. 13. That Peirce disagreed with Spencer’s philosophy on broader grounds is evident, for example, from his 1891 review of his Essays, Scientific, Political, and Speculative (W8: 242-4). 14. The text of the article is a broader rejoinder to Carus’ comments on Peirce’s architectonic and his account of chance, as exposed in his Monist Metaphysical Series (1891-1892). 15. The relationship between Hanson and Peirce, especially on the issue of observation, deserves a discussion of its own, which is beyond the scope of this article (see Lund 2010: Ch. 3) for a productive attempt in this direction). At a basic level, one of the possible criticisms that can be made to Hanson’s approach is that, despite its standing out as a pioneering attempt at vindicating observation, it still relegates it to the realm of brute, uneducated perception (hence the role of theory as an indispensable framework to enable interpretation). A criticism along these lines has been proposed by Daston 2008 and Daston & Lunbeck 2011. On the other hand, Hanson’s emphasis on seeing not merely amounting to the “having of a visual experience,” but also to “the way in which that experience is had” (Hanson 1972: 15) seems to suggest a far more nuanced stance, and one that is much closer to Peirce’s. 16. For the sake of simplicity, here I am only discussing Peirce’s view of observation, however it must be pointed out that his account of observation would later converge into his theory of perception, to the point that the two are extremely difficult to detangle. Peirce’s account of perceptual judgments, and more generally of the inferential nature of perception (which for Peirce is inherently abductive, and which he models on sight), is fully articulated in his 1903 Lectures on Pragmatism. There Peirce exposes his three cotary propositions: 1) nihil est in intellectu quin prius non fuerit in sensu, which Peirce reads as “in perceptual judgments (in sensu) we find the source of a sign’s meaning (intellectus)”; 2) “perceptual judgments contain general elements”; 3) “perceptual judgments are to be regarded as extreme cases of abductive ” (EP2, 226-7). On the relation between observation and perception in Peirce see Viola (2012: 117-22). 17. Whewell did not dismiss Bacon per se – indeed he considered his work as a continuation of the Baconian project. He did think that Baconian induction should be revived and ‘renovated’ –

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and indeed one of the volumes of the third edition of the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences bears the title of “Novum Organon Renovatum,” with explicit reference to Bacon. See Snyder 2012. 18. Here I am presenting Peirce’s interpretation of Whewell’s views, however it is open to question whether Whewell’s conception of ideas was really as intuitionist as Peirce presents it. Laura Snyder (2012), for example, stresses that for Whewell “fundamental ideas and conceptions are provided by our minds, but they cannot be used in their innate form.” Instead, they have to be subject to a process of ‘unfolding,’ which Whewell referred to as “the explication of conceptions” (Snyder 2012). 19. In his review, Peirce reproaches Richardson for having forgotten his own entry on “Science” in the Century Dictionary as an additional example of classification of the sciences. See (CN 3: 62). 20. The draft continues with a discussion of the standard form of Peirce’s classification of the sciences: thus mathematics is considered the first and widest branch of science, followed by philosophy (only divided into logic and metaphysics at that point). The third order of science is occupied by nomology, divided into physical and psychical. Chemistry occupies the fourth order of science, followed by the physics of the ether as the fifth order, and biology as the sixth. The seventh order of science features sociology and only in the eight order Peirce places “the sciences which treat of individual objects or collections of objects” (R1337: 8), such as cosmology and history.

ABSTRACTS

The classification of the sciences is one of the most discussed and analysed aspects of Peirce’s corpus of work. I propose that Peirce’s attempt at systematising the sciences is characterised by a distinctive historicity, which I construe in two complementary senses. First, I investigate Peirce’s classification as part of a broader nineteenth-century move toward classifying the sciences, a move that was at the same time motivated by social and epistemological goals. I claim that this re-contextualisation adds an entirely new layer to the otherwise distinctively internalist readings of Peirce’s classification. I then look at how Peirce’s scheme, especially in the form it displayed in the early 1890s, relates to his own historical writings, particularly his history of science. Looking at Peirce as a historical actor in his own right through the lens of his classification, I claim, is indispensable to understand the contemporary relevance of his contributions to the history and historiography of the sciences.

AUTHOR

CHIARA AMBROSIO

University College London c.ambrosio[at]ucl.ac.uk

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The Historical Past and the Dramatic Present Toward a Pragmatic Clarification of Historical Consciousness

Vincent Colapietro

“The stone the builders rejected has become the head of the corner[stone].”1 Max H. Fisch

Introduction: An Exemplary Engagement with Intellectual History

1 The aim of this paper is to show the depth to which C. S. Peirce, as a philosopher, was guided by his engagement with history and to clarify pragmatically what history means in this connection. This engagement prompted him to do original historical research and also reflect on historiographical practices. This work was truly exemplary. While this topic has hardly been ignored,2 it calls for much fuller exploration than it has yet received. This is especially true since Peirce’s understanding of history itself calls for more careful consideration, far more probing than it has yet received. As necessary as it is to explore the place of history in his classification of the sciences, this is not sufficient. This essay is designed to complement studies focusing on the conception of history to be obtained from an exploration of that scheme.

2 Its main focus is on a pivotal but implicit distinction, the distinction between historical knowledge and consciousness. Peirce came very early in his life to see the attainment of historical knowledge and, more generally, of knowledge in all fields of scientific inquiry in the context of reflexive consciousness: his thought encompassed an awareness of the historicity of these pursuits and, moreover, the most salient implications of their essentially historical character. This distinction is however related to another crucial one, that between an abstract definition and a pragmatic clarification of the historical past. Here as elsewhere Peirce’s pragmatism does not compromise his realism: when abstractly defined, the past stands in irreducible otherness to the present, but when

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pragmatically clarified, it is what experimental inquirers might more or less reliably reconstruct on the basis of such historical evidence as monuments, documents, and other traces of the past. Pragmatically defined, the historical past is, in its most rudimentary sense, the discoverable past (both that something had taken place and what had assumed a determinate, discoverable form in the flux of history). As such, it is to some extent intelligible (e.g., whatever its significance, Stonehenge is a human artifact, not a geological formation, and in principle its functions or significance are discoverable). In its more refined forms, however, the pragmatic clarification of the historical past pushes beyond historical knowledge and drives toward historical consciousness: experimental inquirers thereby acquire a more or less explicit awareness of the historical drama in which they are implicated agents. Such agential awareness is what I mean by historical consciousness. 3 Peirce’s understanding of history is indeed subtle, nuanced, and in no small measure elusive. It is bound up with virtually all of his most important doctrines, most notably, his realism, pragmatism, commonsensism, and . In this paper, however, I cannot even approximate doing justice to all of these linkages. For my purpose, Peirce’s realism and pragmatism are at the focus of our exploration, but consideration of his synechism (or doctrine of continuity), however brief, is necessary. The past, as past, is continuous with the present. What is no longer actual in the strongest possible sense (haecceity) is nonetheless real and, moreover, even actual in an attenuated sense. In his lexicon, is not synonymous with actuality (or haecceity). The real is what would disclose itself in the fullness of time, whereas the actual is what exerts itself here and now (Boler 1963: 51, 58; Short 2007: 86-7, 50, 70-8).3 In particular, the actuality of the past is, for Peirce at least, just that – an instance of actuality. But the actuality of the past stands in marked contrast to the actuality (or haecceity) of the present. Finally, our knowledge of the past can contribute to a “historical sense” in the living present. Because this is an agential sense, one acquired and developed by agents caught up in the flux of historicity, it is ineluctably a dramatic sense. The perspective of agents, implicated in evolved and evolving practices, the outcomes of which hang in the balance, becomes in part that of a self-conscious participant in an unfolding drama (cf. CP 7.572). This sense is nonetheless tied but not reducible to such knowledge. Hence it is necessary to distinguish between historical knowledge and historical consciousness (or imagination). There is, on the one hand, the knowledge obtained by historical actors and, on the other, the awareness on the part of such actors of the nature of their undertaking. These are distinct yet ultimately inseparable. 4 The principal task of this paper is, hence, to draw the requisite distinctions for understanding the most important features of Peirce’s distinctive vision of human history, above all, the one just formulated. Only by drawing these various distinctions can we begin to comprehend the depth and character of this vision. For this purpose, none is (to repeat) more important than that between historical knowledge and consciousness. No denigration of the hard-won knowledge of the past is implied here. Just as imagination (at least the strictly scientific imagination) needs to be tempered and tutored by experience, so too experience needs to be continually recontextualized and illuminated by imagination. Let us now consider in greater detail the distinction around which I allege everything turns.

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The Craft of Historical Inquiry and the Cultivation of Historical Consciousness

5 Peirce’s engagement with the writing of history began in his youth. At twelve years of age, he undertook the study of chemistry and, several years later, the task of writing a history of that science (Fisch 1986: 403; also his Introduction to W 1: xxvii-xix). This trajectory turned out to be a definitive tendency in his intellectual life (Eisele 1979: esp. Ch. 3, 7, and 10; Fisch 1986: Ch. 20, esp. 385-9).4 He very early forged the conviction that nothing is fully intelligible apart from the history in which the story of how it arose and evolved is detailed. He was not fixated on origins, but focused on the entire course of typically ongoing developments (cf. Peirce 1966: 403). This lifelong conviction encompassed a disciplined desire not only to acquire accurate knowledge of past deeds, but also to attain a nuanced consciousness of the historicity of our diverse undertakings. The accuracy of this knowledge was, in the end, arguably slightly less important than the liveliness of this consciousness. But this does not carry any disparagement of the demanding task of obtaining reliable knowledge of past events. It only means that the imaginative venture of deepening historical consciousness is of overarching importance.5

6 Shortly after being led by his study of chemistry to assembling a history of that science, Peirce by accident caught a glimpse of the science that would enthrall him for the entirety of his life. To Victoria Lady Welby Peirce late in his life wrote: Know that from the day when at the age of twelve or thirteen I took up, in my elder brother’s room a copy of [Richard] Whately’s Logic, and asked him what logic was, and getting some simple answer, flung myself on the floor and buried myself in it, it has never been in my power to study anything […] except as a study of semeiotic […] (Peirce 1966: 408) 7 In 1861, he wrote as the last entry of his class-book: “No longer wondered what I would do in life but defined my object.” That object was logic, eventually re-envisioned as a general theory of signs, inclusive of a normative account of inquiry (Ransdell 2000: 342). Even when he was investigating topics by which he was inherently fascinated, he was also studying them for sake of deepening his understanding of logic, that is, the working of signs.

8 As illuminating as this revelation is, it is likely to be misleading. For even before this, another tendency, indeed a complementary one, had taken root: from very early in his intellectual development, it was never in his power to study anything, including semeiotic (of the theory of signs), except historically. His propensity to study whatever captivated his interest in light of semeiotic was from the beginning conjoined to his propensity to consider everything in light of history (Colapietro 2004). 9 His first public address, given November 12, 1863, was entitled “The Place of Our Age in the History of Civilization” (Peirce 1966: Ch. 1). At the height of his maturity, he published an essay appearing in the New York Evening Post (January 12, 1901) as “Review of the Nineteenth Century” and in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D. C., 1901) as “The Century’s Great Men in Science.” He concludes this piece by suggesting, “To an earlier age knowledge was power, merely that and nothing more.” In his own time, however, the pursuit of knowledge had become not only a way of life6 but also “the summum bonum.” “Emancipation from the bonds of self, of one’s own prepossessions, importunately sought at the hands of the rational power before

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which all must ultimately bow – this is,” Peirce contends, “the characteristic that distinguishes all the great figures of the nineteenth-century century from those of former periods” (Peirce 1966: 274). 10 His thoroughgoing identification with the leading figures in this historical development, pragmatically, means a dramatic sense of his personal participation in an ongoing dialogue, that is, a sense of his role in this drama.7 In this context, it is appropriate to recall his numerous efforts to draft a finely detailed history of scientific inquiry, stretching back before the ancient Greeks and driving forward to the cutting edge of his historical moment. The fledgling chemist who undertook the task of writing the history of chemistry matured into a philosophical historian who indefatigably researched the historical antecedents to his contemporary world, especially the dramatic transformations due to scientific inquiry (again see Eisele, also Fisch). The lessons to be drawn from the history of science were, as much as anything else, lessons for philosophers (cf. CP 5.364). Peirce was confident that, in time, they would prove to be invaluable in assisting honest philosophical inquirers to re-envision nothing less than the very nature of their undertaking, including that of logic (and logic as semeiotic).8 11 Regarding this, he was anything but a spectator. He was self-consciously an agent who took himself to be responsible, in some measure, for the development of a practice. Accordingly, a dramatic sense of his intellectual obligations animated and guided his orientation toward the past and also his involvement in the disputes of his own day, not least of all, the dispute between the progeny of the scholastic realists and the offspring of the Renaissance humanists.9 In brief, his understanding of the past fostered a consciousness of his role in a drama. More than anything else, this is what I mean by historical consciousness as distinct from historical knowledge. This is a distinction, not a dichotomy or dualism. Peirce was convinced that the reality of the past was, to some extent, discoverable. He was unquestionably a realist, not a skeptic or what is commonly called a constructivist. But he was also a pragmatist. Whatever reality (including the reality of the past) means must be spelled out in terms of habits of conduct bearing upon the future. Part of the difficulty is giving equal weight to both the realist and pragmatist facets of his thought, another part showing how they are anything but incompatible. 12 It would be hard to exaggerate the extent to which Peirce was committed to approaching logic, science, and any topic of interest to him from the hard-won perspective of detailed historical knowledge. Such a perspective however fosters what W. B. Gallie calls “historical imagination” (1968: 146). Even more than this perspective flowing from such imagination, it flows into more developed, explicit, and nuanced forms of this singular heuristic capacity. Such imagination is dramatic by virtue of being historical, since it fosters a sense of one’s fateful entanglement in an ongoing history. 13 In one of his most detailed contributions to intellectual history (his extended review of Fraser’s critical edition of Berkeley’s collected writings), Peirce considers his own time in contrast to Berkeley’s: “the minds from whom the spirit of the age emanates have now no interest in the only problems that metaphysics ever pretended to solve” (EP 1: 84) – God, freedom, and immortality. Moreover, the “few who do now care for metaphysics are not of that bold order of mind who delight to hold a position so unsheltered by the prejudices of as that of the good bishop” (EP 1: 84).

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That is, these few in their metaphysics hew closely to these prejudices. “As a matter of history, however, philosophy [including metaphysics] must always be interesting” (emphasis added), even to anti-metaphysical minds. What he goes on to claim is even more pertinent to our purpose: the history of philosophy “is the best representative of the mental development of each age. It is so even of ours, if we think what really is our philosophy.” But this facet of development needs to be considered in conjunction with other ones. “Metaphysical history is,” Peirce insists, “one of the chief branches of history, and ought to be expounded side by side with the history of society, of , and of war; for in its relations with these we trace the significance of events for the human mind” (EP 1: 84). 14 Unlike most philosophers, however, Peirce’s understanding of history is in accord with the practice of historians, at least, those committed to testing their hypotheses about the past by means of the traces of that past (e.g., monuments, documents, and other ). Professional philosophers seem to have difficulty expounding intellectual history and, more narrowly, philosophical history in a manner that would be recognizable to the historian as history. Part of this is that too little care is given to evidence, part also that too little attention is paid to what historians and those other than philosophers have written about the topics under consideration. In these respects, Peirce distinguished himself from such philosophers. In reference to history no less than to, say, physics, chemistry, or biology, the outward clash of relevant experience possessed a critical relevance (Viola 2015). What William James wrote in a letter to his brother Henry in reference to psychology was, in Peirce’s judgment, true of any form of inquiry: “I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts.” Of course, these facts are not data. They must themselves be painstakingly established. They must also be imaginatively envisioned. The inquirer “can stare stupidly at phenomena; but in the absence of imagination they will not connect themselves in any rational [or intelligible] manner” (CP 1.46). To look at phenomena intelligently means, for Peirce, looking at them imaginatively or “fancifully.”10 This is as true of the historian as any other inquirer. What makes Peirce’s lifelong engagement in intellectual history so exemplary is that, unlike most philosophers, he possessed an interior sense of the demanding craft of historical inquiry. 15 To study anything historically, in Peirce’s judgment, did not mean simply or even primarily tracing that thing to its origin, but detailing the still unfolding drama of a continually renewed endeavor (e.g., the endeavor wherein a generation just coming into its own renews the undertaking of preceding generations, such as we witness in the case of sciences such as physics, chemistry, or indeed history itself). However it might be with their counterparts in physics or chemistry, virtually all contemporary historians possess a working sense of the historical development of their intellectual vocation. Chemists without much knowledge of the history of their own science are hardly exceptional, whereas historians ignorant of Herodotus, Thucydides, and other practitioners of their craft would be. 16 In any , Peirce was in his time rather exceptional in his devotion to cultivating, precisely as a conscientious participant in experimental inquiry, a historical consciousness of his passionate engagement in various scientific fields (Esposito 1984; Viola 2015). Such consciousness is not the same as knowledge of the history of these fields, though it is unattainable apart from such knowledge. In the sense intended here, such consciousness designates, above all else, a sense of the past in its bearing on the

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present. Insofar as this is different, it also designates a sense of the present as derived from the past. Moreover, it includes the recognition that this sense itself is through and through historical: it does not pretend to imply a perspective above or beyond history. 11

17 This consciousness is, nevertheless, critical for agential self-understanding and critical in a twofold sense. Historical consciousness is, for an agent caught up in an endeavor such as parenting, teaching, or inquiring, crucial or indispensable. It is, moreover, critical in the sense that history provides both invaluable resources for attaining a critical distance from present preoccupations and securing possible criteria for judging contemporary performances. In this sense, history in the service of life (even simply the life of the craftsperson) is critical in the sense identified by Nietzsche. In brief, one of the uses of history is to foster a critical sensibility. Though it does not necessarily do so, historical consciousness can function as critical consciousness (cf. Trilling 2008: 196): a sense of the past in its bearing on the present can enliven and emancipate those devoted to making something significant and memorable of the present. In its ability to accomplish this, the historical sense “is to be understood as the critical sense, as the sense which life uses to test itself” (Trilling 2008: 196). It is the sense which life also uses to transform and transcend itself, that is, modify its inherited or habituated forms of striving. In other words, history here is pressed into the service of self-overcoming. 18 The craft of the responsible historian is one thing, the cultivation of historical consciousness quite another, even if the cultivation of such consciousness is hardly possible apart from what only can be accomplished by the painstaking discipline of detailed memorialization. There is, in the foreground of Peirce’s preoccupation with history, critical attention to the distinctive methodology of historical inquiry (i.e., to how historians as inquirers into the past can most responsibly and effectively carry out their task). He includes history in his classification of the sciences and its locus in this scheme provides insights into what he takes history to be (see, e.g., Peirce CP 1. 272; also Miller 1971 and 1972; and Esposito 1983: esp. 156-7). But history is more than a narrowly delimited field of experimental inquiry.12 It is also an indefinitely expansive consciousness of any human endeavor, attainable by participants in the endeavor. That is, there is, in the background of Peirce’s fascination with history, the deliberate cultivation of historical consciousness, an awareness of one’s role in the drama in which one is so fatefully entangled (see, e.g., CP 7.572; and Colapietro 2016). From his perspective, agents ought to cultivate such consciousness, principally for the sake of acquiring a fuller, deeper sense of their own agency and, indeed, also a candid, contrite sense of the limits of that agency.

First Steps toward a Pragmatic Clarification of the Historical Past

19 At this juncture, however, I want to highlight another distinction, indeed, one of the most basic distinctions in all of Peirce’s philosophical writings, one drawn at least as early as 1878 and deployed with varying degrees of consistency ever afterwards. It is at the center of Peirce’s effort to close or, at least, reduce the distance between our theoretical understanding of logical procedure (logica docens) and the working logic (logica utens) of the most successful inquirers. It is attempt to make explicit, in the form of a maxim, what inquirers tend to do in their efforts to render their efforts

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experimental. That is, the logica utens of the most successful sciences ought to inform our logica docens (part of the task of the latter being to make more explicit than we have yet done the former). If our logica docens is to move toward catching up with our logica utens, we must move beyond abstract definitions and insist upon pragmatic clarifications. As it turns out, however, pragmatic clarification in its most rudimentary form needs itself to be supplemented by such clarification in ever more refined, reflexive forms. In particular, the dispositional properties of inquiring subjects need themselves to be made explicit, indeed, the foci of criticism, not just the dispositional properties of investigated objects. To take a simple example, “hardness” is pragmatically clarified when it is conceived as how a substance would behave in reaction to certain operations (e.g., being scratched by a diamond). This is however only one half of the story, for how experimental inquirers, as deliberate agents, ought to comport themselves in the context of inquiry is also critical. The dispositions of experimental investigators call for critical attention as much as those of the experimental objects and events being investigated. These dispositions range from very simple operations (e.g., submerging litmus paper in a liquid and observing specifically how the paper is disposed to react to such submergence) to formally reflexive habits (e.g., the disposition to attend with the most painstaking care the manner in which an experiment was conducted and, beyond this, the disposition to imagine one’s specific line of research as a contribution to a vast network of analogous endeavors).

20 In Peirce’s judgment, traditional logic had not caught up to the best practices of the most successful investigations. The degree of clarity demanded in such investigations was higher than those formally acknowledged by logicians (those who ought to provide a normative account of objective inquiry). The famous pair of “claire et distincte” translated into practice to mean tacitly familiar and formally defined. Even apart from the ability to define the word triangle, one might know how to use this word in countless contexts and such ability embodies a rudimentary level of conceptual clarity (it shows that one has grasped, in however indistinct a manner, what the term means by being able, for example, to grasp what others mean when they use it). Abstract definition provides a higher grade of conceptual clarity. And traditional logic has rested content with the attainment provided by such formal distinctness. 21 In Peirce’s judgment, however, tacit familiarity and abstract definition need to be supplemented by pragmatic clarification. The practice of inquiry suggests as much, as does the attempt to draw out some of the implications from ’s definition of belief (Fisch 1986: Ch. 5). Bain’s definition of belief, as that upon which a person is prepared to act (see, e.g., Peirce CP 5.12), is an improvement upon Locke’s suggestion, “I have always thought that the actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.” For actions might be taken to mean simply that which takes place hic et nunc, rather than that which is expressive of a purpose or indicative of a habit.13 The “dumb” smarts of competent agents and the formal definitions of those careful inquirers who desire to draw distinctly the boundaries of what they are investigating are indispensable tools. But the practice of inquirers reveals the need to translate their concepts into habits of action, on both sides – the side of the object being investigated (How is, for example, salt disposed to act when immersed in a liquid such as water?) and that of the agent undertaking the investigation. Only by doing so will we effectively break out of the circle of words and expose our claims to the rough-and-tumble world of experience (cf. Short 2007: 56-9); only then do we adequately learn what in the

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course of experience counts against our claims and attributions, only then are objects granted their dialogical right to be what their name implies (for only then are they in a position to object).14 22 It is surprising that even some of the most informed and insightful scholars still all too infrequently use this simple and fundamental distinction, one explicitly and indeed repeatedly drawn by Peirce, as an interpretive key to his philosophical writings. This is even true in the case of their treatment of such topics as his account of science, definition of semiosis, and stance on realism, though Peirce illustrates the meaning of his maxim (to some degree, the practical import of the pragmatic maxim itself) by recourse to the concept of reality. It must however be acknowledged that Peirce himself is part of the problem, since he not infrequently fails to push his thought on a topic beyond the intermediate level of abstract definition. Consider, for example, the character of so many of his definitions of sign or semiosis. At least on the surface, these appear to be abstract definitions. Though he explicitly warns us to be on our “guard against the deceptions of abstract definitions” (CP 7.362), he trades rather freely in such definitions. So many of his expositors have been themselves deceived by this tendency on Peirce’s own part, or so it seems to me. At his best, however, Peirce is at his most pragmatic and, at his most pragmatic, he is committed to translating his thought about any topic whatsoever into habits of action.15 23 We can ascertain the full force of the pivotal distinction between abstract definition and pragmatic clarification only by seeing it as part of a trichotomy (tacit familiarity, formal definition, and pragmatic clarity). What we need to become clear about is the reality of the past, on the one hand, and our more or less reliable knowledge and, beyond this, our dramatic consciousness of that reality, on the other hand. I however resist identifying these two facets of our concern as the and epistemology of history, because questions regarding such knowledge are, in the spirit of Peirce’s project, better identified as methodological than as epistemological (Ransdell 2000: 348-50). The point is that the possibility of such knowledge is not in question. Here as much as anywhere else (if not more than most other contexts), we ought not to pretend to doubt in our philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts (CP 5.265). And we do not – in certain respects, we cannot – practically doubt either the reality of the past or our knowledge of that reality. Indeed, every form of our knowledge is in some manner and measure historical. If we did not possess a more or less reliable sense of what we have done and what has befallen us (above all, what has befallen us as a consequence of how we have comported ourselves (cf. Dewey, MW 10)), we would be precluded from knowing anything at all. The meaning of our words (not least of all, the meaning of the word doubt) must be relatively steadfast if we are to articulate our doubts, if these words are to be meaningful signs rather than semantically empty sounds or squiggles. Hence, the stability of their meanings, however relative and alterable, in effect bears testimony to the reliability of memory. The continuity of unconscious, largely unacknowledged habits is much deeper than that of our conscious, voluntarily conjured memories. Indeed, such memories depend, to a far greater extent than we tend to appreciate, on such habits. 24 Our beliefs, what we act or go on, are distillations of history, though in the case of innate or instinctual dispositions, they are distillations not of our personal but of our evolutionary history. The doubts indicative of the inadequacy of our beliefs are, in turn, episodes in which history is manifestly “a-making” (CP 6.301). At the most rudimentary

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level, then, our “knowledge” of the past is unreflectively practical and almost wholly tacit. The vast, vague background upon which our deliberative draws is immeasurably vast and irreducibly vague. 25 For our purpose, what additionally merits notice is the distinction among three aspects of the past. Confusion will result if we fail to distinguish the past in its indefinite determinability, in its irreducible otherness, and in its fateful continuity. It must seem contradictory to claim, at once, that the past is indefinitely determinable and truly irrevocable. But this contradiction is apparent, not real. The past in its actuality – the past in its secondness (I am disposed to say, simply, the past as past) – is irrevocable, whereas the significance of the past is determinable in ways not fixed by the irrevocability of the past. For example, the significance of the outcome of the Civil War in the – the defeat of the Confederacy by the Union – did not mean, irrevocably, the defeat of a country in which states’ rights were subordinate to federal authority. Indeed, the decades after that war were ones in which the effective authority of the federal government became or simply remained in crucial respects very limited. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower was, for example, reluctant to send federal troops into southern states to insure compliance with federal law (the desegregation of schools in, for example, Little Rock, Arkansas). 26 The abstract definition of the reality of the past is one in which the secondness of the past is foregrounded, whereas pragmatic clarifications tend to be ones in which some form of thirdness is rendered prominent. This runs strictly parallel to what Peirce suggested about reality simpliciter. Some might be inclined to argue this makes matters too simple. But there is an advantage of beginning here and introducing greater complexity as fuller attention to the relevant phenomena require or simply invite us to do. Lest the main point is obscured or worse, lost entirely, let me stress the need to string the bow, by bringing one end (that of irrevocability) close enough to the other (that of intelligibility and, hence, of revisability) so that a sufficiently taut fiber can be put in place. It would be hyperbolic to suggest that this task requires Herculean strength! But it does demand arduous or at least careful thought. 27 A sufficiently developed pragmatic conception of the historical past includes both a rudimentary clarification of what this past pragmatically means and a reflexive understanding of the undertaking of the historical inquirer (i.e., the inquirer into what has taken determinate, discoverable form in the flux of history). This either is or is intimately akin to the pivotal distinction between historical knowledge and historical consciousness. What the historical past pragmatically means is what historical inquiry is destined to disclose. But what such inquiry itself most fundamentally means turns out to require the cultivation of a reflexive, agential consciousness of both one’s role in such an inquiry and the role of such an endeavor in the unfolding drama of experimental intelligence. Accordingly, a pragmatic clarification of historical consciousness requires nothing less than for experimental inquirers to conceive themselves as deliberative agents and, in turn, for such agents to conceive themselves as historical actors. For this purpose, the deliberate control of conduct in a specific field of endeavor is necessary but not sufficient. If we appreciate the implicit import of Peirce’s pragmatist stance, then only a deliberately cultivated consciousness of one’s historical role in an unfolding drama – an agential sense of the historical present – offers a sufficiently pragmatic clarification of the historical past.

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28 But this implication seems to work against what Peirce so indefatigably defends. The development of historical consciousness can be made to look at odds with the attainment of historical knowledge. The espousal of the ideal of objectivity can be made to look inconsistent with the actual work of reconstructing the historical past, since such reconstruction is an instance of construction and, as such, seems to imply a form of constructivism. Does not Peirce’s thought, in driving toward historical consciousness, undermine its own realistic aspirations, does not its acknowledgment of the historicity of science undercut its commonsensism? Put yet otherwise, is not Peirce ultimately forced to abandon his commitment to in favor of what has been called a transcendentalist perspective? Such questions turn out to be part of the historical record. They have been pressed by one of the most insightful readers of Peirce’s entire oeuvre, from the earliest juvenilia to the most mature writings.

Commonsensical Realism, Unconstrained Constructivism, and Peircean Pragmatism

29 One of the most erudite and penetrating expositors of Peirce has not only written a critique of Peirce’s views regarding history (Esposito 1983, 1984) but also formulated in detail his own subtle position regarding this thorny topic (Esposito 1984). In “Peirce and the Philosophy of History” (1983), Joseph L. Esposito highlights an apparent tension in Peirce’s largely implicit philosophy of the historical past. There is, he alleges, a tension between a commonsensical understanding of the past and what he rather unfortunately calls a “transcendental” approach. In Peircean terms, the former stresses the secondness or objectivity of the past, whereas the latter emphasizes thirdness or intelligibility. In The Transcendence of History: Essays on the Evolution of Historical Consciousness (1984), he reiterates (though without reference to Peirce) his critique of “objectivism” or “realism” but also presents his own account of history, one deeply indebted to Hegel but also to Peirce (see especially 1984: 45, 165). It is accordingly surprising that, at least as far as I know, no defender of Peirce has taken up the challenge implicit in this critique. Nor has anyone assessed whether Esposito’s appeal to Peirce’s insights is justified (Is Peirce truly an ally in articulating the approach to history championed by Esposito in his book?). Hence, I want in this essay, among other tasks, to take up this challenge. My ultimate objective in this section however is positive rather than critical, this goal being to work toward attaining a pragmatic clarification of the historical past. But my proximate goal is to show that Peirce’s views regarding this past are more coherent and defensible than Joseph Esposito claims. In fairness, Esposito does not make a strong claim regarding any fundamental incoherence in Peirce’s philosophy of history and he even suggests what I take to be the most effective way of dispelling the appearance of such a flaw.

30 Esposito does however claim to discern a tension in Peirce’s treatments of history between an objectivist and a transcendentalist (or constructivist) account. This distinction “corresponds roughly [I would urge, very roughly] to the common-sense distinction between history as that which the historian studies and history as that which the historian produces [or constructs] from his study” (Esposito 1983: 156). Esposito significantly frames the distinction in terms of consciousness. For the objectivist, “without a past to study [without the actuality or reality of temporally superseded events, actions and structures] there would be no historical consciousness.”

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For the constructivist, however, “without historical consciousness there would be no historical past.”16 Esposito is disposed to ask, “Was Peirce an objectivist or transcendentalist?” In other words, was he a commonsensical realist regarding the historical past or an imaginative constructivist? Some passages imply a commitment to such realism, while others suggest a leaning toward a form of constructivism. As it turns out, we must also ask, Are these the most appropriate or illuminating terms by which to identify this tension? 31 Given Peirce varied remarks about the historical past and related topics, it is certainly no surprise Esposito discerns disparate or even conflicting tendencies in Peirce’s writings. But he does more than this. He suggests a way of possibly reconciling them. It would thus be very instructive here to recall some of the most important details of Esposito’s nuanced interpretation of Peirce’s own subtle position. Another name for the objectivist is realist (see Esposito 1984: 86-7), since the advocate of this position insists upon the reality of the past. However much they might rely upon the techniques of literary fiction, the practitioners of responsible historiography do not take themselves to be composing fiction; they are deeply appreciative of the defining characteristics of historical narrative vis-à-vis more freely fictive genres (e.g., purely novelistic narrative). Put more simply, the constraints on the historian are greater than those on a novelist. This does not imply that there are no constraints on a novelist, simply that they are quite different from those on the historian. While historical facts, like all other ones, are forged in the crucible of painstaking inquiry, the processes by which they are forged are in crucial respects different from those of more purely imaginative authors (cf. Esposito 1984: 86-7). Whether or not Pythagoras had a golden thigh is, for instance, a historical question (EP 2: 80), one more difficult to answer than we are likely to suppose. However much Hamlet might be derived from, or based upon, historical figures, those figures as they appear in this drama have been transfigured by Shakespeare’s literary imagination. 32 To return to a point broached earlier, Peirce goes so far as to insist, regarding anyone desirous to discover the truth, “there is, after all, nothing but the imagination that can ever supply him with an inkling of the truth” (CP 1.46). So, “after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination” (CP 1.47). But Peirce is quick to point out: “There are, no doubt, kinds of imagination of no value in science, mere artistic imagination, mere dreaming of opportunity for gain” (CP 1.48), that is, mere “practical” imagination. What distinguishes scientific imagination from other kinds is that it “dreams of explanation and laws” (CP 1.48). He might have included that scientific imagination also dreams of instituting procedures by which the most rudimentary facts might be discovered (e.g., carbon dating as a procedure by which to determine when life first appeared on Earth). Some sciences are descriptive rather than nomothetic or, at least, far more descriptive than nomothetic. Indeed, history, as a science, is one of them (see, e.g., CP 1.272). The discovery of facts and laws depends to a far greater extent than we commonly realize on the exercise of the imagination, though an imagination tempered and tutored by the exacting demands of experimental inquiry. That of facts alone greatly depends on this. For example, the historical imagination of the painstaking historian is nowhere more evident in asking what, immediately upon being posed, are “obvious” questions, yet they are the ones that for lack of imagination have not been taken up (e.g., what were the everyday lives of ordinary people during, say, the medieval epoch like?).

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33 To whatever extent this might be the case, the realist insists upon an irreducible difference between that which is independent of our thinking and that which depends on our thinking. Put more simply, the advocate of realism refuses to erase entirely the distinction between the real and the fictive. However fuzzy the boundaries might be, in practice, in particular cases, they are, in principle, to be defended against the widely influential rhetoric of unbridled constructivists. An historical account based on the best available evidence is different from one grounded unduly in conjecture and speculation. 34 It is however not enough to stress, as the objectivist or realist does, the reality of the past. It is also necessary to identify what might be called the character of that reality,17 for the historical past is manifestly different from the historical present, though both are undoubtedly real.18 From Peirce’s perspective, the historical present is marked by vagueness and generality to a far greater degree than the historical past. The actuality of hinc et nunc is fundamentally different from that of having been (or having occurred or taken place). The haecceity of the present is the paradigm of haecceity, whereas that of the past is rather paradoxical. How could the past, as past, be here and now? An adequate understanding of both the historical past and the historical present requires us to realize that the past is not simply past. More accurately, the historical past is not in all respects simply annihilated by the ceaseless self-annulment of the historical present. In annulling itself, the cutting edge of the present cuts off the present from the past, the now from the no longer. But there is more to this story than a tale of rupture, a drama of discontinuity.19 35 The past is in some form there to be known, though this there turns out to be hard to specify. To some extent, the past as past, the past as that which no longer exists in the manner of the present, can be known. Like every other instance of reality, the reality of the past is that which exists independent of what you or I or any other finite individual happens to think about the past. This however calls for clarification. At the level of abstract definition, the reality of the past is identical in meaning to that of any other object of inquiry. At the level of pragmatic clarification, however, the linkages of this reality to thought, not its independence, need to be brought into focus. While the abstract definition seeks to clarify the meaning of reality by highlighting the contrast between the real and the fictive, the difference between reality and the vagaries of our thoughts regarding reality, pragmatic clarification foregrounds not only the link between reality and intelligibility but also the processes by which the possibilities of discovery and understanding are most effectively realized. 36 Before trying to show how these grades of clarity bear upon the meaning of history, however, we must first clarify what Esposito takes to be, in contrast to the objectivist stance, the constructivist approach to human history. The word history is of course ambiguous. It might designate what actually happened or the attempt to record or discover what actually happened. As Esposito puts it, it might mean “history as that which the historian studies and history as that which the historian produces from his study” (Esposito 1983: 156). It is however not simply a matter of emphasis. While the objectivist is stressing the importance of attending to what actually happened and the constructivist the necessity of acknowledging the extent to which even the most responsible historiographers are engaged in an imaginative reconstruction of a largely (if not entirely) elusive past (cf. Miller 1981: 186), the difference between the two is more than a difference in emphasis. To take an exemplar of objectivism, Leopold von

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Ranke was not only focused on discovering in detail what actually happened but also scornful of attempts by such thinkers as Hegel to interpret human history in terms of sweeping claims (e.g., the whole of this history is, at bottom, the story of the struggle for freedom). To take an exemplar of constructivism, R. G. Collingwood, a thinker who was in important respects quite close to Hegel, the task of the historian is not so much to discover as it is to re-enact the thoughts of the past. History is the drama of such re- enactment. The reality of the historical past is, for the objectivist, something to be discovered, in a manner closely akin to, if not identical with, the manner in which anything else is discovered (specifically, by the framing, testing, revising, and rejecting hypotheses).20 In contrast, the significance of the historical past is, for the constructivist, something to be constructed or created. What has actually happened derives its point and purpose from how it focuses the energies and enlarges the imagination of agents in the present. The historical past is made up not of dead facts but of enlivening forces. For the constructivist at least, history is not a meaningless sequence of “just one damn thing after another,” but an intelligible series of intertwined developments. For the pragmatist, it is no less so. 37 A way out of this impasse can be glimpsed by tracing the implications of a claim made by J. W. Miller.21 What he wrote about history helps us to grasp the most salient features of what I am calling historical consciousness. He addressed these questions more explicitly and directly than Peirce tended to do, but his approach was deeply akin to Peirce’s. Hence, I am here appealing to his formulations. “One may, and [indeed] one must,” Miller asserts, “allege that the concerns that animated Plato were not brought to completion” (1981: 83) by him or any of his successors, including ourselves. Above all else, the crisis of the polis at the center of Plato’s project, the ensemble of events to which his philosophy is a response,22 did happen long along in another place than that in which we now dwell. But, at the very least, the reverberations of this crisis can be heard and felt in the systematic failures of our political institutions. “We are,” as Miller so poignantly notes, “the heirs not only of past wealth, but also of past debits” (Miller 1981: 188). Plato’s “failure” to respond adequately to this crisis is not only his. It is also ours. Or, to take another example, the concerns that animated the pre-Socratics in their efforts to envision the world of their experience as a cosmos were far from brought to completion by their labor or genius. Despite the scientific revolutions intervening between their allegedly inaugural efforts and contemporary investigations, our efforts and theirs are continuous. Moreover, ours are no more likely to be brought to completion in the millennia after us than were theirs. If this is so, we are not making or re-enacting the thoughts of our predecessors but are renewing or simply prolonging their efforts to bring to fuller realization their unfinished projects, without necessarily any hope of bringing these to final closure or definitive completion. We consciously join some specific ancestors in some specific regard (e.g., Plato as a thinker whose project is bound up with the history of Athens, especially as symbolized in the execution of Socrates) because we discover, time and again, that we are fatefully enjoined to some inherited undertaking. Our current crisis is the unwitting prolongation of an unresolved issue bequeathed to us by historical figures from whom we can dissociate ourselves only by maiming our identity and vitiating our agency. We no more invented science, philosophy, or politics than the language we speak or the morals we enact, not least of all revealing ourselves to be inheritors, rather than creators, in our linguistic innovations or moral “transvaluations” (cf. MacIntyre 2006).

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38 Accordingly, the historical past is, at once, continuous with the past (e.g., Plato’s struggles to conceive the polis as a place in which justice might be effectively operative are in effect taken up anew by succeeding generations) and discontinuous with that past (no simple return is possible, since our time is in critical respects markedly different from earlier times). Neither continuity nor disruption can be the final word. Both historical knowledge and consciousness require a detailed, nuanced, and accurate understanding of the respects in which history exemplifies the of continuity and disruption. 39 The historical past is hence not so much given as won. We must work to achieve both knowledge and consciousness of it. This can be construed as a form of constructivism, but given Peirce’s realism this is likely to be more misleading than accurate. In particular, the form of constructivism being advocated by Esposito and attributed by him, however circumspectly, to Peirce is one in which the historical past is decidedly not created out of whole cloth. It is, in addition, not sewn together from the merely disparate scraps from exquisitely designed garments long ago torn asunder. It is rather an historical past with a more or less determinate shape.23 It has such a shape, however, because it is the past claimed by those who have a determinate sense of their present identity (e.g., an understanding of themselves as participants in a specific field of scientific research or citizens of a specific nation). 40 But what is so characteristic of his thought in other contexts is also discernible in Peirce’s writings on history and allied topics. He is anxious to do just to reality, in particular, the reality of history, lest we remove from under the feet of historians the ground on which they so reasonably claim to stand. In a perfectly straightforward sense, then, the craft of the historian is focused on what has taken place, even though we are never in a position to perceive historical events or even, in most instances, not in a position to call upon the living memory of direct witnesses who were at the time in the position to perceive them. But historical knowledge even in this narrow sense hardly exhausts our concern with history. Yet even in this narrow sense the thirdness and secondness, the intelligibility and actuality (or “objectivity”), of history are of focal concern. Allow me to make this point precisely in reference to Peirce. He self- consciously intervened in the history of logic for the purpose of re-orienting the science of logic, desiring to recast it as a normative theory of objective inquiry. The deliberate cultivation of historical consciousness made this possible, so much so that his self-conscious intervention in this ongoing history was inseparable from his historical consciousness of his specific locus in the actual history of the logical theory. Such historical consciousness is more than historical knowledge. Its cultivation points beyond objectivism to constructivism. Esposito suggests, “as soon as one raises the question of the priority of the disciplines among each other [e.g., as soon as one considers that, say, mathematics and phenomenology are prior to psychology and history], the transcendental perspective of historical consciousness enters the picture” (Esposito 1983: 161; emphasis added).24 In other words, we supposedly need to go beyond history in order to ground our knowledge of history (in a word, we need to go transcendental). For reasons far from clear, Esposito seems to hold that the conditions for the possibility of our experimentally acquired knowledge of history are transcendental rather than “merely” historical. So, “instead of looking upon history as an objective human past, ‘the past’ becomes a metaphysical category interpreted according to a particular category of modality called ‘actuality’ or ‘existence’”

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(Esposito 1983: 161). As a result, “‘history’ becomes the name for the living theoretician’s construction of human memories, signs, and inferences” (Esposito 1983: 161). Here I imagine Peirce resisting Esposito’s insistence on historical consciousness requiring a transcendental perspective and, moreover, history being a construct in any sense opposed to realism. 41 But Esposito is certainly right in taking “the past” to be either a category or a phenomenon to which Peirce’s categories was applicable. Regarding history, the memories, signs, and inferences to which he refers are unquestionably instances of Thirdness and, as such, are “not literally capable of existence or actuality.” More cautiously put, they are not capable of being fully or exhaustively embodied in actuality. One of the most important implications of this constructivist stance toward human history is that the actuality of the irrevocable past is not allowed to eclipse the intelligibility of an ongoing history. To do justice to history, both the irrevocable actuality (the past as a fully determinate domain of fait accompli) and the alterable significance of the historical past need to be fully given their due. 42 The tension identified by Esposito is hardly a contradiction. Peirce might be characterized as both an objectivist and a constructivist, but it would be, in my judgment, better to identify him as a realist and a pragmatist (even better, as a pragmatic realist). And his own pragmatism enables us to see how fully these apparent rival stances complement rather than preclude one another. At the level of abstract definition, the past – better, the reality of the past – designates a rather paradoxical form of haecceity. At the level of pragmatic clarification, however, it points to an equally paradoxical feature of the past – its revisability (not merely the revisable character of our “knowledge” of the historical past, but also the alterable significance of the irrevocable past itself). One of the paradoxes of the past is that its having been and hence its being no longer are what it is and what will remain ever afterwards. The actuality of the past can no more be gainsaid than that of the present, though the actuality of fait accompli is not the same as that of what exists here and now (that which in the present crowds out a place for itself (CP 1.432)). 43 The principal task of the historical inquirer is to discover, on the basis of evidence, the actuality and reality of the past. This is as true of the intellectual historian as any other kind of historian. But this task relies as much as anything else, save the passion to ascertain the truth, on imagination (CP 1.46). It is not only rooted in historical imagination but also blossoms into various forms of this intellectual flora. The growth of a plant is partly the result of an ongoing interaction between the internal structure of the plant and the environing conditions, including light emanating from a star over ninety million miles away. So, too, is that of historical consciousness or imagination.25 It is truly the consequence of a dialogue, multifaceted and multileveled.

Human History: The Ongoing Dialogue with an Irrevocable Yet Revisable Past

44 The past addresses us in a language we barely understand, if we do indeed comprehend its modes of articulation at all.26 There are far too many cases where our most focused, sustained, and ingenious efforts have been frustrated to encourage unbridled confidence in our ability to divine even the most rudimentary facts about the historical past. But, then, there are too many instances in which we have been successful in our

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efforts to make sense out of the perceptible traces of the historical past to warrant wholesale skepticism regarding historical knowledge.

45 Let us however recall here what Peirce suggests in a passage having no explicit link to historical knowledge. “Some [signs] address themselves to us, so that we fully apprehend them [as signs]. But it is a paralyzed reason that does not acknowledge others that are not directly addressed to us, and that does not suppose still others of which we know nothing definitely” (NEM IV: 299). The traces of the past are among the most prominent of signs not addressed to us,27 but ones availing access to facets of what is no longer extant. It would indeed be a paralyzed reason that was unable to imagine the ubiquitous possibility of historical traces and, moreover, one that was unable to generate reasonable conjectures about at least the historical past in its roughest outlines (e.g., from the evidence available to us at the site of this dig, there appears to have been a cluster of dwellings adjacent to one another and, in addition, structures possibly serving functions other than shelter or dwelling, perhaps temples or, more cautiously, what would be in this culture the analogue of such a building). 46 The allegedly simple fact of there having been, at this site, such a village or assemblage of dwellings is itself noteworthy. Beyond this, however, there might be clues regarding the form of life made possible in part by this cluster of structures. Even the most rudimentary of historical facts are necessarily neither dead nor deadening (cf. Esposito 1983: 157-60; Esposito 1984: 141). They might be lively and enlivening. When they prove to be, historical “knowledge,” even when it turns out to be erroneous, fosters historical consciousness, dramatic identification with almost always anonymous agents far removed from contemporary life.28 47 The paintings on the wall of a cave disclose to us those engaged in a form of life akin to our own, even if we have not yet been able to ascertain the significance of those paintings.29 Our encounter with them almost certainly enlivens our imagination and holds our interest, prompting us to ask, Who were the people who crafted these images? What were they, in terms of their self-understanding,30 doing when they were pictorially using pigments to capture these animals? Even the most remote ancestors are ancestors, even the most enigmatic utterances are utterances and, almost certainly, also enactments. 48 The exacting “price of a historical past is,” as Miller notes, “a historical present” (Miller 1981: 179). The fixed present is however anything but an historical present. Where there is a fixed past, it is in the interest of a fixed present, so that one ‘is’ of a certain race or creed or nation, not that one could become so [or cease to be so], not that the past was also a becoming in its own time and place” (Miller 1981: 179-80). As the title of Octavio Paz’s Nobel Lecture implies, we have to go in search of the present and, to a degree we could never have anticipated, this search drives us deeply and intimately into the historical past (the past as both that which itself became in its own time and place and that with which many of our simplest acts (e.g., our acts of speaking and gesturing) are inexorably bound up.31 49 The exacting price of an historical present is an historical past. We can no more have an historical present without an historical past than we can have an historical past without an historical present. Again, let us take Peirce as an example of this point. As a philosopher of science, Peirce felt compelled to make himself into a historian of science. Undoubtedly, he was inherently fascinated by history, but his painstaking engagement in the imaginative reconstruction of the historical drama in which his

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most noteworthy predecessors and contemporaries strove to carry forward the groundbreaking work of the ancient logicians was rooted in more than this fascination. It derived from his passionate involvement in this unfinished drama. That is, his present concern required the careful cultivation of his historical consciousness. But, then, the historical past, when candidly acknowledged as a fateful inheritance, demands a historical present. For example, the failure of our forebears to fulfill their tasks imposes upon us, here and now, the need to take up those tasks. For instance, the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War in the United States is not simply that of those who were living in the decades after that horrific conflict. It defines the citizens of this country still. Speaking as an American, one must acknowledge that their failure is yet ours. So, a historical past demands a historical present no less than a historical present demands a historical past (as much as anything, the conscientious cultivation of historical consciousness). To go in search of the present ineluctably leads to the ruins of the past (Paz 1991). Such ruins are however part of the landscape of the present. To know where we presently stand, thus, requires us to see what constitutes the contours of this landscape, not least of all these ruins, but also the intricate designs they intimate and epochal energies they indicate.

Conclusion: The Unfolding Drama of Historical Imagination

50 “The nature of history,” Erik Erikson predicted over fifty years ago, “is about to change.” He was practically certain that: “It cannot continue to be the record of high accomplishments in dominant civilizations, and of their disappearance and replacement” (Erikson 2000: 224).32 The shared fate of human beings demands “new ethical alternatives” and, accordingly, a transfigured historical consciousness.

51 History has indeed changed in our times, though not exactly in the manner identified by Erikson. And it is bound to change just as profoundly time and again. There is no ahistoric matrix in which historical processes unfold (Esposito 1984). And history is not a process of evolution in the etymological sense. The contexts in which change occurs are themselves changing. They are through and through historical as is our understanding – hence, our relationship – to these contexts. A philosophy of history must be nothing less than a philosophy of contexts (cf. Esposito 1984: 6), one in which the historical nature of complexly related contexts is illuminated in its most salient details. As it historically played out, the elevation of mathematics involved the denigration of history, despite the ingenious efforts of such early critics of the Cartesian framework as Vico (Fisch 1986: Ch. 11; and MacIntyre 2006). But, a century before , Charles Peirce discerned the relevance of history for an understanding of science and, indeed, for all else. 52 “The stone the builders rejected has become the head of the corner” (Fisch 1986: 214; cf. MacIntyre 2006).33 And this has been accomplished in no small part because of the indefatigable and imaginative efforts of Peirce to give history its due. Only thus can science and more generally signs and symbols be given their due. The voluminous writings of this still elusively enigmatic genius are in effect nothing less than monumental testimony to this heuristic principle. They are indeed a dramatic instance of monumental history in the Nietzschean sense, above all, because we encounter there, in however compressed and thus elliptical a form, a compelling case for the

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historical past as both an irrevocable actuality and an inescapable inheritance of unfinished tasks (also broken promises and fateful evasions). The significance of the past is nearly as malleable as the actuality of the past is unalterable. Since we are first and foremost agents caught up in processes and practices for the most part transcending our consciousness and control, but ones in which our interventions and innovations are often far from inconsequential, our present is dramatic. A guiding sense of the historical past is an integral feature of deliberative rationality. Such rationality is deliberative by virtue of being dialogical (cf. Bernstein 1992: 52). Signs are “the only things with which a human being can, without derogation, consent to have any transaction” (CP 6.344). This includes the monuments, documents, and other traces of the past. 53 Our dialogue with history can be a largely unsuspected farce in which we impose contemporary categories on past forms of human life. For it can be one in which we are not only unconsciously engaged but also one in which we obliviously commit the sin of anachronism! But it can also be a gentle comedy in which our limitations, errors, and shortcomings are revealed to us by our dramatic encounter with human beings whose irreducible otherness, hence whose unassimilable modes, prove time and again critical for assisting our self-understanding and self-overcoming.34 In brief, our dialogue with history is a process in which anachronism is hardly avoidable35 yet possibilities for self- understanding and self-transformation are readily available. In his dialogue with his past, however, Peirce strove to avoid anachronism (see, e.g., CP 7.181) and also to exploit these possibilities. In our dialogue with his writings, we are ineluctably drawn into his imaginative dialogue with the historical past. To read Peirce seriously is, indeed, to be caught up in the unfolding drama of human fallibility,36 rendered increasingly self-conscious,37 a drama in which the epoch-making power of experimental intelligence emerges as a central figure in the tragicomedy of our age. Hubris and the blindness resulting from it are unquestionably part of the story of our time, but so too are those revelatory yet comic episodes in which we realize just how foolish or stupid we have been, though without causing much, if any, harm. In being drawn into his thought in this manner, we are driven to place dramas of self-correction at the center of a life devoted to self-overcoming (see, e.g., Peirce 1966: 274; CN I: 188-9; see also Colapietro 1989: 95-7).

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NOTES

1. Of course, Fisch is here invoking a metaphor found in Christian and indeed Hebrew scripture (see, e.g., Psalms, 113, 118; Matthew 21, 41; and Mark 12, 10). My reason for attributing this metaphor to him is, in this context, that he uses the image to suggest history, that which has been thrown away by Descartes and countless other philosophers, provides Peirce with nothing less than the corner stone of a philosophical edifice built for inhabitants of our historical time. He does so, no doubt, with historical consciousness, as do I. But there is reason to make this explicit. The image is scriptural, the use to which Fisch puts it however is the one most directly relevant to this essay. 2. Significant steps toward such a clarification have already been taken by Willard Miller, Philip Wiener, Joseph Esposito, Tullio Viola, Chiara Ambrosio, Daniel Brunson, and others. In gratitude for their endeavors, I was disposed to use as my subtitle “Further Steps Toward a Pragmatic Clarification of Historical Consciousness”! This however would have made a title already too long and cumbersome even more so. But I am acutely conscious not only of the efforts of others but also my indebtedness to their work and insights. This essay is indeed an enactment of what it thematizes, a self-conscious endeavor to take up and carry forward a task already underway. 3. Especially in its ontological deployment, Peirce’s concept of secondness was designed to capture what Scotus intended by haecceity (Boler 1963: 122, 164; cf. Bernstein 1971, 180-2). Secondness signifies “not mere twoness [or duality] but active oppugnancy is in it” (CP 8.291). It is

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that which is insistently and aggressively here and now – that which “blindly forces a place for itself in the universe, or willfully crowds its way in” (CP 1.459). For this reason, Peirce discerns at least an affinity between his understanding of secondness and the Scotistic recognition of haecceity. 4. Reading Peirce on the topic of history and indeed much else, I have learned much from those who were already prominent when I took up the study of Peirce – in particular, Carolyn Eisele, Max Fisch, Kenneth Ketner, Joseph Ransdell, T. L. Short, Lucia Santaella, Joseph Esposito – but I have learned no less from those younger than me (most notably, David Agler, Chiara Ambrosio, Daniel Brunson, Masato Ishida, and Tullio Viola). 5. In “Philosophy and Civilization” John Dewey writes: “Significant history is lived in the imagination of man, and philosophy is a further excursion into its own prior achievements” (LW 3: 5). This clearly implies not only that philosophy is an engagement with history but also that it is an adventure of the imagination. Elsewhere he astutely observes: “From the human standpoint our study of history is still all too primitive. It is possible to study a multitude of histories, and yet permit history, the record of the transitions and transformations of human activities, to escape us” (MW 14: 78-9). 6. Science was, for Peirce, “a mode of life whose single animating purpose is to find out the real truth, which pursues this purpose by a well-considered method, founded on thorough acquaintance with such scientific results already ascertained by others as may be available, and which seeks cooperation in the hope that the truth may be found out, if not by any of the actual inquirers [now engaged in its pursuit], yet ultimately by those who come after them and who shall make use of their results” (CP 7.54, emphasis added). 7. His self-understanding conjoined an unabashed commitment to traditional Christianity with an acute awareness of the character of scientific inquiry. And this self- understanding is expressly dramatic: “A man is capable of having assigned to him a rôle in the drama of creation, and so far as he loses himself in that – not matter how humble it may be rôle, – so far he identifies himself with its Author” (CP 7.572; Colapietro 2016). Peirce took himself to have been assigned the role of scientist. As a result, inquiry was for him a form of worship and, in turn, worship a practice in which the growth of understanding, above all else, self- understanding, was critical. 8. “Peirce was,” Joseph Ransdell properly notes, “a radical thinker, attempting to re-think and re-establish logic at the most fundamental level, and it is appropriate [for us] to go back to the beginnings of logic in the West to understand what this means” (2000: 342). This is so because Peirce felt it was necessary for him to go back at least this far for the sake of executing this task. 9. The dispute between the realists and nominalists was, for Peirce, at bottom one regarding the nature and indeed the possibility of community, hence, one regarding continuity (in particular, the degree and forms of continuity between, or among, selves distant from one another, be it historical or some other kind of distance). 10. Fancy and phantasy were often used in the nineteenth century as synonyms for imagination. “Fancifully” hence might only refer to the exercise of imagination or, rather misleadingly to contemporary ears, “fancy.” While Descartes drew a sharp distinction between intellect and imagination, Peirce returned to the scholastic position (human intelligence is rooted in and depends on our imaginative capacities). The poet Alfred Tennyson wrote, “maybe wildest dreams/Are but the needful preludes of the truth,” to which Peirce responds: “I doubt the word maybe. Wildest dreams [or fancies] are the necessary first steps toward scientific investigation” (Peirce 1966: 233). 11. Whatever perspective from which “history needs to be written [or simply imagined] if it is to escape subjectivity, it seems that it, too, is, as J. W. Miller notes, a historical resultant. Thus the one necessary point of view from which history is to be written [at present] is self the outcome of history” (Miller 1981: 188). And, for the person engaged in this task, this must be a self-

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consciously historical perspective. “The present is no Olympian height from which all history is to be judged as from some timeless perspective” (Miller 1981: 188). Rather this present is, to repeat, historical through and through. 12. Of course, one cannot conduct experiments in history in the same manner as one can in, say, physics or chemistry. 13. “Action is,” Peirce suggests,” second, but conduct is third” (CP 1.337). Action as that which takes place here and now is an instance of secondness, and hence needs to be clearly distinguished from that which is bound up with generality (be in the generality of a purpose or that of a habit or, of course, both, as is almost always the case). To avoid confusion, “action” expressive or indicative of generality might be designated as conduct, manifestly an instance of thirdness. 14. “Successful research,” Peirce suggests, “is conversation with nature; the macrocosmic reason, the equally occult microscopic law, must act together or alternately, till the mind is in tune with nature” (CP 6.568). What such research facilitates is a finer and fuller attunement between the habits of rational agents and the dispositions of the countless objects encountered in the course of experience. “An experiment, says Stöckhardt, in his excellent School of Chemistry, is a question put to nature. Like any interrogatory, it is based on a supposition. If that supposition be correct, a certain sensible result is to be expected under certain circumstances which can be created, or at any rate are to be met with. The question is, Will this be the result? If Nature replies ‘No!’ the experimenter has gained an important piece of knowledge. If Nature says ‘Yes,’ the experimenter’s ideas remain just as they were, only somewhat more deeply engrained” (CP 5.168). “Experiment, after all, is an uncommunicative informant. It never expiates: it only answers ‘yes’ or ‘no’; or rather it usually snaps out ‘No!’ or, at best only utters an inarticulate grunt for the negation of its ‘no’” (CP 5.428). Even so, there is much to be learned from these inarticulate grunts! 15. “[O]f the myriad forms into which a proposition may be translated,” Peirce asks, “what is that one which is to be called its very meaning? It is, according to the pragmaticist, that form in which the proposition becomes applicable to human conduct, not in these or those special circumstances, nor when one entertains this or that special design, but form which is most directly applicable to self-control under every situation, and to every purpose. This is why he locates the meaning in future time; for future conduct is the only conduct that is subject to self- control” (CP 5.427; see Colapietro 1999/2000). 16. John William Miller suggests, “where nothing is cherished nothing is found” (Miller 1981: 111). What he immediately goes on to say is even more pertinent to our purpose: “Now this seems to be a matter of some weight, but likely to be passed over, or denied, in our factually oriented idiom. For to cherish requires emotion and will. If there are to be memorials [or monuments] they have to be treated as memorials. There are no monuments of the past as matters of fact. […] There are no monuments in terms of the traditional epistemology of passivity [that in which objects are given rather than constructed]. A past has to be actively treasured if it is to be perceived as a past” (Miller 1981: 111, emphasis added). 17. This distinction is central to Esposito’s argument in “Peirce and the Philosophy of History” (Esposito 1983). Insisting upon the reality of the past, as the objectivist or commonsensist does, is understandable and even valid, but the task of clarifying the meaning of this reality cannot be skirted. This is correct, but it hardly entangles Peirce in the difficulties that Esposito alleges. 18. Of course, one might object that it is possible to doubt the reality of the past. “There is,” proposed, “no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into existence five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that ‘remembered’ a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore, nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. […] I am not here suggesting that the non-

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existence of the past should be entertained as a serious hypothesis. Like all skeptical hypotheses, it is logically tenable but uninteresting” (Russell 1921: 159-60). Peirce would however take such a fanciful doubt about the existence of the past to be merely a “paper” doubt. The fact that we can put words done on paper in the form of an interrogatory does not mean that we are genuinely in doubt. 19. “Ordinarily change is measured with reference to the permanent and is explained in terms of the permanent. Thus a change in weather gets explained by reference to the unchanging laws of air masses. […] But historical change involves one in the paradox of attempting to understand the discontinuous. It seems plain that if there were no discontinuous change there could be no historical knowledge as an independent sort of knowledge” (Miller: 1981: 187-8). It however seems equally plain that absolute rupture renders historical impossible: bridges between the past and present must be construct in order for the past, at least in a determinate, intelligible form, to reached by us who are, at once, bound to the historical present and, principally by virtue of the critical resources provided by historical consciousness, possess a limited capacity to transcend the all too narrow bounds of an insular present (cf. Esposito 1984: Ch. 5). 20. “A discussion of history does well,” J. W. Miller observes, “to avoid an alienation from natural science so abrupt that in the end the two interests confront each another as incommunicable. At the same time one can hardly avoid differences that at first do seem alienating. Science eventuates in formulae. […] History, in contrast, needs acts, agents, dates, places, desires, and passions. In order to study these, it employs a peculiar sort of material – namely, documents and monuments” (Miller 1981: 107). History as a distinctive form of experimental inquiry is, at least in general terms, no different from other forms of such inquiry. But, for the most part, history as the imaginative reconstruction of the historical past undertaken for the sake of deepening our consciousness of our own historicity cannot be assimilated too closely to such disciplines as physics, chemistry, or even biology. 21. Miller’s work deserves to be far better known than it is. While he was critical of pragmatism, especially James’s version of this doctrine, he was, partly through his intellectual kinship with Royce’s absolute pragmatism, much closer to Peirce than he realized. 22. Here, too, Miller’s counsel is instructive. The “action with which one deals in history is always a reaction” (Miller 1981: 191) or, since the term is less likely to have mechanistic implications, a response. “We reacted,” Miller notes, “to Pearl Harbor. Perhaps no one knows all the factors of temper in that reaction [or response]. Nor could one say in advance of the reaction” just what the reaction or response would be. One [indeed] never knows apart from what is done at a time and place” (ibid.; emphasis added). Antecedent conditions do not determine these responses, however much they might color of influence how rational agents respond to historical events. No reductionism is intended here. To see Plato’s project as a response to the crises of the polis does not imply that it is nothing but such a response. In turn, to see Peirce’s philosophy as a response to the crises generated by Darwin’s theory of evolution does not imply that it is nothing but such a response. Even so, we understand both thinkers only when we take with the utmost seriousness the profound crises by which their philosophical projects were, in part, generated. 23. This implies a distinction between the merely chronological and the truly historical past. “The chronological past,” J. W. Miller contends, “has no shape. It is all the vents common to all points of view. The historical past has shape. It is not a common past. It is peculiar to each society, for each society has its own past as surely as it has its own present” (Miller 1981: 165). He adds: “Only the particular present [i.e., the present of us, here and now] has a historical past. Therefore, the historical past will be as particular as its present extension [or prolongation]” (ibid.). To make this concrete, consider the intergenerational community of experimental scientists with which Peirce so deeply identified (see, e.g., CP 8.101). This is in a sense a society, a more or less integrated assemblage of distinct individuals. Contemporary members of this specific society do not claim just anyone who lived before them (i.e., who chronologically

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antedates them) as their ancestors. They would almost certainly see Thales, Ptolemy, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and countless specific others as their scientific forerunners. 24. This does not necessarily mean that we transcend history in its entirety or in every sense, only history taken to be a determinate field of purely objective knowledge. 25. The life of experimental intelligence is as much as anything else an adventure of the human imagination. So, too, the evolution of historical consciousness (or imagination) is such an adventure. There are no doubt distinct senses of this protean term. Peirce goes so far as to suggest, “‘imagination’ is an ocean-broad term, almost meaningless, so many and so diverse are its species” (Peirce 1966: 255). But the several senses at play in this paper – scientific, historical, and by implication moral – are distinct, though not incompatible. 26. “The past cannot address one,” John William Miller suggests, “in one’s own language. One must learn the language of the past. It is not accommodating or kind, and can’t be ordered to make itself clear to one” (Miller 1981: 187; cf. Colapietro 2003). 27. Even here, it is necessary to be cautious. Are we necessarily in a position to know that a monument constructed millennia ago was not addressed to unknown future generations? 28. “History is not,” Miller insists, “‘about’ a past; it is [in the present] a disclosure and vehicle of the past. Except as a career and continuum there is no past to write ‘about.’ And if a career, then the present has joined and embraced the past” (Miller 1981: 178-9). “The very word ‘politics’ is Greek, not biblical. Their career is also ours” (Miller 1981: 135). However remote and alien we are from the ancient Athenians, our political life is in some manner and measure continuous with theirs. Such dramatic identification is at the bottom of all historical consciousness. Miller goes so far as to suggest, “what seems analogical is actually a search for identity. We ask, ‘Who were the [ancient] Romans?’ We [simply in posing this question seriously] join them in self-definition, not in a technical problem. By knowing themselves better we know ourselves better. We profit not from a technical skill or failure, but from the common political purpose that is self-disclosing” (ibid., emphases added). With regard to history in this sense, “one is here dealing not with analogy, but in a career. We are together in a career, not as technicians.” In the sense most relevant here, history is, in other words, a drama in which we are implicated and, as such, one in which the dramatis personae includes far more than contemporary actors. 29. “In the caves of the Pyrenees there are drawings of a herd of deer. A friend of mine, a lawyer, who saw them, gave me a quiet but stirring account of his visit. What was it that he saw? A pretty picture? That would not have prompted his words or his manner. Nor was he commenting on the degree of intelligence of Neanderthal man. It was, rather, that in those caves something was revealed. Here was a voice, an utterance, an announcement, not of any matter of fact, but the presence of men and objects. These drawings were a voice. “Out of the silence a voice, out of the darkness a light. In the story of chaos from which the world emerged it was the generation of particulars – earth, sky, vegetation – that brought content and form. I think that my friend felt he was a spectator of the creation. On what other basis could one find anything [so] awesome in those drawings? The maker, the poet, saw himself in telling what he saw. He is not represented there, but presented” (Miller 1981: 103-4). 30. In asking this question, we need not project onto them reflexive or explicit forms of self- understanding, only a vague sense of the import or function of their own characteristic endeavors. 31. Our relationship to our language implicates us as inheritors. “We do not come upon a past,” Miller insists, “as upon something new, extraneous, or merely additional. To inherit one’s mother tongue is to have spoken and to have heard, to have been addressed and to have attended to others. Something of the past has [always] already become part of one’s activity. No one begins a lively acquaintance with objects or persons by studying history. One learns first to conduct oneself in ways that only later on disclose their historical implications” (Miller 1981: 179, emphasis added).

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32. In The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, the protagonist muses, “History isn’t the lies of the victors. I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.” This implies that history has never been simply “the record of the high accomplishments in dominant civilizations” (2011: 61). 33. As already noted, Fisch is here invoking a metaphor found in Christian and Hebrew scripture (see, e.g., Psalms, 113, 118; Matthew 21, 41; and Mark 12, 10). But it is his use of this metaphor that is most relevant to this essay, so citing his text seems only apposite. 34. “Unlike his contemporary, Karl Marx, who sought to explain ‘history in general’ using a materialistic model that allowed only the most elementary recognition between effects and their conditions [hence between the ideological superstructure and the economic foundation], Peirce’s model,” Esposito suggests, “described history as a vast dialogue of significations and reflections, continually shedding contingencies and growing hyperbolically in the direction of greater concrete reasonableness” (Marx 1983: 65). 35. “The besetting sin of history is,” Miller astutely observes, “anachronism, the description of any past in the terms of an abstract present. History writing that is not the imaginative reconstruction of the past on its own terms, indeed the very discovery of such terms, leaves the past as a mystery or else reduces it to the ahistoricity of scientific nature, to psychological , or theological incomprehension” (Miller 1981: 186-7). 36. “It is truth well worthy of rumination,” Peirce insists, “that all the intellectual development of man rests upon the circumstance that all our action is subject to error. Errare est humanum is of all commonplaces the most familiar” (CP 6.86; cf.W 1: 5). But it might be as profound as it is familiar. 37. Picking up the thread from the previous note, the most important truth about human intelligence is that virtually all of our knowledge is the result of having made mistakes or, more precisely, flows from the exercise of our ability to proceed erroneously. The capacity to make mistakes is no mean or ignoble ability. The Peircean doctrine of thoroughgoing is itself the dramatic outcome of a historical development, the uncompromising acceptable of our ineradicable fallibility conjoined to an equally robust faith in our ability to discover novel truths (see, e.g., CP 1.14). Abandoning the quest for apodictic does not entail losing faith in the possibility of pragmatic certainty or confidence. But it does require us to acknowledge that approximation is the very fabric out of which our philosophy not only has been woven but also must always be woven (CP 1.404).

AUTHOR

VINCENT COLAPIETRO

Pennsylvania State University vxc5[at]psu.edu

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“I Have To Confess I Cannot Read History So,” On the Origins and Development of Peirce’s Philosophy of History

Alessandro Topa

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I am indebted to the two anonymous referees, the editors and Emily Smith for suggestions that improved this paper. “The science of knowledge is to be a pragmatic history of the human mind.” Fichte, 1794 “Nature’s highest goal, to become wholly an object to herself, is achieved only through the last and highest order of reflection, which is none other than man; or, more generally, it is what we call reason, whereby nature first completely returns into herself, and by which it becomes apparent that nature is identical from the first with what we recognize in ourselves as the intelligent and the conscious.” Schelling, 1800 “Our physical science, whatever extravagant historicists may say, seems to have sprung up uncaused except by man’s intelligence and nature’s intelligibility, which never could before be operative because it was not studied minutely. But had no such divine birth. On the contrary, it pays the usual tax upon inheritances from revolutions. It was the product

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of a double and triple revolution – the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Copernican revolution.” Peirce, 1902

I. Introduction

1 The task of speaking about the origins and development of Peirce’s philosophy of history is confronted with difficulties, the articulation of which will prefigure our understanding of the question and determine the direction in which an answer shall be sought. Let us, therefore, first establish some common ground: Readers of Peirce will certainly agree that his écriture is pervaded by an encyclopaedic 1 and intensely curious historical consciousness that neither shies away from the consideration of minute details (see below) nor from the responsibility to understand the causes of large scale historical processes (see third epigraph above) and is nourished by the modern ideal of our deliverance from idola: “one of the main purposes of studying history ought to be to free us from the tyranny of our preconceived notions,” writes Peirce in 1901. Thus when he reflects on an explanation of certain habits of mind that govern Aristotle’s inquiries by conceiving of him as the “scion of a family whose every member, from the further prehistoric times had been trained in medicine” and did, therefore, not share “the Hellenic repugnance to dissection” (CP 2.12), we see him jotting a memo: Before this goes to press, I have to go over three books: Barthélemy St. Hilaire’s Ed. of Arist. Historia Animal 2. Littré’s Hippocrates 3. The best German history of medicine. (MS 425: 14, lower left margin) 2 To return to the sources and, at the same time, identify and read the best available account of the historical development in any field of knowledge, touches upon what would become a routine in the intellectual metabolism of Peirce the historian of science, logic and philosophy.

3 Here, however, a first problem arises: the objectivistic outlook animating the routines of Peirce the historian reflects stances taken by Peirce the philosopher of history. There thus seems to be, as Esposito (1983) points out, a strong “narrativist” strand in Peirce’s philosophical conception of history: “the view of the past as an objective actuality” (Esposito 1983: 160) resulting from an application of the pragmatic understanding of inquiry and reality to the realm of the past. If the real is the object of that ultimate opinion we would ultimately agree upon, then our knowledge of the past must lead to testable consequences that would eventually confirm a theory of what the past, as an objective sequence of events, was truly like (cf. CP 2.642, 5.461). In contrast to this, however, Esposito finds a less prominent “transcendentalist” (Esposito 1983: 156) conception, in which “the term ‘history’ seems to refer to a particular theoretical construction of human temporal activity” (Esposito 1983: 164). Indeed Peirce can speak of a “logic of history”2 in the sense of a logic of its processuality, which is capable of being guided by human intentionality; but Esposito is, nonetheless, mistaken in diagnosing a “dearth of arguments from Peirce that clearly assume the transcendentalist perspective” (Esposito 1983: 164) because he fails to realize how prominent texts such as “Fixation of Belief” assume such a perspective, which, however, is not in contrast to the objectivistic stance but rather complementary to it, as the approach to the historical in these texts is geared towards disclosing and

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enabling the growth of a normative component in our understanding of history. Thus for Peirce, objectivism notwithstanding, if history were to be tackled in a dégagé third- person perspective, it would mean to refuse to see what history really is (cf. EP 1: 364, 369; CP 2.111-8). As a particular object of philosophy, history thus is a subject that transcends Esposito’s dichotomies because our first-person conception of it – our ‘agent’s knowledge’3 – determines the mode in which we will actualize (or disrupt) historical continua in our actions.4 4 This leads to the next problem: Peirce was not only interested in development as an historian, but also as a metaphysician. Where literally everything developmental seems to become historical, however, traditional distinctions could seem to have been abandoned without offering any substitute. As Hampe (2006) has aptly characterized this aspect of Peirce’s philosophy of history, his evolutionary metaphysics – in which processes of habit-taking propel the emergence of regularities in the development of nature and civilization – ultimately interlaces the historicization of nature with a naturalization of history5 so that the difference between historia naturalis and historia rerum gestarum seems to become obsolete, unless the subtlety of Peirce’s conception of the normativity and self-referentiality of our own conception of history is properly acknowledged. It is no coincidence that his cosmogonic philosophy of the early 1890s culminates in the vision of a creative “agapastic” form of the historical development of human thought, but instead indicates an essential element of Peirce’s “realistic ” (MS 400) with its aim to “gain room to insert mind into our scheme, and to put it into the place where it is needed, into the position which, as the sole self-intelligible thing, it is entitled to occupy.”6 It is, thus, only in the acknowledgment of the agapic processual-semeiotic causes and conditions that have led to the emergence of such a “sole self-intelligible thing” that we commit ourselves to a normative conception of history as the developmental form of an “endless perfectibility” (W 1: 114). 5 The term “philosophy of history,” however, is nowhere used in the Monist series. Thus, a third problem emerges: If we look into Peirce’s mature classifications of the heuretic sciences (a hierarchy of interdependent research activities that, being “the pursuit of living men,” exist in an “incessant state of metabolism and growth,” EP2: 129), we see that Peirce reserves a place for a family of historiographic sciences he refers to as “[descriptive] Psychognosy” (CP 1.272) or “Descriptive Psychics, or history” (CP 1.189), but nowhere in this classification can we detect anything that reflects the necessity to philosophically come to terms with history as a dimension and vector of that experience all men have in common and in which our relatedness to the world, ourselves and others is rooted (cf. EP 2: 372-3), whether in its meaning as res gestae, or ‘that which factually happened,’ or in its meaning as a historia rerum gestarum, i.e. as a ‘knowledge of what has happened.’ What we can derive from Peirce’s architectonic enframing of historiography is nonetheless important: Inasmuch as “Descriptive Psychics, or history” is classified as belonging to the descriptive order of the psychical subclass of the “idioscopic” or “special sciences,” it does not attempt to nomologically establish general laws (cf. EP 2: 261), nor does it taxonomically study “kinds of mental manifestation” (CP 1.271), but rather aspires “to describe individual manifestations of mind, whether they be permanent works or actions” and “to explain them on the principles of psychology and ethnology” (CP 1.189, emphases mine). We can thus say that history qua “Descriptive Psychics” is a form of scientific activity that focuses on the description of individual events in which mind becomes manifest as a productive power, incarnating itself in the materiality of “permanent works” and “actions.” What such a

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mind is, however, and how we can account for its poietical and practical purposiveness in bringing about artifacts and practices, are questions another science has to answer: “to philosophy must fall the task of comparing the two stems of causation and of exhuming their common root” (CP 1.273). Thus, although there is no explicitly marked slot for the philosophy of history on Peirce’s “ladder” of principle-dependent sciences “descending into the well of truth” (CP 2.119), it is clear that there can be such a slot, if not a connection of several slots contributing to the philosophical clarification of what history is. 6 In the connection of such architectonic stances, however, a third ‘ontotheological’ aspect of Peirce’s philosophical interest in history must be taken into account, as it constitutes a constant horizon in which history is conceived of as something that is not only grounded in the sequentiality of events and, moreover, acquires degrees of directionality through the categories of evolution operative in their connection, but also constitutes a medium of the expression of rationality (cf. EP 2: 245-5): A passage from How To Reason (1894) stratifies these three central aspects of Peirce’s philosophical interest in history and provides us with its pre-conception as a [a] cooperative product of individuals bringing about civilization with [b] a directionality depending on the degree of historical awareness in their actions, [c] functioning as the medium of the self-revelation of the Absolute. [a] To say that man accomplishes nothing but that to which his endeavors are directed would be a cruel condemnation of the great bulk of mankind, who never have leisure to labor for anything but the necessities of life for themselves and their families. [b] But, without directly striving for it, far less comprehending it, they perform all that civilization requires, and bring forth another generation to advance history another step. Their fruit is, therefore, collective; it is the achievement of the whole people. [c] What is it, then, that the whole people is about, what is this civilization that is the outcome of history, but is never completed? […]. We may say that it is the process whereby man, with all his miserable littlenesses, becomes gradually more and more imbued with the Spirit of God, in which Nature and History are rife. (CP 5.402 n2) 7 In the light of these aspects and interpretive problems, we will first identify the origins of central leitmotifs of Peirce’s philosophy of history in the early key text “The Place of Our Age in the History of Civilization” (1863). This piece is deeply influenced by Schelling’s notion of history as a “self-disclosing revelation of the absolute” (SW III: 603) and presents us with a matrix of ideas outlining the metaphysical horizon and systematic interest in and with which Peirce will concretize his philosophy of history in subsequent years (Section II).

8 As will be sketched in the next section, this concretization takes place within the framework of two complementary argumentative movements connecting “Fixation of Belief” and “Evolutionary Love” in accordance with a scheme for the proof of which Schelling, in his System of (1800) – designed to complement the Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797) – describes as follows: In knowing as such – in the fact of my knowing – objective and subjective are so united that one cannot say which of the two has priority. […] Hence there are only two possibilities: A. Either the object is made primary, and the question is: how a subject is annexed thereto, which coincides with it? […] B. Alternatively, the subjective is made primary, and the problem is: how an objective supervenes, which coincides with it? If all knowledge rests upon the coincidence [Übereinstimmung] of these two, then the problem of explaining this coincidence is undoubtedly the supreme problem for all knowledge. (SW III: 339-41)

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9 Accordingly, we will explore an interpretation that argues for a complementaristic reading: Whereas “Evolutionary Love” is the culmination of a cosmogonic account of the phenomenon of scientific knowledge which moves from the analysis of the objective cosmological conditions to the “historical development of human thought” (EP 1: 363), resulting in the progress of scientific rationality (cf. EP 1: 369-71), “Fixation of Belief,” on the other hand, analyzes an inverse movement that leads us from the subjective representational conditions of embodied intelligences to the emergence of the idea of an “external permanency” (EP 1: 120). The ensuing coincidence of the structure and results of these two movements of analysis does not only confirm the objective idealist hypothesis of a processual identity of the evolution of nature and thought, but also justifies our hope that both processes are expressions of one and the same grammar of their intelligibility – “Chance is First, Law is Second, the tendency to take habits is Third” (EP 1: 297) – and, therefore, grounded in a categoriological form of reality thus receiving architectonic confirmation of its universality. It is only in the horizon of the coincidence between the objective and subjective conditions of scientific knowledge revealed in this circular movement that history can be pragmatically conceived of as a normative developmental form of the expression of rationality, which enables our ‘agent’s knowledge’ to project empirical history as a progress towards an increasing self-control over our future historical development (Section III).

II. Early Leitmotifs of Peirce’s Philosophy of History

10 As we shall see in this section, a main perspective of Peirce’s philosophy of history, namely (i.) the conception of history as a medium of the absolute, originates in his first public speech “The Place of Our Age in the History of Civilization” (1863). “POA” anticipates other leitmotifs of Peirce’s philosophy of history, to wit (ii.) the conception of a universalist understanding of history, (iii.) the theme of history as a development of reason progressing in accordance with universal categories as its developmental structure, and finally (iv.) the necessity of a normative conception of history as a cooperative process that is to be reflected from the first-person stance of ‘agent’s knowledge.’

II.1 “The Place of Our Age in the History of Civilization”

11 Among the philosophies of history developed by German Idealists from 1780 to 1830, most of which were inspired by Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity (1784-1791) and Kants’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” (1784), the works of Schiller and Schelling seem to have had a bigger impact on Peirce’s conception of history than Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837) or Fichte’s Fundamental Traits of the Present Age (1804-5). Whereas On the Æsthetic Education of Man (1796) is known to be a major source for Peirce’s understanding of 7 and of his early theory of categories,8 both the general nature and specification of the categoriological status of Schiller’s three drives – the formal, the sensuous and the play-drive – as categorial moments of historical processes in the Letters XXIV to XXVII have gained little attention in their relevance to Peirce; something similar might be said of Schelling, inasmuch as the influence of his Naturphilosophie on Peirce’s metaphysics has been adumbrated repeatedly,9 while the importance of his conception

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of the philosophy of history, as articulated in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) and the lecture “The Historical Construction of Christianity” (1803), is a subject yet to be tackled.

12 From a sketch Peirce gives of his juvenilia (1859-1864), we can infer quite safely that “POA” is rooted in the soil of his earliest speculations on the categories, which goes far beyond what Kant conceives of as the objective validity of his “pure concepts of synthesis”10 and represents the undertaking of an ‘historical deduction of the categories’ that thus aims “to solve the puzzle [of the categories] in a […] historical […] manner” (CP 1.563). As the Peircean scheme of categories does, by that time, already comprise two “distinct orders of categories,” namely “the particular and the universal” (EP 2: 148), we are confronted with a scheme in which the latter are conceptualized as universal developmental stages that are connected by the former as their particular disjunctive “phases of evolution” (EP 2: 143, 148). This categoriological scheme will reappear in all texts we are studying.11 13 “POA” could be read as originating in and resulting from the combination of two central ideas of Schelling’s philosophy of history:12 The notion of a “historical construction of Christianity,” which is intimately connected with a representational conception of the Absolute, and his reflections on the possibility to conceive of history as a play (Schauspiel, SWIII: 602) of the “gradually self-disclosing revelation of the absolute” (SWIII: 603).13

II.1.1 History as Drama and Revelation of the Absolute

14 In the chapter of the System of Transcendental Idealism devoted to the “Deduction of the Concept of History,” Schelling presents us with a drama in which everyone performs their role according to their preferences. A reasonable development in such a play would become conceivable only under the assumption that the mind of the playwright – the author of history – would have coordinated the roles beforehand, thus guaranteeing a harmony between the free play of the actors and the necessity constituting the intelligibility of a narrative (SW III: 602).

15 In agreement with this train of thought, “POA” sets out to solve its central question – is it possible to conceive of the “spirit of Scepticism and Irreverence” of the “Age or Reason” as an integral element and “work of Christianity” (W 1: 101-7)? – by introducing the dramatic stages of plot-development (cf. W 1:108) as temporal schemata of the historical synthesis of the absolute. Having differentiated six stages of dramatic development, Peirce thus immediately invites us to “see if Christianity, the plot of History, does not follow determinate laws in its development, so that from a consideration of them we can gather where we are and whither we are tending” (W 1: 108, emphasis mine). It will be the categories that, functioning as “determinate laws” of development, constitute the historicity of our ‘agent’s knowledge.’ 16 Schelling’s use of drama as an analogy for history does, however, not stop where we have left it. It is only through careful observation of the next stage of Schelling’s analogy that his conception of a radically historical absolute comes to light and reveals its affinity to the Taylorian conception of ‘agent’s knowledge’ as an “achievement” (cf. fn. 4), inasmuch as “the very play of our own freedom” (SW III: 602) as agents in the drama of history would certainly require more creativity and sense of responsibility if we were to assume that the author had no independent existence apart from the play.

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Thus, Schelling argues, the author would be “only successively revealing himself through the very play of our own freedom,” so that, “without this freedom even he himself would not be,” whereas “we,” on the other hand, were to be “coauthors [Mitdichter] of the whole, and self-inventors [Selbsterfinder] of the peculiar role we play” (SW III: 602, translation mine). 17 Thus, we see how, in Schelling’s conception of history, human freedom is conceived as the medium of a successive revelation of the absolute. This revelation takes place in the three historical periods of “Destiny,” “Nature” and “Providence” (SW III: 603-4; cf. SW V: 209ff.); but only when, in an indefinite future, the last period will have begun, so Schelling concludes his “Deduction of the Concept of History,” “God also will then exist” (SW III: 604). 18 The aim of “POA” – to offer an historical outlook within which our “Age of Reason” can be grasped as a necessary stage toward the revelation of its true religious essence in the apotheosis of scientific rationality on the subsequent historical stage – is obtained by presenting the outlines of an “æsthetic view of science” (W 1: 114) and the conception of creation enshrined in it. With this vision of history and its goal, Peirce obviously does not appear to be primordially committed to the ideas of the progress of moral agency, political institutions and their constitutional framework, which are at the heart of the metaphysics of freedom in the tradition of Kant’s “Idea for a universal History”;14 rather it seems that Peirce conceives of the “æsthetic view of science” as a Weltanschauung, in which the scientific understanding of creation as an agapic process will collaterally also yield “the lever of love to move the world” and thus unleash more “surplus energy in the business of philanthropy” as has so far been used on “our triumphant road to wooing things” (W 1: 112-3). 19 Connecting the concerto grosso scientiarum Peirce stages at the end of his speech to the Schellingian notion of human freedom as the medium of a historical “revelation of the Absolute” (SW III: 603), we can see the denouement of Peirce’s “æsthetic view of science” to consist of the notion of a co-authorship of man – who “may impress nature with his own intellect, converse and not merely listen” (W 1: 113) – with the creator: This co- authorship is a reflection of the original harmony of creation manifesting itself in the “majestic symphony” resulting from the cooperation of the sciences, in which “one as viol, another as flute, another as trump” translates the modulations of the divine agápe into the scientific knowledge of an object envisaged as a “cosmos”: When the conclusion of our age comes, and scepticism and materialism have done their perfect work, we shall have a far greater faith than ever before. For then man will see God’s wisdom and mercy, not only in every event of his own life, but in that of the gorilla, the lion, the fish, the polyp, the tree, the crystal, the grain of dust, the atom. He will see that each one of these has an inward existence of its own, for which God loves it, and that He has given to it a nature of endless perfectibility. He will see the folly of saying that nature was created for his use […]. Physics will have made us familiar with the body of all things, and the unity of the body of all; natural history will have shown us the soul of all things in their infinite and amiable idiosyncracies. Philosophy will have taught us that it is this all which constitutes the church. (W 1: 114) 20 Let us summarize and then put this last quotation into perspective: Following Schelling, as soon as 1863, Peirce conceives of history as an ongoing “revelation of the Absolute.” This revelation proceeds in three stages, in which the Schellingian Absolute – being the ground of the identity of subject and object, mind and matter, freedom and necessity (cf. SW III: 600) – appears first as “destiny, i.e. as a wholly blind force” (SW III: 604),

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which, for Peirce, corresponds to the “arbitrarily imagined perfection” of the “egotistical stage” (W 1: 113). –, then, as “nature,” i.e. as the idea of a law-governed mechanical order – which, in “POA,” corresponds to the “idistical stage” on which perfection is “observed” (W 1: 113). Finally, the Schellingian Absolute will eventually appear as “providence,” i.e. as a process of revelation in which man conceives of nature and history as the expressions of an Absolute that has the formal condition of its manifestation in the processuality of its revelation and is thus radically historical and of the nature of a representation (SW III: 604, and cf. 601-2).

21 But the very moment this Absolute were to have completed its revelation so that the objective world would then be (and nolonger become) “a complete manifestation of God” (eine vollkommene Darstellung Gottes, SW III: 603), a state of absolute determination would be reached – corresponding to the “absolutely perfect, rational, and symmetrical system in which mind is at last crystallized” in Peirce’s “Cosmogonic Philosophy” (EP 1: 297). In this state, Schelling argues, “nothing could be other than the way it is” (SW III: 603) and the spontaneous and the necessary, freedom and necessity, would have become identical (cf. SW III: 340-1). Finally, Peirce’s æstheic view of science, which is conceived as the last stage preceding the tuistical stage of revelation, presents us with a vision of the Absolute rooted in the idea of mankind’s cooperative and sympathetic co- authorship in the historical process of its revelation. The manifestation of the Absolute as a “cosmos” in the synergy of scientific work, however, is not independent of the semeiotic process of its representation. It only reveals itself in our semeiosis, thus acting as the horizon in which a maximal degree of ‘agent’s knowledge’ becomes attainable for us.15

II.1.2 History as Absolute Synthesis

22 For both Schelling and Peirce, the historicity and semeioticity of the Absolute are a consequence of its deep dialogical structure, reflected in the very notion of revelation. Peirce’s basic Schellingian assumption – that the history of our freedom is the medium of revelation of the Absolute and can be compared to a play, the author of which has no other manifestation besides – leads him to a proto-semeiotic notion of history as a process of representation that develops in accordance to “determinate laws” (W 1: 109), specified as categoriological “laws of […] objective presentation” (W 1: 109) expressing general conditions of intelligibility: “Every object is obliged to appear under a certain set of forms” (W 1: 109), Peirce writes at the beginning of his ‘categoriological construction of Christianity.’

23 In this construction, Peirce lays down the “formula of Christianity” (W 1: 113) – the proposition “The Church is the Kingdom of Heaven” (W 1: 110) – as the starting-point of a gradual revelation of the total semantic contents of the idea of Christianity. Accordingly, the deductive plan contained in those central sections of the text that are lost (they were not published in the Cambridge Chronicle, which instead notifies its readers that “the orator here proceeded to analyze the formula ‘The Church is the Kingdom of Heaven’ and endeavored to show what part each had played in its enunciation” (W 1: 110)) becomes clear: [a] First there was the egotistical stage when man arbitrarily imagined perfection, now is the idistical stage when he observes it. Hereafter must be the more glorious tuistical stage when he shall be in communion with her. And this is exactly what, step by step, we are coming to. [b] For if you will recur a moment to my draw

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analysis of the formula of Christianity, you will perceive that the conclusions of the preceding ages have answered three kinds of questions concerning that proposition. [ba] Two were metaphysical, what is its predicate and what is its subject? [bb] two were dynamical; is it hypothetical or actual, and is it categorical or conditional? [bc] two were mathematical; what is its quality, and what is its quantity? [bd] And now there are questions of but one kind more that remain to be asked, and they are physical. And they are two. The first is, is christianity a fact of consciousness merely, or one of the external world? And this shall be answered by the conclusion of our own age. The second is, is the predicate true to the understanding merely, or also to the sense? And this, if we may look forward so far, will be answered by Christ’s coming to rule his kingdom in person. And when that occurs, religion will no longer be presented objectively, but we shall receive it by direct communication with him. (W 1: 113ff., additions in brackets and all italics mine) 24 In this passage, Peirce answers the question raised in the title of his speech by connecting the three stages of revelation with a categoriological movement reminiscent of Kant’s four types of principles of the understanding (CPR, B 201n.f ). He thus relates (1) eight ages with (2) the three stages of revelation of the Absolute, which are connected by (5) eight categories that (4) answer four types of categoriological questions, and are (3) schematized as moments of dramatic development. We may put these correlations in the following table:

3. Dramatic 1. Age 2. Stage 4. Question 5. Category Schema16

Heathens & Jews egotistical prologue metaphysical predicate

Rise of Christianity plot is actualized subject

hypothetical – Migrations of Barbarians causes, means, conditions dynamical actual

categorical – Modern Nations passion in full operation conditional

Crusades counterplot mathematical quality

Reformation idea in material effects quantity

internal – Reason idistical conclusion physical external

ens rationis – Future age tuistical soliloquy ens realis

25 Now, we might be willing to accept the idea that history is “the gradually self- disclosing revelation of the absolute” as a postulate that aims to ascribe maximal solidarity, cooperativity, circumspection and responsibility to rational agents for the use of their freedom in the historical development of rational purposes that are embodied within nature and culture (cf. CP 1.615). Still, a question needs to be addressed: In which sense can history be seen as developing by ‘answering categoriological questions’? The answer, I think, lies in the difficulties connected to a

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normative component ingrained in our conception of history, according to which, as Schelling puts it, “history ought to represent freedom and necessity in unification” (SW III: 593): Neither a strictly predetermined anancastic sequence of events representing a “system of ” (SW III: 601), nor a tychastic progression resulting from mere chance – “a system of irreligiosity and ” (ibid.), as Schelling calls it – can be considered to be historical. Only a view that allows us to conceive of an absolute ground of the harmony between freedom and necessity, so Schelling argues, will allow us to conceive of history in the first place. Such a history is “a system of providence, or religion in the only proper sense of the word” (ibid.) and – as we might anticipate: agapastic (cf. III.3) – the product of an “absolute synthesis” (SW III: 602), which, as such, can never be completed without negating the appearance of freedom in the world (cf. SW III: 270).

26 The view of the Absolute as historical, so Schelling argues in “The Historical Construction of Christianity” (1805), emerges with Christianity as the worldview in which “the world is looked upon as History, as a moral kingdom” (SW V: 287).17 With Christianity, thus, the Absolute as the ground of unity of the finite and infinite, the divine and the natural, necessity and freedom, represents itself in the new symbolism of historical action: Where the infinite itself can become finite, there it can also become plurality; there is possible. Where the infinite is only signified by the finite, it remains necessarily one, and no polytheism as a co-existence of divine forms is possible. […] Consequently, Christianity can be taken only from that which falls in time, that is, from History; and, hence, Christianity is, in the highest sense and in its innermost spirit, historical. Every particular moment of time is a revelation of a particular side of God, in each of which He is absolute: that which the Greek religion had as co- existent, Christianity has as a succession. (SW III: 288) 27 The Christian God here appears as the totality of historical time; but as the “endlessness and immensity” of history render it incapable of providing us with a representation of God, it becomes necessary “to represent history in a both infinite and limited appearance, which itself is not real, as the political state is, but ideal, and represents the unity of all [human beings] in spirit, their individual segregation notwithstanding, as an immediate presence” (SW V: 293). This representation is “the church,” which Schelling conceives of as a “living work of art” (ibid.), adding strong æsthetic connotations to the Kantian origins of this concept.18

28 In the central section of the argumentatio of “POA” (cf. W 1: 108-10), we see Peirce embarking on an attempt to deliver that detailed construction of Christianity, of which Schelling had only demonstrated “the possibility in general” (SW V: 295). That the subject of Peirce’s formula of Christianity is the Church and has its predicate in the notion of a “heavenly kingdom,” which consummated the condition of being “perfection in human form” with the life of Christ (cf. W 1: 110), thus becomes intelligible after having considered the Schellingian backgrounds of the speech: The church is a growing cooperative community attracted by a goal it is destined to in its predicate, which it gradually makes clearer to itself in its history. The categories of the revelation of its predicate, therefore, are moments of a synthesis of the Absolute in the medium of history, directing us from the first stage of revelation to an eschatological end we can only approach in history (cf. W 1: 114).

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III. Developments: “The Fixation of Belief” and “Evolutionary Love”

29 In this section we will trace the further development of Peirce’s philosophy of history by focusing on two quite remote networks of ideas: Whereas “Fixation of Belief” (1877) and its twin “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” were written to introduce the readers of the Popular Science Monthly to a series of articles entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science (1877-8), in which Peirce, for the first time, developed his theory of inquiry within the broader horizon of a set of themes and tenets that, two decades later, became canonical for the pragmatistic movement, “Evolutionary Love” (1893) is part of a speculative “Cosmogonic Philosophy” (EP 1: 297) Peirce outlined in his socalled ‘ Monist Metaphysical Series’ (1891-3).

30 In this cosmogony, Peirce develops a categoriologically founded account of the whole of reality, including minds sharing an interest in cosmogony, as having evolved in the process of a “natural history of the laws of nature” (EP 1: 246, 288) that originates from a state of absolute chaotic potentiality and – by mere chance – actualizes possible developmental paths through a “generalizing tendency” (EP 1: 297) of habit-taking, in which regularities and uniformities like laws of nature or the directionality of cultural processes begin to emerge. Unless, that is, in an infinitely remote future, a final state of complete rationalization of the cosmic system is reached and mind – being the habit- taking agency of the universe – becomes “crystallised” as “effete mind” (EP 1: 297, 293). The origins of this narrative in Schelling’s philosophy become obvious when they are couched in a theological language that reveals a significant continuity with the metaphysical narrative of “POA”: The starting-point of the universe, God the Creator, is the Absolute First; the terminus of the universe, God completely revealed, is the Absolute Second; every state of the universe at a measurable point of time is the third. (EP 1:251) 31 Still, as it is far from trivial to identify a point of convergence between the philosophical interests and methodological approaches that characterize the writings of two series – which have even been deemed to be incompatible19 – it comes as no surprise that “for some early commentators the whole idea of a Peircean system of metaphysics was a puzzling embarrassment,” as Hookway (1997: 2) succinctly puts it.20 Upon closer inspection, however, the distant phases to which “FOB” and “ELO” belong turn out to be consecutive in the mental biography of someone who, moreover, cultivated cosmological interests from the start.21 Thus, as soon as 1885, Peirce writes to W. James to “have something very vast now,” namely “an attempt to explain the laws of nature, to show their general characteristics and to trace them to their origin & predict new laws by the law of the laws of nature” (W 6: 595; emphasis mine). Consequently, as a close reading of the opening sections of the Monist Series confirms, the interest in the explanation of the possibility of hypothesis-framing reflects a central heuristic aspect that Peirce’s “Cosmogonic Philosophy” shares with his logic of science. Consequently, after having sketched his theory of a rational instinct, according to which the success of early scientists to select hypotheses in accordance with the criterium of simplicity can be explained by considering that and how embodied minds have been shaped by the very laws they have become able to divinate (EP 1: 287-8, cf. EP 1: 181), Peirce writes:

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[a] To find out much more about molecules and atoms we must search out a natural history of laws of nature which may fulfill that function which the presumption in favor of simple laws fulfilled in the early days of dynamics, [aa] by showing us what kind of laws we have to expect and [ab] by answering such questions as this: Can we, with reasonable prospect of not wasting time, try the supposition that atoms attract one another inversely as the seventh power of their distances, or can we not? [b] To suppose universal laws of nature capable of being apprehended by the mind and yet having no reason for their special forms, but standing inexplicable and irrational, is hardly a justifiable position. [c] Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to be accounted for […]. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason. Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature...is to suppose them results of evolution. (EP 1: 288, additions in squared brackets and italics mine) 32 Peirce here states that the program of his architectonic philosophy is motivated by two interdependent concerns: First, the need to find a functional substitute for the heuristic power of the principle of simplicity, which would [aa] enable us to hypothetically derive specific laws from a ‘law of laws,’ and thus second [ab] provide us with a criterium for testing hypotheses efficiently. The concerns [aa] and [ab], however, make it imperative to have a theory of the diversification of the special forms of laws of nature and their relation to the law of laws if we do not want to lose all grounds for assuming the general intelligibility of nature, which would be the case if we were to claim [b]: a radically unsystematic empiricism that merely postulates general lawfulness without being able to account for the relation that needs to be thought as obtaining between general lawfulness and its specifications.22 The concerns [aa] and [ab], thus, necessitate us to offer an account of the grounds of the general intelligibility of nature, from which, then, the lawfulness of the special laws would become intelligible to us in the first place. Such an account, Peirce says, needs to be evolutionary.23

III.1 The Structure of “The Fixation of Belief”

33 The structural analysis of “FOB” reveals a symmetry: After an episodic sketch of the history of the empirical sciences, the sections II-IV introduce the basic concepts of Peirce’s theory of inquiry by outlining the archetypical pragmatistic epistemic situation in which an organism is primordially related to its environment through biological needs, emotional responses and conceptual dispositions to act. The normative grounding of inquiry, however, has so far only been involved embryonically, especially in a momentous reference to the role of reflection (EP 1: 114). This normative grounding will be articulated in section V, where a second narrative sequentially introducing four methods of fixating belief leads to the emergence of scientific rationality and its apotheosis in the “integrity of belief” (EP 1: 123). On the whole then, this structuring presents a triptych: Two narratives are mediated through the theory of inquiry. The unity of the text thus consists in its giving an answer to the question ‘What conception of logical thought is needed to account for scientific progress?’

34 There is, however, another possible analysis: We can read “FOB” as a sequence of three narratives soaked with theory that disclose three aspects of history: In its firstness (in its being what it is without reference to anything else),24 history is chronicled as a mere sequence of monadic events and agents (sec. I). In its secondness (in its being what it is as determined by something else), history is resulting from a blind evolutionary process in which “logical animals” (EP 1: 112) are forced to react to the challenges of their environment (sec. II-IV). In its thirdness (in its being what it is as mediating between a

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first and a second) and third degree of clearness, 25 history eventually is projected as a gradual realization of the conceptual moments of scientific rationality (sec. V). With this approach – and the conception of an ideal history (cf. 1.60) enshrined within it – Peirce follows a tradition that can be traced back to Fichte’s conception of a “pragmatic history of the human mind,” articulated in his 1794 Science of Knowledge,26 that with its emphasis on the dialectical actuosity obtaining between Ego and Non-Ego in the genesis of subjectivity, not only inspires the philosophy of history in Schiller’s Æsthetic Letters – which Peirce remembers as his first philosophical reading (cf. 2.197) leaving an “indelible impression upon my soul” (MS 619: 10) – but also informs the conception of “Philosophy as a History of Self-Consciousness in Epochs” in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) that, through excerpts and paraphrases in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), 27 had become part and parcel of the Concord Peirce remembers to be the origin of his “Schelling-fashioned idealism” (EP 1: 312).28 A decade before Hegel’s Phenomenology, Schiller and Schelling thus are among the first idealists to emphasize the historicity of reason by conceiving of it as a process of education in which the static faculties of Kant’s first Critique – which closes with a chapter on “The History of Pure Reason” merely to “designate a place that is left open in the system and must be filled in the future” (A852/B880) – are interpreted as stages of the historical becoming of reason. On this backdrop, “FOB” answers a question which complements the first: What philosophical conception of history will allow us to conceive of ourselves as historically capable of gaining increasing control over the development of rationality by studying logic as “an art not yet reduced to rules” (EP 1: 141)?

III.2 The Sequence of Methods and Transitions: Peirce’s Analytic Program

35 The sequence of four methods of belief-fixation is introduced to test their respective conformity with the normative principle of belief-formation (NPBF). As Peirce indicates in section IV, this principle, which should regulate all rational processes of reflectively turning – not to the sensuous matter of inquiry, but – to the procedural mode of belief- formation, “will make us reject any belief which does not seem to have been so formed as to insure this result” (EP 1: 114, emphasis mine): This result is to produce beliefs which can (i.) “truly guide our actions,” (ii.) “so as to” (iii.) “satisfy our desires.” Reflection thus monitors – and in case of a violation of norms, inhibits – the process of belief- formation under the profile of the question whether a belief has been produced in such a way that it meets the conditions to be (i.) irrevocably authoritative (ii.) to establish a relation of functionality (iii.) among our beliefs and aims of action. Inasmuch as NPBF – as a principle that does not state what our goal is, but only which form it requires – thus sets the that all our beliefs ought to be formed in a certain way so as to guarantee the most fundamental requirement for the practical identity of an agent, namely the possibility of the continuity of its actions,29 section V, consequently, assigns itself the task to assess which methods of generating and stabilizing belief are in accordance with this principle and, therefore, practically rational.

36 Irrespective of Peirce’s literary style, there is a dense analytic program underlying the description of each of the four methods and three transitions.30 This analysis progresses towards two goals, in which the accomplishment of the first depends on the second:

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(A.) to differentiate the developmental stages of the unfolding of man’s second nature as being rooted in a capacity to acquire and modify complexes of habits, and (B.) to give an account of the necessity of the form (and thus: lawfulness) of this development by identifying the principle of its movement and thus provide a justification for the specification of its moments qua particular developmental stages, which is required for accomplishing the first task.

III.3 A Categoriologically Grounded Interpretation of Section V of “Fixation of Belief”

37 As we can here only sketch the close reading that becomes possible when we conceive of “ELO” as a complement to “FOB,” let me immediately refer you to the passage that holds the key both for the reconstruction of the sequence of methods as categoriologically derived moments and for the explanation of their unity and form through a principle that specifies the origin, growth and télos of the development they constitute: In the third section of “ELO” we see Peirce applying the general modes of evolution he has categoriologically differentiated to the “historical development of human thought,” thus obtaining a tychistic mode, “two varieties of anancasm” and “three of agapasm” (EP 1: 363). He writes: [o] In the very nature of things, the line of demarcation between the three modes of evolution is not perfectly sharp. That does not prevent its being quite real, perhaps it is rather a mark of its reality […]. The main question is whether three radically different evolutionary elements have been operative; and […] what are the most striking characteristics of whatever elements have been operative […]. The [a] agapastic development of thought is the adoption of certain mental tendencies, not [aa] altogether heedlessly, as in tychasm, nor quite blindly by [aba] the mere force of circumstances or [abb] of logic, as [ab] in anancasm, but [b] by an immediate attraction for the idea itself, whose nature is divined before the mind possesses it, by the power of sympathy, that is, by virtue of the continuity of mind; and this mental tendency may be of three varieties, as follows. First, [ba] it may affect a whole people or community in its collective personality, and be thence communicated to such individuals as are in powerfully sympathetic connection with the collective people, although they may be intellectually incapable of attaining the idea by their private understandings or even perhaps of consciously apprehending it. Second, [bb] it may affect a private person directly, yet so that he is only enabled to apprehend the idea, or to appreciate its attractiveness, by virtue of his sympathy with his neighbors, under the influence of a striking experience or development of thought. The conversion of St. Paul may be taken as an example of what is meant. Third, [bc] it may affect an individual, independently of his human affections, by virtue of an attraction it exercises upon his mind, even before he has comprehended it. This is the phenomenon which has been well called the divination of genius; for it is due to the continuity between the man’s mind and the Most High. (EP 1: 364, additions in brackets and all italicizations except the last are mine) 38 I shall first briefly show how this passage allows us to understand the categoriological nature of the distinctions Peirce draws in “FOB” (III.3.1). Then I will adumbrate in how far ‘that-which-first-manifests-itself-as-the-social-impulse’ functions as the principle of the internal development – i.e. as the origin, growth and télos – of the impulse’s manifestation in three stages (III.3.2). As we will see, Peirce is first retroactively establishing a seamless correspondence between the methods of belief-fixation and the modes of the historical development of thought ontologically grounding them (cf. [a]- [bc]), and then proceeding to account for the internal unity and categoriological order

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of the three manifestations of the social impulse as concretizations of the modes of agapic historical development (cf. [ba]-[bc]). In this perspective, thus, the methods of tenacity, authority and pure reason are conceived of as degenerate forms of the method of science, whereas tychistic and anancastic agapic evolution reveal themselves to be degenerate forms of “divination” (cf. [bc]).

III.3.1 The Methods of Belief-Fixation are Praxeological Manifestations of the Evolutionary modes of the development of Human Thought Cosmologically Grounding them

39 The claim that the objective relation man is capable of establishing between him and the world through science is grounded in practices and social relations among human beings, is the explicit epistemological theme of “FOB”: we establish our relation to an objective realm we call ‘reality’ or ‘the world we share’ by entering and entertaining definite social – i.e. cooperative – relations to others. The claim that the objective relation that man is capable of establishing to reality via scientific inquiries, is the upshot of a development in which mind – as a communicative agency unfolding from a “social impulse” – has the tendency to develop in accordance to a categoriologically ordered sequence, is the implicit metaphysical theme of Peirce’s philosophy of history in “FOB,” culminating in the temporal schematization of a categoriological analysis of the moments of scientific rationality in section V: A conceptual sequence is schematized in a dramatic form in order to idealiter present methods of fixating belief as distinct complex sets of habits that realiter are not sharply demarcated, but – being simultaneously operative types of causes of historical processes – do, rather, overlap (cf. [o]).

40 The description of the method of tenacity does thus not mean to imply that there are real historical individuals who are capable of exclusively following the method of tenacity in their belief-forming-procedures by voluntaristically determining their beliefs in order to then cut themselves off from all communication with others and the world by selectively perceiving and hearing what confirms their beliefs and, as a last resort, rejecting all requests to abide by standards of rationality as a request to use standards that are not their own (cf. EP 1: 116). We also resist the temptation to conceive of the method of tenacity as an independently existing 31 “historical state of culture […] [in which] one opinion does not influence another” and men “cannot put two and two together,” as Peirce characterizes its essence two pages later (EP 1: 118). 32 Rather, we understand that this method aims to capture the internal bond of certain attitudes, practices and economies inherent in routines of belief-production which, both on the onto- and phylogenetic level, are verifiable as the dominating factors periodically determining phases of personal and cultural development. Moreover, we understand that these practices have an unrestricted autonomy at their core which, when pushed to its extremes, will result in the complete absence of rule-governed forms of fixating and reflectively assessing belief. Of course, these rule-governed forms have yet to develop; but they cannot develop without having the act of logical determination in its firstness as its prerequisite: “[W]e cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing just what we do believe” (EP 1: 114). What emerges on the stage of tenacity, thus, is the intent to determine one’s self by determining one’s beliefs: the most fundamental condition of any form of logical determination or practical identity. Here and in what follows, Peirce does not base his analysis on “purported fact[s] about our

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psychological make-up.”33 The taking control of their processes of belief-formation by organisms praxeologically requires their autonomy. Consequently, Peirce emphasizes that tenacity, considered in isolation from the other methods, is a praxeological fiction: 34 it is “unable to hold its ground in practice” as “the social impulse is against it” (EP 1: 116). 41 In correspondence with the method of tenacity, the tychistic mode of evolution is held to be capable of reigning a historical process only for a limited time, insofar as this mode occurs “whenever we find men’s thought taking by imperceptible degrees a turn contrary to the purposes which animate them, in spite of their highest impulses” (EP 1: 365). As a result, this mode – like the tenacious method cosmologically grounded within it – will effectuate “slight departures from habitual ideas in different directions indifferently, quite purposeless and quite unconstrained whether by outward circumstances or by force of logic” (EP 1: 363), thus establishing a practice of “heedlessly” (EP 1: 364) fixating beliefs, i.e. without any concern for general standards and the well-being of others. 42 As Peirce impatiently exclaims in “ELO,” we surely cannot understand ourselves and our history on the basis of the supposedly exclusive action of absolute chance: “I have to confess I cannot read history so” (EP 1: 365). As much as the method of tenacity has the social impulse against it, it is correspondingly not possible that “tychasm” – note Peirce’s slip from talk of a mode of evolution to talk of a method – “has been the sole method [sic!] of intellectual development,” inasmuch as such a development “has seldom been of a tychastic nature, and exclusively in backward and barbarising movements” (EP 1: 365). Cooperation and communication reign in the historical world we inhabit, thus indicating the operativeness of a “real entitative »spirit« of an age or of a people” (EP 1: 365). 43 Is the social impulse really the “psychological property of human beings, [that] we cannot hold on to beliefs that other people confidently deny”?35 Peirce’s argumentation points to a different meaning: the upshot of the social impulse is that men as historical beings “necessarily influence each other’s opinions” (EP 1: 118), inasmuch as the most fundamental practices – especially the semeiotic-communicative ones – are rule- governed. The social impulse, then, is primarily an instinctive openness to coordinate and communicate, a capacity to have our thoughts influenced by others; only secondarily is it a form of pressure to accept the views of others, as this presupposes the recognition that “another man’s thoughts or sentiment may be equivalent to one’s own” and “arises from an impulse too strong in men to be suppressed, without danger of destroying the human species,” i.e. the recognition arises from the social impulse as a first manifestation of a transactional instinct to coordinate, cooperate and communicate (EP 1: 116-7; my emphasis). Without this impulse then, men, passing on their through mediatic practices from generation to generation, would never become part of the collective process of experience they most naturally dwell in. 44 The social impulse, originating from the transactional-communicative instinct is the origo of all histories and communities. Like the agápe generating the “agapastic development of thought,” this impulse is neither autonomous (like tenacity as the praxeological manifestation of the tychastic mode of thought-development, cf. [aa]) nor heteronomous (as the methods of authority and pure reason qua manifestations of the two anancastic modes, cf. [aba]36 and [abb]37), but heautonomous38 (like the self-

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correcting method of science qua embodiment of the agapic mode; cf. [bc]) or: ‘inventive in giving to itself rules for the reflection of itself.’ 45 We are thus invited to conceive of the methods of authority and the apriori method as those sets of habits of belief-determination in its secondness that are expressions of the two varieties of the anancastic development of thought, in which, generally, “new ideas are adopted without foreseeing whither they tend” and have the specific character to be “determined by causes either external to the mind […] or internal” (EP1: 364), whereas the method of science corresponds to the agapistic mode and is “distinguished by its purposive character,” consisting in the “development of an idea” (EP1: 369).

III.3.2 The Manifestations of the Social Impulse are Categoriological Concretizations of the Agapic Modes of the Development of Thought

46 The categoriologically structured ideal history of scientific rationality Peirce develops in section V of “FOB” makes intelligible the scientific progress sketched in its first section. We thus see the tenacity with which Roger Bacon holds on to the concept of interior illumination at the threshold of modern science, move to the ideas of the authoritarian , who “wrote on science like a Lord Chancellor,” cross the apriorism of the Copernican Revolution, which almost prevented Kepler from testing the hypothesis of elliptical orbits (cf. EP 1: 110), and reach the experimentalism of Lavoisier, whose new habit was “to conceive of reasoning as something which was to be done with one’s eyes open” (EP 1: 111). Darwin, Clausius and Maxwell, eventually, engender a new form of statistical control over natural phenomena in which a cross- fertilization of methods emerges and announces the possibility of a method of devising methods of inquiry – a pragmatic “method of methods” required for “the age of method.”39 Our categoriological scheme thus allows us to pragmatically conceive of our history as the unfolding of an increasing control over the development of the scientific life-form we have become.

47 Is it possible to offer a cosmological account of the origin, growth and télos of our interest in our history? Are there resources to account for the development of the transactional-communicative instinct that manifests itself (i.) as “the social impulse” (EP 1: 116), then (ii.) as “a wider sort of social feeling” (EP 1: 117) and finally (iii.) as the desire to have our beliefs determined by “nothing human” (EP 1: 120)? Note that the qualitative changes from method to method would be impossible if the propellant of the movement were not itself capable of development: Each method has been grounded in a corresponding evolutionary mode of the development of thought (cf. III.3.1), but a cosmogonic account that shows how these modes themselves evolve from each other as diversifications of a unifying principle is still missing. 48 It is exactly here that Peirce’s “law of love” (EP 1: 362) and the differentiation of three modes of the agapic historical development of thought (cf. [b]-[bb]) become relevant. As this account is carefully prepared in what Peirce, especially in “The Law of Mind” (1892), has to say about the mathematical form of experience (cf. EP 1: 323-7), the semeiotic structures and inferential forms of psychic processes (cf. EP 1: 327-9), and the developmental stages of personality and communication (cf. EP 1: 330-3, 348-51), we can here only sketch the objective cosmological account of the evolution of the social impulse.

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49 1) Whereas the growth of the social impulse in “FOB” is represented as the development of a reflexive activity culminating in a thematization of the grounds of the generalizability of the motives of our beliefs,40 the term reflection41 is avoided in the 1890s and substituted with an inferentialistic account of thought (generally predilected since the 1860s). 50 2) In order to appreciate in which sense Peirce’s – often neglected42 – account of the three modes of agapic development of thought (cf. [b]-[bc]) represents the key to understanding the origin, growth and télos, thus: the unity and principle of diversification of the development of the social impulse, it is crucial to understand the common nature of the agapic modes: Their generic distinctive mark consists of their having the attractivity of an idea as the ground of the “adoption of a mental tendency.” In the characterization of genuine agapic development (cf. [b] and [bc]), however, Peirce speaks of “an immediate attraction for the idea itself” (my italics) emphasizing that the idea is apprehended for no other reason but its sheer attractivity. In accordance with Peirce’s distinction of three inferential “modes of action of the human soul” (EP 1: 327-9), this attractivity consists in abductively bringing formerly discrete elements into an unexpected continuum and thus reflects the pure mediality of the creation of a new habit of mind, which – in the experience of the emergence of an intelligible form hovering between object and cognizer – interlocks both in a possible continuous cognitive relation, without which mind and world would forever remain worlds apart: Habit is that specialisation of the law of mind whereby a general idea gains the power of exciting reactions. But in order that the general idea should attain all its functionality, it is necessary, also, that it should become suggestible by sensations. That is accomplished by a psychical process having the form of hypothetic . (EP 1: 328) 51 3) The degeneracy of the two other forms is grounded in the impurity of their mediality: in an attraction which is either [ba] ‘not an immediate attraction for the idea itself’ (tychastic agapism) or [bb] ‘not an immediate attraction for the idea itself’ (anancastic agapism).

52 3.1) In the first case, the ground for the adoption of the habit, is not the idea as such, but the semi-conscious mimesis of the habits of a “collective personality”: mere custom, the individual abides by almost involuntarily, though lovingly as out of sympathy with others. The tychistic stage of agapic development thus represents a weak purposive processuality which corresponds to the first manifestation of the social impulse: on the lowest level of reflexivity, processes of interaction between organisms are necessary, in which mimetically adopted habits can evolve and establish the primitive “kind of coördination or connection of ideas” (EP1 : 331) on the existence of which the emergence of an almost undifferentiated individual within a “collective personality” depends. The continuity of mind diversifying itself in the evolution of culture and human purposes does, thus, have its first sedimentation in the establishment of semeiotic practices in which the directionality of time and the spatial coordination of mental action emerges (EP 1: 323-5). When an idea is conveyed from one mind to another, it is by forms of combination of the diverse elements of nature, say by some curious symmetry, or by some union of a tender color with a refined odor. To such forms the law of mechanical energy has no application. […] They are embodied ideas; and so only can they convey ideas. (EP 1: 333)

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53 3.2) In the second case, the ground for the adoption of the habit, is not the idea in its immediacy, but rather that which it helps us to accomplish (cf. [bb]). Consequently, we observe how the “collective personality” dominating the first phase diversifies into personalities, which now, by explicitly conceiving of themselves over against the community, exist and act as “private person[s].” Peirce mentions St. Paul; but we are invited to think of a variety of historical individuals necessitated to experiencing their existence in an identical categoriological constellation determining their adoption of a new habit of thought. What characterizes the specific nature of the anancastic stage of the agapic evolution of thought as exemplified in Socrates (Ap. 20c4 – 23b9), Saulus (Acts 9: 3-9; 22: 6-16) or Mohamed (Qur’an 33: 19-22; 96: 1-5) is the necessity to bridge their dualistic existences as diversified, committed members of the community through reformative action, 43 thus grounding that “wider sort of social feeling” (EP 1:118), in which the adoption of new ideas “affect[s] a private person directly […] by virtue of his sympathy with his neighbors, under the influence of a striking experience or development of thought.” This mode, thus, is determined by the loss of a social unity it has emancipated itself from and is animated by the desire to found new communities. The idea is thus not apprehended for the sake of its contents, but of its use.

54 4) The word “divination” encapsulates and structures Peirce’s thought on the possibility of genuine agapic historical progress. Bearing in mind that Peirce – in conformity with the historical role he ascribes to the method of authority as “the path of peace” (EP 1: 122) for the “intellectual slaves” of the “mass of mankind” (EP 1: 118) – held anancastic development to have been “the chief factor in the historical evolution” (EP 1: 290), the ‘etymological chord’ divination nonetheless connects four ideas in a harmonious unity: First, the idea of a predictive power of the mind (divination); second, the idea of something’s originating from God (lat. divinus); third, the idea of a supreme goodness something has (engl. divine) and fourth, the etymological association of a latinization of the homoíosis theoi (ital. divenire: to become; from lat. devenire: to descend from above), i.e. the becoming like God.44 55 5) In speaking of “divination,” Peirce introduces four aspects of that genuine mode of agapic evolution in which the social impulse transcends itself in the contemplative life of theoría adopting an idea in its pure mediality “by virtue of the continuity of mind” (cf. [b]). The third stage of the social impulse, thus, discloses the tendency of mind to establish continua within itself by joining continua beyond itself: Historically, the idea of a highest continuum man can relate to and immortalize in by surrendering the needs and wants of his biological and political existence to an engagement with the cosmos in the aspect of its pure intelligibility originates in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. With them, the ultimate stage of man’s ethical development is characterized by the dialectic of self-transcendence and true self45 in the contemplative life with its capacity to grant authentic eudaimonía in accordance with our psychic structure. We thus see how the modes of agapic development anchor the stages of the social impulse in bíoi (EN, I, 5) qua degrees of self-transcendence in ecstatic feeling, the memory of the pólis and a life “in conformity with the highest that is in us”: The wise man, no less than the just one and all the rest, requires the necessaries of life; […] but the wise man can practise contemplation by himself, and the wiser he is, the more he can do it. No doubt he does it better with the help of fellow-workers; but for all that he is the most self-sufficient of men. Again, contemplation would seem to be the only activity that is appreciated for its own sake; because nothing is gained from it except the act of contemplation, whereas from practical activities we

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expect to gain something more or less over and above the action […]. [Thus] this activity will be the perfect happiness for man […]. But such a life will be too high for human attainment; for any man who lives it will do so not as a human being but in virtue of something divine within him […]. So if the intellect is divine compared with man, the life of the intellect must be divine compared with the life of a human being […]. [W]e ought, so far as in us lies, to put on immortality, […] do all that we can to live in conformity with the highest that is in us; for even if it is small in bulk, in power and preciousness it far excels all the rest. Indeed it would seem that this is the true self of the individual, since it is the authoritative and better part of him; so it would be an odd thing if a man chose to live someone else’s life instead of his own. (EN, X, 7 ) 56 The prevention of the “odd” choice, to which Aristotle here refers, seems to be at the heart of Peirce’s understanding of what we have called ‘agent’s knowledge’: A wisdom that – being of the nature of a “developmental teleology” (EP 1: 331) and ensuing a harmony which, “at one and the same impulse,” requires the capacity of creative love of “projecting creations into dependency” and “drawing them into harmony” (EP 1: 353) – constitutes the ethical dimension of Peirce’s normative philosophy of history. It is, after all, in every living second, up to us to lovingly conceive of the mode of connection of our past with our possible futures.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARISTOTLE, (1976), The Nicomachean Ethics, J. A. K. Thompson (trans.), London, Penguin Books.

BARNOUW J., (1988), “‘Aesthetic’ for Schiller and Peirce: A Neglected Origin of Pragmatism,” The Journal of the History of Ideas, 49, 4, 607-32.

COLAPIETRO V., (1989), Peirce’s Approach to the Self. A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity, Albany, State University of New Yord Press.

COLAPIETRO V., (2003), “Portrait of an Historicist. An Alternative Reading Of Peircean Semiotics,” in Williamson R., Sbrocchi L. G. & Deely J. (eds.), Semiotics 2003: Semiotics and National Identity, New York – Ottawa – Toronto, Legas, 3-12.

COLERIDGE S. T., (1983), The Collected Works of Samul Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols., London, Routledge & Kegan Paul/ Press.

DE TIENNE A., (1996), L’analytique de la représentation chez Peirce. La genèse de la théorie des catégories, Bruxelles, Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis.

DE WAAL C., (2013), Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed, London/New York, Bloomsbury.

ESPOSITO J. L., (1977), “Peirce and Naturphilosophie,” TCSPS, XIII/2, 122-41.

ESPOSITO J. L., (1980), Evolutionary Metaphysics. The Development of Peirce’s Theory of Categories, Athens/Ohio, Ohio University Press.

ESPOSITO J. L., (1983), “Peirce and the Philosophy of History,” TCSPS, 19/2, 155-66.

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FICHTE J. G., (1982), Science of Knowledge, ed. and tr. by P. Heath and J. Lachs, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

FISH M., (1986), Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism, Bloomington.

FRANKS P., (2015), “Peirce’s ‘Schelling-Fashioned Idealism’ and ‘the Monstrous of the East’,” British Journal of the History of Philosophy, 23/4, 732-55.

Gallie W. B., (1952), Peirce and Pragmatism, London, Penguin.

GOODMAN R. B., (2015), American Philosophy before Pragmatism, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

HAMPE M., (2006), Erkenntnis und Praxis. Studien zum Pragmatismus, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag.

HOOKWAY Ch., (1985), Peirce, London, Routledge.

HOOKWAY Ch., (1997), “Design and Chance. The Evolution of Peirce’s Cosmology,’ TCSPS, 33/1, 1-34.

LEFEBVRE M., (2007), “Peirce’s Esthetics: A Taste for Signs in Art,” TCSPS, 43, 319-44.

MISAK C., (2004), Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

MURPHEY M., (1961), The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy, Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing.

PAPE H., (1997), “Love’s Power and the Causality of Mind: C. S. Peirce on the Place of Mind and Culture in Evolution,” TCSPS, 33/1, 59-90.

PAPE H., (2002), Der dramatische Reichtum der konkreten Welt. Der Ursprung des Pragmatismus im Denken von Charles S. Peirce und William James, Weilerswist, Velbrück Verlag.

PERRY R. B., (1935), The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols., Boston, Little Brown.

REYNOLDS A., (2002), Peirce’s Scientific Metaphysics, Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press.

SCHELLING F. W. J., (1997), System of Transcendental Idealism, Peter Heath (trans.), Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia.

SCHILLER F., (1982), On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, edited and translated by E. M. Wilkinson & L. A. Willoughby, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

SHORT T. L., (2000), “Peirce on the Aim of Inquiry: Another Reading of ‘Fixation’,” TCSPS, 36/1, 1-23.

SHORT T. L., (2011), “Did Peirce Have a Cosmology?,” TCSPS, 46/4, 521-43.

SMYTH R., (1988), “Why Be Logical?,” TCSPS, 24/4, 441-68.

TAYLOR Ch., (1985), Philosophical Papers, Vol. I: Human Agency and Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

TOPA A., (2007), Die Genese der Peirce’schen Semiotik. Teil I: Das Kategorienproblem (1859-1865), Würzburg.

VENTIMIGLIA M., (2008), “Reclaiming the Peircean Cosmology: Existential Abduction and the Growth of the Self,” TCSPS, 44/4, 661-80.

APPENDIXES

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Abbreviations

– TCSPS: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society – In citations from and references to C. S. Peirce’s writings the following notations are used: CP The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, followed by volume number and paragraph number: The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols., vols. 1-6 Hartshorne, C. & Weiss, P. (eds.), Cambridge, 1931-1935; vols. 7-8, Burks, A. (ed.), Cambridge, 1958. EP The Essential Peirce, followed by volume number and page number: The Essential Peirce, vols. 1-2, Bloomington, 1998. MS Manuscripts of Charles S. Peirce in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, followed by manuscript number and page number, as identified in: Robin, R. (1967): Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce, Amherst, and in: Robin, R. (1971): The Peirce Papers: A supplementary catalogue, in: TCSPS, vol. 7, 37-57. W Writings of Charles S. Peirce, followed by voulme number and page number: Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A Chronological Edition, vols. 1-8, Bloomington, 1982-. – In citations from and references to F. W. J. Schelling the following notation is used: SW Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schellings sämmtliche Werke, Erste Abtheilung, vols. 1-10, followed by volume and page number, ed. by K. A. Schelling, Stuttgart und Augsburg 1856-1861. – In citations from and references to the following notation is used: AHE The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Kant: Anthropology, History, Education, followed by page number, ed. by Zöller, G., translated by Louden, R. B. and Zöller, G., Cambridge 2011. CPR The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, followed by page number of the first and/or second edition: Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by Guyer, P. & Wood, A. W., Cambridge, 1998. CPJ The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Kant: Critique of the Power of Judgment, followed by reference to page number: Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Guyer, P., translated by Guyer, P. and Matthews, E., Cambridge, 2000. RRT The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Religion and Rational Theology, followed by page number, edited and translated by Wood, A. & Di Giovanni, G., Cambridge 2001.

NOTES

1. Peirce, however, admits to being better acquainted with the “history of philosophy” than with “political history” (CP 7.231).

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2. Esposito (1983: 164) refers to CP 3.425, erroneously assuming that “The Regenerated Logic” (1896) belongs to the Monist series of the early 1890s. 3. See Taylor (1985: 80): Agent’s knowledge, according to Taylor, originates with Vico’s verum ipsum factum (ibid.: 81) and reflects the beautifully commonsensical notion that “the degree of awareness in our action is something we come to achieve” (ibid.: 84). 4. This is also clearly brought out and emphasized by Hampe (2006: 40-1, 141-52). 5. Hampe (2006: 124-52). 6. EP 1:309, emphases mine. 7. See Barnouw 1988, and Lefevbre 2007. 8. See De Tienne (1996: 55ff.), Topa (2007: 113-56). 9. Cf. e.g. Esposito 1977 and 1980; Reynolds (2002: 5-25); and Franks 2015. 10. CPR, A 80/B 106. 11. Cf. the analogous distinction between a “repetitive order” and a universal “greater life- history that every symbol furnished with a vehicle of life goes through” in the semeiotically grounded metaphysics of history of the Minute Logic (CP 2.111). 12. In a letter to James from 1895, Peirce acknowledges that “my views were probably influenced by Schelling, – by all stages of Schelling, but especially by the Philosophie der Natur” (Perry 1935: 416ff.), which implies he read substantial portions of Schelling’s works in the German original. Correlating this with the ‘confession’ to have been introduced to the thought of Schelling through the acquaintance with the Concord Transcendentalists in his early youth (cf. EP 1: 312-3), there is, then, good reason to assume that Peirce, after having studied Schiller and Kant, started to read Schelling in the original around 1860. 13. I will be quoting Heath’s translation of the “System of Transcendental Idealism” (Schelling 1997), but refer to the pagination of the Sämtliche Werke which is also given there. 14. Cf. AHE: 116: “One can regard the history of the human species in the large as the completion of a hidden plan of nature to bring about an inwardly and, to this end, also an externally perfect state constitution, as the only condition in which it can fully develop all its predispositions in humanity.” 15. See MS 1334: 21 where Peirce defines ‘God’ as “the highest flight toward an understanding of the original of the whole physico-psychical universe that we can make” of HIM as inquirers. 16. Cf. W 1:108. 17. All translations from “The Historical Construction of Christianity” are mine, unless otherwise stated. 18. See Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Part III: “Concerning the victory of the good over the evil principle and the founding of a Kingdom of God on earth,” in RRT: 129-71. 19. See e.g. Gallie (1952: 221-9); and Hookway 1997. 20. This embarrassment stems from the fact that the position Peirce develops in his metaphysics – and which he is not too shy to call “Schellingism transformed in the light of modern physics” (Letter to W. James, 1895, quoted in Perry 1935: 416 ff.; cf. 6.605) or a “Schelling-fashioned idealism” (EP 1: 312-3; cf. MS 400) – must appear as a betrayal to those who read (i.) the theory of reality (cf. EP 1:120-1, 136-9) as a form of positivistic , (ii.) the pragmatic maxim (cf. EP 1: 132) as a verificationist procedure, and (iii.) the theory of inquiry (cf. EP 1: 111-5) as a naturalistic instrumentalism anchored in a proto-behavioristic biologism, in which thought and the development of its logicality are understood to be aiming at nothing nobler (and less relativistic) than the production of adaptive habits of action. 21. CP 4.2 (1898): “I came to the study of philosophy intensely curious about Cosmology and Psychology.” 22. Note that this is the same problem that Kant, in The Critique of the Power of Judgment, tries to solve with his account of the regulative apriority of an heautonomous reflective power of judgment; cf. CPJ, Introduction, IV.

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23. For a further elucidation of this point see Hookway (1985: 265-71). 24. In their most primitive meaning, the Peircean categories we are here using represent the three elementary and irreducible relational modes of the determination of being (cf. e.g. EP 1: 242 and EP 2: 267-8). A fine introduction to Peirce’s categoriology is offered by de Waal (2013: 33-46) 25. See Peirce’s identification of the “third grade of clearness of apprehension” of the meaning of a concept with the reflection on its “conceived sensible effects” on the basis of the pragmatic maxim in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (EP 1: 132). Before, Peirce reflects on the historical impact the cultural preference for two opposed conceptions of the goodness of ideas might have: On the one hand, the preference for an “excessive wealth of language and its natural concomitant, a vast, unfathomable deep of ideas”; on the other hand, the pragmatic predilection for a language “whose ideas […] are few, but which possesses a wonderful mastery over those that it has” (EP 1: 126-7). 26. Fichte (1982: 198-9): “The Science of Knowledge is to be a pragmatic history of the human mind.” 27. Cf. Coleridge (1983: 129-67). 28. Cf. Goodman (2015: 147-61) 29. Cf. CP 5.133. 30. Items on this agenda are (i.) descriptions of the practices constituting the methods; (ii.) implicit analyses of the faculties involved and the specific historical constellations emerging among them; emphasis on individuating the (iii.) social, (iv.) objective and (v.) normative relations established in the practices of each method between the individual on the one and the community, world and rational thought on the other hand. 31. Murphey’s (1961: 164-5) decision to read section V of “FOB” as a mere assemblage of methods, leads him to a view which has significantly shaped later scholarship: once the first three methods are degraded to “straw methods” (Murphey 1961: 165), the main problem is no longer an analysis of the moments of scientific rationality, but the justification of the superiority of the method of science and the ensuing search for Peircean arguments supporting this claim, which then, quite unsurprisingly, turn out to be “barely worthy of the name” (Murphey 1961: 164). By taking it for granted that “there is no historical justification of the list” (Murphey 1961: 164), Murphey’s interpretation buries the distinction between historiography and a philosophy of history in the graveyard of oblivion and prevents the contextualization of “FOB” in the idealist tradition, taken up again by Smyth 1988. 32. Cf. SW V: 287: “There is no state of barbarism that does not have its origins in a perished culture.” 33. Misak (2004: 57-8); and cf. Hookway (1985: 48-9). 34. This analytical abstractness and real interdependence of the methods is also seen by Pape (2002: 65-79). 35. Hookway (1985: 48). 36. External anancasm, which praxeologically corresponds to the uniformity of will brought about by the forced surrender of the will of the individual to “the will of the state” through its techniques of indoctrination, censorship and degrees of violence as ultima ratio of its power (cf. EP 1: 117), thus establishes vast historical spaces dominated by the gradually morphing belief- systems of monotheistic faiths, which utilize the intellects, hearts and hands of human beings to produce and refine material culture (cf. EP 1: 118). 37. Internal anancasm or “logical groping” (EP 1: 368) brings about a change of ideas not by external constraints, but by causes “internal to the mind as logical developments of ideas already accepted, such as generalisations” (EP 1: 364) and corresponds to the a priori method as its processual ground of historical concretization. 38. See CPJ: 28, 72. 39. Peirce in a letter from 1882 to his brother James Mills, quoted in EP 1: 211.

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40. All three transitional reflections are related to NPBF (cf. III.2) and can be reconstructed as aspects of a sensus communis, in the sense that the § 40 of the Critique of the Power of Judgement defines it as “a faculty of judgement” that “in its reflection takes account” of the following “maxims of common human understanding”: “1. to think for oneself; 2. to put ourselves in thought in the place of everyone else; 3. always to think consistently” (CPJ, § 40; see AHE, 307-8, for a parallel in § 43 of the Anthropology). 41. Cf. the account Peirce gives of reflection in the earliest phase of his evolutionary metaphysics in “Design and Chance”: although reflection is “the instrument by which we make ourselves rational, it does not follow that it is essential to rationality” (EP 1: 222-3). For Peirce, in this period, reflexivity thus is only an accidental remedy for a generic imperfection in our modes of bringing thought to unity. 42. An exception is the excellent interpretation offered by Pape 1997. 43. Cf. Peirce’s division of three classes of men, in: MS 1334: 16-8. 44. Cf. Plato, Theaitetus, 176 a-b and Timaeus, 90 a-d. 45. Cf. Ventimiglia 2008; and Colapietro (1989: 61-97, and esp. 95-7) on this theme in Peirce.

ABSTRACTS

This study aims at a better understanding of Peirce’s conception of a philosophy of history. Peirce has a well defined place for historiography in his classification of the sciences, but what he has to say about history as a philosopher is not primarily referring to it as a form of historiographic knowledge, but to history as a process and a medium. As a process, history is, fundamentally, a cooperative activity of man resulting in civilization and capable of varying categoriological degrees of directionality that reflect the ‘agents’ knowledge’ of history incorporated in the communicative practices of their community. As a medium, history – in the light of the cosmogonic narrative of Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics and of his mature conception of the summum bonum – is one of two forms of expression of the Absolute. Our paper studies the development of these conceptions from the Schellingian influences on “The Place of Our Age in the History of Civilization” (1863), to “Fixation of Belief” (1877) and “Evolutionary Love” (1892). Throughout this development, Peirce remains primordially interested in the philosophy of history as a mode of normatively conceiving of history (as a medium) in a way that enables us to pragmatically project our cultural development as a process in which an increasing control over our own history is actualized.

AUTHOR

ALESSANDRO TOPA

American University in Cairo a.topa[at]aucegypt.edu

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The Anticipated Past in Historical Inquiry A. O. Lovejoy, C. I. Lewis and E. Wind on Accounting for Knowledge of the Past Within a Pragmatist Theory

Stefan Niklas

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I am very grateful for the invaluable comments by Tullio Viola and the anonymous reviewers which very much helped making my ideas clearer. I would like to warmly thank Annie Castro and Jono Taylor for reading the paper and improving my English.

Introduction

1 Historical inquiry presupposes the possibility of obtaining knowledge of the past. It thus implies (usually tacitly) an epistemology which can account for this kind of knowledge. However, the pragmatist theory of knowledge – especially as developed by Peirce or Dewey – is based on the anticipation of future events in order to verify or falsify the assumptions made. For this reason, serious doubts have been raised as to whether a pragmatist theory of knowledge is capable of accounting for historical knowledge at all: if knowledge is to be tested in the future, how can it possibly be tested by events which have already taken place in the past? Such doubts have been expressed quite meticulously by Arthur O. Lovejoy, who was an important critical interlocutor of pragmatism, when this style of philosophizing became dominant in North-America in the early 20th century. The aftermath of Lovejoy’s interventions can be observed in a number of reactions, including a response by Dewey which opened a debate between the two renowned philosophers in the Journal of Philosophy.1 However, instead of delving into this specific debate, I examine how C. I. Lewis dealt with the respective criticism while outlining his pragmatic theory of knowledge. In my view, Lewis’s theory as presented in Mind and the World Order (1929) is the clearest and most comprehensive

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account on knowledge given from an enhanced pragmatist point of view. Although Lewis gives a formal answer to the problem of knowledge of the past, he is less concerned with the practice of historical inquiry. This omission by Lewis requires us to consider how the past is known through documents that are used as the epistemic instruments which make the past detectible. Edgar Wind’s regrettably unheeded paper on “Some Points of Contact between History and Natural Science,” produced in 1936, is concerned with precisely this issue.

2 Through a consideration of the related arguments of Lovejoy, Lewis and Wind, I suggest that a pragmatist theory of knowledge cannot only account for knowledge of the past in the first place, but can actually elucidate a basic epistemological feature of historical inquiry: Knowledge of the past can only be gained by means of anticipation.

I. Lovejoy’s Criticism

a) Arthur O. Lovejoy as a Critical Interlocutor of Pragmatism

3 The role of Arthur O. Lovejoy in the history of pragmatism is that of a provoking and belligerent, though still somehow appreciative (but in any case critical), interlocutor of the movement. His criticism is noteworthy not least because it was effective within the pragmatist tradition itself: Lovejoy provoked a great deal of response (direct or indirect) from those who considered themselves to be pragmatists – including Dewey and reportedly James – and thus influenced the development of this very movement. Lovejoy’s critical contribution – which centered on his calls for greater clarification of the basic concepts of pragmatism as a consistent doctrine – is commonly associated with two works: his notorious paper on “The Thirteen Pragmatisms,” published in two parts in 1908, and a chapter on “Pragmatism Versus The Pragmatist” from 1920. Although Lovejoy’s later contribution presents a much more elaborate attempt of criticism and led to a direct debate with Dewey, his paper on the “Thirteen Pragmatisms,” or at least its brusque title, has, until recently, been received more intensely.2 The general aim of Lovejoy’s attacks is to offer “a species of Prolegomena zu einem jeden künftigen Pragmatismus” (Lovejoy 1908: 39)3 and to rectify what he considers to be the crucial self-misunderstandings of this otherwise promising kind of philosophy. The yardstick of this criticism is the idea of a consistent doctrine that pragmatism should become, and which shall be defended against “the pragmatist’s” assumed readiness to affiliate his position to various doctrines. I say “his,” because in Lovejoy’s paper from 1920 “the pragmatist” is exclusively identified with Dewey as the main representative of this current.

4 At the outset of his article on “Pragmatism Versus The Pragmatist”4 Lovejoy takes pains to detect the steady position of pragmatism between idealism and realism, which he regards as the mutually exclusive foundations of presumably any philosophical doctrine. However, this opposition rather reflects the situation of American philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century than a systematic necessity to keep realism and idealism as polar opposites. According to this presupposed opposition, pragmatism must either be a version of realism or of idealism (both either monistic or dualistic)5 – or it must present a third option. Lovejoy then devotes a great deal of his argument to a lengthy discussion of quotations from Dewey at different occasions (and partially taken out of context) to show how “the pragmatist” recurrently contradicts himself in a way

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that cannot be harmonized since his claims sometimes fall in the realist’s and at other times in the idealist’s camp. Apart from taking delight in deliberate provocation of the philosophic community, this exhibition of ambiguities in Dewey’s writings serves Lovejoy to delineate the field of his aspired reassessment of pragmatism. In the center of this field he puts the problem of knowledge and approaches it with regard to the existence of mental entities and, more importantly, knowledge of the past.

b) Lovejoy’s Arguments against the Anticipatory Character of Knowledge

5 While exploring the pragmatist’s stance on the existence of mental entities, Lovejoy encounters anticipatory knowledge as a key concept in Dewey’s theory6 and detects its importance for the close connection of knowledge and action which is indeed characteristic of philosophical pragmatism in general. Lovejoy takes the suggestions concerning the concept of knowledge, which Dewey presents most extensively in his Essays in Experimental Logic (2004), as a limited piece of descriptive psychology and attacks the assumption that every anticipated meaning is closely connected with an operation: “This amounts to an assertion that we never anticipate without proposing to ourselves some course of action with reference to the thing anticipated – an assertion which I take to be a false psychological generalization” (Lovejoy 1920: 52). He objects that there is also “passive” anticipation of future events (and even quotes James to support this view) and gives the example of “a windfall of fortune which one can do nothing – and therefore intends to do nothing – to bring about” (Lovejoy 1920: 52). The scenario that Lovejoy selects to illustrate his point, however, is not an example of knowledge – neither of knowledge about the event itself, nor about something else that would be rendered true or false by it – but instead refers to the mere hope for something to happen. Furthermore, the hope for this “windfall of fortune” is clearly concerning one’s conduct until and after this event occurs.

6 Although the first objection is easily refutable, Lovejoy’s second one is much more important and lies at the heart of his criticism. It concerns “Dewey’s limitation of the ‘knowledge-experience’ exclusively to forward-looking thoughts,” which, as Lovejoy rightly observes, means that Dewey “identifies all knowledge with anticipation” (Lovejoy 1920: 52). Lovejoy now tries to turn Dewey against himself – or “pragmatism” against “the pragmatist” – as he argues that this definition of knowledge “ignores the patent empirical fact that many of our ‘meanings’ are retrospective – and the specifically pragmatic fact that such meanings are indispensable in the planning of action” (Lovejoy 1920: 53). This point seems worthwhile since retrospection is indeed the very source of anticipation: Experiences we are presently having and those we are going to have are both informed by reference to former experiences, which are consequently the source out of which we first gain the assumptions to be tested as knowledge. Lovejoy acknowledges that Dewey is not actually arguing against this, and he even quotes one of Dewey’s affirmative statements on this kind of inter-temporal cognition which explicitly emphasizes the meaning of retrospection.7 He still maintains, however, that Dewey is not systematically integrating retrospection into his theory of knowledge since anticipation remains the decisive element that defines knowledge within this theory.

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7 If Lovejoy is right about the systematic lack of retrospection in Dewey’s account, two mutually exclusive consequences are conceivable. One possibility is that Dewey’s neglect indicates the “psychological” one-sidedness of his theory and must be rectified by introducing retrospection as a distinct mode of inter-temporal inference and the strict opposite of anticipation. Alternatively, Dewey’s oversight can be explained by suggesting that anticipation, as the basic operational mode of knowledge, must somehow integrate (or overlap with) retrospection. Only the latter consequence could build on Dewey’s conception of knowledge. Lovejoy’s decision to only conceive of the former consequence forces him to opt for the replacement of Dewey’s theory of knowledge by another, yet unspecified, theory. He does not even consider the possibility of anticipation as integrating retrospection and the associated possibility of the past as an object of anticipatory knowledge. Unfortunately, this prevents Lovejoy from asking the real question his criticism brings about: If all knowledge is contained in anticipatory or predictive judgments, this must also be true for knowledge of the past; but how is it possible to “anticipate” a past event in a judgment (without producing logical non-sense)? Lovejoy is not alone in failing to ask this question. Dewey, who fails to make the respective implications of his theory explicit, is also guilty of this oversight. Thus, Dewey passively facilitates misunderstandings such as Lovejoy’s which culminate in the claim that “[t]he pragmatist […] manifests a curious aversion from admitting that we have knowledge, and ‘true’ knowledge, about the past” (Lovejoy 1920: 63). 8 In order to achieve a more constructive understanding of how to approach the question – how can the past be anticipated? – I will first consider Lovejoy’s misunderstandings by examining the three explanations he provides when making sense of what he describes as Dewey’s “strange disinclination to acknowledge the immense importance of retrospection” and “to recognize the possibility of veridical retrospection” (Lovejoy 1920: 63). 9 According to Lovejoy, the first reason is Dewey’s “moral appraisal” of anticipation as serving creative intelligence more effectively than retrospection. It is true that Dewey’s essay “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” which Lovejoy quotes in support of his accusation, carries such an overtly “moral” plea as regards the role of philosophy in society. It is also true that Dewey regards anticipation as “more primary than recollection” (Dewey 1917: 14) in the course of acting towards a goal – which is what creative intelligence is about. This is in fact how Dewey conceives the process of life, namely as the constant process of readjusting the relationship of organism and environment, something that involves the ongoing pursuit of an ever passing equilibrium. Within this bio-evolutionary view one must inevitably conceive “success and failure” of organic adaption as “the primary ‘categories’ of life” (Lovejoy 1920: 14)8 and to hold that anticipation is the primary cognitive operation which obeys these “categories.” In contrast to goal-oriented or problem-solving actions, operations of a more (self-) reflective character, like retrospection, appear “secondary” to the direct practical need for anticipation. One may or may not consent to the bio-evolutionary foundation of Dewey’s philosophical outlook, but one cannot say that his prioritization of the anticipatory function was merely a moral postulate without any further (bio-) logical reason. 10 Dewey admits then that the “[i]maginative recovery of the bygone,” which in Lovejoy’s terms is retrospection, “is indispensable to successful invasion of the future, but its

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status is that of an instrument” (Lovejoy 1920: 14); it is subordinate to the more general operation of anticipation. Since Dewey’s essay is about the “Recovery of Philosophy” he immediately tries to transpose this argument into the business of philosophy. The merits of the recovery of the bygone in the pursuit of knowledge remain unquestioned (and become apparent in Dewey’s own work), but Dewey criticizes the tendency of his philosophical contemporaries “to isolate the past, dwelling upon it for its own sake and giving it the eulogistic name of knowledge” (Lovejoy 1920: 14). His attack is not, therefore, directed against recollection or recovery of the past in general, but against the habit of philosophical discourse to restrict itself to “traditional” problems of bygone times instead of applying the attitude of “normal” practical life – which is primarily based on the cognitive function of anticipation – to their own business. Dewey is guilty of moving from the level of the biological foundation of practical human conduct to his postulates and polemics concerning the deplorable condition of philosophy far too quickly, leaving certain steps of his argumentation to the reader. He thus, again, leaves room for the suspicion Lovejoy articulates. 11 Lovejoy then identifies the second reason “why retrospection is the Cinderella of the pragmatic theory of knowledge” (Lovejoy 1920: 65) in the problems that Dewey is understood to have in his concept of “the past” as such. Lovejoy observes that the pragmatist “finds it difficult to see how the data which serve in an inference can be unaffected by the intent of the inference and by the character of the particular situation in which the need for inquiry and inference originates” (Lovejoy 1920: 65), which I consider to be a generally satisfying description of the attitude of experimental logic. Lovejoy, however, holds that Dewey fails to acknowledge the fact that the past “is just blankly there, unmodifiable, irremediably external to the ‘present concrete situation,’ inaccessible to action either present or prospective” (Lovejoy 1920: 65). This statement, which is suggestive of an utterly un-critical realism, however, is at odds with the historian of ideas Lovejoy was.9 For if the past was blankly there, it would be either totally disclosed, wholly inaccessible to the inquiring mind (because the mind could not get “there”); or it would be totally open and accessible in every detail. Neither is the case. Since he does not further elaborate on the implications of this claim, it is not clear – but rather unlikely – that Lovejoy would really defend such a view of the past as the absolute totality of the bygone. Leaving Lovejoy’s intentions aside, it is clear that Dewey’s pragmatism does not in fact (and could not possibly) entail such a notion of the past. His theory of knowledge concerns knowledge as emerging from concrete “experimental” interaction, not from the abstract correspondence of internal assumptions with external facts (without knowing what mediates between them). Accordingly, knowledge of the past, pragmatically considered, can only be achieved through experimental interaction with instances of the past in a present concrete situation. Therefore, Lovejoy’s negative assumption only reaffirms what Dewey’s theory is compelled to presuppose, if this theory shall account for knowledge of the past, namely that the past is accessible to present and prospective action. (Further consequences of this claim will be discussed below in section III.) 12 The third reason, which Lovejoy regards as the principle reason for “the pragmatist’s unwillingness to classify retrospection as true knowledge,” concerns “that subjectivistic strain in his [the pragmatist’s] thought” (Lovejoy 1920: 65). What Lovejoy has in mind here is the attitude of “” that was established by James and indeed became very influential within and beyond the pragmatist movement. Although this particular attitude does not – at least not necessarily – affect the more

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“instrumentalistic” views of Peirce and Dewey, Lovejoy thinks that pragmatism is altogether pervaded by it.10 By adopting this approach, Lovejoy, who once tried to show how many independent doctrines call themselves pragmatism, imposes one special doctrine upon all other modes of the pragmatic attitude. This false generalization represents a common mistake in the reception of pragmatism – which is why it is important to take a closer look at this aspect of Lovejoy’s critique. He crudely presents empiricism as a theory which requires direct, i.e. subjective, experience as the precondition for establishing whether something can truly be known. Assuming that this is a claim which is more or less implied – though not consistently – in every pragmatist theory, Lovejoy starts to draw the respective consequences for the epistemic status of the past in “the pragmatist’s” theory of knowledge. He writes: The status of my past experience, from the point of view of a present judgment or inquiry concerning it, is precisely the same as the status of a contemporaneous but extra-subjective reality. Neither the one nor the other can now or hereafter be directly experienced; of neither is the reality accessible to verification. If, then, truth is an experienced relation, true judgments about the bygone are as impossible as true judgments about such ‘transempirical’ objects […]; for the past term of the relation is also, qua past, a kind of ‘transempirical’ […]. The past cannot be known because, since it is ex hypothesi now inaccessible to us. We can never compare it with our idea of it, nor determine which of our ideas of it are true or false. (Lovejoy 1920: 66) 13 The basis for this conclusion is a long quotation from Dewey’s “A Short Catechism Concerning Truth” (1910) – but it is hard to see where in this piece Lovejoy finds the hypothesis he ascribes to Dewey. Dewey argues that the past, as with anything else that is not immediately present, becomes inaccessible if treated in abstraction from the concrete situation of a present inquiry. He attacks the “intellectualist” account of truth, by which he means a correspondence-theory of truth, for being unable to show how a judgment comes to land “straight on the devoted head of something past and gone” (Dewey 1910: 160)11 which is the reason why it is forced to talk about “transcendence.” Against this Dewey defends a theory which takes “truth” to be a function of statements about events as distinguished from the events themselves. Accordingly, events only become “true” in terms of a judgment about them.12 Although at this point Dewey says nothing about how knowledge seeks access into events and objects which are not themselves present in a given moment, it does not follow that he denies the very possibility of such access – in fact, the opposite is the case.

14 What Lovejoy misconstrues in the above quotations is the very notion of experience on which pragmatism as instrumentalism is built. By regarding experience as thoroughly subjective – a position that may be commonly held, but is at odds with the pragmatist conception – he puts it in opposition to objective facts. Against this common misconception a counter-interpretation can be given: According to the experimental logic of inquiry, experience allows for the creation of criteria which make it possible to decide if a belief is supported by some kind of material evidence or not. And although it is impossible to subjectively experience the past event itself, this is not even necessary in order to have experiential access to it: The very existence of the past event in question as much as its relevant features (relevant in terms of the question asked about it) can be inferred from presently experienced events as signs. While this take on accessing the past remains implicit in Dewey’s Essays in Experimental Logic, it becomes very clear in the introduction to the second edition of Experience and Nature from 1929

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(which Lovejoy, admittedly, could not have known at the time). Here, Dewey gives the following example: A geologist living in 1928 tells us about events that happened not only before he was born but millions of years before any human being came into existence on this earth. He does so by starting from things that are now the material of experience. Lyell[13] revolutionized geology by perceiving that the sort of thing that can be experienced now in operations of fire, water, pressure, is the sort of thing by which the earth took on its present structural forms […]. The geologist did not leap from the thing he can see and touch to some event in by-gone ages; he collated this observed thing with many others, of different kinds, found all over the globe; the results of his comparison he then compared with data of other experiences, say the astronomer’s. He translates, that is, observed coexistences into non-observed, inferred sequences. Finally he dates his object, placing it in an order of events. By the same sort of method he predicts [!] that at certain places some things not yet experienced will be observed, and then he takes pains to bring them within the scope of experience. (Dewey 1958: 4a) 15 This prediction of observability is another expression for the future consequences which prove the truth of an idea about a past event, as Dewey already put it in another passage of the “Catechism.” 14 In contrast to the ambiguities of the latter text, which is composed as a rather dogmatic (though somewhat ironically intended) dialogue between a teacher and a student,15 the passage from Experience and Nature makes very clear that the kind of experiences Dewey is concerned with are not private or merely subjective ones, but public or intersubjective. It also shows that “the past” is by no means an inaccessible realm of transempiricals, as Lovejoy is convinced the pragmatist was compelled to hold. It is only Lovejoy himself who is bound to such a static conception of the past since his correspondence-theory affords a comparison of an idea about the past with the past “itself” and thus makes the whole matter a question of metaphysical realism.16 As the example of the geologist – which vividly depicts the decisive trait of the pragmatist’s take on knowledge – shows, however, the issue at stake relates to methodological principles of inquiry, i.e. about the epistemic techniques applied to a certain problem, rather than notions of abstract realism. These techniques do not simply presuppose the reality of past things as static comparable parameters “out there,” they rather try to find out what can be conceived as real in the first place by compiling evidence and making inferences from it. In any inquiry of the past, and especially in historical inquiry, the reality of a past event is first of all an assumption that needs proof: Either the inquirer is already sure that something did happen (be it ten or a million years ago) and tries to find out what exactly it was and how it happened; or the inquirer asks whether an assumed event happened at all, and if not, what happened instead.

16 Now this instrumentalistic conception of a pragmatist theory of knowledge, which in fact can account for knowledge of the past, is free from any concession to “radical empiricism” and thus meets this crucial demand of Lovejoy’s critique – while refuting his allegation concerning “the pragmatist’s unwillingness to classify retrospection as true knowledge” (Lovejoy 1920: 65). Although Lovejoy’s call for a general “rectification” of pragmatism and the respective theory of knowledge points in the wrong direction, he nevertheless brought to the fore the underlying question which is still left open: If knowledge is essentially anticipatory, how can the past be anticipated? Although my interpretation of Dewey’s example from Experience and Nature seeks to steer the course of Dewey’s theory into this direction, Lovejoy is surely right that “the time-distinctions

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pertinent to this inquiry” (Lovejoy 1920: 79) are not yet made precise. He is also right that Dewey’s tendency to produce ambiguities in his writings which make it difficult – though not impossible – to reconstruct his theory of knowledge, especially without concessions to “.” Therefore, I will now turn to the most elaborate theory of knowledge provided by an adherent of the pragmatist tradition, a theory which is unambiguously opposed to the attitude of radical empiricism and at the same time acutely aware of the consequences of an anticipatory concept of knowledge. This theory has been provided by C. I. Lewis in terms of his “conceptual pragmatism.”

II. A Response by C. I. Lewis

17 On the occasion of a meeting of the American Philosophical Association in in 1929 Clarence Irving Lewis, who had recently published Mind and the World Order, looked back on the development of pragmatism and tried to place it within current thought. Without mentioning the name of Arthur O. Lovejoy, the infamous intervention of the “Thirteen Pragmatisms” serves Lewis as the starting point for his reflection: “That there should be thirteen distinguishable pragmatisms, however, is not a peculiarity: these could be set alongside the thirty-seven and fifty-one realisms” (Lewis 1970a: 78). He adds that “William James is reported to have said that he was pleased to find that pragmatism had this wealth of meaning; he accepted all thirteen. In any case, such variety merely marks the fact that pragmatism is a movement, not a system” (Lewis 1970a: 78). This movement, however, is not completely without a common denominator, although it cannot be fixed in a single claim: “Pragmatism is, as James indicated, not a doctrine but a method” (Lewis 1970a: 79), and the condensed principle of this method is the pragmatic test of significance, which refers to the difference a notion makes in terms of the pragmatic effects it bears (or does not bear).

18 While Lewis is stealing the thunder of Lovejoy’s attacks and defends the idea of pragmatism as a method, it becomes clear from his talk (which was published in the Journal of Philosophy in 1930) that his own adherence to pragmatism is, however, not without reservations. These concern the “highly subjectivistic theory of knowledge as immediate” (Lewis 1970a: 81) one might arrive at, if the emphasis on the directly empirical receives too much weight. Lewis, in contrast, stresses the meaning of a functional theory of knowledge, which analyzes the use of concepts as the basic instruments of thinking – while leaving out the immediate altogether. “We must all be pragmatists,” Lewis declares his conviction, “but pragmatists in the end, not in the beginning” (Lewis 1929: 267). 19 In this sense Lewis is taking up Lovejoy’s demand for a pragmatism without radical empiricism. But in contrast to Lovejoy, Lewis also elaborates a positive vision of pragmatism as “conceptual pragmatism” which he presents as the Outline of a Theory of Knowledge (this is the subtitle of Mind and the World Order). This book presents a very unorthodox reading of and contribution to the pragmatist tradition since it does not only emphasizes the importance of conceptual interpretation, but also dares to reanimate the a priori as an indispensable element of knowledge. He thereby suggests a constructive way of dealing with topics which were usually attributed to idealism by giving them a pragmatic twist. Lewis holds, in short, that knowledge consists of two functional elements, the empirical and the a priori, of which only the a priori element

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is truly pragmatic. Before experience can even begin to be intelligible, it needs criteria (definitions, principles) supplied by deep-lying attitudes of thinking to interpret given presentations. These criteria determine “reality” which in Lewis’ theory translates as “experience categorized” (Lewis 1929: 365). Consequently, these criteria of categorization are not derived from, but applied to concrete experience, giving some kind of order to it. Lewis does not claim that the a priori element in knowledge comes from above; on the contrary, he holds that the human mind determines the categories it uses relative to its purposes. The intension or intrinsic meaning of categories is stable, they are “absolute” as Lewis likes to put it in a certain idealist vocabulary,17 but they are constantly tested in application. If they do not serve the mind’s purposes of making the empirical intelligible, they are discarded and replaced by others. Categories are restrictive, but their own boundaries in application are set by the “qualia of the given” (Lewis 1929: 157).18 Thus the choice of categories – which is also contingent upon historical change as regards the actual set of accessible and plausible categories19 – is the fundamentally pragmatic aspect of knowledge. And every pragmatic choice of a certain category, i.e. every conceptual interpretation of something that is presented to the mind as given, implies a hypothesis about the anticipated outcome of its application. 20 As Lewis is very much aware, a theory which is based on an anticipatory concept of knowledge must also explain how it can account for knowledge of the past: It is a frequent criticism of the type of theory here outlined that it cannot account for our knowledge of the past. Knowledge, it is said, is here identified with verification, and verification comes about by some proceeding from the present into the future. Thus the past, so far as it can be known, is transformed into something present and future, and we are presented with the alternatives, equally possible, that the past cannot be known or that it really is not past. (Lewis 1929: 149) 21 Although Lovejoy’s name is again not explicitly mentioned, it is reasonable to assume that he is the author (or at least one of the authors) of the criticism Lewis rephrases here. Lewis seems to repeat the conclusion of Lovejoy’s paper from 1920 as he admits that a complete answer to this criticism would require a metaphysical analysis of temporal categories. Instead of such a “complete” answer, Lewis presents several of considerations that serve as an epistemologically sufficient response. The initial consideration holds that to have knowledge of the past at all does not require to know everything that can possibly be known about the past: “If, then, we assert that, from the point of view of knowledge, the past is so and so, this is not to deny to the past various types of significance not included in such an epistemological account” (Lewis 1929: 150). Lewis starts with the simple fact that the past, or aspects of it, are in general verifiable – because “there could not be any item of the past which is intrinsically unverifiable.” This verification can only happen in the present or future. It does not follow, however, that the past itself was thereby transformed into something present or future, as the critics – like Lovejoy – seem to suggest. It only means the assignment of a temporal locus to an object or event which is known by means of its effects. In Lewis’ words: “The assumption that the past is intrinsically verifiable means that at any date after the happening of the event, there is always something, which at least is conceivably possible of experience, by means of which it can be known” (Lewis 1929: 151). Lewis calls this “something” the effects of the past event which endure after it has ceased to exist, and states that the “totality of such effects quite obviously constitute[s] all of the object that is knowable” (Lewis 1929: 151). My reading of Lewis’ rather short

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remarks about these effects is that the way in which they represent the past object must be conceived as a material extension which is literally identified with the past object. To say the effect is identified with the past event does not mean it was identical with it – for the event and its extension are not simply the same. A finger print or a sample of DNA are not identical with the person who left it, still, the person and the print or sample are mutually identified: the one makes the other identifiable. Likewise, the fragments of a Roman temple are not strictly identical with the corresponding religion or the totality of the bygone Roman civilization, but, as the concrete parts of the whole, they are identifiable with reference to this religion and thus identify the very civilization which once settled here. Lewis’ own way to make this point “that the event is spread throughout all after time” makes use of a comparison with modern physics where it is said that “the field of an electronic charge is spread through all space and that this field is the electron” (Lewis 1929: 151-2). Accordingly, what cognition apprehends in the enduring effects of a past event “and what historical knowledge proceeds to verify, is a part of its [i.e. the past event’s] nature” (Lewis 1929: 152).

22 I read the predication expressed by “is” (as in “this field is the electron”) and Lewis’ reference to the “nature” of the event as a logical “is” and a functional “nature.” Although the identity of present effects and past event means a material identity (instead of a formal, ultimately arbitrary representation), this identity is differential or partial: The effect does not exhaust the event, but it means the event since it belongs to it as one of its parts and thus concretely presents it. I regard this relation of effects and past events as a logical inseparable relation. Just like the present light of a collapsed star is logically inseparable from this very star which ceased to exist, a book written in a “dead” language is inseparable from the culture in which this language was a vital means of communication. Of course, taken merely as light or simply as a bulk of paper the meanings of these phenomena cannot be understood as the effects of something; but the moment they are comprehended as such evident effects of events that are temporally prior to them, they also become logically bound to these events. In other words, although the book can be seen in abstraction from being a leftover, its status as an effect strictly implies20 the bygone linguistic system it presents. Obviously, the reverse does not follow: The bygone linguistic system does not imply this specific materialization of it; but it does imply that there must be some materialized expressions – just like the book found in some archive or the carved stone found in an archeological excavation. 23 The assumption about the logical inseparability of present effects and past events, which I find in Lewis, prevents his theory of knowledge from transforming the object “into some incognizable ding an sich” (Lewis 1929: 151). Furthermore, it sets the boundaries which condition the possibilities of knowledge of the past. As already quoted above, “[t]he totality of such effects quite obviously constitute[s] all of the object that is knowable” (Lewis 1929: 151), which means that if all effects have been detected, no further knowledge is possible than that which can be gained from these effects. But if more effects occur, there is more to be known. It is of course hard to say when exactly the point of exhaustion is met, therefore a “for the time being” clause is usually advisable. But in many cases it is easy to see that there is a limited number of detectible effects, for instance if there is only one document in a certain language no one speaks anymore, or if wide portions of a collection were destroyed so as to restrict

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the respective research and possible knowledge about it to only a few relicts. In any case, it is not necessary to actually exhaust “all of the object that is knowable” in order to have true knowledge of a past event21 since partial knowledge already is knowledge. Furthermore, relevant knowledge – relevant in terms of an answer to a specific question asked about the object – is partial by definition, because not everything that is knowable, but only certain aspects of it, can contribute to the purpose of answering a given question. 24 Recognizing that past events “are knowable ‘after they occur’ because their appearances or effects are ‘there’ at a later date to be experienced” (Lewis 1929: 152) stops short of explaining how these effects of the past are identified in the first place. Lewis concedes that his account would have to reveal “by analysis of experience, those peculiar characteristics by which the pastness of a thing is presently identified” (Lewis 1929: 153), but confines himself to the statement of principles, which is perfectly apt for an epistemological outline. On this in principle level it is sufficiently clear that knowledge of the past, attained by means of present effects, includes the knowledge that the object known is itself in the past. In other words, it is “known through a correct interpretation of something given, including certain given characters which are the marks of pastness” (Lewis 1929: 153). To treat something as a characteristic of pastness is an assumption made in the course of inquiry and, as always, to be verified by the anticipated proof of further experience. 25 Consequently, knowledge about the past is first and foremost the knowledge of something as being a sign or characteristic of the past – which means that the basic cognitive function in this respect is the assignment of a temporal locus from the point of view of a present situation.22 Within that situation the characteristics of the past are by no means “transempirical,” but concretely present and experienced. For Lewis the past is everything but the abstract sum of the strictly bygone; it is precisely what has left all those traces behind which can now be taken as the starting point and evidence for asking questions about the “nature” of this very past. Based on these traces (or marks of pastness, as Lewis says) there is no mystery in claiming that the past can be and must be anticipated – not as something to happen, but as something to be known. Accordingly, if retrospection shall be used as a name for justified knowledge of the past, as Lovejoy promoted, it cannot mean an unqualified attempt to “look back,” but rather the process of hypothesizing: making well-grounded assumptions and using the evidence at hand to inferentially prove these right or wrong, always aiming at further proof and always ready for revision. In short, if retrospection means knowledge (and not just contemplation) it is really anticipation. 26 To sum up the major insights about knowledge of the past to be drawn from Lewis’ theory: The past is extending into the present23 by means of its enduring effects which are identifiable by certain marks of pastness (while leaving open how these marks are identified concretely). The past can be known by using these material extensions as evidence for assumptions which await future corrections or proof. Since Lewis left open the more concrete conditions of the process in which knowledge of the past is gained, I will now turn to Edgar Wind’s contribution on history as inquiry. Wind not only complements Lewis’ epistemological achievement, but also draws some resolute consequences concerning the interdependent relationship between the past as extending into the present and the past as something to be reconstructed by intruding

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into it. These consequences concern especially the difference a past situation will make in the future.

III. Edgar Wind on Historical Inquiry: Intruding into the Past (and its Future)

27 What, then, are the specific features of the knowledge-experience that is attained in historical inquiry? According to Edgar Wind, the general way in which knowledge is gained in the modes of history and natural science is indeed the same. And this holds not only in principle, but to a certain extend even in practice; it only differs in terms of the material items used as tools in the process of inquiry.

28 Wind, born in Berlin in 1900, was a gifted scholar who started his academic career as a philosopher and later became an art historian in the Warburgian style of Kulturwissenschaft (and the first to become professor of art history at the University of Oxford). After receiving his PhD from Hamburg University, where he studied with Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky, Wind moved to the United States where he spent four years (between 1924 and 1928) working as a teacher in New York and as a lecturer of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.24 During this time, he became closely acquainted with the American philosophical scene of the 1920s and especially with the pragmatist tradition. He was strongly impressed by the writings of Charles S. Peirce which were just made available by Morris R. Cohen’s famous edition Chance, Love, and Logic from 1923. Peirce’s essay on “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” became something of a model for Wind’s book about Experiment and Metaphysics,25 which he wrote after returning to Hamburg. In 1926 Wind attended the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy at Harvard University where he presented a paper which set out the principles presented in his later book. Among the many renowned philosophers who attended this congress (including Dewey, Whitehead, Weyl, Hartmann, Lévy-Bruhl, Croce and many more) were also Lovejoy and Lewis, although the latter did not give a presentation at the congress.26 Lovejoy spoke about “The Meaning of ‘Emergence’ and its Modes” (1927) in a session on emergent evolution to which Wind later refers in his own discussion of constancy and emergency.27 However, it is not clear to what extent Wind engaged with Lovejoy’s work28 and if he took any notice of Lovejoy’s earlier criticism of the pragmatist theory of knowledge. By contrast, the influence of Lewis is more evident since Wind directly refers to Lewis’ paper on “The Pragmatic Element in Knowledge” (1970c), which is an earlier version of a central chapter of Mind and the World Order.29 John Michael Krois even goes so far as to claim that Lewis’ thoughts on the historically changing pragmatic conditions of a priori concepts ultimately led Wind to revise the kind of Kantianism30 that was so very strong in his home country and especially among his teachers. 29 Be that as it may, Wind tries to combine the pragmatic ideas he gained during his early years in America with the basic insights of the as developed by his teacher Ernst Cassirer and relates these ideas to the problem of how history and cultural inquiry generate knowledge. In a paper which was included in a collection of essays presented to Cassirer at the occasion of his 60th birthday, Wind explored “Some Points of Contact between History and Natural Science” (1936). Although this paper presents a brief outline of a potentially path-breaking account on the philosophy of inquiry, which entails a bridging of the needless gap between “science” and

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“humanities,” it had – like all of Wind’s philosophical writings – almost no impact on the philosophical, historiographical, and scientific community.31 30 Objecting to the common separation of “science” and “humanities” (or “Naturwissenschaft“ and “Geisteswissenschaft”), Wind argues that both fields of inquiry entail the same mode of using epistemic instruments. The basic suggestion of Wind’s position consists in the functional equation of two kinds of investigational tools, namely scientific instruments and historical documents, which are themselves part of the very matter they are “measuring.” An instrument of experimental investigations into a certain sphere of the physical world, say of temperature, must itself participate in this very sphere of the physical world: it must be a physical thing which is sensitive to changes in temperature in order to be able to continuously react to such changes and be able to represent these on a scale.32 Likewise, the documents which are the means of historical investigations must themselves be parts of the historical world and the particular historical situation they are representing. For example, the Rosetta Stone is a presently existing physical thing that embodies a practice of translation it was once part of and thus allows for the investigation of historic encounters of Greek and Egypt ancient cultures. 31 Thus the process of inquiry, not only in history but also in natural science(s),33 is unavoidably circular: one must already presuppose the historical or physical situation which is investigated in order to recognize some material thing to be a part of that situation. Once such a thing has been recognized, it can be used to understand the very situation which was already presupposed. This kind of circularity – which Wind describes in detail for the experimental sciences in his outstanding book on Experiment and Metaphysics34 – is not “vicious,” meaning a mere logical mistake, but the unavoidable condition of every kind of (scientific) inquiry as conducted by the ever limited, but ever extendable human understanding. In other words, inquiry never starts from scratch, but on the grounds of what we already know, assume and presuppose. The claim to knowledge, which remains essential to the practice of inquiry, is secured by treating not only the explicit assumptions of a given research project, but virtually every supposition implied in the process as a system of hypotheses. The idea of hypothesis has to be taken very seriously in terms of testable, decidable assumptions – unlike neutral or indifferent propositions, which are not decidable, but simply die off over time.35 (This is precisely the passage where Wind, though mainly discussing Poincaré, directly refers to the aforementioned paper by C. I. Lewis.) 32 The functional equivalence of documents and instruments does not mean that there are no significant differences – though these differences, as Wind’s paper makes very clear, are gradual, not essential. One significant difference, which is of particular interest here, concerns those aspects Lewis calls the marks of pastness. Unlike the purely technical instruments of natural inquiry, the historical documents Wind has in mind necessarily show such marks of pastness: In order to “be” historical documents they first have to be recognized as participating in a past reality, a past state of human affairs. Before the Rosetta Stone is understood as documenting a remote trilingual cultural encounter, it is a mere stone; but it becomes a document as soon as some scholar recognizes that the unusual grooves on its surface display a script, even different scripts arranged in parallel order. The scholar is able to know that because s/ he already knows something about script, something about the place, where the stone was found, and especially something about the history of ancient Egypt and Greece. But

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furthermore, as soon as s/he uses the Rosetta Stone as a means for finally translating hieroglyphs (which s/he was until now unable to decipher) into Greek letters (which s/ he already knew), this document is used as a powerful instrument of knowledge of the past. 33 In order to have a definition it can be stated, first, that all documents, if used in inquiry, are instruments; and second, that they are instruments of a specific kind, carrying the marks of pastness. But while all documents are (potential) instruments, the reverse does not follow. If a drilling machine that is used as an instrument in geological research is taken as a purely technical instrument for the extraction of a sample of sediments deep in the soil, it is not itself documenting anything about the past of the planet. However, the sample extracted by use of the drilling machine is clearly a document, a material extension and representation of the past and thus a (non-technical) epistemic instrument of knowledge of the earth’s past (as well as of the subsequent present condition of the planet). In any case, the decision whether a thing is an instrument of the technical or of the documentary kind is a decision that is made in the practical use of the respective item. Even the drilling machine can become a document if it is treated as representing a certain stage in the history of engineering and of drilling in particular, or in the history of invasive methods in experimental geology (in contrast to methods of computer simulation, for instance). In other words, “instrument” is the generic term which encompasses the specific terms of technical instruments and documents. When it comes to practical decisions in the process of inquiry these different kinds of instruments are not only equivalent, they are interrelated and enhance each other: Technical instruments help identify and obtain documents that might themselves become “technical” devices (like the Rosetta Stone becomes a medium of translation), whereas the technical instruments might in turn become documents of past technologies. 34 Now the most striking aspect of Wind’s essay becomes apparent as he asserts that “[t]he investigator intrudes into the process that he is investigating” (Wind 1936: 258). He further explains this statement as follows: This intrusion, of which every investigator must be guilty if he wishes to make any sort of contact with his material and to test the rules of his procedure, is a thoroughly real event. A set of instruments is being inserted, and the given constellation is thereby disturbed. The physicist disturbs the atoms whose composition he wants to study. The historian disturbs the sleep of the document that he drags forth from a dusty archive. This word ‘disturbance’ is not to be taken as a metaphor, but is meant literally […]. To the historian it might, indeed, sound like a metaphor if he is told that the document is disturbed by him. For involuntarily he pictures it as a material piece of paper, which does not mind whether it is lying in a cupboard or on a table. However, if we look upon it as an historical object, and consider its present status –viz. how it has been discarded and forgotten – as part of the historic process itself, then this process is indeed ‘disturbed’ by him who brings the forgotten words back to memory. (Wind 1936: 261) 35 Using the example of an unpleasant disclosure of some hero’s weakness (looking on recent philosophical discussions one may think of the case of Heidegger here36), Wind makes clear that by disturbance he means “a factual alteration of our belief” and that “no historical inquiry is ever undertaken without the intention of creating such a disturbance” (Wind 1936: 262). So the purpose of historical inquiry is to disturb an historical situation in order to find out how this situation is like and how it has

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changed now that it is disturbed. This kind of disturbance is analogous to the methods of experimental physics where atoms and quanta are disturbed in order to reveal their nature, and where measurement necessarily means modification.37 In this sense, a discovery is nothing but the reaction of the studied object to what is implemented into it by the investigator.38 From this invasive (or simply experimental) concept of historical inquiry it follows that the past is neither “dead and gone,” but instrumentally accessible, nor “blankly there,” but needs to be disturbed in order to reveal what is there to be known about it. Both happens by means of the embodiments of a past situation (which are, as I like to put it, the material extensions of the past into the present) which serve as evidence for future findings about it. To say that the past extends and is thus accessible and real, and to say at the same time that it is not immediately given, but needs to be disclosed trough documents, amounts to a position – namely Wind’s position – which bridges the gap between “instrumentalism” and “realism.” Although these two “isms” are usually taken as counterparts in philosophical discourse, it must be acknowledged that they are deeply and necessarily intertwined. To paraphrase Wind’s suggestion: The reality of the past, which is embodied in a document, is the (metaphysical) precondition for the instrumental status of this very document.

36 The consequences from all this for the anticipation of the past can be summarized in the following three interrelated aspects: • Hypothesis and proof. To deploy a hypothesis about a past event is to anticipate the outcome of its proof. In other words, this means the anticipation of our future knowledge about the past and its impact on subsequent action. With Wind’s paper it becomes clear how this knowledge is attained: It is developed from what the inquirer already knows and what s/he for this reason assumes in a methodically justifiable manner, which means to introduce a hypothesis into the circle of inquiry in order to change what s/he already knows. Since the methodical justifiability relies on the documents as pars pro toto and evidence of the past, the hypothesis – the question whether the assumption is correct – is invested into these documents as epistemic instruments. • Anticipating the present as becoming past. If there are extensions of the past into the present, it is also clear that the present will extend into the future and will thus become past. To treat the present by anticipating its future pastness is to take the historical standpoint towards the present. This loop of the self-reflective circle is not explicitly discussed in Wind’s paper, but it is an obvious consequence of his argument: Anticipating the future discovery of a present situation means to reckon not only with its enduring consequences, but also with its disturbance and re-evaluation in the light of the now unapparent evidence, which will survive. One might regard this as a specifically ethical implication of anticipating the (present as) past,39 but it also articulates an epistemological insight: In contrast to the idea that the past was widely inaccessible, because it is gone, this perspective makes clear that the present will first be understood as soon as it is ceases to be present, i.e. as soon as one can take distance towards it, which is a precondition for knowledge altogether.40 • Anticipating the transformation of ourselves. Wind’s position not only bridges the assumed gap between natural science and history, showing that the latter is as much a science as the former, both equally entangled in hermeneutic circles; he also aims at linking the theory of knowledge, as derived from these modes of inquiry, to the problem of cultural self-reflection and the self-transformation of human kind.41 This truly pragmatist attitude is supported by his claim that historical inquiry is always guided by the intention to disturb. Historical inquiry is in other words driven by the anticipation of the effects its discoveries will have on

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the conduct of social life, as it intrudes into the self-conception of a social group. It not only reckons with the past to be a different past in the future, it also anticipates that as the past changes, “we” change (whereas “we” means simply those who are affected by it). For example: As soon as we find out about the influence some anti-democratic forces had on the very democratic constitution we are the heirs and adherents of, this changes our position within such a legacy and we suddenly become different democrats. However, these changes may not always come up as a shock with immediate dramatic consequences, they may also appear as rather slight alterations – still they are changes caused by inquiring the past.

37 Finally, the paradox of the claim that the past is anticipated vanishes completely as soon as this claim is supported by what Wind calls the configural progression of time. Wind articulates this concept42 mainly in negative terms as opposed to the dominant idea of linear progression according to which time is regarded as a continuous, mechanical unfolding of strictly consecutive stages. Positively defined, configural progression means the constant reshaping of relations in time and accounts for possibly overlapping sequences (instead of discrete stages). It thus allows us to conceive of time structures which are internal to the phenomena of a given investigation, be it in history or modern physics, and gives a “sense for periodicity”43 which is omitted in the externalist concept of linear time. A concept like this is necessary in order to account for the emergent symbolic interrelations of historical (as well as physical) events, and also for the specific conditions under which a past meaning or figuration “survives”44 and is transformed in and through cultural changes and the intrusions of investigators. A linear concept, based on the idea of causal “chains,” is simply unfit for this task. This is precisely what Lovejoy did not see in his criticism of the anticipatory concept of knowledge which was ultimately based on the linear understanding, thus committing what can be called the fallacy of linear time progression.45

38 Wind’s concept of the configural progression of time comprises his understanding of the vibrant debate on “emergence” following Samuel Alexander’s and C. Lloyd Morgan’s (and later also Whitehead’s) engagements into this subject-matter, and which was discussed by Lovejoy in the aforementioned talk at the congress in 1926.46 The reference to emergence is crucial for the configural concept because it opens the path for an understanding of how certain past, present and future events enter into configurations which create meaning and have consequences – not because they strictly follow (from) each other, but because they affect each other and thus create a specific new situation. It also introduces (epistemic) chance and (ethical) freedom, “diversity of alternatives” and “the recognition of different degrees of reliance” in acting,47 or simply contingency as undeniable factors of progression. 39 Thus, the configural concept of time makes conceivable the many ways in which past, present, and future are closely intertwined instead of being mere successions of time fractions. Based on this concept, historical inquiry appears to be concerned with the consequences which emerge from disturbing a past event and from bringing it into new epistemic constellations. In this way it is recognized that different consequences of a past event make it a different kind of event, which means that the past will on the whole not stay the same. Anticipation is a prerequisite of establishing the difference the past will make in the future.

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MEYER M., (1908), “The Exact Number of Pragmatisms,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 5/12, 321-6.

MONTAGUE W. P., (1909), “May a Realist be a Pragmatist?,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 6/17, 460-63 (I.); 6/18, 485-90 (II.); 6/20, 543-48 (III.); 6/21, 561-71 (IV.).

RYDENFELT H., (2009), “The Meaning of Pragmatism: James on the Practical Consequences of Belief,” Cognitio, 10/1 (São Paulo), 81-9.

VAN FRAASSEN B. C., (2008), Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

WIND E., (1927), “Experiment and Metaphysics,” in Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, edited by E. S. Brightman, New York, Longmans, 217-24.

WIND E., (1932/33), “Grundbegriffe der Geschichte und Kulturphilosophie,” typescript of lectures held at Hamburg University, in Edgar Wind Papers, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS. Wind 154, folder 2.

WIND E., (1936), “Some Points of Contact between History and Natural Science,” in Philosophy and History. Essays presented to Ernst Cassirer, edited by R. Klibansky & H. J. Paton, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 255-64.

WIND E., (2000), Das Experiment und die Metaphysik. Zur Auflösung der kosmologischen Antinomien, edited and with a postface by B. Buschendorf, introduced by B. Falkenburg, Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp (first published in 1934).

WIND E., (2001), Experiment and Metaphysics. Towards a Resolution of the Cosmological Antinomies, translated by C. Edwards, introduced by M. Rampley, Oxford, Legenda (European Humanities Research Center).

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NOTES

1. Cf. Lovejoy 1924; in fn. 1 Lovejoy summarizes the preceding papers which constitute the debate. 2. Cf. Rydenfelt 2009, who defends James against Lovejoy’s reproaches. 3. This bold attempt did of course not remain uncontested. Explicit reactions appeared immediately, be it in the form of a counter attack, as for example in a paper by Max Meyer (1908), or by accepting the challenge for an analysis of the evolution of pragmatism, like in A. C. Armstrong’s paper on the matter (1908) – or both at the same time as in J. E. Boodin (1909). Lovejoy’s controversial criticism of pragmatism also flowed into another debate, which concerned the relation of pragmatism and realism. This debate was initiated by a series of papers under the titular question “May a Realist be a Pragmatist?” by William P. Montague – a prominent advocate of the “new realism” – which were published in The Journal of Philosophy in 1909. 4. It was published as a chapter in a book entitled Essays in Critical Realism. A Co-operative Study of the Problem of Knowledge. The treatises included in this volume document the cooperative project of a group of renowned American philosophers (namely Durant Drake, James Bissett Pratt, Arthur K. Rogers, , Roy Wood Sellars, C. A. Strong and Lovejoy), who aimed at launching a “critical” (though non-Kantian) period of realism in the United States, reacting to an earlier volume by the “new realists” (Holt et al. 1912). 5. Lovejoy seems to construct a space of philosophical doctrines, in which the polar distinction of monistic and dualistic positions intersects vertically with the distinction of realistic and idealistic doctrines. 6. Cf. Lovejoy (1920: 51-3). 7. Cf. Lovejoy (1920: 53). 8. In his quotation of this passage from Dewey, Lovejoy fails to give quotation marks Dewey puts around the word “categories,” thus indicating that he is using the term rather as a metaphor. 9. Although Lovejoy later introduced his “analytic” method of the history of ideas, which treats ideas as distinct units, which are (re-) combined with each other in the course of history, even this method does not work on the grounds of a past, which is “blankly there,” but one which has to be reconstructed and interpreted; a past, in which ideas, even as units, have contexts in various fields of connections, uses, and connotations. So fortunately Lovejoy at least practically discards this pseudo-realist notion of the past. 10. ’s The Metaphysics of Pragmatism gives a clear account of pragmatism as instrumentalism, drawing from Peirce and Dewey, while rejecting James’ (and F. C. S. Schiller’s) views. Cf. Hook (1927: esp. 9). 11. Quoted in Lovejoy (1920: 66). 12. Cf. Dewey (1910: 160-1). 13. Charles Lyell (1797-1875), British geologist, author of Principles of Geology (1830-33). 14. Cf. Dewey (1910: 162); and Lovejoy (1920: 68). 15. The “Catechism” even includes a very infelicitous remark on “the personal milk” the pragmatist had spilled “in the absolutist’s cocoanut” which cannot avoid supporting Lovejoy’s complaint about the “subjectivistic strain.” See, Dewey (1910: 168). 16. He also tries to make the problem about the decision between monism and dualism – which is what Dewey takes up in response to Lovejoy, cf. Dewey 1922. 17. Cf. for example Lewis (1929: 167). 18. Lewis is famous for introducing the term “qualia” which, however, can already be found in Peirce. 19. Cf. Lewis (1929: 271-2).

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20. The theorem or system of strict implication was established by Lewis in his Survey of Symbolic Logic (1918). Given the complexity of Lewis’ formal analysis of strict implication my reference to it is rather superficial. I am using the term in the general sense that it is impossible that p (the effect) and not q (the event). 21. Such a claim to exclusive truth is an exaggeration of a certain kind of idealist epistemology, cf. Lewis (1929: 150). 22. Cf. Lewis (1929: 151). 23. By this phrase I am alluding to Nicolai Hartmann who uses the term “Hineinragen.” Cf. Hartmann (1949: esp. 546). Although Hartmann’s account would be very useful in this context, it will have to be discussed elsewhere. 24. Wind spent another extended period of his life in the USA as he became professor of art and philosophy first at the University of Chicago (1942-1944) and then at Smiths College in Northampton (1944-1955) before moving to Oxford. 25. Cf. Wind (2001: 6). 26. The attendance of Lewis, who at the time was a professor at Harvard, is asserted by Krois (2011: 11). 27. Cf. Wind (2001: 113, fn. 89). 28. Although this is strongly suggested by Buschendorf (2000: 298-9). 29. Cf. Wind (2001: 32). 30. Cf. Krois (2011: 11-2). Krois assumes that Wind already knew Lewis’ paper “A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori” from 1923 (1970b) – which is indeed quite likely. 31. Surprisingly, acknowledges the merits of Wind’s argument in a footnote of her paper on “The Modern Concept of History” from 1958, where she remarks: “It seems strange that so fundamental and obvious an argument [like Wind’s] should have played no role in the subsequent methodological and other discussions of historical science” Arendt (1958: 590). Many thanks to Sascha Freyberg for calling my attention to this passage. 32. For a contemporary account on the complex history and logic of the thermometer cf. van Fraassen (2008: 115-39, esp. 125-30), where van Fraassen gives his interpretation of Mach’s account. 33. For some reason Wind uses the singular, natural science, perhaps in order to rhetorically stage the presumed contrast between historical and “scientific” investigation. 34. After this book got Wind his Habilitation at the University of Hamburg under Ernst Cassirer and Ernst Panofsky in 1929, it was first published in 1934. Being neglected over many decades, it only reappeared in 2000 and was published in an English translation in 2001. 35. Cf. Wind (2001: 31-3). 36. Wind expressed his own criticism on the Heideggerian legacy in a polemic piece entitled “Jean-Paul Sartre, A French Heidegger,” which is included as an appendix in Bredekamp 1998. 37. Cf. Wind (1936: 261-2). 38. This principal of , which applies to natural science and history alike, Wind puts as follows: “[I]n a competition between science and history, the historians would be sure to score one point: in dealing with their symbols, they have long realized, what the physicist, dazzled by the polished appearance of their equations, have only recently noticed; namely, that every discovery regarding the objects of their inquiry reacts on the construction of their implements; just as every alteration of the implements makes possible new discovery” (Wind 1936: 262). 39. By coincidence, Jürgen Habermas recently emphasized the importance of taking the future historians view on current developments, while reflecting (mostly) on the Brexit vote in an interview on Die Zeit (Nr. 29/2016, 7. Juli 2016): “Of course, it’s only with hindsight that you learn there could have been another way. But before throwing away an alternative before it’s even been attempted one ought to try and imagine our current situation as the past present for a

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future historian.” The quotation is taken from the English translation (by David Gow, with the author’s approval), which is on: [socialeurope.eu/2016/07/core-europe-to-the-rescue/]. 40. Arthur C. Danto has argued for a similar position, cf. Danto (2007: esp. 342-63). 41. Cf. Wind (1936: 263-4). 42. Cf. Wind (2001: 97-115), as well as the typescript of his last lectures in Hamburg on the foundational concepts of history and the philosophy of culture from 1932/33 which is stored in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (MS. Wind 154, folder 2). A widely convincing interpretation of Wind’s configural concept with extensive quotations from the lecture-typescript is presented by Buschendorf (2000: 295-301). 43. “Konfig[uraler] Zeitbegriff gibt [ein] Gefühl für Periodizität.” 44. This concerns what in the Warburgian tradition – of which Wind became one of the prominent proponents – is called “Nachleben.” For a reference to Warburg in the context of configural time cf. Wind (1932/33: 18). 45. Wind considers the linear concept only as an impossible limit case of configural time, as a certain kind of ideal configuration. Cf. Wind (2001: 104-5). 46. From a Windian perspective Lovejoy’s acknowledgment of emergence (and the useful distinctions he made within that concept) should lead him towards a configural understanding – which he did not (yet) have when criticizing the anticipatory concept of knowledge. 47. “Die histor[ische] Geschichte sieht Vielfältigkeit der Alternativen. […] Labilität also führt zur Anerkennung dieser versch[iedenen] Grade der Verbindlichkeit” (Wind 1932/33: 27).

ABSTRACTS

In this paper I argue that, from a pragmatist point of view, to know the past means to anticipate it. Accordingly, historical inquiry is directed towards the future, namely the future of the past as known. I develop this argument in three steps: (I.) Starting with A. O. Lovejoy’s criticism of Dewey’s anticipatory theory of knowledge I defend the basic claim that all knowledge, including knowledge of the past, is anticipatory (i.e. directed at future consequences). Lovejoy’s criticism shows that Dewey’s statements invite misunderstandings, which have to be removed. (II.) I then turn to C. I. Lewis’ enhanced outline of a pragmatist theory of knowledge. Lewis provides epistemological arguments regarding the structural features of knowledge of the past and argues knowledge that is gained by the past’s present effects. (III.) Finally, I turn to a notable essay by E. Wind in which he stresses the intrusive and future-oriented character of historical inquiry: Documents are used as instruments for intruding into the past, asking how the past will be understood in the light of new or reconsidered evidence. This process involves anticipating the effects that a different past will have on those affected by the history in question.

AUTHOR

STEFAN NIKLAS

University of Oxford / Universität zu Köln mail[at]stefanniklas.de

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History and Social Progress Reflections on Mead’s Approach to History

Daniel R. Huebner

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Portions of this paper were first presented at a conference on “Pragmatism and Sociology” at the University of Chicago, August 2015. I wish to thank the organizers and participants of that conference for fruitful discussions that have benefited the present paper.

1 is familiar to many sociologists and social psychologists for his theory of the social genesis and development of the self, but he almost never features in discussions of history or the philosophy of history. Yet Mead took the problems of conceptualizing and studying history seriously and consistently wrote with problems of history in mind. In this paper, I seek to demonstrate not only that George Mead wrote substantively on historical issues, but also that his long-ignored conceptualization has wide-reaching implications for how we study history. The key lies in identifying the connections between his understanding of the nature of the past and how to understand it, on the one hand, and his broader , on the other. The paper is not intended as a comprehensive restatement of Mead’s work on history, but is rather an attempt to explore some of the possibilities that Mead’s approach opens in light of the other aspects of Mead’s philosophy and in response to possible criticisms. I hope to show that the implications of Mead’s approach warrant greater scrutiny, not just from those interested in Mead or classical American pragmatism, but from researchers in any disciplines that employ historical research, because Mead’s work explores the nature of the relationship between history and social progress. The paper begins with a discussion of the major sources for Mead’s understanding of history and temporality and a review of literature that has interpreted and built upon Mead’s work on history, which I hope will be useful to scholars who find Mead’s approach worth pursuing. Special emphasis is placed on the productivity of social scientific interpretations of Mead’s philosophy as a unique theory of action and on the

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recent renewed focus on Mead’s approach to history. This review provides an overview of the major features of Mead’s approach as they have typically been understood and provides orientation for the proposals made in later sections. Following this review, I consider potential criticisms or shortcomings of Mead’s approach – as overly presentist or historicist – and show how recourse to other aspects of Mead’s philosophy may address such criticisms. In particular, I draw upon his dynamic and semiotic theory of social action, his view of the relationship between democratic social practices and forms of knowledge, and his theory of social self- consciousness. Such an examination opens suggestive avenues for philosophers of history and for historians that demonstrate the novel impact Mead’s approach may have on historical investigations. In considering criticisms of Mead’s presentist focus – that the past is always discovered in the present – I show that Mead provides a novel grounding of our understanding of history in ongoing social processes, and in considering criticisms of Mead’s – that knowledge, while claiming to be universal, is always a product of its time – I propose that Mead’s approach seeks to develop better historical knowledge through more participatory, democratically inclusive social practice. The paper concludes by seeking to synthesize Mead’s social and dynamic approach to historical inquiry around the notion of “responsibility” by proposing that, in Mead’s view, historians have a profound responsibility to social reconstruction and progress.

Reconstructing and Interpreting Mead on History

2 Mead’s major philosophical discussions of history and the nature of temporality may be found partly in a variety of works published during his lifetime (esp. Mead 1930, 1929a, 1929c, 1908, 1899; and Rigney & Lundy 2015), and partly in posthumously published works constructed from students’ and stenographers’ notes and Mead’s manuscripts (esp. Mead 1938, 1936, 1932). Perhaps because of the near monopoly of the posthumously published Mind, Self, and Society (Mead 2015) in most discussions of Mead’s philosophy, the remarkable breadth and depth of Mead’s reflections on history in works such as The Philosophy of the Present (1932), Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936), and “The Nature of the Past” (1929a) have largely remained in obscurity (Huebner 2014: 191; and Camic 2016). Along with these major sources, remarks about historical events or about the nature of history appear throughout Mead’s other published works, sometimes in surprising contexts, and seem to indicate the ubiquitous importance Mead placed on such problems of history in his philosophy. The dozens of extant student notes from his courses that remain unpublished (see Huebner 2014 for complete listing) rarely fail to discuss historical transformations in social consciousness. Indeed, Mead’s first academic position was as an instructor at the University of Michigan teaching courses in the history of philosophy alongside courses in physiological psychology, and he continued to teaching and write on historical topics his entire career.

3 A major problem confronting those who would seek to reconstruct Mead’s theory of history across his entire oeuvre is that much of the relevant material is not found in self-contained, tightly-argued published articles, but rather in disparate remarks as recorded by students or in manuscript fragments of variable incompleteness. This fact likely indicates that Mead repeatedly returned to these problems of history throughout

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his career and was perhaps even repeatedly unsatisfied with their solution. This should probably caution us against a strictly held literalism and finality with regard to Mead’s theory. I suggest throughout the following paper that the most productive course may be to focus on the kinds of approaches Mead’s broader philosophy offers as the starting point for our own inquiry rather than attempting to find the final answer on historical topics. 4 Although Mead’s work on the nature of history has never been a central aspect of the literature commenting on his philosophy, there have been disparate analyses of his work on history and temporality that may be found in the social sciences and social theory (Bergmann 1981; Bourgeois & Rosenthal 1990; Bourgeois & Rosenthal 1993; Flaherty & Fine 2001; Frings 1983; Joas 1985: Ch. 8; Maines, Sugrue, & Katovich 1983; Moore 1936; Nowotny 1992; Strauss 1991; and Tillman 1970), and in the literatures on metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and the history of philosophy (Brogaard 1999; Cook 1979; Eames 1973; Fen 1951; Leahy 1953; Lee 1963; Miller 1943, 1973: Ch. 11; Murphy 1932; Natanson 1953; Stone 2013; Tonness 1933; and Ushenko 1934). Despite the diversity of these literatures, a few core themes that are important to subsequent discussions in this paper may be identified: (1) nature, itself, is temporal; (2) human consciousness emerges through temporal social processes; (3) and science emerges in history as the most reflective form of human consciousness. First, natural reality must be understood as profoundly processual and temporal rather than static. Mead was in dialogue with philosophers of science, physicists, , and others in attempting to formulate an understanding of reality that was necessarily relational and perspectival, and in which those elements of reality did not always already exist, but rather continually emerged. He was strongly influenced early in his career by evolutionary theories and later in his career by work in relativity theory and by the process philosophies of and Henri Bergson. Second and concomitantly, Mead argued that human social transformations are intrinsic to how we understand natural reality. Much of his work is directed toward examining how the cognizing subject – the “self” – only emerges through the course of historical social processes, and that it is therefore not independent of history. In Mead’s view, one of the forms of self-reflection in which humans engage is seeking to understand historical events. The development of such self-reflective capacities happens in both phylogenetic (the development of human species characteristics) and ontogenetic (the development of the individual’s self consciousness) timeframes. Third, scientific inquiry – understood by Mead (1917a) as the social process of working to incorporate new experiences of observers into a continually reformulated universalizing perspective – emerges as the most self-reflective form of social consciousness in the modern era, and an inherent part of this process is inquiry into historical events. It may be noted that in Mead’s work, and consequently in the interpretations made of that work, there is little effort to maintain a principled line of demarcation between the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history – that is, between Mead’s understanding of the historical movements of scientific and philosophical thought, on the one hand, and his theory of the role of history in human social action, on the other hand. As the analysis below seeks to demonstrate, the way thought unfolds in history is inseparable, in Mead’s view, from the way we understand historical development, itself – and both must be understood in terms of social transformations, not the self- unfolding of ideas.

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5 Although few scholars in the field of history proper have seriously engaged with Mead’s ideas on history and temporality, there are a number of works in the historically- oriented social sciences that have sought to interpret and apply Mead’s ideas and for whom “pragmatism” means primarily the work of Mead and John Dewey. While I do not intend to comprehensively review that literature here, it is worth pointing out that there are some general points consistently attributed to Mead and other pragmatists in such historical-sociological work. The pragmatists are considered proponents of a non- teleological view of history in which emphasis is placed on: the formation and sequence of events as problematic situations in the course of human social processes (Abbott 2001; Schneiderhan 2011; and Wagner-Pacifici 2010); the importance of habits, cultural conventions, and institutions in shaping the course of history (Ansell 2011; Baldwin 1988; Gross 2010, 2009); the self-reflective abilities of human actors to respond creatively, open new possibilities of social action, and create through social action the very values toward which action is directed (Baert 2005; and Joas 1996); the experiential ordering of temporal events by means of narrative and symbols (Maines 1993; and Maines et al. 1983); and hence an overall view of society as a historically dynamic process of people “doing things together” (Becker 1976; and Blumer 1969). They are affinities between this view and recent forms of cultural or practical institutionalism in historical social science (e.g., Adams, Clemens, & Orloff 1995), and connections between pragmatism and the “new institutionalist” analysis associated with organizational studies (Powell & DiMaggio 1991) have also been noted (e.g., Scott 1995). 6 The common view implicit in such social scientific approaches is that the core of pragmatism is its unique theory of action.1 To my mind, the most convincing work to explain this characterization is found in the work of Hans Joas (1996, 1985), who argues that Mead’s theory of action centers the corporeal or embodied nature of human action, the necessarily situational or contextual nature of intentionality, and the essentially social nature of action, both onto- and phylo-genetically (see also Gross 2010 and Margolis 1986 for related discussions). Put another way, action is ultimately a process of human bodies oriented to common practical problems that develop in the course of life together. Human mind or thought (in all its connotations), thus, develops within this process through communication that is bodily or gestural, social or intersubjective, and situational or oriented to solving problems of real life. It is only the insistence of all of these features that truly sets Mead’s pragmatism apart as a starting point for historical inquiry, because such a theory offers a comprehensive conceptualization of action that overcomes the problems of “residual categories,” a challenge raised but not adequately solved by Talcott Parsons (1937). By developing a theory that leaves no residual categories – such as non-rational or non-normative action (Joas 1996: 4-5) – unexplained, Mead provides an approach to human action applicable to events of all times and places – not just those that are judged to be oriented toward appropriately rational ends or norms – as well as individuals’ subjective understandings of their own actions. 7 It might also be noted parenthetically that framing a philosophy in terms of human action already implies history. On the one hand, a comprehensive theory of human action must be able to conceptualize action not directly witnessed, including past actions – an approach that I have elsewhere proposed is key to understanding the development of certain concepts of social theory, such as Max Weber’s ideal types and

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W. I. Thomas’s situational analysis (Huebner 2014: 13-5). And on the other hand, as R. G. Collingwood (1999: 40; 1956: 9) famously noted, “historians think and always have thought that history is about res gestae, deeds, human actions done in the past.” A comprehensive theory of action must be adequate to the explanation of history, and history is ultimately the study of action.2 The further implications that can be derived from applying a pragmatist theory of action to the problems of history are explored in subsequent sections of this paper. 8 In the last few years, Mead’s understanding of history and temporality has also been the subject of renewed attention as part of a broader reevaluation of Mead’s philosophy (Camic 2016; Campbell 2013; Côté 2013, 2015; Garcia Ruiz 2013; Joas 2016, 2013; Rigney & Lundy 2015; Stone 2013; Thomas 2016; and Westbrook 2016). My own contribution to this recent literature, upon which the present paper builds, has sought to demonstrate that Mead consistently taught courses in the history of science and philosophy throughout his career, that he wrote several major articles and participated in professional discussions regarding the history of science, that among the Deweyan pragmatists Mead was considered the definitive expert on the history of thought, and that Mead supported efforts to institutionalize the history of science as a field of inquiry (Huebner 2016). In general, I have sought to develop an analysis of Mead’s pragmatism both as a topic for historical reconstruction and as a subtle perspective from which to engage in social scientific study of knowledge – that is, to treat Mead as part-subject matter and part-method (Huebner 2014). Hans Joas and I have also collaborated on projects to bring to light new interpretations of Mead and his work (Joas & Huebner 2016; and Mead 2015). 9 As a result of this renewed literature, it is not unreasonable to conclude that Mead was the classical American pragmatist who worked most consistently and substantively on the problems of history. Throughout these various efforts, Mead appears to have consistently argued that the history of thought depends on practical social changes and that what counts as history is, itself, the result of changing ways in which the social order becomes problematic in social consciousness. These findings echo some of the earliest conclusions of Mead’s students and colleagues, that his method in approaching historical investigations was to identify the socio-historical context in which intellectual or philosophical problems arise and to show how thinkers of the time handled these problems in context (Castell 1937; and Moore 1936). All of these leads in Mead’s work and in the various interpretations that have been made of them are very suggestive and may prove useful to historical investigators. In addition, however, I wish to propose that Mead sketched a profoundly social and dynamic orientation to historical explanation, the implications of which have not been fully recognized, and proposed an approach that may ground the possibility for progress and ethical responsibility in historical knowledge. The additional orientation that may be gained by examining the interconnections between Mead’s understanding of history and the other aspects of his philosophy underscores both why Mead’s approach may be viewed as a practically and ethically productive framework for research, and how his approach avoids becoming merely another flat, relational history.

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Presentism and History as Social Problems

10 Mead was acutely aware of a fundamental challenge that his work faced in accounting for history, and of the criticism that he (and John Dewey) received in this regard (Joas 2016; Huebner 2016; and Joas 1993). In centering itself theoretically on action in the present, pragmatism raises the challenge of , both in the sense that one’s present claims about the features of history seem to be merely constructed rather than revealing of absolute truth, and that regardless of its content one’s own knowledge must also be historically grounded, so it can apparently be no more universally true than any other knowledge. The first we might call, for sake of convenience, the problem of “presentism,” and the second the problem of “historicism,” although these are intimately tied to one another.

11 Mead acknowledged the problem of presentism head-on in a number of his writings. Most obviously, he explicitly claimed in his posthumously published Carus Lectures, The Philosophy of the Present, that “reality exists in a present” (Mead 1932: 1). The past can only take on significance in relation to a present, so the kind of features and events history has is continually “reconstructed” from this reality of ongoing social process. The past is both “irrevocable and revocable” in his view, with an emphasis on how the supposedly irrevocable “‘real’ past” is only ever encountered through the present within which discoveries emerge, so each new emergent-present makes for a “different past.” Far from meaning “radical doubt” in historical fact, this means that we take the past for granted as “given” except when the problems of the present prompt us to “rewrit[e] the past to which we now look back” so as to be capable of bringing about a different “world that will be” in the future (Mead 1932: 3-5). It is easy to see how the past is “revocable,” in Mead’s dynamic view, but its “irrevocability” seems to refer to the “apparatus” of “documents, oral testimony, and historical remains,” the “memory images and the evidences by which we build up the past” that have a duration through time so that they form the given – but not essentially permanent – background against which discoveries of new evidence of the past, or reinterpretations of those durable apparatus, occur in the present (Mead 1932: 5, 29-30). 12 History, in Mead’s view, must necessarily be an aspect of the process of society’s self- knowledge, as every transformation of society that gives rise to problematic courses of action necessarily transforms what we consider history. What is needed is not a recovery of the past as it really was, but a reconstruction that enables us to “interpret what is arising in the future that belongs to the present” (Mead 1932: 30). No past that can be constructed can be “as adequate as the situation demands,” because the “implications of the present” could be carried further than they ever practically are in pursuit of constructing “a past truer to the present within which the implications of this past lie” (Mead 1932: 31). Notice here that social reconstruction in the service of a better future necessitates a rewriting of history, and the construction of history is simultaneously a practical and ethical endeavor for the historian. 13 This problem of the ongoing-present remaking the past means, for Mead, that even the very way in which historians formulate questions – to what features of reality and other bodies of knowledge they turn as evidence and fact – is historically variable. Mead (1910) argued, for example, that the turn away from political history toward social and anthropological history – specifically, the “New History” of American historian James Harvey Robinson in the early twentieth century – was an indication

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that new “problems” had become central to society. In Mead’s analysis, historians seek out new kinds of analysis and accounts when a new “social consciousness” arises that faces new questions of social function. 14 Mead’s account, of course, raises important questions about how historians are affected by changes in the general social consciousness (or what early sociologists of knowledge following Karl Mannheim (1936) called the problem of “imputation” – how we validly connect the trends of thought or consciousness to the actions of particular social groups or individuals (e.g., Child 1941). Mead’s most direct answer to this question comes from his work on the history of modern scientists, where the individual investigator is made the center of analysis (Mead 1917a), an analysis which builds upon his theory of the social nature of the self. Individual investigators wrestle with problems that conduct presents to them in the course of their social lives, meaning their work depends necessarily on their understanding of the problems of previous work by themselves and others, as those problems are interpreted from their own experience. The individual investigator – and in this respect the historian is no different from the experimental biologist – as socialized in “a highly organized society,” finds problems with taken-for-granted assumptions or practices in his or her own experience, and instead of solving the problems through the adoption of a new “subjective attitude” about them, develops a new “object” of experience that attempts to incorporate all previous experiences. 15 As I have suggested elsewhere (Huebner 2016: 50, 58), Mead’s explication of this process of inquiry sought to demonstrate the superiority of such a pragmatist approach over so-called realist approaches. The New- and Critical Realist philosophers of the time (Holt et al. 1912; and Drake et al. 1920) misunderstood the pragmatists by proposing that the pragmatists’ conception of inquiry was a subjective process: people confronted by anomalies change their minds about some aspect of reality. Mead was a particular target of realist philosophers of history Donald C. Williams (1934), A.O . Lovejoy (1939), and Maurice Mandelbaum (1948), and of essayist Elinor Castle Nef (1953: 417-8), who was Mead’s niece married to historian John U. Nef (Huebner 2016: 52-3). But the alternatives posed by realistic approaches must always in some way assume an independent real reality that is unaffected by human action and yet knowable in better or worse ways by humans. Mead’s solution proposes instead that the object of experience – a trace of a historical event or an observation of a natural phenomenon – is actually reconstructed into a different object by a social process of communication in which experiences with the object by particular individuals conflict with socially taken- for-granted ways of responding to the object (Mead 1917a). The experience of the socialized individual in the present is absolutely essential to the very nature of reality (in any way that it can be conceived) and hence the social process is continually necessary to the transformations of that reality. This approach to inquiry is just as essential to historical investigation and underscores Mead’s broad understanding of “science” to include all the ways in which reflection on experience is capable of changing reality.3 16 It would be easy to see in Mead a willing surrender to presentism; after all, what can we say if even what counts as history fundamentally changes, and if even the authority of individual experience is variable across time? In order to answer this question adequately, Mead’s broader theory of action is necessary. Historical investigators, Mead seems to argue, in order to develop a self-reflective enterprise, must examine the kinds

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of problems that confront them in the course of their action in ongoing social processes, and in reflecting on other times and places the investigator must also examine the collective problems of those times and places as they appear to have presented themselves in those times and places. When Mead examined historical events, he reportedly exemplified this theory, because his discussions did not attempt a “mere reproduction” of a historical event but rather proposed a “selective reconstruction, for present purposes and in the light of present problems” (Murphy 1936). And when Mead made specific claims about history, he consistently found them in eminently practical problems: the expansion of Ancient Greek commerce in Asia Minor was key to the development of speculative (Mead 1896) and the application of steam power to industry prompted the development of thermodynamic laws (Rigney & Lundy 2015), for example. 17 This solution, because it is specifically and thoroughly social, may be more satisfactory in historical inquiry for much the same reason that Mead argued we may prefer a thoroughly social theory of mind (Mead 2015: 223): because it is better able to ground its own (and its alternatives’) presuppositions. For example, an “evolutionary” (i.e., historical) theory of the state may be preferred to a “contract” theory, in Mead’s view, because social-contract theories cannot explain the existence of minds and selves that they must presuppose in explaining how such already-conscious individuals enter into society. Evolutionary theories, however, which must only presuppose “the existence of the social process of behavior,” are fully able to ground this seemingly self-evident presupposition in fundamental biological and physiological relations consonant with evolutionary principles (Mead 2015: 223). More broadly, the implication seems to be that the historical investigator should begin to build an argument by examining the practical, objective features of the social process – discovering which features appear to be relevant in context – and minimizing the assumption that actors of other times and places are (or are not) essentially “like us” in their cognitive faculties or motivations. This is a problem that has plagued many attempts to conceptualize historical action in terms of “rational” and “irrational” or “normative” and “non-normative” elements (see Joas 1996 for discussion). 18 What is clear throughout is that Mead provides a sophisticated and subtle approach to the problem of presentism – of historical inquiry always occurring in the present – without simply dismissing the problem, and that Mead’s approach consistently addresses this issue by rooting historical inquiry in social processes of action. We do not overcome the problem in this way, if what that means is finding a way to recover the past “as it really was,” but we find an approach that conceptualizes the process of inquiry and provides a novel perspective on the investigation of historical events. Mead opens an avenue by which we may ground history as social self-reflection, and when added to additional insights developed below, may perhaps point toward better inquiry into past events.

Historicism and the Grounds of Historical Knowledge

19 Mead also addressed the criticism of “historicism” – that our understandings of the past are, themselves, located in historical contexts, and are thus no less fundamentally a product of their time. Or stated another way: because our investigations and conclusions about the past are no less fundamentally directed toward practical

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problems in the present, they cannot definitively claim to be faithful retellings of past events in their own terms or universally true for all future inquiries into the “same” past events. What is necessary, then, is to be able to ground the possibility of better, not just different, knowledge of history. Can we discern a criterion for progress or a logic for more encompassing knowledge in historical inquiry?

20 There are at least two interconnected approaches in Mead’s philosophy to the problem of seeking grounds for better knowledge: (1) in terms of democratic social practices, and (2) in terms of the symbolic character of human social action. For a first approach to this question, we can look to Mead’s explicit attempt to ground pragmatism historically, in a paper given on the occasion of John Dewey’s seventieth birthday. For Mead, Dewey was the best exemplar of the principles of American pragmatism (more so than William James or , whom he also considers), and he grounded the analysis of this philosophy in the “political habits” that ultimately derive from the pioneer settlers (Mead 1930: 212; see also Mead 1935).4 The political arrangements and consciousness of the settlers, which was centered on the “nexus of town meetings,” “grew out [of] the solution of their problems” in “achieving” rather than “inheriting” a political and social union. Mead traced what he saw as implications of this basic tendency through the government, business, and educational institutions of the country. Mead noted that pragmatism has faced “opprobrium” as the “philosophy of American practicality,” but it is clear that he found a ground to prefer this philosophy over those that privilege a fixed cultural ideal precisely because of its roots in democratic social practices (Mead 1930: 230-1). Cultural historian Eduard Baumgarten, in particular, found Mead’s essay provocative in attempting to ground pragmatist philosophy in “town meetings” in which the participants understood themselves to be “creating the community in the process of acting together” as they confronted problematic situations (Baumgarten 1936: 83; 1938: 314).5 Baumgarten seemed to consider Mead’s particular contribution to pragmatism (over Dewey’s or James’s) to be this grounding of a philosophy that centers social action in historical conditions of social action, themselves – a coherent, pragmatist grounding of pragmatism. So, from Mead we gain a sense that one aspect of conceptualizing the historical nature of knowledge is being able to ground one’s own knowledge in the political practices from which they emerge – that is, showing how one’s mode of understanding is implicated in the practices by which the political community is constituted. 21 Mead’s fundamental neglect to acknowledge pervasive forms of exploitation and inequality over the course of American history – including slavery and forced labor, systematic violence against native people and dispossession of lands, social control and disenfranchisement of women, and other forms – is striking, and should of course lead us to temper the stark distinctions Mead makes between American, European, and other political contexts. This criticism can be pressed further by acknowledgement of his engagement with the American colonial settlements in (Huebner 2014: Ch. 3), and of the various points in Mead’s work in which forms of social domination are seemingly intertwined with the gaining of knowledge. But at the same time, we may wish to avoid the kind of reductionism that would explain Mead’s theory (and pragmatism in general) as merely a class ideology (e.g., Herman 1944), and we should perhaps also acknowledge the attempts by Mead to advocate on behalf of “radically democratic” social reforms (Joas 1985: Ch. 2). Other major attempts to ground

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pragmatist philosophy in particular conditions have included the posthumously published dissertation of C. Wright Mills (1966), originally entitled “A Sociological Account of Pragmatism,” which sought to ground the philosophy primarily in the context of the development and expansion of the modern independent research university in the late nineteenth century, and the work of (1989), who emphasized the importance of American bourgeois ’ experience of liberation from past constraints while also acknowledging the ways in which those experiences were nevertheless rooted in institutional apparatuses which reinforced hierarchical social distance from ordinary people. West’s work, which nevertheless neglects Mead, is perhaps the most sophisticated attempt to conceptualize the relationship between the experience of freedom and agency that grounds pragmatism’s sense of the importance of social reconstruction through critical intelligence, on the one hand, and the systematic inequalities that locate the possibility of such experiences only in particular social strata, on the other hand. The attempts at historical- sociological grounding, while extremely valuable in many respects, are necessary here only to show the profound willingness of Mead and other fellow travelers to acknowledge the particular historical conditions in which the tendencies of their own thought may be found; these works demonstrate – by its practitioners’ own admission – that pragmatism is not rooted in an idyllic democracy. 22 However, having sought to ground knowledge in historical social practices, we then need an approach that is able to differentiate forms of social practice in terms of their epistemological value. Can Mead support a claim that political contexts with more democratic tendencies (but which are not idyllic democracies) are superior to other possible contexts in terms of the knowledge they produce? Later pragmatists including , Cheryl Misak, and Richard Rorty have quarreled over whether pragmatist epistemology implies a particular political stance or not (see Westbrook 2006 for review), but it is very clear that Mead saw a necessary connection between democratic inclusiveness and “smarter” political and social decision-making (Joas 1985: Ch. 9; Carreira da Silva 2008). Westbrook (2016) has recently argued that Mead’s (1923) “Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences” gives a better “epistemological justification for democracy” than even his friend and colleague, John Dewey, was able to mount. In Mead’s view, as in Max Weber’s (1946), modern scientific inquiry cannot determine the ends toward which social reconstruction should be directed, but such inquiry can formulate those ends more systematically by virtue of its capacity to estimate the consequences of various pursuits. Mead takes this insight in a novel direction by arguing that democracy is a necessary condition of scientific inquiry, because good science welcomes all interested inquirers to its deliberations. Thus, a society that hopes to deploy the best scientific inquiry on behalf of its social reconstruction – what we might want to call better knowledge – would thus have to have political institutions that seek to allow any values and interests a seat at the table. Social inquiry, in order to be as successful as possible, must be as inclusive as possible, but we are always faced with pressing demands to solve the problems at hand that cannot await the realization of full democratic participation. So there is a continual tension between the practices of democracy in the present and the ideals of full democratic deliberation that would provide the most effective knowledge in the service of social reconstruction – a dynamic in which democratic reform and social inquiry are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. There is, in Mead’s work, a sense that the work to bring people to the table

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and to view oneself from the perspective of others is always ongoing and practically accomplished wherever people engage in cooperative social processes. 23 In a recent work, Jean-François Côté (2015) argues that Mead took this line of argument even further by providing a theory of society as a dynamic, self-grounding totality. Drawing especially from Mead’s work on political rights and internationalism (Mead 1915a, 1915b; 1929b, 1936: Ch. XVI), he proposes that Mead sketched the historical evolution of a form of society capable of being permanently self-conscious, not in the sense that it becomes a metaphysical entity nor that it solves all social problems, but rather one in which social action as a whole could be guided by continual anticipations of practical consequences from participants in democratic politics. In this way, science and democracy are again necessarily intertwined. The key, according to Côté’s reading, may be found in the way that democratic societies institutionalize an engine of social self-transformation into their political constitution. In Mead’s (1915a: 141-2) words, the creation of representative democracy, itself, involves an “institutionalizing of revolution” so that instead of permanently securing a fixed structure of government they secure “the opportunity for continual change.” This, of course, does not mean that we should take Mead to naively believe in the irreversible progress of democracies. As Joas (1985, 2016; see also Deegan 2011) has argued, such faith was shattered, if for no other reason, by World War I. 24 Related to this claim that better knowledge may be grounded in more democratic social practices, and in part explaining the mechanism by which this process may take place, is Mead’s “semiotic” or communicative theory of human action, with its notion of universal role-taking. Joas (2016, 2013), especially, has been concerned with the problem of historicism and has worked to develop a synthesis of pragmatism and Ernst Troeltsch’s “existential historicism” that is adequate to address such problems.6 Mead’s theory of action is not capable of providing a final “absolute” or “ideal” end to historical inquiry, but it may suggest a unique criterion for validity claims while still acknowledging the radically temporal or historical nature of all human experience and, consequently, of all human ideals. In Mead’s view, symbols extend far beyond their emergence and use in particular social interactions (as they were implicitly understood in much “Symbolic Interactionist” sociology that claims to descend from Mead), because symbolic acts bear a reference to a “universe of discourse” – a continually emerging social totality defined by all those individuals who can understand the symbol in functionally identical terms and for whom the symbol can become a reference point for action. Now, Herbert Blumer’s (1969: 20, 60) classic statement of the theory and method of “Symbolic Interactionism” does acknowledge the historicity of each new social situation by arguing that any instance of “joint action” necessarily “emerges out of and is connected with a context of previous joint action” and “cannot be understood apart from that context” or “historical linkage.” However, much of Blumer’s work lacks a sense of anything fundamentally new emerging in social life – new situations, new institutions, and new actions, surely emerge in his view, but out of other situations, institutions, and actions – leading to a rather flattened view of historical development. It is difficult in such work to find a theoretical ground for the emergence of “international mindedness” out of national mindedness, of a society capable of intelligent self-regulation out of a habitually-oriented society, or of human consciousness emerging through historical social process, all problems that concerned Mead’s more dynamic, emergent view of historical change. And in this regard, mainstream sociological approaches to history by way of the study of sequences of

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interactions or the development of institutions fare little better. Still, Blumer was closest to recovering Mead’s view when he reflected on the rise of industrialization, social movements, and scientific discoveries (esp. Blumer 1990; see also Blumer 1969: 23, 47). 25 Mead’s semiotic approach to action allows for the emergence of multiple and overlapping universes of discourse and for collective symbolic actions, such as the acts of a social institution. Take, as Côté (2015: 123) suggests, the example of the conferral of rights upon some individual or group: such a performative act becomes a reference point for other institutions and actors in other contexts, even those who would oppose them. Indeed, as Mead (2015: 161-2, 199, 261, 267-8; 1936: 13-9, 21, 25-7) repeatedly argued, a right to “property” is more than just “possession” precisely because of its symbolic character – anyone who would claim it as a right must also recognize that claim as reciprocal when made by others. This symbolic character of human action also allows it to transcend the ongoing present (while still being rooted therein) in order to reflect on the past and to anticipate the future (Mead 2015: 350). And Mead (2015: 202-3, 281-9; 1929b) sought to show how, when new relationships form that expand the social processes in which people participate, symbolic communication becomes more universal in its reference, and that fundamental changes in the nature of these symbolic referents characterize the transitions from one historical period to another. 26 In this view, the social importance of historical inquiry lies in the historian’s ability to trace out the developments – social “changes, forces and interests” – that were not present in the conscious experience of the members of the community at the time (Mead 2015: 256). The life of the whole social process in which the individual is involved transcends the experience of the individual, and Mead argues that it is precisely the vital work of historians to bring more of that process into focus. The unique vantage point of the historian does not come merely from the abstract passage of time, but from processes of “social reconstruction” that allow people to identify with one another in ways that they had not previously (Mead 2015: 297). Human diversity is, thus, productive of social progress when people who had not previously been brought in contact are incorporated into cooperative acts together.7 Because such practical forms of social participation lead people to become more self-conscious of the broader community life of which they are a part, inclusive social processes also make for a more universal standpoint from which to evaluate past events. 27 Of course, everything still remains to be done in order to turn this suggestion into a practical guide for history. The specific paths by which inclusive social processes would make for better knowledge, how we can determine what counts as “more inclusive” arrangements in a practical sense, the origins of the human diversity that drives changes in social perspectives, and other problems all remain open questions and lead us back into ongoing debates in contemporary ethics, politics, and philosophy. Nevertheless, connecting the lines of argumentation sketched in this section leads us to the suggestive possibility that there is a ground for better historical knowledge in such a democratically inclusive and self-transformative social order, because in rewriting history from the standpoint of a more inclusive social process we find a claim to greater universality. This approach preserves an understanding of the historicity of our knowledge about history (as well as about other topics) while also suggesting how social change can be more or less conducive to progress in our historical knowledge.

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The Historian’s Social Responsibility

28 Perhaps one of the most unique contributions Mead can make to historical research and thought, a contribution that helps bring together the practical implications of Mead’s approach, is his notion of responsibility. In an early review essay, Mead (1897: 790) already called responsibility “the most central of all the expressions of personality.” In the view of Mead’s social philosophy, the personality is always developing through social processes that change and enlarge our self-consciousness, and one of the key functions of that self-consciousness is anticipatory control over one’s own responses to a situation. This makes us responsible not only for our own conduct, but also for shaping the changes in other individuals’ conduct involved in the same cooperative action (Mead 2015: 403). Thus, there is an imperative sense in which to become a more fully conscious personality or self is to accept the responsibility both to know one’s own attitudes and habits and to display or represent the action in which one is involved in a conscientious way that will lead to successful cooperative processes, however success is situationally defined.

29 From nearly the earliest reflections on his understanding of history, Mead’s students and colleagues made the case that his historical work was necessarily intertwined and inextricable from his more well-known theory of the self (Moore 1936: xxvii-xxxvi; and Murphy 1936), but this observation has rarely been developed. For the historian, Mead’s approach means a self-conscious recognition of the collective and ongoing enterprise of historical inquiry in which people are involved together, as well as a socially-rooted responsibility to conduct that inquiry conscientiously. Mead (2015: 175-8, 182-3, 203) emphasized that, regardless of whether someone takes a stand in criticism or in support of some particular situation, that response involves an acceptance of responsibility for the situation. Taken seriously, this responsibility may lead us to conclude that the conscientious approach to history is to conduct ourselves in such a way that we can both locate our claims historically and take responsibility for the subsequent consequences of our claims about historical events. If we accept Mead’s approach to the problem of “presentism,” we may conclude that conscientious historical inquiry means both crafting claims that are open to – and expect – revision by the ongoing process of historical discovery (Huebner 2014: 218-20) and seeking out precisely the evidence and the social perspectives that would provoke those revisions. Only if one truly accepts Mead’s radical conclusion – that the history to which we look back, itself, changes as society changes, and not that history is unaffected by our changing social perspectives on it – does the full weight of the historian’s responsibility really become apparent. The possibilities of historical investigation only develop in the course of history, not in the abstract, Idealist sense of Mind’s self-unfolding, but in the sense of practical social developments providing new perspectives on events, and hence a responsibility to shape those developments. And if we accept the further connections sketched between knowledge and democratic politics, we may further conclude that historical knowledge is better whenever it can be shown to refer to – and be the result of – more inclusive social processes.

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MEAD George H., (1910), “Untitled response to a paper by Professor Robinson,” in Box 14, Folder 1, George Herbert Mead Papers, 1883-1964, Special Collections Research Center, Joseph P. Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

MEAD George H., (1915a), “Natural Rights and the Theory of the Political Institution,” Journal of Philosophy 12, 141-55.

MEAD George H., (1915b), “The Psychological Bases of Internationalism,” Survey 33, 604-7.

MEAD George H., (1917a), “Scientific Method and Individual Thinker,” in Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude, edited by John Dewey et al., New York, Henry Holt and Co.

MEAD George H., (1917b), “Josiah Royce – A Personal Impression,” International Journal of Ethics 27, 168-70.

MEAD George H., (1923), “Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences,” International Journal and Ethics 23, 229-47.

MEAD George H., (1929a), “The Nature of the Past,” in Essays in Honor of John Dewey, edited by John Coss, New York, Henry Holt.

MEAD George H., (1929b), “National-Mindedness and International-Mindedness,” International Journal of Ethics 39, 385-407.

MEAD George H., (1929c), “A Pragmatic Theory of Truth,” University of California Publications in Philosophy 11, 65-88.

MEAD George H., (1930), “The Philosophies of Royce, James, and Dewey in Their American Setting,” International Journal of Ethics 40, 211-31.

MEAD George H., (1932), The Philosophy of the Present, edited by Arthur E. Murphy, Chicago, Open Court.

MEAD George H., (1935), “The Philosophy of John Dewey,” International Journal of Ethics 46, 64-81.

MEAD George H., (1936), Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Merritt H. Moore, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

MEAD George H., (1938), The Philosophy of the Act, edited by Charles W. Morris, John M. Brewster, Albert M. Dunham, and David L. Miller, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

MEAD George H., (2015 [1934]), Mind, Self, and Society: The Definitive Edition, revised edition edited by Daniel R. Huebner and Hans Joas, original edition by Charles W. Morris, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

MILLER David L., (1943), “G. H. Mead’s Conception of the Present,” Philosophy of Science 10, 40-6.

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MILLER David L., (1973), George Herbert Mead: Self, Language, and the World, Austin, TX, University of Texas Press.

MILLS Wright C., (1966), Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America, New York, Oxford University Press.

MINK Louis O., (1969), Mind, History, and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

MOORE Merritt H., (1936), “Introduction,” in Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, by George H. Mead, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

MURPHY Arthur E., (1932), “Introduction,” in The Philosophy of the Present, by G. H. Mead, Chicago, Open Court.

MURPHY Arthur E., (1936), “[Review] Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, by G. H. Mead,” Journal of Philosophy, 33, 14, 384-6.

NATANSON Maurice, (1953), “George H. Mead’s Metaphysics of Time,” Journal of Philosophy, 50, 25, 770-82.

NEF CASTLE Elinor, (1953), Letters & Notes, Los Angeles, Ward Ritchie Press.

NOWOTNY Helga, (1992), “Time and Social Theory: Towards a Social Theory of Time,” Time and Society 1, 421-54.

O’TOOLE James M., & Richard J. COX, (2006), Understanding Archives & Manuscripts, Chicago, Society of American Archivist.

PARSONS Talcott, (1937), The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers, New York, McGraw Hill.

POWELL Walter W., & Paul DIMAGGIO, (1991), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

RIGNEY Ernest G., & Timothy C. LUNDY, (2015), “From a Pragmatist’s Point of View: George Herbert Mead’s Unattributed Review of Theodore Merz’s A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 7, 1, 191-203.

SCHELER Max, (1926), Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, Leipzig, Der Neue-geist Verlag.

SCHNEIDERHAN Erik, (2011), “Pragmatism and Empirical Sociology: The Case of and Hull-House, 1889-1895,” Theory and Society, 40, 6, 589-617.

SCOTT Richard W., (1995), Institutions and Organizations, Thousand Oaks, CA, Publications.

STONE Jake E., (2013), “Mead’s Interpretation of Relativity Theory,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 27, 2, 153-71.

STRAUSS Anselm, (1991), “Mead’s Multiple Conceptions of Time and Evolution: Their Contexts and Their Consequences for Theory,” International Sociology, 6, 4, 411-26.

THOMAS Michael L., (2016), “Mead, Whitehead, and the Sociality of Nature,” in The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead, edited by Hans Joas & Daniel R. Huebner, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

TILLMAN Mary Katherine, (1970), “Temporality and Role-Taking in G. H. Mead,” Social Research, 37, 4, 533-46.

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TONNESS Alfred, (1933), “A Notation on the Problem of the Past – with Especial Reference to George Herbert Head,” Journal of Philosophy, 29, 22, 599-606.

USHENKO Andrew, (1934), “Discussion: Alternative Perspectives and the Invariant Space-Time,” Mind, 43, 170, 199-203.

VAN DER DUSSEN Jan, (2015), Studies on Collingwood, History and Civilization, New York, Springer.

WAGNER-PACIFICI Robin, (2010), “Theorizing the Restlessness of Events,” American Journal of Sociology, 115, 5, 1351-86.

WEBER Max, (1946 [1917]), “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by Hans H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills, New York, Oxford University Press.

WEST Cornel, (1989), The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press.

WESTBROOK Robert, (2006), “Liberal Democracy,” in A Companion to Pragmatism, edited by John R. Shook & Joseph Margolis, Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishing.

WESTBROOK Robert, (2016), “George Herbert Mead and the Promise of Pragmatist Democracy,” in The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead, edited by Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

WILLIAMS Donald C., (1934), “The Argument for Realism,” The Monist, 44, 2, 186-209.

NOTES

1. In the confines of this paper I am unable to fully articulate the possible tensions between two views of the core of pragmatism: as either a theory of action or a theory of truth or knowledge (let alone other possible interpretations). These views are obviously complementary in many respects, and the particular emphasis on one or the other depends largely on what use can be made of the label “pragmatist” in different contexts. With regard to the classical pragmatists, it may be worth noting that a clear articulation of pragmatism as a theory of action dates at least as far back as Wilhelm Jerusalem’s (1909: 554-5) work to develop a “sociology of knowledge” [Erkennen] in which he claimed that pragmatism was ultimately a theory of “the intimate interrelation between theoretical thought and human organization invested in its very core with activity, with action.” Of course, the classical American pragmatists, themselves, made this argument (perhaps especially in the work of John Dewey from the 1890s onward), but Jerusalem is perhaps the first scholar who, upon encountering the work of American pragmatism, developed its theory further along the lines of a theory of action. Although many early critics also focused on pragmatism as a theory of knowledge or truth, some others who appear to have been influenced by Jerusalem’s reading, such as Émile Durkheim (1983 [1913-14]) and (1926), focused instead on its approach to action (cf. Huebner 2013). In Durkheim’s (1983: chaps. 13, 16) view, in particular, the ability to explain historical events is a critical test for a coherent philosophy, and pragmatism’s apparent individualistic starting-point (he was thinking mostly of James) failed to provide an account of historical action that was as adequate as his own sociological theory. 2. Collingwood (1956) is, of course, known for his thesis that all history is the history of thought, because in his view what interests historians in human actions is the rationality they express. Although this approach is avowedly idealist, recent scholarship has sought to free Collingwood of the charge that he over-rationalized the object of history by showing his expansive approach to the nature of what counts as “reason” in action (van der Dussen 2015). Louis Mink (1969) was

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among the earliest and most explicit in attempting to draw connections between pragmatist and Collingwoodian philosophies of history; and we might add that Collingwood’s ideas – that historical knowledge is the “reenactment” of historical events in the mind of the historian and that ultimately the purpose of historical inquiry is general “human self-knowledge” – present interesting connections that could be further developed between the two philosophies. Of course, Collingwood is by no means the only theorist to conclude that history is essentially the study of action, and it is interesting to note that even the practical literature on the management of archives draws the same conclusions to support an understanding of how archival materials may serve as documents of human social life (e.g., O’Toole & Cox 2006: 87-92). 3. It may also be noted that the very process of inquiry in which the individual’s experience is central to advancing knowledge of reality is, itself, the result of the individual becoming a historical problem for society, according to Mead. This is a topic Mead apparently discussed in his lectures, both with reference to how the individual emerged as a problem for social consciousness in the development of modern nations and citizenship and with reference to psychological and ethical theories, which were faced by problems of social control. For additional discussion, see Huebner (2016: 44-5). 4. In his posthumously published manuscript on “The Philosophy of John Dewey” (Mead 1935), which was likely originally a preparatory essay for his talk on the occasion of John Dewey’s 70th birthday (Mead 1930), Mead discussed American philosophy in light of historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s “most illuminating conception,” the so-called frontier thesis, arguing that pioneer settlers were forced by circumstances to justify their institutions by their usefulness and the ability to serve more than one purpose rather than subjecting them to purely philosophical criticism. These articles also have two more autobiographical counterparts in which Mead locates his own intellectual development in these same social contexts (see Mead 1917b; Cook 1992). 5. Eduard Baumgarten, who was a nephew of Max Weber, studied and lectured in the United States at Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin– Madison, and had definitely met both Dewey and Mead in the late 1920s before returning to Germany. He even apparently discussed with Mead the possibility of translating Dewey’s Experience and Nature into German (M. C. Otto to J. Dewey, 19 December 1928; Dewey [1997], no. 05085). Joas (1993: 110) has pointed out that Baumgarten was the “decisive figure,” the “catalyst,” in “conveying the ideas of pragmatism to fascist intellectuals,” including and Helmut Schelsky, in pre-World War II Germany. One can underscore this point by noting that a few of these scholars referred to Mead’s “Royce, James, and Dewey” essay explicitly on the basis of Baumgarten’s analysis (e.g., Effelberger 1936; Gehlen 1951). It appears that these fascist theorists drew upon what Mead took to be an ethically positive claim – that pragmatist philosophy was linked with particular American democratic practices – to criticize its general philosophic importance and perhaps also to attempt to ground fascist theories of action. 6. Joas (2016) seems to argue that Mead’s “semiotic anthropology” is the correct direction for historical knowledge, but finds that on several accounts Mead does not ultimately provide all the tools necessary for this endeavor – for which we must look especially to ideas from Ernst Troeltsch and Josiah Royce. In particular, Mead does not ground the conditions for our ethos of universalism, itself (i.e., why we find a moral necessity in seeking universal cognitive or ethical claims), he does not provide a fully elaborated theory of narration as key to the historical research process, and he seems not to make an explicit and dedicated attempt to connect his theory of universal role-taking with the development of ideals as a way of addressing his radical temporality. Joseph Margolis (2006; 1986) is another major voice to have attempted to work out such a synthesis between pragmatism and historicism. Although Margolis (2002: 131) acknowledges that Mead’s historical investigations have been “almost entirely neglected,” even by John Dewey, he does not give any substantive discussion to Mead’s ideas and underestimates the breadth and depth of Mead’s historical work, which he characterizes as “very limited.”

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7. Historically important forms of this integration, according to Mead (2015: chaps. 36-7), have included incorporation in economic trade and production relationships and in universalistic religions, although Mead was very aware of the need to differentiate between exploitative and cooperative economic and religious arrangements.

ABSTRACTS

Although not known as a philosopher of history, George Herbert Mead wrote and taught seriously about the nature of the past and about historical investigation throughout his career. The paper identifies the major documentary sources and interpretive literature with which to reconstruct Mead’s radically social and dynamic conceptualization of history and extends beyond the existing literature to develop striking implications of Mead’s approach in response to possible criticisms and challenges. By connecting Mead’s writings on history with his broader social theory of action, democracy, and consciousness, the paper shows how Mead provides a novel grounding of our understandings of history in ongoing social processes and suggests that better historical knowledge may be related to participatory, inclusive social practices. As a result, historians have a responsibility to social reconstruction and society’s self-reflection, in Mead’s view. Because of the novel ways in which Mead’s approach explores the relationship between history and social progress he warrants renewed attention and scrutiny from researchers and theorists of history.

AUTHOR

DANIEL R. HUEBNER

University of North Carolina at Greensboro drhuebne[at]uncg.edu

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Development and Difference Pragmatism and the Social Process

Andrew Abbott

1 A central premise of the Chicago School of Sociology has been its insistence that social facts are located in place and time. The meaning of a social fact is always relative to its context of other social facts. Methodologically, this rule has implied a certain hesitancy about the decontextualized approach characteristic of survey analysis. Substantively, it has taken shape in a focus on “natural history” and “natural areas,” that is, on typical developments over time and typical differences between parts of the social world (Abbott 1997).

2 Development in time and difference in space are closely related. The idea of personal development seems natural and unproblematic as a result of our everyday familiarity with narratives of experience. But narrative cannot be a complete account of social life, because the past does not reach out and influence the present, as it does so often in our stories. The influence of the deep past on the present must come through the traces that that deep past has left in succeeding presents. Causality happens in the present moment: as George Herbert Mead says, the world is a world of events. This means that present differences – both within the self and beyond it – are the present traces of past events. In some sense, difference in the present is then the correlative, the trace, the record, of past events, and therefore development and difference are at the deepest level two sides of the same phenomenon – of process itself. 3 In practice, however, these problems are usually investigated separately, and indeed we might expect them to have separate sources. For the Chicago School in particular, a likely influence would be the pragmatists. The Chicago School took shape in the years pragmatism was strongest at Chicago, and indeed there were extremely close relations between W. I. Thomas – the central progenitor of the Chicago School – and his pragmatist philosopher colleagues John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. Moreover, while the topics of development and difference are are largely absent from the earlier pragmatists Peirce and James, they are important for Mead and central for Dewey. 4 In this paper I shall examine how the pragmatists regarded the context of a single self in time (the problem of personal development over the life course) and the context of a

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single self in social space (the problem not only of surrounding individuals but also of surrounding and fundamentally different groups). After a quick glance at the ontologies of the earlier pragmatists, I discuss the problems of individual development and social difference as they emerged society-wide during and after the first pragmatist generation. Having specified these problems, I can set the second pragmatist generation in the context they provide. The paper concludes with a discussion of the centrality of accounts of development and difference in a processualized social ontology. 5 The usual disclaimers apply. I do not provide a definitive account. This is a reading and reflection on a possible linkage, not a precise exercise in intellectual history. The principal focus is on the pragmatist authors, not on the Chicago School, whose interest in these topics I have discussed extensively elsewhere. But as a theorist in the Chicago tradition, I am principally interested in development and difference because of their twofold centrality to the processual account of the social world. By reading (especially) Mead and Dewey in this light, I hope to find new issues and problems that require theoretical clarification. As for the evolution of pragmatist thought in itself, that is a topic that others are better equipped to undertake.

I. The Earlier Pragmatists and the Great Watershed

6 Peirce’s account of ontology, as of nearly everything else, embeds ontology within the master analysis of signs. The result is an epistemological ontology, if we can imagine such a thing; observable phenomena are defined in terms of their logical structure. Pierce’s purely logical approach disregards the passage of historical (that is, particular) time, whether in the lives of individual humans, or in the evolution of “larger histories,” or, ultimately, in the evolution of the species. Peirce’s pragmatism evades the problem of particular temporality almost completely.

7 Similarly, the Jamesean individual – at least in the two versions of the psychology course – does not really change over life course time. James’s famous line about the baby’s world as a “blooming, buzzing confusion” (James 1950, 1: 488) comes in the middle of a discussion of perceptual discrimination, not at the beginning of a phenomenological analysis of individual development. Nor did James study whether the “universals” of human psychology change in historical time or across social space, since such changes would imply differences between people rather than properties universal to all of them. This implication would in turn violate one of James’s basic premises in his project of inventing psychology – the premise that there was such an abstraction as “an individual,” whose universal properties were the proper study of psychology. 8 In short, the early pragmatists did not really address the basic problems of social ontology nor did they worry much about temporality or differences. To the extent that they did consider social ontology, they took either a logicist or an “abstract individualist” position, positions long familiar from the contractarians and central to vernacular American social theory at the time. In consequence, they have little to tell us about the need to combine concerns for ontology and temporality into a single framework.1 9 Between the early and later pragmatists the problems of development and difference became central in American social thought. But they did so in quite different ways, and,

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more important, their theorists chose very different presuppositions. My earlier remarks presented the problems of development and difference as two aspects of a single issue: the need for a viable processual ontology for the social world. But the differing intellectual trajectories of studies of development and difference have made this unity of approach more and more difficult as time passed.

A. Individual Development

10 Around the turn of the twentieth century, there emerged from a variety of sources a concern with what we would now call developmental psychology – the evolution of the self across the life course. This concern flowered in writers like James Mark Baldwin, Adolf Meyer, and Sigmund Freud. The intellectual sources of the new developmental psychology lay in part in changes internal to the new discipline of psychology itself. The field was pondering the old philosophical debate of associationism versus apriorism, but with novel data from anatomical and physiological studies of the human nervous system. At the same time, some sources of the new developmental concern lay outside the discipline, for example in the newly psychological novel, where writers like Flaubert, Eliot, Tolstoy, Conrad, and William James’s brother Henry followed the lead of Dostoyevsky (and other writers of Bildungsromane) away from the realist, social-level analysis characteristic of Dickens, Balzac, and Zola, and towards an intensively developmental account of individual transformation.2

11 Alongside those intellectual sources, two great new social institutions also demanded a practical focus on developmental psychology. One was mass schooling, where developmental questions became particularly salient because of the cultural differences that immigration had induced in the school-age population of the United States, differences often misunderstood as developmental differences rather than cultural ones. (The Army Alpha Test debate in 1917-18 was a late example of this misperception. See Carson 1993.) The other source was the mental hospital system, in which hundreds of thousands of lived, and where hereditarian pessimism was giving way to a more optimistic life-course approach in the work of people like Meyer and Freud. This new work facilitated the transfer of methods for “abnormal psychology” to the perplexing plethora of “nervous” diseases then newly common among the general bourgeois population. The Freudian approach would triumph in that expanded, non-psychotic clientele, of course, but it was in fact only one of many such analyses of the emotional development of the self.3 12 Thus, the problems of education and anxiety guaranteed that the later pragmatists confronted a world obsessed not only intellectually but also practically with individual development and change over the life course. The main academic result of this obsession – the theoretical and experimental literature on developmental psychology – was already extensive by 1900. For example, James Mark Baldwin and others were already experimenting with children (usually their own) to uncover the exact course of mental development. A good deal was “known” about the order in which various skills and abilities developed in childhood, and the beginnings had been laid of a “natural history” of the human individual across the life course.4 13 In Baldwin, this theory of individual development was coupled directly with a concept of larger historical flow. Baldwin’s profound commitment to evolutionary theory as then understood led him to base his theory of development on Haeckel’s notion that

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ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. This recapitulation concept recognized two levels of development – those of the individual organism and of the species. The two were differentiated mainly by their time scales. The one unfolded in decades, the other in millions of years. 14 But between these two was nothing. The Haeckel phrase – and the Baldwinian psychology – did not envision processes on some intermediate time scale. Specifically, Baldwin had no concept of the “history of social entities” – the thing we would today call “history.” Yet outside psychology, such a “historical” level of process was well recognized at the time. Debates about the nature of history were endemic in the later nineteenth century; we have only to recall Ranke’s positivism, Schmoller’s , Buckle’s evolutionism, and the French historical school of Langlois and Seignobos. And this had a quite specific view of the temporality of history. “History” was typically seen as “larger” than the individual, a conceptualization that would eventually pass uncritically into modern social theorizing as the idea of “levels” of social reality. This “larger” history, in the view of the highly progressivist late nineteenth century historical writers, occurred on a time scale roughly one order of magnitude longer than individual development. It was a matter of hundreds of years, but not of millions. Yet such history went unrecognized in the Baldwinian psychology, which theorized only individual development and species evolution.5 15 Like Baldwin, Freud also developed a complex developmental theory for individuals, in his case a theory of emotional development. Unlike Baldwin (but like Rousseau, in the different case of social inequality), he did this on purely hypothetical principles. That is, rather than extensively observing early childhood behavior, Freud reasoned back from later symptomatology to earlier events, a procedure that obviously involved very strong assumptions about the causal effects of early experience. This procedure seemed in many ways cognate with that of “history” as an emerging discipline, which – as I just noted – usually read the past through the lenses of progress and thereby made the past simply the starting place for the present, rather than a period of interest on its own, from which other possible presents might have descended. Because of this correlation of methodologies, we might expect Freud to have come closer than Baldwin to a merged conception of individual development and historical change.6 16 But while Freud’s theory of the larger process was not on the heroic evolutionary time scale, it ignored history even in the progressivist sense, much less in the contingent one. In a late series of works stimulated by the great puzzle of the First World War, Freud urged the purely hypothetical history of the “primal horde.” As Freud knew perfectly well, the concept of the primal horde was not really historical, but simply projected Freud’s theories of individual development onto an indefinite social past. And in discussing civilizational sublimation, Freud returned (still hypothetically) to this indefinite past: When a child reacts to his first great instinctual frustrations with excessively strong aggressiveness and with a correspondingly severe super-ego, he is following a phylogenetic model and is going beyond the response that would be currently justified; for the father of prehistoric times was undoubtedly terrible, and an extreme amount of aggressiveness may be attributed to him. (Freud 1961 :78) 17 Like the “” of the various contractarians, the primal horde concept was an arbitrary fiction, not in any way independent of Freud’s developmental theory. Moreover, if the primal horde was not really historical, neither was it in any way particular. Freud himself never seems to have doubted the universality of any of his

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major conceptions, although, to be sure, anthropologists influenced by Freud would soon begin to ask about the possible cultural universality (or limitation) of his theories. 7

18 Thus the great developmentalists Baldwin and Freud both more or less avoided the question of contingent and particular “history” in order to pursue a universal concept of individual development. This allowed them to produce very elaborate developmental theories, but at the cost of assuming a universal, historically decontextualized psychology. This new developmental theory provided a crucial context and challenge to evolving pragmatist thinking, by demonstrating how much could be achieved by ignoring the social question in either of its guises: as the question of historical change or as the question of the social differences that arose out of that historical change.8 19 The developmentalists’ achievements could not be ignored. The pragmatists read Baldwin attentively, finding much to dispute but also much to absorb, as can be seen from Dewey’s review (1898) of Baldwin’s magnum opus. And like all intellectuals alive in those years, the pragmatists also read Freud, whose work seemed to destroy any possibility of a non-developmental account of emotional life. This encounter with developmental psychology must have strongly prejudiced the later pragmatists against the purely abstract temporalities of the earlier pragmatists, but at the same time they cannot have missed the new ahistoricism evident in the idea of universal sequences of psychological development.

B. Social Differences

20 The other great social issue providing a context for later pragmatist thinking was of course the question of social differences, posed in the United States first by the slavery issue and the Civil War, and second by the immense immigration following 1880. Like developmental theories, these discussions of social difference were often in dialogue (sometimes positive, sometimes negative) with the hereditarian approaches to social differences dominant in the 1880s, which were themselves traceable to Darwin and Spencer.9

21 The social differences literature had two major strands. Both were normative literatures, driven by the concern to ameliorate what were perceived as fundamental problems in American society. They are best differentiable by their strategies for that amelioration. One strand would resolve social differences by designing an educational system that would in principle gradually destroy those differences, leaving behind people who were – as it were – diverse but not different. They would be liberal citizens, completely equal makers of a . But within that contract they would – it was hoped – make a wonderful and richly rewarding diversity.10 22 This first strand of “social differences” thinking did admit of a simple history of social differences: different peoples come together, encounter one another, and ultimately merge into some new whole without losing their individual uniqueness. In the Deweyan and Americanization versions, this amalgamation would happen through education. In the Robert Park “race relations cycle” version, it would happen through mutual confrontation in which different groups would “educate” each other, which would be followed by assimilation. Either way, the history imagined was usually progressivist and straightforward. It was not massively contingent or complex, nor did it involve truly irreconcilable difference and conflict, or their sequel of social catastrophe.11

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23 The other strand of writing on social differences focused on dichotomous models of differences, which it thought were not so easily resolved. This view is of course most clearly associated with Marx and the scientific socialists, but it was quite general in the late nineteenth century. Its clearest version was the capital/labor framework, pervasive in American public life – as in European public life – throughout the period. In the United States, most of the other dramatic social differences of the time mapped onto this one quite clearly, so all the versions of difference were more or less equivalent: religion (Protestant capital versus Jewish and Catholic labor), ethnicity (Anglo-Saxon and German capital versus East and South European labor), language (English-speaking capital versus foreign-speaking labor), migrant status (native or old- migrant capital versus new immigrant labor) and so on. The dichotomous difference approach presumed a simple, non-overlapping system of social differences. In its dominant progressive version, the approach assumed that modified social institutions – in particular, the redistribution of wealth – would unmake the dichotomous differences. For adherents of this approach, neither social mobility (under which the interclass line would blur as people moved across it in both directions) nor class conflict (under which explicit confrontation would lead to revolution) would really resolve social differences. There must rather be steady, institutionalized amelioration.12 24 Thus, both strands of thought about social differences in the period were unlike the developmental theories in that they were somewhat historical. They focused on actual processes of change and usually escaped the excesses of Spencerian evolutionism. But other than the Parkian race-relations and ethnicity writings, they were not really contingent or pluridirectional. They were often simplistic in terms of the social differences involved, since the vast majority of differences were mapped onto a fairly simple dichotomy of native/immigrant or capital/labor. They differed chiefly in the kinds of institutional change expected to reconcile difference: long-run demographic processes like education and assimilation in the first case and shorter-run and more directly ameliorative transfer policies in the second case. 25 That the social differences problem preoccupied the later pragmatists is evident. Dewey’s entire oeuvre on education was concerned with social difference and with the challenges that a newly complex urban society presented to traditional educational practices. In a more muted way, Mead’s writings also concerned the problem of difference, and as Treasurer of Hull House he was extremely active in progressive affairs.13 26 In summary, the later pragmatists wrote in a context very much shaped by the two great social questions of individual development and social differences and by the literatures responding to those questions. But the two great questions pointed in very different intellectual directions. For they took very different approaches to theorizing social life in liberal, individualist society. One approach to this cat’s cradle of causality pulled the strings of determination so as to make evident the trajectories of individuals, in order to understand how to create trajectories that would produce proper citizens for a liberal . This was the theory of development and the educational route to reconciliation of social differences. 27 To be sure, the Parkian assimilation literature had a more potentially contingent and heterogeneous account than the schooling literature, but ultimately it too was captured by a unidirectional progress story, partly through its submergence under the black- white race issue after the ending of immigration in 1925. Overall, the focus on human

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development pushed its theorists in the direction of simple, directed, uncontingent history. 28 By contrast, the other approach pulled the cat’s cradle quite differently, because it aimed to reconcile group differences in the short-term present. The dichotomous theory of social differences focused on the immediate sources of conflict. Although all these differences and conflicts had quite particular and contingent histories, those histories tended to disappear, for the focus was on conflict between present groups whose existence and conflicting interests were taken as self-evident and (tacitly, and perhaps for simplicity’s sake) as more or less eternal. The welter of those conflicts was then conceptually tamed and simplified by the dichotomous characterization of society. The great problem with this literature would of course prove to be that when one pulled the cat’s cradle of determination by the threads of group conflict, one confronted immediately the problem that individuals were members of not one but dozens of groups, conflicting on different dimensions and in different areas. As long as conflict was unified and dichotomous, the theory was safe. But the superproductivity of capitalism after 1920 permitted a concomitant expansion of consumer society, and this new abundance quickly subdivided and crosscut the seemingly eternal dichotomous conflicts of the late nineteenth century. 29 In summary, the internal of their two problematics rapidly drove these literatures apart. What were useful simplifying assumptions in one literature were foolish premises for the other, and vice versa. In particular, with respect to temporality, one literature found the other short-sighted because it ignored the importance of development, while the other literature found the one dilatory because it hesitated to demand immediate redress. All this arose, in fact, because these two great questions of individual development and social differences were not theorized together. The rewards for narrowing one’s assumptions were too great, and so their separation continuously increased. 30 This social and intellectual background is necessary to specify the context in which the later pragmatists wrote. It is obvious that neither the approach of Peirce nor that of James was helpful in the new context. It made little sense to talk about universal properties of either symbols or psychologies. More particularly, in the new context it made little sense to ignore the development of the various aspects of human psychology across the life course, nor to ignore social differences at a given time. These facts had been clearly recognized by the decade 1900-1910. The later pragmatists thus faced a much more complex intellectual landscape, with two fundamentally different ways to pull the cat’s cradle of social causality. They had to rethink completely the analyses of their elders.

II. The Later Pragmatists

31 The later pragmatists – Mead and Dewey chief among them - dealt with this new pair of problems in quite divergent ways. Surprisingly, Dewey – the elder of the two – was the more radical. But this fact probably reflects disciplinary allegiances. Mead was a professional philosopher, while Dewey was not only a professional philosopher, but also a school reformer, a political theorist, and a public intellectual.

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A. Mead on Development and Difference

32 Mead’s social psychology diverges immediately from the union Haeckel (and Baldwin) had proposed. Ontogeny and phylogeny were pulled apart. Mead’s account of the origins of symbols and cognition was phylogenetic in general outline; humans developed a larger repertory of significant symbols than other animals. And his analysis of mind remains within this phylogenetic world of pigeons and parrots and dogfights – animals to be contrasted with “what we call a reflective individual” (Mead 1934: 73). Yet much of Mead’s argument is phylogenetic only in a limited sense. He compares the different static states of humans and other animals rather than developing a seriously phylogenetic argument of how one kind of system leads to another within a new species, given the evolutionary mechanisms then known.14

33 Thus, Mead’s phylogeny was not very phylogenetic. Neither, in fact, was his ontogeny very ontogenetic. As is well known, Mead’s account rests on the idea that significant symbols called out the same reaction in the self as in the other. This was simply a philosophically precise elaboration of the Jamesean/Cooleyan looking-glass self concept. But in terms of my earlier argument, it was a form of “abstract ,” with the slight twist that it was not so much individualist as interactionist. Mead, that is, envisioned an abstract situation of interaction and theorized how such an abstract form of interaction could in principle prove to be the origin of both the individual consciousness on the one hand and the set of general rules constitutive of a social entity (the generalized other) on the other hand. But in accomplishing this intellectual tour de force, Mead used examples and arguments that were about abstract human individuals who were for some unspecified reason without individual consciousness, rather than specifically about babies, who were already at the center of the “origins of mind” debate as it was posed at the turn of the twentieth century by psychologists like Baldwin. Mead’s main argument in the Mind section of Mind, Self, and Society was not essentially about education or socialization, but about the abstract logical requirements of a possible account that derived mind from interaction with an outside world in the context of certain limited ego endowments. The Meadean account did succeed in straddling the gap between Kantian apriorism and Humean associationism, but it did so by a logical rather than a developmental argument. There was little ontogeny to it. 34 In the Self section of Mind, Self and Society, to be sure, there was a distinct sense of ontogeny. Children’s games played an important auxiliary role in Mead’s account (Mead 1934: 150-64), and the acquisition of the generalized other was construed in explicitly developmental terms. But by comparison with his contemporaries’ developmental writings, Mead’s developmentalism was vague. One has only to compare Mead with Piaget, whose first works appeared at the same time as Mead was giving the lectures that became Mind, Self, and Society, to see the rapidity with which strong and narrow developmental assumptions – and the banishing of the phylogenetic side of the Baldwin program to philosophy or biology – had enabled developmental psychology to bypass the pragmatists. This transformation was accomplished particularly by Edouard Claparède – a friend and occasional collaborator of Baldwin’s – and above all by Claparède’s brilliant student Jean Piaget. By comparison with Piaget’s Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood, which although published in 1945 was built on Piaget’s research in the 1930s, Mead’s account of the role of play in symbols is only very loosely

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ontogenetic, whereas Piaget, pulling the cat’s cradle very hard indeed, makes the detailed ontogeny of intelligence into the central process of psychology. Mead was thus in some sense moving backward, towards the abstract individualist position, rather than prioritizing ontogeny over phylogeny as had Claparède and Piaget.15 35 Rather than embrace this new ontogenetic focus on individual development over time, Mead thus remained in the world of abstract philosophical imaginings. His concepts of “interaction” and of “calling out the same response in self as in the other” are concepts like “state of nature” and “primal horde”: abstractions employed to make a clear point about the logic of particular situations. Through them, Mead was indeed able to produce self and society out of the same singular process of interaction – surely an intellectual triumph, given the complete dominance of the Enlightenment social ontology with its independent and prior adult individuals. But he accomplished this triumph only by largely ignoring real change over real time, at both the individual and social levels. This backward step may have been the price of his processualizing move. 36 As for the issue of social differences, the Self section of Mind, Self, and Society occasionally does recognize the non-concentric nature of the “generalized others” in which one participates (e.g., Mead 1934: 157). But Mead did not really consider the resulting problem posed for the self – the need for internal unification of what could be wildly differing self attitudes and consequently the problem those differing selves posed for social solidarity itself. And yet this very issue constituted the main empirical work and theoretical concern of Mead’s colleague and friend W. I. Thomas. Thomas taught about attitudes from 1913-14 onward, and the dialogue between personal attitudes on the one side and social values on the other is the central concern not only of the “Methodological Note” of The Polish Peasant but indeed of the text as a whole (Abbott & Egloff 2008). Also central to that work is an attempt to account for the emergence and fixation of social differences (between groups) in the process of interaction, another of the theoretical processes discussed in the Methodological Note, and a topic ignored even in the social differences literatures discussed earlier. (Differences were there taken for granted.) By contrast with Thomas’s robust inquiry, Mead’s social theory usually presumed a nested series of concentric generalized others leading up to that most general of generalized others, the League of Nations (1934: 209, 287). Although there are occasionally examples drawing on actual political situations (e.g., 1934: 187-8), these are interspersed with static phylogenetic comparisons referring to the contrast of human experience with that of sentinels in animal herds (1934: 190-1). Mead’s argument is abstract, absolutely scalable across all levels of temporal comparison. 37 Thus we see that the price of Mead’s merger of the individual and the social was the forfeiting of a truly temporal account of either the individual or the social level, and more specifically of the emergence and fixation of differences at the social level. It is this problem more than any other that derails any attempt to generalize Mead’s pragmatic “socializing” of cognition by, for example, extending it to the question of emotional development. Such accounts would need to parallel Mead’s account of cognition, demonstrating the origin of both the personal emotional self and (say) the group emotions of the “madness-of-crowds” type in a single interactive emotional process. But the only compelling accounts of individual emotional life are very strongly developmental. To “socialize” emotional life without recognizing developmental issues would therefore be a self-evident mistake.

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38 Moreover, while the Mead theory of mind and self seems excellent in its abstract perfection, the mind and self of any given individual arise in a context filled with other individuals and selves which are far more fully developed – parents, teachers, and elders – and filled as well with developed institutions like family, school, and workplace. In practice, a realistic general framework cannot ignore the location of development within an already existing and highly particular social process. And it must even confront fixed social differences of a non-functional type – nationalism, for example. In summary, while Mead succeeded admirably at showing individual/society dualism, he did so that the price of removing all particularity. But since particularity is universal, his arguments were necessarily limited. To surpass him, one must pull the cat’s cradle not just on the two points of individual and society, but also on a third point - the embedding of each of these in particular lineages of development.

B. Dewey on Development and Difference

39 It was of course John Dewey who began this analysis of individual development in particular contexts. His reform of education had very specific origins: it aimed to respond to the disappearance of particular kinds of training that used to occur in most households: sewing, craftwork, woodworking, and so on. Individual development and social change are thus both central to Dewey’s thinking, as are social differences. This is perhaps not unrelated to the fact that it was Dewey, too, who pushed the pragmatist program most strongly in the normative direction.

40 In the first place, Dewey in his educational writings was much more explicitly developmental than pragmatism theretofore. To be sure, he could when necessary write in the earlier, non-developmental style. Human Nature and Conduct (1988) is meant to theorize the psychological structure of a fully developed adult, in the tradition of the great Enlightenment philosophical psychologies like the first book of Leviathan, Locke’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, and Kant’s three critiques. But even here Dewey cannot avoid putting the character into motion, noting the importance of development in chapters 4 and 5, and – not by coincidence – raising in the same chapters the issue of social differences. But Dewey is usually a full- blown developentalist, and it is in his early thinking on education – contained in his 1899 lectures on the – that we see his detailed developmental approach for early education.16 41 The analysis rests on two great pillars. The first is the idea that education consists of the “adjustment” of the individual to the surrounding society. Education is thus always fundamentally social in its origin and the origin of the self necessarily social. But the self is not merely social. For at the same time, the individual always engages the social through antecedent endowments (e.g., Dewey 1966: 48). Dewey had thus already begun in 1899 to adumbrate the position – which Piaget would soon elaborate – of the dual cycle of assimilation (adjustment of novel input to preexisting endowments) and accommodation (adjustment of self to novel external inputs).17 42 The second pillar for Dewey is the premise that education is never a goal in itself: It is not a specific content, a specific set of skills (or even Deweyan habits) acquired once and forever. In this sense, Dewey’s account is completely processual. As he would later argue, all interim ends must eventually become means to other further ends. He thus refuses to acknowledge any particular content to education, just as he would later

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argue in The Public and Its Problems that there could be no once-for-all form of “good government.” 43 Dewey was quite specific about development, giving explicit phases in education in the 1899 lectures (Dewey 1966b: 149). Setting aside infancy, he sees age 3 to about 7 as a first phase, 7 to puberty as a second, puberty to 18 or 20 as a third, and 20-plus as a fourth. In classic Deweyan fashion, these stages are distinguished by their differing relations of means and ends. The first stage is one of “direct experience”: no distinctions of means and ends, no distinction of process and product. There is simple immediacy of experience. The second stage is the transition from immediacy to the beginnings of deferred experience, via separation of means and ends, a distinction evident in the shift from play to games. The third period is a period of coming into consciousness of a larger society of which one is a part: a world of inclusive wholes (Dewey 1966b: 158) which define and locate themselves as rules, procedures and generalizations.18 The child gains a sense of the large-scale and important, versus the detailed and local, and now conceives of him- or herself as a part of something that is outside and other. A fourth phase is about entering into work: choosing a place where one’s skills, abilities, and shortcomings will find optimal expression, “the line of work which is best suited to his capacity and in which he is capable of rendering the greatest service to society” (Dewey 1966b: 159). 44 Although Dewey was thus strongly developmental, he was less concerned, in the 1899 Lectures at least, with difference. He did not really confront the enormous variety of individual children, perhaps because he was mainly concerned with young children and with the grades in which education was already almost universal in coverage and content. And, looking beyond education, neither did he problematize the fit between young people’s very varying abilities and desires on the one hand and the work demanded in the labor force on the other, even though he lived through a period in which much of the craft work that he thought was highly educational was not only stripped from the household (as he had noted, in his arguments on behalf of craft education) but also stripped from the labor force entirely through mechanization and automation. He did speculate that “the mechanic ought to have something within him which would make him more intelligent, more ethical, more cultured in his calling, as well as the doctor or minister or lawyer” (1966b: 172). No doubt he was thinking of the various virtuosi of craft culture: the plumber who has learned from long experience and reflection the complex behaviors of hot water heating systems, for example. But while he may have theorized the idea of craft genius, and indeed although he focused intensively on the loss of household instruction for little children, Dewey did not theorize this shifting work process explicitly, even though it created many of the problems that he wanted education to ameliorate. Thus it is fair to say that Dewey’s analysis of social differences did not really deeply affect his analysis of development.19

C. Dewey as Processualist

45 Dewey is, however, a committed processualist. An important sign of this is his strong emphasis on the present, combined with his strong commitment to the openness and possibility of the future. For Dewey, education is really an attitude about the relation between self and the non-self world. It is an agreement to continue learning, not to become a dead self through habit. It is a commitment to process. But despite his high hopes for the future, Dewey does not really address the question of how process itself

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maintains ideals and conserves the good, rather than just wandering among new (and possibly meretricious) possibilities. He certainly felt that he (John Dewey) could not foresee the future and that the future would need to makes its decisions for itself, in light of things we could not possibly know now. That was the creed of processualism. But other than mandating adjustment in the future, he is unwilling to specify strategies and criteria for that adjustment. This would prove to be an Achilles heel for his political theories, as it is for any processual politics: there is no obvious way to guarantee avoidance of “adjustment” to totalitarianism and its like.

46 This processual creed shone especially strong in Dewey’s later work on the higher levels of education, in the book Democracy and Education (1916). Here Dewey becomes explicit about lifelong education and has drawn the inevitable conclusion that once we regard education as enduring throughout the whole of life, in a society that is continually changing, we have arrived at the theoretical problem of the mutual constitution of society and individual as particular things, over time. Moreover that problem is not expressed simply in the Meadean form of abstract individualism, but as a question of practical historical experience. 47 Dewey had thus come to the threshold of a fully particularized processual ontology, embracing both particular individuals and particular social structures in a mutually constituting system. Dewey himself did not, however, directly theorize this ontology. Rather, that task was undertaken by Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant In Europe and America, which began appearing two years after Democracy and Education and whose research was contemporaneous with it. The mutual constitution argument pervaded the Methodological Note and the first two books of The Polish Peasant. The study of historically differing institutions pervaded the entire text. And the biographical and developmental approach was implicit in the 200 pages autobiography of the hapless Wladek Wiszniewski, which was the third volume of the original edition. Indeed, The Polish Peasant – whose motivating author was after all a longtime friend and colleague of Mead and Dewey – should be regarded as the most comprehensive (if not very clear) statement of a pragmatist approach to empirical social science. It is also the most sophisticated pragmatist text in terms of integrating personal development and institutional change (that is, the necessarily particular histories of individuals and of social entities) into a fully processual social ontology. This argument appears in the center of the Methodological Note and seems to have been forced out of Thomas by Znaniecki (see Abbott & Egloff 2008), whose social was rigid enough to counter Thomas’s diffuseness and commitment to an almost random processualism.20 48 Thus The Polish Peasant came as close as any pragmatist text to a work showing the mutual constitution of society and the individual as particular things, not as abstractions of the type Mead had envisioned. Yet Dewey himself retreated from the need to theorize these particular histories. By embedding his concept of education within the concept of democracy, Dewey made a crucial move. On the one hand, he moved the pragmatist position towards explicit normative commitment. In one sense, this naturally reflected Dewey’s concern for education, which is inherently a normative activity, since it involves choices of what to teach and how to teach it. But in another sense, this commitment derived from the pragmatist desire to judge activity in terms of its consequences and the pragmatist recognition that such judgment is always partly normative, and indeed that therefore any successful social ontology must not only be,

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as I have just argued, historical in both individual and social-entity terms, but also willing to recognize the social process as in part inevitably normative.

D. Dewey as Normative Democrat

49 But by making a normative turn towards democracy, Dewey inevitably had to accept some of the concepts of social ontology implicit in the longstanding philosophical foundations of democracy. These lay in contractarian liberalism, at least as far as most of his readers were concerned. And the social ontology of contractarian liberalism was then and has since remained largely ahistorical. As a result Dewey seems to give up – on the normative side – what he has achieved (in part) on the empirical one. Just as Mead had stepped back from developmentalism and differences to craft his mutual constitution argument for individual and society, so also Dewey seems to pull back from particularities in his attempt to add the normative dimension to his mutual constitution argument.

50 A brief aside is necessary about the inadequacies of the normative ontology of contractarian liberalism. Under the normative ontology of contractarianism, the political world is constituted of equal individuals in a state of nature who have come together to make a society. This coming together is, of course, a normative ideal expressed as a hypothetical history, not an empirical model. But it nonetheless serves to generate the concepts of liberty and of equality before the law which in turn underwrite the legal and political systems that are the empirical foundation of most democratic societies. But the normative ontology of contractarianism in practice thus enacts a legal and political world that is quite at variance with what we know perfectly well is the ontology of the empirical world. Contractarian theory divides the world into an ideal public and political world, and a less-than-ideal private and empirical world.21 The normatively ideal side of this ontology comprises free and equal citizens without particular (private) ties affecting their participation in universal political life. The empirical and private ontology – willy nilly – comprises differentiated individuals linked through dozens of complexly overlapping groups, wide inequalities associated with numerous different types of stratification, and overdetermination such that politics conducted in terms of one of these bases of stratification has complex knock-on effects through the others. Thus, the normative ontology of contractarianism not only lacks any serious model of complex particularities (which are banished to the private world), it also lacks a serious model of history, of inheritance, of lineage. While all of these things also profoundly shape democratic societies in practice, they are banished by the normative ontology of contractarianism to the almost unanalyzed “private” realm of society. It is a great ideal, but one achieved by sweeping many inconveniences under the rug. 51 Dewey understood the inadequacy of this simplistic approach. His notion of democracy is both more complex and more processual. He did not think democracy was one thing or one set of institutions, as the heritage of typically thinks. Yet even his own two major definitions of democracy themselves leave serious questions. 52 In Democracy and Education, the main definition of democracy – the first of two in the this book – comes in Chapter Seven on “The Democratic Concept in Education.” Dewey gives two basic standards for democracy (1966: 83): “How numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared? How full and free is the interplay with other

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forms of association?” These standards (diversity and free interplay) are fine criteria for a democracy, but of course there are crucial assumptions. One is the assumption that the “various interests” do not include anti-democracy, a matter which would become central, immedately after Dewey wrote, through the rise of fascism. 53 More subtle and insidious is the second assumption. Dewey has no doubt of the existence of varied interests. Because of that, he does not recognize that in his ideal society, varied interests might actually become scarce. His definition – hardly surprising for a definition propounded in 1916 – takes the existence of great diversity for granted and asks how highly diverse groups can get along. But those diverse interests, whose preservation and interaction are the supposed glory of liberal and democratic society, could perhaps only be created in societies that were themselves relatively closed and even close-minded. Thus, it is a beautiful thing to talk about diverse religions or languages or schools of art getting along with each other. It is quite another to imagine how any individual religion or language and school of art can – within a society committed more or less to eclecticism – come to the coherence and strength that allows it to represent a serious alternative to current religions or languages or schools of art. 54 This problem of the origin of difference no doubt seemed irrelevant to Dewey. After all, difference was arriving on the steamships every day, and the entire contractarian tradition, buried in a narrowly economic concept of self-interest and frightened by the religious differences that had destroyed Europe 1500-1650, ignored the possibility that the creation of serious cultural or social difference might become a problem. Only the mass society literature – Ortega y Gasset (1932) and others – asked this question (as well they might in an era of strident populism and fascism), and it is striking that they were themselves soon branded as fascists (by the left) for daring to pose it. But in the end, the sources of difference remain a question for Dewey. Granted that in this first definition democracy involves different kinds of people making common cause, the question remains: where does real difference come from? 55 Dewey’s later definition of democracy, in The Public and its Problems, was again twofold, but this time two fold in terms of individual and society. From the standpoint of the individual, [democracy] consists in having a responsible share in forming and directing the activities of the groups to which one belongs and in participating according to need in the values which the groups sustain. From the standpoint of the groups, it demands liberation of the potentialities of members of a group in harmony with the interests and goods which are common […]. A good citizen finds his conduct as a member of a political group enriching and enriched by his participation in family life, industry, scientific and artistic associations. There is a free give-and-take; fullness of integrated personality is therefore possible of achievement since the pulls and responses of different groups reinforce one another and their values accord. (Dewey 1927: 147-8) 56 The difficulty with this definition becomes visible as soon as we begin to try to insert it into real history. Consider the individual first. Across the life course, the individual’s responsible share in forming and directing the activities of the groups to which he or she belongs must necessarily vary with the many personal qualities that vary in the life course: intellectual development, education, group-relevant skills and expertise, degree of commitment to the group, and so on. Likewise, the individual’s needs will systematically vary: by alternative sources, by ill health and other damages, by prior experiences that have created advantage or disadvantage. Moreover, once we put the

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individual in motion, we must confront the issues of moral hazard, uncertainty, and discounting, which disturb the simple flow of responsible power and justifiable need. On the social side, the notion that a society’s diverse artistic, political, industrial, and scientific groups inevitably accord because of cross-cutting pulls is probably wishful thinking, and Dewey was either unaware of or ignored the extensive use of the American political system for set-asides and private benefits for this or that social group, be it ethnicity, , race, , age grade, or illness risk group. And those are only the synchronic difficulties. Dewey writes as if there is no gain and loss in political life, as if one could count on a rising tide that would raise all boats. One is reminded of Rousseau’s remark that true democracy is a government only for angels.

57 This is surely not to say that Dewey has not identified a great ideal. He has indeed done that, as he so often did. But in point of fact, the American political system handles all these many problems of history and particularity via a legislative and legal system based mainly on procedural rather than substantive safeguards, and one that has not always had a strong record for social equity. We would be well-advised to rethink the very premises of our social contract, embedding it in real time and recognizing the continuous process of group conflict that it represents, as well as recognizing that we should be aiming to produce whole lives that are just (in Dewey’s word, democratic), rather than simply thinking about equity moment by moment. There is no automatic inference that equity moment to moment must inevitably produce equity in the long run. 58 To be sure, throughout The Public and Its Problems Dewey emphasizes the need for experiment and change in political institutions. But he never tells us how those experiments are going to be accomplished and who is to judge (and how) whether they have succeeded or failed. There is today, for example, a state-led movement to call a constitutional convention in the US to force the Federal Government to balance its budget, but those who propose it have begun to realize that other institutions – institutions that protect their power like the Electoral College, winner-take-all voting, and the Senate – could in fact all disappear if that convention took a surprising populist direction. Indeed, it is not clear that anyone dares truly experiment with the form of the U. S. government. This follows from another of Dewey’s insights in The Public and Its Problems, which is that the chief aim of law is predictability of consequences (1927: 53-4). Experimenting with government is bound to produce enormous unpredictability. 59 We see then that although Dewey has done well in recognizing development, and has maintained the Meadean coplanar processualizing of individual and society, his encounter with the contingencies of group history is not as solid, and as a result his views of current group differences are adrift. Moreover, he has not completed a contingent theory of individual development, but has left development mainly universal, largely in order to reconcile his theory with requirements arising from the simple normative ontology of contractarianism. All that said, of the great pragmatists, he alone really makes the transition to processualism. If he failed to draw some necessary conclusions, that is because the initial leap is one of such extraordinary daring.

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III. Requisites of a Processual Ontology

60 The analysis here makes clear that much of pragmatist social theory, although quite processual, proceeded in the modality of “abstract individualism.” It accepted the notion that society comprised adult individuals whose qualities could be understood as given in a moment.

61 Mead’s attack on the vernacular social theory of the time placed even such an abstract individual on the same ontological level as society. He challenged the vernacular view at its strongest point: its belief in the origins of mentation through personal experience on an associationist basis. By arguing that mentation was first a social act and only later an individual one, Mead turned the vernacular on its head. Individual and society were now coplanar. 62 But Mead accomplished this by working chiefly in an abstract rather than a concretely processual manner. This almost certainly reflected polemical necessity. Anglo-Saxon social and legal thinking has worked in the vernacular of the English and French contractarians since the early eighteenth century. To engage it one must talk its language, which includes not only the contractarian logic but also the mechanically associative psychology that could produce – independently of any social experience – adult consciousnesses that could come together to make a contract. Society was thus in that vernacular a somewhat static collection of mature individuals rather than a continuous process in which young people were first entering families and then entering the larger society (changing both of them in the process), then aging and changing further, then growing old and dying. By showing that even on its own terms this view was incoherent and probably erroneous, Mead erased the vernacular relation of individual and society. But he did not then move on to place those elements in a new and fully processual interpretation. Dewey by contrast did so, largely because of his particular subject focus of education. Although Human Nature and Conduct proceeds on traditionally abstract lines, all of Dewey’s writings on education are strongly developmental. 63 Two things seem important about pragmatist developmentalism. First, it does not touch the topic of emotion. The pragmatist philosophical program concerned the relation of thought and action. Emotions make hardly any appearance in Peirce. They command a characteristically brilliant chapter of James, who conjectured that emotion was merely the cognition of a state of bodily feeling, thereby turning another of the vernacular truths on its head (James 1950, 2: 449). But one feels that the analysis is clever rather than persuasive, and one doubts whether James himself – a man given to lengthy and profound depressions – can have actually believed his own theory. This wilful ignorance of emotion continues through to Dewey. The final judgment of the pragmatists on emotions may well be Dewey’s remark in Human Nature and Conduct (1988: 177) that “alas, emotion without thought is unstable. It rises like the tide and subsides like the tide irrespective of what it has accomplished.” There is no clearer statement of the pragmatist credo that accomplishment is the test of all things. 64 It was rather Freud who made a decisively emotional account of human ontogeny. Whatever we may think of the contents of his theory, it – and the broader life course concept of development of which it is the most elaborated exposition – have triumphed absolutely as vernacular theories of modern emotion and indeed of the modern life

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course. Yet the pragmatist response to Freud, and even to life course psychological theories more broadly, is almost nonexistent. 65 The other main quality of pragmatist developmentalism is something shared with Freud and indeed with most other developmentalists. This was an abstract approach to development itself. Freud claimed that his theory of emotional development was universal. Dewey, as we have seen, could often ignore individual differences between children. More broadly, the vulnerability of individual development to the kinds of differences in culture, family, and social institutions that were characteristic of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century is largely unnoticed. That is, while Dewey integrated the concept of development very clearly into the social ontology of the pragmatists, he did not do so while simultaneously recognizing the vast differences within the population both in terms of what they brought to the society and in terms of the positions in the society available for them to occupy. Different kinds of families produced different kinds of ontogenies, and the perpetual changes of a modern consumer society – in jobs, in goods, in morals – meant that development could take numerous turns. Indeed, those differences and turns have become one of the great political issues between the and right. 66 More generally, the pragmatists also failed to theorize the various forms of social difference themselves: ethnicity, religion, gender, age, class, ability, and so on. Even Thomas and Znaniecki saw only distantly the complex interactions and overlaps of these things, with the result that the “developmental” story for social entities – the logical equivalent of individual ontogeny – all too often evinced a gradualist “loss-of- tradition” approach of the kind Dewey skewered in the opening sections of The Public and Its Problems. Yet Dewey’s own concept of multiple publics does not in fact sustain a serious analysis of social differences. 67 In short, the pragmatists made the move to development on the one hand, and, to a limited extent, to a real history on the other. But they did not really view difference in full round, either as presenting problems to be solved or as being, in itself, something that could possibly weaken or disappear. But fascism and most forms of communism soon eradicated much social difference, with extraordinary consequences. The pragmatist social ontology was dangerously irrelevant in a world filled with unitary states of left and right, which called themselves democratic but were not so in practice. Indeed, one of the issues raised by totalitarianism was whether the achievement of a society’s modernity might itself not require, in historical terms, the virtual destruction of the free experience of whole cohorts of that society. This was a process Dewey could and did judge, certainly, but it was not something of which his theory could make sense. 68 Here again we confront the prices of Dewey’s admirable theoretical commitment to normative thinking in general and to democracy in particular. Dewey recognized that complexifying the purely empirical conception of the social world was not enough. To be sure it was essential to recognize development. And, to a certain (but not sufficient) extent, he saw that it was important to imagine that development as happening in parallel with dramatic changes in social institutions. But Dewey also saw that our social ontologies themselves involve normative judgment – right and wrong – because the social process is itself a process of values (as the pragmatists would have said, the social process is about the quality of the consequences of our actions). Yet when he chose a normative ontology he tended to slide back into the familiar world of contractarianism,

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which obviously describes a world that never was and can never be: a world without history, without particularity and difference, without development. This makes moral judgment relatively easy, and provides familiar terms for one’s audience. 69 But it means that his normative theory is adrift. In the first place it doesn’t tell us anything about the vast proportion of the world that is not democratic or liberal and shows no sign of becoming so. In the second place, it doesn’t tell us anything about the everyday politics of the nation, which mainly concerns conflicts between complexly overlapping social groups, and in particular those groups’ attempts to remove their concerns from the cut-and-thrust world of everyday politics (the private world of the contractarians) and to get them onto the list of things that are protected and sustained by universal public rules and transcendental legitimacies (the public world of the contractarians). Nor does Dewey really provide us with anything like an ontological framework for thinking about the succession of these groups in time. 70 We come then to the end of this review with a number of new requisites for a processual ontology. The first is that it recognize individual development and life- course trajectory as essential to any general theory of society. The second is that this trajectory not be conceived in simplistic directional terms, as in the functionalists’ theory of socialization. It must be seen as a complex and contingent system, with regularly patterned internal contingencies. The theory of age structure, the lexis diagram, and such tools must be essential parts of this ontological approach. Third, a similarly ontogenetic approach must be taken to social entities, with the additional proviso that their overlapping and shifting topology requires tools not yet invented to extend the kind of demographic approach we have used for biological individuals. 71 Fourth, and most important, we must refuse to allow ourselves to choose any one of these aspects of analysis as primary. For that is the danger of pure ontogenetics, as it is of pure organization theory, and so on. The reason pure developmentalism fails is that by pulling the cat’s cradle purely in the direction of trajectory, it uses up all the degrees of freedom in the system for that one project. But in fact, organization theorists, or pure demographers, or others could pull the cat’s cradle in other directions and exhaust those same degrees of freedom in different ways. (Ecological theories – for which I am myself well known – are an equally obvious example.) But the degrees of freedom can be exhausted only once, and that is by a social process in which both of individual and social developments are mutually conditioning each other, and in which the theoretical expectations we might generate from a theory based on only one side are preempted by changes on the other. This is the great insight we must take from Mead. It is correct that the individual and the social derive from the same process of interaction. But they do so not under abstract but under very particular circumstances. And this very particularity is what makes their mutual interdependence so difficulty to theorize. But also so worthwhile. Our task is to understand the nature of the cat’s cradle itself, not to find out what happens when we pull it in one theoretical direction.22

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABBOTT A., (1982), The Evolution of American Psychiatry, 1880-1930, Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago.

ABBOTT A., (1997), “Of Time and Place,” Social Forces 75, 1149-82.

ABBOTT A., (2016), Processual Sociology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

ABBOTT A., & R. N. EGLOFF, (2008), “The Polish Peasant in Oberlin and Chicago,” American Sociologist 39, 217-58.

ALLPORT G. W., (1937), Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, New York, Henry Holt.

BALDWIN J. M., (1893), Elements of Psychology, New York, Henry Holt.

BALDWIN J. M., (1897), Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development, New York, Macmillan.

BALDWIN J. M., (1903), Mental Development, New York, Macmillan.

BALDWIN J. M., (1915), Genetic Theory of Reality, New York, Putnam.

BARNES H. E., (1962 [1937]), A History of Historical Writing, New York, Dover.

BENNOUR M., & J. VONÈCHE, (2009), “The Historical Context of Piaget’s Ideas,” in U. Müller, J. I. M. Carpendale, & L. Smith, (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Piaget, Cambridge, Cambridge Unviersity Press, 45-63.

BOWLER P. J., (2003), Evolution: The History of an Idea, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

BREISACH E., (2007), Historiography, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

BROUGHTON J. M., & D. J. FREEMA-MOIR, (1982), The Cognitive Developmental Psychology of James Mark Baldwin, Norwood, NJ, Ablex.

CARSON J., (1993), “Army Alpha, Army Brass, and the Search for Army Intelligence,” Isis 84, 278-309.

DEEGAN M. J., (1988), Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press.

DEWEY J., (1898), Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development, by James Mark Baldwin, Philosophical Review 7, 398-409.

DEWEY J., (1927), The Public and Its Problems, Columbus, Swallow.

DEWEY J., (1966a [1916]), Democracy and Education, New York, Free Press.

DEWEY J., (1966b [1899]), Lectures in the Philosophy of Education, New York, Random House.

DEWEY J., (1988 [1922]), Human Nature and Conduct, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press.

DYKHUIZEN G., (1973), The Life and Mind of John Dewey, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press.

FREUD S., (1960 [1921]), Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, New York, Bantam.

FREUD S., (1961 [1930]), Civilization and Its Discontents, James Strachey (trans.), New York, Norton.

FREUD S., (1962 [1923]), The Ego and the Id, Joan Riviere (trans.), New York, Norton.

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GREENWOOD J. D., (2004), The Disappearance of the Social in American Social Psychology, New York, Cambridge University Press.

GROB G., (1983), Mental Illness and American Society, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

HOFSTADTER R., (1944), in American Thought, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.

HOFSTADTER R., (1955), The Age of Reform, New York, Vintage.

HUEBNER D., (2014), Becoming Mead, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

JAMES W., (1950 [1890]), The Principles of Psychology, two volumes, New York, Dover.

JOAS H., (1985), G. H. Mead, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

KARDINER A., (1945), The Psychological Frontiers of Society, New York, Columbia University Press.

LEWIS J. D., & R. L. SMITH, (1980), American Sociology and Pragmatism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

MALINOWSKI B., (1955 [1927]), Sex and Repression in Savage Society, Cleveland, Meridian Books.

MEAD G. H., (1934), Mind, Self, and Society, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

ORTEGA Y GASSET J., (1932), The Revolt of the Masses, New York, Norton.

PARK R. E., (1950), Race and Culture, Glencoe, IL, Free Press.

PARK R. E., & E. W. BURGESS, (1921), Introduction to the Science of Sociology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

PIÉRON H., (1941), “Edouard Claparède,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 48, 150-2.

RODGERS D. T., (1998), Atlantic Crossings, Cambridge, MA, Harvard.

ROHEIM G., (1952), The Gates of the Dream, New York, International Universities Press.

RYAN A., (1995), John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, New York, Norton.

SEWNY V. D., (1945), The Social Theory of J. Mark Baldwin, New York, King’s Crown Press.

SPENCER H., (1873-1881), Descriptive Sociology, New York, Appleton.

THOMAS W. I., & F. ZNANIECKI, (1918-1921), The Polish Peasant In Europe and America, vols 1 & 2, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Vols 3-5, Boston, R. G. Badger.

TYACK D. B., (1974), The One Best System, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

VIDAL F., (1994), Piaget Before Piaget, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

NOTES

1. Of course there is much more to say about these topics in the early Pragmatists. I mention them here briefly for the sake of completeness in an analysis mainly aimed at their successors. Note that the dominant social thought of the time in the Anglophone world was Spencer’s. Spencer’s position on development and difference might seem to resemble James’s in its abstract individualism, particularly in Spencerism’s vulgar version as Social Darwinism. But Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology volumes contain comprehensive functionalist and institutionalist accounts of

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hundreds of societies. Spencer was in fact obsessed with social differences, but dealt with them in functionalist terms, more than historical ones. 2. For a discussion of the literary sources of the new approaches to behavior, see Abbott & Egloff 2008. 3. On mass schooling, see Tyack 1974. On the mental hospitals, see Abbott 1982, and Grob 1983. 4. Baldwin’s major works are Elements of Psychology (1893), Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development (1897), Mental Development (1903), and Genetic Theory of Reality (1915). Secondary works on Baldwin include Sewny 1945 and Broughton & Freeman-Moir 1982. 5. A dated but comprehensive and still useful history of historical writing is Barnes 1937. For a contemporary account, see Breisach 2007. 6. It is the “middle Freud” who has this methodological resemblance with history, of course. The early Freud of “psychic energy” and the later “pseudo-historical” Freud are both far from this psychodynamic conception rooted in hypothetical analyses of a past whose chief warrant was its plausibility given the symptomatology of the present. 7. Examples are Malinowski (1927), Kardiner (1945), and Roheim (1952). The relevant Freud texts are The Ego and The Id (1962) and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1960). 8. On the loss of the “social” side of psychology, see Greenwood 2004. The “universal psychology” account of personality was simultaneously systematized and attacked in Allport’s famous text of 1937. On the one hand, the book is an attack on absolute psychological universalism. Allport said psychologists were “enthusiastically at work on a somewhat shadowy portrait entitled ‘the generalized human mind’” (Allport 1937: vii). On the other. Allport aimed to pull all the “nomothetic constructs” of his colleagues into a single (and presumably universal) thing called “the personality,” which involved social difference only insofar as it affected that personality. The book was thus making a synthetic, but still universal claim. Allport did argue that this universal quality of having a personality was done differently by every individual. He was thus accepting the fact that it is universal to be particular, but only for the case of the personality. But this personality is a universal, ahistorical thing – in the book’s closing words (1937: 566) “[The individual] stuggles on even under oppression, always hoping and planning for a more perfect democracy where the dignity and growth of each personality will be prized above all else.” 9. The literature on these developments is enormous. A classic text is Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Life (1944). 10. The greatest statement in this literature was of course Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1966a). The rather skeptical secondary literature starts with Tyack 1974. 11. The basic Park sources are Park 1950, and Park & Burgess 1921. 12. Again the secondary literature is large and again it begins with Hofstadter (1955). See Rodgers 1998 for a more recent general analysis. 13. Biographical sources on Mead include Joas 1985, and Huebner 2014. See also Lewis & Smith 1980, and Deegan 1988. On Dewey, see Dykhuizen 1973, and Ryan 1995. 14. A standard history of evolutionary thought is Bowler 2003. Note that Mead’s texts predated what is usually called the “modern evolutionary synthesis” of the 1930s, in which Mendelian genetics was firmly articulated with Darwinian theories of variation and selection. 15. For biographies of Claparède and Piaget see, respectively, Pieron 1941 and Vidal 1994. Piaget was born in 1896 and thus was about thirty years younger than Mead. But he was extremely precocious, and his first monographs (Le langage et la pensée chez l’enfant, Le jugement et le raisonnement chez l’enfant, and La représentation du monde chez l’enfant, date from 1923, 1924, and 1926 respectively. The magisterial La naissance de l’intelligence chez l’enfant dates from 1936). 16. It was apparently an occasional practice to have the courses of major lecturers recorded by student stenographers (hence the dozens of Mead transcripts discovered by Daniel Huebner (2014: 233-43). In 1963, Richard D. Archambault discovered by happenstance a transcript of

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Dewey’s 1899 lectures in the Grinnell College Library and prepared the published edition discussed here. 17. The names of these processes – well-known to any reader of Piaget – came from Baldwin’s Mental Development in the Child and the Race. On Piaget’s antecedents, see Bennour & Vonèche 2009. 18. Dewey, too, was thus a theorist with a concentric view of social units. It is not clear whether this was for him a strong personal position or a mere analytic convenience. 19. The crucial difficulty here was that the industrial workers tended to acquire skills strongly related to particular technologies and untransferable from one technology to another – mule spinners were a classic example, but there are many others. Physicians and other professionals, by contrast, were able to learn skills that would last a lifetime or that could be updated steadily and systematically across the life course. 20. A long and partisan literature has attempted to distinguish the contributions of the two authors to this magisterial work. A review of the primary material and of Thomas’s prior work makes clear that the main architecture and core ideas of the text – its problematics, its genre, its style, and, above all, the pragmatists themes of processualism and mutual-constitution – were longstanding themes in Thomas’s life and work, dating from well before his encounter with Znaniecki. See Abbott & Egloff (2008: 231-3). 21. The division in clearest in Rousseau’s Social Contract, e.g., in the discussion of equality book II, Section xi, which opposes political equality to economic and social inequality. More generally, the division is clear in the distinction of the general will, which emerges from equal citizens and cannot err, and the private wills of individuals. From this distinction comes Rousseau’s explicit contrast of the general will and the “will of all,’ which is the mere sum of private wills (in II: iii). 22. I have myself begun to attempt this theory in the various essays of Processual Sociology (Abbott 2016), carrying forward arguments I have made in several earlier works. Successful analysis must start from the premise – common to Mead and Dewey – that causality happens in the present and that, as noted in the present paper, all influence from the distant past must come through the continuous encoding of past effects into the immediate present via a process of encoding. The first task is then to explain how such a continuously changing world – a world of events – can exhibit so many signs of stability. The second is to trace the consequences of the fact that there is no one single time-space present, but rather an extended space of presents through which causes and actions travel to distant events they may ultimately affect. Such ontological issues are canvassed in the early chapters of the book, while the later chapters begin to address the normative issues that preoccupied Dewey. Nonethless, the book is only a series of beginnings on the main enterprise. I am currently working on a more formal exposition.

ABSTRACTS

In this paper I shall examine how the pragmatists regarded the context of a single self in time (the problem of personal development over the life course) and the context of a single self in social space (the problem not only of surrounding individuals but also of surrounding and fundamentally different groups). After a quick glance at the ontologies of the earlier pragmatists, I discuss the problems of individual development and social difference as they emerged society- wide during and after the first pragmatist generation. Having specified these problems, I can set the second pragmatist generation in the context they provide. The paper concludes with a

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discussion of the centrality of accounts of development and difference in a processualized social ontology.

AUTHOR

ANDREW ABBOTT

University of Chicago aabbott[at]uchicago.edu

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Dewey, Mead, John Ford, and the Writing of History Pragmatist Contributions to Narrativism

Verónica Tozzi

“The writing of History is an instance of judgment as a resolution through inquiry of a problematic situation.” John Dewey

I. Narrativism and New Philosophy of History

1 The second half of the twentieth century has been witness to a blooming of reflections on the status of historical writing, and specifically narrative writing.1 As opposed to previous debates within critical philosophy of history, focused on the adequate relationship between history and the natural sciences model,2 new philosophers of history detected that historicizing the past in narrative terms does not amount to scientific underdevelopment, but is rather the expression of an autonomous form of knowledge. The works of (1985), Louis Mink (1987), Hayden White (1973), Paul Ricœur (1983), Hans Kellner (1989), David Carr (1986), and Frank Ankersmit (1983 and 2002),3 despite their many differences, converge precisely in considering that the tenacious use of narration by historians does not stem from a didactic or ornamental choice, but rather it is constitutive of our way of knowing the human past. Concretely, it is largely the result of the persistent use of ordinary language that specifically describes occurrences of the human past in intentional vocabulary, something very few authors would willfully forsake. The “language of motives” (another way of naming it) is undoubtedly riddled with vagueness and ambiguity, and comes without a clear distinction between description and value and between literal and figurative. But it is precisely due to such richness that narration offers us a guarantee to understand the human in human terms. Literary theory and classical rhetoric have offered their own analysis of the diversity of figures and tropes that flood our everyday vocabulary; many

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of them even fossilize and thus seem to describe rigidly and literally various parts of our world.4

2 Their interest in the value of narrative to represent human past reality led all these theorists to inquire into the complexities of historical discourse and its multiple dimensions (factual or epistemic, its plot and its ideological implications). Some of them focused on detecting the myriad ways or styles of narrating and the consequences derived from such choices. Thus, the study of classical rhetoric coupled with the various strands in literary theory5 could help us deploy the mechanisms and resources involved in the production and circulation of narrative discourse. It is clear that, from this point of view, historical narratives themselves become privileged objects of analysis, since they allow us to identify their differences or similarities and thus contribute to elucidate the conflicts that arise between them. Literary theory seems to be a powerful tool able to orient us in the diversity of narrative styles and genres that historians have used since the appearance of historical writing. It seems promising to apply such dispositive, created for the analysis of literary works, to the analysis of something that goes beyond what we consider in a strict sense “literary,” as is the case with disciplinary history. 3 As a conclusion, it is unlikely that we can solve differences between competing historical narratives by simply turning to an independent reality or exclusively to documentary evidence, since when we present the past narratively there is much more at stake than “mere reality” or “what really happened.” 4 Now, these reflections have been read by critics as implying some kind of linguistic idealism – there is only language (a version of Berkeleyan idealism); some kind of linguistic – whereby humans are spoken by language; antireferentialism – historical knowledge does not refer to the past, it does not refer at all; and, finally, anti- realism – the past historians speak about does not exist.6 As a consequence, we find an “all’s fair” relativism which allows historians to say whatever they want about the past in accordance with their particular interests, since writing about the past would be nothing but “a literary or fictional exercise,” also putting rational discussion about competing narratives to an end. 5 Nevertheless, we should remember that NPH does not deny the importance of documentary evidence in historical studies.7 The moral of narrativism is that one should responsibly acknowledge the fact that every configuration of the past is not limited to what already happened nor does it abide by it, and that the choice among different narratives is not solved by turning to some neutral body of evidence which could tell us which were the events that actually took place in the past. Rather, when evaluating their differences we will become involved in the deployment of all the implications of that given configuration. And literary theory, the discipline which has taken as its subject discourse in general and narrative discourse in particular, is more than apt as an instrument to guide us in deploying such consequences.8 6 These few observations allow us to identify the exact point where NPH is at this moment. In a few words, we could say that its achievements consist in having called attention to historical writing in itself, and reinforced the worth of an autonomous historical knowledge vis à vis standard conceptions of science which made history appear as underdeveloped. Now, although it is clear that NPH does not dismiss the importance of documentary evidence, it did not produce an integrative account of both dimensions. In other words, the work of writing and the work with evidence are not

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integrated as part of the same process of inquiry. Because, to some extent, they are slaves of some kind of epistemological dualism. On one hand, they seem to remain in the representationalist paradigm in the case of evidence, and, on the other hand, they only admit pragmatic and practical (moral) criteria in the case of narrative discourse. 7 In this paper I suggest that John Dewey’s reflections9 on the writing of history, within the framework of his logic of scientific inquiry, offer us (Narrativist Philosophers of History) compelling keys for a rational evaluation of the contributions of literary theory for reconstructing the controversies about the interpretation of the past. According to Dewey, historical writing consists in a judgment produced as an answer to concrete problematic situations. The meanings of judgments about the past (historical narrations) “have a future reference and function”10 and, as a consequence, their production, understanding and justification involve deploying the consequences of accepting them. I will show that these reflections allow us to consider literary theory as an unavoidable instrument to navigate all the consequences that follow from the different descriptions of the past. That is, the meaning of a proposition about the past does not refer exclusively to a past event in itself; rather, it also refers implicitly to future processes of justification. Insofar as history is writing, the science of writing (literary theory) is a key element to reconstruct such processes (the consequences that follow from descriptions themselves). Dewey’s contributions will also be complemented with the reflections of his friend and colleague George H. Mead11 about the uselessness and, thus, irrationality, of believing in the reality of a past independent from our present and from our inquiry processes. Why do I lay emphasis on rationality? Because by placing meaning in the very process of inquiry, instead of placing it in reality itself (which, by the way, could well be unattainable), we commit ourselves to being always ready to provide new and good reasons for our choices and take responsibility for their consequences.12 8 All of this leads us, on the one hand, to recognizing an explicit and proper pragmatist philosophy of history that, in view of contemporary debates in the field, deserves to be reconsidered. This is not a task for this paper but I need to point out that its main proponents, Mead and Dewey, are absent precisely in the debates of a discipline that is not shy about reading the classics. On the other hand, it is urgent to move forward in the development of a narrativist, pragmatistically-informed philosophy of history. This is the task that I effectively try to accomplish in this article. The alliance of narrativism with pragmatism will reinforce the most provocative – and thus more productive – thesis of the former: that the means of production of historical writing are central to elucidating controversies about the past. In my pragmatist reconstruction, narrativism affirms that the meaning of discourses about the past is not unveiled as a result of its representative relation to past reality (independently from our instruments of “representation”), but rather in terms of the future consequences of accepting such discourses as answers to problems that emerged in the context of our current practices of inquiry. 9 I have chosen to unfold the importance of the contribution of Dewey and Mead to narrativism through the analysis of the controversial case of a past event which inspired the memorable film The man who shot Liberty Valance.

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II. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

10 I will begin by taking up the example of a concrete problem about the past posed by filmmaker John Ford in his memorable 1962 film The man who shot Liberty Valance.13

11 Old Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) returns to Shinbone, a city in the West where he had lived in his youth, right after finishing Law school in the East. He comes back to attend the burial of Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who in 1910 was an inconspicuous man. Stoddard, on the other hand, is famous in Shinbone for being the one who, 25 years before, had shot dead the toughest thug of those times, Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin, henceforth LV). 12 A young journalist from the local newspaper, very excited about Stoddard’s visit, requests an interview, which gives place to a long flashback taking us back to 1885 Shinbone. The town was driven by a typical western end-of-the-century conflict: powerful landowners who defend their “freedom” to use open lands for their cattle, against small farmers who demand State intervention to establish statehood. The main characters of this drama are Stoddard himself, supporting law and opposing the use of weapons, and Tom Doniphon, a local rancher, involuntary protector of the town due to his expertise in handling firearms. The conflict focuses on how to confront Liberty Valance, the landlords’ thug who harasses small farmers into giving their lands away or selling them for almost nothing. 13 The story goes that Stoddard must force himself, against his principles, to accept a duel set against Liberty Valance. He shoots him dead, becomes a hero, and is chosen as town delegate for the State convention, which will be held to decide between open land or statehood. These events were followed by a great political and economical development in the town, and Stoddard builds up a prominent political career, which eventually leads him to the . 14 Within Stoddard’s flashback narrative we are led to a second flashback, in which he appears tormented for having violated his convictions, and unwilling to represent Shinbone. His does not tolerate the fact of having killed a man. In a succession of scenes not unlike the well-known series Law and Order, Doniphon reconstructs the shooting, revealing to Stoddard that in the same second in which he shot his gun, Doniphon himself had shot his rifle, and it was the latter who killed LV. In this way, Doniphon cleaned Stoddard’s conscience and suggested he did not disclose the “truth” in order not to interrupt the process that followed. 15 Back in 1910, Stoddard begs journalists to publish the truth in the newspaper: that it was not the bullet from his gun that killed LV, but the one shot by Doniphon with his rifle. In this way, Stoddard hopes to grant his place in history to the forgotten Doniphon. The youngest of them cannot wait to get the news in print, and this is when the old journalist pronounces the now memorable phrase “when the legend became fact, print the legend.” 16 The case presented in this film is a clear example that illustrates our subject of inquiry, since it is founded on the presupposition that it is possible to distinguish clearly between the true and the useful. True is what is independent of our contexts and interests, and useful is what is convenient for an individual or a collective in a certain context. The old journalist’s sentence, “when the legend…,” obviously implies that he has chosen to solve the matter of who killed LV according to what is more convenient

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for the community of Shinbone, and for modern democracy in general, which needs heroes like Stoddard (a man of law) and not like Doniphon (a gunman). Moreover, one could suppose that the journalist knows the truth but prefers to conceal it; that after Stoddard’s account he had the choice of bringing to light what really happened, but does not. Finally, we could also say that the journalist could have considered that the best option for the present times of his community was to tell the truth.14 All three options carry the unspoken assumption that – leaving aside the moral or political meaning of the stories, or their usefulness – one of them is false and the other one is not, and that this is determined by reference to what happened in 1885. Independently of how we understand usefulness or the lack of it (in moral or in plainly political terms), and independently of which are the winding paths of the proof, evidence or confessions we could collect, we must recognize that whatever makes our descriptions of the past true, it demands that an event happened before them. 17 In the next section, we will see the possibilities of clearly demarcating this event that serve as reference for the affirmation in past tense, and its role in deciding among conflicting affirmations by following pragmatist considerations.

III. Dewey and the Writing of History

18 Dewey addresses historical writing in the chapter “Judgment as Spatial-Temporal Determination: Narration-Description” (1938), a part of his logic of judgments.15 That is, in the context of his logic of inquiry and of the theory of the temporal and historical phase of judgment (see Dewey 1938: 246, 247). As a consequence, the specifically historical dimension of judgment, of inquiry and of the act of knowing in general come to light. His reflections primarily display the situated and active nature of inquiry. The situation frames a problem that must be addressed by a future resolution. Specifically, a judgment “consists in the transformation of the existentially indeterminate or unsettled situation into a determinate one […]. It refers to a total qualitative situation” (Dewey 1938: 220).

19 This is a remarkable text, as it reveals how deeply aware our author was of the impregnable place the past holds in our lives. In this respect, he analyzes three cases of judgments about the past: namely, cases a) about one’s personal past; ii) about special events that are not included in one’s own experience; and iii) historical narrations (the ones that define historical inquiry or history as a science), noting the fact that in all dimensions in life, the past is always there and calls for us. For the pragmatist, the question about knowing the past is not a mere philosophical game; it is a vital problem to tackle, and this is why it should be formulated in a way that allows for an answer. Addressing the issue of the results of inquiry in terms of judgments, instead of propositions or sentences, is no minor detail either. Rather, it shows that we are thinking about the results of a concrete practice, stemming from a concrete problem – in our case, in relation to past events –, the solution of which, from the point of view of his logic of inquiry, must follow a number of requirements which will be specified throughout the inquiry itself. And this is where a common misunderstanding in relation to pragmatism must be avoided. This is not about reducing inquiry to a mere satisfaction of interests or to merely answering a question that emerges in a given context. What an analysis in terms of the logic of inquiry mandates is that, in order to evaluate any solution, we must come to terms with the consequences of accepting it.

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And this is why the process of justification and criticism is open, and not dogmatically sealed. 20 “To judge is to render determinate; to determine is to order and organize, to relate in definite fashion” (Dewey 1938: 221). The determination thus reached stemmed from a concrete problematic consideration, and therefore the resulting order cannot be evaluated without contextualizing it within the problem or situation that motivated it. Analyzing judgment (the ordering) in relation to an alleged reality independent from our ordering practices gives us no orientation as to how to evaluate such order. The representationalist strategy is based on a clear distinction between semantic problems (the relationship between representation and reality) and epistemic problems (criteria to find out whether the representation represents reality). On the other hand, it tends to focus on the singular existential proposition which describes singular events as an example or case of representation. According to Dewey, such a strategy provides no orientation as to how to distinguish adequate solutions to our problems of inquiry from unacceptable ones.16 21 Dewey characterizes judgments about the past as those in which temporal considerations are dominant. Their common trait is that they explicitly establish temporal connections: this phase is linguistically expressed in narration,17 through which “a limiting reference to both past and future is present in every existential proposition [that stresses the temporal phase of a judgment…]. Without this limitation, a change is not characterized or qualified” (Dewey 1938: 221). 22 The subject matter of any particular narration-description is determined by a “from which” and a “to which,” and these limits are “strictly relative to the objective intent set to inquiry by the problematic quality of a given situation” (Dewey 1938: 221). When the verbal expression of an existential judgment has the past as its explicit content, the meaning of such judgment is not a past event. Expecting to analyze meaning in terms of the relationship between atomic sentences and mutually isolated events is completely arbitrary. This is because, for Dewey, any statement about the past (be it about my past, or about an event of which I had no experience, or even about a very remote event I could not possibly have experienced), if empirically gronded, will be mediated, and will depend on probatory data (see Dewey 1938: 223). It should be noted, however, that the issue of the ground or justification is not external to meaning: this is the key step in his argumentation. At first sight, singular propositions refer to isolated events (see Dewey 1938: 223). But “were the facts as isolated when the latter is separated from context, the latter would have no more meaning than if uttered by a parrot, and were the sentence uttered by a phonograph, its meaning would be fixed by the context, say of the story or dramatic reproduction in which it appears” (Dewey 1938: 225). In other words, in order to understand any statement that has the past as an explicit object, we need to display its temporal depth, and the conditions of proof for what is said in relation to a concrete problem – that is, it involves in its meaning the unfolding of inquiry itself. 23 In the end, as Dewey already stated sixteen years before, “the past by itself and the present by itself are both arbitrary selections which mutilate the complete object of judgment” (Dewey 1922: 314). “[T]he past incident is part of the subject-matter of inquiry which enters into its object only when referred to a present or future event or fact” (Dewey 1922: 314). Furthermore, “event is a term of judgment, not of existence apart from judgment” (Dewey 1938: 222). This is why when Dewey claims that “In

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denying that the past event is as such the object of knowledge, it is not asserted that a particular present or future object is its sole and exhaustive object, but that the content of past time has a future reference and function” (Dewey 1922: 314). He is not granting metaphysical priority to the present or to present experience, nor to merely flowing, as judgments or knowledge always involve a connection, “and, where time enters in, a connection of present with past and future” (Dewey 1983: 47).18 24 Dewey’s observations on historical judgment should not seem strange or out of place to our great twentieth-century philosophers of history, Collingwood, Gadamer, Ricœur, White, Danto and Mink. Nevertheless, it is surprising that, despite their family resemblances, Danto criticized them fiercely and Mink ignored them altogether. Dewey reflects on the cognitive status of history by wondering: “Upon what grounds are some judgments about a course of past events more entitled to credence than are certain other ones?” (Dewey 1938: 230). Whether it is possible or not to formulate fully guaranteed judgments about the remote past (the skeptic’s problem), or if history is a science or not, are matters of no interest to him. Let us quote once again Dewey’s precept: “the writing of history is an instance of judgment as a resolution through inquiry of a problematic situation” (Dewey 1938: 231). If this is the case, then his concrete question refers to accepting some (narrative) structures instead of others. Now, although judgments and narrations are made of existential propositions, the meaning of each proposition cannot be isolated from the process of inquiry, nor from its relation to the initial problem. But this trait is not exclusive to history: it in fact belongs to scientific inquiry in general. The logic of inquiry recognizes that every existential proposition must operate “(1) as material for locating and delimiting a problem; (2) as serving to point to an inference that may be drawn with some degree of probability; or (3) as aiding to weigh the evidential value of some data; or (4) as supporting and testing some conclusion hypothetically made” (Dewey 1938: 231). That is, the meaning of the existential proposition is not determined by an independent event or occurrence, but by its role in inquiry. In the specific case of history, existential propositions about facts established under conditions of maximum control (as a result of inquiry in auxiliary sciences) are indispensable “but they are not in their isolation historical propositions at all” (Dewey 1938: 232). It is only in reference to a concrete historical problem that they will become historical propositions.19 25 This leads us to consider what constitutes a concrete historical problem. In broad terms, and according to common sense, historical inquiry is defined as “giving an account of what actually happened” or “determining what and why something happened in the past.” But we will not find clear and sufficiently broad notions of “what really happened” and “giving an account of” without referring to the concrete contexts in which inquiry is posed. In relation to this, Dewey was well aware of the self- consciousness that historians themselves show in relation to the selective and presentist nature of historical narratives: “All historical construction is necessarily selective ” (Dewey 1938: 234, emphasis added). “The slightest reflection shows that the conceptual material employed in writing history is that of the period in which a history is written” (Dewey 1938: 232-3) Therefore, “if the fact of selection is acknowledged to be primary and basic, we are committed to the conclusion that all history is necessarily written from the standpoint of the present, and is, in an inescapable sense, the history not only of the present but of that which is contemporaneously judged to be important in the present” (Dewey 1938: 234).

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26 In view of the observations made thus far, it is crucial to look into an assertion on the aim of historical inquiry that is more familiar to historians: that is, the reference of history to what “actually happened in this way.” According to our philosopher, such a statement “has its status and significance within the scope and perspective of historical writing” (Dewey 1938: 236). And, strictly speaking, it is a warning to avoid prejudice […] an exhortation to exercise caution and skepticism in determining the authenticity of material proposed as potential data […]. It does not determine the logical conditions of historical propositions, much less the identity of these propositions with events in their original occurrence. (Dewey 1938: 236) 27 Now, from my point of view, there is something that must be clarified in relation to this particular issue. Acknowledging that the meaning of “what really happened” is relative to a certain perspective is not to say that its value is limited to what is useful or satisfactory. Rather, this perspective urges us to pay attention to the consequences that follow from establishing “what really happened” in the context of inquiry. The specific criteria and reasons of our context of inquiry, in which “what really happened” is stated, are a part of the very meaning of that statement. This is precisely why the display of consequences is a never ending business, and it lacks a predetermined direction. Dewey himself notes that one of the main principles in the logic of historical inquiry is that “the writing of history is itself an historical event. It is something which happens and which in its occurrence has existential consequences” (Dewey 1938: 236). “As culture changes, the conceptions that are dominant in a culture change” (Dewey 1938: 233). “History is then rewritten […] the new conceptions propose new problems for solution” (Dewey 1938: 233).

28 Ultimately, his reflections tried to shed light on “the inadequacy and superficiality of the notion that since the past is its immediate and obvious object, therefore, the past is its exclusive and complete object” (Dewey 1938: 237). The past to which our books of history refer is “of logical necessity the past-of-the-present, and the present is the- past-of-a-future-living present” (Dewey 1938: 237). As active beings who interact with our environment, we must deal with a double process. On the one hand, the ever changing environment (natural or social) which throws “the significance of what happened in the past into a new perspective” (Dewey 1938: 238). But, on the other hand, our own activity of inquiry is under constant change, and inasmuch as judgments about the meaning of the past change, those new judgments themselves are, for Dewey, new instruments “for estimating the force of present conditions as potentialities of the future” (Dewey 1938: 238). We need to erase any association of inquiry and narration with images such as building a puzzle with fixed pieces: “No historic present is a mere redistribution, by means of permutations and combinations, of the elements of the past” (Dewey 1938: 238). Inquiring about the past, narrating it, is a problem-solving activity, and as Dewey has aptly indicated, “men have their own problems to solve […]. In using what has come to them as an inheritance from the past they are compelled to modify it to meet their own needs, and this process creates a new present […]. History cannot escape its own process” (Dewey 1938: 238).20

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IV. Danto’s Criticism and a Possible Pragmatist Answer

29 In his great book Analytical Philosophy of History, narrativist philosopher Arthur Danto has taken note of the reflections brought by pragmatists such as Lewis and Dewey as cases of skepticism in relation to the past.21 Historical statements are not about past events; they are predictions about research procedures and their results. For example, the statement “yesterday there was a fire in the car factory” would not be about yesterday and a fire, but rather about twisted metals, smell of smoke, ashes, and so on – that is, traces that would clue us in on the event. What is the problem here? Given that the procedures for detection will take place after the historian formulates the historical statement, its meaning refers to the future, not the past. In Danto’s reading, a pragmatist would say that historical statements are ultimately undercover predictions, and what they predict is relevant evidence.

30 According to Danto, the arguments put forth by Lewis and Dewey are skeptical in kind. Not only do they attest the outworn belief that we only know about the past that cannot be witnessed, based on proof; but also, when I formulate a statement about the past, I am implicitly predicting the experiences I will have in the future if and only if I undertake certain actions, “and Lewis’ mistake is to suppose that this is all I am doing, that the whole of my cognitive claims are expressed in conditional sentences of the sort we have recognized” (Danto 1985: 43). That is, we do something more, something that the pragmatist withholds from the historian, or withholds from all of us: namely, that we speak about the past, that we know the past or that our statements express knowledge about the past. As Danto explained in “Historical Language and Historical Reality” (Danto 1985), they specifically confuse or fail to distinguish two ways in which language relates to the world through (a) a part-whole relationship, that is, by belonging to the inventory of reality, and capable of sustaining causal relationships, and (b) an external relationship to reality in its entirety, in its representative function, capable of sustaining semantic values (true and false) (see Danto 1985: 305). 31 There is an inside and an outside of reality: paintings, maps, concepts, ideas, art have – as does language – this twofold relationship with the world. The particular case of “historical language” (that is, the sentences which, when stated, aim at describing an event previous to its utterance or inscription), implies as truth condition, a sentence in the past tense. “Fernández is an ex-president” implies, first of all, that “Fernández was a president.” Secondly, satisfying this truth condition implies in turn the actual occurrence of some event previous to its utterance. In sum, historical sentences lie, by their own nature, in history; if they are true, they are actually subsequent to the events described in them. Nevertheless, in their attempt to describe the past, historical sentences are external to the past, and claim to be true. Therefore, the fact that historical sentences allow for temporal, truthful connections with the events they describe is a symptom that historical sentences are within and without the reality they describe, and this is why their combined semantics generates problems in philosophy of history (see Danto 1985: 311-4). 32 The utterance “to be historical” does not add any further information about the event (it belongs to what it isolated as language in its relation to the world as part-whole, not as an occurrence in the world). It does not add information on the external descriptive relationship between language and reality (in its representative function).

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33 What makes a sentence true is not affected by the moment in which such sentence is uttered. As Danto has argued extensively in his famous piece “Narrative sentences” (Danto 1985: 143-82), temporal distance of historians and their retrospective position give them an advantage to truthfully know what happened. The possibility of formulating true statements about the past only comes by later, and sometimes much later, than the occurrences. But whatever it is that makes them true does not depend on those who are able to find it out or prove it. 34 In short, we are faced with two ways of approaching the question of the correct representation of the past: (1) What is the relationship between representation and reality?; and (2) how can we legitimately represent the past or reality?22 The first question begins with the establishment of two different ontological orders; the aim is to connect them, in order to unveil the conditions for knowing the past. Worse still, pragmatism grants skeptics their conclusion about the futility of the realist pretense that past events in themselves are not only an object of our knowledge, but also the references of our sentences. Now, at this point we should remind Danto that it is precisely pragmatism that questions the possibility of isolating the meaning of any given proposition from its context of utterance, which includes the question that is answered by the proposition. Determining the past event that serves as reference is the very result of the research, not its starting point.23 35 These observations deserve a last, critical clarification. Danto, as an analytical philosopher of ordinary language, approaches the subject with an analysis of “the sentence in the past tense” (the narrative sentence), whereas Dewey, whose work is previous to the linguistic turn, approaches the matter in terms of “judgments about the past.” This does not stop Danto from applying his criticism, nor does stop us from taking part to the discussion.24 Strictly speaking, for Danto beliefs, sentences (language), theories, judgments, belong to the realm of representation, which is ontologically heterogeneous from reality (Danto 1985: 311). In this respect, the relevant question in relation to our knowledge of the past is to elucidate the relationship between representation and reality (that is: what makes a representation true?), which should be distinguished from the epistemic problem of how to know whether the events actually occurred. Let us return once more to Dewey’s words: The propositions that are accumulated about past facts and facts now observable are but means to the formation of this historic narrative judgment. In themselves they are so many separate items. (Dewey 1938: 229) 36 To which he immediately adds: There is no such thing as judgment about a past event, one now taking place, or one to take place in the future in its isolation. The notion that there are such judgments arises from taking propositions that are indispensable material means to a completely determined situation as if they were complete in themselves. (Dewey 1938: 230) 37 In Danto’s view, pragmatism is skeptical, but we should add that it is so in relation to the possibility of answering affirmatively to a requirement that is posed by skepticism itself: showing a reality independent from our beliefs (something necessary to rebut skepticism). Nevertheless, it is my understanding that the most important point to stress about this debate is that pragmatism is rather skeptical about the possibility that proposals such as Danto’s play any concrete role for solving concrete historiographical problems or controversies. Is this Dantian answer the only way to solve rationally (without resorting to force, or deception) the problems related to the representation of

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the past? It is time to settle these issues by returning to the question about who killed LV.

V. Which Bullet Caused the Victim’s Death?

38 Let us analyze an array of descriptions regarding Liberty Valance’s death, and then compare Danto’s position with the one defended by Dewey.25 1. The bullet in the revolver caused the victim’s death. 2. The bullet in the rifle caused the victim’s death. 3. Senator Stoddard is the man who killed LV (in 1910). 4. Stoddard killed LV. 5. Doniphon killed LV. 6. The bullet that killed LV came out of Stoddard’s revolver. 7. By shooting LV, Stoddard turns Shinbone into a modern, democratic city. 8. This bullet turned Shinbone into a modern, democratic city

39 Danto would analyze these eight sentences by distinguishing. a. Semantic issues, which are sub-divided into: a.i) meaning, a.ii) their truth value, a.iii) the satisfaction of their truth value. b. Epistemic issues, that is, the concrete conditions of proof or verification of the sentences.

40 All these different descriptions (1 to 8) share the same grammar, as they are in the past tense (or in the historical present tense, as in sentences 3 and 7) and, as such, they talk or are about the past. Nevertheless, according to Danto, not all of them do it in the same way, and as a consequence not all could be uttered truthfully by anyone at any point in time. They all speak about an event which is previous to their utterance, but not in the same manner. Sentences 3, 7, and 8, for instance, are an example of what Danto called narrative sentences: sentences that describe a past event in terms of another one that happened later in time, perhaps even at the time of utterance.26 As a consequence, the contemporary subject would be as such unable to know its truth (the issues addressed in point b); an eyewitness would not be able to affirm it truthfully at the moment of the occurrence.27 But in every case the meaning of the sentence includes or implies the occurrence of a past event.

41 I would like to draw attention to the case of narrative or historical sentence number seven. It entails as a truth condition, following Danto, a sentence such as 4 or 6, depending on whether we describe the event in physicalist or in intentionalist terms. And, in turn, the satisfaction of its truth requires that an event described in the terms of such sentence must have actually taken place. Let us take a close look. Sentences 1 to 8 describe some event in the past (again, at this stage we are not asking whether this is the same event under different descriptions, or different events altogether). The important issue here is that at first sight there are differences between them in relation to the language game chosen to talk about reality in general, and social reality in particular. 42 1 and 2 describe events in a physicalist language, which mainly reveals the causal relationships between them.

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43 3, 4, 5, and 7 clearly describe actions, are presented in an intentionalist language, and are understood within a teleological structure, formulated as means-to-ends. 44 6 is ambiguous or unclear as to its status, since it could mean both that Stoddard himself purposefully killed LV with a shot, or that the bullet came out of his revolver in a series of defensive moves (not necessarily voluntary), whereas Stoddard did not want to shoot him. 45 For Danto, one event can bear different descriptions, both in relation to its being described in an intentional language or a physicalist one (what is usually called the language of events, as something different from actions) and in relation to the subsequent “redescriptions produced by its consequences in the future of its occurrence” (as in the case of narrative sentences). 46 Reference, meaning, or that of which the statement speaks and makes it true, is the occurrence of the event. At this stage we could say that Danto is bound to an idea of event without a description, or the idea of a basic description of an event. Either way, we are faced with the need to clarify what an event without a description or a basic event description would be. This last point, to which Danto’s argument leads us, is the one that will prove problematic for a non-skeptical consideration of our knowledge of the past: it leads us to posit a reference for historical sentences that is unaccessible in itself, and therefore cannot be our guarantee for rejecting skepticism. 47 What would a pragmatist interested in historical narrative or a pragmatically informed narrativist say? In search of an example, we can go back to the case of narrative or historical sentence number seven. Following Danto, we would say that it entails as its truth condition a sentence such as 1, 4, or 6 (depending on whether we describe the events in physicalist or in intentionalist terms), and the satisfaction of its truth requires that an event described in the terms of such sentence must have actually taken place. Now, what do we mean when we say that the three sentences refer to the same event, be it narratively or not, be it in physicalist or intentionalist language? What lies at the basis of every description, making it true? How do we determine whether the sentence implied in 7 is the first – “The bullet in the revolver caused the victim’s death” –, the fourth – “Stoddard killed LV” –, or the sixth one? – “The bullet that killed LV came out of Stoddard’s revolver.” Do we decide it by referring to the occurrence or to the future implications of the description, whichever it is? What is more, choosing one or the other has important consequences, be it by allotting responsibility or by alleviating it (a lost bullet). In other words, here we see clearly why, according to pragmatism, the meaning of any empirical sentence about the past or in the past tense, refers to the future. Now we can understand Dewey when he says that The past occurrence is not the meaning of the propositions. It is rather so much stuff upon the basis of which to predicate something regarding the better course of action to follow, the latter being the object meant. It makes little difference whether the past episode drawn upon is reported with literal correctness or not. (Dewey 1922: 43-4) 48 This is the case for those sentences that describe events in a physicalist language, in an intentionalist one, or in narrative descriptions (inaccessible to contemporary subjects). Their correct meaning cannot be decoupled from the future consequences of such descriptions.

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49 In 1929 Lewis noted that meaning and truth of an empirical statement – such as number 1 in our example: “The bullet in the revolver caused the death of the deceased” – entails the fact that “To ascribe an objective quality to a thing means implicitly the prediction that if I act in certain ways, specificable experience will eventuate” (Lewis 1929: 140). In our case, if I believe that a certain bullet caused this death, we should be able to detect certain marks in the body, the rifle, and so on, and these actions are subsequent to the alleged occurrence of the atomic event. But the same thing would happen if we move in the context of intentionalist language: we would always assign properties or offer descriptions which, by assuming them, engage us with other descriptions and with registering or collecting certain testimonies. In short, summarizing the debate, Danto and the pragmatists (Dewey and Lewis in the case at hand) would agree on the complexity of determining who killed LV, since this requires us to: 1. decide the language in which the matter will be addressed (physicalist or intentionalist); 2. search for relevant evidence, and in the specific terms of whichever language game we adopt (physicalist or intentionalist); 3. finally, with regards to whether we want to or must reveal (or not) which bullet killed LV, or caused the death, or whatever, accept that these are matters settled in terms of consequences and evidence. Moreover, they are not settled once and for all, and can be reopened over and over again, from the present of whoever intends to reopen it.

50 The fundamental difference is that Danto that if we do not preserve a consideration of reference as something different from justification, we will fall into skepticism.

51 To this, pragmatism would answer that the notion of an event as reference for our statements leads us to skepticism, since it brings into the historically relevant discussion about who killed LV a component that is not accessible in itself for those involved in the discussion, and therefore in the long run it does not hold any concrete role when choosing a solution to the problem. 52 For the pragmatists, Danto’s commitment to an event as the referent for statements in past tense, and thus previous to the formulation of the problem, does not add or subtract anything to the resolution of the matter. On the contrary, the meaning of a proposition in the past tense is not limited to an alleged reference without description, or with some kind of basic or contextually neutral description. It refers implicitly to socially shared procedures of justification in the future. My main point here has been to show the inextricable bond between that pragmatist argument and the detailed and rich considerations offered by literary theory about the variety of descriptions offered by intentional language, and their consequences. In his classic A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke wonders: What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?” And “any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose). (Burke 1945: XV) 53 Not only are the various combinations of possible answers determined by the events in themselves, but they also reveal different conceptions of the world. And again, which conception we choose will have practical consequences for life.28

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54 Why would this be a case of skepticism? According to Danto, because it has not presupposed a reality independent of the past as a referent for our statements about it. It is time to address this issue with the help of Mead.

VI. Mead and the Re-Writing of History

55 Philosophers have repeatedly addressed a playful skeptical argument about the past, according to which it is logically possible that the world as we know it, even with our memories and fragments of evidence of times past, was created a few minutes ago (five or thirty, little changes).29 If this is the case, statement as “Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B. C.” or “my mother was born in 1937” lack a reference; therefore, either all statements are false, or the problem of their truth will not emerge. In order for this argument to hold, it is not necessary that the world actually started a few minutes ago; we only need to be able to imagine the possibility that it did. It could have started a few minutes ago or not, we can have success or not when talking truthfully about the past, but unfortunately if we follow this argument, we cannot know whether it started or not, whether we will be able to say true things about the past or not, because all evidence is compatible with either possibility. Now, if this argument is unassailable, its reach is so broad that it would not only affect historical knowledge, but knowledge of all kind. In conclusion, we cannot doubt history without putting at risk our beliefs across the board.30

56 In his “The present as the locus of reality,” included in the posthumous publication The Philosophy of the Present, George H. Mead addresses the skeptical argument 31 inquiring the relevance of the existence of a past independent from the present for our experience, and for that of the scientist and the historian. What difference would it make to our inquiry, were we to accept not only the reality of the past, but also its irrevocability, regardless of what happened later on? What would it be the importance of the idea that nothing that happened after the occurrence of that past would be able to change its universal or eternal characteristics? 57 I suggest we approach Mead’s account in connection with Dewey’s idea, surveyed earlier, that “the writing of history is itself an historical event. It is something which happens and which in its occurrence has existential consequences” (Dewey 1938: 236). So, a deeper question here is who “we” are or who this “we” to whom knowing the past involves a complete change of their own existence is. It is important, however, to bear in mind Mead’s contribution to social psychology as conveyed by what he called “social ,”32 and its consequences for an understanding of human beings as subjects thinking in communicative terms. That is, thought and knowledge emerge in novel ways from the activity (interaction) of the organism with its environment. Of course, reality is the reality of our experience in the present, but the present or presents are dense and diverse in their temporal range; they imply a future and a past to which we deny existence.33 The density of the present is manifest in its own identifying traits: becoming and disappearing, coming to be and ceasing to be. Therefore, experience (present, the specious present, or, passage), according to Mead, is a vital process of self- adjustment between an organism and its environment.34 So, is the reality of the past of that organism independent from it? Is there anything like a fixed and irrevocable past? Mead avoids the skeptical challenge by posing the question in relation to our own experiences, so that the past or pasts which we face are both revocable and irrevocable.

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They are irrevocable in that even when historians can reconstruct what happened, and give an authenticated explanation, they will prevent the reconstruction made by historians in the future from differing from ours. But they are also revocable because the world of future historians will not be able to differ from the present, unless it rewrites the past that is now behind us. The end or meaning of “what it was” belongs to the same present in which that “what it was” is explained. Such “what it was” is so for me or for us now, in our present, and will eventually change into another present. In Mead’s words, “against this evident incidence of finality to a present stands a customary assumption that the past that determines us is there. The truth is that the past is there, in its certitude or probability, in the same sense that the setting of our problems is there” (Mead 2002: 37). 58 Mead would concede that what already happened is irrecoverable. However, we need to bring the real past face to face with the present, from the viewpoint of emerging phenomena, of the occurrence of that very surfacing phenomenon. The past that we now observe from this viewpoint is another past, a different one. Why is that so? By definition, the things that emerge are not a necessary consequence of the past; before they emerged, the past was in fact not a past of those things. Nevertheless, once they have emerged, the connection with the past they followed can be discovered. In other words, the past can be reconstructed, but that reconstruction is a redescription that shows the elements that emerged in the present as following from that past (see Mead 2002: 36). As Mead has shown in “The objective reality of perspectives” (2002: 171), the reconstruction of the past in a present is part of that happening, as it emerges from the process – a self-adjusting process of the organism with its environment. Perspective does not consist in thoughts from God’s viewpoint, or from one external to the process itself. Rather, it is a novel event, undetermined though conditioned by the environment locating the problems that promote a redescription or articulation of the system. There is no idealism (a pure game of ideas) or determinism (reality or past reality determining the ideas of them). 59 In 1965, Danto offered a completely different answer. He ignored Mead’s writings, and therefore the contrast among them is an exercise in heuristic. Danto’s approach stems from a very different way of conceiving the adequate method of posing philosophical problems. As we have seen, pragmatism expresses the fundamental philosophical issue in terms of how certain beliefs or commitments contribute to investigating or solving concrete problems. Danto, on his side, contends that philosophical approaches are set in terms of the identity of indiscernibles. Following the skeptical conjecture, it could be possible that two objects which satisfy descriptions in terms of a Ming bowl – that is, two materially indiscernible objects – do not belong to the same kind of object: one is genuine and the other is just a reproduction.35 60 If we remove historical descriptions from our language, certain objects in the world – such as an original Ming bowl inside the museum and the reproductions that decorate my house – would be indiscernible. 61 If we restore historical descriptions in our language, they would be different objects: one being an original Ming bowl, the other a reproduction, even if none of these differences would be manifest to the anthropologically educated eye. 62 Danto invites us to note the extent to which our beliefs about the past penetrate the language we use, even to describe contemporary objects with those descriptions: the so-called “present world.” The skeptical challenge is incompatible with any ordinary

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historical statement applied to the present world. If for one crazy second we believed that the conjecture is true, then all historical statements would all of a sudden become false, all the areas of language left out of the game, and we would lose interest in them, from a historical point of view, both if our beliefs were true and if they were false. 63 It must be said that we are dealing with two sophisticated stances on knowledge of the past and of history, which take seriously into account the fact that historians are also historical agents, that historical perspective is a part of history, and that it is up to every history to tell or narrate histories that are not only true, but also relevant to the historian’s present. Precisely Danto repeated over and over again that “to exist historically is to perceive the events one lives through as part of a story later to be told” (Danto 1985: 343). Nevertheless, Dewey’s and Mead’s considerations must be appreciated in the context of a deep criticism of , of atomistic empiricism, and of the mind/world dualism. Because no concept has a denotation that goes beyond the given. It is as if Danto had remained trapped in the “given vs. constructed” dualism, whereas pragmatism, by virtue of its interest in the basic nature of the idea of “activity,” advances towards a notion of knowledge as the activity of an organism in its environment. As pragmatist philosopher Richard J. Bernstein has noted, these early considerations successfully avoided the “Cartesian anxiety” informing the search of an independent reality as the grounds for knowledge. Once the ontological heterogeneity (or dualism) between mind and body (world) has been established, the problem of its connection becomes unsolvable (Bernstein 1983: 31).

Conclusion

64 From the perspective of a narrativist, pragmatistically-informed philosophy of history, our engagement with Dewey and Mead’s thoughts about history has taught us the following lessons.

65 The meaning of statements in the past tense implicitly refers to the present and the future. Understanding and evaluating them entails deploying and pondering the consequences of accepting them for future action. By developing this thesis, we encountered Dewey’s historical-narrative conception on knowledge as an activity of inquiry. A given judgment cannot be analyzed in terms of singular propositions about events, but instead it should be regarded as the transformation of the indefinite into something determinate. Dewey and Mead did not conceive reflecting on historical knowledge other than within their inquiries about agents acting in their environment, which places them in concrete problems. According to this, certain questions that were supposed to be substantial and fundamental become useless for inquiry, such as those about the role that belief in the reality of a past independent from our beliefs about it plays in determining the truth of such beliefs.36 66 Applying these considerations to the specific problem of how to choose between antagonistic interpretations of the past requires us to deploy the consequences that follow from each one, with the concrete aim of bringing to light precisely the features which make them antagonistic. Literary analysis of intentional language or motives comes to our aid for this task. 67 As for the consequences of this, the point is that these conditionals are endless. This can be read in two ways. One of them, extremely narrow and even malicious in a way, would stress that if meaning is related to justification, and if this depends on fulfilling a

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specific interest in the given context, then once the interest is fulfilled this would be enough for justification. As a consequence, when we face two alternative interpretations, to the extent to which each one satisfies the interest of those promoting it, either they are both justified, or the notion of justification is not applicable in any interesting way. Hence relativism and arbitrariness (Wilkins 1959). 68 But there is a second, more fair and productive reading. The justification process is unfinished, and any consideration has an undetermined number of possible consequences. And this is not only the case from a logical and abstract point of view, but also from a heuristic one, that is, from the point of view of the practice of inquiry itself. This cannot in fact be reduced to the logic of inference between atomic and isolated propositions, but rather it answers to the logic of questions and answers of social beings situated in concrete contexts which face them with concrete problems. 69 In this paper, I have faced a double challenge. On the one hand, I attempted to show that nowadays a pragmatist philosophy of history (inspired by Dewey and Mead), concerned with the consequences that follow from our assertions about the past, is unlikely to be alien to the proposals of new NPH, particularly the orientation which has focused its attention on narrative writing of history, and turned to literary theory with the purpose of pondering the consequences of the diverse descriptions of our past human world. On the other hand, I sought to stress how narrative philosophy of history would be strengthened by taking up pragmatism seriously. 70 The lengthy analysis of The man who shot Liberty Valance allowed us to appreciate the deep complexity of solving a historical problem, even in the case of those referred to an allegedly concrete historical event which, precisely because of this, should not be too arduous. Nevertheless, its resolution does not only involve a factual aspect: answering the question of “which bullet caused LV’s death?” requires taking decisions about the very language in which the events will be framed, depending on the importance of their resolution for the present or for a moment subsequent to the event. As a consequence, this matter is inherently related to another question: “what difference would determine which bullet caused the death make for our future decisions?” Common sense would have that we are in the presence of two different kinds of questions, since one depends on what actually happened, independently of our interests, whereas the other depends on what our interests (or those of whoever actually poses the question) are. As they are different questions, the logic of their justification is supposed to be different as well. One depends on reality, while the other on values. Pragmatist philosophy will dissolve this apparent difference without renouncing either the possibility of historical knowledge or a rational reconstruction of controversies. But as we have tried to show, the basic choice between a language of motives (intentional) and a physicalist one is not defined by referring to the event itself in the past. The validity of the description, as well as its understanding, requires deploying the future consequences of the descriptions we adopt according to our problems of inquiry and to the processes to verify such consequences. This is not skepticism or lack of rationality; rather it is a warning about all the implications of any given description; this is why we are committed to acknowledging its consequences in the future.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANKERSMIT F., (1983), Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language, Dordrecht and Boston, Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library.

ANKERSMIT F., (1994), History and Tropology. The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, Berkeley/ Los Angeles/ Oxford, University of California Press.

ANKERSMIT F., (2002), Historical Representation, California, Stanford University Press.

ANKERSMIT F., DOMANSKA E., & H. KELLNER, (2009), Re-figuring Hayden White, Stanford, Stanford University Press.

BERNSTEIN R. J., (1983), Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvannia Press.

BLAU J., (1960), “John Dewey’s Theory of History,” Journal of Philosophy, 57, 3, 89-100

BURKE K., (1945), The Grammar of Motives, Berkeley, University of California Press.

CARR D., (1986), Time, Narrative and History, Bloomington Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.

COLLINGWOOD R. G., (1994) The Idea of History, revised edition, Oxford University Press.

DANTO A., (1985), Narration and Knowledge, New York, Columbia University Press, [with the complete version of Analytical Philosophy of History, ed. 1965].

DANTO A., 1997) Connections to the World. The Basic Concepts of Philosophy, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, The University of California Press.

DEWEY J., (1922), “Realism without Monism or Dualism -I.: Knowledge Involving the Past,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 19, No. 12 (Jun. 8, 1922), 309-17, J. A. Boydston (ed.), 1983 John Dewey The Middle Works, 1899-1924, Volume 13, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 40-9.

DEWEY J., 1938) Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Chapter 12: “Judgment as Spatial-Temporal Determination: Narration-Description,” in J. A. Boydston (ed.) 1986, John Dewey The Later Works, 1925-1953, Volume 12, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press.

DORAN R., (ed.) (2013), Philosophy of History after Hayden White, London, Bloomsbury.

FOGU C., & K. PIHLAINEN, (eds.) (2014) “Metahistory Forty Years Later,” Storia della Storiografía, 61, 1, 11-205.

JOHNSON Dorothy M., (1953), “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” in Ead., Indian Country, New York, Ballantine Books.

KELLNER H., (1989), Language and Historical Representation. Getting the Story Crooked, London, The University of Wisconsin Press.

LEWIS C. I., (1929), Mind and the World-Order, New York, Chicago, Boston, Charles Scribner’s Sons.

MCBRIDE J., (2011), Searching for John Ford, Jackson, University of Mississippy Press.

MEAD G. H., (1972 reimpr., [1934]), Mind, Self, and Society, The University of Chicago Press.

MEAD G. H., (2002 [1932]), The Philosophy of the Present, Amherst, New York, Prometheus Books.

MINK L., (1987 posthumous edition), Historical Understanding, Brian Fay, Eugene Golob & Richard Vann, (eds.) New York, Cornell University Press.

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MURPHEY M. G., (2009), Truth and History, New York, State University of New York.

RICŒUR P., (1983), Temps et récit. Tome I: L’intrigue et le récit historique, Paris, Le Seuil.

TOZZI V., (2012) “Pragmatist Contributions to a New Philosophy of History,” Pragmatism Today, 3, 1, 121-31

TOZZI V., (ed.), (2013), “Hayden White Metahistory 40 years later,” Metatheoria. Revista de filosofía e historia de la ciencia, 4, 1, 1-110

TOZZI V., (2016), “White, Burke and the “Literary” Nature of historical controversies,” in E. Morales-López & A. Floyd, (eds.), Developing New Identities in Social Conflicts: Constructivist Perspectives on Rhetoric and Discourse Studies, John Benjamin, (forthcoming).

WHITE H., (1973), Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.

WHITE H., (1999), Figural Realism, Studies in the Mimesis Effect, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.

WHITE H., (2014) The Practical Past, Evanston, Northwestern University Press.

WILKINS B. T., (1959), “Pragmatism as a Theory of Historical Knowledge: John Dewey on the Nature of Historical Inquiry,” The American Historical Review, 64, 4, 878-90.

NOTES

1. Translated by Moira Pérez. 2. I am talking about the explanation vs comprehension debate that took place mostly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 3. I name the most remarkable ones. 4. The point on which pragmatism can shed some light is that the correctness or incorrectness of any judgment or description of the past is not determined by something like the occurrence in itself, but rather by the consequences that follow from a determining description or judgment. I work this particular issue more in depth in Tozzi 2016. I will return to this matter in section 5. 5. Such are the cases of Erich Auerbach, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye, Roman Jakobson, and we should also mention the works of Gombrich and Goodman on theory and philosophy of arts. 6. See Murphey 2009. 7. See White (1999: 2), where he distinguishes information about the past and historical discourse, and White 2014, where he distinguishes the practical and the historical past. See also Ankersmit 1983 and 1994 where he distinguishes historical research (questions of facts) and historical writing (questions of interpretation). 8. See Ankersmit, Domanska & Kellner 2009; Doran 2013; Tozzi 2013; Fogu & Pihlainen 2014. 9. In Dewey 1922 (reprinted in 1983) and 1938. NPH is a reaction to the dismissal of narrative history that took place in the first part of the twentieth century. The so called “Covering Law” model (in philosophy) and the École des Annales (in history) considered Narrative History as a pre- scientific activity. What makes Dewey’s account the most interesting one is the fact that he saw neither a fault in the narrative way of historical writing nor the necessity of some alternative logical reconstruction of historical inquiry. There is another interesting fact: his specific remarks on the writing of history reveal his watchful eye on the historical practice, enabled by his active participation in historical debates about the nature of history with other historians. On the relationship between Dewey and American historians see Blau 1960 and Wilkins 1959. 10. Dewey (1922: 314).

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11. Mead 2002. 12. I arrived at Mead through Habermas. I was very interested in the connection he makes between Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society and other social theories interested in communicative aspects of common world and social relationships (Mead, Schütz, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Winch). Then I discovered The Philosophy of the Present, and I found myself completely surprised because one of the main skeptical arguments discussed by Danto in his 1965 work is the same argument discussed by Mead in this book, but Danto ignored Mead, and never quoted him. On the other hand, I discovered Dewey’s text on the philosophy of history through Danto. He treats pragmatism as an example of skepticism. (I discuss Danto’s account in sections 4, 5, and 6). As the reader can see, I studied these two authors in the context of the philosophy of social sciences and of history past the linguistic turn. 13. Ford appoached the dichotomy between telling the truth about the past or telling the most useful story for the Nation in two movies: Fort Apache (1948) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Both movies lead the same moral (the most useful stroy is the one to be told). The difference between them is that one of the main characters in Fort Apache, Liutenant Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda), is a fictionalized version of General George Armstrong Custer, and the events depicted in the movie make reference to “[Custer’s] reckless expedition into sioux territory in 1876 that led to the massacre of the entire battalion of Seventh Cavaltry at the Little Bighorn” McBride (2001: 449-50). On the other hand, the plot of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was adapted from a short story written by Dorothy M. Johnson (1953) and, of course, the controversial event is not a historical event for us but it is a historical event in the film. I have chosen to work on the 1962 film because although the past event is not a historical event (and the researchers depicted in the movie are journalists, not academic historians), the case remind us of Collingwood’s well-known crime story “Who killed John Doe?” through which Collingwood illustrates the work the historian does with evidence, using the “logic of questions and answers” as the correct method of enquiry (Collingwood 1994). 14. Or, a third option he could have evaluated the issue from a strictly personal point of view, that is, paying attention to what he, as a moral agent, should do beyond convenience or utility. 15. Giving a deeper but complementary account to his earlier reflections from 1922. 16. In fact, as we will see at the end of this section, Danto’s criticism of pragmatism (as a form of skepticism) is grounded in his compromise with representationalism. 17. “[T]here are no different kinds of judgment, but distinguishable phases or emphases of judgment, according the aspect of its subject-matter that is emphasized. In the opening statement existential transformation is the point of emphasis” Dewey (1938: 220). “Existential subject-matter as transformed has a temporal phase. Linguistically, this phase is expressed in narration […] all changes occur through interactions of conditions. What exists co-exists, and no change can either occur or be determined in inquiry in isolation from the connection of an existence with co-existing conditions” (Dewey 1938: 220, emphasis added). 18. Dewey, Mead, and Danto all rejected the account of present time as an atomic instant. They considered the present as thick present or specious present. See Dewey (1922: 309); Mead (2002: 35); and Danto (1985: 84). Mead talks about the present as passing. Danto talks about past-referring terms (like scar, widow or divorced), which describe some present feature but they can only be rightly attributed in the case of specific events having occurred in the past – being wounded in the first case, married in the second. See Danto (1985: 71). 19. Let’s pay attention to the similarity between this sentence from Dewey and White’s account on documentary evidence. The latter says that his thought about “historical discourse does not imply that past events never really existed [or] that we cannot have more or less precise information about these past entities […] information about the past is not in itself a specifically historical kind of information […]. Such information might better be called archival, inasmuch as it can serve as the object of any discipline simply by being taken as a subject […] it is only by

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being made into the subject of historical discourse that our information about and knowledge of the past can be said to be historical” (White 1999: 2). 20. I need to make clear a point about Dewey’s notion of narration. As I have already said at the beginning of this section, Dewey introduced the concept in the context of his logic of inquiry and in the context of the theory of the temporal and historical phase of judgment. However, it is important to note that his account on historical writing expresses the common sense of historicist ideas of historical research. For that reason, it is very difficult not to connect these few pages on history to the ideas of those thinkers who were critical of positivism (like Croce or Collingwood). The similarity between Dewey’s text on the writing of history and Collingwood’s “epilegomena” is remarkable, both of them were critic of the common sense belief in the authority of personal memory and witness testimony to corroborate historical interpretations. According to Collingwood, “historical image” (or narration) is constructed and evaluated by historians in response to the interrogations of their age. On the other hand, every answer will give place to new questions. Historians themselves are part of the historical process and each age poses new and different problems. Historical testimony changes with each change of the historical method, each new generation has to rewrite history in its own terms because it has to review its questions. The interesting thing about these remarks is to point out to the fact that Dewey found those ideas of history compatible with his logic of inquiry. 21. In the present paper I am not providing an in-depth account of Lewis’ thoughts. I refer to Lewis because Danto presented his criticism against pragmatism by discussing Dewey and Lewis, and I refer to some of Lewis’s insights on knowledge of the past only when they are clearly connected with some of Dewey’s similar insights. On the other hand, I am completely aware that Lewis deserves a special space (which I do not have here), but, more importantly, I am not claiming that Lewis’ pragmatism is similar to Dewey’s. 22. Danto explains his account on the correct form of philosophical problems in Danto 1997. 23. See the definition of judgment at the beginning of section 3 above. 24. I want to make clear that Danto’s account of Dewey as a case of skepticism is completely unfair. Danto’s view is not the result of either some misunderstanding or of the fact that both philosophers belonged to different times and different philosophical movements. Although it is true that Dewey predates the linguistic turn, he was explicit, on one hand, in his intention to avoid approaching the logic of inquiry based in the analysis of the singular proposition in isolation of the context of inquiry and its relation to the specific problem to be solved, and, on the other hand, in rejecting dualism and representationalism, because they both lead to skepticism. 25. I will not consider, for the moment, whether all these sentences are descriptions of the same event. I will return to the question of what would be a “naked” event devoid of any description a little later. 26. “Their most general characteristic is that they refer to at least two time-separated events though they only describe (are only about) the earliest event to which they refer” (Danto 1985: 143). 27. A contemporary witness is not allowed to truthfully describe events if that description refers to a future event. 28. White took in account Burke’s pentad and tropology in Metahistory in order to disclose the basic ontologies that inform the differences among several historical accounts. 29. This argument is not strictly general given that statements that refer to the past five minutes are not affected. But, as Danto himself states, what historian would be interested in that brief moment of time? See Danto (1985: 31). 30. Danto’s notion of present implies extension, duration, and speciousness. “To be a thing is to have extension and duration, and to deny either of these is to deny the existence of things […] and surely one must run a race on order ever to be said to have won one” (Danto 1985: 84-5).

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31. Mead vaguely attributes to Father Gosse, a 19th Century creationist, the idea that the world might have been created only five minutes ago. 32. By virtue of its behaviorist approach, Mead’s theory overcomes introspection, and idealism. Through its social approach, it surpasses the individualism to which Watsonian behaviorism remained attached. Mead 1972. 33. “The specious present of a human individual would presumably be a period within which he could be himself” (Mead 2002: 49). 34. As I argued in Tozzi 2012, emergentism is, first of all, a kind of historical heuristic, since it allows us to track the appearance of human faculties and processes of extreme complexity, without presupposing an individual or a mind apart from the process of emergence itself, and without appealing to any a priori contents. It thus enables the dissolution of dualisms such as subject/object, mind/world, individual/society. Secondly, it invited the dissolution of the dualism between historical knowledge (unfixed, changing and discontinuous) and the actual past (fixed and irrevocable) at the roots of historical skepticism. 35. In other words, both bowls satisfy, from a material point of view, the narrative sentence that refers to a past event (or object) Ming China (Danto 1985: 335). 36. When I talk about “our beliefs about our world” I mean personal beliefs of our own past and historical interpretations, memory politics and substantive philosophies of history. That is, all account of the past interested in its truth as well as in its meaning.

ABSTRACTS

The second half of the twentieth century has been witness to a blooming of reflections on the status of historical narrative. One of the main achievements of a narrativist philosophy of history (NPH) consists of having reinforced the worth of an autonomous historical knowledge vis à vis standard conceptions of science which made history appear as underdeveloped. Although NPH does not dismiss the importance of documentary evidence, it did not produce an integrative account of both dimensions (the work of writing and the work with evidence), being slave of a number of epistemological dualism. On one hand, NPH seems to remain in the representationalist paradigm in the case of evidence, while, on the other hand, it only admits pragmatic evaluation in the case of narrative discourse. In this paper, I sustain that John Dewey’s and George H. Mead’s reflections on our knowledge of the past offer NPH good reasons to assess the role that literary theory can play in reconstructing historical controversies, without neglecting the importance of empirical research. For instance, Dewey holds that historical writing is a case of the judgments produced in response to problematic research situations. By virtue of this, the meaning of judgments referred to the past (that is, historical narrations) “have a future reference and function,” and thus understanding their meaning involves displaying the consequences that follow from such judgments. Mead, for his part, has argued that by appealing to the independent reality of the past as ground for our beliefs about it, rather than contributing to the rational resolution of our historical problems, we stray towards the search of something which is by definition unattainable. As a consequence, I shall show the urgency of advancing in the development of a narrativist, pragmatistically-informed philosophy of history. My considerations will be illustrated through the analysis of a controversial case about a past event: the main plot of the memorable film The man who shot Liberty Valance, by the equally memorable John Ford.

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AUTHOR

VERÓNICA TOZZI

Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad de Tres de Febrero, CONICET veronicatozzi[at]gmail.com

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Toward Truthlikeness in Historiography

Oliver Laas

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I would like to thank the editors of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy for their patience, and two anonymous reviewers whose comments vastly improved the quality of this essay.

Why Truthlikeness?

1 According to the realist view, inquiry begins with a cognitive problem that has the form of a question. An answer expresses a proposition about the world or a part of it, whether present, past or future, and is the overall goal of inquiry. Answers can be partial or complete (Niiniluoto 1987: 203, 129-30). A complete answer to a cognitive problem is the whole truth. Thus, we might say that the (or a) goal of inquiry is the truth. Call this the truth doctrine. Optimism suggests that the history of science is a progress toward this aim by way of increasingly accurate theories – call this the progress doctrine (Oddie 1986: 1). But fallibilism holds that our theories are generally false or likely to be false, and are, after falsification, replaced with other theories that are also likely to be false.1 One motivation for the notion of truthlikeness in science is the desire to be an optimistic fallible realist about inquiry (Niiniluoto 1987: 156; Oddie 2014).

2 Another motivation is to account for our seeming ability to grade various propositions in different situations according to their closeness to the truth within those situations. Compare: 1) The number of planets in our solar system is 9. 2) The number planets in our solar system is 900.

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3 Intuitively, (1) is closer to the truth than (2), implying that one falsehood can be closer to the truth than another. Consider another pair: 3) The number of planets is between 7 and 9. 4) The number of planets is greater than 0. 4 (3) seems closer to the truth than (4), implying that some truths are closer to the whole truth than others (cf. Oddie 2014). Similar comparisons are possible for qualitative propositions.

5 Finally, it seems that sometimes a false theory can achieve the aims of inquiry better than a true one that is more limited in scope. There may be topics where the best we can do is not to arrive at propositions that are true but to arrive at propositions that are as little false as possible. […] Some false propositions may be far more worth asserting, may be of far more importance for developing a less incorrect view of reality or parts of reality than hosts of true propositions of less range and significance. (Ewing 1934: 226-7) 6 A notion of truthlikeness should be able to show how this is possible.

7 Discussions of truthlikeness have largely been limited to natural science. One reason for extending the concept to historiography is that this would allow us to be optimistic fallible realists about historiography.

Realism, Skepticism, and the Fundamental Ontological Tradeoff

8 In the face of disagreements over notions like evidence, we might define historical knowledge as the analysis of extant evidence with the aim of drawing inferences about history, that is, past events (Tamm 2014: 285-6; Tucker 2006: 1). Historiography consists of representations of past events, since historians cannot observe them. Hence historiography is not the study of past events, but the study of traces of the past; it is the art of reasoning from traces to facts (Tucker 2006: 1, 93).

9 There are two positions about the relationship between historiography and history: realism and constructionism. The latter can support some version of anti-realism, but does not necessarily entail it, since something can be constructed in the present and be a true account of the past. Let’s say that general realism about some subject matter or field of inquiry is the following thesis:

(GR) General Realism: Given a, b, c, … as the distinctive objects of a subject- matter, and F, G, H, … as distinctive properties of these objects, then it is the case that (EC) The existence claim: a, b, c, … exist and have properties such as F, G, H, …; and (IC) The independence claim: the existence of a, b, c, …, and their having the properties F, G, H, … is independent of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on.

10 In short, realism ascribes objective, mind-independent existence to various objects and properties, such as the external world, mathematical objects, or the past. The world is as it is, independently of what anyone else thinks about it (Miller 2014).

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11 Although realism can be accepted or rejected across the board, it is more common to be selectively realist or non-realist about various topics. For example, one can be a realist about everyday macroscopic objects but an anti-realist about abstract objects like numbers. 12 In turn, anti-realism in the broad sense could be defined as the following thesis:

(GAR) General Anti-Realism: Given a, b, c, … as the distinctive objects of a subject-matter, and F, G, H, … as the distinctive properties of these objects, then it is the case that either (NEC) The negative existence claim: a, b, c, … do not exist and/or do (not) have properties F, G, H, … ; or2 (DC) The dependence claim: the existence of a, b, c, …, and their having the properties F, G, H, … is dependent on people’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on.

13 Anti-realism denies the objective, mind-independent existence of objects and properties affirmed by realism in a particular domain or with respect to some subject matter.

14 Semantic realism retains EC from GR but reformulates IT in terms of the principle of bivalence: every meaningful sentence about a, b, c, …, having or not having F, G, H, …, is either true or false independently of whether we are or will ever be able to ascertain this. Anti-realists deny bivalence (see Dummett 1959, 1978, 1983, 1991). Note that this characterization of realism is controversial. Realism requires the objective independent existence of those entities that make statements about them true. Semantic realism says nothing about the nature of the reality that makes such statements true or false (Devitt 1983: 77). Thus, semantic realism is not equivalent to realism, since realism “says nothing semantic at all beyond […] making the negative point that our semantic capacities do not constitute the world” (Devitt 1991: 39). 15 Realism about historiography claims that historiography is a representation of history, that historiography is a true account of past events. Historiography interprets or explains historical evidence to infer from present traces to past events (Murphey 1973, 1994; Tucker 2006: 255). Constructionism claims that historiography is a construction in the present, not a representation of the past. Historiography does not refer to history because sentences about the past are neither true nor false; they have no truth value because they have no clear truth conditions. Since the past is inaccessible, all we have are historians’ present constructions. Any further metaphysical assumptions about the reality of the past are unwarranted (Tucker 2006: 255-6). The most extreme form of constructionism is skeptical constructionism or historiographic skepticism which claims that there is no knowledge of history because historiography is ontologically and epistemically indistinguishable from literary fiction (ibid.: 256). This view rests on the postmodern challenge (so-called because its most prominent supporters, like Roland Barthes and Hayden White, either were or drew heavily from post-structuralist and postmodernist thinkers).3 The epistemic side of the challenge asks how textual and archaeological evidence warrants truth apt assertions about the past. The semantic side concerns whether signs in general, and textual evidence in particular, can refer to a language-independent past. There seems to be a connection between semantic realism and realism about historiography since our access to the past is largely mediated by (written) evidence, and if such evidence cannot be true or false, then we cannot justifiably make inferences about the past on the basis of present evidence.

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16 Realism and constructionism are competing ontologies of historiography, and hence face the fundamental ontological tradeoff, a tension between explanatory power and epistemic risk: a rich ontology has greater explanatory power but a modest ontology is epistemically safer. The more ontological machinery we postulate, the more we might be able to explain, but the harder it is to believe in the existence of all the postulated entities and relations (Swoyer & Orilia 2011). The strengths of anti-realism in general, and constructionism in particular, are simplicity and epistemic safety, since they make fewer assumptions than historiographical realism. The strength of realism is explanatory power, because it is a better explanation of consensus about historical facts, theories, and methods among a large, uncoerced, and heterogeneous group of historians (Tucker 2006: 257). 17 The debate between realism and constructionism touches on a number of interrelated issues. The first of these is realism and anti-realism about meaning in historiography. Historiographical texts employ proper names (Julius Caesar), names of institutions (the Roman senate), and abstract concepts (revolution). Do such expressions refer to entities that actually existed in the past? It is conceivable that they existed independently of historians’ representations (EC) but that the past is nonetheless constructed from their representations (DC). Secondly, there is the issue of the epistemic status of historiographical explanation. The aforementioned concepts are based on present evidence of the past. Such evidence can be missing, erroneous or sometimes require distance to be properly understood. This casts doubt on the notion that the concepts found in historiographical texts refer to past existents. Third, there is the ontology of history. The different kinds of expressions and concepts employed in historiographical texts suggest different kinds of ontologies: proper names seem to require the existence of past individuals, institutional names the existence of institutions, and abstract terms the existence of kinds.4 All of these issues cannot be dealt with in this paper since each would require further investigation. What I have to say will touch mainly on realism and anti-realism about meaning, but not on the epistemology and specific ontology of historiography. I will draw on Charles S. Peirce’s semeiotics, logic, and philosophy of science to provide a metaphysically modest ground upon which a concept of truthlikeness in historiography can be established. This would open the way to optimistic fallibilist realism about historiography.

Desiderata for a Concept of Truthlikeness in Historiography

18 Before a measure of truthlikeness can be defined, we need to know the requirements that such a measure should fulfill. There is no prima facie good reason to suppose that a measure suitable for theories in the natural sciences can be expanded without modification to the human sciences. Hence we should examine the characteristic features of historical knowledge and its acquisition in order to see which modifications, if any, are in order.

19 Realism seems to be connected with the correspondence theory of truth, since it requires an objective relation of reference between expressions and the world (see Putnam 1978: 18). The correspondence theory claims that a proposition is true if it corresponds to the way things actually are, that is, to the facts. The correspondence theory has been criticized on numerous grounds over the years. Instead of reviewing

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the objections I will simply remark that, prima facie, the correspondence theory faces additional difficulties when extended to historical knowledge. Such knowledge is neither based on nor corroborated by observations of historical events. Historical facts are not given. Historiography presents descriptions of such events on the basis of evidence. It “is a science whose business is to study events not accessible to our observation, and to study these events inferentially, arguing to them from something else which is accessible to our observation, and which the historian calls ‘evidence’ for the events in which he is interested” (Collingwood 1956: 251-2). 20 Historical events transfer information through evidence because each event generates numerous informational signals, most of which are gradually lost or corrupted over time. Historians attempt to extract information about historical events from the evidence by separating later additions and distortions from the original signal (Kosso 1992: 32-3; Tucker 2006: 18). The relationship between historiography and evidence is similar to the relationship between theory and evidence in other sciences: descriptions of historical events in historiography are akin to descriptions of unobservable entities, like electrons, in physics, since both are grounded in inferences based on publicly observable evidence - the former on written documents, the latter on instrumental measurements (Kosso 1992; Murphey 1973: 16). 21 Methods for producing historical knowledge are communal in the sense that there is a large, uncoerced, heterogeneous community of historians who agree on acceptable means of obtaining evidence, strategies for using said evidence, conventions for conducting disagreements, and shared assumptions about the division of labor in inquiry (Tucker 2006: 6, 20ff). Historians construct explanatory hypotheses to explain the evidence, and use evidence to confirm hypotheses (Goldstein 1996: 9-10). The evidence must be interpreted before it can support explanatory hypotheses. Interpretative judgments serve partly as organizing principles for describing past events, and criteria of relevance for the selection of additional evidence in support of explanatory hypotheses (cf. Stalnaker 1967: 176). Since explanations of historical evidence can be wrong, historical knowledge is fallible (Tucker 2006: 257). 22 Thus, a realist account of historical knowledge that would support a notion of truthlikeness in historiography must be fallibilist, closely related to inquiry, include the communal aspect of inquiry, account for the interpretative practices involved in inquiry, and allow for some kind of causal informational link (e.g. by way of reference) between past events and their present traces. Thus, to establish a concept of truthlikeness in historiography, we need at least three things: 1) a referential theory of meaning, because this supports realism by explaining how statements about the past can be true or false due to being about actual past event; 2) a fallibilist account of inquiry; 3) an account of truth that leaves room for progress toward the truth, and accounts for the role of consensus in the whole process. 23 The underlying realism should be modest in order to successfully compete with anti- realist alternatives while retaining its explanatory advantage. I will argue that Peirce’s semeiotics and pragmatist theory of truth, when interpreted dialogically, provide a modestly realist basis from which to develop an account of truthlikeness in historiography that satisfies the three desiderata outlined here.

24 However, before laying the groundwork for such an account, I must first address the postmodern challenge because if it stands, then realism about historiography is

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untenable. I will focus on its semantic aspect, mentioning the epistemic aspect only in passing because it has already elicited a number of novel replies. The semantic aspect rests on a conflict between competing theories of meaning: realists insist that sentences receive their meaning from their relations with the world; skeptics subscribe to the view that sentences receive their meaning from their relations with other sentences (Tucker 2006: 7-8). I will defend realism by challenging the arguments of Roland Barthes and Hayden White, the two main proponents of the postmodern challenge.

The Postmodern Challenge

25 Modern historiography rests on two methodological presuppositions: – The ontological presupposition: the past is real, what happened did formerly exist, and the nonpresence of the past (and of the future) cannot be identified with its unreality (Françoise Châtelet, quoted in Le Goff 1992: 10). – The epistemological presupposition: every discourse about the past must be able to rigorously show, on the basis of evidence, why it proposes a particular sequence of events rather than another (ibid.: 11). 26 The historian’s knowledge of the past is indirect. Texts and archaeological sources only give answers to the questions we pose to them. The historian’s work begins by posing a question which expresses his or her cognitive problem (cf. Bloch 1953: 48-50, 53-4, 64-6).

27 The postmodern challenge is a challenge to the scientific status of historiography. It replaces the question “How is history like science?” with the question “How is history like and unlike fiction?” as one of the main issues in the philosophy of history. It rests on two theses: – Anti-representationalism: the past cannot be the referent of historical statements and representations (Zagorin 1999: 13). – Narrativism: the fictional stories invented by writers and the narrations crafted by historians do not differ in any essential respect (ibid.: 14). 28 Anti-representationalism does not entail that constructivists are all anti-realists who deny the existence of reality. They claim that the reality referred to by signs is ultimately inaccessible to us due to innumerable mediations between us and the sign’s referent (Jenkins 2000: 187). The postmodern challenge undermines the apparent obviousness of modern historiography’s two methodological presuppositions whereas realism would uphold them.

Barthes’ Argument for Anti-Representationalism

29 In his 1967 essay, “Le discours de l’historie,” Roland Barthes gave an influential argument for anti-representationalism, which can be summarized as follows: 1) Language is incapable of referring to anything outside itself, such as the world, reality, or the past. 2) Both historiography and narrative fiction employ the reality effect, creating a referential illusion of apparently being about reality, while actually replacing the text’s referent with narrative.

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3) History appropriates narrative structures from fiction, where these were originally developed. 4) Therefore, narrative history is indistinguishable from narrative fiction (cf. Doležel 2010: 16-9). 30 The first premise rests on structuralist literary theory and poststructuralist (Doležel 2010: 16). Both draw on Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiology which rests on a dyadic sign model according to which a sign is a composite entity made up of two elements, the signifier and the signified, held together by the signification relation:

signifier ———— signified

31 For Saussure (1959: 66-7), the signifier was a sound-image. Subsequent semioticians treated it as a material sign-vehicle, e.g. a sound, a printed letter, a gesture, and so on. The signified is the conceptual part of the sign – a mental entity, image or concept (Sebeok 2001: 5-6). A sign’s meaning is constituted by its language-internal relations of opposition with other signs in the language (Saussure 1959: 88). There are two kinds of internal relations: syntagmatic relations between signs that can be conjoined in well- formed strings called syntagms (e.g. the relation between “the king” and “approves” since they can be conjoined into “the king approves”), and paradigmatic relations between a sign and its possible alternatives in well-formed syntagms (e.g. the relation between “approves” and “disproves” because the latter can replace the former) (Devitt & Sterelny 1999: 262). This leads to a holistic view of language. The meaning of a sign is defined by its relations to all other signs, by its place in the entire structure (Saussure 1959: 22). Language is an autonomous system that is to be explained on its own terms, without any reference to anything outside its structure (Hawkes 1977: 16-7). Reference is a relation between a sign and the object it represents, the referent. As a concept, the signified is determined entirely by language-internal syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations without any reference to language-external entities (Saussure 1959: 111-2; cf. Jameson 1972: 105-6; Hawkes 1977: 17). Post-structuralists, many of whom were not linguists, have interpreted Saussure’s holistic view in an anti-referentialist way. There seem to be at least two reasons for rejecting reference in the post-structuralist literature. First, signification is arbitrary because it rests on a convention maintained by the linguistic community (Saussure 1959: 67). There is no natural connection between signifier and signified (ibid.: 68-9). The assumption seems to be that arbitrariness undermines reference, and hence that a relational analysis is the only viable alternative (Devitt & Sterelny 1999: 267). Secondly, there is the argument from color terms: the signified of a color term, such as “brown,” does not include reference because color terms cannot be taught by the presentation of, say, brown objects. It is only when he [the pupil] has grasped the relation between brown and other colors that he will begin to understand what brown is. […] the signifieds of color terms are nothing but the product or result of a system of distinctions. (Culler 1976: 25) 32 Thus, the referential dimension of language is denied. Some authors have gone so far as to talk of a “referential fallacy” that results from substituting reality for its representation.5 Barthes draws on semiology when he claims in his first premise that language cannot refer to anything outside itself.

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33 The second premise claims that historiography and narrative fiction are similar in that both employ the reality effect and create the illusion of reference to extra-linguistic reality. The reality effect is a complex operation that involves two phases. In the first phase, “the referent is detached from the discourse, it becomes exterior to it, grounds it, is supposed to govern it: this is the phase of res gestae, and the discourse simply claims to be historia rerum gestarum” (Barthes 1967: 138). In the second phase, the signifier is replaced with the referent. In this, historiography resembles the historical novel where concrete details, such as descriptions of the setting or costumes, are also constituted by the “direct collusion of a referent and a signifier” (Barthes 1968: 147-8). As a result “this same ‘reality’ becomes the essential reference in historical narrative, which is supposed to report ‘what really happened’” (ibid.: 146). The reality effect consists in “the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, [which] becomes the very signifier of realism” (ibid.: 148). From the perspective of narrative structure, such details are superfluous, but they serve to create the referential illusion of an objective discourse where history narrates itself (Barthes 1967: 131-2). Historical facts have only linguistic existence, but because of the referential illusion, such facts seem to be anterior to historiography (ibid.: 138). Hence historiography and narrative fiction are similar in that both rely on the reality effect to create the referential illusion that the discourse in question refers to reality. 34 The third premise of Barthes’ argument is that history appropriates narrative structures from fiction, where they were originally developed: “narrative structure, elaborated in the crucible of fictions (through myths and early epics), becomes both sign and proof of reality” (Barthes 1967: 140). His conclusion is that narrative history and narrative fiction are indistinguishable. Historical discourse is “essentially an ideological elaboration or, to be more specific, an imaginary elaboration” (ibid.: 138). 35 Barthes’ views fail to satisfy the three desiderata for the notion of truthlikeness set out above: his theory of meaning rejects reference, equating historiography with fiction leaves no room for truth, and this leads to skepticism, not fallibilism about historical knowledge. Barthes’ conclusion must be challenged in order to make way for a concept of trutlikeness in historiography. 36 Barthes’ argument has numerous weaknesses that the realist could exploit in mounting a counterattack. First, one could challenge the first premise. The arbitrariness of signification is not a sufficient reason for rejecting reference. The structuralists seem to presuppose that the only possible theory of reference is a naïve picture theory according to which signs are “pictures” of things: if signs are “pictures,” then their relation to their referents is not arbitrary – they would be constrained by their likeness to their referents; if signification is arbitrary, then signs cannot be “pictures” of their referents; signification is arbitrary; thus, signs are not pictures and cannot refer (Devitt & Sterelny 1999: 267). Evidence for this presupposition can be found in structuralist writings: There exists no necessary “fitness” in the link between the sound-image, or signifier ‘tree,’ the concept, or signified that it involves, and the actual physical tree growing the earth. The word ‘tree,’ in short, has no “natural” or “tree-like” qualities […]. (Hawkes 1977: 25) 37 But arbitrariness and reference can be compatible. Reference does not involve picturing; it could instead be understood along causal lines (Devitt & Sterelny 1999: 267).

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38 The argument from color terms is implausible. First, it is unlikely that an organism incapable of discriminating between brown and other colors would be able to acquire the concept of brown. But even if learning color terms involves nothing above and beyond learning their language-internal differences from other color terms, it does not follow that color terms do not refer or that their reference depends on other color terms in the language. What is required for learning reference is one thing; what reference consists in, is another (Devitt & Sterelny 1999: 268). Second, cross-linguistic surveys of color terminology have shown that while languages do differ in the number and extensional range of their color categories, the amount of cross-linguistic diversity is notably reduced when speakers of different languages are asked to identify “good examples” of their color words, such as a “good red.” Speakers then tend to select colors from a very limited area of the color spectrum. This suggests that there is a universal set of focal colors, from which different languages make their selection. Furthermore, the lexicalization of color terminology in different languages shows notable uniformities: black, white, and red are generally lexicalized first, while pink, purple, and grey appear last (Berlin & Kay 1969). The existence of a small number of relatively universal focal colors is also supported by evidence from cognitive psychology (see Heider 1971, 1972). 39 The rejection of reference encourages anti-realism, because access to a language- independent reality by way of signs becomes problematic if the referential relation between sign and world does not have any bearing on the sign’s meaning. While semiology does retain some notion of reality, since the signified as a concept is a concept of something (Jameson 1972: 106), this something is a reality created by language itself (cf. Hawkes 1977: 26, 149). While the poetic, world-making powers of language cannot be denied (cf. Goodman 1978), overemphasizing them leads to the view that (human) reality is language-dependent (cf. Hawkes 1977: 28), that the language-independent world is a mysterious and inaccessible “formless chaos of which one cannot even speak in the first place,” (Jameson 1972: 33) and to relativism which claims that different autonomous sign systems create different, independent and incompatible (Hawkes 1977: 56). The corollaries of this view of language are the inaccessibility of the past, and an understanding of historical discourse as analogous to fiction-making in that it creates the past it surreptitiously purports to be about.

White’s Argument for Narrativism

40 Hayden White has given a prominent argument for the narrativist thesis. His research into how elements of narrative discourse function in historiography was influenced by Barthes. In fact, White’s approach draws explicitly from poststructuralist philosophy of language, and embraces its constructivist implications: Historical accounts purport to be verbal models, or icons, of specific segments of the historical process. But such models are needed because the documentary record does not figure forth an unambiguous image of the structure of events attested in them. In order to figure “what really happened” in the past, therefore, the historian must first prefigure as a possible object of knowledge the whole set of events reported in the documents. This prefigurative act is poetic inasmuch as it is precognitive and precritical in the economy of the historian’s own consciousness. It is also poetic insofar as it is constitutive of the structure that will subsequently be

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imaged in the verbal model offered by the historian as a representation and explanation of “what really happened” in the past. But it is constitutive not only of a domain which the historian can treat as a possible object of (mental) perception. It is also constitutive of the concepts he will use to identify the objects that inhabit the domain and to characterize the kinds of relationships they can sustain with one another. In the poetic act which precedes the formal analysis of the field, the historian both creates his object of analysis and predetermines the modality of the conceptual strategies he will use to explain it. (White 1973: 30-1) 41 White argues that historiography is equivalent to fiction-making, because emplotment is a literary operation employed by both historiography and literature, and literature is fiction. His argument for the narrativist thesis can be summarized as follows: 1) Emplotment is a literary operation employed in historiography. 2) Emplotment is a literary operation employed in literature. 3) Literature is fiction. 4) Therefore, historiography is equivalent to fiction-making (cf. Doležel 2010: 21). 42 The first premise, that emplotment is employed in historiography, rests on White’s views on how historical discourse achieves its “explanatory effect.” Historiography is a three-staged process. First, a chronicle is formed from the elements in the historical field comprised of historical events. Chronicles are open, without beginning nor end, because they begin when the chronologist starts recording events, and stop when he does (White 1973: 5, 6). Second, the chronicle is transformed into a story through motifical encoding. A story, unlike a chronicle, is a unit demarcated by a beginning and an ending. Historians do not find stories in chronicles; they invent them because one and the same event, for instance, the king’s death, can function as an inaugural, transitional, or terminating motif in different historical narratives. It is the historian who, in crafting a historical narrative, decides which of these roles a particular event plays in his or her account of the past (ibid.: 5-7). Third, the newly formed narrative unit is subjected to one of three modes of explanation: explanation by emplotment, explanation by argument, or explanation by ideological implication. Inspired by Northrop Frye (1957), White distinguishes four ways of emplotment, and derives from them four “archetypal” forms of historical narrative: tragedy, comedy, satire, and romance. Every historian is compelled to emplot his text according to one of these four forms (White 1973: 7-8).

43 The second and third premises claim that emplotment is a fiction-making operation because it is also employed in literature, and literature is fiction. This is explicitly laid out in White’s Tropics of Discourse, where he writes that history is the matching of “a specific plot structure with the set of historical events that he [the historian] wishes to endow with a meaning of a particular kind,” (White 1978: 85) and adds that “[t]his is essentially a literary, that is to say fiction-making operation” (ibid.). This establishes the double equation at the core of the narrativist thesis

emplotment = literary operation = fiction–making

44 It is set up by a substitution of terms that White treats as synonymous. He concludes that historiography is equivalent to fiction-making. Subsequent writers have relied on this double equation to make even more radical claims about history, viz. that history is invented (Munslow 1997: 118, 178) and that history is ending (Jenkins & Munslow 2004: 2).

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45 White’s views, too, go against the three desiderata set out above, since he denies both reference and truth, and seems to support skepticism about historical knowledge by equating historiography with fiction. The realist could attack White’s argument in a number of ways. First, even though emplotment is employed in both literature and history, there are crucial differences between fictional and historiographical texts. Narratives in fiction and narratives in historiography differ in their purpose: the latter purport to be true, and can therefore be doubted or turn out to be false, while the former are not supposed to be true, are therefore not supposed to be doubted and cannot turn out to be false (Van den Akken 2013: 349). 46 Second, factual narratives advance claims of referential truthfulness while fictional narratives do not. This difference becomes apparent when we compare factual with forged narratives. Both claim to be true, but the latter, when uncovered, is deemed false, not fictional. One cannot falsify a fictional narrative in the way one can falsify a forgery (Tamm 2014: 277-8). More specifically, we can distinguish between world- imaging texts (I-texts) and world-constructing texts (C-texts). I-texts are representations of the actual world and provide information about it. The world itself exists prior to and independently of I-texts. C-texts are the results of world-making practices that construct the worlds represented in them. Such texts exist prior to the world they describe. Literary and fictional texts are C-texts. I-texts are truth-apt while C-texts are not (Doležel 1998: 24). Historical texts are I-texts. Their goal is to express propositions that carry information about the actual world at some time in the past. Such propositions are made true or false by the actual world, not by a world constructed by the text.6 Texts are identified as C-texts or I-texts by their purpose, how they are made and used in a community. Peirce writes that science is a mode of life: Science is to mean for us a mode of life whose single animating purpose is to find out the real truth, which pursues this purpose by a well considered method, founded on thorough acquaintance with such scientific results already ascertained by others as may be available, and which seeks co-operation in the hope that the truth may be found, if not by any actual inquirers, yet ultimately by those who come after them and who shall make use of their results. (CP 7.54) 47 Scientific inquiry as a mode of life is an activity that is important to its practitioners’ sense of identity. The specific goals and ambitions of scientific inquiry distinguish it from other human endeavors. This influences how judgment is exercised, evidence admitted or rejected, and so on (Hookway 2000: 72). The late Wittgenstein (2009: § 23) would call scientific inquiry a language-game that is part and parcel of a scientific form of life. Forms of life involve agreements in definitions, opinions, and judgments (ibid.: § 241-2). Scientific investigators have a substantive commitment to the truth that is accompanied by reflections on and commitment to a method (Ransdell 1977: 164-5). Historians share these commitments with other kinds of investigators – they, too, reflect on their methods, scrutinize their sources, and seek to support their claims with evidence (Tamm 2014: 276). This makes the historians’ form of life a scientific one. Thus, historical texts are I-texts because they are intended to be used as sources of information about the past, and result from the intention to produce texts that provide such information.

48 Skeptics could argue that such intentions do not change anything because historiography employs rhetoric. Rhetoric is opposed to truth as well as proof, since its primary aim is effectiveness and persuasion. This non-referential interpretation of rhetoric comes from Nietzsche who treated rhetoric as a means for reflecting on truth

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outside the sphere of . According to the Aristotelian tradition, however, rhetoric encompasses different modes of proof for the purposes of persuasion. Within this tradition, argumentation and explanation deals with probabilities and plausibilities (Ginzburg 1999). Recent developments in rhetoric, such as Chaim Perelman’s and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s (1969) new rhetoric, define rhetoric as “the study of discursive techniques allowing us to induce or to increase the mind’s adherence to theses presented for its assent” (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969: 4). On this view, dialectic7 and rhetoric are related: the former is a theory about the techniques of argumentation while the latter is a practical discipline about how dialectical techniques may be used to convince or persuade an audience (van Eemeren Frans et al. 2014: 261). In real-life settings, rhetoric often involves reasoning on the basis of non-analytic thinking, which is discursive, and aims to convince and rationally persuade the audience (ibid.: 261-2, 261n8). Rhetoric in this sense is neither antithetical to nor constrained by truth and proof. This view was partly inspired by Peirce’s rhetorica speculativa, which studied the transmission of meaning from mind to mind, and from one state of mind to another by way of signs (Olbrechts-Tyteca 1963). Thus, the concept of rhetoric employed by the skeptics is too narrow. The rhetorical dimension of historiography does not necessarily exclude it from the domain of truth. 49 Finally, the stylistic forms of historical narratives have no influence on the relationship between historiography and evidence. Narratives are not necessarily fictional. Scientific theories about the evolution of life or the big bang come in narrative forms, but this does not make them fictional. What matters is not the form of historiography, but its epistemic relation with the evidence (Tucker 2006: 92, 139). A skeptic could counter that even if this is the case, arguments are the primary means of rational persuasion, narratives, whether fictional or factual, are not arguments, and thus cannot persuade on rational grounds. But it is not at all clear that narratives and arguments are mutually exclusive. Some arguments make extensive use of narratives. For instance, an arguer may introduce a story, either factual or fictional, and, through the development of his or her argument, show how the story supports the argument’s conclusion (see Hunt 2009; Govier & Ayers 2012; Plumer 2015). Story structures can be used for organizing and making sense of the evidence in support of some conclusion or thesis (Pennington & Hastie 1992, 1993). The four ways of emplotment distinguished by White could be seen as abstract story schemes that link together events and actions for presenting evidence (cf. Bex 2011). The links between events can be temporal or causal, and how the whole sequence hangs together is evaluated in light of our common knowledge about the way things can be normally expected to go in a familiar type of situation (Walton 2014: 35). Last but not least, it is also possible that narration itself may be a form of argumentation (see Fisher 1987). Thus, the non-argumentative nature of narratives is not a foregone conclusion, and cannot be used as a truism in support of the skeptical point of view.

Dialogue and Truthlikeness in Historiography

50 Let’s begin by clearing up some possible misunderstandings. Truthlikeness is not probability. Probability, interpreted epistemically, measures the degree of seeming to be true. Truthlikeness measures the degree of being similar to the truth. Seeming to be true is concerned with appearances, similarity to the truth with objective facts about

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similarity or likeness. Probability and truthlikeness do not measure the same thing. The probability of the proposition “the number of planets is greater than or equal to 0” is maximal, but it is not very close to the truth (Niiniluoto 1987: 183; Oddie 2014).

51 Truthlikeness is not vagueness. Suppose that, pace epistemicists (see Williamson 1994; Sorensen 2001), vagueness can be explained by treating absolute truth and absolute falsity as extrema on an interval of truth values representing degrees of truth. Such degrees are not degrees of closeness to the truth. Suppose Jones is 175 cm. Consider two propositions: 1) Jones is exactly 170 cm tall. 2) Jones is tall. 52 The first should be absolutely false on any good theory of vagueness, while the second should have a relatively high truth degree if our reference class for tall people includes, say, those who are 185 cm and above. On the other hand, the precise but false (1) is closer to the truth, or more truthlike, than the vague (2) (Oddie 2014).

53 Truthlikeness is commonly taken not to refer to the acceptability or plausibility of a proposition (Hilpinen 1976: 23). I will, however, argue below that plausibility is one of the factors that goes into determining the truthlikeness of a historiographical proposition. 54 One of the biggest challenges for the concept of truthlikeness is the logical problem of truthlikeness, that is, the problem of giving an adequate account of the concept and determining its logical properties. A solution involves defining a measure of truthlikeness. No generally accepted measure has been found so far. (1962), who also put truthlikeness on the agenda of 20th century philosophy of science, defined two measures of truthlikeness in terms of the true and false consequences of a theory. The Tichy-Miller theorem (Tichy 1974; Miller 1974) demonstrated the inadequacy of Popper’s measures. There have been attempts to remedy Popper’s approach by defining a measure of truthlikeness in terms of the relevant consequences of a theory (see Burger & Heidema 1994; Schurz & Weingartner 1987). However, the applicability of relevance-based measures is limited (Gemes 2007). An alternative is to define a measure of truthlikeness in terms of similarities, determined by a similarity metric, between the possible worlds in which the proposition is true and the actual world (see Tichy 1974; Hilpinen 1976; Oddie 1986; Niiniluoto 1987). Besides disagreements over which similarity metric best captures the intuitive logical properties of the concept of truthlikeness, the main challenge of the similarity approach is the extension problem: how to appropriately extend a given measure of truthlikeness between possible worlds to propositions and larger units of evaluation (Schurz & Weingartner 2010: 423)? 55 In light of these challenges, I will not attempt to define a measure of truthlikeness for historiography, opting instead to outline a theoretical basis from which such a measure could perhaps be defined. The aim is to present some of the factors that a measure of truthlikeness should take into account, and to show that Peirce’s ideas provide a possible setting within which it could be defined.

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Reference and Semantic Dialogues

56 Peirce’s semeiotic would satisfy the first desideratum for a concept of truthlikeness, because it is referential, and broad enough to account for both textual as well as non- textual evidence. Throughout his life, Peirce formulated different versions of his semeiotic. I will rely on his final account, formulated between 1906 and 1910 (Atkin 2013), for presenting a referential theory of meaning as a viable alternative to the Saussurean paradigm favored by the skeptics. My reasons for relying on his final account are twofold: first, the early account was compatible with idealism (see Short 2007: 28ff), and second, his final, realist account draws an instructive parallel between semiosis, the overall process of sign interpretation (CP 5.484), and inquiry.

57 Perhaps the most well-known among Peirce’s multiple definitions of “sign” says that a sign “is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (CP 2.228). A sign gets its meaning from interpretation whereby someone determines which object the sign refers to, since the relation between a sign and its referent is by itself insufficient to ground representation (Misak 2004: 16; Pietarinen 2006: 32). Meaning is, according to Peirce, an irreducibly triadic relation where a sign, s, that refers to an object, o, according to an interpretant i (W2: 224; Hookway 2000: 9, 126). To be more specific: – Sign: is the signifying element in the triadic meaning-relation, the material underpinning in the form of some physical mark that is to be interpreted, that stands in a dyadic relation with some object, and can enter into another dyadic relation with some interpreter (CP 4.536; Ransdell 1977: 169). – Object: is whatever is represented by the sign. This can be anything discussable, whether an individual or a collection, regardless of whether it exists or not (CP 2.232; EP 2: 498). The object determines the sign by placing constraints on the sign for the successful representation of that object with respect to some of its relevant characteristics. – Interpretant: is the sign’s more or less clarified meaning, the understanding of some sign-object relation reached as the end-point of an interpretative process where we have formed an idea of the difference that the sign’s being true would make (Atkin 2013). It is determined by the sign via the features of the object, and the way the sign represents it. 58 Each of these three elements determines the others in the sense that each limits what the others may be: each object limits what may be a sign of it, and each sign limits what may be an interpretant of it (Short 2007: 167-8). This triadic relationship includes three referential relations: a sign directly refers to its object (also known as denotation, or the real thing it represents), indirectly refers to the characteristics common to the objects (also known as connotation, or, as Peirce calls it, the ground of the object), and indirectly refers to the interpretant which provides the totality of the facts known about the object (information, according to Peirce) (CP 2.418; W2: 59, 82).

59 In Peirce’s late account, semiosis was patterned on his understanding of inquiry as a process that starts from a primitive or impoverished conception of the sign’s object, and moves through intermediate stages toward a complete conception. At each intermediate stage of semiosis, both the object and interpretant are developed up to that point based both on previous stages and in anticipation of the presumed future course of interpretation that would culminate in a complete understanding of the

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object (Ransdell 1977: 168-9). The endpoint of this gradual process is the dynamic object (the real object as it is truly known at the end of semiosis) (Ransdell 1977: 169-70, 169n10-11; Hookway 1985: 139) which is accessed via the final interpretant or the true understanding of the dynamic object at the end of inquiry (see CP 8.184, 8.343) that interacts with the dynamic object in that it is a complete grasp of the dynamic object, captures all there is to know about it (Ransdell 1977: 173), and sets a normative standard for judging our interpretative responses to the sign because it is “the interpretant we should all agree on in the long run” (Hookway 1985: 139). The starting point of semiosis is the immediate interpretant (an understanding of the general features of a sign’s meaning) (CP 5.473). Each intermediate step involves the dynamic interpretant (our understanding of the relationship between the sign and the dynamic object, as determined by the sign, at any intermediate stage of semiosis) that is connected with and constitutes the immediate object (the dynamic object as it appears at any interim stage of semiosis and differs from it due to partially mistaken or erroneous interpretations) (CP 4.536; Ransdell 1977: 169). 60 The distinction between immediate and dynamic objects reflects the realism of semiosis (Short 2007: 200). It explains the difference between success and failure as well as truth and falsehood in interpretation. The success of an interpretant depends on reality, the dynamic object, not on representation, the immediate object (ibid.: 191). The dynamic object is incompletely knowable because “the Sign cannot express [that], which it can only indicate and leave the interpreter to find out by collateral experience” (CP 8.314). Collateral experience, in turn, is the interpretation of different signs as signs of the same object on the basis of experience that acquaints us with the object referred to by the sign (CP 8.178-9). Signs can be corrected and supplemented because the same dynamic object can be represented by different signs, and false or incomplete representations can contain enough truth to enable one to identify the object and provide a more accurate representation (Short 2007: 193-4). 61 But why think that collateral experience provides access to a mind-independent reality? Because experience is characterized by three basic features or categories: firstness is the mode of being of things that are without reference to anything else, such as appearances or qualities of feeling (CP 8.328-9); secondness is the mode of being of things with respect to a second but regardless of a third, such as the experiences of effort, struggle, causation, and resistance (CP 8.328, 8.330, 1.325); and thirdness is the mode of being of things that bring a second and a third into a relation with each other by mediating between them, such as a law or a meaning that molds future behavior (CP 8.328, 1.343; W5: 304). Secondness is manifest in the experience of reality: “In the idea of reality, Secondness is predominant; for the real is that which insists upon forcing its way to recognition as something other than the mind’s creation. […] The real is active; we acknowledge it, in calling it the actual” (CP 1.325). This is the “Outward Clash” (CP 8.41) of something outside of our control on our experience that lies at the core of our concepts of reality and its mind-independent existence. It supports the conjecture that there is something that would exist as it is, irrespective of whether it is perceived, represented or experienced. That something is the dynamic object, the end-point or limit of semiosis, which ensures that the final interpretant, the interpretant we should all agree on in the long run, is at least potentially obtainable. This also accounts for the self-correcting nature of semiosis, which is based on the supplementation of signs.

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62 But how is all this relevant to historiography where the past cannot be directly experienced? In his most famous trichotomy, Peirce distinguished between three kinds of signs: icons (signs that exhibit firstness and refer to their objects in virtue of their properties) (EP2: 291; CP 2.276), indices (signs that exhibit secondness and refer to their objects by being causally or otherwise connected to them) (CP 2.305), and symbols (signs that exhibit thirdness and refer to their objects by virtue of a law that causes a symbol to be interpreted as referring to that object) (EP2: 292). According to Peirce, all propositions are informational symbols. To convey genuine information, a proposition must be true: If anything is true, definitely and decidedly true, that of which it is said to be true may be in some sense a creation of the mind. Still, once created, it must be in a measure independent of thought, so that merely denying the truth of what is asserted shall not destroy its truth. Otherwise, it does not mean anything to say it is true. (MS 463: 9) 63 An informative proposition conveys some truth in the sense of being connected to reality, independent of thought, because the interpretant of [the proposition] […] represents the proposition to be a genuine Index of a real Object, independent of representation. For an index involves the existence of its Object. The definition adds that this Object is a Secondness, or real Fact. (EP 2:278) 64 This is the case only if the real object in question is a real event that no amount of reinterpretation can erase from the historical record, and actually modified the attributes of consequential states of affairs, no matter how minutely, due to genuine secondness. In other words, genuine information reflects on or reports about some state of affairs that was in direct reaction with the original observing mind present at the source of information (De Tienne 2006). Thus, the realism of Peirce’s mature semeiotic opens the possibility for genuinely informative propositions about past states of affairs to actually refer to the past because their interpretants are indices of those past states of affairs. Despite its similarity to contemporary causal theories of reference, Peirce’s account is broader since the connections between indices and their objects are not limited to causal relations (see Short 2007: 219-20, 219n4).

65 Semiosis is goal-directed or purposeful process: the end of semiosis determines the stages leading to it and elements of the triadic meaning-relation determine each other. Peirce was a realist about potentiality, actuality, and generality in the form of laws: “the will be’s, the actually is’s, and the have beens are not the sum of the reals – they only cover actuality. There are besides would be’s and can be’s that are real” (CP 8.216). Thus, he explains the purposefulness of semiosis by incorporating the doctrine of final causation into his theory of signs. He defines final causation as follows: we must understand by final causation that mode of bringing facts about according to which a general description of result is made to come about, quite irrespective of any compulsion for it to come about in this or that particular way; although the means may be adapted to the end. The general result may be brought about at one time in one way, at another time in another way. Final causation does not determine in what particular way it is to be brought about, but only that the result shall have a certain general character. (CP 1.211-2) 66 Whether this doctrine can be justified is not as relevant for my concerns as is the fact that including it in a referential theory of meaning makes realism epistemically more risky than a theory without final causation. It would be beneficial for my aims to retain Peirce’s late semeiotic views while giving an ontologically parsimonious account of the

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goal-directed nature of semiosis. A suggestion about how this could be done is found in one of Peirce’s less known “dialogical” definitions of “sign”: A sign is an object made by a party we will call the utterer, and determined by his idea, which is the sense or depth of the sign, in order to create in the mind of the interpreter an interpretant idea of the same object. (MS L 237: 1) 67 In his logical writings, Peirce interpreted quantifiers like “every” (CP 5.542) and “any” (EP 2: 408) as parts of a dialogue between two parties, the Utterer and the Interpreter (Pietarinen 2006: 77; Brock 1980; Hilpinen 1982, 2004). He also repeatedly emphasizes that all thought and deliberative reasoning is dialogical: […] all deliberative mediation, or thinking, takes the form of a dialogue. The person divides himself into two parties which endeavor to persuade each other. From this and sundry other strong reasons, it appears that all cognitive thought is of the nature of a sign or communication from an uttering mind to an interpreting mind. (MS 498) 68 Note that he even illustrated the emergence of experience, and secondness, in dialogical terms: Although in all direct experience of reaction, an ego, a something within, is one member of the pair, yet we attribute reactions to objects outside of us. When we say that a thing exists, what we mean is that it reacts upon other things. That we are transferring to it our direct experience of reaction is shown by our saying that one thing acts upon another. […] There are in experience occurrences; and in every experience of an occurrence two things are directly given as opposed, namely, what there was before the occurrence, which now appears as an ego, and what the occurrence forces upon the ego, a non-ego. This is particularly obvious in voluntary acts; but it is equally true of reactions of sense. (CP 7.534, 7.538) 69 The dialogical form of thought is, according to Peirce, in some ways akin to chess: Thinking always proceeds in the form of a dialogue, – a dialogue between different phases of the ego, – so that, being dialogical, it is essentially composed of signs, as its Matter, in the sense in which a game of chess has the chessmen for its matter. (MS 298: 6) 70 Peirce’s dialogical ideas can be modeled as games in the game-theoretic sense. He seems to have anticipated 20th century ludic developments in logic, viz. both the game- theoretic semantics of Jaakko Hintikka and his collaborators (see Saarinen 1979; Hintikka 1973) as well as dialogical logic, where dialogues are understood as games (Lorenzen 1958; Stegmüller 1964; Lorenzen & Lorenz 1978). Peirce’s semeiotic dialogues are compatible with Hintikka’s semantic games, with the dialogue games of dialogical logicians, and have connections with game-theoretic pragmatics as well.

71 Semiosis, as outlined above, can be recast in game-theoretic terms. Game theory, as introduced by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (1944), and taken in an evolutionary direction by John Maynard Smith (Maynard Smith & Price 1973; Maynard Smith 1982), is a collection of analytical tools for studying interactive processes between agents (Osborne & Rubinstein 1994: 1). A benefit of treating semiosis as a semantic dialogue or game between an Utterer and an Interpreter is that this allows us to explain the goal-directed nature of semiosis without appealing to final causation, since goal-directed processes and purposeful activities, such as interpretation or inquiry, can be understood as games (Hintikka 2007: 94). Note that what follows is not a reconstruction of Peirce’s own views, but a simplified development of them. 72 At the center of semiosis is a semantic dialogue, understood as a game-theoretic structure, which links signs with their objects, and language with reality (see Hintikka

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1968, 1973). A semantic dialogue game is an interpretative process associated with a particular sign. There are two players, (quasi-)minds capable of interpretation, who can occupy the roles of Utterer, who transmits a sign, or Interpreter, who interprets it. These roles can be occupied be humans, animals or nature. Every semantic dialogue game is an attempt at the verification (by one of the players) or falsification (by the opposing player) of a given sign. Each player has a strategy, that is, a plan of action (Carmichael 2005: 4) that consists of instructions for choosing and evaluating alternative actions in light of what the player ought to choose (Pietarinen 2006: 84, 441, 442). For Peirce, meaning is a habit. This notion served a similar function for him as strategy does for games: both are exemplified by individual actions, both are plans of action for all possible circumstances, and both are involved in the interpretation of signs (see CP 5.400, 5.491; Pietarinen 2006: 82-4, 99-100). A player’s strategy determines the course of interpretation that arrives at the meaning of a sign. Each player has a payoff that measures how well they are doing in all possible outcomes of the game. Payoffs determine which player wins (verifies or falsifies the sign), and which player loses. A sign is true if the Interpreter has a winning strategy in the correlated game, viz. if the Interpreter can always choose his moves (depending on what has happened before in the game) in a way that leads to his winning no matter what the Utterer does. The Interpreter wins if he can verify the truth of the sign, and loses otherwise, while the Utterer wins if he can falsify the sign, and loses otherwise (cf. Hintikka 1974: 52). This corresponds to the Tarskian notion of truth (see Hintikka & Sandu 2011). The game ends once a sign has been assigned an object by the Interpreter’s interpretant. The Interpreter wins if the sign represents the dynamic object as it truly is (if the sign is true of the object), and the Utterer wins if it does not. Hence semiosis, which determines the meaning of a sign, is an interactive process that gives rise to the totality of all actions, possible or actual, that do, might, will or would arise, as a consequence of playing the game in different contexts and settings (cf. Pietarinen 2007: 231-2). 73 One could argue that a dialogical interpretation of semiosis is not enough to guarantee the desired outcome in the way final causation does in Peirce’s original account. But it is well-known that repeated plays or games in evolutionary settings tend to converge on stable equilibrium outcomes. Likewise, repetition or evolution can drive a semantic dialogue to a determinate and stable outcome. But the problem of equilibrium selection shows that there can be multiple stable outcomes of a game-like interactive process, and there seem to be no reliable criteria for determining which of these is chosen, or whether the chosen outcome is optimal. While this matter would require additional research, it seems to me not to be an insurmountable problem since Peirce’s notion of final causation includes chance as an essential ingredient: chance provides the range of outcomes from which a selection is made (see Short 2007: 137). Thus, even if a dialogical treatment of semiosis omits some of Peirce’s original metaphysical ideas, it seems sufficient for an ontologically modest referential theory of meaning that would not tip the fundamental ontological tradeoff as much in constructivism’s favor as a would a theory that incorporates final causation. This would fulfill the first desideratum for truthlikeness in historiography: an ontologically modest referential theory of meaning.

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Inquiry, Truth, and Information-Seeking Dialogues

74 Peirce’s pragmatist theory of truth could satisfy both the second and the third desiderata outline above since it is fallibilist, links truth with inquiry, emphasizes the communal aspect of inquiry, and is closely connected with his semeiotics which accounts for both the interpretative and referential aspects of truth.

75 There are two closely interacting components in Peirce’s theory of truth: reality and truth. Peirce defines the real as “that whose characters are independent of what anyone may think them to be” (W3: 271). Different definitions of truth can be found in Peirce’s writings. The best known among these is the following: Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion. This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a foreordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion. This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality. (W3: 273) 76 Inquiry, like semiosis, is for Peirce a purposeful or goal-directed processes that evinces final causation (W3: 3, 45): a proposition p is true not solely because a community agrees that it is true, but because reality causes it to be true (see W3: 45). Mind- independent reality constrains the scientific community, which employs the scientific method, in a way that the inquiries and judgments of its members lead them, in the long run, to the belief as well as the agreement that p is true; truth draws us toward itself (Ransdell 1977: 162; Hookway 2000: 47). This interpretation is supported by another one of Peirce’s definitions of convergent truth: “Truth is that accordance of the abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief” (CP 5.565). Peirce’s theory combines aspects of both the correspondence and coherence theories of truth (Haack 1976: 247). It is compatible with Tarski’s notion of truth (Misak 2004: 127-9). It is fallibilist, since although inquirers will eventually reach the truth, at no point in the process is there any guarantee that their current beliefs will not be falsified by further evidence (Hookway 2000: 49-50, 77). On Peirce’s account, then, a proposition at any stage of inquiry is only approximately true, i.e. truthlike, but not absolutely true. An absolutely true proposition is the ideal limit of inquiry. These ideas place Peirce within a broader tradition of thinking about truthlikeness that stretches from Nicholaus Cusanus to Karl Popper.8

77 The incorporation of final causation into theories of truth and inquiry tips the scales of the fundamental ontological tradeoff in favor of simpler constructionist alternatives. Misak (2004: 167-8) provides a modest and non-metaphysical interpretation of Peirce’s theory of truth. On her reconstruction, truth depends on humans to the extent that it is a property of beliefs and beliefs are mental states of humans (ibid.: 132). Truth is convergence toward consensus at the end an indefinitely prolonged inquiry. It is not convergence in the sense of decreasing erroneousness of theories as they approach the truth, because convergence in this sense is about approaching the limit while consensus is about agreement (ibid.: 122-3). Convergent truth is objective not because it

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would correspond to reality by the end of inquiry but because it would be believed by a final community of inquirers at the end of inquiry (ibid.: 131-8). 78 While I find much to like about Misak’s interpretation, her emphasis on consensus over convergence leaves no room for truthlikeness, and a slim ground for realism, because it downplays the constraining effect of reality on inquiry. An account of truthlikeness in historiography that takes Peirce’s ideas as its starting point should retain ideas about convergence as approximation to the limit of truth while also making room for consensus as an additional mechanism that drives theories toward ever increasing truth. If such an account aspires to be metaphysically modest, then it should not appeal to final causation. 79 According to Peirce, inquiry starts with a cognitive problem or question and ends when the question has received an answer (W2: 471). This view of inquiry is reminiscent of the Socratic elenchus – inquirers interrogate nature and nature responds. Taking a clue from the dialogical interpretation of semiosis, I propose that inquiry, too, can be treated as a type of dialogue, viz. an information-seeking dialogue that constitutes inquiry (Hintikka & Saarinen 1979; Hintikka & Hintikka 1982: Hintikka 2007: 85). It can be understood as a two-player game, where one player is the Inquirer and the other is Nature. The goal is for one player, the Inquirer, to elicit or make explicit tacit information possessed by the other player, Nature. In game-theoretic terms, a game against nature is a game against an unreasoning entity whose strategic choices affect the other player’s payoff, but which has no awareness of, or interest in, the overall outcome of the game (Straffin 1993: 56). The Inquirer can, among others things, make interrogative moves that consist in addressing questions to Nature. Nature’s answers are assessed in light of the Inquirer’s background knowledge. Questions are essentially requests for information, the specification of which is the specification of the epistemic state the questioner wants to be brought about (Hintikka 2007: 4-5, 89). They elicit tacit information. A question is more informative than another if answers to it are more informative than answers to another. In the context of natural science, questions can be thought of as observations, in the context of historiography, they can be thought of as explanatory hypotheses. The assumption is that for each question there is a certain set of potential answers. The availability or non-availability of answers affects the Inquirer’s strategies, and the set of potential answers is not limited by the Inquirer’s language or conceptual scheme but by matters of fact (ibid.: 85-7). In historiography, answers can be construed as explanations of hypotheses by the evidence. Players’ strategic considerations involve strategies of questioning as well as strategies for drawing further inferences from the answers. The Inquirer wins if he is able to verify the thesis expressed in his question. 80 As with semiosis and semantic dialogues, construing inquiry as a dialogue accounts for its goal-directedness without appealing to anything more than the strategic interactions of the participants. The method of science, according to Peirce, has two parts-the logic of science, which is voluntary since we can control the methods we apply in our reasoning, and experience which is involuntary (Misak 2004: 86). The methods and inference rules employed in an information-seeking dialogue are given by its definitory rules (Hintikka 2007: 7). These can be construed as codifying the shared methods of a scientific community. The strategic rules of an information-seeking dialogue tell the player how to play well in order to increase his or her chances of

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reaching the goal (ibid.). Each partial answer in the sequence of questions and answers in an information-seeking dialogue is a truthlike claim about some past event.

Consensus, Plausibility and Persuasion Dialogues

81 Historiography and evidence are linked by theories that identify the evidence as such in the first place. Competing historiographies are competing explanations of the evidence that posit different descriptions of historical events to explain the evidence (Tucker 2006: 93). Disagreements are due to the absence of knowledge of history, incomplete theories, and the underdetermination of evidence by theories (ibid.: 141ff). Information-seeking dialogues with the evidence of past events left by nature (understood here as including past human agents) account for the truth factor in truthlikeness. This should be distinguished from consensus, since, as Misak has argued, the two are different. In the context of historiography, however, consensus among a sufficiently large, uncoerced, and uniquely heterogeneous group of historians is an indicator of historical knowledge (ibid.: 6, 20ff). Consensus is attained within the community through argumentation and persuasion. The evidence used for persuasive purposes is acquired in inquiry. If persuasion is successful, that is, if it manages to create consensus within the community, then the evidence as well as the associated explanatory hypothesis become part of historical knowledge. Thus convergence and consensus should be seen as two mechanisms that determine the truth and likeness (i.e. similarity) factors of truthlikeness in historiography, respectively.

82 In keeping with the dialogical approach adopted so far, persuasion within the community can be seen as a persuasion dialogue. This is a game between two players that starts with a conflict of opinions where one player holds one thesis or hypothesis, and the other either denies it or holds a contrary hypothesis. The overall goal is the resolution or clarification of an issue that is the cause of the conflict of opinions. This is done by proving or disproving the thesis (Walton 2008: 4-5, 11; Walton 2006a: 99). The underlying value of this type of dialogue is respect for the truth (Walton 2006a: 100). This supports the goal of resolving the conflict of interests by rational argumentation, which can involve or take the form of narration, in order to approach truth as an ideal. Movement toward the truth is evaluated through a process of collecting and testing evidence, done partly within an information-seeking dialogue, which leads to the rational acceptance or rejection of a player’s thesis (ibid.: 128). 83 In natural sciences, the likeness of a proposition to the truth is increased or decreased by conducting experiments. What could fulfill a similar function in historiography? Following Georg Iggers, I suggest that we look to plausibility: [P]lausibility obviously rests not on the arbitrary invention of an historical account but involves rational strategies of determining what in fact is plausible. It assumes that the historical account relates to a historical reality, no matter how complex and indirect the process is by which the historian approximates this reality. (Iggers 1997: 145) 84 Plausibility is a complex notion that can be understood in different ways. A hypothesis or claim is plausible if it appears true under normal circumstances and familiar types of situations, in light of the credentials represented by the bases of its credibility (Walton 2006b: 71; Rescher 1977: 38-9). For example, given two competing explanatory hypotheses of evidence, the one that is more in line with our understanding of how

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things typically are in the world is more plausible. A hypothesis or claim is prima facie plausible if it has sufficient epistemic support for additional inquiry (Bartha 2010: 15-8).

85 The normative aspects of Peirce’s theory of truth suggest what role plausibility could have in historiography. Both scientific inquiry and convergence to truth occur within a community. When an inquirer asserts a proposition and assents to it, viz. proclaims that it is true, he or she incurs commitments. The asserted proposition is presented as being truthlike. Asserting such a proposition forms part of the practice of cooperative inquiry within the scientific community. The proposition is directed both to one’s contemporaries and to a potentially unlimited number of future inquirers. The scientific community is held together by the practice of assertion. He who asserts a proposition is trying to get other community members to believe it. Assertion is the vehicle for scientific debate. Once a public assertion is made, the asserted proposition is open to criticism. If the assertion was improper or the proposition false, then it is eventually withdrawn (see Hookway 2000: 65, 67-8, 70, 72-3, 144). The plausibility of an asserted proposition is settled by consensus reached through (narrative) argumentation in a persuasion dialogue. Rhetorical strategies, narrative structures, evidence – all of these are employed by the historian to increase the plausibility of his or her account in the eyes of the community. 86 Thus, historians belong to a community of researchers. They engage in information- seeking dialogues with their evidence in order to arrive at informative and true claims about the past. They address the (often partial) answers obtained from those dialogues to other community members, and try to persuade them of the truthlikeness of their thesis or explanatory hypothesis about the evidence. The likeness of those claims to the truth is determined by the outcomes of persuasion dialogues with other members of the community. The measure of truthlikeness of a claim about the past is determined by the informativeness of the answers obtained from information-seeking dialogues with the evidence, and its plausibility and rational acceptability at the end of a persuasion dialogue with other members of the scientific community.

Conclusion

87 Skeptics have argued that historiography cannot make truth-apt claims about the past because statements about the past are neither true nor false – historiography is akin to fiction and historians to authors of fiction in that both construct the worlds they write about. This view rests on a particular theory of meaning which is subject to criticism. Peirce’s semeiotics and pragmatist theory of truth,9 reinterpreted in dialogical or game-theoretic terms, provide a plausible basis for defining a concept of truthlikeness for historiography in a way that accounts for its epistemic and methodological specificities. A plausible account of truthlikeness would go some way toward justifying optimistic fallible realism about historiography. Defining an actual measure of truthlikeness within the limits set by the framework introduced here is beyond the scope of the present essay. Similarity-based approaches define truthlikeness in terms of distances between possible worlds. Dialogues qua games can be viewed in standard form (represented by matrices) or in extensive form (represented by trees or directed graphs). One option would be to explore distance measures between the vertices of a graph as a basis for a measure of truthlikeness. Future research will have to determine the viability of this approach.

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NOTES

1. This is the conclusion of Larry Laudan’s (1981) pessimistic induction. 2. It seems that NEC could be interpreted in different ways. A strong interpretation would deny the existence of objects and their properties in some domain (e.g. there are no natural numbers qua abstract objects). A weaker interpretation would deny the existence of objects but could affirm the existence of properties attributed to them (e.g. there are no natural numbers qua abstract objects, but their properties belong to mental constructions). 3. The name “postmodern challenge” comes from Lubomir Doležel (2010: ix). 4. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me. 5. Michael Riffaterre tried to add this fallacy to the panoply of informal fallacies (see Pavel 1986: 118). 6. The logic and metaphysics of time are complex issues that I cannot enter into here. Regarding reference to the past, suffice it to say that historical discourse employs natural language, and one of the metaphysical presuppositions of natural language semantics seems to be that past moments of time and past places can be the referents of ordinary language expressions (see Bach 1986). 7. Dialectic is understood here as the art of rational argument by conversation, not as a Hegelian comprehension of the (see Walton 2006a: 47, 70). 8. See Niiniluoto (1987: 165-71). For a dissenting view, see Misak (2004: 119-20, 122). 9. The realist theory of truth I have derived from Peirce’s remarks differs notably from how pragmatist theories of truth have been traditionally described. I would argue that the theory outlined here can still be called pragmatist because truth, according to Peirce, at least as I have interpreted him here, is neither correspondence nor coherence nor consensus, but the fallible

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“opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed upon by all who investigate” (W3: 273). In other words, the account outlined here deserves to be called pragmatist because it retains the central tenets of Peirce’s views, viz. that truth is related to inquiry, connected with the practices of inquirers, and fallible.

ABSTRACTS

Truthlikeness in historiography would allow us to be optimistic fallible realists about historiography – to hold that historical knowledge is about the past, true albeit fallible, and can increase over time. In this paper, three desiderata for a concept of truthlikeness in historiography will be outlined. One of the main challenges for truthlikeness is historiographic skepticism which holds that historiography is indistinguishable from fiction and cannot therefore furnish us with true knowledge about the past. Such skepticism rests on the postmodern challenge, which will be criticized on the grounds that it rests on an implausible theory of meaning. It will be shown that Peirce’s semeiotic and pragmatist theory of truth, interpreted dialogically or game-theoretically, provides a suitable framework within which to pursue the project of defining a concept of truthlikeness for historiography. Finally, directions for possible future research into truthlikeness in historiography, including ways of defining a measure of truthlikeness, will be considered.

AUTHOR

OLIVER LAAS

Tallinn University oliver.laas[at]gmail.com

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The Need for Quinean Pragmatism in the Theory of History

Jonathan Gorman

Historical and Philosophical Stances

1 Suppose we speculated that there was some connection between pragmatism and philosophical theorising about history. How might we investigate whether that was so? A claim that there was some such connection might be interpretable as a factual if vague assertion that pragmatists share an interest in philosophical theorising about history. Given this, and seeking more exactness, we might well need first to identify our “pragmatists”: pragmatism has a long and complex tradition that has been expressed in multifarious, even inconsistent, ways, and we might well find that only some pragmatists have, or have had, this interest. Perhaps we would find ourselves addressing the interests only of some past – to be clear, historical – pragmatists; perhaps only some present ones; perhaps, indeed, all, regardless of date. Yet even if only present-day pragmatists were involved and the imagined factual claim (about their interest in philosophical theorising about history) were expressed in the present tense, this assertion would nevertheless, not at all implausibly, be warranted by historical methods, that is, warranted by informed and scholarly reading of relevant texts and other interpretable remains.

2 While it is true that such methods are commonly, even necessarily, used in historical research, the reference here to “historical methods,” and the particular characterisation of them just mentioned, might suggest that we here presuppose the view that “history” should be conceived, even exhaustively conceived, as a particular kind of epistemic discipline. Yet how “history” should be conceived is a controversial part of what “philosophical theorising about history” involves. Philosophical readers might well be suspicious that the view that history is an epistemic discipline would itself be an outcome of philosophical theorising about history, and was not a conclusion to be taken for granted. They would be right, on both counts. However, while it is appropriate to be alert to such matters, we do not yet need to determine or presuppose

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any connection with theorising about “history,” for we need at this point only the notion of scholarly reading, and can safely recognise that historians, including historians of ideas, are usually well trained in that, whatever else is involved. Here are two possible outcomes of such imagined scholarship in the present context, offered as possible truths warranted by informed and scholarly reading of relevant texts and other interpretable remains: Morton White, a pragmatist, was interested in philosophical theorising about history.1 W. V. Quine, another pragmatist, was not.2 We need no more examples than just these two to make two simple points: the connection between pragmatists and being interested in philosophical theorising about history now seems “accidental” or “contingent,” in the philosophical senses of those words: at least one pragmatist is, at least one pragmatist isn’t, and the contrast is cast in terms of the pragmatists’ individual psychologies (how “interested” they were in philosophical theorising about history). We seem to need further “historical” investigation into particular pragmatists to take the matter further. 3 However, we may suppose that we are philosophers rather than historians, although it remains to be seen how sound that separation is. An elementary distinction between philosophy and history is illustrated in the following: we may imagine historians to ask, for example, if some particular pragmatists were interested in philosophical theorising about history; we may suppose philosophers to ask instead if pragmatism is “intrinsically connected” to philosophical theorising about history. Philosophers and historians alike seek “truth,” but perhaps of different things: historians seek truth about who believed what; philosophers seek truth about connections between ideas, where who had those ideas may be incidental. Philosophers thus sometimes address the “history of philosophy” – past philosophers – in what seems a peculiarly philosophical rather than a historical way. Here is Peter Strawson: “when I refer to the system of Leibniz, I shall not be much concerned if the views I discuss are not identical at all points with the views held by the historical philosopher of that name. I shall use the name ‘Leibniz’ to refer to a possible philosopher at least very similar to Leibniz in certain doctrinal respects; whether or not they are indiscernible in these respects matters little.”3 4 Unusually explicit among philosophers about this matter, Strawson intended by this to block any complaints against his references to “Leibniz” that he imagined might be made by “proper” historians. He believed that the “proper” historians’ sense of historical scholarship, as involving the grounding of historical assertions with appropriate historical evidence, material that they interpreted with accuracy and respect,4 was not relevant to what he was engaged in. Philosophical scholarship required instead exactness of expression and respect for logical reasoning.5 Philosophers like Strawson (and a number of pragmatists are like Strawson) saw themselves as engaging in a dialogue with “possible philosophers,” with the analytically improved constructs of past philosophers; they thought about an imagined improved world where, unlike the actual historical world, the people were not, as they saw it, made of straw. Historians, by contrast, characteristically thought that one could not get much more straw-like than merely imaginary people. 5 We would need, I have suggested, further historical investigation into particular pragmatists to recover any interest of theirs in philosophical theorising about history. However, following Strawson, claiming that pragmatists have an interest in philosophical theorising about history clearly need not be a genuine description of

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some actual pragmatists’ psychological dispositions. Moreover, despite Strawson’s attitude to the history of philosophy, the claim need not even be the ascription of a rationally constructed attitude to (some) analytically improved relevant possible pragmatists. It may be, rather, a comment on the intrinsic (arguably, stipulated) nature of pragmatism “itself”; it would not at all be the outcome of miscalled “historical” research, imaginary or otherwise. On the contrary, setting the historical question as “did the pragmatists Morton White and W. V. Quine have an interest in philosophical theorising about history?” presupposes that White and Quine were “pragmatists,” a judgement that (given the supposed contrast with historians) only philosophers could make, for it is not a judgement made on historical evidence (assuming that to require some highly constrained derivation from past texts) but is, rather, and relative to that, “a priori” in some way.6 6 Whether White and Quine were “pragmatists” requires an understanding of what philosophers think of as (a relevant part of) the history of philosophy. It is very usual for philosophers to think in a context of ideas set by what they see as the history of philosophy. But then, it is very usual for historians to address what seems to be exactly the same context of ideas, and they use the very same texts for the purpose as philosophers do. Philosophers and historians alike would seem to need to know what was meant by the texts in question, and, given similar skills in interpretation, this suggests we might find it difficult to distinguish the disciplines.7 However, we could try to force a distinction in the following way, by importing a certain theory of meaning: a philosopher, in order (for example) to assess the grounds of its truth or the validity of its deduction from others, might well ask what a particular sentence in the text means, and will often think of that as a matter that is determinable independently of any “context,”8 which they might well deliberately ignore; the historian, by contrast, might well ask what the author of the text meant, and think that to be a matter that depends – even depends in its entirety – on the “actual context” of its being said.9 7 However, this is not a very useful way of making a distinction between history and philosophy. Many historians, whatever their interest in some form of “context,” suppose that they do not need a “theory of meaning” to make sense of their evidence, for they often think, as some philosophers had thought pre-war,10 that what a person meant by uttering certain words was neither more nor less than the meaning of the words in that utterance. Historians often treat an utterance as having a transparent meaning independently of its context, much as a philosopher would commonly treat a statement of mathematics. It is usually philosophers rather than historians who are aware of a contextual approach to meaning (even if they rarely use it for statements of mathematics).11 For example, followers of the later Wittgenstein think of “meaning” as “rule-governed,” so that a case for philosophy being indistinguishable from a social science is arguable,12 while other philosophers of language have developed “speech act theory.” As explained by Strawson in referring to J. L. Austin: “Given that we know […] the meaning of an utterance, there may still be a further question as to how what was said was meant by the speaker, or as to how the words spoken were used, or as to how the utterance was to be taken or ought to have been taken.”13 8 Yet we should note here Strawson’s firm distinction between “the meaning of an utterance” and the other, “further,” features of the “meaningful” situation. He did not take or allow the more radical step of holding that we do not know “the meaning of an utterance” unless we know how what was said was meant, or how the words spoken

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were used, or how the utterance was to be taken or ought to have been taken. What view do, or should (for, following Strawson, we may need to improve the expression of their positions), pragmatists take about this? While they may well have a larger vision than Strawson, it matters not, at this point. If “the meaning of an utterance” is available independently of “context” – whatever “context” is – it is available to philosophers and historians alike, who can share access to the ideas involved. Conversely, if “the meaning of an utterance” is not available independently of “context” then, again, philosophers and historians alike have access to meaning on whatever basis is involved. 9 It would be mere dogma on philosophers’ part to insist that historians do or should deal only with the contingent psychological characteristics of past individuals (their “interests”), while philosophers alone are entitled to assess the (logical, epistemic or metaphysical) merits or “truth” of the substantive contents of the thoughts they had; historians regularly do that sort of thing despite any such insistence. After all, the actions historical individuals engaged in likely bore a close relation to the substantive contents of the thoughts they had, and how meritorious those thoughts were might well be of historical relevance requiring historians’ judgement. While the history of pragmatism often displays serious practical engagement with the world in which pragmatists found themselves, it would be a mere contingency if some philosophers did not often act much on the basis of their own ideas, where the content, however better in quality than the usual run, did not generate in them sufficient confidence to warrant their acting, so that those philosophers became historically irrelevant. For my part, I think of myself as being pragmatic when I allow historians to invade my philosophical space, while – as will be seen – I equally think myself able to dip in and out of history as I choose. There is plainly some overlap between philosophy and history where “meaning” is concerned, and any interest in philosophical theorising about history may also be an interest in metaphilosophical theorising about philosophical inquiry. But that bathetic conclusion says nothing that relates especially to or involves a commitment to pragmatism, although some pragmatists may well form a view about it. 10 Here I will highlight a point I will make use of later: in so far as “meanings” are not to be understood as fixed eternal quasi-mathematical objects appropriate for more abstract theorising then we should note some degree of temporal extension to the “meaningful” features of the situation to match the temporal extension of the local “context” involved. This may well seem to open the door to a full historicising approach, but in fact most analytical philosophers shunned what they saw as a risk of relativism and chose not to take that route. Analytical philosophers did not notice or think relevant any temporal duration of speech acts, usually continuing to suppose that the sentences uttered in such a meaningful context had some fixed meaning, while where the context allowed a “thicker” meaning – such as in Austin’s ‘performative utterances’14 – they were thought to be atemporally analysable in such terms as an utterer’s “intention” or a hearer’s “uptake,” notions which were themselves atemporally analysable. It was difficult to find analytical philosophers or even concerned historians moving beyond the temporally immediate where “meaning” was concerned. Theorising about meaning took place from what I have called elsewhere a “philosophical stance,”15 as if the theorising were dealing with quasi-mathematical objects.

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11 Nevertheless, whichever discipline has the skills most appropriate for answering it, a question remains open to us: is there an “intrinsic” connection between pragmatism and philosophical theorising about history? Here, in so far as that is possible, we direct our attention to the ideas referred to in the question. If we have also to attend to the persons alleged to have held those ideas, or to the “contexts” in which the ideas were thought or expressed, so be it. One way or another, we can examine – analyse – these ideas, it seems. One point is readily apparent: if there is some intrinsic connection between pragmatism and philosophical theorising about history then there seem to be at least three forms it could take: pragmatism requires attention to philosophical theorising about history; attention to philosophical theorising about history requires us to adopt pragmatism; both of these. Given the multifarious versions of “pragmatism,” not least the existence of Quine’s philosophy, it would be unnecessarily heroic to assert the first form of “intrinsic connection” here, and since the third form includes the first, a similar objection can be made to that. Rather, in the present essay it will be shown historically (indeed, autobiographically) how philosophical theorising about history required in practice the adoption of a particular version of pragmatism. 12 As already remarked, it is very usual for philosophers to think in a context of ideas set by what they see as the history of philosophy, and we propose to enter here this world of ideas. We need not, however, limit ourselves to the world of “philosophical” ideas, for our concerns with “meaning” affect the world of ideas imagined on the basis of education or memory or of empirical evidence or historical remains or “reason” more generally: our “history” in a more full-blooded sense;16 indeed, we are likely to imagine here not just the past but also the present and we often think of history as continuing into the future. Now it may be that we believe, following Strawson for example, that philosophical analysis enables us to abstract from this overarching context the ideas that we propose to address and analyse, that is, we can attend to particular sentences in texts and take their meanings as fixed and sufficiently transparent to us so that they are identifiable and reidentifiable in whatever other small contexts we find them or use them as our own. It may well be that (some) pragmatists would not allow such “abstraction.” Nevertheless, however we attend to the ideas at issue and however “free-standing” it is appropriate to think them, in practice we pick them out from a welter of other ideas we might attend to instead. This world of ideas – this ongoing history – is imagined to be temporally extended. Philosophy about “history” in this sense is not necessarily philosophy about “history” conceived as an epistemic discipline. We conceive our situation here as involving an object of thought – the context of a welter of thoughts (possibly inseparable from each other) constituting ongoing history including the history of philosophy – that has a duration well beyond the immediate, and both philosophers and historians can feel at home in it. My “pragmatism” here is therefore tolerant.17 As philosophers, as historians of philosophy, or as historians, the temporally extended object that one is thinking about here is essentially mentally “observable” as fixed, enduring, continuing, changing or becoming, perhaps with temporally distinct and moveable parts, perhaps not, perhaps with an internal structure, perhaps not, perhaps evolving, perhaps not. There would have been no evolution for Plato’s Forms. 13 We thus adopt here what I have called elsewhere a “historical stance,”18 which characteristically has as its object of thought something which is imagined to spread over an indeterminately longish period of imagined time. However, one does not have

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to be any kind of theorist or historian to adopt it, for it is a stance appropriate to the experienced temporal continuity of our everyday lives. An apparent disadvantage of this point is that, precisely in so far as the world of history is continuous with the everyday, an adequate philosophy of the “everyday” – maybe some form of pragmatism – might be an adequate philosophy of history too, and attention to the philosophical issues particularly concerned with “history,” in particular with “history” conceived as the discipline of historiography, might well be able to be bypassed. In any event, this ongoing “historical” world is one of the imagination or consciousness. Despite the Cartesian thought that imagination and consciousness are private to the individual, here they are not private but essential features of our shared world, just as meaningful language itself is. It is not, of course, imaginary;19 it is real time that is imagined. Those like Strawson theoretically inclined to traditional philosophical analysis may well imagine a temporally extended, yet temporally immediate because also eternal, quasi- mathematical shared world of reidentifiable meanings that are, following Frege,20 fixed (or at least comparatively determinate in any flexibility they are supposed to have), whereas those inclined to the “historical” may imagine a shared world that is temporally extended and structured in terms of concepts that can cover change and can themselves change, even, with Bakhtin, change in some extreme way.21 On the other hand many historians share a commonsense, if not naïve, view that “meanings” can be taken for granted as broadly unchanging, whereas it is the philosophical speculators who see revolutionary possibilities here.22

From History to Hate: Redescribed Recollections

14 Given this world of ideas we propose to enter, where should we begin? “In treating of […] ideas, whatever order we adopt has its own disadvantage,” wrote F. H. Bradley.23 This is because “there is not and there can not be any such thing as a mere idea, […] standing or floating by itself.” “Really, here as elsewhere, what in every sense comes first is the concrete whole, and no mere aspect, abstracted from that whole, can in the end exist by itself.”24 As Louis O. Mink put it, “despite the fact that an historian may ‘summarize’ conclusions in his final chapter, it seems clear that these are seldom or never detachable conclusions.”25 It is a “ruinous superstition,” Bradley concluded. 26 With these and similar arguments Bradley justifies his view at the beginning of his The Principles of Logic, first published in 1883, that “It is impossible […] to know at what point our study should begin.”27 Yet Bradley is pragmatic at least in this sense: he is going to try: “[…] If we incur the reproach of starting in the middle, we may at least hope to touch the centre of the subject.”28 He would see if it worked.29

15 With the help of my imagination informed by memory – or maybe it is the other way around30 – I will now enter this temporally extended world of ideas around 1970, when I embarked on postgraduate research into the analytical philosophy of history.31 For me, in this bit of personal academic history, the problems involved in philosophical theorising about history came before I gave any attention to pragmatism. But I was not at all sure whether the problems were epistemic, or metaphysical, or logical, or even political, and I was not at all sure whether the problems had to do with history as a “discipline” as opposed to “history” in one of its many other senses. Indeed, I had no idea at all what the problems ought to be conceived to be. Beginning in wonder and doubt, like many intending philosophers I was tempted by the desire to start

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addressing from scratch those matters about which one may be curious or astonished.32 But where was “scratch”? 16 It lies not so much in either wonder or doubt themselves, or even in the things wondered about or doubted, but rather in the recognition that these worries – indeed, puzzlements and disagreements of many kinds – need to be dissolved, resolved or overcome. That is a pragmatic thought. It lies in the recognition that such matters be investigated as necessary and appropriate, inevitably with assumptions made about the form of the investigation and about where any burden of proof lies, assumptions that are themselves likely to generate controversy. Descartes thought that “scratch” in such recognition was “here” and “now,” and interpreted those as referring to his immediate and personal consciousness and such unavoidable and undeniable thoughts as he found it to contain, with philosophically “rationalist” criteria for the latter, generating the view that the dissolution of doubt and the overcoming of puzzlements involved particular perennial issues that required universal and permanent solutions, reflecting the eternity that God, mathematics and for that matter Plato’s Forms, occupied, and defining also the nature and limits of the philosophical. There seemed nothing in Descartes’ consciousness that was temporally extended in a historical sense, or indeed in any sense other than the “eternal,” and nothing that was shared with others. 17 Problems generated by the “here” and “now” in a more mundane sense – temporally localised compared to eternity, no doubt temporary and changeable – were beneath the ken of those reflecting on the eternal, so that, for example, “history, expelled from the body of knowledge proper by Descartes in part I of the Discourse, is still regarded with suspicion by his successors today.”33 Hume, long thought of as primarily a historian,34 started his philosophy in much the same place as Descartes but with “empiricist” criteria, interpretable as assuming that it was the “here” and “now” of individual phenomenal experience that marked “scratch,” and to some extent he shared with Descartes an understanding of the limits of the philosophical. Commonly evaluated as if it offered a new and different range of solutions to Descartes’ supposedly perennial philosophical questions, Hume’s philosophy was in the light of Descartes’ work usually ascribed a sceptical character, but his history “is recognizably within a classical tradition of dealing with public affairs and public men.”35 Usually thought of as distinct in some principled way, how Hume’s philosophy and history are connected is an intriguing question,36 although that will not be dealt with here. 18 Perhaps supreme among philosophers, Kant sought a rapprochement between and empiricism, but like many historical philosophers before and after him the issues he addressed were set by his forebears.37 His “here” and “now” included those inherited issues. He set still more puzzles for his successors, particularly when he attempted to apply pure reason to the course of history,38 and my “here” and “now,” when I began to research in philosophy, included many of those puzzles. None of these philosophers helped me much at the time, not least because “scratch” in post- Wittgenstein 1970 was widely accepted by philosophers as meaningful language in a shared world. Understanding this need not involve Wittgenstein’s “rules,” but a science of human behaviour seemed highly relevant and most of us were “pragmatists” in at least one sense: said Charles Sanders Peirce, “It is not ‘my’ experience but ‘our’ experience that has to be thought of”; as Bryce Gallie summarised this, “language is essentially a vehicle whereby one expresses those parts of one’s experience that are general, that must be ‘ours’ rather than ‘mine’ if they are to be communicated at all.”39

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19 I came to research in this area with a fairly sound grounding in the history of philosophy and with a background of study in philosophy of history.40 At that time the philosophy of history was distinguished into two areas. In the usage of W. H. Walsh, these were “speculative” and “critical” philosophies of history.41 In the usage of Arthur Danto, these were “substantive” and “analytical” philosophies of history.42 “Speculative” or “substantive” philosophy of history had had a comparatively benign past prior to the twentieth century. The “meaning” of history has been a perennial worry for humanity, expressing as that issue can a concern about our past, present and future, with religion often understood to give the historical “meaning” sought, characteristically telling us “why we are here” or “what we are for.”43 During and since the Enlightenment, and beginning with Biblical exegesis using skills first learnt in studies of classical texts, historical understanding had been developed in ways distinct from religion, with the “meaning” of history conceived as a subject for rational and secular attention rather than being a matter for religious authority. We may summarise Vico from 1725: “Because, as a species, we have ‘made’ history and the social world, we – humanity or its representatives – have the capacity to transform both.”44 That we can only know what we make – verum factum – is an even briefer summary of his epistemological position. That thought offers an opportunity for a pragmatic approach. 20 However, by the Second World War it came to be held that “speculative” or “substantive” philosophy of history, thought of as a historicist precursor of various forms of totalitarianism undertaken in the name of “progress,” was a misconceived if not evil activity that had been well demolished, in then current theory at least, by Karl Popper,45 and – thanks also to the publicly defended pluralism of Isaiah Berlin – it was thoroughly out of tune with the time. Patrick Gardiner had been able to write an introductory book in the area without referring to speculative philosophy of history at all;46 Walsh, who had published his Introduction one year earlier than Gardiner, had felt it necessary to apologise in case it was thought to be speculative.47 I was familiar with the thought of Collingwood,48 Bradley,49 and various works by historians, which were most commonly (it then seemed to me) the result of philosophically untutored reflections in their dotage, although Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History was a distinguished exception to that judgement,50 while I had some of the most advanced philosophical discussions with the historian Maurice Cowling. 21 Inevitably, one was allowably engaged only in “critical” or “analytical” philosophy of history. While philosophy of science at this period engaged with big epistemological, logical and metaphysical issues, these were not open to philosophers of history. Analytical reflection about big philosophical issues did not require attention to what historians got up to or to what they thought.51 The nature of historical “facts” seemed problematic, but nobody supposed that one needed any more than current philosophy of science to address the epistemic difficulties involved here,52 while there would be no need for a pragmatist approach in philosophy of science unless one were already committed to it. Five works particularly set the scene for me in 1970: Carl Hempel’s “The function of general laws in history,”53 William Dray’s Laws and Explanation in History,54 Bryce Gallie’s Philosophy and the Historical Understanding,55 Arthur Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History,56 and Morton White’s Foundations of Historical Knowledge.57 22 All these were concerned with the nature of historical explanation, and allowable philosophy of history seemed to consist of nothing else. Hempel imposed his empiricist philosophy of science on historical writing using a Humean model of causal

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explanation, while the historian Dray objected to this by arguing for the role of reasons in historical explanation. Causes versus reasons in the explanation of human action was an ancient debate that continues today, but – almost to prove what a backwater philosophy of history had become once it had lost its evil speculative edge – as this debate became once again more philosophically valuable it morphed into the philosophy of action58 and left behind philosophers of history. It was not as if historians explained human actions particularly well, and the place for debate, if anywhere outside core philosophy, would have been in psychology or the philosophy of the social sciences or, as earlier noted, the philosophy of the “everyday.” 23 Gallie, Danto and White, by contrast, highlighted “narrative,” which seemed to be a kind of explanation quite different from what the scientists produced. One knew a “narrative” when one saw it: historians produced them at a great rate and each of them had lots of sentences in it. Gallie saw such stories as “followable” and harked back to the romantic philosophies of around 1800. These were difficult to grip in terms of analytical philosophy, and left one with an uncomfortable feeling that there had to be more to narratives than a large collection of facts organised in an entirely aesthetic way; even Danto’s valuable and arguably pragmatic “rules of redescription” covering what he called “narrative sentences” seemed in the last resort to be aesthetically driven.59 Aesthetics, it was commonly assumed at the time, could not possibly have any epistemic role.60 24 Danto and White, in subtly different and clever ways, tried to make analytical sense of narratives mainly by offering – indeed forcing on them – a version of Hempel’s so- called covering-law theory of causal explanation as modelling the constitutive links that supposedly tied together the explanatory elements of narratives. That just seemed to me to be an unnatural fit (were there “constitutive links” that needed to be modelled?), but then there was no other theory of explanation available (and should it be a theory of explanation that I required?). Putting these concerns aside for a while, I threw myself instead into the fast developing work at Cambridge in the History and Philosophy of Science Unit, where, apart from exciting developments in empiricist philosophy of science, like many other research students I studied in depth and tried to make sense of the works of Kuhn, Quine and Feyerabend,61 while cracks appeared in the received understanding of empiricist philosophy of science.62 But while my understanding of history and philosophy of science became better informed and more sophisticated, I was still unable to unpack the dimly perceived philosophical confusions that making sense of “history” seemed to require. 25 Historians took their positions seriously, more seriously than current philosophical understanding of their discipline made plausible. While they often agreed on “facts,” their invective against each other was educational and entertaining beyond the ordinary, and the deep-rooted differences between them clearly went far beyond mere matters of aesthetic or even political choice. “It’s hate,” I heard at a recent colloquium of historians.63 Philosophers might differ on fundamental as well as stylistic issues too, but, even though there was among them the occasional threat64 and ad hominem bullying in seminars was not uncommon, by contrast historians in general left the philosophers far behind in depth of feeling and mastery of vicious language. On what is for me now a memorable afternoon I went to the Library of Peterhouse (then in an attic and not the grand affair it is now) to search out, if I could, two historical accounts of much the same thing that were in such clear opposition to each other that I might be

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able to identify the philosophical issues I only dimly saw. Indeed, I later came to realise that it was opposition that was the issue and that it was staring me in the face.

Joyce and a Synchronic View of Quine

26 I knew that A. J. P. Taylor had annoyed a lot of fellow historians, so I started with his English History 1914-1945.65 Noteworthy was his account of William Joyce, otherwise known as “Lord Haw-Haw.” Joyce had been charged with high treason on the 17th September 1945, it being alleged that “he being a person owing allegiance to the King, did traitorously adhere to the King’s enemies in Germany by broadcasting propaganda.”66 He was found guilty, this was upheld on appeal, and he was executed at Wandsworth Prison on 3rd January 1946. Taylor dealt with this matter in a little detail, 67 observing “Technically, Joyce was hanged for making a false statement when applying for a , the usual penalty for which is a small fine.”68 I could see well enough that a remark like this could not plausibly be a contribution to historical knowledge, and was best ignored (after all, “technically” he was hanged for what he was charged with); on the other hand there was much apparently truthful information in Taylor’s account that seemed – before one saw any contrasting account – both to express and to warrant his pro- rather than anti-Joyce view.

27 After puzzling over the Library shelves for a while I found a suitable anti-Joyce foil to Taylor in Chambers’ Encyclopaedia: “William Joyce, 1906-46, traitor […]” Taylor and Chambers gave me the brief narrative accounts, for and against Joyce, that I required. However, each needed considerable revision to remove tendentious, morally judgemental or “ideological” sentences, false implications and implicatures, and other features similarly epistemically problematic, and this left me with a number of sentences that were, on the face of it, true, or – if one is unhappy with “truth” – at least well warranted in normal historiographical terms. An important consideration in my next move was this: against F. H. Bradley’s view that “there is not and there can not be any such thing as a mere idea, […] standing or floating by itself,”69 I knew that analytical philosophy permitted me to ignore any original context of other sentences70 and allowed me to take each sentence as a free-standing whole, move it about and juxtapose it with other sentences as I thought fit, subject only to avoiding any inconsistency in the outcome. So far as current analytical logic and epistemology were concerned each sentence, wherever it was placed, would carry with it undisturbed whatever truth- value it had, or whatever epistemological warrant it had. Given this assumption, I formulated the following pair of accounts, selecting from Taylor and Chambers: (A) “Joyce was born in Ireland, according to the application for a British passport made by him in 1933. He became a Fascist, for whom Sir Oswald Mosley, the ‘Bleeder,’ was too moderate. In August 1939, a few days before the outbreak of hostilities, he went to Germany and offered his services to the German ministry of propaganda. He was the Germans’ principal English broadcaster (known as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ from his manner of speaking). He was executed as a traitor.” (B) “Joyce was born in New York. His father was a naturalized American citizen. Joyce never made a formal request for British nationality, though he spent most of his life in England and was regarded as patriotic. In September 1940 he became a naturalized German. Joyce attracted to himself the mythical repute of Lord Haw- Haw. These legends were the manufacture of war-nerves. He was executed as a traitor.”71

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28 These are brief, but that is sufficient for the argument. It is not apparent from the superficial text alone whether these short accounts are fictional or historiographical, but that is not here relevant. What does matter is that they are offered as factually true: an exact analysis shows that every sentence in each of the two accounts is indeed individually true, or (for those who prefer it) at least accepted by historians as warranted by the historical evidence. They were sourced in an appropriately historical way. One issue is what historians characteristically mean when they think of an account being true. There is no doubt that a part of this is that the individual sentences of the account should each severally be thought of as true, but that is not enough. Removing tendentiously expressed sentences and the like had not avoided the obvious feature that there remained highly tendentious selection – why, for example, leave out of the (B) account of Joyce reference to his having been the Germans’ principal English broadcaster, and include only a reference to the mythical stories about Lord Haw-Haw (and there were some)? – but it was precisely this need for the selection to be itself truthful that I had to address.

29 It seemed clear to me that objective “selection” required rational grounds for determining the relevance of sentences, and that holding it to be merely an aesthetic choice was utterly implausible. The problem was surely in some way epistemic. “Explanation,” by contrast, seemed for a moment to offer an answer: it is plain that the (A) account does, and the (B) account does not, explain in a followable way why Joyce was executed as a traitor. But “explanation” is an unsupportable criterion of truth, knowledge or cognate matters. Sir Walter Scott saw it clearly: “were we to point out the most marked distinction between a real and a fictitious narrative, we would say that the former, in reference to the remote causes of the events it relates, is obscure, doubtful, and mysterious; whereas, in the latter case, it is a part of the author’s duty to […] account for everything.”72 Explanatory clarity is no guide to truth; for Scott it was a sign of fiction. Intriguing for a moment was the thought that a logical argument73 is also a selection of sentences, and here a “truthful” selection might be cashed in terms of validity. Perhaps there was a rational analogue for validity where historical accounts were concerned? Yet it is elementary logic to distinguish validity from truth, and the validity of an argument says nothing whatever about the truth of its constituent statements. This suggestion seemed to me to be one among many dead ends.74 30 I later found that had said that “it is not inconceivable that each of two historical accounts of the same period could contain only indisputably correct statements about matters of particular (or ‘simple’) fact but that each would nevertheless be marked by a distinctive bias.” However, he continued, “the argument hardly warrants a wholesale skepticism toward the possibility of historical objectivity.” 75 But I had no doubt that my examples proved that that is exactly what it did. What made the matter epistemic in some centrally important sense was that the (A) and (B) accounts were incompatible, inconsistent with each other in some historiographical way. No historian, indeed, no ordinary reader, could accept them both as true. At least one of them – quite probably both of them – had to be false, and one was not going to find that falsehood in one of the constituent sentences. Despite every sentence in each account being consistent with every other sentence in both accounts, the selections of sentences presented as they were involved two meaningful but incompatible or inconsistent “wholes.”

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31 While each sentence had a “truth-value” and an epistemological warrant that did not vary with the context of other sentences, just as current analytical logic and epistemology permitted (indeed, was committed to), nevertheless there was a sense of “whole account truth” that then current analytical logic and epistemology did not and, I later came to see, could not recognise. Yet the situation was in one sense “logical,” for there seemed no reason why one could not use the elementary tools of propositional logic in dealing with the unit of meaning that a “whole account” expressed. On the other hand, I came to see later that one could not use the tools or the assumptions of predicate logic. I argued for the need for a philosophy enabling us to reason with respect to “relevance,” understanding that as being a quality of a sentence that changed according to the historical account – the context of surrounding sentences, at least – that contained it. “Statements do not carry a ‘relevance-value’ with them just as they carry a truth-value, regardless of where they appear.”76 “Whole-account-truth” was clearly historical truth in an important way but it was not truth-functional relative to its constituent sentences. One could not usefully treat a historical account as a conjunction. This, then, was the epistemically problematic dimension of historiography. Received empiricist philosophy of science offered no help, I argued in 1974.77 I then spent a while trying to make sense of sets of sentences in terms of , but that too I came to think a dead end. 32 In due course I was tempted, not particularly to use “pragmatism” as a general resource for this problem, but at least to use Quine’s conception of what later was called the “web of belief.” In contrast with Hume’s position, on Quine’s approach in “Two dogmas” we hold that our beliefs look for their warrant, not to particular experiences, but to experience “as a whole.” The web initially looked to me like sets of sentences, just as a historical account did, and it seemed as if that conception might be fruitful. Following the “impossible term-by-term empiricism of Locke and Hume,” Quine had famously said that “what I am now urging is that even in taking the statement as unit we have drawn our grid too finely. The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science.”78 That was a powerful – indeed blinding – thought. Later I reflected, as it seemed to me that Quine quite plainly had not (at least, not in a serious way), that it was a pragmatic question how large a “unit of empirical significance” was to be taken to be, and that we could hence treat narratives as a central unit for the purposes of the epistemology of historiography. Quine clearly had no recognition that the notion might be used in this way.79 While Quine’s pragmatist philosophy may not look historicist and was plainly not intended to be, successors of his such as Richard Rorty drew out some historicist implications of pragmatism, although not especially with any epistemic issues relating to historical accounts in mind;80 after all, the “everyday” was sufficient. 33 For Quine in “Two dogmas,” experience alone warrants no particular beliefs as certain. We are to recognise that no one of our beliefs is so fully and directly related solely to experience that we are forced to keep or amend just that one if experience requires it. Equally, what we choose to treat as a priori is not a matter independently given to us by the demands of pure reason or anything of the kind, for reason does not itself generate substantive beliefs. Quine recognises that, in trying to make sense of the experienced world, there is room for conscious and deliberate decision regarding which sentences we propose to hold true and which we propose to discard as false. It is open to us to amend our knowledge claims as we find pragmatically convenient, and there are in

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principle many ways of effecting any required change. As Isaiah Berlin put it, “Any one proposition or set of propositions can be shaken in terms of those that remain fixed; and then these latter in their turn; but not all simultaneously.”81 As Quine put it, “Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system.”82 Again, “no statement is immune to revision,”83 so it is not merely that “there is much latitude of choice,”84 but that unlimited adjustment to the web of beliefs is in principle available.85 34 If Quine is right here then it is not the “statement” or the Lockean or Humean “term” or a particular “belief” that is the unit of empirical significance but rather some meaningful “whole,” whether “the whole of science” or, as I saw it, just that “whole” consisting of a particular historical narrative understood as a set of sentences. I felt I could take from Quine at this point his explicit holistic view that particular beliefs are constrained by their relationship to other beliefs within our total set of beliefs. We can then describe the set of beliefs, sentences or statements as he does, as a “web” of beliefs, with such implications of constraint and stickiness as the word “web” suggests. The web of other beliefs are the sole constraints upon a particular belief, and are equally the only source of validation or justification for that belief. For the sets of sentences in historiographical accounts, the “beliefs” I argued to include such sentences as express the evidence or the “historical sources” for them. These characteristically appear in footnotes to the account, so that the selection of sentences involved in producing a historical account are more than appear in the explicit narrative in the main text but includes also roots in the much larger world of historical “ideas,” sources themselves very often also of narrative form. 35 Yet what makes this “whole of science,” or “whole historical account,” true, rather than merely being a free-floating and false construction? Quine himself did not take to heart his own assertions in “Two dogmas,” for, against his view that the term and the individual statement were not “units of empirical significance,” we find him in Word and Object86 introducing the notion of “stimulus synonymy” which looks like nothing so much as a route to permitting the causal stimulation of belief, hinting that reality is independent of our conceptualisation and comes in “units of empirical significance” that are in belief-sized bits. Now it may well be, once we have allowed that it is a pragmatic matter what the “unit of empirical significance” is, that the whole of science, a historical account and an individual sentence can each be “units of empirical significance” for different purposes, and even a fragmented view of our minds, our shared consciousness, may become appropriate. But this makes it implausible to suppose that one or other of these units is epistemically fundamental relative to the others. That analytical philosophy generally, and even Quine himself, currently assumed that some version of “atomic sentences” was indeed fundamental was an unfortunate context for trying to make sense of what was going on in the expression of historical knowledge. 36 Apart from what seemed to me to be an incoherence in Quine’s position at this point, the difficulty for the epistemology of history was that “grounding” selections of sentences in such terms took one back to the old, and failed, view that historiographical truth involved a unified synthesis of independently available atomic facts. First get your facts, then select them “properly.” But no ground for synthesis seemed available, while Quine’s view that the web involved some constraint on a particular belief because “Any statement can be held true come what may,”87 if we make

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drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system” offered no more constraint than “consistency” between sentences or beliefs. This might (although it probably didn’t) work for short sentences and the like, which pragmatically we could allow in certain contexts or for certain purposes to be our “units of empirical significance,” but the requirement of such consistency was already met in the (A) and (B) accounts, and it was consistency between statements that Quine clearly (although inconsistently) had in mind here, rather than consistency between “units of empirical significance,” as – pragmatically – we could take historical accounts to be. 37 Berlin’s expression of a similar position in terms of “propositions” involved a similar failure. Consistency between accounts was not only different from consistency between their constituent propositions or statements, it did not even require it, for statement- truth, while clearly desirable, I had shown to be not even a necessary condition for whole-account-truth.88 The old idealist idea of “degrees of truth” seemed tempting, although I did not follow through with that thought. Irrelevant falsehoods, like irrelevant truths, had no relevant cognitive content, while even a false statement (most obviously where the error was trivial) could be relevant and be an essential feature of the whole true account. This failure of a particular kind of compositionality occurred in both directions. Just as one cannot assure oneself of whole-account-truth on the basis of constituent statement truth, so one could not assure oneself of constituent statement truth on the basis of whole-account-truth. Bradley was right when he said “what in every sense comes first is the concrete whole, and no mere aspect, abstracted from that whole, can in the end exist by itself,”89 although he had slightly overstated the point, for while analysing or breaking up the “whole” provided no assurance or warrant whatever of constituent statement truth and might well result in falsehood, it was not a necessary outcome, for the conclusion was not a matter of principle but of practice. One might be accidentally lucky to extract some true sentence, but even then one had no assurance of its relevance, the crucial epistemic ground for the expression of historical knowledge.

A Diachronic View of Quine

38 There was a further important point: I came to realise that in worrying about how the web was to be understood and structured I was myself adopting a synchronic view of it, much it seemed as Quine and everyone else did, and that I was thereby adopting what I called earlier here a “philosophical stance.” It was necessary to take much more seriously the idea that the web should be understood as temporally extended: Quine’s “web of belief” should be conceived in diachronic and historiographical terms as a rolling web. Just as Quine had said, “To learn ‘apple’ it is not sufficient to learn how much of what goes on counts as apple; we must learn how much counts as an apple, and how much as another,”90 we needed to think of the rolling web as a web of reality- sorting expressions,91 where “expressions” referred not necessarily to terms or sentences or beliefs but, for historical meaning and truth, to narrative length units of meaning that counted or sorted shared experience in various ways.92 Matters such as representation or reference had subordinate status and were to be analysed in such terms.

39 We can now adopt a historical view of the rolling web in a more substantive sense. Think of this shared world of reality-sorting expressions in what we may imagine to be

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the early stages of its development, that is, the early stages of the development of language itself. We do not have to adopt the philosophically parochial supposition that in its early stages the development of language involved the creation of simple referring and descriptive atomic terms, enabling us to operate with “moderate-sized specimens of dry goods,” in J. L. Austin’s words,93 as if we had already analysed the world in which we lived. No doubt, with such an imagined language, we might develop a fairly successful practice of living a small life within closely bounded horizons, where “meaningfulness” need do little more than support our everyday engagement with other people, that is, support a way of life that is to a large extent a consequence of the few senses and small memory-sizes with which we human beings have been, to the best of our philosophical and scientific understanding, accidentally endowed. 40 Given this experientially brief and narrow life that we may imagine we once led, then it is no surprise that meaningful contributions to knowledge and understanding may be half-plausibly interpretable as having, as Aristotle claimed, a brief and narrow subject- predicate form. Perhaps sadly (although there have been many theoretical developments and successes), philosophical assumptions since then have often been fashioned as imitating or mirroring Aristotle’s substance/attribute metaphysics, with much work over the centuries that has attempted to explain “logic,” “truth,” “reference,” “knowledge” and cognate concepts in terms of these ancient assumptions, and such assumptions continue to inform the post- predicate logic that many exact philosophers use today. Pragmatically, it surely has its uses; but answering the epistemic problems of history is not among them. The world, as shown by historians, scientists and mathematicians, is much bigger than that, and requires a more expansive sense of “meaningfulness” which is plausibly not translatable into such limited and ancient terms; the “academic person” has a “discourse many times larger, and he looks before and after many times as far.”94 41 In the light of ancient and anthropological discoveries I will offer, not necessarily a probable, but a possible alternative. Early communication between people, and storage of what some of us call “information,” seems to have taken place in terms of oral traditions which primarily took the form of stories or narratives. We might well think that these are refinements of still earlier linguistic attempts to express what is going on which involve concepts that we may now think of as “temporally extended” in two ways. First, the expression is itself “temporally extended” (for it takes time to present or to follow a narrative), while even the briefest of expressions takes some time to get across, given what may well be uncertainty over the receptiveness or uptake of the audience. Second, what the expression is “about” may well also be “temporally extended,” for, comparatively unanalysed as experience then is, it might refer for example to “approaching flood” or “imminent storm,” where a proto-version of what some philosophers of history have called a “colligatory concept” is adopted,95 but here we do not interpret such concepts as built up from simpler “facts” but rather as epistemologically prior to simple “facts” and involving a similarly large yet vague ontological construction and commitment. We may imagine early peoples, developing language as a tool, trying out such “concepts” to see how useful, how workable, how predictive, how memorable, these large expressions were for their experience of their narrow worlds, later refining them for more exact use where that was pragmatically possible. We continued to search for “meaning” in our lives in the larger senses of that, adopting religious answers early on, but eventually coming to use, for historical understanding, comparatively vast concepts such as “Renaissance” or

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“Enlightenment.” Such summary terms were adopted not by historians alone but also to characterise their own situations by, in these examples, Vasari96 and Kant 97 respectively. 42 As I remarked earlier, for me the epistemic problems of history came before Quine’s version of pragmatism, and attention to the epistemic dimension of historical inquiry required me to develop from him the form of pragmatism I have described. I drew on his pragmatism to help solve the problems I found, and at no point found a more plausible source. But, being pragmatic, I allow that one day I might find one. My approach has inherently involved adopting a historical stance and Quine’s pragmatism framed and facilitated this despite the unashamed philosophical stance that in the main he adopted. Just as he did not touch ethics, so he did not touch history, and in so far as he was a pragmatist – and the choice of descriptions and redescriptions that is inherent in the web (among many other features) suggests to me that there is no doubt that he was – it is implausible to suggest that there is any intrinsic connection between his pragmatism and philosophical theorising about history in any of the senses of “history.” There may well, however, be an intrinsic connection between pragmatism more generally and what I have called elsewhere a “temporal stance,”98 where a “temporal stance” attends to a temporally extended object of thought characteristically much shorter than the object of a “historical stance,” allowing us as pragmatists to hold importantly fundamental time-extended habits of human behaviour. However, this relates to the “everyday,” to “commonsense,” and a philosophical understanding of it would not seem to require attention to the philosophical problems of the discipline of historiography. By contrast, Morton White was a brilliant polymath of a scholarly pragmatic philosopher yet, despite his detailed essays into history and historical theory, his attention to the theory of history I found completely unhelpful. It was one of those ladders that one had to kick away after one had climbed it, itself a good pragmatic move. But that is hindsight.

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NOTES

1. See, for example, White 1965. 2. Quine’s entire oeuvre is evidence for this. He did, however, display a fondness for etymology. See Quine 1990, where the alphabetically ordered entries jump from “Gödel’s Theorem” to “Ideas” with no mention of “History,” “Future” has a place, with a rare (for Quine) reference to an ethical issue (74-5); “Past,” “Present” and “Time” do not appear. The entry for “Etymology” is entirely in the present tense, although see the entry for “Kinship of Words” for a historical conjecture. 3. Strawson (1959: 117). I have presented arguments relating to this quotation in Gorman 2008 and in Gorman 2016. 4. Here Strawson, and we too for the present, assume that the derivation of historical assertions from historical evidence involves different skills and considerations from those characteristic of the discipline of philosophy. 5. This is an observation made about analytical philosophers in general, and not particularly about Strawson. 6. Just because some past philosopher wrote that he or she was a “pragmatist” does not mean that they were, nor that denying it meant that they were not. Peirce famously suggested that he was a “pragmaticist” rather than a “pragmatist” (Gallie 1966: 22), while Engels reported in 1890 that Marx had said he was not a Marxist. 7. Analogously, that philosophy was not fundamentally distinct from a social science was the main point made in Winch 1958. 8. “Context” is a shockingly ambiguous term. I address some of its features in Gorman 2016. 9. understanding ‘context’ as including a range of things, including the context of other sentences or a time-extended dialogue or discourse which arose under certain social conditions. 10. Ewing 1935. However, for a famous exception among historians see Skinner 1969.

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11. See, however, Macbeth 2014. 12. Winch 1958. 13. Strawson (1971: 24). Emphases in the original. 14. Austin 1971. 15. See Gorman 2011. 16. Is the “world of mathematical ideas” part of this world? Following Plato, perhaps not, but we can suspend judgement about how far we can agree here with Plato. Nevertheless, mathematics raises special problems that will not be deal with in the present context. Again, see Macbeth 2014. 17. Recall Quine’s pragmatic conception that philosophy and science are continuous with each other: Quine 1961. It seems sure that Quine did not think of himself, a philosopher and logician, as tolerating science; by contrast, scientists might well, in so far as they accepted his approach, think of themselves as having to tolerate philosophy. 18. See Gorman 2011. 19. See Gorman 2014. 20. “It must be laid down that a letter retains in a given context the meaning once given to it” (Geach & Black 1966: 1). 21. “At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions – social, historical, meteorological, physiological – that will ensure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions,” (Bakhtin 1981: Glossary ,428). 22. Recall Strawson’s distinction between “descriptive” and “revolutionary” metaphysics in Strawson (1959: 9). Thomas S. Kuhn had a revolutionary take on meaning in Kuhn 1962; as did Paul K. Feyerabend in Feyerabend 1968 and Feyerabend 1975. 23. Bradley (1922: 597). Bradley did not think of himself as a pragmatist, and excludes “practice” from his concerns in that work, Bradley (1922: 17-9 and passim). 24. Bradley (1922: 640). Contrast this with his view in Bradley (1874: 9): “The historical event […] involves in the first place a judgment. It is ‘objective,’ it is distinguished in itself, and yet it is a whole.” 25. Mink (1966: 180-1). 26. Bradley (1922: 95). 27. Bradley (1922: 1). 28. Bradley (1922: 1). 29. Pragmatism, it has been so often said, is what “works,” but that, it has also been so often said, is not much help. 30. I am able now (2016) to characterise or re-describe my ideas in 1970 in a way I did not know, or perhaps could not have known, at the time and will where appropriate do so. I will, in other words, use on occasion what Danto (1965: 152 and generally chap. VIII) called “narrative sentences.” His example is “The Thirty Years War began in 1618,” which one could not have known in 1618. Such sentences describe an earlier event in terms which involve referring to a later event not knowable at the earlier time, although we need not limit this to “referencing” or to “events.” Whatever the detail about that, only hindsight enables these to be constructed. 31. This was at Peterhouse, Cambridge, famous at the time for the quality of its historians. My supervisors were officially Bryce Gallie and Mary Hesse, but among historians Maurice Cowling took a lead and I found Ian Hacking helpful also. 32. Gorman 1991. 33. Expelled by Plato, too. Walsh (1951: 12). 34. Hume 1754, dominant for decades. 35. Burrow 2007. 36. See, for example, Spencer 2013.

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37. He famously admitted to being woken from his dogmatic slumber by David Hume, Kant (1953: 9). 38. “We can regard the history of the human race as the progressive realisation of a rational plan of nature to bring about a perfect moral community with a perfect political constitution. We, being rational, can work out this plan, and so help forward our necessary progress towards that final perfect state” (Kant 1959: 22-34). 39. Gallie (1966: 28-9), with reference to CP 5.189. 40. Helped by my teachers Leon Pompa and W. H. Walsh. 41. Walsh (1951: 15ff). 42. Danto (1965: chapter 1). 43. The assumption that there is a “meaning of history” to be found, particularly an ethical one, is dubitable. See Geuss 2014. 44. This is a helpfully brief summary from Villa (2013: 89). For the original, see Pompa 2002, where two other characteristics of Vico’s position are summarised and worth mentioning here: it “challenges the traditional view that philosophy can lay claim to a historically independent viewpoint,” while the New Science was written to demonstrate in practice “his conception of the philosophical importance of etymology” (endpaper). 45. Popper 1961 and Popper 1945. 46. Gardiner 1952. Gardiner was one of my 1973 Cambridge Ph.D. examiners. The other was Quentin Skinner. 47. Walsh (1951: 11ff). 48. Various works including Collingwood 1946. 49. Various works including Bradley 1874. 50. Butterfield 1931. 51. Unless the historian were a historian of science like Kuhn, but no “proper” historian I knew would have accepted him as a member of their discipline. Reflection on Kuhn’s work required philosophy of science, not philosophy of history. 52. It took a while for a distinctive contribution to be made here: Bayesian decision theory was offered in Tucker 2004. 53. Hempel 1942. 54. Dray 1957. 55. Gallie 1964. 56. Danto 1965. 57. White 1965. 58. See, for example, Davidson 1968. 59. Danto (1965: chap. VIII). Danto’s subsequent career as a philosopher of aesthetics and art critic almost proved the point, historically if not philosophically. Pragmatically, I here forget undergraduate philosophical warnings that one should not engage in ad hominem reasoning. 60. After I left Cambridge I became aware of White 1973, in which aesthetics played an epistemic role. It would not have helped me if I had known of such material in 1970, as I explain in Gorman 2013b. 61. Kuhn 1962; Quine 1961; Quine 1960; Feyerabend 1968. 62. Hempel acknowledged the merits of Kuhn’s history-based philosophy of science when he gave his paper “Problems in the empiricist construal of theories” [“not to be quoted in print”] at a History and Philosophy of Science Seminar, Cambridge, 4th November 1971. 63. “History, Religion, and Freedom in the Thought of Herbert Butterfield, Michael Oakeshott, and Maurice Cowling,” September 2016. 64. See, for example, Edmonds & Eidinow 2001. Such “threats” are rare enough in philosophy to warrant a book. We might well be flooded with such books about historians, if it were thought to be a matter of comment.

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65. Taylor 1965. 66. The Times report, 18th September 1945. 67. Taylor (1965: Note B, 647-8). 68. Taylor (1965: 648). 69. Bradley (1922: 640). 70. I stress this, as “context,” earlier noted as ambiguous, is here limited in its reference, and does not refer to other notions of “context,” and in particular not to what some historians mean by it as the “religious, political, and economic factors” involved. See Skinner 1969. 71. Developed for my PhD thesis, the construction is explained in Gorman 1998, where many other constructions permitted the investigation of associated problems. I argued for the need to recover the rational standards which would have to be involved to make sense of the “objectivity” or “comparative objectivity” of selection in historical accounts. Further lengthy analysis of these matters was given in Gorman 1982, which used Michael Dummett’s understanding of antirealism. 72. Scott (1910: xi). I say more about this in Gorman 2014. 73. Particularly relevant might be Hempel’s deductive-nomological model of causal explanation. 74. Bradley’s view in 1874 was: “[…] it is clear to us that we are concerned with a number of judgments, […] it is not less clear that these many judgments are united, and, as it were, resolved in a single judgment which answers to the whole event. This one judgment comprehends in itself the many judgments; it must be looked on as their result, or in other words it is a conclusion.” (Bradley 1874: 9-10). See, for later work on the argumentative structure of historiography, Kuukkanen (2015: 86-96, 157-67). His is in many ways a pragmatic position (65-6, 138-47). See Roth 2016. 75. Nagel (1961: 580-1 and note 25). 76. Gorman (1998: 331). 77. Gorman 1998. 78. Quine (1961: 42). I began to follow through this material in Gorman 1982 and in Gorman 2008. 79. I asked Quine in about 1974 why he assumed the “science” which he took to be continuous with his philosophy was physics or psychology and not sociology, but got no useful answer. That it might be history rather than social science seemed to be one thought too far, and I did not mention it to him. 80. Rorty 1982. 81. Berlin (1980: 115). Berlin continued here, “It is this network of our most general assumptions, called commonsense knowledge, that historians to a greater degree than scientists are bound, at least initially, to take for granted.” 82. Quine (1961: 43). 83. Quine (1961: 43). 84. Quine (1961: 42). 85. This is in effect Quine’s argument against the analytic-synthetic distinction given in Quine 1961. In practice rather than principle there are limitations – often strong limitations – on the available room for adjustment, limitations that a pragmatic approach can recover. Moral beliefs, in so far as they can be held true (for expressivism might be the best explanation here), have the same status as factual beliefs on this approach, and equally permit unlimited adjustment in principle. It follows that there is no empirical warrant for the fact-value distinction, and thus, again given empiricism, no epistemological justification for that distinction. Quine himself does not consider questions of value, however. 86. Quine (1960: 68ff and passim). 87. Quine (1961: 43). 88. Gorman (1998: 327). 89. Bradley (1922: 640).

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90. Quine (1960: 91). “Learn” here does not mean “discovering,” for our concepts have to be created, often on the basis of lengthy, even aesthetic, experience. 91. See Gorman 2013a and Gorman 2011. 92. Hence the title of my first book, Gorman 1982. 93. Austin (1962: 8). 94. Cornford (1908: 14). 95. The idea comes from Whewell 1840, and is used by Walsh to speak of the historian’s search for “dominant concepts” by which to “illuminate his facts.” Walsh (1951: 24ff and 61). See also Mink 1966 and Kuukkanen (2015: chap. 6). 96. Vasari 1550. 97. Kant 1784. 98. See Gorman 2011.

ABSTRACTS

I present the history of philosophy, and history more generally, as a context of ideas, with respect to which philosophers and historians share concerns about the meaning of the texts they both use, and where for some there is a principled contrast between seeing meaning in quasi- mathematical terms (“a philosophical stance”) or in terms of context (“a historical stance”). I introduce this imagined (but not imaginary) world of ideas as temporally extended. Returning to my early research into the epistemic problems of historiography, I present my view that foundational was meaningful language in a shared world, and I display some difficulties found in handling the “wholeness” of historical accounts. I came to realise that it was epistemic opposition between historical accounts that mattered. I concluded that analytical philosophy was wrong to assume that individual sentences were free-standing meaningful units that could be juxtaposed with others at whim, and that an understanding of the rational grounds for determining relevance was needed. In order to make sense of this I used Quine’s conception of the “web of belief,” and noted that a historical account could be treated as a “unit of empirical significance” in his terms. I observe that, although the epistemic problems of history arose for me before I considered his pragmatic position, nevertheless attention to those problems required me to adopt the Quine-based form of pragmatism I describe. I came to realise that I had wrongly adopted a synchronic view of the Quinean web, thereby adopting a “philosophical stance.” Rather, the web should be conceived in diachronic terms as a rolling web, so forming history itself. It is wrong to think that language started in atomistic terms so that, following Aristotle, it first consisted of simple concepts forming sentences of brief and narrow subject-predicate form. Instead, early communications took the form of oral traditions usually in narrative form. Meaningful wholes such as historical accounts are conceptually prior to atomistic sentences and need to be seen in extended temporal terms, so that an Aristotelian subject-predicate metaphysics is implausible. Quine’s pragmatism framed and facilitated my historical stance despite the unashamed philosophical stance that he adopted.

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AUTHOR

JONATHAN GORMAN

Queen’s University Belfast jonathan.gorman[at]cantab.net

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Historical and Philosophical Stances Max Harold Fisch, A Paradigm for Intellectual Historians

David L. Marshall

1. Introduction

1 On 28 July 1985, well into his retirement, Max Fisch – student of Roman law, translator of the Italian rhetorician, Giambattista Vico, and scholar of the American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce – was asked whether he thought Vico had been right about some things and wrong about others. Fisch’s response was hesitant. “There’s something a bit personal about this,” he confessed, “and I am having a little difficulty detaching myself from what led me to Vico and trying to think in entirely impersonal terms about Vico.”1 What Fisch meant was that, for him, there was no clear or easily narratable distinction between the work that he did to make Vico available to an Anglophone public and the way in which, in the 1930s, he had encountered this eighteenth-century Neapolitan thinker as someone who (in effect) had said to him “every piece of serious scholarly work that you have done to this point is wrong.” Fisch had defended a dissertation in 1930 on the influence of on Roman law, and he had come across Vico while conducting research he hoped would lead to the publication of the dissertation as a book. Thus, Fisch encountered Vico as a fellow scholar and not as a historical artefact. Far from being a moment of merely biographical significance, I think that Fisch’s hesitant response to this question – posed by Fisch’s former student, Don Roberts – is in fact a sign of something unavoidable, perilous, and absolutely essential about intellectual historical inquiry. Fisch was both philosopher and historian. His life’s work is, I submit, a study in the ways in which – for some purposes – one cannot be the one without also being the other.

2 The question of whether intellectual historians, these hybrid creatures working in the interstice between the disciplines of philosophy and history, may legitimately be interested in asserting in their own voices the assertions they find in the historical record is one that has been posed in a number of forms – and answered in a variety of ways. To a degree, Fisch was conscious of this. Indeed, when Roberts continued his interview with Fisch in October of 1985 by asking about Fisch’s 1961 paper on “The

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History of Philosophy Delusion,” Fisch responded immediately by saying that one might think his paper had been superseded by a book bearing the title, Philosophy in History, published the previous year, edited by Richard Rorty, Jerry Schneewind, and “an Englishman” (Quentin Skinner).2 In their introduction, the editors had argued that some via media ought to be found between those historians of philosophy who thought intellectual historians were grubbing antiquarians and those intellectual historians who regarded historians of philosophy as nothing more than partisans of some presently ascendant philosophical school.3 3 Yet the Rorty et al. volume itself embodied a tension on whether intellectual historians might take up – as their own – questions that motivated thinkers in the histories they were writing. On the one hand, Quentin Skinner accepted that it was difficult to write the intellectual history of something one regarded as nonsense (religion was his example), but he also argued that, because there were no “perennial problems” in the history of thought, much of a historian’s work would consist of attempts to situate texts in argumentative contexts in order to highlight the difference between conventional and non-conventional answers to questions that were not the historian’s questions.4 A line of inquiry went back from the Rorty et al. volume to what has become one of the most cited essays in the history of intellectual history (namely, the 1969 piece on “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”), and that essay was itself a continuation of an earlier initiative articulated by R. G. Collingwood following his translation of Benedetto Croce’s La Filosofia di Giambattista Vico.5 On the other hand, the Rorty et al. volume was also a pivotal text in the development of a pragmatist line of interpretation taken up by Rorty in his own contribution to that volume – namely, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres.” Rorty certainly permitted historians to be intellectually fired up by the questions posed by the historical figures they studied, and we should note that aspects of Rorty’s thinking are still presently evolving in the work of Robert Brandom, whose distinctions in Tales of the Mighty Dead between de re, de dicto, and de traditione historiographies are intimately connected with the issues under discussion here.6 4 Now, to my knowledge, Fisch did not follow up on his allusion to Philosophy in History (although after the exchange with Roberts, Fisch seems to have headed off to find the volume – “I’ll see if I have the book here”).7 Nevertheless, the remarks we do possess link Fisch to broader debates about the relationship between history and philosophy, and we do see comparable tensions in Fisch’s own articulation of that relationship. On the one hand, in his “History of Philosophy Delusion,” Fisch had denied that there were any “eternal problems” in philosophy and had argued that, therefore, one should not ask whether one was persuaded or unpersuaded by, for example, Descartes’s argument for the . Instead, Fisch had claimed, one should inquire into the relationship between the method articulated in the Discours and the method utilized in the Dioptrique. Was Descartes right? Wrong question. How should we speak of these theories and practices as moments in a sequence of inquiry? That was the issue.8 On the other hand, in 1985, Fisch wanted to clarify that such assertions did not mean that one could not agree with Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner that history and philosophy might be deeply imbricated. It was as if the history of thought might suggest problems and solutions, even as one ought not to place oneself in judgment over it. 5 Here is my claim: Fisch may not have pursued the questions raised by Philosophy in History about the tension between historical and philosophical pursuits, but

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intellectually he led a vivid life at the intersection of these two commitments, and so, for anyone interested in this tension, his life takes on the quality of exemplarity. Born in 1900, Fisch graduated first from James Russell Lowell High School in San Francisco, then from Butler University in Indianapolis with a degree in philosophy (where he studied with Elijah Jordan), and finally from Cornell University with a doctorate focused on the history of philosophy in the ancient world. He worked in departments of philosophy at Case Western Reserve University, the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, and Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. His core intellectual achievements were two: translating (with Thomas Goddard Bergin) Vico’s 1744 Scienza nuova and founding the chronological edition of the works of Peirce (a project that is ongoing). These bare, even unimpressive, facts do little to convey the significance of the life of this mind. In fact, the claim I want to make about this life is quite ambitious: the case of Max Fisch articulates one of the most basic tensions experienced by intellectual historians.9 6 The procedure here is broadly chronological. Fisch’s experience of the distance between history and philosophy can be explored under five headings: law, translation, institution, style, and semiosis. These headings are not, strictly speaking, phases that follow one upon another in a discrete fashion, but they do identify preoccupations that are most intense in, respectively, each of the five decades between 1930 and 1980. In what follows, this “distance” between history and philosophy will appear alternatively as an irreconcilable tension, a fertile ambiguity, and a problematic gap. My purpose is neither to praise nor to blame Fisch per se but rather to take him as an extremely instructive example of a difficulty that intellectual historians must learn how to face. Readers of fiction practice a “suspension of disbelief,” and one of the core questions for intellectual historians is whether they must practice an analogous “suspension of belief.” In the process of showing how Fisch responded to this challenge, I hope to make manifest and communicable what was really distinctive about his work – to give some value to the as yet unused and undetermined adjective “Fischian.” The aim is to explore these five headings in such a way that each provides a distinctive vocabulary for expressing the difficulty. Fisch did not “solve” the writing of intellectual history, nor did he resolve history and philosophy into each other. What he can do is show us what writing intellectual history is like and reveal its contours under a variety of configurations.10

2. Law

7 We do not have many sources attesting to the origins of Fisch’s experience of the distance between philosophy and history in the field of law. To be sure, we have the typescript of Fisch’s 1930 dissertation on “The Influence of Stoicism on Roman Law” (kept in the special collections of Cornell University Library) as well as the heavily annotated personal copy that Fisch revised in the course of the 1930s (now held by the Peirce Edition Project at IUPUI). But it is necessary to turn to later sources in order to understand why Fisch decided to proceed with research on this topic when he arrived at Cornell in 1924 and found his prospective doctoral advisor (James Edwin Creighton) already on his deathbed. Particularly revealing is a manuscript dated 16 February 1940 in which Fisch was preparing himself for a piece on the “Social Ideals of American Jurists.” In a spirit of self-criticism that may have been modeled to him by the Vita di

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Giambattista Vico scritta da se medesimo (with which he was already familiar and that he would publish in an English translation four years later), Fisch sketched out some “Biographical Data with a Possible Bearing on the Choice of Subject.” He presented montage: school-boy obsession with the Gregg shorthand used by court reporters, a seventeen-year-old self orating at the unveiling of General Frederick Funston’s statue at City Hall in San Francisco being told that he had the makings of a lawyer (and later realizing the remark may not have been a compliment), an undergraduate at Butler University “captured for philosophy” by Elijah Jordan, whose Forms of Individuality and Theory of Legislation he declared the “toughest, most original and most important work by an American on the ,” and marriage into a family of lawyers when he wed Ruth Bales in 1927.11

8 Hindsight, however, is never quite to be trusted. In that same manuscript, at a distance of only ten years, Fisch miscited the title of his Cornell dissertation, referring to it as “Stoicism and Roman Law,” thereby eliding a crucial term in the original title, which had been “The Influence of Stoicism on Roman Law.”12 The slip or revision may have been significant. The chief argument of Fisch’s dissertation had been that Stoic philosophy was such a dominant cultural milieu in imperial Rome that the legal system, Rome’s chief intellectual achievement, was shot through with indirectly received and often unconscious Stoicism.13 “Influence” was a category that Fisch employed as a kind a tactical retrenchment against the notions of cause that he was resisting, particularly those predicated on an that allowed no independent role for ideas in the promulgation of a legal culture.14 Remarkably, even as this was the central concept in the work, Fisch noted within the dissertation itself that “the commonsense and quasi-scientific category of ‘influence,’ with which we have been working throughout, breaks down in proportion as our canvas becomes crowded with detail and approaches lifelikeness.”15 Fisch may at first have meant this as an assertion of his historical ambition. He thought that the indirectness of influence was precisely one of its conceptual advantages over the Newton’s cradle or base/superstructure imaginary of historians searching for causes and effects. 9 I conjecture that the conception of “influence” was the core weakness of the dissertation and that Fisch never published it because with increasing acuity he saw the impracticality of the concept. Even as he was annotating the finished dissertation in the years after 1930, Fisch – nailing his colors to the mast – claimed that “the Stoicism of those who professed it is less significant for our purpose than that of those who did not.”16 In this way, the desire to prove that Stoicism had achieved its effect more by cultural saturation and conceptual osmosis than by, for instance, quotation functioned as a constant frustration because, necessarily, no direct evidence could be presented for the indirectness of the influence. For our current purposes, the key point is this: Fisch designed his dissertation in such a way that philosophy could have no direct philological antistrophe. That is, Fisch committed himself to the pursuit of ideas that were minimally manifest in particular places and times. 10 Precisely when Fisch encountered Vico for the first time is unclear. Later, he would relay that he could not recall Jordan, his undergraduate mentor, ever referring to Vico. 17 Glenn R. Morrow, a fellow graduate student from Cornell, who had been slightly ahead of Fisch and had studied with Creighton, wrote to Fisch upon the publication of the Autobiography translation in 1944 to say that he was taken back to the days in Ithaca when Creighton had him reading “Flint, and Hume, and , and Montesquieu, and

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Croce’s Vico” in preparation for a volume on historical method in philosophy. But Fisch had not studied with Creighton, and it is not clear that Morrow and Fisch discussed Vico when they were graduate students.18 Vico may have come up when Fisch and a number of other professors at Western Reserve University in Cleveland gathered with Thomas Goddard Bergin (who would become Fisch’s collaborator on the Vico translations) to read Dante in the 1930s.19 What we do know is that, as Fisch would come to recount the story on several occasions after the fact, Vico was encountered as the living force of a scholar who said, “Your dissertation is fundamentally misconceived and beyond repair.”20 Where Fisch had said that Greece influenced Rome, Vico responded that theories of cultural diffusion were superficial and that the real historical task was to account for origins as autochthonous. Where Fisch had said that philosophy informed law, Vico responded that philosophy was itself an outgrowth of political discord that registered itself in the law first. And where Fisch had said that influence lost its conceptual integrity the closer it got to the specificity of the actual, Vico responded that the law could only be understood as a kind of tension between the extreme particularity of cases and the philosophic universality of principle. 11 Fisch himself registered the first two of these Vichian responses more clearly than the third, but I would argue that it is in fact the third that is the most crucial here.21 Vico’s sense of the tension between (and potential cooperation of) philology and philosophy would become an increasingly important point of reference for Fisch in the 1940s. In the context of law, Vico’s key terms of art were certum (the particular, the determinate, the certain) and verum (the true, the intelligible, the principled). What Vico sought to identify here was the way in which law as an institution was compelled to take seriously two essentially different and perhaps ultimately irreconcilable modes of being. The historicity of Roman law, as Vico put it, derived from the way in which the utter specificity of judgments in particular cases – instances of what one might term pure and violent exception – came in time to be interrogated for their value as precedents. As Vico conceived it in his Diritto universale (1720-22), the first “sentence” of the law had in fact been a public execution, and, in effect, he explained that the “life” of the law was an ongoing articulation of what precisely the crime was that warranted this punishment. That is, the principle of verum had to play catch-up with the fait-accompli of certum. Precedent, in turn, raised issues of equity and a kind of principle that might even be expressed abstractly as a rule that could be applied to cases but that was not itself a case. In this way, Fisch learned from Vico that the history of concepts could be narrated as a series of increments in which parties discovered the meaning of the letter of the law by construing its particular verdicts as nascent principles. 12 In truth, analogues of this tension – or dialectic – between certum and verum had been present, but subordinate, in the dissertation of 1930. In particular, Fisch’s attention to the role of the praetor in the development of Roman law allowed him to focus on tensions between the ius civile of the Twelve Tables and the ius honorarium that grew out of Praetorian judgments regarding aliens, which mirrored – in his mind – the tensions of which Stoicism was extremely mindful between the laws of particular places, whether customary or positive, and the ius gentium that reached out beyond the bounds of Roman citizenship to propose a simulacrum of universal law.22 Likewise, Fisch was struck by Selden’s early modern English notion that “equity is a roguish thing” and could, effectively, function as a form of prerogative, because the sovereigns would make rules out of their whim in granting it.23 Similarly, he thought his account of Greek

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influence at Rome could be furthered by tracing conceptions of ἐπιείκεια, “reasonableness” (developed by Aristotle in his Rhetoric).24 Moreover, according to Fisch, Stoicism distinguished itself – particularly from Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of form – by developing a rich theory of individuation (which, he contended, had legal implications).25 And he was very interested in the Stoic conception of καθήκων (meeting, meeting halfway, being appropriate) together with the kind of casuistry that it sponsored. As Fisch pointed out, “there is nothing more characteristic of Stoicism than its preoccupation with the definition of [καθήκων] and its casuistic application to the most varied concrete situations.”26 The principle of acting in a way that was appropriate to the situation had infinite variations. 13 As Fisch’s interest in law was beginning to inform his subsequent intellectual initiatives in the fields of Vico studies and the history of pragmatism in the 1940s, we see developments in his sense of the ways in which case-based casuistic systems such as the law might have to accept that the meanings of decisions would only become visible over time. Vico was there in the footnotes to Fisch’s seminal essay on “Justice Holmes, the Prediction Theory of Law, and Pragmatism” of 1942, telling the author, “First popular government; then law; then philosophy,” thereby licensing the hypothesis that pragmatism grew out of the prediction theory of law and not vice versa – case to rule not rule to case.27 And Vico’s contribution to legal studies was then addressed directly in “Vico on Roman Law” of 1948.28 But what was really crucial in the “Prediction Theory of Law” essay was Fisch’s understanding of the significance of Holmes’s notion that the true – and only – criterion for evaluating lawyers was their ability to predict what judges would decide in particular cases. What was crucial was the lawyer’s ability to predict what a judge would take a particular statute or precedent to mean in the circumstances of a case.29 What this implied was that the meaning of any legal utterance was to be evaluated in terms of the future decisions that might be said to follow from it. 14 What Vico had understood as a historical category, Holmes transposed into the future, but the effect was essentially the same for someone like Fisch who was learning to ask how the particularities of the historical record might be said to interact with the philosophical abstractions of principle. This was the effect: meaning was virtual, in the sense that the implications of the letter of the law could only be understood in terms of proclivities to act in the future. Those actions might be predicted or narrated historically; the difference seemed negligible – at least until 1969, as we shall see. For Fisch, the law was such a decisive institution (not simply socially or politically but for the process of thinking as such), because it forced individuals and communities to confront very basic issues concerning the relationship between time and idea. Try as they might sometimes, legal institutions were often very bad at forgetting themselves. A multiplicity of answers would accrue to a problem that could not be ignored (because the institution was charged with providing very practical remedies), and in order to deal with that multiplicity a host of distinctions and specifications to rules needed to be elucidated. The history of law was thus a model for the history of concepts: acts became examples becoming rules producing exceptions brokering thereby the piecemeal removal of ceteris paribus riders. In this way, the institution of the law provided Fisch with a basic template for understanding how the historian of thought and the thinker might be the same person.

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3. Translation

15 Having encountered Vico as the destroyer of his dissertation in the 1930s, Fisch travelled to Naples in 1939 in order to explore the possibility of translating his masterwork, the Scienza nuova, into English. Benedetto Croce and Fausto Nicolini told him they knew of no one who was attempting such a translation, and so Fisch invited Bergin to join him in Naples to make an exploratory start on the work. Around this time, it seems, Fisch composed a list of questions for Croce and Nicolini, the second of which went as follows: “utmost possible literalness, or such a degree of paraphrase as would make the translation really a commentary on the text, or something in between?” The answer next to “utmost possible literalness,” written in pencil, was “yes.”30 This was a significant decision, with implications for the reception of Vico in the Anglophone world. The effect was to repeatedly force the translators back to the Italian original to find ways of replicating its particularities as much as possible without producing a kind of stenography that would be unintelligible to the Anglophone reader.

16 The tension between the love of words that is philology and the love of wisdom that is philosophy is perhaps nowhere quite so minutely palpable as in the work of translation. Certainly, Fisch and Bergin narrated their collaboration as a kind of dialectic between philology and philosophy. In their representations of the process, Bergin – an Italianist – would generate a very literal translation that Fisch would remold into a smoother and more conceptually structured form. They would continue to exchange the draft translation – by letter after an initial week or two together on Capri in 1939 – until, as they put it, neither of them could see a way of going any further.31 This was the method they used both for the translation of Vico’s autobiography (which they published first, in 1944, having learned later in 1939 that Elio Gianturco was working on an English translation of the Scienza nuova) and for the translation of the magnum opus, which they eventually published in 1948 (reasoning that Gianturco had had nine years to finish his translation and had therefore lost his right of first attempt).32 17 The effort was heroic. Even Italians speak of a need to get fit while preparing to read the Scienza nuova. And the method employed was successful. The anti-Fascist politician and historian, Gaetano Salvemini, confessed that he preferred Bergin and Fisch’s English to Vico’s Italian.33 But it is not clear that Bergin and Fisch’s tidy representation of their collaboration was always accurate. The manuscript sources attesting to the translation process are fragmentary and incomplete, but they cast a different light on the division of labor between Bergin and Fisch. At times, in his letters to Fisch, Bergin would simply throw up his hands ostentatiously and confess that he has no idea what Vico was on about. Thus, “literalness” may sometimes have been evidence of incomprehension, a sticking to the letter because the spirit could not be divined. Once, an exasperated Bergin – described lovingly by Fisch as the “poet and humorist of my life” after his death in 1987 – declared that Vichian prose gave “every indication of having been written in a nursing home or while undergoing the Neapolitan equivalent of the Keeley Cure.”34 On another occasion, Fisch called attention to the silent omission of several pages in Bergin’s “transliteration” of the autobiography, asking politely but firmly, “Could you have been following Michelet [who had produced an abbreviated paraphrase in French] a bit too closely?” Thus, although Fisch would later describe himself as philosopher to Bergin’s philologist, we should not conclude that verbal

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scrupulosity was not one of his concerns or one of his talents. Indeed, whatever the division of labor between the translators, we must say that Fisch was both philosopher and philologist. 18 Recall that Vico himself cast the Scienza nuova as an attempt to synthesize philosophical and philological modes of inquiry. He defined filosofia as that which contempla la ragione, onde viene la scienza del vero (that which “contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true”). And he defined filologia as an observing of l’autorità dell’umano arbitrio, onde viene la coscienza del certo (“the authority of human choice [that is, human choice considered in terms of what it authors], whence comes consciousness of the certain.”35 Manifestly, therefore, these disciplines were modifications of the tension between verum and certum that Vico had thought central to the historicity of Roman law. The implication was that there could be no possibility of separating the content of the Scienza nuova from the form of its expression. Every translator of the work has labored in the shadow of this intimidating proposition. In general, the vast majority of readers have marveled at the ingenuity of the Bergin and Fisch translation. Erich Auerbach, who had himself published a German translation of the Scienza nuova in 1924, judged it “the most complete and accurate” translation in any language.36 Perceptively, Auerbach thought the translation “very conservative” in matters of terminology, less so with regard to syntax. Bergin and Fisch had indeed made the conscious choice to break up many of Vico’s sentences, but (although Auerbach would perhaps have disagreed) I would argue that forcing readers to grapple with the strangeness and simultaneously poetic and technical quality of Vico’s vocabulary – witness autorità above – enables those readers to work at reenacting the overall vision that the Neapolitan thought so distinguished his work and that he had worked to convey by means of an extremely intricate or “networked” syntax.37 Vico spoke explicitly about the pleasure readers were to experience in reproducing the science in their own minds. 38 The Bergin and Fisch translation permits that. Miraculously compact and austere, it rewards close attention.39 19 Fisch’s terminological punctiliousness in matters of translation was perhaps most expansively attested to in a later essay, published in 1974, called “The Poliscraft.”40 Staged as a dialogue between a political scientist, a philosopher, and a classicist (who teach the history of political thought from Plato to Rousseau, ethics from Aristotle to Mill, and ancient history, respectively), the piece argued that modern disciplinarity has divided what was united in Aristotelian inquiry. In the Greek originals, Fisch contended, there were no clearly distinct terms for what moderns refer to as “politics” and “ethics”: ή πολιτική ought to be defamiliarized as “poliscraft” (the capacity to, and knowledge of how to, act in the polis), and one should not speak of Aristotelian “ethics” at all. Aristotle never used the term, ή ἠθική. Philologically, what Aristotle had done, Fisch pointed out, was coin the adjective ἠθικός from the nouns ἔθος (“a custom or habit”) and ἦθος (“a total character composed of such customs or habits”), such that he could speak of ἀρεταί ἠθικαί – excellences in habitual character. 41 Decisions in translation here had implications for whether a reader might suppose that Aristotle was proposing a universally applicable science of morals or was observing excellences in the Greek polis, and Fisch concluded that there was ultimately no alternative to facing-page translations in which the tensions between source and target language could be made publically manifest.42

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20 , then a graduate student working on her critical edition of Aristotle’s De motu animalium, agreed with Fisch about facing-page translations in a letter dated 10 July 1975, but she was pessimistic about the future of editions like the Loebs that Fisch was recommending. (Given the recent extension of the Loeb principle into the I Tatti Renaissance Library, perhaps she was too pessimistic.) After reading “The Poliscraft,” though, she referred Fisch to an essay on “The Penguinification of Plato” by Trevor J. Saunders, which she thought might well be relevant.43 In Fisch’s annotated copy of that piece, the following assertion is underlined: “a translation should not lift the reader out of the ancient world, but immerse him in it; and the reader must be prepared to think himself imaginatively into that world.”44 Fisch, it would seem, believed that reading the New Science should be an exercise in controlled alienation, even as Vico could be an author who spoke in the manner of a living interlocutor. In his negative review of David Marsh’s 1999 Penguin translation of the 1744 Scienza nuova, Donald Phillip Verene, a leader in Anglophone Vico studies, agreed. Marsh had done too much, he argued, to render Vico contemporary.45 And the success of that edition (which, it seems, continues to outsell the Bergin and Fisch version) may well be a failure. 21 The most brilliant example of Fisch’s extreme acuity in sensing nuances at the border between syntax and semantics came slightly earlier in the 1969 essay, “Vico and Pragmatism.” There, Fisch established connections between Vico and the other great preoccupation of his mature intellectual life, Charles S. Peirce. At the very end of an essay replete with provocative perceptions, Fisch added a “last suggestion.” Engaging in a form of conjectural history, he asked himself what Peirce would have said about Vico’s famous verum-factum principle if he had encountered it, late in life. After all, Vico’s notion that the true or the intelligible (verum) was synonymous with the made or the done (factum) might well seem to be a crucial anticipation of pragmatism. Exercising at this moment an almost peerless capacity to think by means of the categories brought into being by grammar, Fisch proposed that Peirce would have said that if Vico had thought in Greek instead of in Latin, he might well have arrived at pragmatism, because, whereas the Latin term factum was a past participle doing duty as an adjectival noun, the Greek term τὸ πρᾶγμα privileged no temporal span, neither past nor future – and, indeed, it could countenance the most abstract hypotheticals too. A synonymy between the intelligible and that which might be done would have gotten Vico to pragmatism, Fisch thought (impersonating Peirce). There are no words for the exquisiteness of this observation. Even if, at some point, we were to discover that it had been wrong (after, say, finding some manuscript in which Peirce relayed his reaction to Vico’s principle), the suggestion is justified because its sheer acuity brings into being so many other possibilities for thought.46 22 A translation is an interpretation. Many would accept that. What Fisch wanted to achieve, I believe, was a kind of doubleness in the translated text that would attest to the fact that it was, indeed, just such an interpretation. In the case of facing-page translations, such doubling may be indicated very literally. In the case of single- language translations like the Autobiography and the New Science, however, this doubling had to be achieved by other means. It is my contention that the conservativeness of the Bergin and Fisch translation, especially in matters of terminology, is a means to this end. The linguistic alterity of the text, which does not leave its target language unchanged (just as the original Scienza nuova did not leave

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Italian unchanged), requires Anglophone readers to work at reconstructing the text’s meaning. Because of the skill and precision of the translation, however, this work is rewarded. The reader gains a capacity to generate Vichian thought processes because the basic structure of the original – its conceptual grammar, one might say – is left intact. What this means is that the New Science makes it possible for future readers to engage directly in the production, reproduction, and renovation of Vico’s new science.

4. Institution

23 In 1961, Bergin and Fisch issued a revised and abridged edition of their translation of the Scienza nuova. Fisch wrote a new and more substantial introduction to replace the short preface that had accompanied the 1948 version. True to his sense of the inventive power of philological scruple, Fisch organized this introduction as a primer on the key Vichian terms that appeared in the titles of the various editions of the Scienza nuova. In particular, Fisch drew the reader’s attention to the ways in which Latin etymologies of Italian words lurked behind Vico’s usages and modulated them in subtle and crucial ways. Occasionally, Vico himself would point this out. More often, the usage was tacit.47 Fisch closed the introduction by offering remarks on a number of other key terms, one of which was cosa. In the original translation of 1948, Bergin and Fisch had rendered the term as “thing” (the most obvious and uncontroversial option), but in the 1961 revision they chose the more technical “institution” instead. Thus, instead of “The Recurrence of Human Things,” Del ricorso delle cose umane (the title of Book V) was rendered as “The Recourse of Human Institutions.” Some readers have been critical of the substitution; others have been puzzled.48 In fact, Fisch’s insertion of “institution” was the product of almost a decade’s worth of thinking about that term and its significance both for philosophers and for historians.

24 Five years earlier, Fisch had addressed the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association as its president and had posed this question: “we who sit here tonight as members of a philosophical association – what have we in common besides the association?”49 By way of answer, Fisch rejected the definition of the philosopher as a critic of abstractions, as proffered by Alfred North Whitehead, and argued for a variant: “the critic of institutions.”50 Fisch thought that Whitehead’s account focused the role of philosophy too narrowly on the concept use of scientists. Fisch preferred “institutions” to “abstractions” because it allowed one to focus on a much wider array of phenomena, which he described simply as the class of things that had been brought into being by action, that persisted (insofar as they persisted) in the manner of habitual action, but that could be otherwise.51 In a move that surely derived in part from his philosophical inheritance from Elijah Jordan and that was continued (although rather unhappily, I would argue) in Lawrence Haworth’s The Good City, Fisch emphasized that institutions were to be understood in terms of practices, practices most particularly that participated in the constitution of communities.52 25 In fact, there were multiple ways in which Fisch had been practically and theoretically focused on the role played by institutions in creating community in the course of the 1950s. Beginning now to work more intensively on the history of pragmatism, Fisch emphasized Peirce’s insistence that a university was not “an institution for instruction” but rather “an institution for study” – a term that for both of them connoted not simply research but inquiry as such.53 A year after that, Fisch published the results of

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his 1950-51 Fulbright year in Naples where he had worked on the seventeenth-century Neapolitan Accademia degli Investiganti, which, he thought, had influenced Vico’s sense of what a science might be and what a community of inquiry might look like.54 Between 1950 and 1955, Fisch had served on the board of the newly inaugurated International Association of Universities, arguing for the importance of a scientific internationalism that was genuinely opposed to the increasing subordination of research to the nationalist requirements of what Eisenhower would soon dub “the military-industrial complex.”55 Having been a Fulbright Professor at Keio University in Japan during 1958-9, Fisch noted that Japanese had no terms to differentiate a college from a university, and he proceeded to set out a vision of what “the university ideal” implied for the practice of research.56 Fisch’s earlier work at the Army Medical Library in Cleveland during World War II and his subsequent dedication to the production of bibliographies and research aids, not to mention, obviously, the bringing into being of conditions of possibility for scholarship by translating Vico into English and establishing a chronological edition of the writings of Peirce, or even his ceaseless provision of questions, hypotheses, and points of departure for students and other scholars – all of this is to be understood in terms of Fisch’s theoretical investment in the concept of institution and in terms of his practical commitment to the particular kind of institution that is a research community. 26 While in Japan, Fisch had attended the IXth International Congress for the History of Religions held in Tokyo and Kyoto. He had delivered two papers – one on “The Creation of Universal Institutions” and another on “The Idea of Institution in the Major Religions.” In the first of these, Fisch announced that “the problem of our time is the creation of a world community,” which he deemed physically possible and spiritually dubious. Such a community, were it constituted at a governmental level and were it to become totalitarian in nature, might prove less tolerable even than its alternative – which Fisch identified as nuclear warfare and the renewed “barbarism of irradiation” that it would bring.57 Fisch’s preference was for a proliferation of transnational non- governmental organizations, and the question that he posed to his audience was what role religion might play in such a proliferation, “to what extent the major religions of the world conduce to, or merely tolerate, or aggressively oppose, such an experimental attitude toward institutions of all kinds.”58 27 In his second paper, Fisch made the connection to Vico, who, after all, had argued that religion – alongside marriage and burial – was one of the three most basic and most universal human institutions. Fisch contrasted two accounts of institutions, one rationalistic (in which institutions were brought about by design), the other naturalistic (where unconscious habits over time coalesced into accepted ways of doing things). He noted that there were many who saw the eighteenth century as a period in which these two accounts came into increasingly overt conflict, with the conservative reaction to the millennial institutionalism of the French Revolution taking center stage. 59 In this context, he argued, Vico stood for sophistication, because he saw that the law of unintended consequences meant that institutions were a complex amalgam of initiatives undertaken at particular times for particular consciously recognized reasons that over time became habits the rationale for which changed beyond recognition or was forgotten altogether.60 28 I would add that, in making this argument, Fisch was in essence claiming that Vico was not to be understood as a partisan in any debate between Enlightenment and Counter-

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Enlightenment. If anything, Vico was an antidote to that debate. In this way, Fisch was seceding from a line of inquiry that runs from Elio Gianturco, through Isaiah Berlin and , down to Zeev Sternhell.61 It is in this context that we are able to understand Lilla’s rejection of Fisch’s rendering of cosa as “institution.” To Lilla, this editorial choice may well have implied the presupposition that religion was merely optional for Vico (as distinct from a necessary substrate of any viable society). And, to be sure, Fisch had argued in his 1961 introduction that “Vico shares with the Marxists and existentialists the negative view that there is no human essence to be found in individuals as such, and with the Marxists the positive view that the essence of humanity is the ensemble of social relations, or the developing system of institutions.” 62

29 Even such a sympathetic interpreter as Don Roberts would take exception to this assertion, when, in 1985, he asked Fisch whether Vico’s providentialism did not in fact imply that for him Man was created in God’s image in such a way that no truck could be had with Sartrean claims that existence precedes essence. Fisch simply replied that what he meant was that, to Vico’s way of thinking, the question of what a human being would be like in the absence of any human institutions or community was essentially unanswerable. This was a question, Vico said, that had destroyed seventeenth-century investigations into the state of nature.63 What might be more interesting for Lilla, though, would be the admission in the same interview that, although he had been an ordained minister of the Disciples of Christ in his youth (and had preached intermittently for a year or so), Fisch – if pressed – would have to answer the question, “Are you an atheist,” in the affirmative. If religious institutions had had positive effects qua institutions, he continued, then the key thing was to ask what other institutions could achieve the same ends without “the superstitions.”64 30 Even more striking for our present purposes, however, was another essay that Fisch published in Japan in 1959, entitled “The Philosophy of History, A Dialogue.” There, he appeared to argue that not just the philosopher but even the historian was to be understood as a critic of institutions.65 This was an essay staged as a debate between a philosopher and a historian over the status of covering laws in history. Are we to understand the articulation of cause and effect relationships between two events in history as invocations of general laws that would be expressed in a multitude of cases? The historian resists the philosopher’s attempts to foist necessitarianism onto his discipline and responds by arguing that the historian is involved in the narration of the coming into being of institutions that could be otherwise. Rule-following is itself a historical phenomenon: rules develop and decay; they do not simply “hold.” Criticism of institutions is therefore always a possibility for historians, because the story of the genesis of those institutions is simultaneously an accounting of their contingency. The historian persona in the “Dialogue” is entirely explicit: “objectivity” in the discipline of history does not entail an “absence of criticism, but [rather] unreserved submission to further criticism, complete openness, withholding nothing from judgment.”66 That is, the objective historian is not someone who refrains from praising or blaming the institutions the history of which he or she is examining. It is simply that no such evaluation may prevent that historian from considering new evidence illuminating that institution’s value. In the dialogue, the philosopher responds by saying that this all sounds rather familiar, given that he himself had recently given a talk in which he defined the philosopher as the critic of institutions. The historian is unperturbed and sees no problem with this: there is, he says, “a continuum of inquiry connecting the

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shortest-tethered grubbing of the historian with the most abstract and universal critiques and speculations of the philosopher.”67 31 What surprises me in these various definitions and discussions is Fisch’s lack of attention to the word “critic.” “Institution” was such a crucial word for him, perhaps, that the other part of his respective definitions of the philosopher and the historian became as inconspicuous as a habit. Vichian that he was, though, this term ought to have caught his eye. If we were to channel the spirit of Max Fisch for a minute to gloss the letter of Max Fisch, we would say that “critic” connoted its antistrophe, “topic,” and that the term “critic” ought not to be understood as a person – whether philosopher or historian – but rather as a mode of inquiry. Within the rhetorical frame of reference, the ars topica had been a series of tactics for finding arguments; the ars critica, a discipline focused on adjudicating goodness and badness in inference. We can suppose therefore that, for Fisch, the critic of institutions was the person who considered whether the arguments made and implied by institutions were or were not good ones or (more deflationary) consistent ones. 32 When we find Fisch saying in one of his Japanese papers that “with regard to any institution it is wise to inquire what purpose it was designed to serve [and] whether that purpose is still our purpose,” we see the historian and the philosopher working closely in tandem to interrogate our reasons for continuing to practice in the future what we have practiced in the past.68 But this is a relatively unremarkable thought. The more interesting line pushes towards what we might term the “topic of institutions.” It is the sheer variety and historical vicissitude of practices in any given institution that points out not only their contingency but also the hitherto unarticulated possibilities lying between, among, and at odds with these practices. The point is not simply to decide whether a principle of sufficient reason rules over our institutional practices. The point is rather to find ways of forever finding new ways of achieving our goals and of achieving a clearer sense of what new goals we might pursue. Fisch’s most basic article of faith, it seems to me, was an ever-open future – the irrepressible creativity of inquiry. As such, his more basic allegiance was to topic and not critic.

5. Style

33 Using Max Fisch to think about Max Fisch is, in point of fact, precisely the kind of doubling of – or, better, extrapolation from – the historical record that Fisch himself began to use with greater frequency in his later work. Based on the published and unpublished sources that we have, it would seem that this was an unconscious development more than a conscious one. As such, one can only offer a theoretical account of this practice by making explicit several assertions that, if adopted and implemented, would lead to the kind of practices that we see in a number of essays dating from the 1960s and 1970s. One might describe the focus of this section as a close analysis of style. “Style” though must not be understood as something optional that is added to a thought once its content has been determined. Genre, mode, and device are just as constitutive of thinking in the context of historiography as they are in thought more generally. Thought events come into being through and because of such frames and presentations. As Fisch would say, himself channeling Vico and Peirce, “language is not merely a medium for the communication of thought but is the medium of thought itself.”69

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34 Fisch’s “A Chronicle of Pragmaticism, 1865-1879,” which appeared in 1964, was indicative of one recurrent mode of Fischian analysis. The article, published in The Monist as a supplement, took an almost notational form. Broken down into a year-by- year and month-by-month accounting of events in Peirce’s mental life, the essay was almost positivistic in its desire to set out every piece of possible evidence before proceeding further. Only at the very end did the reader receive seven discrete conclusions. Indeed, although the adjective “positivistic” has become more of an insult than a descriptor, one ought really to say that positivism was precisely what Fisch was after: like a sequence of promulgations in positive law, a firm chronology (which he described as “the prerequisite of history”) was what Fisch wanted.70 Indeed, on the odd occasions that Fisch managed to specify points in Peirce’s mental life on a day-by-day basis, one detects in him a frustration that the process of decomposition could not be carried further – hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute, sentence-by-sentence would seem to have been the desideratum. We see therefore that the atomization implied by the chronicle format was but a stage in an ironic process, for it was the connections between and among these points that were crucial, connections that drove these points towards a continuum of perceptions and the implied inferences that selected them. 35 Following Peirce (and a long tradition in the history of thought), Fisch understood thinking as itself a kind of internalized dialogue. To him, this constituted an alternative to the more common way of understanding speech as a kind of externalized thinking. For this reason, we ought to understand his experiments with the dialogue form itself as attempts to capture and analyze the sequence, the strophe and antistrophe, of thinking itself. Thus, dialogue and chronicle were two literary modes that only appeared to be diametrically opposed. In fact, they were extremely similar in their aims. In “The Poliscraft” of 1974, Fisch was much more identifiable with the figure of the classicist than he was with the other two interlocutors, a political scientist and a philosopher. Therefore, we may think of this essay as an attempt to anticipate (or perhaps report) the kind of argument that members of these three disciplines might find themselves involved in, were they to examine seriously the question of how all three could examine the same texts within entirely disparate disciplinary frameworks.71 “The Philosophy of History,” from 1959, was a little different. As Fisch clarified in 1985, his person is to be identified neither with the philosopher nor with the historian but with both equally.72 Fisch, thus, was deliberately doubling himself in order to interrogate the nature of his own statements. But his process was not simply a critical one. It was properly topical in the sense that dialogue opened up a distance between the interlocutors, a discursive topos that – perhaps in the manner of a vacuum – called into being new positions, new considerations, new questions. 36 It is in the context of this line of thinking that we should interpret another of the seemingly innocuous devices that Fisch used to represent his historical and philosophical investigations. Take his 1973 essay on “Hegel and Peirce,” for instance. There, we find Fisch engaged in an enumeration of what he argued were the twenty- one discrete steps that Peirce worked through when he was using Hegel to revise the categories of Kant.73 Enumeration is almost an anti-style, a philosophical procedure feigning utter sobriety. Within a Vichian frame of reference, such enumeration might appear to be something akin to Cartesian soritic, because it gives the impression of reveling in the utmost conceptual explicitness, leaving nothing for the reader to infer. The appearance is misleading. Cartesian soritic is an inferential form that begins with

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intuitions held to be indubitable and proceeds by way of deductions that follow necessarily from the previous assertions. In contrast, Fischian enumeration begins not in indubitability but rather in a sliding from authority into doubt. Witness his account of the origin of Peirce’s thinking on categories, which becomes ostentatious with just a little emphasis: Peirce “at first accepted Kant’s list, as if from Sinai.”74 But inquiry begins in doubt. Just so, a forty-year inquiry sequence was, in Fisch’s opinion, precipitated by Peirce’s use of Kant against Kant: “he began finding among the categories in Kant’s list relations other than those that Kant himself pointed out.”75 And the key term in that sentence is “finding.” What we have here is an unannounced hypothesis: that for Peirce and Fisch alike the history of philosophy was an ars topica and not an ars critica. 37 We see that, from a stylistic point of view, one of the fundamental facts about intellectual historiography is disquotation. In turn, disquotation is an iteration of the kind of topical inquiry we have just seen Fisch engaged in during “Hegel and Peirce.” Absolutely crucial here is the movement from what, for instance, Kant actually said to what he might well have said (but did not). When, as Fisch supposed, Peirce was “finding among the categories in Kant’s list relations other than those that Kant himself pointed out” what he was doing was impersonating Kant in order to go further into Kantian thinking than Kant himself had done. Kantian potential was being derived from Kantian act. Expressed in the terms of intellectual historiographic style, the potentialities of paraphrase emerge from the actualities of quotation. Every intellectual historian struggles, consciously or not, with the complexity of the shift from oratio recta to oratio obliqua and vice versa. The reasons for this are not just that there can be no paraphrase that is not always already an interpretation but also that indirect speech has an impetus and a creativity of its own. For the simple reason that intellectual historians do not wish always to be interjecting with markers such as “said Peirce,” attributed indirect discourse very often slips – in ways that are impalpable to writer and reader alike – into a kind of free and indirect roving. 38 Although Fisch resisted such elision of attribution to an extent that distinguished him (his commitment to philology was as strong as his commitment to philosophy), we do find a good deal of this paraphrastic mode in that Fischian gem, “Vico and Pragmatism.” Thus, we find in the text the following assertions: “the logic of deduction is not the logic of science; experiment is central to the logic of physics, not just an adjunct; it is heuristic and inductive; it belongs to topic, not critic; and that is why the new critic of the Cartesians, who neglect topic as the Stoics did, cannot be the logic of science.”76 Who is the author of these assertions? Vico, Peirce, Fisch? Read in context, it is clear that this is paraphrase, with the attributor “said Vico” elided, but there is no easy way to return this abbreviated oratio obliqua to its original form, as quotation. Too much confection has taken place in the meantime, and the true author here cannot be understood as Vico or Peirce or Fisch but as a curious and creative synthesis of the three. In this way, Fisch’s extraordinary apostrophe at the end of the essay, in which he impersonated what Peirce would have said if he had read Vico, was simply the stylistic counterpart of a mode already well established in the body of the essay itself. The invention of counter-factual quotation was disquotation reversed. 39 One final example will suffice to confirm, for the moment, the suspicion raised here that the stylistics of Fischian historiography have real significance. In the 1977 piece, “American Pragmatism Before and After 1898,” we find ourselves in an entirely different stylistic universe. Counter-factuality has metastasized from the “last

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suggestion” of 1969 into a that organizes the entire essay. The essay pivoted on the first usage of the term “pragmatism” in a public address, by William James in 1898. Fisch bade author and reader to “imagine ourselves as members of the Philosophical Union […] attending James’s address, reading it soon afterwards, [and] being moved by it.”77 Behind us, lay the reading we had done to prepare ourselves for the event – namely, James’s and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy – and the history of pragmatism from 1865 to 1898 that we would be moved by James’s talk to investigate. Ahead of us from 1898 onward, lay the future history of pragmatism as we were continuing it in our present intellectual labor and by others as yet unknown to us. This temporal manifold of past and future, pluperfects, future perfects, and hypotheticals all perceived from the vantage point of a very particular present was the frame within which Fisch wanted to situate all of the minds that were or would be party to his essay. It was a frame, constructed out of a historic present tense, that asserted the indivisibly of historical and philosophical inquiry. Just so, it culminated in the tasks that Fisch himself took to be simultaneously his own and those of the communities of investigation in which he was immersed.

6. Semiosis

40 As Fisch was narrating this culmination of “American Pragmatism Before and After 1898” for the communities of inquiry that existed in 1977, he mentioned – almost, but not quite, as an aside – that “work has begun on a new and much more comprehensive edition of [Peirce’s] writings, in chronological order, including a large portion of still unpublished work.”78 He was, of course, referring to The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, which was to supersede the thematically organized Collected Papers edition of Hartshorne and Weiss. By now it should be clear why Fisch believed with such conviction that a chronological edition of the writings was so essential. It was not simply that no one could understand Peirce who did not know how the myriad iterations of his philosophy constituted lines of inquiry pursued – if not continuously then at least serially – from the 1860s until his death in 1914. It was also that no one could hope to continue those lines of inquiry who did not have access to such a temporally indexed archive. After all, a trajectory can only be projected if the data points one possesses are ordered chronologically, and the seedbed of inference is the topical motley of assertions or proto-assertions than spans particular moments of inquiry.

41 In truth, this was another point at which Fisch was adopting the assertions of the historical figures he studied and transforming them into assertions made in his own voice and put into practice by his own person. After all, it was Peirce who had told him that “all thought is in signs.” And, from Peirce’s various explications of this point, Fisch drew the paraphrases that “every thought continues another and is continued by still another,” that “there are no uninferred premisses and no inference-terminating conclusions,” and that “inferring is the sole act of the mind.”79 If semiosis was at work (and in dyadic as distinct from triadic action it would not be), then there was no object that was not a sign and no sign that did not bring into being an interpretant.80 One task that the historian and the philosopher shared was to be forever and creatively aware of the possibilities implicit in this semiosis without end. Equally, this work consisted either in seeing whether some of these potentialities had in fact been carried into actuality in the past or in asking whether one might wish to do so in the future.

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42 Fisch was himself a vehicle for precisely this kind of semiosis – simultaneously historical and philosophical – when on 23 January 1980 he wrote to Bernhard Kendler at Cornell University Press in reference to a manuscript titled “Giambattista Vico’s Science of Imagination” by Donald Verene.81 Fisch indicated that he was unable to provide “a detailed and formal evaluation” of the manuscript, but he thought it ought to be published. What he did want to say was that the book brought into focus a new and interesting line of inquiry. Verene, he related, was the editor of the journal, Philosophy and Rhetoric; Vico had been professor of Latin Eloquence at the University of Naples; and Peirce, he estimated, “was perhaps the greatest of those philosophers who have not only devoted themselves to retaining rhetoric along with grammar and logic, and to developing it further, but have made it preeminent in the trivium.” Peirce’s achievement in this regard, he argued, was to see the error of those who took rhetoric to be nothing more than “a bag of tricks for persuading an audience or a readership of something that is in the persuader’s interest, regardless of its truth or falsity.” Fisch went on to say that people failed to recognize this because, in his later work, Peirce used the term “methodeutic” in place of “rhetoric.”82 Nevertheless, rhetoric was not to be understood as an art of persuasion. It was “the art of discovery.” Indeed, it was the art of semiosis. 43 Fisch’s realization here was something like an epiphany. Like a Peircean investigator becoming aware of the reasons for his guessing only after the fact, Fisch was becoming conscious of the previously hidden inferential connections among the various projects of his life. To be sure, Fisch had already established connections between Vico and Peirce in the 1969 article that asserted an essential parallel between Vico’s path from nominalism to realism and Peirce’s and that also identified Vico’s verum-factum theory as a kind of proto-pragmatism. And before that he was aware of the explicit connections that took him from Roman law to Vico to American and the prediction theory of Holmes. But the rhetorical connection was new; or rather, Fisch’s attention to that connection was new. And reading Peirce into this rhetorical lineage was his confection, not Verene’s. Indeed, if we look back at Fisch’s work with this issue in mind, we are struck by his former ignorance and disattention. In a letter to Bergin (written before the winter of 1942/3 and in connection to their translation of the Vita), Fisch confessed that of all the words in the Vichian lexicon the two giving him the most trouble were ingegno and acutezza – the key terms of Vico’s Baroque-inflected reception of classical rhetorical theory. He was struggling to find satisfactory uniform translations and supposed that a literary historian would know more about this kind of thing.83 Likewise, in his 1971 essay, “Peirce’s Arisbe,” Fisch noted that Peirce, having found a life’s vocation reading Whately’s Logic in 1851, moved next to a work on rhetoric that “set [him] thinking for [himself].”84 But the significance of the connection was not expanded upon. Indeed, in a footnote, Fisch went on to say that this thinking for himself had led Peirce to compose a treatise on “The Dynamics of Persuasion,” only to add that he had lost the reference to the manuscript in which Peirce gave this title.85 44 To this list of missed opportunities, one might add Fisch’s introduction of Isaiah Berlin in 1974, which focused on the notion of zetetics as a “general science of research” without connecting Vico and Peirce.86 Moreover, when Fisch did go further into Peirce’s rhetorical inheritance (as in the 1978 essay on “Peirce’s General Theory of Signs”), the connection to Vico was not a factor.87 Again, in 1954 Fisch had done significant work in tracing the influence of Alexander Bain’s conception of belief (as that on the basis of

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which a man was prepared to act) on Peirce’s development of pragmatism, but he did not in turn explore the rhetorical origins of Bain’s conception.88 But perhaps the most persuasive evidence for the hypothesis that around 1980 a matrix of connections was becoming explicit that had to that point remained implicit in Fisch’s work came in the two installments of “The Range of Peirce’s Relevance” – published in 1980 and 1982, respectively. In 1980, “the logic of discovery” connoted a tradition running through Peirce, Dewey, and Popper – with Vico and rhetorical nowhere to be seen. In 1982, Fisch was demonstrating an awareness of “the new rhetoric” of Charles Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca.89 45 The point here is not to fault Fisch for not being even more ingenious than he already was. The point is simply to identify as many lines of inquiry as we can into the connections among Vico, Peirce, and Fisch, rhetoric, semiosis, and the logic of discovery. Moreover, we should understand that Fisch’s own eventual perception of the continuity running through Vico and Peirce on the issue of discovery was one that made sense of his double identity as historian and philosopher. What was “scientific discovery” in the context of twentieth-century philosophy had been inventio to Vico and all those from antiquity to early modernity who had been invested in the rhetorical tradition. Fisch intuited that this continuity (not identity) allowed one to think of intellectual historians as persons who became immersed in the thought of past thinkers to the point that they could begin to bring the languages of those thinkers back to life – to, as it were, learn the grammar of those dead languages and begin to speak them again with a mastery permitting them to bring new configurations into existence, to fashion sentences that were grammatically correct according to the parameters of a dead conceptual language but that had not been uttered before. Qua historians, such individuals would be wanting constantly to compare their inventions to the historical record, to see if there were ways in which their innovations had, in fact, been anticipated. In that event, the innovation would become something like a verified prediction. Insofar as such historians of thought could also be thinkers in their own right, however, they would experience a falsified prediction – that is, an innovation that turned out not to have been anticipated in the historical record – as a discovery that they themselves might assert in their own name. As such, the history of thought would remain there, always, a reservoir of potential thoughts never yet brought into actuality, waiting for the moment at which some chance connection would transform them from mute philological objects into signs replete once more with their own interpretants.

7. Conclusion

46 In the extremely famous and still influential 1969 article alluded to in the introduction to this paper, Quentin Skinner argued that historians of ideas ought not to be in the business of looking to the past for their beliefs: “we must learn to do our own thinking for ourselves,” he said.90 History was not a series of responses to problems that were eternal and unchanging. Not simply the answers but even the questions themselves – they evolved over time. As a result, the best that history could offer, over and above antique erudition, was exorcism. That is, the ephemeralness of questions in the history of thought ought to demonstrate to us that the answers themselves had a highly contingent relevance. Only under certain conditions were particular intellectual

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formations decisive, or even useful. Where the historian could dredge up possibilities from the past that had been foregone and covered over, the upshot ought not to be the reinvigoration of a past research agenda but rather an instant of defamiliarization. The strangeness of the past could reveal the strangeness of the present, for each was but a contingent way station. In response to accusations that he turned historical inquiry into a form of mere antiquarianism, Skinner invoked Foucaultian archaeology (rendering the present strange) and Nietzschean genealogy (occluded possibilities from the past gave one pause, made one ruminate).91 But these were oddly unsustained gestures. The divisions of labor stood: historians of political thought on one side, for instance, political theorists on the other.

47 Max Fisch constitutes an alternative to any intellectual historical method insisting that practitioners remain agnostics about the value of the ideas they study. It is the chief contention of this essay that he is a paradigm for intellectual historians, a paradigm both in the original Greek sense of an example and in the derived contemporary sense of a framework within which the community of research can proceed. Indeed, it is precisely such doubling of the philological object qua example into a carapace for ongoing action and thought that Fisch explored in a variety of ways during his half- century of creative intellectual work. Law was a zone of interpretation where the virtual qualities of meaning became manifest. There, the letter of a decision ought to be understood in reference to the future. Some might think of that future as predictable, but the history of legal languages and institutions demonstrated that it was not. As such, the particular judicial acts of particular courts were transformed into precedents with unintended consequences, and example became framework. Translation was a training in the extraordinarily subtle syntactic and semantic rigors of entering into an alien language. The point was not simply to achieve competence in, say, Italian. The goal was an ability to enter into the structure of another thinker’s modes of invention, to the point that one could construct thoughts – some reconstructed, some new – in the style of that thinker. This, moreover, was a goal that a translator could achieve only by leaving a good deal of the interpretative work to the translation’s readers. A translation should be strange and resolute – a philological fact of some inexplicability – in precisely the degree that would provoke such readers to begin to learn that writer’s terminology and lines of inquiry for themselves. In this way, a translation should become something like an institution – that is, a framework for action that is not so tightly ordered that it cannot, by means of the variety of its injunctions and practices, stimulate the generation of new practices or improvisations on the themes it established. And, even as Fisch was literal-minded enough to understand such institutionality in some very concrete, almost bureaucratic ways, he was also enough of a poet to see that the task of discovering and exploiting the spaces between assertions made by figures become crucial in the history of thought was, in large part, a stylistic task that required experimentation and variety. Finally, although he was tactful in this regard, Fisch did not hesitate to practice the beliefs he appropriated from the past intellectual initiatives that he thought important. He did his thinking for himself precisely by adopting, adapting, and cobbling together the thought sequences of those he valued most. This was, in fact, an appropriation of Peirce’s account of semiosis. The meaning of any given sentence was to be understood not only in terms of the prior sentences to which that sentence was reacting but also in terms of the subsequent sentences that such sequences brought into being. If some of those sentences were Vico’s, some Peirce’s, and some Fisch’s, that did not matter.

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BRANDOM Robert, (2002), Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

COLLINGWOOD R. G., (1913), The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, London, Howard Latimer.

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FISCH Max Harold, (1930), “The Influence of Stoicism on Roman Law,” PhD Diss., Cornell University.

FISCH Max Harold, (1942), “Justice Holmes, the Prediction Theory of Law, and Pragmatism,” The Journal of Philosophy, 39, 4, 85-97.

FISCH Max Harold, (1948), “Vico on Roman Law,” in Milton R. Konvitz, & Arthur E. Murphy (eds.), Essays in Political Theory, Presented to George H. Sabine, Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

FISCH Max Harold, (1953), “The of the Investigators,” in E. Ashworth Underwood (ed.), Science, Medicine, and History: Essays on the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice, Written in Honor of Charles Singer, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Two vols.

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FISCH Max Harold, (1954b), “The International Association of Universities,” Educational Record 35, 157-9.

FISCH Max Harold, (1956), “The Critic of Institutions,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 29, 42-56.

FISCH Max Harold, (1959), “The University Ideal,” Bulletin of the International Association of Universities 7, 125-7.

FISCH Max Harold, (1960a), “The Creation of Universal Institution,” Proceedings of the IXth International Congress for the History of Religions (Tokyo: Maruzen), 723-5.

FISCH Max Harold, (1960b), “The Idea of Institution in the Major Religions,” in Seizi Uyeda (ed.), Proceedings of the , Tokyo, Waseda University Press.

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FISCH Max Harold, (1961), “Introduction: Principi di Scienza Nuova di Giambattista Vico d’intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni,” in The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin & Max Harold Fisch, Garden City, NY, Anchor.

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FISCH Max Harold, (1964), “A Chronicle of Pragmaticism, 1865-1879,” The Monist 48, 441-66.

FISCH Max Harold, (1969), “Vico and Pragmatism,” in Giorgio Tagliacozzo & Hayden V. White (eds.), Giambattista Vico, An International Symposium, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press.

FISCH Max Harold, (1971), “Peirce’s Arisbe: The Greek Influence in his Later Philosophy,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 7, 187-210.

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FISCH Max Harold, (1974b), “The Poliscraft, A Dialogue,” in Craig Walton, & John P. Anton (eds.), Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts: Essays Presented to Herbert W. Schneider, Athens, Ohio University Press.

FISCH Max Harold, (1976), “What Has Vico to Say to Philosophers of Today?,” Social Research 43, 399-409.

FISCH Max Harold, (1977), “American Pragmatism Before and After 1898,” in Robert W. Shahan & Kenneth R. Merrill (eds.), American Philosophy from Edwards to Quine, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press.

FISCH Max Harold, (1978), “Peirce’s General Theory of Signs,” in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Sight, Sound, and Sense, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

FISCH Max Harold, (1980), “The Range of Peirce’s Relevance,” The Monist 63, 269-76.

FISCH Max Harold, (1982), “The Range of Peirce’s Relevance (continued),” The Monist 65, 123-41.

FISCH Max Harold, (1988), “Obituary: Thomas Goddard Bergin, 1904-1987,” New Vico Studies 6, 189-90.

FISCH Max Harold & Jackson I. COPE, (1952), “Peirce at the Johns Hopkins University,” in Philip P. Wiener, & Frederic H. Young (eds.), Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

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JORDAN Elijah, (1956), “Structure of Society,” Collected Essays of Elijah Jordan, 1911-1955, Urbana Champaign, Library of the University of Illinois.

LILLA Mark, (1993), G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

MADDEN H. Edward, (1986), “Max H. Fisch: Rigorous Humanist,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 22, 375-96.

MARSHALL L. David, (2013), “The Implications of Robert Brandom’s Inferentialism for Intellectual History,” History and Theory 52, 1-31.

MARSHALL L. David, (forthcoming), “Neither/Nor: Vico Beyond Enlightenment and Counter- Enlightenment.”

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RORTY Richard, (1984), “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” in Rorty, Schneewind, & Skinner (eds.) (1984).

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SKINNER Quentin, (1969), “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, 3-53.

SKINNER Quentin, (1998), Liberty Before Liberalism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

STERNHELL Zeev, (2010), The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, David Maisel (trans.), New Haven, Press.

TAGLIACOZZO Giorgio, (1983), “Toward a History of Recent Anglo-American Vico Scholarship, Part I: 1944-1969,” New Vico Studies 1, 1-19.

TURSMAN Richard, (ed.), (1970), Studies in Philosophy and in the History of Science, Lawrence, KS, Coronado Press.

VERENE Donald Phillip, (1981), Vico’s Science of Imagination, Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

VERENE Donald Phillip, (1999), “On Translating Vico: The Penguin Classics Edition of the New Science,” New Vico Studies 17, 85-107.

VIALLANEIX Paul, (1959), La voie royale: Essai sur l’idée de peuple dans l’œuvre de Michelet, Paris, Librairie Delagrave.

VICO Giambattista, (1990), “Princìpi di scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni,” in Andrea Battistini (ed.), Opere, two vols, Milan, Arnoldo Mondadori.

NOTES

1. Max Harold Fisch et al., “Interview with Max Fisch,” 24-5, Fisch Papers. The Papers of Max Harold Fisch (always cited as “Fisch Papers,” see References) are held by the Peirce Edition Project at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. The papers have not been formally archived, and references to them here follow the system of organization used by Fisch himself with folder name and page number given (where Fisch gave them). I am especially grateful to the scholars and staff at IUPUI who welcomed me into their circle for a few weeks in the summer of 2003 – Nathan Hauser, Martha Rujuwa, André De Tienne, Cornelis de Waal, and Martin Coleman, in particular. I am also very grateful to David E. Pfeifer for an invitation to present a preliminary version of this piece in Indianapolis in 2011, where I was honored to meet and converse with Fisch’s son, William B. Fisch. 2. Rorty, Schneewind, & Skinner (1984). 3. Rorty, Schneewind, & Skinner (1984: 7). 4. Bejan. 5. Skinner (1969: 7, 37-8, 50-1); Collingwood (1939: 29-43); Croce 1911, translated as Collingwood 1913. 6. Rorty 1984; Brandom 2002; Marshall 2013. 7. Fisch et al., “Interview with Max Fisch,” 17-8, Fisch Papers. 8. Fisch, “History of Philosophy Delusion, The (1961),” Fisch Papers. 9. Fisch’s vision of a chronological edition of the writings of Charles S. Peirce is being carried forward in the work of the Peirce Edition Project in Indianapolis, but we may ask whether his attempt to be both philosopher and historian found an institutional home beyond that particular

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venue. If we look at the collection of essays in the Fisch festschrift (many of them fine contributions), we see no representation of the Vico side of his intellectual identity and only a few contributions that would count as genuinely historical by his standards. See Tursman 1970. 10. The secondary literature on Max Fisch is quite small. Consider the following points: Fisch’s method develops that of Peirce and is “à la fois historique et synthétique” (Deledalle 1991: 355); Fisch, fastidious and yet brilliantly ingenious, “combines […] cautious judgment and insightful synthesis” (Madden 1986: 393); and “Max’s slight preference for Plato over Aristotle is based, in part, on his preference for philosophical dialogue over philosophical treatise” (Roberts 1986: 413). 11. Max Harold Fisch, “Fisch, Max H: Philosophy of Law,” Fisch Papers. 12. Fisch would later recount his alarm at discovering that this error had become a habit in the 1985 interview with Don Roberts. Fisch et al., “Interview with Max Fisch,” 24-5, Fisch Papers. 13. Fisch (1930: 2-3). 14. Fisch (1930: 168). 15. Fisch (1930: 169). 16. Max Harold Fisch, “The Influence of Stoicism on Roman Law,” 27r, Fisch Papers. 17. Fisch et al., “Interview with Max Fisch,” 23-4, Fisch Papers. 18. Glenn R. Morrow to Max Harold Fisch, 24 May 1944, in “[Untitled Folder],” Fisch Papers. 19. Fisch (1988: 189). 20. This paraphrase of what Fisch took Vico to be saying to him is cast in my words, but the rhetorical device is his. See Fisch (1976: 402). 21. Fisch (1976: 401-2). 22. Fisch (1930: 86-91). 23. Cited in Fisch (1930: 106). 24. Fisch (1930: 163-4). 25. Fisch (1930: 133-4). 26. Fisch (1930: 147-8). 27. Fisch (1942: n22). 28. Fisch 1948. 29. Fisch (1942: 86ff). 30. Fisch, “[Untitled Folder],” Fisch Papers. 31. Max Harold Fisch to Giorgio Tagliacozzo, 5 January 1981, in Max Harold Fisch, “Tagliacozzo, Giorgio,” Fisch Papers. 32. Max Harold Fisch to Giorgio Tagliacozzo, 27 March 1987, in Fisch, “Tagliacozzo, Giorgio,” Fisch Papers. 33. Gaetano Salvemini to Max Harold Fisch, 1 August 1944, cited in Tagliacozzo (1983: 1). The comment is also something of a topos, however. Note Michelet’s boast that the Italians preferred his French translation to Vico’s Italian original. See Viallaneix (1959: 230). 34. Thomas Goddard Bergin to Max Harold Fisch, 27 August [no year], in Max Harold Fisch, “Vico Notes,” Fisch Papers. The comment almost certainly refers to translating the Scienza nuova. 35. Vico (1990: §138). 36. Auerbach (1949: 196). 37. Fisch, “[Untitled Folder],” Fisch Papers. The first of the questions that Fisch wanted to ask Croce and Nicolini was “Break up into small sentences?” And the answer recorded there was “yes.” 38. Vico (1990: §345, 349). 39. The translation did not please all readers. Gianturco (1950: 141) went so far as to declare it “subprofessional,” although one should add that he did not alert his own readers to a potential conflict of interest (given that, at one time, he himself had been engaged in preparing a translation of the Scienza nuova).

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40. Fisch 1974b. 41. Fisch (1974b: 26, 30-1). 42. Fisch (1974b: 33, 48). 43. Martha Nussbaum to Max Harold Fisch, 10 July 1975, in Max Harold Fisch, “Poliscraft, The, Finished March 9, 1972,” Fisch Papers. 44. Max Harold Fisch, marked copy of Trevor Saunders, “The Penguinification of Plato,” 26 in “Poliscraft, The,” Fisch Papers. 45. Verene (1999: 106) – “philosophers such as Vico force the reader of any age to come to grips with what is unfamiliar and the unfamiliarity that often lies hidden in the familiar. The modern reader must come to grips with Vico’s own terminology or risk never reaching what Vico says.” 46. Fisch (1969: 424). 47. Fisch (1961: xx). 48. See, for example, Lilla (1993: xi). 49. Fisch (1956: 42). 50. Fisch (1956: 44). 51. Fisch (1956: 45). 52. In an undated manuscript that must derive from the late 1980s, Fisch noted that he had Jordan and Dewey most in mind as he was writing “The Critic of Institutions.” He went on to say that “the philosopher who has done the most original work in the philosophy of institutions since then is Lawrence Haworth, in his three books The Good City (1963), Decadence and Objectivity (1977), Autonomy: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology (1986).” See Max Harold Fisch, “Critic of Institutions, The,” Fisch Papers. In 1985, when asked whether Jordan had a similar notion of “institution,” Fisch had said “I think so; I was not conscious of using Jordan’s language, and I don’t remember looking things up in Jordan during the time I was working on Vico. But it’s quite conceivable to me that if I hadn’t been a student of Jordan’s, the chances of my having done this would have been very slim.” Fisch et al., “Interview with Max Fisch,” 23-4, Fisch Papers. Compare their respective definitions: in Jordan (1956: 81), an “institution […] is essentially ordered or legalized property”; in Fisch (1956: 44), an institution is “any provision or arrangement of means or conditions for subsequent activity, additional to or in modification of the means or conditions that are already present prior to the institution, whether present in nature prior to all institution or present in nature only as modified by previous institutions.” 53. Fisch & Cope (1952: 278). 54. Fisch (1953: 1.521-63). 55. Fisch (1954b: 158-9). 56. Fisch (1959: 125-7). 57. Fisch (1960a: 723-4). 58. Fisch (1960a: 725). 59. Fisch (1960b: 514). 60. Fisch (1960b: 515-6). 61. Gianturco 1937; Berlin 1976; Lilla 1993; Sternhell 2010. For treatment (and criticism) of this Counter-Enlightenment reading of Vico, see Marshall (forthcoming). 62. Fisch (1961: xxxix). 63. Fisch et al., “Interview with Max Fisch,” 18-9. 64. Fisch et al., “Interview with Max Fisch,” 6-7. 65. Fisch (1960c). 66. Fisch (1960c: 204). 67. Fisch (1960c: 205). 68. Fisch (1960b: 516). 69. Fisch (1976: 403). 70. Fisch (1964: 441).

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71. Fisch (1974b). 72. Fisch et al., “Interview with Max Fisch,” 6, Fisch Papers. 73. Fisch (1974a: 174-8). 74. Fisch (1974a: 174, emphasis added). 75. Fisch (1974a: 174). 76. Fisch (1969: 410). 77. Fisch (1977: 79). 78. Fisch (1977: 105). 79. Fisch (1978: 36). 80. Fisch (1978: 41). 81. The book was published soon thereafter as Verene (1981), and it went on to become one of the key texts consolidating the status of Vico in the Anglophone world. 82. Max Harold Fisch to Bernhard Kendler, 23 January 1980, in Max Harold Fisch, “Verene, Donald Phillip,” Fisch Papers. 83. Max Harold Fisch to Thomas Goddard Bergin, undated, in Fisch, “Vico Notes,” Fisch Papers. 84. Fisch (1971: 189), citing Peirce, ms. 958. 85. Fisch (1971: 208n9). 86. Max Harold Fisch, “Introduction of Sir Isaiah Berlin,” Fisch Papers. 87. Fisch (1978: 34-5, 61-2). 88. Fisch 1954a. 89. Fisch (1980: 272-4); and Fisch (1982: 133). 90. Skinner (1969: 52). 91. Skinner (1998: 112, 118).

ABSTRACTS

This article explores the intellectual life of Max Harold Fisch, the twentieth-century American scholar of Giambattista Vico and Charles S. Peirce. Fisch was a thinker with fundamental commitments to both history and philosophy. The claim here is that his life exemplifies a constitutive tension in the work of intellectual historians, who operate in the interstice between these two disciplines. What we learn is that intellectual historians may have a double investment both in the filigree of particular historical contexts and in the principles that emerge in and then detach from those contexts. The article explores this double investment by following it through five decades of Fisch’s intellectual labor between 1930 and 1980.

AUTHOR

DAVID L. MARSHALL

University of Pittsburgh dlm91[at]pitt.edu

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Reading Allan Marquand’s “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art”

C. Oliver O’Donnell

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The editor would like to thank the staff of Pinceton University Library, especially Don C. Skemer, Chloe Pfendler, AnnaLee Pauls, and Squirrel Walsh, for their help in bringing this transcription to publication.

1 Allan Marquand’s “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” was presented to the Princeton Philosophical Club on 20 January 1889.1 The essay in its entirety was never published, making the transcription of it that follows this introduction an especially interesting historical document for a number of reasons.2 First of all, in 1889 the discipline of art history in America was still very much in its nascent stages; Marquand had been appointed to his professorship – the second of its kind in the entire country – only six years earlier in 1883.3 Thus, it is not an exaggeration to say that the ideas presented in Marquand’s essay were part of the very origin of the discipline of art history in the United States. Despite what Marquand’s ideas helped set in motion, however, and despite what his professional identity would soon be, Marquand had not trained to be an art historian. Rather, as a student he had largely studied philosophy, both as an undergraduate under James McCosh – often described as the last great representative of the Scottish Common Sense tradition – and subsequently during his PhD under none other than Charles Sanders Peirce.4 What makes Marquand’s “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” so interesting and appropriate to discuss and publish in this special issue of The European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy is that it quite clearly lays bare Peirce’s influence on Marquand’s thinking and thus reveals the presence of Pragmatist ideas at a crucial early point in the development of art historical scholarship in the United States.

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2 In what follows, I closely read Marquand’s arguments in “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” both in relation to their sources as well as in relation to Marquand’s own subsequent scholarship. To do so, I organize my thoughts around the structure of Marquand’s, examining the relationships between Marquand and his mentors, contemporaries, and nemeses as they emerge in the course of his essay. My thesis is that while Peirce’s writing is the most conspicuous and important inspiration for the essay, Marquand’s handwritten corrections to the text also reveal a struggle with Peirce’s ideas that can – especially in light of Marquand’s later writing – be read to expose an ambivalent or potentially even critical attitude toward central aspects of Peirce’s thought. Thus while it is important to understand “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” specifically in relation to Peirce, it is also essential to broaden our framework and to place Marquand’s claims in the essay in relation to both preceding and subsequent art historical scholarship.5 Doing so helps flesh out which aspects of Marquand’s essay are clearly indebted to Peirce, which aspects have deeper and more complex historical roots, and perhaps most importantly, how we might understand “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” as foundational for the discipline that partially followed from it.

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3 Marquand hand-scrawled the surviving manuscript of “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” over fifty-five small, loose pages, each no bigger than an A5 sheet of paper. Many of the pages have extensive corrections and some even have pasted-on additions. All in all, the original manuscript reveals the signs of having been edited repeatedly and thoroughly, and considering it remained unpublished during his lifetime, it is safe to say that Marquand was never completely satisfied with its claims or conclusions. Yet, as noted at the outset, Marquand did present the essay to the Princeton Philosophical Club and did publish an abstract of the essay in the Princeton College Bulletin. Passages from the essay also appeared in another text that Marquand published several years later, titled “The History of Art as a University Study,” which was written more for the general audience of the university community than for academic specialists.6 Thus, even though Marquand never published “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art,” it is certain that the ideas presented in the essay played a key role in how Marquand both envisioned and established art history at Princeton.

4 As the essay’s title suggests, “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” is very much a part of the positivistic thinking that by 1889 had long been taking hold within all forms of scholarship – art history being no exception. Much in keeping with the research of Leopold Ranke in history and Auguste Comte in sociology, starting in the 1820s, Karl Friedrich von Rumohr and his followers in Berlin developed an approach to art history that was marked by careful archival research and scrupulous attention to the material dimensions of individual art objects.7 Similarly to Rumohr’s writing, in his essay Marquand advocates an empirical approach, one that, it should be said, also very much mirrors a broader trend in American historical scholarship of the time.8 In Marquand’s subsequent writing he put this general method into practice by, on the one hand, publishing transcriptions of previously unknown archival documents and by, on the other, focusing his practice of attribution on the detailed material qualities of artworks. Just as Rumohr had addressed the question of Giotto’s oeuvre by focusing on the wax

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binding agent that he thought was particular to Giotto’s mode of painting, so too did Marquand write about the glazes used by the Della Robbia, pointing to the particular qualities of those glazes – gritty versus runny, evenly or unevenly applied, marked by certain color combinations, etc. – as a grounds for assigning authorship to specific works.9 While Marquand was not nearly as incredulous about existing attributions as was Rumohr – who was so critical of the attributions of paintings to Giotto in the 1820s that he whittled them down to a single indubitable object – he is likely best and most broadly positioned as a connoisseur of his ilk.10 In this respect it is fitting that Marquand not only maintained a correspondence throughout his professional life with Wilhelm von Bode, the most prominent inheritor of the Berlin-based school of thought that Rumohr helped establish, but also dedicated his first book on the Della Robbia to Bode as “The Pioneer of Robbia Studies.”11 5 In relation to his mentorship under Peirce, that Marquand practiced such a positivistic approach is certainly apt; Peirce himself had advocated and developed a strictly “scientific” method of inquiry, and the Pragmatism that he introduced and championed has often been positioned within the larger history of positivism.12 Considering this commonality, the specific Peircean bent of Marquand’s thinking is important to clarify, and, in this regard, the general structure of Marquand’s essay is key. Marquand begins “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” by describing three alternatives to his preferred method, namely what he calls the mystical, the metaphysical, and the literary. This general structure is deeply reminiscent of Peirce’s well-known claims in “The Fixation of Belief” of 1877.13 Therein Peirce also lays out three alternative and flawed modes of belief in order to differentiate his scientific approach: what he dubs beliefs based on tenacity, on authority, and on a priori principles. While the terminology of Marquand’s essay does not perfectly mirror Peirce’s, considering that Marquand was studying under Peirce at Johns Hopkins when “The Fixation of Belief” had been recently published, it is safe to assume that he knew about the essay and only warranted to take Peirce’s essay as an important model upon which “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” was based.14 As we will see, a close reading of Marquand’s text continues to substantiate this interpretation. 6 By the mystical approach to art Marquand means the belief that the key to or essence of visual art is somehow beyond sensuous apprehension, that art requires some special abilities or faculties to understand. Marquand associates this mode of understanding with a naïve public and with a “priest-craft” that doles out judgments seemingly based on authority alone.15 In “The Fixation of Belief” Peirce too used the examples of theology and religion as examples against which he distinguished his approach, and, like Marquand, uses the example of a “priesthood” to do so.16 Though specific historical writers who fit this method are lacking in Marquand’s essay, the mystical method is more than just an empty straw man for Marquand to tear down. The Princeton Department had quite literally been founded against the idea that “the word Art implies a mystery, which can be penetrated by only a few intellects,”17 or so that is what two of its earliest advocates stated in one of their most public attempts to establish the professorship that Marquand was to occupy. Moreover, as Marquand is sure to point out in his essay, part of why he is so inimical to the so-called mystical method is because it stands opposed to “anything like consensus of thinking minds.”18 With this last phrase Marquand further displays his education both under Peirce and within the tradition of Common Sense philosophy more generally. As is well known, both Peirce and the Scottish Common Sense philosophers defended the central role of

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consensus in the construction of knowledge, a position that is often connected to the New England tradition of town-hall meetings and that has continued to cause much debate among later Pragmatist thinkers.19 While we cannot be certain where Marquand would have positioned himself within these subsequent debates, his appeal to a “consensus of thinking minds” is nonetheless important in understanding how he adapted his philosophical training to art historical purposes. 7 Marquand next distinguishes this mystical approach to art from what he terms the metaphysical method, a distinction that roughly parallels Peirce’s distinction between beliefs based on authority and those based on the a priori. “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” understandably associates the metaphysical approach most heavily with the work of Hegel, but Marquand does also gesture toward forms of idealism more generally. On Marquand’s view, the chief strength of Hegel’s metaphysical method is also its main weakness: it functions through analytic distinctions and definitions, for instance it defines works of art in relation to beauty and then defines beauty itself in relation to further terms. Marquand points out that Hegel’s metaphysics is an improvement over the so-called mystical method in that it subjects itself to the public test of reason and thereby aims to “make our ideas clear,” a turn of phrase that Peirce used to title one of his best-known essays from the period and one whose reappearance within Marquand’s text is hard to see as coincidental.20 Despite this noble goal, however, the price paid for the metaphysical approach is that Hegel’s system focuses more on theoretical definitions and their interrelation than on what Marquand claims to be the actual object of art historical study: “material things.”21 Here Marquand’s insistence that the study of art be first and foremost empirical and realist parallels one of the most lasting legacies of 19th-century “science,” both the naïve and sophisticated. 8 Whether or not Marquand’s own empiricism was as innovative and as complex as Peirce’s is an open question. Marquand’s previous research in philosophy does assure that he was well aware of the long-standing questions over the liabilities surrounding empirical inferences. Indeed, what seems to be the published introduction to his now- lost dissertation is a sophisticated discussion of the ancient debates between the Skeptics, Stoics, and Epicureans about the limits and powers of induction.22 Combined with his training under Peirce and McCosh, it is certain that Marquand was not philosophically naïve. Moreover, if we ourselves approach Della Robbia sculpture through the lens of Marquand’s period and remember the importance of statistics both for the Darwinian revolution and for Peirce himself, the artistic production of the Della Robbia becomes a fitting problem to tackle. Having been created by generations of artists and being made up of over a thousand objects, Robbia ware presents itself as ripe for statistical reasoning.23 Though Marquand did not explicitly publish statistical tabulations of visual characteristics in his study of the Della Robbia, that he did so in other publications shows that he was certainly capable of this type of work and suggests that some implicit form of probabilistic reasoning could even be behind his attributions.24 9 Much in keeping with these interdisciplinary currents, Marquand’s practice of connoisseurship was also heavily based on applying the morphological techniques of the natural sciences to the task of delimiting the oeuvres of individual artists, a practice that is criticized as often as it is praised by art historians today.25 Like his more famous contemporary Giovanni Morelli, Marquand often gauged the authorship of individual art objects by how well the specific features of one of their representational

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details matched the typological features of that same representational detail in an artist’s larger oeuvre.26 Whereas Morelli practiced this method by comparing the depicted ears and hands in paintings attributed to Renaissance masters like Botticelli, Marquand often did so by comparing the eyes found across sculptures attributed to the Della Robbia.27 As critics of this approach are prone to point out, in its heavy focus on mere observables, Morellian connoisseurship inches dangerously close to the hyperbolic reduction of scientific hypotheses to observation alone. The problems with such an approach for historical scholarship are, of course, well known, if not obvious. For one, historical research seeks to understand something that is by definition beyond observation – the past – and thus the notion that historical hypotheses must be verified through observation alone is clearly overstated. Because Peirce himself made similar criticisms of Comte’s positivist method and Marquand did not solely base his attributions on the visual qualities of art objects, one can justifiably believe that Marquand was similarly savvy as to the limits of observation.28 Moreover, unlike Morelli, Marquand was not prone to categorical assertion and openly acknowledged that his connoisseurial claims were only probable, never certain.29 10 The third and final critique that Marquand puts forward in what amounts to his initial negative definition of his own approach is of what he calls the literary method, a distinction that Peirce himself also used.30 Figures as diverse as Giorgio Vasari and Hippolyte Taine serve as Marquand’s representatives of this school of thought, whose method he associates with a focus on expression. On Marquand’s view, even though there are many parallels between visual art and literature, much like the metaphysical approach, the literary method does not place enough emphasis on “the observation of things.”31 The specificity of visual art, in other words, is largely lost when it is approached as if it were a work of literature, and if the study of visual art is to reach its maximum potential, it should rely on methods that allow its practitioners to analyze and understand art objects on their own terms. The validity of this final critique is perhaps less historically interesting than its likely intended object of ridicule: the only other competing model of art historical education and research in the United States at the time. In 1874, Charles Eliot Norton was appointed Professor of Fine Arts as Connected with Literature at Harvard and, by 1889, had already done much to establish art history in the US.32 Considering Norton’s title, the fact that he was a scholar of Dante, and that Marquand explicitly mentions Norton’s mentor, John Ruskin, by name, the direction of Marquand’s third and final critique would have been hard for readers of the time to miss. Norton’s classes were popular at Harvard and his fame was so intense during his lifetime that his friend and fellow Harvard professor William James believed that Norton – rather than himself – would be remembered as one of the greatest voices of his generation.33 While James’s judgment has not stood the test of time and Norton has sunk into historical obscurity, Norton’s popularity and fame would have certainly made him an evident and important alternative for Marquand to distinguish himself against. Moreover, considering Norton’s own critical attitude toward James’s Pragmatism and Marquand’s proximity to that approach thanks to his education under Peirce, it seems only fitting that Marquand would have contrasted his form of art history to that of Norton.34 11 In the face of these various “non-scientific” methods, Marquand defines his approach positively by first offering a broad and rough definition of visual art, an effort that speaks at once to the nascent state of the discipline as well as to his philosophical education in general. Marquand limits his study of “art” to those objects that are

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designed by man to “appeal to us through impressions made upon the eye” and to objects that “arouse the higher forms of consciousness: memory, understanding, imagination, emotion, will.”35 Here we can see that even though Marquand’s “scientific” approach is heavily empirical and deeply critical of philosophical idealism, he recognizes that any study of art that ignores the broad range of human mental activity that art objects often stimulate will be incomplete. Perhaps more surprisingly, despite Marquand’s firm empirical commitments, at scattered points in the essay Marquand’s claims even edge toward some of Peirce’s grand metaphysical speculations: for instance when Marquand introduces the very notion of art in relation to pure chaos as well as when he speaks of alternate universes of color “of which we have never dreamed.”36 In his later art historical scholarship, however, Marquand does not pursue these ideas and does not discuss in any developed way the “higher forms of consciousness” or alternative universes that he appeals to here. Indeed, taken together, Marquand’s subsequent publications amount to a multivolume catalogue raisonné of the Della Robbia workshop, an impressive accomplishment in terms of its encyclopedic aims and reach but one that does not even gesture toward the grand schemes mentioned in this early essay. 12 In this respect it should be pointed out that however indebted “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” is to Peirce, it is hard to see Marquand’s mature writing as fully Peircean. For one, Marquand’s lack of subsequent theorizing lends credence to the characterization of him by one of his friends and colleagues as having a “profoundly anti-metaphysical nature,” a characterization that Marquand himself seems to have at least indirectly courted.37 Not only does Marquand explicitly oppose his method to metaphysics in this early essay, but the very reason why he ended up teaching art’s empirical history at Princeton was because he refused – or perhaps more accurately adapted to his interests – James McCosh’s initial suggestion to teach the philosophy of art.38 Much in keeping with such preferences, when faced with philosophical questions from his old mentor not long after making his disciplinary transition, Marquand resisted taking up such issues and described himself as “an outsider in philosophical matters.”39 Under such descriptions, Marquand’s scholarship is surely closer to that of high positivists, for whom the words “philosophy” and “metaphysics” are often opposed to “science,” rather than to that of Peirce, for whom such an opposition was specious at best. Indeed, Peirce himself once said: “Find a scientific man who proposes to get along without any metaphysics […] and you have found one whose doctrines are thoroughly vitiated by the crude and uncriticized metaphysics with which they are packed.”40 13 Further into “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” we see just how radically committed Marquand was to applying rigorously “scientific” methods to his object of analysis, to describing art, as Peirce might have said, “independent of the vagaries of me and you.”41 In analyzing works of art in terms of their color, he turns immediately to mathematics, specifically to the binomial equation, and deduces from it that there are an infinite number of complementary colors.42 Perhaps what is most interesting about Marquand’s claim is not whether or not it is correct – many questions about color still persist today – but rather how it further suggests that his training in Peircean logic exerted a strong hold upon him.43 Marquand’s algebraic argument is, after all, much more akin to his earlier work with Peirce on a logical machine than to average art historical research of the time.44 Though Marquand’s mathematical tack here is neither without precedent nor without affinity to later scholarship, a similar

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appeal would likely come across as more baffling than intriguing to art historians today. This fact may be lamentable; however, it testifies at once to the distance between Marquand’s approach and contemporary scholarship as well as to the divide between the Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften that has become especially evident in the scholarship of more recent generations.45 14 Much in keeping with Marquand’s strong “scientific” commitments, it comes as no surprise that Marquand also believed that the Darwinian model of evolution – what Peirce called the application of statistics to biology – would be equally applicable to the study of visual art.46 Though today we are justified in criticizing Marquand’s championing of a Darwinian model as overly optimistic, it is important to recognize that Marquand’s praise occurred for a reason. When Marquand penned this essay in the late 1880s, a revolutionary chronological technique was being developed by the British archaeologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie that owed much to Darwinian thinking. Known as sequence analysis, in this technique Flinders Petrie arranged pottery sherds from various archaeological sites into series based on their formal features. He then inferred from these sequences of objects relative, rather than absolute, chronologies and correlated those chronologies with the various stratigraphic layers in which those objects were discovered.47 Given the lack of alternative evidence available at the time, Flinders Petrie’s technique was especially powerful. And while it was neither exact nor infallible, subsequent studies that have relied on more modern techniques – like radiocarbon dating – have confirmed its usefulness.48 When placed in this historical context, we can well understand Marquand’s strong commitment to the formal analysis of art objects. 15 Interestingly, however, and not unimportant, the revisions in the handwritten draft of “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” reveal that Marquand conceptualized his overstated appeal to Darwin specifically in relation to some of Peirce’s claims. In considering which method would be best for studying visual art “scientifically,” Marquand refers to Peirce’s distinctive tripartite scheme of “deduction, induction, and hypothesis.”49 Rather than develop this line of reasoning further, however, Marquand subsequently crossed this explicit reference to Peirce out of his essay. The reasons for Marquand’s change of heart are likely lost to history; however, Peirce’s notion of “hypothesis” was a distinctive one. In fact, Peirce later tried to capture the particularity of his term “hypothesis” by renaming it “abduction,” by which he meant “the process of forming explanatory hypotheses,” “all the operations by which theories and conceptions are engendered.”50 Peirce was even confident enough in his theory of abduction that he dubbed it the experimental mode of inference that lay behind his philosophy in general – his Pragmatism.51 While the validity of such a claim is disputable and Peirce’s notion of abduction is controversial, the continued interest in his writing, not to mention the growth of neo-Pragmatist thinking across disciplines today, makes Marquand’s passing and excised reference to Peirce’s term for theoretical invention especially intriguing. Combined with the early place of “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” within the history of art history, we might wonder what art historiography would look like today if Marquand had embraced Peirce’s conceptualization of the role of theory in science – let alone Peirce’s vast metaphysics in general. 16 In closing, such speculation is especially fitting because most art historians today would likely – at least at first glance – understand Peirce’s and Marquand’s writing as

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deeply antithetical. Though much of this essay has been dedicated to showing why such a judgment is flawed, the fact is that the recent art historical rediscovery of Peirce’s scholarship was motivated not by the confidence in inductive inference found in Marquand’s catalogues but rather by a skepticism and doubt concerning the discipline’s possession of a sufficiently robust grasp of its own philosophical foundations. Indeed, art historians today most often associate Peirce’s name with the discipline’s semiotic turn in the 1980s and ’90s, a turn that largely interpreted Peirce’s writing as an ally of deconstructive ends.52 Thus it would seem that if Marquand had more fully embraced Peirce’s project and developed his connoisseurship on a more explicitly theoretical basis, the “crisis of the discipline” that Henri Zerner and Hans Belting announced in the 1980s would likely have confronted vastly different art historical precedents.53 Moreover, now that we stand on the other side of that crisis and have the privilege of hindsight, it seems clear that the largely negative thrust of art history’s deconstructive moment was only partially sufficient. Clearly what is still needed is a working out in a positive manner of new art historical principles upon which the fundamental practices of the discipline – practices like Marquand’s connoisseurship – can be based. That art historians continue to struggle with such a task is itself a testament to the valuable work that Marquand himself might have done if he had further developed the Peircean dimension of his early thought, if “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” had not remained an unpublished, handwritten essay but rather had become a true monograph on the “scientific method” behind Marquand’s – and thus our – history of art.54

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VON RUMOHR Karl Friedrich, (1827-31), Italienische Forschungen, 3 vols, Berlin, Nicolai.

VON RUMOHR Karl Friedrich, (1988), “On Giotto,” in Gert Schiff (ed.), German Essays on Art History, New York, Continuum, 73-94.

VON STOCKHAUSEN Tilmann, (2007) “Wilhelm von Bode,” Klassiker der Kunstgeschichte 1, 141-51.

SNOW C. P., (1959), The Two Cultures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

SUMMERS David, (2003), Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, London, Phaidon.

TURNER James, (1999), The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press.

WOLLHEIM Richard, (1974), “Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of Scientific Connoisseurship,” in Art and the Mind, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 177-201.

ZERNER Henri, (1982), “The Crisis in the Discipline,” Art Journal, 42, 4, 279.

NOTES

1. The original manuscript is housed in the Allan Marquand Papers, Box 10, Folder 22, Firestone Library, Princeton University. For a published abstract of the paper, see Marquand (1889: 56-7). 2. Allan Marquand (2016: 290-8). 3. For a more thorough contextual discussion of Marquand’s appointment, see Marilyn Lavin 1983. For an additional contextualization of Marquand’s appointment, see Betsy Rosasco 1996. 4. On McCosh, see Hoeveler 1981. On Marquand’s work with Peirce, see Nathan Houser (1989: xix- lxx); Max Fisch (1986; esp. 230-1). 5. For a helpful overview of these developments, see Kleinbauer 1971. For perhaps the best- known discussion of the place of American scholarship within longer-term disciplinary developments, see Panofsky 1953. 6. Marquand 1892. 7. Rumohr’s most extensive statement of his views is found in his Italienische Forschungen (1827-31). For a contextual discussion of Rumohr’s work, see Enrica Yvonne Dilk 2000. For a brief but recent introductory overview of the emergence of “scientific” approaches to art history in the German tradition see, Matthew Rampley (2013; esp. 18-21). 8. For an extensive discussion of this development, see Peter Novack 1988.

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9. For an example of Marquand’s use of differences in the material qualities glazes as a ground for attribution, see Marquand 1912. 10. Rumohr’s discussion of Giotto is found in his Italienische Forschungen. For a translation of this chapter, see Rumohr 1988. 11. Marquand 1912. The extant letters from Marquand to Bode begin in 1883 and end in 1921. They are housed in the Nachlass Wilhelm von Bode in the Zentralarchiv of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Bode’s letters to Marquand are housed in the Allan Marquand Papers, Princeton University Library, (Box 11, Folder 46). For a discussion of Rumohr’s so-called “Berlin School,” see Gabriele Bickendorf (2007: 46-61). For a discussion of Bode in particular, see Tilmann von Stockhausen (2007: 141-51). 12. For instance, Leszek Kolakowski 1968. 13. Charles Sanders Peirce (1992 [1877]: 109-23). 14. Marquand earned his PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1880 and he took multiple courses with Peirce while there, including his general course in logic, his course in medieval logic, and two courses in advanced logic. Marquand also gave papers at that Peirce founded at Hopkins in 1879. See, Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen & Jean-Marie Chevalier 2014. 15. Marquand (2016: 290). 16. Peirce (1992 [1877]: 117). 17. William C. Prime & George B. McClellan (1882: 15-6). 18. Marquand (2016: 290). 19. For an example of a scholar who connects the consensus theory of truth to New England town meetings, see 2003. For debates among current Pragmatist philosophers about the consensus theory of truth, see, for instance, Cheryl Misak’s criticisms of Richard Rorty in her, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (1999). 20. Marquand (2016: 292). Charles Sanders Peirce (1992 [1878]: 124-41). 21. Marquand (2016: 292). 22. Marquand 1883a. 23. For an example of the large number of objects that were attributed to the della Robbia workshop during Marquand’s lifetime, see Maud Cruttwell 1902. 24. For an example of Marquand’s use of statistics to analyze the style of visual art objects, see Marquand (1894: 521-32). 25. For a critical take on this approach, see Karen Lang (2006; esp. 179-98). For a more affirmative take, see Richard Wollheim 1974. 26. On Morrelli in general, see Carol Gibson-Wood 1988. On Morelli’s relation to inductive reasoning see, Carlo Ginzburg 1980. On this point it should be noted that Morelli’s method owed much to the morphological techniques of Louis Agassiz, whose work was also greatly admired by Peirce. For Morelli’s debt to Agassiz, see Margaret Olin 2012; Richard Pau 1993. 27. For a discussion of Marquand’s approach and lasting contribution to Della Robbia scholarship see, Marietta Cambareri (2014: 13-21). I would like to thank Rachel Boyd for this reference. 28. For Peirce’s criticisms of Comte’s positivism see, Peirce 1904. 29. For Marquand’s acknowledgement of his fallibilism, see Marquand (1922: vii). Marquand also strongly criticized Josef Strygowski for having too much confidence in his categorical claims about the Middle Eastern origins of early Christian art. See Marquand 1910. 30. A clear instance of this is found in Peirce’s essay “What Pragmatism is,” Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 5.414. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Tullio Viola for this reference especially and for other references found in this essay as well. 31. Marquand (2016: 293). 32. For the most comprehensive account of Norton’s appointment and life, see James Turner 1999. Despite their differences, like Marquand, Norton owed much to Scottish Common Sense philosophy. For this connection see, Linda Dowling 2007. On this point it should also be noted

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that, like Marquand, Norton himself published transcriptions of unpublished primary sources in his books. See Norton 1880. 33. For James’s comment about Norton, see William James to Alice James, 23 August 1891, in James (1961: 137). James Turner notes in his biography of Norton that at the height of his fame, close to a third of the Harvard undergraduate student body – some 451 students – attended his course “Fine Arts 3.” See Turner (1999: 375). 34. Norton (1913: 412). 35. Marquand (2016: 294). 36. Marquand (2016: 298). For instance, one might compare Marquand’s ideas here to those of Peirce as expressed in his “A Guess at the Riddle,” The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 245-79. 37. Quoted in Rosasco (1996: n.164, 49). 38. Marquand’s decision to teach art history is recounted in both Lavin’s 1983 and Rosasco 1996. 39. Quoted in Ketner (1984: 208). 40. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Hartshorne, Weiss, and Burks, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931-58, 1: 129. 41. Peirce (1992: 52). 42. Marquand (2016: 298). 43. For a lucid discussion of various problems with our understanding of color that persist today see, Alva Noë (2004: 123-61). For a representative art historical approach to color, see John Gage 1999. 44. For Marquand’s work with Peirce on a logical machine, see Marquand 1883b. It should be noted here that this machine not only worked but has even been taken as an important object in the development of computers. 45. Perhaps the most well-known statement about this divide is by Snow 1959. This divide was very much being articulated within Marquand’s milieu, especially by writers like Wilhelm Dilthey and Wilhelm Windelband. Though it is unknown exactly how Marquand thought about this divide, it seems reasonable to assume that he would have downplayed it and advocated for a more unified view of “scientific” research across the humanities, social, and physical sciences. 46. Peirce (1992 [1877]: 111). 47. On the origins of Flinders Petrie’s sequence dating techniques, see Dower 1985. For Marquand’s interest and excitement about Petrie’s work in general, see Marquand (1891: 12-4). Marquand was one of the founding editors of the American Journal of Archaeology and was thus likely familiar with Flinders Petrie’s techniques from quite early on. 48. For example, see Richard MacNeish’s relative chronologies of pottery (MacNeish 1970). 49. Marquand (2016: 295). 50. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5: 172, 590. 51. For a discussion of Peirce’s theory of abduction and how it relates to his Pragmatism, see Burks 1946. For a more extensive treatment of Peirce’s notion of abduction, see Fann 1970. 52. A good example of such an interpretation is Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson (1991: 174-208). For a consideration of art history’s incomplete engagement with Peirce see, James Elkins (2003: 5-22). 53. Henri Zerner (1982: 279); Hans Belting 1983. 54. Art historians have long dedicated themselves to this type of positive theory building, though perhaps because of early models like Marquand, it has taken English-language art history an especially long time to catch up. In this regard, two relatively recent books are especially noteworthy, Summers 2003; Davis 2011.

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ABSTRACTS

In this introduction I closely read Marquand’s arguments in “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art” both in relation to their sources and in relation to Marquand’s own subsequent scholarship. My thesis is that Charles Sanders Peirce’s writing is the most conspicuous and important inspiration for the essay; however I also contend that Marquand’s handwritten corrections to the surviving manuscript of the text reveal a struggle with Peirce’s ideas that can – especially in light of Marquand’s later writing – be read to expose an ambivalent or potentially even critical attitude toward central aspects of Peirce’s thought. I conclude by noting that Marquand’s intellectual relationship with Peirce speaks to both the past, present, and future of art historical scholarship.

AUTHOR

C. OLIVER O’DONNELL

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz oliver.odonnell[at]khi.fi.it

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On Scientific Method in the Study of Art

Allan Marquand C. Oliver O’Donnell (ed.)

EDITOR'S NOTE

[undated, delivered 1889] transcribed and edited by C. Oliver O’Donnell. For the original manuscript, see “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art”; dates not examined; Allan Marquand Papers (C0269), Box 10 Folder 22; Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

1 The original manuscript is handwritten in pen and pencil on fifty-five loose sheets of paper, each measuring approximately 14 x 20 cm. The original pages are numbered in the top left corner; however, there are two pages numbered 30 and no page 23, presumably due to extensive editing on Marquand’s part. In addition to Marquand’s at times difficult handwriting, there are many corrections in the original manuscript (including extensive crossings-out and even some pasted over sections) which make deciphering some sentences difficult. To facilitate future comparisons and potential corrections, I have marked the end of each page in the original manuscript with corresponding numbers in brackets within the text of this transcription. Sections of text in brackets in this transcription indicate doubt as to Marquand’s intent or an addition made by the editor for the sake of clarification. Sections of text in this transcription with strike-through font indicate that Marquand crossed these words out in the original manuscript. I have omitted the vast majority of Marquand’s crossings- out; however, those that I judged to be of interest for intellectual history and that could be incorporated with ease, I have included. Underlined sections in this transcription reflect underlining in the original manuscript.

2 The reformation of the sciences by means of which we have received a new chemistry, a new astronomy, a new science of which and a new history is the result of applying to

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these departments of knowledge the method of observation and reasoning now known as the scientific method. This method is not very new with application to the study of art and yet so lasting have been the results [1] of unscientific attempts that it is worth our while to stop and consider, perhaps to justify the method of our work. [Let us glance first at those unscientific methods to be distinguished from ours.] 3 1. The mystical method. It is a very general belief amongst uneducated people that art is a mystery which they cannot comprehend which nevertheless they can apprehend and admire. How many a man or a woman do we see standing in rapt admiration over a picture or a statue, simply because they apprehend that it was a work of art. Whether it was [2] fine art or despicable art they make no attempt to decide but appeal for such judgment to the guidance of others. To supply the demand for such judgments there spring up pretending critics whose only function it is to pronounce upon works of art. What the foundation of those judgments may be matters little provided they be clear and distinct and the popular want is satisfied. It is enough to say of the mystical method that there is no such mystery in works of art. There is no super or sub natural quality that removes art from human comprehension; and no necessity therefore for an artistic priest-craft, and no hope that by this method we could ever reach judgments of permanent value, or anything like consensus of thinking minds. [3]

Allan Marquand, first page of “On Scientific Method in the Study of Art.”

Delivered in 1889, Allan Marquand Papers (C0269), Box 10 Folder 22. Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

4 A second method which we claim as unscientific may be best designated as the metaphysical method. Thinkers of this class transfer the distinctions of philosophy to the domain of art. They look upon art as and [as a phenomenon] to

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be explained by the ideas which philosophy supplies. One of the principle distinctions which they have succeeded in applying to the value of art – and to literature as well – is the distinction between the real and the ideal. [The distinction has no longer a vigorous vital hold upon philosophy itself. It not only involves a confusion of thought, inasmuch as real things are not identical with non-ideal things and idealities are not identical with unrealities, but it no longer expresses an important means of classifying philosophical thinkers.] [4] Whenever [this distinction] has been adopted in art criticism it has only [made] confusion of thought. We shall be better off by rejecting it altogether.

5 Another notion which has a still stronger hold upon our [conceptions] concerning art is that it is concerned with the Beautiful. But metaphysical conceptions of the beautiful fall short of the requirements [of a scientific method] because they import as fundamental [5] notions which are not fundamental to art. Thus with Hegel, the beautiful is the absolute in sensuous existence, the actuality of the Idea in the form of limited manifestation. All I need say [of] the connection is that if the object of our search be the absolute as the Idea, we [may] undoubtedly widen our conceptions by considering works of art in addition to other phenomena. But if our search be limited to works of art, our fundamental notion must be that of art itself. [6] As a matter of fact beauty may be present or absent in works of art. We may search for it there, if we please – but we may search for it as well in the orderly arrangement of the stars, in the constructive characters of chemical combinations, in physics, in botany, in biology, in literature. [Once the conception of beauty has been objectively established, it will be interesting to have its developments in works of art. But in works of art as a whole, beauty is so rarely a leading motive that this inquiry would confine our attention to a comparatively narrow field.] 6 The metaphysical method is a step in advance of the mystical [7] and for two reasons. First, by an analysis of the contents of consciousness it seeks to do away with mysteries and make our ideas clear. Second, by the very attempt to reach rational judgments, it abandons the individualistic position of the mystic and reaches conclusions the grounds of which may be tested by other minds. Metaphysical methods have sometimes anticipated the results of science, as when Swedenborg anticipated the nebular hypothesis of La Place – but far more presently have metaphysicians failed, when they have attempted to go beyond the universe of ideas and deal with material things. [8] 7 A third method in which the subject of art is frequently approached we may call the literary method. I do not now refer to the use which is made of works of art as a means of reconstructing before our imagination the records of past history and literature, but of the infusion into the study of art the spirit of literary work. As I take it the distinguishing [9] characteristic of the student of literature is the attention he has to expression. Thoughts or ideas are merely incidental to the literary student. They are included in the material or presuppositions of his study. He has nothing to do with them until they are expressed and then it is with the expression rather than the thought that his work is concerned. The practical creator of literature finds himself in natural sympathy with other artists because he sees in the architectonic, plastic, graphic and musical arts [10] forms of expression more or less similar to his own. The various arts are to him other languages, some closely others distantly related to his own, but all languages which man speaks to man. We cannot listen to one of Wagner’s late operas without being impressed with the linguistic power of the artist who can

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express the most varied feelings through the medium of musical forms. Similarly we are impressed with [Michelangelo’s] pictures as an eloquent appeal for greater humanity in religion, in the administration of justice and in the intercourse of nations with each other. 8 There are indeed many points of analogy between the art of writing and the other arts and it is certainly helpful when anyone [11] of these, which may have progressed more rapidly than the others, should diffuse the benefits of that progress to its sister arts. Thus architecture may present us with the clearest notions of construction, sculpture with that of form, painting may teach us the secrets of color and light, and music the worth of harmony. Even if the special idea of one art should be discernible in all the rest, the fullest development of that art cannot be secured except upon the condition of freedom. Kant recognized this when he [tells] us that art is free production and [Victor] Cousin when he says “a condition of art which it cannot renounce without being destroyed is that it be free, or in other words that it be the servant of nothing except itself.” [12] Sculpture and painting are enslaved to architecture[;] they cannot be more than constructed ornament and decoration. It is only as free and independent arts that their own growth can reach its highest point. A similar misfortune befalls the study of art, if it be pursued merely in the spirit of literary study. We may as a result have beautifully written lines of the artists (as Vasari), or elaborate works upon various schools of art treated still in the metaphysical method (e.g. Lübke), we may have literary treatises whose subject is art (e.g. Ruskin, Taine) and yet feel something wanting. [13] The product is merely a department of literature, interesting to men of literary tastes rather than helpful to the cause of art. 9 The demand which practical artists make upon the thinking of today is that objects rather than ideas or persons, or modes of expression, should be made the foremost subject of study so that the experience of the past may be available for practical guidance in the future. Neither the mystical [14] nor the metaphysical nor the literary thinkers are sufficiently skilled in the observation of things, as distinguished from ideas and words, to take upon [themselves] this task in hand. Nor can [this task] be relegate to practitioners absorbed as they are in the technical methods of special arts. What is needed is evidently that a wider survey of the subject be taken under the guidance of the scientific method, which has been so fruitful in its results in other departments of knowledge. A leading characteristic of the scientific method is the application of experience to the increase of knowledge. And this is precisely what is needed in the present case – a [summarizing] [15] of the laws which are obtainable from a study of objects of art and an application of such laws to near cases. We need not discuss the possibility of the scientific method in dealing with this subject for that method is applicable in all departments of knowledge wherever the class of phenomena are sufficiently clear and distinct to be made the object of observation. It is necessary only to separate from other phenomena those which shall be our special subject of study. 10 In the widest sense art comprehends all things we find in any way put together, formed or made. In this sense art is distinguished [16] from chaos. In the condition of perfect chaos there are no laws. In the condition of art, the universe assumes form and statements may be made concerning it which are either true or false. It is evident then that all sciences in the widest sense deal with objects of art and we must proceed to bring our subject within practical limitations.

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11 A second and more limited definition of art, confines it to the things formed or made by man. This distinguishes art from nature, [17] a distinction which we must be careful to regard as a practical limitation rather than as a definition. Art is not ever in this limited sense, opposed to nature, but rather a part of a fulfilment of nature – that part of nature in which man appears distinctly as formative agent. [18] The things made by man form [an] art-universe by themselves, not unrelated to, but a part of the great universe of art not made by man. But this lesser universe is large enough, yet far too large to form a field of study by itself. We must still further limit the subject before we can handle it practically. The total universe of things made by man shows very different characters. It is in the widest sense an artistic process by which man [19] forms mythologies, , [and] sciences, yet the results differ greatly from those of architecture, sculpture, and painting, which may have been [inspired] by precisely the same motives. Discussed as products the latter are distinguished from the rest as being visible products. They appeal to us through impressions made upon the eye. This suggests a differentiation of all the sensible from the insensible products of human activity and it is evident that to the former [20] rather than [to] the latter that the science of art is limited. The sensible arts would then be naturally classified according to the sense organ through which they make their appeal to us. [Gastronomies], [perfumes], music and sculpture fall naturally into their own classes. So divergent however are these fields of study from an objective standpoint that the practical student must still further limit his field. [21] Let us then confine our attention to the arts which address themselves to the organ of sight, leaving music and poetry and all the arts which appeal to us through the other senses to form separate fields by themselves. 12 Our definition is not yet complete. The arts do not aim to impress the senses merely, but through sense impressions to arouse the higher forms of consciousness[:] memory, understanding, imagination, [22] emotion, will. In this complete sense we exclude from our field all products of activity that serve a purely material purpose. A house, if it be a mere box for shelter, is not specifically a work of art. It becomes so only when by its proportions, the relations of its voids and solids, its decorative members and other such qualities, an appeal is made to our higher consciousness. A dress may be a mere covering for the body – and mere garments are hardly more than this – [24] or it may be designed to arouse the emotion of others – as women’s dresses sometimes are – and thus become a work of art. In this more specific sense art is to be distinguished from manufacture and other similar forms of industry. [25] 13 It is because of this latter purpose that architecture, sculpture, and painting have been selected as convenient classifications of the visible arts. This classification, it will be recognized, is not exhaustive or complete. It is practical rather than logical and is too frequently adopted, because of its convenience, without being investigated or understood. A thorough classification of the visible arts should rather proceed to indicate the kinds of things that affect the organ of sight. These we may distinguish broadly according as they affect us by means of form or color. [26]

Form I) Lines – graphic 1) drawing – pencil, pen, crayon, brush, etc. arts 2) engraving – copper, wood, etc.

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3) Etching = 1) + 2)

4) Weaving – embroiders, lace, textiles

1) marble & stone cutting, wood, ivory

II) Surfaces – plastic 2) ceramics, bronzes, moulded glass arts

3) wrought iron, refuse, hammered

III) Solids - architecture architecture

I) Light & shade 1) selection of shades, use of light & shadow

Color II) color - Playing of color (mosaic (glass, ivory, woods, stone, marble, chromatics illumination))(painting(wood, canvas)

[27]

14 Having selected the class of objects however limited or extensive that class may be – by what method shall we proceed to study them? By all means let us adopt the method by which our knowledge of the subject may be best extended and by which our conclusions may receive the concurrence of all who may properly examine the facts. [28] What we need is not so much [a knowledge of the principles of induction, deduction and hypothesis] to import a system of thought into the subject, as it is to secure from the start the right point of view and a few inspiring ideas to guide us in entering upon our work. [29] The point of view which we have reached as the right [one] is the simple and direct study of the facts, accepting from every other department all the help we need and enslaving ourselves to none with our [energies.] Directed to the complete organization of knowledge within our limited sphere and ever asking to apply this knowledge to unlock the meaning of new facts and reveal the existence of new laws. [30]

15 We have recently been told what that method has done for our knowledge of history and politics and we cannot be blind to the fact that the most fruitful study that is given to the department of art at the present day is inspired by the same scientific spirit. Ever since the close of the last century the [29/30] method of work in this department has become more and more exact and the excavations, investigations and discoveries more and more significant. This method we believe has been a natural growth within the limits of the subject, rather than a method foisted upon us from without. Within a year after Darwin had published his Origin of Species there appeared in England a work on the Development of Christian Architecture in Italy [by William Sebastian Okely] in which the gradual evolution of one species of architecture out of another was distinctly shown by a [31] series of diagrams. This idea of evolution is one of the inspiring ideas we have referred to as leading to fruitful results. It is already revolutionizing the old ideas of spontaneously generated arts. Even Greek Art, which stands most prominently to the imagination as the shining example of original and creative minds, is more and more being recognized as dependent upon the Orient for almost the entire series of its forms. When therefore any artistic form is presented to the mind and we seek to understand

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it, we are at once led to [32] inquire into the series of persisting forms which prepared the way for it, assuming that artistic forms develop not per saltum but by a gradual series of changes. 16 To establish a series of forms is an important task to which the student of today is called to contribute his share of labor. This is not a mere archaeological task, in the sense that we are satisfied when we have ascertained the relative antiquity of objects, it is a scientific task of establishing a progressive series so that any particular [33] form in the series may be better understood in the light of what has preceded and followed it. We may borrow from the archaeologist all that he may have ascertained with regard to the antiquity of the monuments in which we are interested. This will aid us in establishing our series. The archaeologist on the other hand may frequently have no other means of determining the antiquity of an object than by the position it occupies in such a formal series. He then becomes the borrower from the student of artistic forms. The two cover the same field [34] when the archaeologist limits his attention to artistic objects and the student of art limits his to the archaeological side of his subject. 17 The attempt to establish a series indicating the actual state of progress in any department of art gives rise to a new exercise of the imagination. Only in comparatively recent times can we expect to find actually existing monuments in sufficient number to enable us to trace the development from actually existing [specimens]. Here also and still more in the art of remote periods are we obliged to reconstruct in [our] imagination forms that no longer exist in part. [35] Such reconstructions may be accomplished with far greater security today than they could have been a few generations ago. When a writer like Mr. Fergusson [restores] to [our] imagination an Assyrian palace with a careless mingling of Russian, Greek and Assyrian elements we at once discard his reconstruction as worthless. Even an elementary knowledge of ancient art is sufficient to inform us that such hybrid specimens could never have existed in ancient Assyria. The use of the scientific [36] imagination is in constant demand in the history of art. So many objects come down to us in fragmentary condition – in so many series. There are missing links that we are constantly required to complete by supplying the absent data. The exercise of the scientific imagination is one of the inspiring factors in the new method of work. It is of the nature of prediction and such predictions are being constantly verified. When Dr. Waldstein recognized in an unclassified marble head in the Louvre workmanship, he predicted that it would fit upon one of [37] the headless Lapiths of the Parthenon metopes and so it did. When Brunn recognized in a few statues in Italy characteristics of style that seemed to radiate from the west coast of Asia Minor, he predicted the great discoveries in Pergamon which since have been made. [38] 18 A still wider prospect and still stronger inspiration is in store when the comparative methods of research are adopted. The tracing of the line of a single art form implies a constant comparison. Without such comparisons we could not establish our series – but we shall find the same original form under different conditions following different lines of development [39] or the various arts in any one country progressing at differing rates. Thus Byzantine art in extending to southern countries is developed in the direction of the graphic arts. Under Mohammedian influence it [undergoes] an architectural decline while its ornamental and decorative features are developed to an extraordinary degree. Travelling northward its graphic elements remain unchanged for centuries, but architecturally it develops with the bizarre forms of complicated

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[domical] structures of the Russian churches. [40] Such differences as these are interesting from the comparative standpoint and offer a new series of problems for [solution]. The agreements also are no less striking. In Greek architecture and sculpture we find low, sturdy forms succeeded by higher, slenderer ones – the same order of development that we find in the transition from Romanesque to Gothic. Is this to be explained by the similarities of human nature? Then what are the traits in human nature which [41] lead men under the most varied circumstances to follow the same order of growth? Or is it to be explained by a similarity of social conditions? Then what are the conditions that thus effect the artistic development of a people? Thus the comparative method leads us at once into contact with psychological and sociological problems. [I have often thought it strange that political [economists] of note should expend so much labor upon the commodities which we have classed as objects of industrial art and that they affect to despise the objects of fine arts as useless luxuries – as if an object which supplied a bodily want were more useful than that which stimulates and nurtures and calms the mind. For the purposes of scientific study as well as for the purposes of the things themselves, our sympathies are [with] the man who said “give me then the luxuries and let the necessities take care of themselves.”] [42] 19 We have thus far treated our subject as a mere study of forms and principles concerning [43] forms. We have also to consider the element of color as another mode by which objects impress us through the eye. This is a more difficult subject than the study of forms, especially as color is usually considered in works of art as a mere concomitant of form. But it is evident that the various modes of influencing the mind by means of the colors must fall within the sphere of our study. All the possibilities of color combinations whether by the mixing of pigments or of [44] lights or the purely subjective combinations should be known to the student of art both as matters of experimental research & as objects of historic [interpretation]. It is easy, for example, if we should proceed in a purely empirical way to accept only a few pairs of colors as complementary to each other. Whereas if by being complementary we mean that color which being combined with the other will give white light, it is easy to see that the number of such pairs is infinite. For if x stand for white [45] light & a for any color, it is evident that x – a will be the complementary of a, whatever a may be. And from the coefficient of the binomial theorem we may determine exactly how many pairs of complementary colors there will be, under any given analogies of white light. 20 Let …

x = white light

a = a color or combination of color

b = x – a , the complementary of a

n = the number of colors into which white light is analyzed

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21 So much for the number of complementary colors – but there will be many other numerical [46] and non-numerical relations of colors which must be introduced into a comprehensive study of the subject. The chemist, the physicist, the psychologist, the student of classical literature, and lastly the physicians may all interest themselves in the subject of color. Still there remains the point of view [of] the student of art to determine the conditions and laws under which the universe of color may be made to satisfy the psychical want of man. We have only in our imagination or in fact [to] eliminate the element of color and what a different universe would this be. We have [47] again only to adjust polarizing apparitions and we have revealed to [ourselves] a whole universe of colors that under normal conditions we never see. There may be still other universes of color within our grasp of which we have never dreamed. The utilization of all the possibilities of color for psychical purpose belong to the artists. [48] 22 Thus far we have spoken of forms and colors as things in themselves and outlined a method of the study which is akin to the biological method on the one side [and the] mathematical-physical on the other. The analogy of the scientific study of art and the present study of biology is a striking one. In the study of constructions, implements, and drawings of prehistoric, primitive or underdeveloped man, we have [49] a department corresponding to paleontology. In this study of historic art we have the morphology of the subject. In the comparative view of different arts, or the arts of different peoples, we have a department corresponding to comparative morphology. And finally in the interpretation of artistic forms we have the physiology of art. In the study of color the analogies to the biological treatment are not so striking. [50] The physiology or interpretation of art comes last for the forms must be studied as forms before their meaning can be properly understood. In this part of our subject we view works of art as serving a purpose. [51] That purpose we recognize in our definition as a psychological one as the end and aim of a work of art is through sense impression to excite some kind of psychic feeling. This affords us a new basis of classification. Some works of art address mainly the senses, the gratification of the eye by combinations of form and color. Others address the imagination and lift us above the commonplace into a new ideal universe. And again others appeal to the memory [52] and recall scenes or faces which we do not wish to lose. But we cannot rest content with a psychological classification alone. What we wish to know is not the mental [53] faculty of the nervous centres involved in the contemplation of artistic things. This falls to the lot of the psychologist. What we wish to know in interpreting a work of art is not only (1) its purpose but also (2) how that purpose has been accomplished (process) [and] (3) whether it has been accomplished in the best possible way (degree of success). All of these three questions are to be determined from a study of the objects themselves and from other similar objects rather than from the feelings they excite within us. Hence in the interpretation of works of art[,] [54] if we would eliminate as far as possible the personal equation and reach conclusions of general and enduring value, we must proceed methodologically – and in our judgment, the best method to secure that result is the scientific method.[55]

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Symposia. Pragmatism and the Writing of History

Interviews

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Genesis and Geltung An Interview with Hans Joas

Tullio Viola and Hans Joas

Tullio VIOLA – One of the most relevant aspects of your intellectual career is your reflection on the link between historical and normative arguments with regard to values. This reflection goes back at least to your 1997 book The Genesis of Values, and may be seen to culminate in the methodological chapter of your 2011 book on The Sacredness of the Person, in which you talk about the need for an “affrmative genealogy” of values. As you have made clear many times (most recently in the article “Pragmatismus und Historismus” in the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie for 2015, published in English in the new volume “The Timeliness of G. H. Mead” that you yourself edited together with Daniel Huebner), this historicist argument has many points of contact with pragmatism. Hans JOAS – In the debate about my book The Sacredness of the Person it has been remarked that the main foundation of my argument – and even the main foundation for the methodological chapter of the book – is not pragmatism. The main source of the argument itself is Emile Durkheim’s sociology of religion, which I have applied to non-religious, mostly secular values; and the main foundation of the methodological chapter is the Protestant theologian, historian, and sociologist Ernst Troeltsch, and particularly his last work Historicism and its Problems. What I think I could show, however, is, first, that there are connections between pragmatism and Troeltsch’s methodology; and second, that there are connections between William James’ psychology of religion and the fundamental argument coming from Durkheim about the sacredness of the person. (Actually I even realized that William James in several passages uses the expression “sacredness of the individual.”) So, in both respects pragmatism is not the main source of my inspiration here, but something with which my main sources of inspiration in this book have strong affinities. And the article in the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie that you have mentioned has been written precisely to demonstrate in detail the connection between American pragmatism and the most mature version of German historicism, as we find it in Troeltsch.

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Tullio VIOLA – However, your later books seem to push pragmatism more into the background in comparison with your early work. Is there something specifc you could not fnd in pragmatism, which has now become more important? Hans JOAS – When you say that I’m coming from pragmatism, this is of course true in some sense. But I’m not American and I was not originally trained in America. From the very outset, my interest in pragmatism was filtered through German historicism. And this is true even in my first book on Mead. As a young man, I had the (megalomaniac) ambition to write a biography of G. H. Mead in the same sense in which W. Dilthey had written a biography of Schleiermacher – i.e., to study an author of the past who, for a reason that you may understand at first only intuitively, is totally attractive to you, so that you have the feeling you want to read everything that author has ever written, and you want to understand in detail why that author changed opinion or attitude at certain points in time, and you want to give a genetic reconstruction of an author who is totally fascinating to you individually. So, when I began my research on Mead and found out – here where we are sitting, in the archive of the then East Berlin University – that Mead had indeed studied with Dilthey, that fact had a kind of “electrical” importance for me. Not only was Dilthey the methodological role model for my study about Mead, but there was indeed an intellectual connection between the two. This connection told me that Mead’s own move in the direction of a pragmatist philosophy that is oriented toward the social sciences was already influenced by Dilthey’s historicism. So, as you can see from this story, I’ve always moved within the tension between pragmatism and historicism, and I now feel to be at the point at which I can spell this out more clearly and contribute to a possible synthesis of these two great schools of thinking.

Tullio VIOLA – So let us try to delve a bit deeper into the connections between pragmatism and what you now call “affrmative genealogy.” One such connection, it seems to me, is the idea that human action is inherently creative, as you describe it in your 1992 book The Creativity of Action. Hans JOAS – In my book on creativity I emphasize that every creative process has a passive dimension. To put it bluntly, you cannot find the creative solution to a problem if that solution does not come to you. You can decide that you would like to solve the problem, but you cannot decide that you will indeed solve the problem! The inspiration for your creative act has to come from somewhere. Now, when we deal with the emergence of values, this passive dimension is even stronger. You may not even have thought about solving a problem in this case; and yet, you are confronted with the attractive qualities of certain values – of certain evaluative, holistic orientations. And I say “confronted” in the sense that you realize only after the fact that something in you had already been pre-disposed to accept what has suddenly come to you. This is something that William James, in his psychology of religious conversion, has described very vividly. But the same is true when no proper conversion takes place, and you simply experience an oscillation with regard to your values: in some phases of your life, your value orientation may somehow lose its vitality, or needs to be revitalized. That is true for individuals and it is true for collectivities. So, for example, when I write about the abolition of slavery, and about how important Christian motivations were for that movement in the U.S., people sometimes object that Christianity had been around for a long time, so it cannot simply be Christianity that led to the abolition of slavery. But this is exactly my point: You need a kind of collective “re-awakening” (I take that term from American

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religious history), which I call an intensification of a motivation derived from a morality that had already been your morality before. The notion of “affirmative genealogy,” in turn, refers to the idea that the processes of the genesis of values – of the emergence of new ideals – in human history are indeed highly contingent; but that the contingency of the emergence of a value does not mean that the value can only be relevant to the people somehow immediately connected to the processes of this emergence. Something comes into the world as a point of orientation under very contingent circumstances; but can then become a point of orientation for people who have nothing to do with the cultural, economic, political processes that led to the emergence of those values. To put it less abstractly, we could say that – whether we are Christian believers or not – Christianity somehow emerged in a strange corner of the Roman Empire, as a sort of revolutionary transformation of Ancient Judaism. But the relevance of Christianity has not been confined to the Roman Empire, or to Jews. On the contrary, it has become an important source of inspiration for contemporary people, say, in South Korea. Why? In the process of the emergence of an ideal, something has come into the world that can develop its attractive force towards people who have nothing to do with the conditions of its emergence. So, the objectivity, here, is not an objectivity in the neo- Kantian sense of a separate realm of values. It is an objectivity in the sense that people experience it as going beyond what they can produce by themselves. Already in my book on The Genesis of Values I referred to Max Scheler’s seemingly paradoxical expression: ein An-sich für-mich. Scheler’s expression refers to something that I may experience as indepedent from me, but in the awareness that other people will also experience other values as true in themselves. This argument, therefore, introduces an experiential level into the debate about subjectivity versus objectivity.

Tullio VIOLA – The attempt to conjoin objectivity and contingency may even go back to your 1980 book on Mead, where you make the example of secondary qualities of the world, such as colors. On the one hand, colors are objective; but on the other, they are contingent, because they are not independent from our constitution as bodies in the world. In retrospect, this looks like a blueprint for your philosophy of values. Hans JOAS – Yes, I think that this is indeed the relevance of my interpretation of those very long texts by Mead in which he embarks on a critique of empiricism and rationalism. They are mostly about the problem of objectivity in the epistemological sense. But subsequent works on values (think of John Dewey’s Theory of Valuation) were able to draw a parallel between these epistemological debates and the debate about the status of valuation.

Tullio VIOLA – In your 2015 article on pragmatism and historicism, you hint at the possibility of conjoining affrmative genealogy with what you call the “semiotic anthropology” of certain pragmatists. Could you expand on this point? Hans JOAS – Indeed, I do think that pragmatism – though not all pragmatists to the same extent, but certainly Peirce and Mead – very much emphasized, in an anthropological sense, that the human being is a being that uses signs. And that we cannot understand the specific way in which human beings relate to the world and to themselves if we do not see how these relationships are mediated through a particular type of signs. I think that Peirce was the first to have that idea, and that James never really understood the epochal importance of that idea. In my current work, I contend that one of the weaknesses of James’s theory of religion is that,

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although he has such fantastic things to say about the dynamics of religious experience, he did not understand that he also needed a theory of the articulation of these religious experiences. And this would have been the systematic place where he would have had to incorporate a Peircean semiotics into his psychology of religious experience. Now, I have been aware of that weakness in James since writing my book on the Genesis of Values, but what I was not aware of back then is that there is another figure – a close friend of both James’s and Peirce’s – who already realized exactly that weak spot in James, and tried to synthesize Peircean semiotics with James’s psychology or phenomenology of religious experience. And that figure is Josiah Royce.

Tullio VIOLA – Let me go back to an expression you have just used: that of “articulating an experience.” This expression pops up rather often in your work. In particular, there is a passage of your last book in which you pit the articulation of experience against the idea of a total linguisticization of experience. Now, do you think it is possible to look at the notion of articulation as a “metaphor of creativity,” in the sense in which you use this notion with regard to other concepts (such as the concepts of “life,” “production,” “creative intelligence”) in your book on the creativity of action? I am asking this because it seems to me that it is the very notion of articulation which allows you to have an open or liberal understanding of the relation between experience and its conceptualization. Hans JOAS – I have never thought about this with regard to my “metaphors of creativity.” I would have the inclination to say no, and to add that articulation has to be a component of my fifth metaphor, namely creative intelligence. When you had an intense experience, you cannot simply move on without integrating it into the interpretive frameworks of your everyday life. And this means that we either have to reduce the experience to something we have already known, or we have to modify our interpretive frameworks. This is a real challenge, of course. And it is all the more a challenge as we do not tackle it in a completely lonely manner. We cannot change our interpretive framework without being asked by others: why do you suddenly change the way you think about the world? That is the point where Mead’s article about “Scientific Method and Individual Thinker” would come into the picture. When I have had a deviant experience – something that deviates from what I expected on the basis of shared patterns – and I start to articulate that, I do that in a world of shared symbols (not necessarily in language). And I have to tell others: it is not only me who has to transform his or her interpretive patterns, but you have to change too. And I can only do that by producing something that is attractive or convincing to others. It could be attractive in the sense of poetic expression. Others will then recognize in my poetic expression that I have articulated an experience that they have also had, without being able to articulate it. But it could also be convincing in the sense that I derive from my experience a propositional statement about which I claim: this is closer to the truth than what we have thought so far, and you are therefore forced to accept this new description of the world, and can only evade the force of my argument if you offer me a description that is convincing to me even in light of the new experience I have had. So, articulation is not an additional metaphor of creativity, but is an elaboration of what happens intersubjectively when we are in a process of creative intelligence.

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Tullio VIOLA – Let me ask you a few questions about your interlocutors. A few decades ago, especially in America, when people started thinking seriously about the relationship between pragmatism and historicism, there was a prominent way of understanding pragmatism that seems to me very different from yours. I am referring to the neo- pragmatism of Richard Rorty. How would you describe the differences between Rorty’s and your own attempts to move pragmatism closer to historicism? Hans JOAS – I have to say immediately that I am grateful to Richard Rorty: he contributed more than anybody else to the renaissance of an interest in American pragmatism, at least within the U.S. and in the circles of people trained in analytical philosophy. Rorty did a vast amount for the sake of pragmatism. I also knew him personally. It was him who approached me when I published my book Pragmatism and Social Theory. We saw each other on several occasions and I found him an absolutely brilliant interlocutor. So, I don’t want to distance myself too sharply from him. However, there are clear differences in our interpretation of pragmatism. His understanding of pragmatism is dominated by what he calls “conversation,” and that is not a typical notion of pragmatism. On the contrary, it is bereft of what would be a typical pragmatist notion, namely the notion of “inquiry.” To put it in a nutshell: the pragmatists treated reality as a source of our learning processes, and said that we encounter the hardness of reality in our action, and while this does not impose on us an unambiguous understanding of what reality is, it certainly rules out certain understandings of reality. I have to modify my description of the world on the basis of my encounter with the world.

Tullio VIOLA – This is what Peirce would have called the “outward clash” of reality…

Hans JOAS – Exactly. And I would say that Rorty’s pragmatism ignores this “outward clash,” and writes as though we were free to use this or that or another vocabulary for our description of the world, just in the sense of an arbitrary choice of a liberated individual. This, I think, is both deeply un-pragmatist and the source of many problems in Rorty’s philosophy. Now, saying that something is un-pragmatist is not an argument in itself; it is only an argument if we are talking about whether Rorty’s is a correct interpretation of pragmatism or not. There were many debates with Rorty that you can read in printed form in which Rorty admitted that his interpretation of Dewey is not a philologically appropriate interpretation of pragmatism. Another difference is that Rorty was a militant atheist. Not only a non-believer, but an atheist in the sense of really thinking that we have to overcome religious faith; and this is certainly very far from what I am driven by. And I personally think that some of his interpretations of pragmatism (for instance of William James) are somehow distorted by this militant intention.

Tullio VIOLA – You have proposed to locate your own stance on values and the role of genealogy mid-way between Nietzsche and Kant. Do you think we can place Rorty on the Nietzschean side? Hans JOAS – I would say that Rorty has a more Nietzschean than pragmatist understanding of creativity. But he was a democrat like John Dewey, and very far from Nietzsche in political respects. The way he tries to combine a Nietzschean understanding of creativity with a Deweyan understanding of politics is by privatising the impulses coming from a theory of creativity. As a private individual, you are free to do what you want, and there should not be a collectively imposed

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morality (this is how he retains the Nietzschean liberation from Christian morality). At the same time, he avoids the political consequences of Nietzscheanism, as you find them in the history of the German (or Italian) right, as well as – because of the French transformation of Nietzsche after the second world war – in leftist versions of academic radicalism. Rorty was an outspoken critic of this Nietzschean academic radicalism. Politically, he was more of a social democrat.

Tullio VIOLA – The fact remains that he has tried to combine two philosophies – pragmatism and Nietzscheanism – that might seem hardly reconcilable. Hans JOAS – There is a certain affinity between Nietzsche and pragmatism, which has nothing to do with an internal ambiguity of pragmatism itself. At the end of the nineteenth century you have a parallel revolution taking place in different countries in the direction of a reflection about creativity. The German version of that is Nietzsche, together with some followers of Nietzsche, who did not share everything that Nietzsche thought, such as Georg Simmel. At the same time, the American pragmatists are the American version of that (I say “American pragmatists” although there are many differences in the pragmatist “family,” as Richard Bernstein has aptly put it). And I would add Henri Bergson as the French version of the same movement. Moreover, I would say that although Bergson and Durkheim are often seen as polar opposites, they also share very much with one another. Durkheim’s theory of religion, too, is a version of this general late-nineteenth-century, early-twentieth- century movement in the direction of an inquiry into the creativity of human action. So, the fact that people tend to be Nietzschean under the label of pragmatism has probably more to do with this original affinity.

Tullio VIOLA – If we now move on to the other extreme of the Nietzsche-Kant polarity, we fnd another important interlocutor of yours who has been looking with interest at pragmatism. I mean, of course, Jürgen Habermas. Hans JOAS – Habermas and Apel relied on a very selective reception of pragmatism, a reception that is led by their interest in the logic of the discourse, in the sense of the processes of rational deliberation and argumentation. Now this is clearly a component of both Peirce’s and Mead’s philosophy. (Not so much of James’s, which is why there is hardly any trace of James in Habermas’s work; and in Apel’s writings James appears as a sort of second-class thinker, as opposed to the first-class thinker Peirce – which I think is totally unfair, but comes from the fact that he never had an affinity for what is important in James.) Both Apel and Habermas use pragmatism to get away from a monological understanding of reason and to move in the direction of collective or social processes of rational argumentation. And I’m all with them on that. But I think that in the work of Peirce, Mead, etc., there is a closer connection between genesis and validity than you find in Kant or in the Kantianised reception of pragmatism such as Habermas’s or Apel’s. One can spell out this point on the purely cognitive level, by saying that Apel and Habermas are mostly interested in how we justify cognitive validity claims. Peirce, however, was very much interested also in how we arrive at interesting validity claims that are worth being justified. For Peirce, the scientific process does not simply depend on the rational justification of validity claims, but on the emergence of validity claims that lead to experimental practices, and lead to results that have to be rationally justified. This is a holistic approach, which contains both the formation of creative hypotheses and their rational justification. Not every hypothesis is an interesting hypothesis that is worth being

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experimentally tested. If the opposite were the case, you could produce hypotheses just arbitrarily or randomly. But this is not the case. Human beings need to come to the conclusion: “this could be the solution to our problem.” In other words, there is an interaction between the formation of a hypothesis and the processes through which we justify the validity claims derived or implicit in this hypothesis. Certainly for the cognitive level, on which I haven’t elaborated very much. But I think I did elaborate the internal connection between genesis and validity on the level of values.

Tullio VIOLA – Another way to characterize your reflections on history against the backdrop of your interlocutors may be to compare it with the broadly Hegelian ideal – still well alive today – of a “reconstruction” of the historical past. Hans JOAS – In fact, the English-speaking world has often brought and German historicism very closely together. But in the German intellectual history, this is more of an alternative. The first is a more or less teleological philosophy of history, the other lays emphasis on historical contingency. And I side with historicism in being very skeptical with regard to teleological outlooks. Now, my idea of an affirmative genealogy of values does have a dimension of “reconstruction,” in that it says that if I believe in the validity of something today, I cannot avoid retelling history in light of this contemporary validity claim. So, for instance, when I think that human rights are a good thing, I will have to look at history in light of this and ask who the forerunners of human rights were, who contributed to their genesis, and so on. But it is important for me to do so without reconstructing history in the sense that somehow the historical process had to lead to the point where we are now. In other words, I want to leave open the “implicit futures” of certain historical pasts. Some readers of The Sacredness of the Person took me to say that there is an ongoing process of sacralization of the person. Not at all! There are only episodes, and it is a totally empirical question, for example, to ask to what extent the nineteenth-century abolitionists relied on the eighteenth century declarations of human rights. In principle, they could have! But often they didn’t. For them, the American document was written in the spirit of slaveholders. So they didn’t say: “the declaration of independence has already proclaimed that all men are created equal, from which we derive that we have to respect the slaves as equal human beings.” No: they had other sources. But this is not something I derive from philosophy. You have to derive it from empirical research. You have to read the abolitionists and see what’s the case. There is a difference here with Axel Honneth who uses the term “reconstruction.” And it seems to me that this term in the work of this old German colleague of mine clearly has teleological implications. People struggle for recognition and something has to come out of this struggle. To this I answer: no, many struggles just lead to very negative outcomes for all participants, and no moral progress comes out of that at all.

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Tullio VIOLA – Let me now go back to The Sacredness of the Person, about which I would like to raise a possible objection. You often express your skepticism toward the idea that values can be justifed in a purely argumentative manner. But I am worried that this could end up in an overly strong distinction between “narratives” and “rational accounts.” Hans JOAS – But that is exactly what I would not want to do! Your objection is similar to a point recently made by German philosopher Matthias Kettner, who has in a very intelligent and constructive manner criticized my conception of rational discourse.1

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And I have replied to Kettner by making the following point, which I take to express a deeply pragmatist attitude. When we realize that we disagree in our evaluative judgments, the next step has, of course, to be rational argument. I have to tell you why, starting from something that we share, you derive a judgment that seems to me to be inconsistent with our shared foundations. And you may in turn try to show me why you are consistent, and I am not. This is a purely rational argument. But it presupposes that we do share certain things. Maybe, we share our belief in the ten commandments; or in Kant’s moral philosophy. If this is the case, we have a common basis and we can go on to argue in a purely rational way about what follows normatively from our common basis. Now the pragmatist would say: this is good in most cases. That is, in most cases there is no need for narration and affirmative genealogy, because there is space for rational argumentation. What happens, though, when we discover that we do not share either our belief in the ten commandments or our belief in Kant’s moral philosophy, or in short, that we do not share anything? Let us imagine that I have a debate with somebody who belongs to the NSU – the German right-wing extremists who killed at least ten Turkish immigrants. These are people who are as far from my moral intuitions as possible. You could say that in this case nothing helps, that these people are just enemies. And politically, that’s probably true. We have to arrest these people and I do not get the feeling that talking to them could modify my opinions. But as a matter of principle (although perhaps not in the empirical reality), I feel obliged to do as much as I can to understand what drove children who grew up in Thuringia to become anti-immigrant terrorists. I therefore imagine that it should be possible to enter into a process of communication with them. And this communication cannot be restricted to rational argumentation. I would have to tell the other person that I realize we are so far from each other that we seem not to share anything in moral respect. “You believe in the superiority of the Aryan race” – I could say, – “and I find this belief not only completely unjustified on the cognitive side, but also normatively abominable. So, tell me: how have you come to that? What happened to you, biographically? If, for instance, this was not already the worldview of your parents, you must have had some act of conversion to a neo-nazi conviction.” In turn, the other person will have the right to ask me a similar question: to ask me why I do not see the “obvious” superiority of the Aryan race. That is the point where narration comes into the picture. So, I am not saying: let’s replace rational argumentation with narration. What I am saying is: let’s enlarge the scope of human communication beyond the limits of rational argumentation. And beyond these limits there is not only the possible clash of worldviews, but there is the possibility to talk to each other (at least, in principle), and when we talk to each other in a narrative way, we can use autobiographical, historical, or mythical narration. And then we may find out that we do share certain things. I may, for instance, understand what happened to you that made you convert to a neo-nazi worldview, and although I would say “no, that’s still the wrongest possible direction you could have taken in that situation!,” I understand better now that you are a human being like me, and that I have to understand what makes you go in this terrible direction. So, I do not contrast narration and rational argument, but I use certain structures of narration to go beyond the merely rational-argumentative form of rational argumentation into something more comprehensive.

Tullio VIOLA – Your book aims to be both a scholarly account of the genealogy of human rights, and a meta-theoretical reflection on how such genealogies may affect the public. My

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question, then, is the following: empirically, what do you think is the difference between a situation in which discussions about values are sustained by books like yours (i.e., scientifcally informed accounts) and a situation in which the affrmative genealogy of values is articulated by non-scientifc means, such as journalism, art, political discourse, and everyday life? Is there a qualitative difference between these two levels, or can we think of a continuous spectrum? Hans JOAS – I could give a long answer by saying that mankind was deeply steeped in narration until the . Up to that point, the justification of values passed through mythical stories. Then, a kind of critical distance toward mythical narratives emerged. The question arose: is this story you are telling me a real story, or did somebody make it up? Can I improve this story by looking at facts independently from the story I have been told? As of that moment, there is a tension between narration and the rational criteria that makes us critical narrators. Historians do not simply tell a mythical story, but claim that what they are saying is a true story. However, after that innovative introduction of a kind of theoretical distance from mythical stories, myths do not die out. But books like mine make the claim that, although there are many narrations of the genesis of human rights, many of them simply cannot be defended. It is simply not true, for instance, that human rights have developed only in the West. Let’s look at the facts; but we also have to reintegrate all these facts into a new story. Now, for me the result of the critique of certain narrations cannot be – as some historians have claimed in Germany over the last decades – “let’s give up on narration.” Rather, we have to rethink the fundamental structure of narration. So, my problem in the book was to integrate three levels: the given conventional histories, the fundamental structure of an alternative history, and the methodological reflection on this process.

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Tullio VIOLA – Is it possible to enlarge your reflections on Genesis and Geltung beyond the scope of a philosophy of values? I think, for instance, that there are strong affnities between your philosophy of values and your predilection for a historical contextualization of philosophical accounts. Hans JOAS – I share your interpretation. I wrote a biographical work on Mead at a time in which among German historians it was extremely unfashionable to write a biography. Biography was seen as over-estimating the role of individuals (whereas sociologists were supposed to study much wider processes of collective transformation) or simply naive, because if we are interested in social sciences, what counts is the social scientific explanation as such, and not the way some social scientists have found that explanation. Even today, the typical attitude of sociologists is: let’s take interesting hypotheses, let’s tear them out of the work of a given writer, and then let’s put them to a test. I was intuitively against this attitude, for at least two reasons. The first is that I do not think that interesting cognitive statements come in such isolated form. A more holistic approach is more appropriate. Secondly, you understand even a cognitive validity claim better when you study it in connection with the genesis of this cognitive validity claim. Why did that author make that claim? All thinkers have interlocutors, and therefore emphasize something because they are influenced by other thinkers, or because they are struggling for independence from those thinkers, and so on. People like Quentin Skinner have elaborated on this idea, and although I do not share all Skinner said, I think this is

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true (morever, it is also a fundamental historicist assumption in the study of intellectual history). In the history of science, this emphasis on has been developed under the label of “.” Now if we follow Thomas Kuhn, paradigms are not exclusively cognitive, but they contain values. And this means that although it is true that an isolated cognitive statement can be tested empirically, totally irrespective of who the speaker is (or of what her or his motivations were), paradigms cannot be evaluated like that. So, the bridge between my affirmative genealogy and the cognitive question is, I think, the evaluative dimension of major cognitive frameworks. And this is even a bridge to the history of science. When we try to reconstruct the history of science and its fundamental transformations, it is not sufficient to look at the falsification of isolated cognitive statements. The transformations in the history of science bear clear similarities to conversion processes in individual biographies or in collective changes, in that a new paradigm is seen as more attractive, more satisfying, more fulfilling than the other.

Tullio VIOLA – Alongside your interest in the history of ideas, part of your work certainly falls under the category of historical sociology. I am thinking for instance of your book Kriege und Werte. Studien zur Gewaltgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (2000) (English: War and Modernity, 2003). Would you say that pragmatism has played a role there too? Hans JOAS – I would certainly suscribe to the label “historical sociology,” although I am moving between several disciplines. But I am not doing so as an act of arbitrary choice. Rather, I feel that I cannot deal adequately with the problems I have if I confine myself to only one discipline. Already at this level, however, I think you could say that this is a pragmatist attitude, because there is a priority of the problem. And problems do not come in disciplinary forms. I see the system of scholarly disciplines as a pragmatic form of the division of labour which we should adhere to if it’s good for the solution of problems. But if the solution of certain problems asks us to transcend disciplinary boundaries, then we clearly have to do so. So, I do indeed write again and again about the history of philosophy, but my work is always driven by certain systematic questions related to historical sociology that necessarily drive me to take seriously the contribution of non-sociological thinkers as well. So, I have a feeling that I remain a pragmatist even when I do not talk about pragmatism.

NOTES

1. Matthias Kettner (2014), “Affirmative Genealogie und argumentativer Diskurs. Ein Vergleich im Anschluss an Hans Joas,” in Hermann-Josef Große Kracht (ed.), Der moderne Glaube an die Menschenwürde. Philosophie, Soziologie und Theologie im Gespräch mit Hans Joas, Bielefeld.

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AUTHORS

TULLIO VIOLA

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin tullio.viola[at]gmail.com

HANS JOAS

Freie Universität Berlin/University of Chicago hjoas[at]uchicago.edu

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Histoires pragmatiques A Conversation with Simona Cerutti and Yves Cohen

Roberto Gronda, Tullio Viola, Yves Cohen and Simona Cerutti

EDITOR'S NOTE

Based at the EHESS in Paris, Simona Cerutti and Yves Cohen are among today’s most authoritative advocates of a “pragmatic” or “pragmatist” approach to historical research. By these terms we mean both a focus on the practices of actors as an object of study, and a methodological concern for the ways the actors themselves justify those practices on the level of theory. The way “histoire pragmatique” has drawn on classical philosophical Pragmatism will be at the centre of this interview. Cerutti’s area of specialization is the history of modern Italy. In particular, she has studied the genesis of social groups and the transformation of the understanding of justice in Piedmont, with a focus on the link that Ancien Régime societies established between the actual possession of a status and its theorization. Her two most recent books are Giustizia sommaria. Pratiche e ideali di giustizia in una societè di Ancien Régime (Milan 2003), and Etrangers. Étude d’une condition d’incertitude dans une société d’Ancien Régime (Paris 2012). Yves Cohen is a historian of the twentieth century. His research has been principally devoted to a comparative investigation of the 20th Century’s passion for leadership and command in different geographical contexts. In his Le siècle des chefs. Une histoire transnationale du commandement et de l’autorité (Paris 2013) he compares Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany to the liberalism and the development of Taylorism in France and America, from the viewpoint of intellectual history and from that of a history of practices. He recently published Histoires pragmatiques (Paris, 2016) with Francis Chateauraynaud. The interview was conducted in French and later translated by Roberto Gronda and Tullio Viola.

Roberto GRONDA & Tullio VIOLA – Your work is frequently referred to as “pragmatic history.” This notion, however, is by no means a new one: Polybius spoke of pragmatikê historia,

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Germany had pragmatische Geschichte in the tradition of Kantian anthropology. Can you tell us something about how you understand this label, and about your own encounter with “pragmatic history”? Simona CERUTTI – Personally, I had quite an idiosyncratic introduction to pragmatic history, although this encounter was not unique to me. It was related to the experience of a group of researchers (many of whom, myself included, were pupils of Giovanni Levi), all working within the framework of microhistory, and who were at that time trying to develop an analytic approach to history. The keyword here is “analytic.” We owed much to Edoardo Grendi: our goal in doing analytic history was to recover a strong form of empiricism. At the same time, it is important to note that, according to this view, empiricism is not the starting point of inquiry – its degree zero – but rather something that must be achieved. We should be wary of the familiarity we feel toward the past: rather, what we should do as historians is investigate the meaning of the words and concepts we find in the source. The idea of entering a foreign country expresses this attitude toward the past very well, as well as the kind of work needed to build up empiricism. Hence a particular attention to the sources, to the actions they report, to the fact that sources themselves are actions whose meaning should be reconstructed. I have to say that such a program of research was fostered by the criticism of positivistic social history, which was completely inattentive to the specific language of social actors.

Yves COHEN – My encounter with pragmatic history was also idiosyncratic. An indirect source of inspiration – one I have become aware of only recently – is the pragmatism of Mao Tze Tung. I was Maoist when I was young. My motto when I was seventeen was “No Inquiry, No Right to Speak!.” Mao’s conception of inquiry has a distinctly pragmatist tone, possibly related to the fact that he attended Dewey’s lectures in China in 1919-1920.1 According to Mao, inquiry came first, even before theory. At that time, I belonged to the Proletarian left (gauche prolétarienne), and we were completely taken with this tradition of thought. Apart from that, I would say that my encounter with pragmatic history was not only idiosyncratic, but also unique. Contrary to Simona, I did not belong to any specific group of scholars. Obviously, I paid great attention to what other people were doing around me – for instance, the social studies of science or microhistory – but I do not see any single, decisive influence that drove me towards pragmatic history. Rather, what was decisive was my discovery in 1979 of the personal archive of the director of production at the Peugeot factory, Ernest Mattern, which made it possible for me to study concrete practices. In the early 1980s, I started to think of my work as a history of practices, largely in resonance with Foucault. On the one hand, Foucault dismissed the study of what he called pratiques réelles. On the other, in 1980, he claimed for himself the title of “historian of practices” (see, for instance, his 1978 discussion with historians published by Michelle Perrot).2 Still, his approach remains peculiar, as he claimed that practices should be analyzed from the viewpoint of discourse. But, his idea of practices being at the crossroads of what is said and what is done has been very influential for me. This made me reflect on the fact that alongside “material” acts – which I was studying in industrial settings – we have linguistic ones, as pragmatic linguists said. So I started thinking about the relationship between linguistics,

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practice and history. These influences allowed me to adopt a truly analytical approach in my historical work.

Simona CERUTTI – I have to say that I see things rather differently. For me, the pragmatist or pragmatic approach is in opposition to Foucault, who I regard as a teleological historian. He is teleological because you already know who the murderer is – to quote, once again, Giovanni Levi – since the relationships of power are established from the beginning. There is an issue of Quaderni Storici entirely devoted to the analysis of the systems of charity, which highlights the difference between a historical and analytical approach to historical sources and Foucault’s approach. The essays which constitute that issue study the practices within a particular institution such as the hospital, investigating in concreto the government of a hospital, the relationship between governors and government. That issue of Quaderni Storici was explicitly intended to challenge and contrast the teleological model of Foucault.

Yves COHEN – I see your point. Foucault can be read in so many different ways, and many of them are terrible! Personally, however, I do not think it is correct to speak of teleology in the case of Foucault. Some of his works grew from questioning the present and clearly triggered a retrospective history, but others opened fields of inquiry that had been little investigated by historians, such as “practices of the self,” with a problem setting grounded in the past.

Roberto GRONDA & Tullio VIOLA – This is a point on which we would like to dwell somewhat longer. Often, when people refer to pragmatism in history or in the social sciences, they see it through the lenses of thinkers who are not pragmatist in a strict sense, even though they do share some features with pragmatism. One such thinker is Foucault; another – at least here in France – is sociologist Luc Boltanski. Simona CERUTTI – Boltanski has indeed been extremely important for me (I even wrote a review of his work). I think we can summarize Boltanski’s message as taking actors seriously. Such an approach is in contrast to that which forms a large part of social history, one which aims rather at correcting and integrating the point of view of the actors. But even more than Boltanski, ethnomethodology (and in particular Garfinkel’s texts) exerted a significant influence on my work: I learned much from the ethnomethodological analysis of the roles of the observer and her subject-matter, of observation and, above all, of description. This is, I suppose, the path along which I am led to action, to its creativity, to its significance: what we have to do is locate the genesis of normativity within action, not outside.

Yves COHEN – Personally, the encounter with Boltanski was not as important for me as it was for you. It might be that I consider the order of justification (which is Boltanski’s and Thévenot’s paramount interest) as simply one amongst many reference orders present within practices. Equally important is, for instance, how the actors formulate the situated concerns that they have when they act, and how they define the kind of relationships that they have with the institution or the group to which they belong. This is why I do not agree with those who consider this “pragmatic sociology” to be the only way to understand practices from a pragmatist/ pragmatic point of view. Take, for instance, the performativity in linguistic pragmatics: it can be used to investigate non-linguistic acts such as the spatial acts – for example, going to the street to protest, or leaving one’s own space to meet people in theirs, and so on. What I found more inspiring than Boltanski and Thévenot – and I do not mean to deny the importance of On justification for the present situation of the

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social sciences – was the theory of situated action as formulated by Lucy Suchman in her book Plans and Situated Action (1987). I was really impressed by the fact that, according to that approach, all that is pre-established – knowledge, norms, plans, languages, spaces, etc. – must again be tested through action. I realized that we have to re-situate action and practice, and to start our investigations from that level. The curiosity for the founders of pragmatism came much later, with the new wave of interest around 2000.

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Roberto GRONDA & Tullio VIOLA – Let’s go back for a moment to your respective felds of research. Your texts show a strong, intrinsic link between methodology and subject-matter. Along with adopting a “pragmatic” or “pragmatist” perspective, you study historical phenomena that, however different, display a specifc relationship between “practice” and “norms” or “discourses.” Do you think that pragmatic methodology can also be extended to historical objects or epochs in which this relationship appears in very different ways? Simona CERUTTI – Indeed, many of my reflections on the notion of practice originate from my work on summary justice and from the discovery of the treatment of practice made by post-glossarists. Particularly important in this context is Baldus’ “pratica consumata”: according to this conception of practice, the legitimacy of an action stems from its repetition, provided that there is the consensus of the actors. The discovery of this subject-matter somehow created a short-circuit between the body of pragmatist texts that provided the theoretical horizon of my inquiry and my analysis of the status of action. A second point that I would like to highlight is the idea that historical sources themselves can be conceived as actions. When conceived in this way, they are not merely – and, I would say, not primarily – reports of what happened, but rather actions that dramatically change the relationship between text and context.

Yves COHEN – You hit on an important point here. In the 20th century the relationship between theory and practice was a concrete issue, not something that only concerned scholars and historians. In my work, I investigated the history of practices that are organized by other practices, the latter being practices of the production of norms. I was fascinated by the fact that the 20th century brought about great domains of practice organized by enormous apparati such as Taylorism and Communism. At the same time, pragmatism was a philosophy that did not aim at justifying the need for the organization of practice, but rather attempted to understand its functioning. It is not by chance, therefore, that the rediscovery of pragmatism took place at the end of the 20th century, that is, at the end of a century that was essentially committed to the organization and normalization of practices. It is a historical fact and, at the very same time, a matter of concern for the historian.

Simona CERUTTI – I would like to make a distinction that may be useful here. We are dealing with two different notions: on the one hand, concrete practices and, on the other hand, pragmatism, which I regard as a method. So we could formulate the question in these terms: are practices a subject-matter or a method? I take practice to be a method: consequently, when I started reflecting on the practice of producing legitimacy and on the relationship between norms and practice, my historical investigations started thematizing something that was originally a method.

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Yves COHEN – I had to face a similar problem in my work. The difficulty stems from the fact that subject-matter and method somehow conflate. The adoption of a pragmatist method makes it possible to perceive that there are practices at work in history. Practice is not a subject-matter that we historians can freely choose among many others; it is the very substance of history. Practices – rather than theories – define how things are. Again, pride of place goes to the practices: theories are called for by practices, and not vice versa – as many believe.

Roberto GRONDA & Tullio VIOLA – In many of your answers, Yves, you seem to presume the existence of a plurality of practices. Your book argues that the 20th century is characterized by a strong dichotomy between practices that produce normativity, and thereby control other practices, and practices that simply apply what has been decided elsewhere. The recognition of this dichotomy paves the way for the study of the practical side of leadership, as well as for the analysis of the normative aspects embedded in accepting the decisions of the authority in charge of the production of normativity. So, you seem to be led to a slightly paradoxical conclusion: it is like you were saying that it is precisely such a split that makes us realize that the two kinds of practices cannot be split. Yves COHEN – You are perfectly right, but it is not a contradiction for which I can be held responsible! It is a contradiction of the actors: it is a contradiction in the things themselves! Take, for instance, management. Management has a strong, almost natural relationship with a practical attitude. It does not care much about theory. Managers are very interested in the theory of management – Taylorism, for instance – and they produce theory. However, they know that it is not theory that makes the difference, but rather the solutions that can be found by analyzing the concrete problems at stake: on the spot, theory may help or not. One excellent example is the Berliet factory. Berliet wanted to be a Fordist and a Taylorist; he built a huge factory replete with machines coming from the United States. He imported American normativity, so to say. But the factory never worked because the steel that was necessary to build the automobiles was not the same that was available in the United States, and he could not import all the steel he needed from America. So, his project turned out to be a disaster, and simply because he wanted to apply a theory! He failed because he privileged theory over the situated conditions. In Stalinist communism – we should always keep in mind the distinction between Stalinism and Maoism on this specific viewpoint – we have the same idea of a practice controlled and directed by theory. Nonetheless, if we study its practice, we see on the one hand that it is no less pragmatic than the others, since theory was always called by the demands of the concrete situation. The control by theory was just a propaganda argument. On the other hand, this approach has been harmful for the social sciences, especially here in France. For a long time, theory was said to be in charge of telling us what is real – what the essence of class conflict is, for instance. So, to go and look for what was happening in the concrete practices was deemed as a waste of time. The appeal of theory blocked the road of inquiry. Take, for instance, the introduction written by Henry Wallon to the important collective book À la lumière du marxisme (1938-39). In this text, we see clearly how Wallon formulates and constitutes what we might call the “ban of inquiry.” Its bearings on French social sciences have still to be appraised.

Simona CERUTTI – May I ask you a question? From what you have just said, it seems that you take pragmatism and inquiry as being substantially equivalent, as if they

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were the same thing. When you talk about Mao, for instance, you say that he was pragmatist because he praised inquiry. I am not sure that this is correct.

Yves COHEN – No, I do not think that pragmatism can be boiled down to inquiry. Among other things, pragmatism is also the idea that we should not take categories for granted, and that we should investigate the modes of constitution of things. Another important aspect is the study of the relationship between practice and theory, in the way that it is perceived by the actors. I studied that problem as it relates to some contemporary constellations of events such as Stalinism and Fordist production practices. And the problem is connected to another important issue, namely the relationship between discourse and practice. I have to say that I am deeply annoyed by how people now use and abuse the expression “let’s study the discourse and the practice of” – say, the discourse and the practice of social protection. I am not saying that we should get rid of the conceptual couple discourse/ practice, nor that we should blur the distinction. The other way around! We should delve deeper into that relationship. As you say, we cannot simply pit norms (or discourses) against practices. According to Foucault, discourse is a discursive practice, and it is for this very reason that discourse becomes relevant. At the same time, when we turn our attention to concrete practices (for instance, the practices of organization of work), we see that they have a strong material and spatial dimension, but they are constitutively accompanied by discourse. This is a real pluralism of practices. Practices turns out to be a plurality of interlocked practices: practices are made, among other components, by discourses – which are practices!

Simona CERUTTI – This is also the idea of looking for validation (légitimation) in concrete practices, which is an important aspect of what we do when we read historical sources. I think this is a truly pragmatist tenet. Reading the sources as actions that raise a claim for legitimacy dramatically changes the way in which we do history. By legitimacy I do not mean formal legitimacy. Legitimacy can be informal, and in the latter case the claims for legitimacy do not refer to a legal order. The point is that actions may create a social status, instead of simply mirroring something else. If you stress the continuity between action and interest, and conceive of actions as sort of emanations of the interests of the agents – that is, of their identity and their social condition – then you can actually develop an analysis of actions. It might even be possible to have an analysis of actions in terms of practices. This goes back to the criticism that has been raised against E. P. Thompson: If you create a continuity between action and individual interest, and conceive of action as a sort of emanation of individual interests (or of their social position, etc.), you end up with a conception of action which you might certainly call “practice,” but which remains the reflex of something that already exists – such as social order, hierarchy, etc. If, in contrast, you approach the reports of actions that you find in sources as something that contains a reason in itself, and is not a mere overflow of experience, but rather the organization of an experience – in that case, you have broken the continuity between action and social order. You have introduced a gap, a cleavage between the two layers. Therefore, you are in the position to reflect on the creativity of action as a necessary condition for the production of claims of legitimacy,

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normative demands, etc. By breaking the chain that directly links action to individuals, you can start looking at action as the product of a specific situation.

Yves COHEN – I totally agree with you. But I would like to complicate the picture slightly. I think that it is incorrect to say that everything that is said or written is discourse. In one interview given to Roger Pol-Droit, Foucault remarks that it is important to distinguish things said (choses dites) and discourse. Things said are what we do when we talk to each other in a boulangerie: “How much is this croissant?” There is no discourse here; there are just things that are said.

Roberto GRONDA & Tullio VIOLA – Moreover, it seems to us that discourse has at least two different meanings. On the one hand, it may refer to what you fnd in the sources; on the other, it means theory. In turn, theory can be investigated from two different perspectives: it can be studied historically – as the subject-matter of the research – or as the overall framework of the historian. So, there is the relationship between discursive practices and material practices, and there is also the relationship between theory and practice. Yves COHEN – This was precisely my point! In the 20th century, the relationship between theory and practice was considered a historical matter; but it is not an issue that concerns only the historian. For instance, the communists used to say that words do not matter, only facts matter. It was an attempt, which we now perceive as meaningless, to contrast words and facts. But this is a trick, a fraud! What is interesting from my point of view is to understand, historically, whence the idea that words do not matter comes. I feel that there is something extremely important related to the effort to weaken and erase free thinking. If you do not think that words are acts of speech, it follows that words do not matter. The fact that you have the right to speak will not make any real difference. Put in this form, it is clear that this is an argument of power through which practices can be organized. This is something that we should clarify historically in order to free ourselves from its grip.

Simona CERUTTI – With regard to the notion of practice, a recent article by Roberto Frega (who is a philosopher) shows an interesting difference from the perspective of the historian. By this, I mean the distinction that Frega draws between action and practice. Action, he says, has to do with the individual, while practice is collective. However, modernist historians are often confronted with sources that showcase a distance between action and individual responsibility. Let me offer an example: the case of wedding pledges in the 16th and 17th centuries. Sources tell us of cases in which a girl was sitting, doing nothing, and a man would throw a ring at her. The interesting point is that if she was touched by the ring, that could count in court as a form of “action” and a valid proof of the engagement. The rationale here is that she did not react against the action performed by the man. She is “struck” by the action, and is therefore “held” by that action, provided the action unfolded “without contradiction” – this is the crucial phrase. If an act is produced “without contradiction,” it can change social statuses, irrespective of individual intentions. This example suggests an answer to your question about the dialogue between historians and pragmatist philosophers: In this case, in fact, we can see that there is a gap between action and individual, which goes against twentieth-century philosophy as a whole.

Roberto GRONDA & Tullio VIOLA – This is interesting also from a methodological perspective: Pragmatist philosophers tend to take “action” or “habit” as universally valid concepts, although they also endorse a genealogical approach to philosophical categories.

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Conversely, you are now insisting on the role of pragmatism as a method that prevents us from taking our categories for granted and from projecting them all too easily onto other historical periods. Simona CERUTTI – I think so, and let me further expand on the previous example. My current work centres on the notion of responsibility: responsibility and justice in the long term. Now, while the term “responsible” as an adjective has always existed, the word “responsibility” suddenly appears at the end of the 18th century. And I suspect – although this is yet to be demonstrated – that there is a relationship between the sudden introduction of that word and the birth of the concept of action as related to individual intention. To test this hypothesis, I have been working in territories such as bankruptcies and merchant insurances, to explore which conception of “responsibility” is at play therein. And what I noticed is that the idea of “intention” is always related to culpability, not to responsibility. This means that the concept of action is somehow autonomous. People were more concerned with putting the action right than with finding a responsible individual or culprit.

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Roberto GRONDA & Tullio VIOLA – Let’s delve a bit deeper into the relationship between practice and normativity. You both insist that we should not draw a neat divide between practices and norms, because a practice can always “turn into” a norm. Yet this is hardly enough to acquiesce philosophers, who are on the lookout for precise ways to defne when, exactly, a practice turns into a norm. Can you single out any qualitative difference between the two dimensions? Simona CERUTTI – Sources of the ancien régime suggest that an essential aspect of actions’ transformation into norms is consensus and repetition over time – I mean the fact that an action has unfolded in a continuous way over time, backed by consensus. This dynamic somehow triggers a process of generalization. There is a moment in which actions are granted a weight as precedents; they are recognized as having a general purport. Which is interesting, because today we tend to conceive of the path from particularity to generality as related to accumulation, not to repetition and consensus. (Think again of the distinction between individual actions and collective practices.)

Roberto GRONDA & Tullio VIOLA – We are close to the problem of convention, aren’t we?

Simona CERUTTI – We certainly are, although a very interesting article by Louis Quéré, A-t-on vraiment besoin de la notion de convention?,3 suggests that we do not need to talk about convention if we undertake an analysis of action. Action creates convention. As for me, I would give pride of place to the idea of consensus – and ultimately, to the public. Consensus has the power to transform the status of action. Now the question is: In contemporary societies, does that suffice? Do we need a formal act of recognition that turns an action into a convention? In ancien régime sources, this is continuously evoked. “I do this without contradiction” – this phrase may become a bit of evidence in all sorts of territorial conflicts, etc. A recent book by Tamara Herzog, Frontiers of Possession, shows that all national boundaries in ancien régime are established by specific acts of ownership, which have unfolded without contradiction.

Yves COHEN – I have a slightly different viewpoint. I have always been puzzled by the conventionalist emphasis on agreement: it seems to me that this is an overly irenic view of social life. I would rather stress the confrontational nature of society. Which

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does not mean that overt conflict, or war, is all-pervasive. Confrontation often leads to compromise. Even authority may be conceived in terms of the compromises reached in order to let things work. Authority is shaped in open conflict and settled in its breaks, forming a compromise (which may also be implicit, not formal). So this is my view of things: a confrontational dimension, with moments of overt conflict and moments of compromise.

Roberto GRONDA & Tullio VIOLA – Is this the reason why you emphasize that the notion of ends is not part of the defnition of the notion of practice? Yves COHEN – Exactly. I want to reject views such as that of McIntyre’s, who sees practice first of all as a “community of ends.” This cannot work. All the more so as there are institutions which, historically, have been invented in order to put together people who do not share the same ends – to have them contribute to the same practice. Think of enterprise, or even of war! People might not have ends in common apart from production or war deeds.

Simona CERUTTI – True, but let me reply: “consensus” does not mean that people always agree. Rather, it is the condition – the condition declared, or put on display – to legitimize an action. But I agree that this is a relation of power. You silence the other voices. This is far from being the same as to say that everybody agrees. But you may nonetheless say that there is consensus.

Yves COHEN – So, this is perhaps what I call compromise.

Roberto GRONDA & Tullio VIOLA – In any case, both of you insist on the productive character of conflict for a reflection on normativity. Simona, you hold that the conflict between two norms represents the juncture from which new norms or new actions are created. And you, Yves, explicitly remark that normativity is always directed “against” former norms. Yves COHEN – Let us start off from Roberto Frega’s useful invitation to look at practices as themselves normative.4 I agree with him, but I would add that the normativity of practices is always a counter-normativity: an opposition to already existing norms. Taylorism is a good case in point: it is a “device” to produce norms, which have been established at the expense of other norms: ordinary norms that regulated labour; norms that workers had agreed on and fabricated by themselves, and which, at the same time, protected them from the threat of entrepreneurs. A similar dynamic characterized Communism, which aimed at destroying the ordinary ways in which masses fought for themselves and the norms of typical social fights. By imposing other forms of normativity, Communism wanted to steer masses toward revolution and turn history for the better. So, power always establishes norms against other norms. At the same time, ordinary practices always fabricate norms. I think we are a bit limited by the classical idea of a norm as something that enables and constrains. This overlooks the fact that every action entails a commentary to its norm; a criticism of the norm, as limited as it may be. Three aspects: norms are enabling, constraining and open to criticism.

Simona CERUTTI – This reminds me of a notion which the urban sociology of the last ten years has been working on – namely the notion of acts of citizenship – as a means to complicate the link between official discourses and everyday interactions. Lately, I have been to Sciences Po to give a lecture on political mobilization. And as I talked about labourers, people from the audience objected: This is not politics! The problem here is the distinction between politics and everyday action. If a person says to

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another: “Don’t jump the queue please – it’s not ok!,” this is an everyday conversation; but it is also “encrusted” with criticism and normativity. This particular point is the object of very recent sociological investigations. And while some social sciences are caught off-guard by this overlapping of ordinary and normative acts, other social sciences are not. For they show that this distinction is not essential; it simply marks a difference of degree. In this sense, acts of citizenship are practices within the political space, which carry criticisms and make propositions.

Yves COHEN – Indeed. And a similar discourse applies to the worker on the line. Sometimes, the amount of criticism and proposition is an infinitesimal dimension of practice. But it is there all the same. Sartre used to say: There is never a total absence of freedom. There is always a small fragment of it. I would say: a small fragment of criticism (or interpretation) of the norm. A fragment that sometimes grows into overt resistance, contestation, even revolution. No norm can be other than counter- normative.

Simona CERUTTI – But if you say “counter-normative,” you end up pitting one norm against the people that oppose it. I think, instead, that there are many norms. We live in a thick fabric of norms; we face a huge amount of normative centres. The state is one of them. The family, the couple, the workplace are others. This normative thickness of everyday life counters the traditional understanding of normativity, but also that of “counter-normativity.” I don’t mean to say that there is no class struggle. But I do believe that we constantly face a plurality of normative universes. I found myself working on sources that are similar to those on which E. P. Thompson drew to study labour force. Thompson interpreted phenomena such as the Saint Monday,5 which was the workers’ resistance to those norms that dictated the work schedule. In the cases on which I have been working, however, the Saint Monday was not so much a resistance to the norm as a parallel organization of working time. During Saint Mondays, people wouldn’t stay at home with their arms folded, just to “resist.” Rather, they interpreted it as a workday in which they would walk into other boutiques, would organize the movability of workers, etc. But this system was, in turn, a normative system. There were people fighting against that system as well. Does this change anything? It seems to me that reconstructing the plurality of norms amounts to admitting that conflict is everywhere. The space of conflict is the space of interrelation. A source is not a description, but is addressed to someone. And very often, it entails a conflict – which is not necessarily a political conflict, but it is a conflict all the same.

Yves COHEN – We are less distant in our understanding than you think. I wrote an article on “multiple authorities,” which dovetails with your idea of a multiplicity of normative universes.

Roberto GRONDA & Tullio VIOLA – A last question on the issue of normativity. In your analyses, actions that have a normative force tend to acquire a symbolic force that goes beyond their pragmatic dimension. In the case of ancien régime acts of ownership (Cerutti), we read about people who go to the houses they wish to own and perform symbolic actions, such as repeatedly opening doors and windows, in order to signal performatively that the house is theirs. In Cohen’s book, the commandment of the chef, when it is embodied into a concrete artefact (for instance, a drawing or a plan) tends to acquire an autonomous allure, to be revered as an artwork. Alternatively, the very image of the chef may become the

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object of symbolic production. These phenomena seem to point to a tight link between the pragmatic and the symbolic. Simona CERUTTI – I don’t know – I really don’t – if I would talk about “symbolic” action here. Maybe a better term is ritual, which also encompasses the problem of the effectiveness of action. The conditions of effectiveness of a regular action which I have been singling out in my work – i.e., its unfolding without contradiction, its being repeated over time, etc. – may also be seen to characterize ritual action. Therefore, ritual action may be studied from the viewpoint of normative effectiveness. This certainly opens up an enormous field of research.

Yves COHEN – When looked at from the viewpoint of practice, institutional statuses, scientific utterances, concepts and social categories no longer appear as fixed entities. Rather, they resemble formal elements that need to be continually re- conceived, re-composed, re-justified. The point is not to deny existence to forms by dissolving them into practices; rather, it is to see them as a stage of practical activity, or as a manner of composing the situation in which action unfolds. To talk about these elements we may certainly use the word “symbolic”; but Simona’s use of the word “ritual” is very much to the point, because the ritual is always a modality of practice; it points to a formal moment within practice. So, for instance, the relationship I establish between plan and situated action is not aimed at destroying the autonomy of the plan. Rather, the plan appears within the universe of action as one component amidst others – like norms, scientific utterances, etc. Once again, historians of science may come in helpful. They suggest to stop looking at knowledge in an abstract sense, and to start looking at the way knowledge is effectively produced, and then at its concrete deployment within action, at the ways it is questioned and re-articulated. The point is not to deny existence to formal elements, but to study them as components of the dynamics of practice.

⁂

Roberto GRONDA & Tullio VIOLA – A last, methodological question. As both of you conceive it, pragmatic history primarily hinges on the categories deployed by actors. This stance has deep-seated roots in pragmatist epistemology. At the same time, another major insight of pragmatism is the emphasis on the habitual dimension of action. From this angle, the purport of action always in part escapes the consciousness of actors. And in order to reconstruct it, we need the external perspective of observers. Do you think it is possible to strike a balance between these two views? Yves COHEN – I would put the same point in a slightly different way. The main gist of our attempt to develop a pragmatic history is related to the difference between our approach and that of another way of doing social science – a traditionally Durkheimian way, we might say – in which scholars build up structures, categories of social determination, and so forth. Now, if we want to grasp all the potentialities of our research, I think we should insist on the analytical emphasis on practices, whose relevance to the study of structures and historical contexts has not been completely unpacked yet. The question we should ask is: What is the mode of existence of structures – the materiality of their existence? We have been looking for social structures for so long, so many centuries! We should keep going in the other direction and studying the creativity in, and of, the practices on any scale.

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The methodological condition of pragmatic history is a certain quality of sources. You cannot do pragmatic history if you do not have sources that “report” the activities of people. And not all sources are well-suited for this enterprise. This is why I would not dream of denying that other ways of doing history are possible: I just insist on my own way of doing it, which hinges on the attempt to see sources as actions, as an element that aims at doing something in its practical context. In any case, the question of actors’ versus observers’ categories is crucial. Bringing out the categories of actors is a necessary condition if we want to give justice to the “alterity” of history. This, however, does not prevent us from using our own categories as well. Only, we ought to render explicit the uses we make of both sets of categories. But there is yet another, pragmatic argument, which goes back to Polybius: I think that, when doing pragmatic history, we need a certain familiarity with the experience we study. I often think of what Marc Bloch said about writing the history of watermills. He said: Go to the countryside; you will find ruins of watermills, and even if they’re not those you are studying in your historical research, it will nonetheless give you an idea of what a watermill was. Now that’s not exactly what I’m talking about, but... Even if history becomes something like a “metaphor” of an experience that one has already had, I nonetheless think that we do need a relationship with experience as a basis to construct alterity. I have, for instance, worked in a factory. Back then I was Maoist. I was a worker, I was engaged in politics, and I then reflected as a historian on the same experiences in a remote past. The way I am dealing with practice is undoubtedly marked by this

Simona CERUTTI – For me, on the contrary, the metaphor of the past as a foreign country is predominant; history should be made against the grain of sources. This is why I speak of empiricism as the result of inquiry, not as its degree zero. The point is to create distance; to undergo a process of estrangement, so as to perceive things that would otherwise appear too close. Of course I can say: I’ve been to the market. But what is a market, in the 18th century? I seek a sort of denaturalization of the object.

Yves COHEN – Well, I do think, instead, that we need some experiential relationship with the object; but the point is that this relationship does not dictate the economy of inquiry! Historical work remains a work of fabrication, of strangeness. Still, we need some sort of proximity to practice. How would you go about making an acceptable analysis of the practice if you have no idea whatsoever of what kind of practice you’re dealing with?

NOTES

1. Cf. Emmanuel Renault, (2013), “Dewey, Hook et Mao: quelques affinités entre marxisme et pragmatisme,” Actuel Marx 54, 138-57; Hongliang Gu, (2014), “L’influence de Dewey sur le jeune Mao,” Actuel Marx 56, 124-32.

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2. Michel Foucault, (1994), “Table-ronde du 20 mai 1978,” in M. Perrot (ed.), M. Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. 4, Paris, Gallimard, 20-34. 3. In Reseaux, (1993), XI/62, 19-42. 4. Frega R., (2013), Les sources sociales de la normativité. Une théorie des pratiques normatives, Paris, Vrin. 5. Saint Monday is the traditional phenomenon of absenteeism on mondays.

AUTHORS

ROBERTO GRONDA

Università di Pisa roberto1gronda[at]gmail.com

TULLIO VIOLA

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin tullio.viola[at]gmail.com

YVES COHEN

EHESS, Paris yves.cohen[at]ehess.fr

SIMONA CERUTTI

EHESS, Paris simona.cerutti[at]ehess.fr

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Symposia. Pragmatism and the Writing of History

Book Reviews

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Francis CHATEAURAYNAUD & Yves COHEN (eds.), Histoires pragmatiques Paris, Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2016, 385 pages

Bruno Settis

REFERENCES

Francis CHATEAURAYNAUD & Yves COHEN (eds.), Histoires pragmatiques, Paris, Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2016, 385 pages

1 1. Can “practice” and “practices” be used as epistemological tools to study history? Can these concepts be used to break up unilateral and teleological narratives one the one hand, and, on the other, to provide a basis for a new understanding and writing of history and histories? The twelve essays (by thirteen authors) collected by Francis Chateauraynaud and Yves Cohen under the title Histoires Pragmatiques (in the EHESS’s Raisons pratiques. Epistémologie, sociologie, théorie sociale series) are bound together by such a research hypothesis, as well as by the scientific pluralism it entails.

2 This review is divided into two main parts. The first gives an account of the content of the book, stressing the affinities between the various essays, as the editors’ coordination and introduction also do. In the second part, starting from the divergences between the same essays, I will try to point out what I think are the main ambiguities and the limits of the pragmatic approach (or approaches). Reference to further literature will be kept to a minimum. 3 2. The intention to discuss ambiguities and limits is, of course, shared by the editors, who open the book with the harsh controversy – a genuine Pratiquesstreit – between Angelo Torre and Roger Chartier, which appeared in the Italian journal “Quaderni Storici” in 1995-96.1 4 By retracing the theoretical steps of António Manuel Hespanha (focusing on his history of political institutions) and Chartier (comparing the latter’s to Bourdieu’s, in which he

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identified its true matrix), Torre criticized the “practice paradigm” (“paradigma della pratica”) which dominated the 1980s. He emphasized that its theoretical framework “suffers from having been developed as a tool in an ideological debate, in the context of the reaction against and interactionism,” looking for a way to avoid the symmetric dangers of positivism and individualism. According to Torre, a possible definition of practices lies in the fact that “the validity of practices lies in their being actions acknowledged as legitimate because of their special relation with legitimation devices in a certain context (situation)”; thereby, “reading actions in terms of legitimation allows [us] to see how rules are created though action” (820-1). Chartier, for his part, claims that his own work was a defense against the linguistic turn, rather than a capitulation to it, inasmuch as it maintained – through a thorough reading of sources and awareness of their social context and epistemological limits – “the irreducible difference between the practices shaping social relations, and those presiding over the production of discourse.” 5 The editors found it useful to recover this twenty year-old dialogue, inasmuch as it brings many unresolved issues explicitly (and harshly) to a head. At that point, on the one hand, the depth of the crisis of the classical historiographical paradigms had been fully revealed; on the other, the proposed innovations and turns coming from philosophy and linguistics had displayed many of their limits and fallen short of most of their proclamations. The main targets of these innovations and turns were notions such as structure and, most of all, of process: notions which, I will argue in the latter part of this review, are still to be considered vital to the work of the historian. In recalling that controversy, the aim of the editors may be to suggest that, twenty years on, the time has come to accept the all-encompassing potential of a notion such as practice, with its ability to surpass its anti-structuralist origin and to overcome objections such as that of Torre. The question is whether, behind the diversity of practices (in the plural), we can detect an idea of practice that is as flexible as it is shared, and whether it provides the main thread for this volume. In my opinion, the notions of practice/ practices appearing in the essays overlap only in part. 6 The essays share the aim of studying documents in their collective dimension, highlighting their production as a collective process involving different social actors and, most importantly, as a framework for ideas of legitimacy. Documents, therefore, are seen neither as a creation of a single individual (Ernest Mattern, in Yves Cohen’s essay, is taken as a representative of a generation of Taylorist engineers) nor as a fragment of social totality (Fanny Gallot’s filles d’usines are not a mere slice of the industrial working class, but a group struggling to gain a new representation and reputation). Rather, they are the products of the practice of groups (social, professional, communities, etc.), in their dialectical relationship with norms. Sociology would speak of a meso level between the micro and the macro. 7 Documents may convey the will of authoritarian organization and social control, as in the case of Cohen’s social engineers, Mattern and Stalin. More often, they bear the stamps and scars of long processes of negotiation: inside institutions and between the institutions and the State (as in Grégory Dufaud’s essay on Soviet psychiatric institutes in the 1920s and 1930, which starts from the accidents and arrives at the public debate that influenced the Council of People’s Commissars’ decisions in 1936); between different social actors confronting each other in the arena of politics and public opinion (Chateauraynaud shows how asbestos and GMOs are made into health issues and

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political issues); between different subjects inside a community, cooperating but holding different demands (Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès analyzes the manuscripts and the accountants’ books, revealing the procedure of compromise and adjustments, in which ideas of legitimacy and book-keeping concerns are meddled with); between the project and its realization (Frédéric Graber outlines a “pragmatic history of formes projet,” an anthropological and sociological reading of which, following Boltanski, may point out a true apologetics of capitalism); between different contexts, building a bridge between which may be the task of a specific, professionalized group (such as Stéphane Péquignot’s case study, through documents coming from the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona, of the hard work of the Aragonese, French, and Castillan ambassadors to bring the parties involved to an agreement on the heir to the throne of Aragon, following the death of Martin I in 1410). 8 The relationship between practice and theory is perhaps the most sensitive point. Cohen even admits that it is easier to define practice by negation, that is, by opposition, in the first instace, to the history of ideas; as soon as a positive definition is attempted, however, it must integrate “the way in which actors, in each of the examined practices, conceive what practice is. […] In fact, in these practices, in the very movement of their development, debates on practice take place, between practitioners” (109). No practice without theory of practice, therefore. We are dealing with a “pragmatism which does not specifically deal with American pragmatist philosophy” (111): it looks like Taylorist engineers and managers, like Monsieur Jourdain, were pragmatists without knowing it (and one might ask, therefore, to what extent philosophical pragmatism was the ideological projection of the organizational drive and managerial revolution of early 20th Century America). In this essay (as in Tullio Viola and Roberto Gronda’s interview in the present issue) Cohen resumes the bulk of his life-spanning research: the legitimation of practices of social control through efficiency and science is the fundamental characteristic of the “siècle des chefs,” the “century of leaders” dominated by Stalin and Ford, the Bolsheviks and the Matterns. 9 In the essay written by Béatrice Delaurenti we see an example of the building of a theory of action, through the debate on the possibilities of action at a distance in the Middle Ages (13th-14th Centuries), involving medicine, philosophy, and theology, going from Aristotle to Richard of Middleton (but, once again, documents are to be studied as a collective production: we have access to some of the students’ notes). Such a debate can be seen, according to Delaurenti, as “a step in men’s reflection on their own possibilities of action, and also an event provoking a rupture in intelligibility”; a rupture in which the “double function of medieval discourse, at the same time creative and normalizing” (171-2), can flourish. 10 The final point of this reflection on the relationship between theory and practice is the essay on re-enactment as a possible tool for pragmatic history, in which Rémy Campos and Nicolas Donin classify different ways of putting sources into practice – with examples ranging from Leroi-Gourhan’s experimental archaeology to the reactivation of the memory of the actors themselves, as director Pierre Huyghe did with bank robber John Wojtowicz in the documentary The Third Memory (1999). Cohen too, as he explains in the interview, has been studying how the factory works as a worker: “Back then I was Maoist. I was a worker, I was engaged in politics, and I reflected on the same experiences as a historian.”

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11 Roberto Frega’s is the most theoretical essay in this collection, and also the most theoretically consistent, addressing the plurality of all the possible and sometimes contrasting meanings of a pragmatic history. The latter can be meant in both a methodological and an ontological sense (more precisely, a “functional ontology,” 337): starting from this distinction, Frega reaches an elastic notion of practice as “a key concept insofar as it allows to show the articulation of this heterogeneous material; in this sense, it is necessary to understand that science is neither knowledge, nor conflict, nor technology, but rather the complex arrangement of all such factors” (336). This notion comes from the realm of science but may be fruitfully applied to others, such as social history: Frega’s favorite reference is to Charles Tilly’s contentious repertoires, clearly situated on a meso level of collective action and legitimation. “Neither a history of individual conducts, nor history of social totalities: pragmatic history shall find its balance in this intermediary ontological dimension of practices” (344). 12 What is perhaps the most interesting and fertile feature of pragmatist historiography is, in fact, its ability to “liven up” sources by combining a thorough internal analysis with an enquiry into the social and cultural conditions of their production (and also their reading, as Chartier has shown us). We can take for example Bouhaïk-Gironès’s essay, dedicated to “writing in action” (“l’écriture en action”) – namely, the writing processes of a Mystère de saint Sebastien, Chalon-sur-Saône, Saône-et-Loire, 1497, and a Mystère des trois Doms, Romans, Drôme, 1509, commissioned by the communes. The “mise en texte” is the preparatory stage of a “mise en scène.” The manuscript of the Mystère de saint Sebastien, for instance, “shows different interventions in the text, though a system of signs in the margins (sharps, crosses, capital letters, etc.); simple corrections of verses, changes of characters in some performances (especially involving the devil), deletion or expansion of some roles, […] addition of some episodes and, finally, instructions in Latin on scenography, representation, pauses, and musical moments (the so-called silete)” (93); it goes without saying that, from this perspective, “the historian will find what is most revealing in the document not in the information that its author wanted but, rather, in what he deleted, in the signs bearing witness of the errors or hesitations of actors, notaries, and parties” (99). In this essay, in conclusion, the case studies are intertwined with reflections on how to detect the vivid traces of practice in historical sources. 13 3. The common goal of putting practices at the center of their enquiries, while building their framework with norms, shall not let the divergences between the essays be overlooked. 14 The most striking concerns perhaps the manifold spectrum of attitudes towards the documents. On the one hand, we find once again the notion that some special method could make historical sources “speak for themselves” (it is here repeated by Graber and Dufaud); on the other hand, there is in Campos and Donin’s essay an “overflowing” of the historian’s own work, which is supposed to produce, through re-enactment and the other reproduction techniques, new sources and new archives (279). 15 Different practices go together, needless to say, with different theories. The different backgrounds of the authors are reflected in the different genealogies that they propose for the pragmatic approach, the two drawn by Torre and Frega being the most articulate. While the former is explicitly polemic, the latter appreciates the heterogeneity of the cultural streams converging in the pratiques approach, starting with Wittgenstein and going beyond Bourdieu. While Dufaud emphasizes the centrality

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of William James, Cohen, for his part, through Bernard Lepetit, traces it all back to Kantian anthropology (which was written “from a Pragmatic Point of View”). In their introduction, Chateauraynaud and Cohen go as far as Polybius. While such a heterogeneity may be a strong point insofar as it concurs in its elasticity, enabling it to encompass many different shades in the relation between practices and norms, it is arguable that it may also reveal deeper weaknesses and as yet unresolved issues. 16 The difficulty of combining philosophical perspectives as different as Wittgenstein’s, Foucault’s, and the American pragmatists’, is perhaps underestimated, making such a combination look more straightforward and harmonious than it could be: one needs only to think of the different notions and functions of power in these philosophers. Furthermore, in the effort of tracing its titles of nobility back to the classics in the writing of history (such as Marc Bloch and Carlo Ginzburg and microhistory in the editors’ introduction, and Bouhaïk-Gironès’s essay, or the reference to moral economy, in Graber’s), the deep bond these had with economic context and technical conditions is often overlooked. 17 If we are to take seriously the purpose of considering meaningful what has been omitted, we should underline the outright absence, in this syncretism, of Karl Marx, and to ask if a specific reason for this absence can be identified. Marx in fact appears only in Cohen’s essay, and even there, in the background (121 and 124). Still, one might argue that a pragmatist approach could fruitfully draw on historical materialism’s stress on human practice and on its ability to shape theory and culture (compare Theses on Feuerbach, VIII: “All social life is essentially practical”). The answer is probably that Marxian stress on social totality (human essence as “the ensemble of social relations,” Theses on Feuerbach, VI) is not compatible with pragmatism, which tends to see it as mere determinism and to focus on the level of intentionality. I will try to come back to these problems in the latter part of the review. 18 What is certain is that, if one wishes to understand the position of the pratiques approach to history in the history of methodologies and, broadly speaking, in the history of culture (an understanding which probably goes together with weighing its potentialities and obscurities), it is necessary to go beyond the pragmatist historian’s own self representation and internal debate. 19 In his introduction to an Italian collection of Chartier’s essays, Carlo Ginzburg set a positivist approach to sources, according to which any document could be used as a “clear and direct testimony of social reality,” against “a radically different, and more sophisticated, path, according to which each source can bear witness only to itself and, therefore, the only reality the historian can have access to is that of representation. It is a radically idealistic view, which, taken to the extreme, would prevent different archival series from being integrated and would block, therefore, the very possibility of historical research.”2 Chartier’s was a “third way” between the two, inasmuch as he aimed at discovering the bond between reality and representation precisely through the inversions and silences in the representations themselves – in the case, at least, of marginalities, namely the cours des miracles’ beggars in the 16th and 17th centuries.

20 By bringing it all back to a contrast between a positivistic and an idealistic approach to sources, Ginzburg highlights that the fundamental traditions in the history of culture are always in action. Therefore, its fundamental issues are always at stake, no matter how radical innovations and ruptures are supposed to be. The combination of history and pragmatism is no exception: in the first place, because of its explicit syncretic

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nature; and in the second place, because of the absolute priority it confers to the subjectivity of actors, whose action and agency are structurally founded on their worldviews (which also means that conflicting actions are in the end founded on a conflict between norms and worldviews, as is the case with the conflict between the Taylorist Mattern and the workers). 21 What the pratiques approach seems to lack is precisely the desire to understand what is going on beyond the conscience of the historical actors, while shaping it. In this regard, once again, the classics in historiography have not finished saying what they have to say. Since pratiques had been conceived in opposition to structures, namely, as a device to unlock the often suffocating determinism of the latter (this, as I have already recalled, seems to be the main thread of the present book), they often ended up forgoing a broad range of questions about the logic of historical changes – questions that fall under the concept of process. 22 What could appear at first sight as mere reverting to the old controversy between structures and processes might, on the contrary, be a step forward, if one thinks of the definition given by Ellen Meiksins Wood of Edward P. Thompson’s research: structured processes, “in which relations of production exert their pressures by transforming inherited realities.”3 Thompson focused on the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions in England as deep social traumas. It is no small achievement, and accounts in part for the fact that his essays on English social history in the 18th and 19th centuries are now essential references about the making of the working classes in many different contexts around the world (this applies in particular to his book on the Making of the English Working Class, notwithstanding the fact that Thompson here deals with a subject located at the very heart of Europe, i.e., the industrial revolution and its role in the genesis of European political cultures). 23 Recalling E. P. Thompson allows us point to out what the pratiques approach seems to be losing in its evolution from tool to paradigm: the ability to grasp the connection between human collective action and cultures and the processes which inform consciousness even when they evade it. By focusing on the supposed meso level of practices, the connection between the micro and the macro falls out of the spotlight; it is the latter, obviously, which is most feared and explicitly rejected (for both practical and theoretical reasons, see Frega’s essay). 24 While “thinking through consequences” [“penser par consequences”] hardly looks like an original and revealing perspective, historians cannot allow unthought of consequences to fall out of sight – consequences which are not apparent to the conscience of the actors themselves. There is a broad range of phenomena which it is not possible to understand (or even to grasp) merely by considering them as the result, or net force, of the different ends, means and practices of different social actors and groups. To take but one, general example: in the rise and evolution of capitalism, both at the core and the peripheries of its expansion, new market and labor relations were subsumed under the capitalist mode of production by the combination of direct coercive force and the impersonal agencies of accumulation, of the labor process itself and its technical exigencies, of the developments of commerce and finance, and so on. The expansion, generalization and differentiation of capitalism was a process imposing itself “in the shape of external coercive laws” (Marx), which often engaged in a violent struggle with pre-existing norms and practices. What E. P. Thompson called “the experience of determination” unifies the micro, meso and macro levels (and in this

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experience we can see the materiality of structures of which Cohen speaks in Viola and Gronda’s interview). This seeming externality is a level of objectivity which must itself be understood in its historical scope.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIZZOCCHI Roberto, (1996), “Storia debole, storia forte,” Storica 5, 93-114.

CHARTIER Roger, (1996), “Rappresentazione della pratica, pratica della rappresentazione,” Quaderni Storici, 92, xxxi, 2, August, 487-93.

GINZBURG Carlo, (1984), Foreword to Roger Chartier, Figure della furfanteria. Marginalità e cultura popolare in Francia tra Cinque e Seicento, Roma, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 3-11.

MEIKSINS WOOD Ellen, (2016), Democracy Against Capitalism. Renewing Historical Materialism, London, Verso.

TORRE Angelo, (1995), “Percorsi della pratica, 1966-1995,” Quaderni Storici, 90, xxx, 3, December, 799-829.

NOTES

1. Torre 1995 and Roger Chartier 1996. It is worth noting that the following issue of “Quaderni Storici” (93 / a. XXXI, n. 3, December 1996) was dedicated to Erudizione e fonti. Storiografie della rivendicazione and Torre was the editor, together with Enrico Artifoni. In their introduction they wrote, clearly referring to the “pratiques approach” and to Chartier in particular (and clearly subsuming pragmatism under the label of skepticism, because of its opening the doors to subjectivism): “New forms of skepticism shifted the historian’s attention from the source itself to reading devices and to the argumentation and demonstration. There is a risk that the nature of evidence, its uncertainty and stickiness are used to legitimize an endless proliferation of interpretations, each inasmuch as the subjective perception becomes the foundation of the attribution of meaning” (511). Cf. Bizzocchi 1996. 2. Ginzburg (1984: 8). 3. Meiksins Wood (2016: 71, and 79).

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AUTHORS

BRUNO SETTIS

Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa / Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po, Paris bruno.settis[at]sns.it

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Essays

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Josiah Royce Influenced Charles Peirce

David E. Pfeifer

1 Josiah Royce (born 10 November 1855) was sixteen years younger than Charles Peirce (born 10 September 1839). Most often, senior scholars influence younger scholars. This view seems common. On the surface, reading histories and biographies, it appears that while Peirce influenced Royce, Royce did not have any impact on Peirce. For example, the superb history of American Philosophy by Elizabeth Flower and Murray Murphey (1977) has no mention of Royce in the Peirce chapter, but has numerous Peirce references in the Royce chapter. Even the meticulous Max Fisch wrote: “Royce was […] acquainted with Peirce, followed his work with increasing interest, and was increasingly influenced by it” (Fisch 1951: 3). The standard biographies of Royce1 and Peirce2 do not indicate Royce had an influence on Peirce. A strong example of this view is expressed by Frank Oppenheim, the dean of Royce scholars, who wrote: Royce experienced Charles Peirce’s Cambridge Conferences of 1898 as epoch- making, since “they started me on such new tracks [Letter of 21 June 1901 to William James].” [Royce integrated] Peirce’s ideas of continuity, individuality, infinity, system, and the logic of relatives into his own idea of individuality […] After a stroke in early February 1912, a recuperating Royce, temporarily relieved from teaching, carefully compared and contrasted the early, middle, and late published writings of “our American logician,” Charles Peirce. In this way Royce grasped Peirce’s theories of signs, interpretation, and his three categories far more profoundly than previously. (Oppenheim 2004,118-9) 2 Even Douglas Anderson in his masterful article, “Who’s a Pragmatist: Royce and Peirce at the Turn of the Century,” says, “I take as given […] the fact that Peirce influenced Royce’s thought in some important ways,” (2005: 473) without discussing how Royce may have influenced Peirce. Mary Mahowald in her insightful study of Royce’s Idealistic Pragmatism states: That Charles Peirce and William James, both well known pragmatists, exerted an important influence on the philosophy of Royce is evident from the biographical data, from cross references in their works, and from their correspondence, both published and unpublished. In general the relationship of Royce to Peirce may be

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characterized as one of deference, his relationship to James as one of friendship. (Mahowald 1972: 17)3 3 Several recent works have explored the relation between Royce and Peirce. Examples are books and articles by Ludwig Nagl (2004), Frank Oppenheim (2005), Randall Auxier (2013), and Cheryl Misak (2013).4 However, none of these authors makes a definite claim that Royce influenced Peirce. Auxier (2013: 13) states that “the direction of influence is undecidable in many cases.”

4 I would like to tell a tale of Josiah Royce influencing Charles Peirce, a narrative worthy of presentation, since Royce had a stronger influence on Peirce than many might realize. The first section of this paper is history, a chronology;5 the second section is a summary of how Peirce’s thought changed because of this instance of Royce’s influence.6

Chronology

5 Josiah Royce and Charles Peirce knew of each other through Johns Hopkins University, though not directly. Royce was at Johns Hopkins 1876-1878, receiving his Ph.D. in 1878. Peirce taught at the university 1879-1884. They knew of each other’s writings, and of course were associated through William James. Here are some examples of their meetings, at least through writings. Frank Oppenheim points out that at the 20 May 1880 meeting of the Johns Hopkins University Metaphysical Club, Peirce was elected President and the club heard Royce’s paper entitled “On Purpose in Thought” (Oppenheim 2005: 14).7 In 1885, Peirce seriously studied Royce’s The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, writing a review8 for the Popular Science Monthly that was never published. While greatly praising Royce, Peirce chided him for being too Hegelian. In 1899, a change in Peirce’s thought about Royce came when Peirce read and reviewed Royce’s The World and the Individual: First Series (1899) and then The World and the Individual: Second Series (1901).9 Peirce offered high praise for the second volume when he stated: “I will say hic et nunc that the volume has cut off a big piece of the road that it remains for Philosophy to travel before she will join company with the rest of the peaceable sciences.”10 He added, “Royce’s ‘The World and the Individual’ will stand a prominent milestone upon the highway of philosophy.”11 And in a letter to William James he said, “The ideas are very beautiful.”12 Following these reviews, Peirce actively worked his way through Royce’s recent writings.

6 As might be expected, Peirce often found fault with Royce’s logic. In a 1902 letter to Royce he stated: “Underneath your logic which I cannot approve there is a nearly parallel stream of thought perfectly sound.”13 This comment is repeated in a 1909 manuscript: “The World and the Individual, [is] a work not free from faults of logic, yet valid in the main.”14 7 1902 is important. Peirce and Royce corresponded.15 The letters and an invitation to Royce to spend time at the Peirce home in Milford in “cooperative” study16 indicate how seriously Peirce took Royce’s ideas. 8 In the Lowell Lectures of 1903 (Lecture III, draft 3) Peirce named an author who assisted him in the effort to show the mistake of nominalism, which is the effort “to resolve everything in our thoughts into those two elements [of Firstness and Secondness alone]” (CP 1.343 (G-1903-2a)). That author was Josiah Royce, who “in his great work

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The World and the Individual has done much to breakup this mistake” (CP 1.343 (G-1903-2a)). 9 In 1905, Peirce even states that “Mr. Royce […] impresses me quite decidedly as a pragmatist” (EP II:361 (Ms. 908 [1905])). 10 In the 1906 “Issues of Pragmatism,” Peirce acknowledged the aid received from Royce’s World and Individual (CP 5.402n3 (G-1905-1b [1906])). Peirce repeated his praise again in 1909. He admired the concept of “the Reality, [sic] of the Absolute, nearly as it has been set forth […] by Royce in his The World and the Individual, a work […] valid in the main” (CP 5.358n1 (G-1909-1)). 11 This very brief chronology demonstrates that Peirce thought seriously about what Royce wrote. Peirce appears to have taken into his own thought elements from those writings.

Royce’s Influence

12 A common manner of organizing Peirce’s work is around the concept of realism.17 Peirce stated that the question of realism is “whether laws and general types are figments of the mind or are real” (CP 1.16 (G-c.1897-1)). The questions of realism are connected with the logic of relatives, pragmatism, evolution, objective idealism, continuity, and semiotics – sometimes one feels that everything in Peirce’s thought is interconnected, as he said himself: “a very snarl of twine” (CP 6.184 (G-c.1911-1)). This discussion will focus on aims, purposes and continuity.

13 The earliest mention of an aim or purpose by Peirce I can find is: The agapastic development of thought should, if it exists, be distinguished by its purposive character, this purpose being the development of an idea. We should have a direct agapic or sympathetic comprehension and recognition of it by virtue of the continuity of thought. I here take it for granted that such continuity of thought has been sufficiently proved by the arguments used in my paper on the “Law of Mind” in The Monist of last July. (CP 6.315 (G-18911e [1893])) 14 While one immediately sees parallels to Royce’s thought, one can also see that this notion of purpose could have grown from Peirce’s development of his realism and his thought on evolution and continuity. Obviously, the concept of purpose is not unique to Royce or Peirce.

15 Max Fisch chronicled Peirce’s realist development in his essay “Peirce’s Progress from Nominalism toward Realism” (Fisch 1986: 184-200). As part of this chronology, Fisch (1986: 189) mentioned the 1885 “provocative” book by Josiah Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. Peirce’s review of this work is a place to begin our discussion. A quick read of the review demonstrates easily that Peirce took seriously what Royce wrote. Peirce was working his way through Royce’s thinking, although he rejected much of what was presented. The review’s discussion of Royce’s thoughts on an aim or ultimate end – we might say purpose – is something that reappears in Peirce’s writings. 16 If the term ‘purpose’18 is used as a lens through which to consider the term ‘application’ in the following quotation, we see how in April, 1900, Peirce was refining his pragmatic maxim. [i]n my youth I wrote some articles to uphold a doctrine I called Pragmatism, namely, that the meaning and essence of every conception lies in the application that is to be made of it. That is all very well, when properly understood. I do not

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intend to recant it. But the question arises, what is the ultimate application. (Peirce 1966: 332) 17 A discussion of ultimate application seems very Roycean. Peirce began to understand that actions require some end or purpose. At this time, Peirce revised the pragmatic maxim to include the notion of purpose, a central element in Royce’s thought.

18 A place to begin a more specific discussion of how Peirce’s thinking changed is the April, 1900, Nation review of The World and the Individual: First Series. It opened with Peirce stating that the purpose of the volume “is to say what it is that we aim at when we make any inquiry or investigation – not what our ulterior purpose may be, nor yet what our special effort is in any particular case, but what the direct and common aim of all search for knowledge is” (CP 8.100 (N-1900-15)). Peirce saw that “Prof. Royce reaches his conclusion by analyzing the nature of the purpose of an idea” (CP 8.105 (N-1900-15)). 19 And in a draft of the review, Peirce stated, […] in the same pragmatistic spirit, Prof. Royce holds that the Internal Meaning of an idea is a Purpose, obscurely recognized in consciousness, partially fulfilled in being recognized but mainly unfulfilled and ill-understood in itself. The external meaning lies in the fulfillment of the purpose. (CP 8.119 [G-c.1902-4] a draft of The World and the Individual review)19 20 In a letter to Christine Ladd-Franklin (most likely from late 1903), Peirce stated: Royce’s opinions as developed in his ‘World and Individual’ are extremely near to mine. His insistence on the element of purpose in intellectual concepts is essentially the pragmatistic position. (Ladd-Franklin 1916: 720)20 21 After the review of The World and the Individual, while continuing his correspondence with Royce, Peirce writes more extensively on purpose. Purpose as a concept become more prominent. In the 1902 entry on Pragmatism in James Mark Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology,21 Peirce wrote about the same kind of transition in his thinking, this time using the term ‘end.’ If it be admitted […] that action wants an end, and that that end must be something of a general description, then the spirit of the maxim itself, which is that that we must look to the upshot of our concepts in order rightly to apprehend them, would direct us towards something different from practical facts, namely, to general ideas, as the true interpreters of our thought. (Peirce 1972: 301) 22 The upshot is that Peirce began to see a connection between general concepts and ends, or Royce might say – purposes. Peirce incorporated into the pragmatic maxim the concept of purpose that is evident in Royce’s writings.

23 Peirce’s reading of Royce led him to articulate a fourth grade of clearness22 which comes when a concept, a conceived action, is thought of in terms of its purpose. The importance of purpose can be seen in Peirce’s 190223 application to the Carnegie Institution seeking funding for thirty-six memoirs, wherein he states “[…] my paper of 1878 was imperfect in tacitly leaving it to appear that the maxim of pragmatism led to the last stage of clearness,” and “I shall develop a fourth, and higher, grade of clearness, resulting from an appreciation of the intellectual relations of the definitum [the thing defined].”24 Further, Peirce agrees with Schiller (CP 5.494 (G-c.1907-1c)) and Royce (CP 8.115 (G-c.1900-2))25 that meaning requires a purpose. Peirce recognized that “concepts are purposive” (CP 8.322 (Letter to F. C. S. Schiller, 10 September 1906)) and that “The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action, and whatever cannot show its

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at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason” (CP 5.212 (G-1903-1)). Vincent Colapietro (1986)26 connects a fourth grade of clearness, namely purpose, to semiosis, a central element in Peirce’s semiotic, sign theory. Peirce stated that the Pragmatic Maxim is “a far-reaching theorem solidly grounded upon an elaborate study of the nature of signs” (CP 8.191 (G-c.1904-3)). Peirce in this work is bringing together a revised Pragmatic Maxim, a fourth grade of clearness, purpose, and semiosis. This set of refinements is quite major. Royce may not have been the chief instigator of these changes, but Royce’s writings provided Peirce with the stimulus and occasion for these changes. These changes could have come later without Royce. 24 In 1906, Peirce mentioned Royce’s influence: No doubt, Pragmaticism makes thought ultimately apply to action exclusively – to conceived action. But between admitting that and either saying that it makes thought, in the sense of the purport of symbols, to consist in acts, or saying that the true ultimate purpose of thinking is action, there is much the same difference as there is between saying that the artist-painter’s living art is applied to dabbing paint upon canvas, and saying that that art-life consists in dabbing paint, or that its ultimate aim is dabbing paint. Pragmaticism makes thinking to consist in the living inferential metaboly of symbols whose purport lies in conditional general resolutions to act. As for the ultimate purpose of thought, which must be the purpose of everything, it is beyond human comprehension; but according to the stage of approach which my thought has made to it – with aid from many persons, among whom I may mention Royce (in his World and Individual), Schiller (in his Riddles of the Sphinx) as well, by the way, as the famous poet [Friedrich Schiller] (in his Aesthetische Briefe), Henry James the elder (in his Substance and Shadow and in his conversations), together with Swedenborg himself – it is by the indefinite replication of self-control upon self-control that the vir is begotten, and by action, through thought, he grows an esthetic ideal, not for the behoof of his own poor noddle merely, but as the share which God permits him to have in the work of creation. (CP 5.402n3 (G-1905-1b [1906])) 25 In this long passage, Peirce reiterated his corrective that the pragmatic maxim does not lead specifically to unique actions but to “conditional general resolutions to act” or conceived action. He once again asserted his realism. The use of the phrase “ultimate purpose” in this passage is a likely indicator of Royce’s influence on Peirce. Furthermore, the statement that the ultimate purpose of thought is man’s “share which God permits him [man] to have in the work of creation” echoes not only Royce but also Peirce own essay “Evolutionary Love” (CP 6.287-317 (G-1891-1e [1893], The Monist, January 1893)). Peirce moved in a Roycean direction.

26 We cannot ignore the aspect of this passage in “Issues of Pragmatism” (above) in which Peirce stated “it is by the indefinite replication of self-control upon self-control that the vir is begotten, and by action, through thought, he grows an esthetic ideal.” The vir is problematic (Krolikowski 1964: 257-70), but some desired end or goal is clearly implied. This esthetic ideal seems to be Peirce’s summum bonum, the ultimate goal or purpose of all thought and evolution, the embodiment of reasonableness. (The first use of the term summum bonum appears to be in the Minute Logic of 1902 (CP 1.575), shortly after the Royce review.) The esthetic ideal, the summum bonum, the embodiment of reasonableness itself and the end or goal of evolution and all thought cannot be conceived except as an echo of Royce and likely much more. This large set of ideas seems not to have been fully developed in the remaining years of Peirce’s active career, but it is clear he wished to see them developed.

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Conclusion

27 Peirce rethought his version of pragmatism, Pragmaticism, as he began to study Royce’s writings around the time of the publication of The World and Individual. For Peirce, the 1899-1902 time period is full of change in thought resulting from the re- examination of earlier positions. Peirce changed his Pragmatic Maxim to move away from actions to generals, conceived actions or dispositions. He developed his theory of signs, semiotic, to include purpose.27 These are all major shifts in Peirce’s thought. These shifts brought the thinking of Peirce and Royce closer than many may have imaged.

28 The narrative presented here should give us a stronger sense of the interaction between Royce and Peirce. They appreciated each other’s work. The voluminous correspondence on logic c.1902-190528 is another indicator that Peirce and Royce understood each other. We see in this narrative two fine philosophic minds in full dialogue. We gain a further sense of Peirce’s appreciation for Royce’s thought, and of course, as often stated, Royce’s appreciation for Peirce’s thought. Peirce went so far as to state, “I think Royce’s conception in The World and the Individual (although I do not assent to the logic in that work) comes nearer to the genuine upshot of pragmaticism than any exposition that a pragmatist has given, – than any other pragmatist has given” (Ms. 284, p. 6 (c. September 1905)). We must begin to see Royce and Peirce as two workers in the same large field. James and Dewey are in this field, but Royce and Peirce were closer than the others. 29 The change in Peirce thought in c.1905 was sufficiently great that he went so far as to state: If this analysis of the pragmatistic opinion is correct, the logical breadth of the term pragmatist is hereby enormously enlarged. For it will become predicable not only of Mr. Royce but also of a large section of the logical world, – perhaps the majority, – since ancient times.29 (EP 2.361 (Ms. 908, late 1905-early 1906)) 30 Royce concluded that he could see himself as a pragmatist; he claimed to have developed “a sort of absolute pragmatism” (Royce 1968: 279). My conclusion is that Peirce was able to include Josiah Royce in the great company of pragmatists because, with the study of Josiah Royce’s work, Peirce enlarged his notion of pragmatism. Josiah Royce had a very significant impact on Charles Peirce, which led to a re-evaluation and development of Peirce’s thinking during the 1899-1902 time period and to a renewed appreciation for Royce as a pragmatist.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABBOT Francis Ellington, (1890), Scientific , The Way Out of Agnosticism, Boston, MA, Little, Brown & Co.

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ANDERSON R. Douglas, (2005), “Who’s a Pragmatist: Royce and Peirce at the Turn of the Century,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 41, 3, 467-81.

AUXIER E. Randall, (2013), Time, Will, and Purpose, Chicago, IL, Open Court.

BALDWIN James, (1972), Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (excerpts) as reprinted in Charles S. Peirce: The Essential Writings, Edward C. Moore (ed), New York, Harper & Row, Publishers.

BOLER F. John, (1963), Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism, Seattle, WA, University of Washington Press.

BRENT Joseph, (1998), Charles Sanders Peirce, revised and enlarged edition, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

CLENDENNING John, (1999), The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press [Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1985].

CLENDENNING John, (ed), (1970), The Letters of Josiah Royce, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

COLAPIETRO Vincento, (1985), “Peirce’s Attempt to Define Semiosis,” Semiotics 1985 (Lanham, MD, University Press of American, 1986), 479-86.

FISCH Max, (1951), “Introduction,” Classic American Philosophers, New York, Appleton-Century- Crofts, Inc.

FISCH Max, (1986), Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press.

FLOWER Elizabeth & Murray MURPHEY, (1977), A History of Philosophy in America, vol. II, New York, Capricorn Books,

HINE Robert, (1992), Josiah Royce: From Grass Valley to Harvard, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press.

KROLIKOWSKI Walter, (1964), “The Peircean Vir,” Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce: Second Series, Edward Moore & Richard Robin (eds.), Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press.

KUKLICK Bruce, (1985), Josiah Royce: An Intellectual Biography, Indianapolis, IN, Hackett Publishing.

LADD-FRANKLIN Christine, (1916), “Charles S. Peirce at the Johns Hopkins,” The Journal of Philosophy, 13, 26.

MAHOWALD BROIDY Mary, (1972), An Idealistic Pragmatism, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff.

MISAK Cheryl, (2013), The American Pragmatists, Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press.

NAGL Ludwig, (2004), “Beyond Absolute Pragmatism,” Cognitio, 5, 1, 44-74.

OPPENHEIM Frank, (2004), “Josiah Royce, 1855-1916,” The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy, Armen Maroobian and (eds.), Cambridge, MA, Blackwell Publishing, 118-19.

OPPENHEIM Frank, (2005), Reverence for the Relations of Life, Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press.

PEIRCE Charles S., (1889-1891), The Century Dictionary of the English Language, New York, The Century Company.

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PEIRCE Charles S., (1966 [1958]), Review of Clark University, 1889-1899: Decennial Celebration in Science (April 20, 1900), pp. 620-2, as reprinted in Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings, Philip P. Weiner (ed.), New York, Dover Publications.

PEIRCE Charles S., (1967), Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce, ed. Richard Robin, Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press.

PEIRCE Charles S., (1972), Charles S. Peirce: The Essential Writings, Edward C. Moore (ed.), New York, Harper & Row, Publishers.

PEIRCE Charles S., (1976a), The New Elements of Mathematics, Carolyn Eisele (ed.), The Hague, Mouton Publishers.

PEIRCE Charles S., (1976b), Manuscripts and letters at Harvard University photocopied by Texas Tech University in 1976, with copies at the Institute for American Thought, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis.

PEIRCE Charles S., (1982-2010), The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Vols. I-VI, VIII, multiple editors (Bloomington, IN, 1982-2010).

PEIRCE Charles S., (1992, 1998), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, 2 volumes, Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press.

PFEIFER David, (1971), The Summum Bonum in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois.

PFEIFER David, (2011), “Inquiry and the Fourth Grade of Clearness” [nordprag.org/papers/ Pfeifer.pdf].

PFEIFER David, (2014), “The Primacy of Procreative Action in Peirce’s Semiosis,” Semiotics 2013, Charlotte, VA, Philosophy Documentation Center, 107-16.

ROYCE Josiah, (1885), The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, New York, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

ROYCE Josiah, (1899), The World and the Individual: First Series, New York, The Macmillan Company.

ROYCE Josiah, (1901), The World and the Individual: Second Series, New York, The Macmillan Company.

ROYCE Josiah, (1905), “The Relation of the Principles of Logic to the Foundations of Geometry,” Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 24, 353-415.

ROYCE Josiah, (1968 [1913]), The Problem of Christianity, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

NOTES

1. Clendenning 1999; Hine 1992; Kuklick 1985. 2. Brent 1998. 3. I became aware of this passage through the Douglas Anderson article cited above. 4. Note that Misak mistakenly says that Royce “was taught by Peirce” (p. 81) at Johns Hopkins University. Royce was at Johns Hopkins 1876-1878, receiving his Ph.D. in 1878. In August, 1878, Royce was in California. Peirce taught at Johns Hopkins 1879-1884. Nagl, in footnote 2 of his essay, indicates that Peirce became “interested” in Royce’s thought. I wish to take a stronger stand. 5. In 1891, Peirce and Royce disagreed violently in the Francis Ellington Abbot controversy over Abbot’s book, Scientific Theism, The Way Out of Agnosticism. The incident does not show the best

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side of any of the participants. I will ignore this incident, since it adds nothing to the present discussion. 6. The focus of this paper is quite narrow. A separate and much longer paper could easily be done on how Royce may have influenced Peirce’s pragmatism. 7. Royce was not in attendance. One desires to know what Peirce thought of Royce’s paper. 8. Ms. 1369, published in CP 8.39-54 (in part), W 5:221-4, and EP I: 229-41. Manuscripts are cited by the Richard Robbin’s catalogue number; CP refers to The Collected Papers by volume and paragraph number; W refers to the Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition by volume and page number; and EP refers to the Essential Peirce by volume and page number. See works cited for complete bibliographic information. 9. Peirce’s review of the first series is published at CP 8.100-16 (N-1900-15; G-c.1900-2), which is a compilation of the review and associated manuscripts. Peirce’s review of the second series is published at CP 8.117 (in part) [except 117n10 and 117n12, 8.120 (in part)] and CP 8.126-30 which are from the published review (N-1902-10). See G-c.1902-4 for selections from alternative drafts printed with the above. 10. CP 8.117n10 (Letter from Peirce to Royce, 27 May 1902, on The World and the Individual: Second Series). 11. CP 8.117 (N-1902-10, review in The Nation.) 12. CP 8.277 (Letter to William James, 12 June 1902). 13. CP 8.117n12 (Letter to Josiah Royce, 27 May 1902). 14. CP 5.358n1 (G-1909-1). 15. See Clendenning (1970: 426-7, 435-8). See CP 8.117 n10 & n12 (27 May 1902) plus CP 8.122 n19 (28 May 1902). 16. Peirce invited Royce to spend the summer of 1902 in Milford, PA, for “cooperative study of Logic, on my [Royce’s] part, and of Hegel, on yours [Peirce’s]” (Clendenning 1970: 436 (20 June 1902)). Royce did not accept. Another series of letters took place in 1905 (Clendenning 1970: 488-9, 489-90, and 490-2). 17. An early and useful study of Peirce’s realism is Boler 1963. The volume has several references to Royce indicating Royce’s awareness of Peirce’s realism. See especially Boler (1963: 38, n.4). 18. Peirce wrote definitions for The Century Dictionary of the English Language (Peirce 1889-1891). He supplied some material for ‘applicable’ and ‘application’ (Peirce 1889-1891: 274); wrote several parts of ‘end’ (Peirce 1889-1891: 1917); but did not provide anything for ‘purpose’ (Peirce 1889-1891: 4858). Peirce was quite familiar with the contents of The Century Dictionary; so it is fair to assume he knew of these definitions. In ‘application’ is found “The act of applying a general principle;” in ‘end’ Peirce wrote “That for which anything exists or is done; a result designed or intended; ultimate object or purpose;” and in ‘purpose’ is “Import; meaning; purport; intent.” 19. Again, Anderson (2005: 473) called this quotation to my attention. 20. Christine Ladd-Franklin, (1916), “Charles S. Peirce at the Johns Hopkins,” The Journal of Philosophy, 13, 26 (21 December), 720. The letter is not dated in the publication, but internal evidence indicates that it written after mid-1903. 21. Baldwin wrote Peirce about doing entries for the Dictionary on 9 October 1900. 22. At times Peirce speaks of a fourth grade of clearness; at other times he seems to include purpose in the third grade of clearness. Peirce’s final decision on a fourth grade of clearness is not evident. I will speak of the fourth grade simply for ease in exposition of my theme. 23. Note the year: it is the same as the review of The World and the Individual and during the time when Peirce and Royce were corresponding. 24. Carnegie Foundation Application (L75), reprinted in part in Peirce 1976a, vol. 4: 30. 25. See Ladd-Franklin (1916: 720). 26. Also see Pfeifer 2011. 27. David Pfeifer (2013: 107-16).

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28. See the letters in L385 of Peirce manuscripts (Peirce 1976b), and the letters from Royce in Clendenning 1970. 29. Note should also be made that Peirce praises Royce’s work in logic. Witness Ms. 816A, p. 1, a discussion of Royce 1905. Context and correspondence place discussion as late 1905 or possibly early 1906. Peirce states: “Prof. Royce has shown discernment in devoting so much as he has to the study of these [A. B. Kempe’s] conceptions, and his memoir is unquestionably of very considerable value.”

ABSTRACTS

A common view is that Charles Peirce influenced Josiah Royce. This paper demonstrates that Josiah Royce influenced Charles Peirce. A chronology is presented, followed with a brief description of a change in Peirce’s thinking from studying the writings of Royce.

AUTHOR

DAVID E. PFEIFER

Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis depfeife[at]iupui.edu

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Logical Theatrics, or Floes on Flows Translating Quine with the Shins

Joshua M. Hall

“Casting ourselves thus in unreal roles, we do not generally know how much reality to hold constant. Quandaries arise. But despite them we find ourselvesattributing beliefs, wishes, and strivings even to creatures lacking the power of speech, such is our dramatic virtuosity.” Quine 1 I will begin this comparative analysis with Quine, focusing on the front matter and first chapter of Word and Object (alongside From a Logical Point of View and two other short pieces), attempting to illuminate there a (1) basis of excessive, yet familiar, chaos, (2) method of improvised, dramatic distortion, and (3) consequent neo-Pragmatist metaphysics. Having elaborated this Quinian basis, method and metaphysics, I will then show that they can be productively translated into James Mercer’s poetic lyrics for The Shins, with an emphasis on the first song, entitled “Caring is Creepy,” from their debut studio album, Oh, Inverted World! Finally, I will explain why Quine and Mercer are particularly suited to this translation (in contrast to other philosophically-rich pop lyricists such as Bob Dylan, and other pragmatist philosophers like Robert Brandom), in the course of which important implications will emerge for our globalized world today. 1

2 Before I begin, however, it might be helpful to clarify what I mean by “Pragmatist metaphysics.” I would argue that there are, at most, Wittgensteinian family resemblances among the metaphysical positions adopted by philosophers who self- identify as Pragmatist. Consequently, the best one can do, arguably, is to arrange these family members around one or more family traits or characteristics. Following William Myers, I have chosen to focus on the characteristic of an emphasis on process rather than substance in metaphysics.2 Using this emphasis as the basis or axis for a spectrum of Pragmatist metaphysical views, from maximally fluid conceptions such as James’ radical empiricism to rigidly solid frameworks such as Putnam’s internal realism, I would suggest that Quine occupies the moderate middle position on this spectrum.

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3 More precisely, at the boundary marker on the left side of this spectrum – representing maximal substantiality – would be any metaphysical position that posits any kind of thing-like substance (whether physical, mental, or otherwise) as the sole foundation of reality to which all else reduces. Anything in that area would be too static to qualify as a pragmatist metaphysics in my sense. And at the boundary maker on the right side of this spectrum – representing maximal fluidity – would be any explicitly anti- metaphysical position (such as ’ flux), or the rejection/abandonment of the question of metaphysics altogether (such as Derrida’s “closure” of metaphysics). Anything in this latter area would be insufficiently metaphysical to quality. But in between these two boundary markers, starting from the most fluid pragmatist point on this continuum, and in order of increasing static-ness (moving leftward), I would order some of the major Pragmatists and neo-Pragmatists as follows: (1) Rorty’s featureless conversation, (2) James’ stream of self-consciousness, (3) Dewey’s qualified experience, (4) Mead’s gestures, (5) Quine’s posited entities, (6) Peirce’s end of inquiry, (7) Putnam’s internal realism, (8) and Brandom’s inferential semantics, to (9) Habermas’ conversation about “how things are.” With this clarification of my use of the phrase “Pragmatist metaphysics” in mind, I now turn to my detailed analyses of Quine.

I. [Distorted] Word and [Indeterminate] Object

4 I will first consider the text of Word and Object, specifically the opening quote, the preface and the first chapter, the latter of which serves as a first pass over the subject matter of the text as a whole. The book opens with a quote from biologist James Grier Miller, “Ontology recapitulates philology.” In other words, metaphysics repeats logic, or the discourse of beings rehearses, re-stages, re-produces (in the sense of a theater production) the love of discourse. To the question as to which came first, the event or the story – the world or art – Quine thus appears to side (via Miller) with the story and art. Thus is the stage set, the scenery in place, the actors at first position for the entirety of the book, beginning with the preface.

5 “Language,” writes Quine (1960: ix), “is a social art.” Quine the scientist, lover of logic, thus begins the introduction to his book of scientific philosophy by defining language as a kind of – not science – but art. He explicates this claim as follows: “there is no justification for collating linguistic meanings, unless in terms of men’s dispositions to respond overtly to socially observable stimulations” (Quine 1960: ix). One is (only?) privy to what happens on stage – on this stage on which one sits, stands or lies listless – and these happenings are constituted by the movements of the actors’ bodies (including the movements of lips, teeth, tongue, larynx, lungs, etc. for speech). If there is a behind-the-scenes, and for Quine we always and continue to assume that there is, then we can say nothing intelligent about it. This idea is what I am calling a basis of excessive, yet familiar, chaos. Or, zooming out to the level of Pragmatist metaphysical systems, this basis is the ocean water that flows beneath the floe of ice-solid formal discourse. 6 Consequent upon this lack of a firm foundation for one’s behavioral responses to the other actors’ behavior, all analysis reveals itself as interpretation, criticism, and improvisation – a poetic distortion sans pre-distorted reality. Put differently, every act of interpretation constitutes a translation (not attempted, for there are no attempts at translation, just good or bad translations) of (observable) behavior into (analytical)

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behavior, of theory-bound praxis into practically-bent theory. This includes translating another actor’s sonic emissions into a meaningful speech pattern (or, with George Herbert Mead, one’s own movement into a meaningful gesture). As an actor, one merely behaves; as an observer of other actors (including observing oneself qua actor), one creates, improvising theories to explain their behavior. This method, based on the excessive yet familiar chaos, is what I am calling improvised, dramatic distortion. Or, at the level of Pragmatist metaphysical system, this method is the ability of the ice floe to float in any direction whatsoever on its flowing basis. 7 Referring back to this flowing, chaotic basis underneath his method, Quine (1960: ix) notes that, “the enterprise of translation is found to be involved in a certain systematic indeterminacy.” Note that the last two words, as a phrase, amount to an oxymoron, because it is generally agreed that (a) what it is to be a system is to be determinate, and (b) to be systematic is to have thoroughly elaborated a collection of principles, rules, positions, axioms, etc. Translation for Quine, however, is not only an indeterminate business, it is fundamentally, pervasively, even systematically indeterminate. For Quine, it is essential to the structure of translation, because essential to the structure of that which is translated, that it lacks any essential structure. 8 In light of these insights from Quine’s Preface, one could legitimately reformulate the opening quote from Miller as follows: ontology recapitulates an abyssal indeterminacy shot through with improvised lines of translation. To summarize, (a) all that exists mirrors the flimsy structure of language; (b) reality, like language, is essentially chaotic and only secondarily, semi-arbitrarily ordered; (c) the world presents itself as undetermined, excessive and vulnerable to creative renderings; and (d) these creative renderings, which are parts acted out on the stage, since they have, quite literally, no basis “to speak of,” are nothing other than that world itself; therefore (e) in actuality, there are no poetic variations of a prosaic substructure – there are only poetic originals. 9 At this point, I would like to return to my opening quote from Quine. Its original context is a discussion of what is, for Quite, the seemingly inevitability fictive and imaginary nature of propositional attitudes, but it can also be applied to the broader issues that I have been considering: Casting our real selves thus in unreal roles, we do not generally know how much reality to hold constant. Quandaries arise. But despite them we find ourselves attributing beliefs, wishes, and strivings even to creatures lacking the power of speech, such is our dramatic virtuosity. (Quine 1960: 219) 10 With the phrases “real selves” and “unreal roles,” Quine is referring to his position that propositional attitudes are simply the projection by a speaker of what s/he imagines s/ he would feel in response to a certain stimulus, onto a third person who has just experienced that stimulus. For present purposes, however, I wish to focus on the last phrase in the quote, “our dramatic virtuosity,” which I take to be central in Chapter One of Word and Object (to which I will proceed shortly). But first, it may be helpful to pause a moment here and consider Quine’s analysis of translation in Chapter Two of this book.

11 The first point I wish to make here is that Quine offers us a scientist – because the linguist is an anthropologist – engaged in what is universally recognized as the “art” of translation. There is thus a kind of science/art tension/fusion at work from the beginning of his extended metaphor. Second, Quine’s choice of the imaginary

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indigenous word for “rabbit,” “Gavagai,” is unnecessarily aesthetically pleasing – fun to say, with a lilting rhythm. Relatedly, his alternate descriptions and hypothetical translations of “Gavagai” are also unnecessarily lovely, from “momentary leporiform image,” to “an otherwise rabbitless sequence,” “rabbit-fly,” “a stage of a rabbit,” “an integral part of a rabbit,” “the rabbit fusion,” and “where rabbithood is manifested” (Quine 1960: 31, 37, 52-3). Third, in writing of “dispositions to assent,” Quine suggests “positions” and “positing,” which – as I have explored elsewhere – are connected to dance (via posing) and poetry (via poiesis as “positing” in Aristotle) of the theater (Quine 1960: 34).3 Fourth, although Quine speaks of the scientist being able to eventually “bicker with the native as a brother,” neither Quine nor his commentators attach significant to the issue of being bilingual, which I wish to explore below (Quine 1960: 47, 74). Fifth, Quine writes that the “method of analytical hypotheses is a way of catapulting oneself into the native language by the momentum of the home language,” and the necessarily approximate nature of catapulting is another good example of an art/science hybrid (Quine 1960: 70). 12 To clarify these points further, it may be instructive to compare the post-Quine development of the radical translation issue by Hilary Putnam in Meaning and the Moral Sciences. The main points I wish to emphasize from the latter book are that (a) Putnam uses artificial and alien lifeforms (namely a computer that produces speech patterns and the Martian interpreters thereof), rather than a fellow human society (as Quine does), and that (b) this correlates with Putnam’s more counterproductively rigid metaphysical position there (in contrast to Quine’s floe/flow metaphysics) (Quine 1960: 38). 13 The most important point to come out of this discussion in Putnam, as noted by (among others) Rorty, is Putnam’s notion of “the ‘interest-relativity’ of explanation” (Putnam 1978: 41; Rorty 2009: 26). Putnam illustrates this with the example of the pointlessness of explaining – at a subatomic level – why a square peg will not fit in a round hole (Putnam 1978: 42). In making this point, Putnam explicitly acknowledges his pragmatist commitments, noting that he views “philosophy of science as normative description of science,” which entails that “explanation has to be partly a pragmatic concept” (Putnam 1978: 42). Returning to the connection to his fellow Pragmatist, Putnam then modifies Quine’s “Gavagai” thought experiment by, first, imagining two alternate translation manuals, using “rabbit” and “undetached rabbit-part,” respectively (Putnam 1978: 44). Putnam uses this to extend Quine’s “indeterminacy of translation” to what Putnam terms “an indeterminacy of reference” (Putnam 1978: 45). This second translation manual, and this is the key, is geared toward the relative interests of the Martians, who (due in part to their potentially smaller size relative to humans) find descriptions of “undetached rabbit parts” more natural, useful, intuitive, etc. than descriptions of “rabbits.” 14 The gist of this modification by Putnam, for my purposes here, is that it attempts to undermine Quine’s conception of the indeterminacy of translation by couching the latter within the determinacy of the biological makeup of the translators. In other words, compared to the interspecies translations between Martians and humans, the intercultural translations between the Western anthropologist and jungle tribal member appear to rest on a fairly secure basis after all. But the cost of this move for Putnam is that of leaving behind the only species we know scientifically to engage in translation, and to abandon that firmer ground for the imaginary realms of intelligent

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Martians. In this way, Putnam moves simultaneously (a) away from reality by positing a supercomputer and Martians, and (b) toward a static, reified, hyper-solid metaphysics. Quine, by contrast, sticks with humans, and stays in a floe-flowing middle path. 15 In other words, Putnam is only able to make intercultural translation seem reliable by contrasting intercultural translation with fictional translation involving a computer that we have been unable to design and an alien species that does not in fact inhabit the planet Mars. And the reason Putnam needs intercultural translation to be reliable is because the source of that reliability is the solidity and fixity of a mind-independent objective world of things, about which different cultures (and more importantly, different scientists) may communicate. Put differently, a close observation of actual human translation (as offered by Quine) reveals it to be much more fluid and creative than commonsense takes it to be. And the only way to save commonsense (as attempted by Putnam) is to depart even further from it and toward the realm of pure fiction and speculation. That is, Quine shows the seemingly ordinary to be a creative, imaginative endeavor in this world, while Putnam can only shore up the ordinariness of the ordinary by pretending temporarily to believe in something extraordinary but nonexistent. 16 I turn now from these additional considerations inspired by Word and Object’s Preface to Chapter One. My translation of the content thereof will be that human dramatic virtuosity – including work in logic – turns on the following six primacies (or instances of prioritization or positing): (1) physical objects, (2) science, (3) sociality, (4) chaos, (5) simplicity and (6) familiarity. These six primacies can also be understood as constituting a preview of the results of Quine’s subsequent investigation, and (more importantly for my article) as the six pillars of Quine’s neo-Pragmatism. 17 First, Quine maintains that the first and most important things are physical objects, and for the following reasons: “Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name” (Quine 1960: 1). Physical objects come first because they are public, common and near-to-the-senses. 18 Contrarily, with regard to what has tended to dominate the materialists’ ontology, “Talk of subjective sense qualities comes mainly as a derivative idiom” (Quine 1960: 1). Like a good Pragmatist-Aristotelian, Quine maintains that qualities inhere in substances; substances are not merely aggregates of qualities. Contrarily again, this time contrary to the liquefied end of the Pragmatist metaphysics spectrum, “immediate experience simply will not, of itself, cohere as an autonomous domain. References to physical things are largely what hold it together” (Quine 1960: 2). Physical objects are more coherent, more conceptualizable, than the pure flux or immediacy of experience. Quine thus makes use of a pragmatic principle to reject positions in the neighborhood of Rorty and James. 19 But what of the past? Those on the contrary side, which is to say the idealist side, of the Pragmatist spectrum of metaphysical systems (such as Brandom and Habermas), find the memory of past events an essential part of reality, and one that undermines the primacy of the physical objects currently in front of us. “[P]ast sense data,” writes Quine (1960: 2-3), “are mostly gone for good except as commemorated in physical posits.” The past is only real as embodied in current relations to physical objects, and those relations are merely relations of positing. And, what is even worse for the dignity

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of the long-ago, “a memory trace of a sense datum is too meager an affair to do much good. Actual memories mostly are traces not of past sensations but of past conceptualization or verbalization” (Quine 1960: 3). Here one finds an unexpectedly Proustian conceptuality of the past. Memories are not records of past truths, but are present fictions (poetically suspect interpretations) at work on past fictions. Again, all that one is left to rely on is the brute immediacy of one’s stimulations, interpreted by recourse to the true fictitious positing of physical objects. 20 Science, which is second among these six primacies, Quine (1960: 4) defines as “self- conscious common sense.” This is science’s ontology, and its language (its neologisms), correspondingly, are “just linguistic evolution gone self-conscious” (Quine 1960: 4). Science is the becoming-aware of language, the coming to awareness of a fundamentally dynamic and evolving phenomenon. But this self-conscious evolution, like its unselfconscious basis, is smooth and gradual, not jarringly abrupt. As Quine remarks (1960: 4), “we warp usage gradually enough to avoid rupture.” Warping is thus the kind of poetic distortion, the kind of dramatic translation, native to science. Borrowing Wittgenstein’s famous metaphor, Quine (1960: 4) suggests that, “we may kick away our ladder only after we have climbed it.” Again one finds (this time Wittgensteinian) Pragmatism at the conclusion of Quine’s analyses. 21 Quine then explicates this position as follows: “No inquiry being possible without some conceptual scheme, we may as well retain and use the best one we know – right down to the latest detail of quantum mechanics, if we know it and it matters” (Quine 1960: 4). As if the theater of life were not already uncertain enough, one now finds that the stage is not really a stage, that where the wooden planks of the floor would be, there are instead a plethora of wooden ladders, each supporting various actors who cling to them, and occasionally climb or jump from one ladder to another, kicking away the ones no longer needed, but always holding on to at least one. “Analyze theory-building how we will, we all must start in the middle” (Quine 1960: 4). Every actor is on a ladder, and no one can see how far down the ladders go, or where their base is, if there is any base at all. This reference to Wittgenstein and this concession to Pragmatism at the conclusion of Quine’s analysis raise the question as to how all of this analysis of science relates back to philosophy. 22 “[P]hilosophy in turn,” writes Quine (1960: 4), “as an effort to get clearer on things, is not to be distinguished in essential points of purpose and method from good and bad science.” Therefore, by logical replacement of identical terms, one could characterize philosophy, too, as self-conscious commonsense; its terminology, too, as the product of self-conscious linguistic evolution; its method, too, as a poetic distortion of reality; and its governing principle, too, as that of James’ pragmatic conception of truth – namely, “do what works.” 23 Quine’s third primacy is sociality. “Society, acting solely on overt manifestations, has been able to train the individual to say the socially proper thing in response even to socially undetectable stimulations” (Quine 1960: 5). In other words, the social cues that determine our linguistic behaviors are so powerful that each fully-trained actor reacts to the cues even when those cues are imperceptible to the others. Fortunately, as an actor, one moves beyond this automatic, robotically-programmed linguistic behavior, which Quine renders poetically as the “the fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news” (Quine 1960: 10). One moves beyond such behavior, specifically, because it is not in a human being’s dramatic nature to rest with prosaic reporting, with knee-jerk

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responses. “We cannot rest,” Quine (1960: 10) adds, “with a running conceptualization of the unsullied stream of experience; what we need is a sullying of the stream.” The difference suggested in this last quote is between an attempt at automatic, faithful, factual recordings of experience, on the one hand, and intentionally strategic, poetic creations of experience, on the other. This creation of experience is a community activity, extending to each person, as both a society-created member and also a society- creating member of society. It is a view of human beings as essentially artist-scientists. 24 Underneath language as social ordering, it turns out, lies a more fundamental chaos, and this chaos is Quine’s fourth primacy. “Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. Not two of us ever learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives” (Quine 1960: 13). Various actors have lines in common, but are they thinking and feeling the same things when they deliver those lines? Their different dramatic renditions would suggest that there are differences in thought, feeling, intent, purpose, etc., but there is, again, no objective measure by which to confirm that seeming. 25 Even the building blocks of these linguistic behaviors, according to Quine, are less clear-cut and more chaotic than one tends to imagine. “What counts as a word, as against a string of two or more, is less evident” according to Quine (1960: 13) “than what counts as a sentence.” It is only where words are distorted into sentences that one has greater clarity. “In the case of words it is a contrast between learning a word in isolation – i.e., in effect, as a one-word sentence – and learning it contextually, or by abstraction, as a fragment of sentences learned as wholes” (Quine 1960: 14). Naturally, the first strategy works better for concrete words, especially for physical objects, while the second strategy is necessary for abstract words, and there is a hierarchy for the two. 26 “What makes insensible [abstract] things intelligibly describable,” Quine (1960: 14) continues, “is analogy, notably the special form of analogy known as extrapolation.” One distorts one’s concepts of physical objects into abstract concepts; one extrapolates physical objects into abstractions; and the physical basis is that to which everything returns. Words “mean only as their use in sentences is conditioned to sensory stimuli, verbal and otherwise” (Quine 1960: 17). These sentences, in turn, as sonic phenomena, are also sensory stimuli, which means that they too are capable of making words mean – a phenomenon that Quine poetically renders as “the interanimation of sentences” (Quine 1960: 18). 27 Quine’s fifth principle, simplicity, is the one that is always at work resolving this chaos into the order previously considered. Considerations of simplicity, he explains, “in some sense may be said to determine even the least inquisitive observer’s most casual acts of individual recognition” (Quine 1960: 19). Simplicity is therefore not one principle among many, or one that operates on occasion, but the governing principle of order, and one that is constantly in process. As Quine (1960: 19) puts it, “a law of least action remains prominent among [the observer’s] guiding principles.” 28 Simplicity has three corresponding powers in the method or process of science/ philosophy. First, “Observation serves to test hypotheses after adoption; simplicity prompts their adoption for testing” (Quine 1960: 19). Observation only becomes relevant for hypotheses initially adopted on conceptually economic grounds. Second, the power of simplicity boosts the power of the hypotheses that it chooses by making it

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more extensive in its applications. “One incidental benefit of simplicity that can escape notice is that it tends to enhance a theory’s scope – its richness in observable consequences” (Quine 1960: 20). Third, simplicity helps keep any given theory alive to its connections to other theories and to the fundamental nexus of practice/reality. The “simpler a theory, the more easily we can keep relevant considerations in mind” (Quine 1960: 20). 29 Quine’s sixth and final primacy is a natural and logical consequence of simplicity, namely familiarity. “Familiarity of principle,” he claims, “is what we are after when we contrive to ‘explain’ new matters by old laws” (Quine 1960: 20). Going with what is familiar is a way of simplifying things, and it guides us in the process of extrapolation from physical things to abstract things, from abstraction to abstraction, and even from physical reactions to physical objects. “Considered relative to our surface irritations,” Quine (1960: 22) continues, “which exhaust our clues to an external world, the molecules and their extraordinary ilk are thus much on a par with the most ordinary physical objects.” In other words, our method of creating abstract object such as molecules is not different in kind from our “creating” physical objects from an aggregation of physical responses to physical stimuli. 30 Quine then summarizes these six primacies. First, “What reality is like is the business of scientists, in the broadest sense, painstakingly to surmise” (Quine 1960: 22, emphasis added). Quine distorts artists, poets and even people in general into scientists. Second, “surmising what reality is like” is ultimately an artistic, groundless activity, not one that admits of indubitable “scientific” progress (Quine 1960: 22). We “have no reason,” he claims, “to suppose that man’s surface irritations even unto eternity admit of any one systematization that is scientifically better or simpler than all possible others” (Quine 1960: 22). (Notice also how closely Quine links “better” to “simpler.”) “Scientific method,” next, “is the way to truth, but it affords even in principle no unique definition of truth” (Quine 1960: 22). And even Pragmatism’s truth fares no better in this indeterminate process, since any “so-called pragmatic definition of truth” for Quine “is doomed to failure equally” (Quine 1960: 23). 31 The bottom line, or “saving consideration,” for Quine (1960: 24) is that “we continue to take seriously our own particular aggregate science, our own particular work-theory or loose total fabric of quasi-theories, whatever it may be.” In other words, all we have is our poetry, and that based on the social poetry of previous generations, but we all agree to believe in it, to pretend that it is not poetry, and so we all get along for the most part and get by. 32 I now turn from Word and Object to two other brief pieces by Quine, in order to buttress my interpretation of him as a neo-Pragmatist. Beginning with “The Pragmatists’ Place in Empiricism,” it begins with insults to the label “pragmatist,” and then chalks up whatever is good in thinkers labeled as such to “empiricism.” The rest of the essay is a list of the five improvements that empiricism has undergone, accompanied by the (so- called) Pragmatists’ relationship to those five points. The points are as follows: (1) “the shift from ideas to words,” (2) “the shift of semantic focus from terms to sentences,” (3) “the shift of semantic focus from sentences to systems of sentences,” (4) “abandonment of the analytic-synthetic dualism,” and (5) “” (Quine 1981: 24). 33 As for the Pragmatists’ relationship to these points, Quine’s evaluation is distinctly ambivalent toward all the classical Pragmatists. For example, he mocks James for his

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“notorious defense of wishful thinking,” but then praises him (and Dewey) for being “decidedly naturalistic in their way of doing epistemology” (Quine 1981: 32, 35). Quine’s most purely positive evaluation, surprisingly, is of F. C. S. Schiller. Specifically, Quine celebrates Schiller’s “doctrine of ‘postulation,’ which had us believing whatever we wish were true until it proves trouble” – because, for Quine, “scientific theory is man- made” (Quine 1960: 32, 33). The Pragmatists’ most original contribution according to Quine, however, can be traced to George Herbert Mead, via Mead’s student Charles Morris. To wit, Morris “chose the word ‘pragmatics’ for the behavioral end of the study of language” (Quine 1960: 37). Quine describes this innovation, along with “the doctrine of man as truth-maker,” as his “two best guesses” as to the “shared and distinctive tenets” of Pragmatism, in which orbit he squarely places himself. 34 As for the implications for Quine’s status as a neo-Pragmatist, counter-intuitively, it is this very ambivalence about pragmatism that most closely identifies him with it. One has only to think of any of the three classic Pragmatists to notice that all had tortured relationships with pragmatism. James popularized one view using its name, which prompted Peirce to abandon that name for a modified version thereof, and Dewey explicitly preferred other labels despite his obvious debts to, and sympathies with, Pragmatism’s two founders. That is to say, it appears to me that a thinker’s willingness and ability to recognize fluidity and differences within other thinkers labeled as Pragmatist, rather than condemning them wholesale via some caricatured oversimplification, constitutes positive evidence of pragmatism in that thinker. In short, a Pragmatist is someone who approaches other Pragmatists pragmatically. And this is exactly what Quine demonstrates here. 35 Turning to the second brief text from Quine, his “Reply to Morton,” one can find pragmatism as well in Quine’s rejection of Morton’s attempt to make “emotions” a separate source (along with “sensations”) of verification of Quine’s “observation sentences” (Quine 1987: 663). Quine rejects this suggestion in a way that, at first, seems to denigrate the emotions. That is, he disqualifies them from serving as corroborators of observation sentences, on the grounds that they require too much “collateral” information (in addition to the present stimulus). In other words, sensation can produce unanimous assent or dissent in the moment, whereas emotion requires much past information as well. But this, ultimately, is a clue to Quine’s pragmatist truth, which is that at least one value (namely truth) into which the emotions tap is part of the warp and woof of inquiry itself. Thus, “normative epistemology is a branch of engineering. It is the technology of truth-making” (Quine 1987: 664-5). 36 Put differently, value cannot serve in the infantry of inquiry (alongside sensations with observation sentences), because it is inquiry’s general. Truth-seeking constitutes the spiritual cables that suspend disciplined knowledge above the turbulent waters of a world in flux – not because truth-seeking – and for Quine, this always means truth- making as well – is mixed into inquiry, but because inquiry’s truth-directedness means that its fibers are always-already truth-oriented, and thus (at least in that respect) always-already ethical. And on this note of truth-making-seeking, I now turn to Mercer.

II. Oh [Philosophically] Inverted World!

37 In this section, I will consider the poem that is the first song from The Shins’ first album, Oh, Inverted World! – “Caring is Creepy.” I will analyze this poem using the

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Quinian neo-Pragmatism elaborated in my previous section. What emerges from this analysis will be a performance of philosophy as freaking out in the face of life, in the wake of which one moves toward a Pragmatist acceptiance of the semi-stable ice floe on the underlying flow of reality (or the theater as shelter of poetic constructions from the turbulent outside world). But first, I will preface my Quinian translation of “Caring is Creepy” with two broad considerations about Mercer’s work.

38 First, Mercer’s poems (qua the lyrics to The Shins’ songs) exist primarily as technological recordings of popular music, played sometimes on the radio but more often on CD players, MP3 players, etc. These are his poetry’s primary media, and they are performative and repetitive ones. Relating this back to the overarching trope of my article, logical theatrics, one could say that the radio, CD player and MP3 player are all in a way personal theaters, and that when played on them, The Shins’ music constitutes a kind of private theatrics. This extension of the theater into the home and for private use is of course a logical extension of Western technological virtuosity. It makes sense that music, along with the rest of Western culture, would be subjected to technological production and commodification. 39 Secondly, as a preview of “Caring is Creepy,” and for a concise demonstration of Mercer’s resonance with Quine, consider the following passage from “Fighting in a Sack,” from the Shins’ second album, Chutes Too Narrow: “to keep this boat afloat well there are things you can’t afford to know so I save all my breath for the sails.” The metaphor for society here, a boat, is a structure built for locomotion, not a secure dwelling on a permanent ground, which suggests the chaotic basis of Quine’s human world (and the floe/flow metaphor for Quine’s moderate Pragmatist metaphysics). The passage also suggests that certain truths about this world need to be ignored, that we improvise in order to distort away certain things on a dramatic scale, echoing Quine’s translation as distortion. Finally, the motive that the passage attributes to these distortions is a thoroughly practical one, entirely sympathetic with Quine’s neo- Pragmatism. We seek to keep the boat afloat in the chaotic seas, so we distort our knowledge of the world, and save our energies for that which keeps our boat sailing along. Here, in just one sentence, the Shins articulate Quine’s (a) chaotic basis, (b) method of distortion and (c) moderate Pragmatist metaphysics. 40 The title of the primary song under consideration, “Caring is Creepy,” could be referencing the fact that one of the arguably most pervasive of all human emotions, namely care, has come to seem unnatural. This discomfort with emotionality is a commonly criticized trend in much traditional ; it has frequently been alleged (by Wittgenstein among others) that philosophy constitutes a semi-willing self-alienation from life out of a fear of its inevitable uncertainties and pains. In other words, one could translate philosophy into a being “freaked out” in the face of life. 41 The orientation of the poem (that is, as song lyrics), insofar as the poem is written in first person and addresses an informal “you,” works much like the monologue of dramatic poetry such as Shakespeare’s plays. This conception of dramatic monologue also resonates with the dramatic elements of Quine’s Word and Object, in which the “natives” and Western “jungle linguist” play vital performative roles, and according to which reference can only be established and clarified through translation – by the trespassing from one speaker to another, whether between or within a human body. 42 I now proceed to a consideration of the entire poem, line by line. “I think I’ll go home and mull this over”

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43 The song begins with the subject I, the ego, reflecting on the fact that it is about to begin reflecting. The verb here, according to the American Heritage College Dictionary, is etymologically derived from “[prob. ME moillen, mullen, to moisten, crumble].” Another denotation it lists for “mull” is “to heat and spice (wine, for example)” (895). Thinking in English is thus a kind of heating, spicing, moistening and crumbling. And philosophy is nothing if not reflecting. “before I cram it down my throat” 44 Presumably unintentionally, Mercer stays true to the Middle English referent of “mull” with the song’s first bit of colorful phrasing. After moistening and crumbling whatever “it” is (we never find out for sure), the speaker intends to cram it down his throat. This line also resonates with Quine’s colorful description of his hypothetical bilingual “jungle linguist” who “deals observably with the native informant as live collaborator rather than first ingesting him” (Quine 1960: 71). One imagines that Quine would applaud the speaker’s plans for some pre-digestion rumination. “at long last it’s crashed, the colossal mass has broken up into bits in my moat.” 45 Notice, still from “mull,” the crumbling that happens to the colossal mass. I would argue that this couplet refers to the confrontation between the universality of ideas and the particularity of the contemplator, necessitating the dramatic change in the universal “substance” for it to be absorbed by the particular speaker of the poem. “lift the mattress off the floor” 46 Here the mattress, essential equipment for sleep, is lifted out of its place. The possibility for sleep is denied to someone whose mattress was already not in the place most conducive to restful sleeping, a bed. Physicality is pushed back for the colossal mass of abstract reflection. Similar neglecting of physicality is one of the defining features of Quine’s analytic brethren (at least from the perspective of many of their critics). “walk the cramps off” 47 The thinker’s body has been neglected for the sake of thought, so much so that the muscles have begun to cramp from atrophy. Philosophically exercising the muscles of the brain is not sufficient to prevent cramping. “go meander in the cold” 48 When physicality is finally allowed to occur, in the walking, it immediately becomes a meandering, “mov[ing] aimlessly and idly without fixed direction,” motion disconnected from practical purpose. The speaker encourages someone to move around like the speaker thinks: aimlessly and idly, and in the cold, in an atmosphere devoid of warmth – warmth being the totem state of healthy mammalian physicality. “hail to your dark skin” 49 The ratiocinating speaker of the poem draws attention, for the first time, to a descriptive quality of the person being addressed – dark skin – which summons connotations of the imperialist white male (as the lead singer, Mercer, is in fact a white male) addressing subaltern populations of color. This also reminds one of the discriminatory connotations of Quine’s figure of the “primitive jungle natives.” “hiding the fact you’re dead again” 50 Death is perhaps the most enduring gift of the white Western male to the black Eastern female. For writing and rationality, à la Derrida, are always directed to death. And

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though “a hero dies once,” as the saying goes, “the coward [philosopher] dies many times in one lifetime.” “underneath the power lines seeking shade far above our heads are the icy heights that contain all reason” 51 In the first of these two lines, the ineffectualness of refuge from the burning eye of Reason is invoked, or the non-consolation of traditional Western philosophy, lines of power channeling surging currents, and too thin to protect something like skin from something like excessive sunshine.

52 In the second line, perhaps, is the song’s climax. The abstract objects of traditional Western philosophical rationality are always-already out of our reach and cold from lifelessness. “it’s a luscious mix of words and tricks that let us bet when you know we should fold” 53 Notice the change here in from philosophical critique of philosophy to philosophical solution to philosophy, from diagnosis to prognosis and prognostication. Poetry and Pragmatism, unlike traditional Western philosophy, make life possible, although they do so through somewhat obvious tricks of aestheticizing and conceding to (basely) practical motives. The result: a Jamesian betting on life once more, an existential commitment, based on the beauty of the way things sound the world. “on rocks I dreamt of where we’d stepped” 54 Having foregone the mattress, the speaker has taken to sleeping on that most uncomfortable of human sleeping surfaces: rocks. Or perhaps s/he just dreams awake. Either way, s/he dreams about stepping, and thus about walking, and dynamic physicality. “and of the whole mess of roads we’re now on.” 55 Things have gotten tangled since the stepping started. But life is like that, full of tangles. “hold your glass up, hold it in” 56 The truth in wine, the pervasiveness of repression, respectively. “never betray the way you’ve always known it is.” 57 Stick to your irrational upbringing, your instincts, the principles that defend you from thought, doubt and despair. With Quine, all theory is theorizing-in-the-middle and doing-the-best-we-can-with-what-we’ve-got, because, after all, what else can we do? “one day I’ll be wondering how” 58 It begins in wonder, said Aristotle. “I got so old just wondering how” 59 It ends in wondering about wonder, about its beginnings, the poem’s speaker adds. Reality may be circular, but one’s hair turns gray only once, and before one dies. Philosophy has made the speaker of the poem almost die from getting old wondering. “I never got cold wearing nothing in the snow.” 60 Traditional Western philosophy and its rationality find life irrelevant. They don’t notice the cold, perhaps because their natural element is abstract frigidity? “this is way beyond my remote concern” 61 Apathy: the emotion of traditional Western philosophy as practiced, for example among the Stoics.

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“of being condescending” 62 Elitism: the hallmark of traditional Western philosophers as practitioners, for example in Plato and Aristotle’s aristocratic tendencies. “all these squawking birds won’t quit.” 63 The philosophers do tend, one must admit, to go on for thousands of pages. “building nothing, laying bricks.” 64 All the philosophers “lay” (because historically it is neither many sexual partners, nor bricks for a house) are metaphorical pieces of excrement.

65 The song then repeats from “hold your glass up” all the way to its end. Thus, despite having just mocked philosophy for its voluminous verbiage to no clear advantage, Mercer then continues to hoist the philosophers’ torch, albeit in his own musical way. Despite the laying of “bricks,” the listener is exhorted again to raise the glass, to move ahead and renew the cycles of life, despite having discovered the fecal foundation of any thoroughgoing rational and logical attempt to understand reality. 66 Notice that it is not any specifically poetic feature of this poem that makes it so challenging to translate. On the contrary, it is the poem’s philosophical qualities, principally its abstraction, which lends the song to vague and fuzzy analyses. Also, like much academic philosophy, it assumes familiarity with things that the listener is unlikely to recognize or understand. Lacking any such helpful cues, people tend to simply go with what works, with what is most familiar, with what is simple and suits their practical ends – in this case, since we are talking about popular music – enjoyment, the pleasure of listening. 67 But say that a particular listener were interested in something else. Say that the pragmatic impulse was toward wisdom, toward getting a better handle on the world. Such being the case, and such being the guiding motive for my article, does it make my analyses more illegitimate than other possible translations of the song? Does the propensity of contemporary Western culture to interpret pop songs as love songs make a romantic reading of the song truer, and if so, why? Why may I not stand on indeterminate ground and offer my own poetic distortions of Mercer’s poetry, and why may I not find philosophy in the “icy heights that contain all reason?” 68 Quine observes that, “Reflective persons unswayed by wishful thinking can themselves now and again have cause to wonder what, if anything, they are talking about” (Quine 1960: 242). Of course the listener is entitled to wonder – and to wonder if Mercer is not, after all, writing about philosophy. Is he not, perhaps, like so many other young men of his generation, disenfranchised with Western academic philosophy? Perhaps Mercer does see in philosophy a “freaking out” in the face of life, an unhealthy fear that makes caring “creepy.” And perhaps he does see a solution in affirming the “luscious mix of words and tricks,” that make life exciting and fulfilling, in lifting one’s “glass up,” and even in singing about bird droppings. 69 Perhaps some readers will concede that my translation of Mercer into Quine is as plausible as any other (i.e., is for Quine as permissible as any other theory). Why, one might wonder, should one think that Quine and Mercer make a particularly appropriate ordered pair? To buttress these Quinian translation hypotheses, I will now consider multiple points in Quine’s work that naturally fit with Mercer’s poetry. I will begin with From a Logical Point of View, followed by a return to “The Pragmatists’ Place

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in Empiricism,” and conclude with a brief stylistic survey of The Shins’ four studio albums. 70 The first essay in From a Logical Point of View, “On What There Is,” uses the phrase “allergic to meanings,” (Quine 1980: 12) and Mercer writes of being “allergic to love” (“Know Your Onion!”). In both cases, the rejection of an abstraction is figured in reductively physiological terms; that is, rejection of an idea is a matter of the body’s rejecting it – naturalism triumphs. 71 Secondly, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” offers the following two interesting moments of alliance: (a) Quine claims that “judgment turned out to be a will-o-the-wisp,” (Quine 1980, 32) while Mercer rights of “too many good intentions / held by clever sprites” (“Red Rabbits”); and (b) Quine refers to a “metaphysical article of faith,” (Quine 1980, 37) while Mercer writes that “though the saints dub us divine in ancient fading lines / Their sentiment is just as hard to pick from the vine” (“Saint Simon”). 72 Third, “Logic and the Reification of Universals” includes the following three moments: (a) “a torrent of universals against which intuition is powerless” (Quine 1980: 123) comparable to “ideas that can’t help / but creep good people out” (“Pressed in a Book”); (b) the mathematical conceptualist as “squeamish” (Quine 1980: 127) comparable to “Most ideas turn to dust / As there are few in which we all can trust / Haven’t you noticed I’ve been shedding all of mine?” (“Fighting in a Sack”); and (c) the mathematical nominalist easing his “puritanic conscience” by comparing himself to the “lotus-eating” Platonists (Quine 1980: 129) comparable to “You are not some saint who’s above, / Giving someone a stroll through the flowers” (“Girl Sailor”). 73 Fourth, “Reference and Modality” notes that “nonsense” “can always be remedied by arbitrarily assigning some sense,” (Quine 1980: 150) while Mercer writes of “the nursery rhymes that helped us out in making sense of our lives” (“Saint Simon”). 74 And finally, “Meaning and Inference” claims that logic “presumed to a certain degree of creativity,” but that its artifice “is a good one,” comparable to the following lines from “A Comet Appears” in conjunction with the subsequent lines from “Young Pilgrims” and “Sleeping Lessons”: Every post you can hitch your faith on Is a pie in the sky Chock full of lies, A tool we devise, To make sinking stones fly Of course I was raised to gather courage from those Lofty tales so tried and true and If you’re able I’d suggest it ‘cause this Modern thought can get the best of you. And if the old guards still defend, They got nothing left on which you depend, So enlist every ounce of your bright blood, And off with their heads. Jump from the book, You’re not obliged to swallow anything you despise, 75 Altogether then, Mercer’s poems rearticulate (in their own idiom) Quine’s insights that (a) our ideas are pragmatic fictions, which are (b) good and worthy as long as they serve our pragmatic purposes, and thus (c) prudent to abandon and replace when they no longer thus serve.

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76 Returning to Quine’s “The Pragmatists’ Place in Empiricism,” both the five points in the evolution of empiricism, and also the reasons for Quine’s self-identification as a Pragmatist, align nicely with Mercer as well. The five points align as follows, 77 (1) Mercer affirms “words” over “ideas,” noting the “impact” of the former and their useful combination with “tricks” (while ideas “creep good people out,” “turn to dust,” and are “vague” and un-relatable). (2) Most of the individual words in the lyrics are literally meaningless outside of their context in the lines and sentences of the songs. (3) Similarly, most of the lines and sentences are meaningless outside of the entire songs, of the songs that make up an entire album, and even of their entire four-album oeuvre. (4) Mercer mocks a priori truth claims (the “icy heights that contain all reason”) in favor of empirical investigation, (“Under the rocks are snails and we can fills our pockets / And let them go one by one all day in a brand new place”). And (5) as Mercer writes, “the trick is just making yourself.” 78 As for Quine’s self-identification as Pragmatist, consider the following lines from Mercer’s “Port of Morrow” (title track from The Shins’ latest album): Under my hat it reads The lines are all imagined. A fact of life I know To hide from my little girls. I know my place amongst The bugs and all the animals. 79 That is, like Quine, Mercer simultaneously affirms (a) truth as human-made/imagined, and (b) the objective truth or reality of that making, the pragmatic implication of which is to remember his objective place in the naturalistic world of the animal kingdom.

80 Finally in terms of supporting evidence for Quine and Mercer’s singular compatibility, there are significant isomorphisms of style between Quine and Mercer. For example, if one combs carefully through all four of The Shins’ studio albums, the following four patterns emerge. First, in sympathy with Quine’s allusions to Neurath’s bootstrap (which compares language to a ship that can only be repaired at sea), there are five references to “boats” in a similar tenor (including “turn this ancient boat around,” “keep this boat afloat,” “if your’re a seascape I’m a listing boat,” “an emptier boat” and “an upturned boat”), thirteen references to the “sea,” and four to the “ocean.” Moreover, there is a marked preference for the sea as a means of travel compared to the sky (where everything is unreachable, and ends up crashing anyway). Second, in terms of Quine’s famous “Gavagai”/rabbit example, there are five instances of the word “rabbit” in the songs. Third, Mercer shares Quine’s fixation on math, including references in the songs to “multiplying,” “quotients,” “algebra,” “adding it up,” “subtraction,” geometric “lines dissecting love,” and “measuring,” as well as multiple references to numbers abstracted from any concrete context. Finally, both Quine and Mercer engage in effective and enjoyable self-deprecating humor (including being “allergic” to meanings/love respectively).

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III. Theatrical Flowing Conclusion

81 To summarize the above analyses, by “logical theatrics,” I mean the following: (1) theatrics which follow logically (i.e., from the nature of reality); (2) theatrics inherent in/as the nature of logic; (3) logic as the sub-discipline of philosophy; (4) logic as the transcendental law of thought; (5) logic as logos as discourse; (6) theatrics as the essence of the theater; (7) theatrics as over-dramatic human behavior; and (8) theatrics as human nature qua dramatic. Quine’s discourse, on these terms, is a theatrically- accented discourse about the necessary theatrics of logic as it enacts the theater of the world. Mercer’s discourse, on the same terms, is a theatrically based logic of reality as the drama of discourse. Quine’s thought is a logical consequent of the theatrical world, while Mercer’s thought is the chronologically logical theatrics of Quine’s logic, and mine is the logical and over-dramatically theatrical blending of these logical theatrics and theatrical logics.

82 In other words, Quine and Mercer’s logic is the posited theater, the solid poetic artifice sheltered against the historical evolution of society. To follow in the roles of Quine and his commentators, one could picture this as a variation on the “Gavagai” translation script. My own attempt in the present article could thus be understood as a new, triadic translation, namely between Quinian, Mercerian, and my own language, which one might call “Reconstructish,” the language of we who live in the tumultuous wake of Rorty’s big three (Dewey, Heidegger and Wittgenstein) and their followers (including Rorty himself).4 That is, instead of merely translating a new indigenous language into one’s own (like Quine’s anthropologist), I have attempted to translate two different languages into a third for the benefit of the speakers of the latter and the rest of our shared globe. 83 The significance of this overlapping theme in Quine and Mercer can be illustrated by recourse to the aforementioned Neurath’s bootstrap, in that the “ship of self” (Mercer) and the “ship of science” (Quine) must be repaired “at sea.” To contextualize this point in relation to the variety of contemporary Pragmatist metaphysics and philosophies of language, Quine and Mercer make logic flow, not all the way to liquefying it, but rather like an ice floe, a sheet of ice floating on the water beneath. The floe and the flow are of the same watery substance, and any molecule above could just as well have been (or become) a molecule beneath; but one can travel on the floe because the current arrangement is stable enough as it is. This, then, is what makes Mercer and Quine singularly suited for each other. They both posit that a reality understood as posited is enough to have something worthy of the word reality. And in so doing, they offer a Pragmatist middle way between Pragmatist total liquefying (as in Rorty’s conversation melted to pure whimsy) and Pragmatist total freezing (as in Habermas’ conversation reified into scientific object). 84 Although I am merely a humble translator, whose own sympathies lie more (like Bernstein) with Dewey and Mead (and who is most at home speaking Reconstructish) I can step back from philosophical partisanship and look in a naturalistic spirit to two contemporary issues in regard to which Quine/Mercer’s position has much to offer. To wit, (a) the literal ice on our waters, such as the polar ice caps, are melting into undifferentiated ocean as part of the tragedy of global climate change, and (b) our poetry and theaters are disappearing into the flow of mass market culture and cinema. The connection I find is that Quine and the Shins help pull us back from both total

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liquidizing and elitist rigor mortis – keeping the theater inside the world, our floe navigable on the flow. Put differently, we cannot survive in undifferentiated water without a handhold or a place to rest our bodies, nor can we survive of dehydration in castles of unyielding ice. Similarly, no livable world can be reified into, à la Shakespeare, “but a stage” (as suggested by, among other things, so-called “reality” television), nor is life worth living in a world where all vestige of the shelter of the theater and poetry have been liquidated into consumer consumption. 85 To return again to my titular metaphor, the present article has attempted to stage a new encounter between Quine and Mercer for the audience of my readers. The upshot of this performance is that, for Quine and Mercer, we need neither a reduction of structure to pure logic-less mess, nor a special elevating of one narrative (physics for Quine, perhaps elegy for Mercer?), but rather a pragmatic humbling of science and an elevation of art into a new fusion: a stable, disciplined Wissenshaftkunst – a Nietzschean “gay science” of poetry. Armed with this scientific art, perhaps more Anglo-American philosophers can be persuaded to abandon their ice castles and join our Reconstructish sea-battle – using logical creations strategically to save the arts (including the theater and poetry) and even the Earth itself (from global climate change).5 86 Less ambitiously, one might hope that Quine translated as a moderate, neo-Pragmatist metaphysician can do for Pragmatism (intra-Pragmatically) what Pragmatism does for Anglo-American philosophy (extra-Pragmatically), namely offer a persuasive style and rhetoric for those most tightly in the clutches of the kind of philosophical rigor mortis that dominates mainstream, ahistorical Anglo-American philosophy. Within Pragmatism itself, the symptoms of this are visible when Pragmatists such as Habermas talk about “facts” and “how things are.” This is analogous to trying to fit the world into a theater that forgets its metaphysical origins and structure lie in artifice. 87 In any event, there is significant benefit to be had merely in noting that even someone like Quine, located in the middle of this Pragmatist metaphysical spectrum, can be translated effectively into the work of a popular poet such as Mercer. Moreover, this unholy alliance already begins to suggest Quine’s own blending of the arts and sciences (and Mercer’s frequent invocation of scientific fact in his poetry). Together, these two philosopher-poets marry aesthetically-rich scientific hypothesizing to scientifically- disciplined artistic creation. In short, Quine and Mercer help show us that beautiful science, rigorous art, and philosophy truly in the world can still save the latter. So let us take up our theatrical true logics, and join the good fight.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BERNSTEIN R., (2010), The Pragmatic Turn, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press.

DAVIDSON D., (2005), “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” Truth, Language and History, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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HALL M. Joshua, (forthcoming), “Positure in Plato’s Laws: An Introduction to Figuration on Civic Education,” Journal of Social Science Education.

PAGIN P., (2008), “Indeterminacy and the Analytic/Synthetic Distinctions: A Survey,” Synthese 164, 1-18.

PUTNAM H., (1978), Meaning and the Moral Sciences, London, Routledge.

QUINE W., (1960), Word and Object, Cambridge, MIT Press.

QUINE W., (1980), From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays, 2nd ed. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

QUINE W., (1981), “‘The Pragmatists’ Place in Empiricism,” Robert J. Mulvaney & Philip M. Zeltner (eds.), Pragmatism: Its Sources and Prospects, Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 21-40.

QUINE W., (1987), “Reply to Morton,” Lewis E. Hahn & Paul A. Schilpp (eds.), The Philosophy of W. V. Quine. Lasalle, IL, Open Court, 663-8.

RAYO A., (2002), “Word and Objects,” Noûs, 36, 3, 436-64.

RORTY R., (2009), Philosophy and the mirror of nature, 30th anniversary ed. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

THE AMERICAN HERITAGE COLLEGE DICTIONARY, (1997), Boston, Houghton Mifflin.

THE SHINS, (2001), “Caring is Creepy,” written by James Mercer, from the album Oh, Inverted World! Sub-Pop Records.

NOTES

1. For recent, more orthodox interpretations of Quine’s Word and Object, see Pagin 2008, and Rayo 2002. 2. This position is based on Myers’ undergraduate course entitled “Pragmatism,” held at Birmingham-Southern College in the spring of 2003. 3. See Hall forthcoming. 4. The reader uncomfortable with thinking of Quine’s oeuvre, or Mercer’s (let alone my invention) as a language, should perhaps consult Davidson’s “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” regarding his claim that there is no such thing as a “language” separate from the sum total of the sentences asserted by speakers thereof (Davidson 2005: 107). 5. This is where, I would argue, Rorty goes wrong in his analyses of Quine as a scientistic reductionist (for example, Rorty 2009: 155). To wit, Rorty equivocates between the following two dichotomies: (a) logic, math and “hard” science versus every other discourse, with (b) disciplined inquiry (inclusive of science, technology, the arts, etc.) versus disorganized experience. If Quine is interpreted as advocating (b) rather than (a), then he can understood as being on board with Rorty’s own advocacy of disciplined inquiry in both the arts and sciences (for example, Rorty 2009: 339, 344-5).

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ABSTRACTS

This article investigates a philosopher and a poet who initially appear to occupy opposing ends of the traditional spectrum from prosaic conceptuality to poetic immanence. The philosopher is twentieth century United States philosopher , one of the central figures in the most prosaic tradition of the history of Western philosophy: so-called analytic or Anglo- American philosophy. The poet is James Mercer, lead singer, guitarist and lyricist for the contemporary “Independent rock” band The Shins, and as such is intimately bound to that allegedly most shallow and unthinking type of all Western music: popular rock and roll. In brief, I will argue that both Quine and Mercer suggest a theatricality at the heart of logical thought and a logic of the theatrical – in other words, a logical theatrics. Or, to put it in terms of a spectrum of Pragmatist metaphysical positions (from pure process to naïve realism), Quine and Mercer offer neither a pure flux in which logic is dissolved, nor a timeless logic that freezes all life from the world, but rather an ice floe of logic on which to navigate the flows of experience.

AUTHOR

JOSHUA M. HALL

CUNY, Queensborough jhall[at]qcc.cuny.edu

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Interviews

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What is happening to the Peirce Project? Interview with André De Tienne, director of the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana and Purdue University at Indianapolis, by Michelle Bella and Giovanni Maddalena

Michelle Bella, Giovanni Maddalena and André De Tienne

Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – Many Peirce scholars wonder about what is going on with the publication of the Writings? André DE TIENNE – The answer is at once, almost nothing, but a lot! We are in a state of quasi-limbo, and so people do notice that we have not been publishing any volume for the last 10 years and the universal question is, what is happening to the Peirce Edition Project? It is a question that I keep asking myself! But I am glad to share this more publicly, so that people can get a clear idea of what is going on, since in my view things are going on. In a way, the history of the project is the same as the history of any particular human being, there are ups and downs. We are dealing with a team of human beings, but you know the project is like a person! Truly speaking, I can see that from the 1970s up to 2010s the project has never been in such bad circumstances, and we have been in bad circumstances in the past, but never as bad as today. And this is something we do not joke about. In the first place, about the Writings, so far we got published seven volumes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8. We have been working on volume nine for too many years and it is actually in great shape, except it lacks the introduction by the director of the project. It is one of the greatest volumes in the collection if you consider that a lot of writings in it either have never been published before or have been published but not as well as we are going to do. It’s the volume that finishes the year of 1892 and does a great deal of 1893, it covers those great topics in the beginning of Peirce’s more mature years and so it covers topics that have to do with logic and the history of science, and Peirce’s attempts to popularize his own works in the Open Court journal. There are four publications from the Open Court but we are adding four other texts that have never been published before. The core of the volume consists of the Lowell Lectures in the History of Science.

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Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – So if we are to make an announcement, when will volume nine be out? André DE TIENNE – It will be out at the end of 2017.

Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – You said that this has been the hardest time for the Project: can you indicate the causes of the trouble? Where is the problem? André DE TIENNE – We could call it a course of negative synechism! Because there was a time when things were doing well, then began to worsen little by little, it was gradual, it was not sudden. It took years and the way it took place was when somebody retires, or somebody is reassigned to a different kind of activity or somebody dies. Over the last ten years nobody else took their place. Usually when a faculty leaves, that person ought to be replaced especially when you are considering that in order to do the work of the Peirce Edition as a team centered in Indianapolis, you really need at least 8 people at all times. When I arrived back in 1985, the team was 8 persons strong and increased over time up to 10 or 12 people, depending on the number of research assistants the center was able to hire, but for the most part there was a team of 8 people that was stable. But when people began to leave, beginning with the death of Max Fish of course, after that there have been ups and downs, but little by little a number of faculty positions – we had at least four or five full time faculty with specializations in Peirce or in logic who were working together at the Peirce Project – were removed either because someone retired or someone was reassigned but the budget line attached to the positions was not renewed. And that is a common theme to other schools, but particularly in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, it is something that has been happening since the mid-1970s because of the increase in the number of research centers that you find in the school. At the beginning there was the Peirce Project and really almost nothing else! So competition for internal funding was not great and we were able to sustain such a team, but over time the faculty body became increasingly sophisticated, and more and more people wanted to create their own center and that began to put enormous pressure on the school budget, and the budget became diluted. However this is not too bad as long as student enrollment keeps increasing. But for the last few years across the United States, enrollment has decreased, particularly in the humanities. So we get funds from students’ tuitions fees, for the most part, and from time to time from major grants for the humanities (but not major in the eye of scientists!). What we get from time to time is not continuous, since we cannot reapply for the same volume every year, and when we get a grant, this does not mean that we are going to get the continuation of that grant. Moreover, each time you apply is as if you were applying for the first time, and also reviewers are always different from year to year. We depend for 90 % of our funding on the school and the university and 10 % on grants. Both are doing badly, and the 90 % from the university is the only source that gives you permanent funding for positions, for permanent lines. My position is permanent, so I do not have to find a grant to sustain my own position. And that was the case of all previous faculty working at the project: their lines were permanent lines! But when the school gets into financial trouble and someone retires, that’s an opportunity for them to save money. Since they no longer have money to pay people’s salary, those lines are actually gone and so a faculty position at the Project can no longer be continued. I do not like to hear them say “Sorry we do not have the

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funding!,” though their language is really nice, “It is not that we are killing the line, it’s simply that we do not have the funding to put money into it.”

Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – So how many people are actually working at the Project? André DE TIENNE – At this stage, skipping the entire gradual history, we are three people of which two have permanent lines and one has a line that is renewed from year to year: the director has a permanent line, and the textual editor April Witt has a permanent position, but that one is not as secure as mine because it is not a tenure line, so it depends on funding as well. The third one is that of the lay-outer and transcriber, whose line is the weakest because it depends on whether the school can afford it from year to year. It’s really two lines, plus one contingent line. Then I have been able to hire every year two graduate students in the department of philosophy who do research work for us and all kinds of tasks but only 20 hours a week each. And those positions depend only and only on gift money that we receive from year to year.

Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – So, let’s go back to the bad synechism.

André DE TIENNE – There are other kinds of causes that are more indirect but that are part of the story as well. Of course this operation is expensive beyond the costs of faculty and staff employees. There are costs associated with the production of editions, and a great deal of it is technological: the machines that we need to maintain and replace from time to time. But there are also other kinds of costs: the cost of simply learning to use them, and the cost of training people to use this technology, and the cost of moving from one technology to another when a certain technology dies because the company that produces it simply stops developing it. So the project has been at least three times in our history moving from one technology to another, and each time that comes with having to reinvent an entire methodology, because the methodology depends on what the tools allow you to do. And each time you have to adapt to the technology and at the same time you have to adapt to new standards, and the standards have the greatest impact on how we consider workflow. Until the 1980s in the United States no one was really talking about applying a universal standard of production to scholarly editions, but since then those standards have been developing and becoming quite well known. They have been promoted by the Text Encoding Initiative consortium, and what they have been advocating for scholarly editions was to really keep posterity in mind. We are long-term editions, and we want to make sure that whatever we produce remains readable to future generations, and does not become obsolete because we put all of our stuff on media that cannot be read by any future machine. So how can we produce texts that remain readable by future platforms and future software regardless of what might happen? All of our methods have been developed according to TEI standards for producing scholarly texts. Those standards have been associated with a number of technological systems. At some point it was attached to SGML markup, then SGML sort of disappeared and was replaced by XML and so TEI had to completely reinvent itself and produced a TEI XML markup system that has been defined in the fifth version of the TEI guidelines (http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/). Those guidelines spell out our current standards and they keep evolving from year to year. Complying with and adapting to them has been and continues to be a steep learning curve, because we are dealing with an enormous document (called XML schema) created by TEI, which

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dictates whether and how to encode every single word in every text, according to different kinds of purposes. If you are going to encode a text in order to simply transcribe it, to begin the transcription work you need to move the text from the manuscript copy you have into the computer, so you have to reproduce it exactly as Peirce wrote it, and it is not up to the transcriber to eliminate anything. We have to simply move the whole text into a file where every transcription event is recorded, everything Peirce wrote in the margins or at the top of the page, every substitution, transpositions made by former editors, in other words whatever has happened on the page must be reported! Then the text has to be proofread several times in order to be sure the text is accurate. So these things take time, much of which was not part of the workflow fifteen or twenty years ago. These are new standards, new expectations that have had an important impact on editions. At last, the third cause is that we are spending a lot of our time, especially myself, to develop a strategy for the long term that will get us out of these problems.

Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – So, how are you going to get out of this situation?

André DE TIENNE – Part of the strategy is to ask everyone to be “patient,” which means to suffer and keep asking what is happening to the Peirce Project! The strategy is to reinvent the structure of the Peirce Project anew. Over the next five or ten years the situation is not going to improve whatsoever. So, in the first place, I need to make sure the project will survive, which means also that it retain credibility inside the university and so I had to figure out a viable plan. The plan is to simply acknowledge that we cannot continue to do it as before and we cannot return to the old ways and days, we are not going to have a team of eight people for a long time, perhaps forever! There is too much competition all around. So I need to recreate the Peirce Project by decentralizing it to some extent, and by both nationalizing but especially by internationalizing the project as such. That means finding people who are going to be transcribers, or editors, annotators, researchers who are going to collaborate with us but from wherever they may be on the surface of this world, except at the North Pole! In other words, I need to recreate a team that will not be living in Indianapolis necessarily but anywhere in the world, people with good will but also institutional backing and credentials, and expertise indeed. That is key to reconceiving the project, it cannot be simply a center where we are going to tell: “Anyone please send us transcriptions!” and that would be it, because we remain a scholarly critical edition no matter what! And that means that we have the highest standards to observe, and quality is something in which we cannot make any kind of compromise. We are dealing with Charles Sanders Peirce and he deserves the best possible scholarly edition, so the quality has to be there and not only for us but also for the sake of many centuries from this point on.

Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – An international Peirce Project?

André DE TIENNE – We have to create a common space, which can only be online, that scholars can access and where they can apply to collaborate with us at the edition. They would do so in a way both useful and helpful, and by this I mean that when we receive it and see that their work is well done, this has a pragmatic consequence of great significance. We do not have to redo it, because the person who submitted the work did it according to the standards that are required for the critical edition. So how do we disseminate the standards that ensure the high level of production of the edition? Those standards apply to transcription methods, proofreading standards,

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the editing of the perfected transcription, the discussion of what changes need to be made to the text (no editor makes those decisions completely alone and so the discussion is among specialists), and to how to decide what to publish. Indeed, before we even transcribe anything, we first have to decide what to publish, and to decide what to publish we need to find and identify the texts, and with Peirce where the text is is actually a recurrent question, in part because many pages are poorly paginated, have been drafted and redrafted, et cetera. So the production of the Peirce edition has always been slow because we spend so much time finding the texts and reconstructing the genealogy of each text, putting a plausible date on it within the scope of the volume we are working on. So to make sure the solution is going to work in the future, we have to know what are the difficulties, what are the problems, what are the standards we need to observe and how do we share these standards with everyone, so that everyone who wants to come and join us does not compromise the edition’s quality. So, the idea is to put together this Scholarly Text-Editing Platform online, and STEP is the first step toward the solution! The first step because we are dealing with two distinct stages of the construction, one is called production of the editions – we have to produce the texts after all and it has to be done according to all of those standards; the second stage is called dissemination, and dissemination can take two forms: it can continue under the form of the print edition, we can keep producing text volumes; but we also put stuff online and have an online critical edition. But that online critical edition is the result of whatever work has been done inside STEP, which comes with the standards embedded in it. Whatever you are going to be typing in it, will actually be encoded according to the TEI guidelines, so that whatever text has been produced here remains readable on every platform for the future. That’s a key element for it that whatever we produce in it is not going to die in the electronic cemetery, it has to survive!

Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – Does this platform actually exist?

André DE TIENNE – The whole platform as such does not exist yet, it still needs further work (see http://www.step-iat.iupui.edu/platform/). Actually, you have seen one part of it, which is STEP Transcriptor. I have been applying for National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants for the last two years. The first two have been rejected one after the other, each time with high scores but with criticisms having mostly to do with matters of detail. What I have done to increase the strength of the next submission – I will be resubmitting in December for a new grant to NEH, they have just renovated the entire program and we can now apply every six months instead of every year – is to describe the enormous amount of work that took place over the last year developing the platform and several STEP Tools, and to emphasize the buy-in I have obtained from the TEI consortium by attending their conference in Vienna, which was the annual meeting of the TEI Consortium, and where I made a demonstration of the software you saw when you visited me, and demonstrated also another software (STEP Text Comparator). STEP is now something known to the TEI community because the demo was presented in a plenary session, so everyone was there!

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Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – Since I have seen part of it, were I asked to describe STEP I would say that it is a platform which allows anybody to upload texts with very small guidance, with the output being a text already encoded. André DE TIENNE – That is right, the encoding is made as easy as possible, even when complex. We have been removing the tedium of the work. But also I am making sure that the encoding is exact. We are not removing the duty of proofreading the texts according to a rigorous kind of proofreading schedule that is dictated by the Modern Language Association, which is another source for standard scholarly editions. The real platform is STEP and the platform is the workflow – we are producing the workflow of a scholarly critical edition. So when people join the platform, they will be entering the workflow, which means they are entering the Peirce Project.

Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – So there will be many Peirce projects all around the world guided by scholars putting a lot of Peirce’s manuscripts into the platform, helping you out with the students. This way you could take care of the last part of the editorial work, and get to a critical edition soon. Is that right? André DE TIENNE – More than that. I was talking about decentralizing the Peirce Project. But decentralization of the Peirce Project still retains a Peirce center in Indianapolis, which remains physically and conceptually a kind of mothership, because we have accumulated plenty of resources vital to editorial scholarship. We need a place that gathers and consolidates all the components of a given product and provides the uniformity required for the credibility of the work. That revamped Project will have a lot of spokes reaching everywhere, depending on the scope of the work that is produced. I expect there would be a high number of solid scholars all around the world, and a number of places with institutional support, independent research centers with a history of having had Peirce as a research component. Such centers would be directed by someone who can provide supervision to their staff – the latter might be students, PhD students or other scholars, people who participate in the activity of the center.

Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – What would be their advantage, beyond the participation to the historical task of publishing Peirce’s work? André DE TIENNE – There has to be something which would be of benefit to whoever joins the Peirce Project: their contributions should be something of recognizable value. If these contributions are helpful, they could become items that contributors can put on their own professional cv and get credit for it. They would count as genuine scholarly contributions, which though not necessarily tantamount to a journal article, would still be important contributions. The result of their contribution will be published either in the printed version or online and be recognized as a real contribution to the profession. The scholarliness of these publications depends on the nature of the contribution: it could by a kind of annotation to the text – not transcribing, not editing, but something clarifying and making cross-connections between what Peirce says here and what he says in other writings, annotations connecting Peirce’s ideas with contemporary research, thus helping improve the understanding of Peirce. These are the kinds of things you can find in the second part of our volume, which is made of all sorts of notes. These notes are the result of of a great amount of work, trying to understand: what Peirce really said here? I think this is real research. In this regard, it is vital that due credit be given to the contributors. There are a number of different things we need. Sometimes we focus on transcribing, on editing, and so on. But there is another side we are

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developing; that is a technology that replicates the complete workflow of a critical edition online. At the moment it is being developed thanks to an internal bridge- funding grant that I received. I have programmers from the School of Science and the School of Engineering, with PhD students who are coming from India, and they are very competent. They spend the number of hours they can afford to work each week, spending a lot of time building the front-end and back-end of the STEP platform. The quality of their realizations allows me to continually refine the entire design of the platform and companion software, taking advantage of the latest programming tricks to improve processes and interfaces. We have reached a point that has now convinced my team that this ambitious project is actually feasible. The roadmap is clear.

Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – How much money is needed to realize the project?

André DE TIENNE – With 300.000 US dollars for two years I would be able to hire an entire team of programmers with different kinds of competences to work on the front end and the back end of the platform and they would do the work as far as they can in order to finish the platform. My experience is that it is going to be hard but a lot will be done to the point it becomes really valuable. But if we want to finish it in the ideal way I want it to be, we need one million dollars, in order to hire a professional programmer with 20 years of experience to do the harder part of it. That kind of expertise is expensive.

Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – The other project is CORPUS, that is the dissemination project. Could you say a but more about it? André DE TIENNE – If you want to have a glimpse of the prototype, you can have a look directly at the link: [peirce.iupui.edu/technology.html#corpus]. I would like CORPUS to be a Peirce research center online. Is the re-invention of the idea of a critical edition. CORPUS is a critical edition online. It is not made of paper, it is not made of books on the shelves. It is something that is alive, something that continues to grow overtime for years, a place where people can read, they can link whatever they want, connecting Peirce’s work with whatever link could be relevant to whatever they are saying. For instance, people could be reading a certain passage in the Peirce edition, and they could discover by means of links that someone already wrote about that in the secondary literature. You get to know that that particular passage is quoted in that article. I would like something that allows texts to keep on growing in the semiotic sense of the term, by means of a growing interpretation of the text. But in order to reach that, the credibility of the project needs to be guaranteed. This requires that CORPUS be protected from hackers and trolls. The platform must be safe, and Peirce must be protected from saying what he never meant to say.

Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – With a proper fnancing how long will it take to make the platform available to scholars? André DE TIENNE – About 3 years.

Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – Which kind of help would you ask from the community? André DE TIENNE – Different things need to be done. Not only transcribing and editing. Also, for instance coding, which means programming. But we also need people testing solutions. For instance, my students have been very useful in testing software thanks to their “innocence” in that regard. Their testing proves if the platform is

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robust or not. There are always bugs. In order to know that the platform works in different browsers, it must be tested. The platform needs to be tested. People of good will could also cooperate in this way. Also, if we are looking for agencies to finance the project, we must acknowledge that agencies are interested in a solution, whatever we develop, that could be used by many other editions. That means that whatever solution I produce for STEP must be customizable, must be usable for many other purposes. This is the spirit in which we want to build the platform. We must take into account the larger community. For instance, I have been advised: “You need an advisory board just for that grant, composed of people working at different editions, and making sure that what you are developing is not selfish by taking into account the interests of other editions.” I am also looking for that kind of people. To sum up, we need people helping us with transcription, contributions, coding, editing, testing, and we are also looking for possible members of an advisory board.

Michelle BELLA & Giovanni MADDALENA – In the last years, many people said that we don’t really need critical editions. We in fact have manuscripts that we can share, and we have our private expertise that we can share as well. Why is the critical edition still worth having? André DE TIENNE – Such a criticism is always powerful, and it is associated with nominalism. But I am on the side of realism. It is the short term against the long term. Peirce was a realist, and in a Peircean way, we must think of a critical edition of Peirce which works for the long run. We must think that we are not doing that for us. We are doing it for posterity.

AUTHORS

MICHELLE BELLA mica_mb{at]hotmail.it

GIOVANNI MADDALENA

Università del Molise gmaddal3[at]hotmail.com

ANDRÉ DE TIENNE

Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis adetienne[at]iupui.edu

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Book Reviews

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Massimo A. BONFANTINI, Rossella FABBRICHESI, Salvatore ZINGALE (a cura di), Su Peirce. Interpretazioni, ricerche, prospettive Milano, Bompiani, 2015, 316 pages

Claudia Cristalli

REFERENCES

Massimo A. Bonfantini, Rossella Fabbrichesi, Salvatore Zingale (a cura di), Su Peirce. Interpretazioni, ricerche, prospettive, Milano, Bompiani, 2015, 316 p.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

References to the essay’s pages are to the Italian text; however, all quotations have been translated into English. If not further specified, all translations are mine.

1 Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is known today as the first American philosopher, and as the ‘founder of pragmatism.’ Indeed, Peirce was both and much more. In a partial list of roles he played during his life, Peirce graduated as a chemist, published as an astronomer, worked in geodesy, wrote as a philosopher, and defined himself as a logician. While he gained only a partial, late recognition in his time, today the broadness of his interests is reflected by the diversity of the people that refer to him, either for scholarly study or for inspiration. The 21 essays constituting Su Peirce provide an overview of Italy’s scholarship on Peirce’s philosophical, semiotic and historical thought.

2 The essays were originally presented in a series of meetings organized by the Psòmega Club for the centennial of Peirce’s death at the University of Milan and the Polytechnic

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University of Milan. They are organized into four sections: an introductory one (“On the meaning of Peirce: Three Introductions”) and three thematic ones (“Understanding Peirce: Perspectives and Problems,” “Peirce and Others: Philosophy and Semiotics,” and “Peirce beyond Peirce. Inquiries and Problems”). Contributions range from close analysis to traditionally philosophical topics in Peirce – such as the idea of externality (Calcaterra), reality (Brioschi), (Maddalena), logic and phenomenology (Stango, Paolucci), language (Fadda) – to dialogical engagement with different thinkers – as with Vailati (Facchi), Lady Welby (Petrilli), Husserl (Silvestri), Saussure (Martone), Hjelmslev (Caputo), Bachtin (Ponzio), Lacan (Cimatti) – and to multidisciplinary discussions in the direction of applied philosophy. In this last section, the authors tackle the problems of historical testimony (Pisanty), the social situatedness of creativity (Goldoni), experience in the working practice (Proni), and abduction and projects in design theory (Zingale). Bonfantini closes the volume with a reflection on contemporary issues in light of a ‘pragmatic historical materialism.’ 3 Despite the diversity of the fields of engagement, I detect a strong philosophical unity beneath the 21 essays in this volume, namely in the quest for a Peircean anthropology. The obvious reference here is to Kant. Anthropology, for Kant, is the study that aims at answering the question on what man is (“Was ist der Mensch?” – Logik Jäsche, 1800; AA IX) through the careful observation of man’s actions. The role of actions becomes even more pivotal in Peirce’s philosophy. Dispositions towards action and expectation of outcomes describe not only the attitude of the inquirer (“The Fixation of Belief,” 1877), but also the purposive self-control of the moral man (“What Pragmatism Is,” 1905). 4 In the following, I will offer a brief account of the many essays that constitute the volume, focusing on how the idea of a pragmatist anthropology emerges from their different perspectives. 5 Bonfantini, Eco, and Fabbrichesi open the volume with three introductory essays. While Eco and Bonfantini provide a connection with the history of Peirce’s reception in Italy, Fabbrichesi programmatically opens the debate towards the future and uses Peirce as a tool “Towards the possibility of a New Pragmatic Anthropology.” In this, her essay fits very nicely within Bonfantini’s presentation of Peirce’s philosophy as an open system of knowledge (“A Guess at the Riddle,” c.1889, CP 1.1): Peirce’s declared hope is that his philosophical work may be general enough that any particular sciences could fit in (13). Indeed, Fabbrichesi draws on biology (Gilber, Sapp, & Tauber 2012) as well as from Peirce’s philosophy for her discussion of man as a socially rather than individually defined being. Her article also relates to Calcaterra’s contribution, in that Fabbrichesi discusses a social and external perspective on the self from later writings of Peirce (“What Pragmatism Is,” 1905, EP2, and a paragraph from MS R 403, c.1893, quoted in De Tienne 2005), while Calcaterra focuses on the early papers “New List of Categories,” 1867, and “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” 1868. 6 Bonfantini’s introduction is quite helpful in presenting chronologically Peirce’s most famous philosophical and semiotic writings. The early “New List” (1867) is the point of departure and the leading aim of philosophical inquiry: to find concepts general enough that they may be used by any other philosopher as well as by any person in the ordinary operations of reasoning. Those general concepts are thus termed ‘categories,’ elucidated in the anti-Cartesian essays of 1868, the “Illustrations of the logic of Science” of 1877-8, the reflections on continuity and mind of 1892 and evolutionary love (Peirce 1893: 15-9). Bonfantini’s final recap of the scope of the “New List” and its integration

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with phenomenology and phaneroscopy highlights the novelty of those later reflections (20) but misses the opportunity to draw the reader’s attention to MS R 403 (c.1893) – an explicit rewriting of the 1867 early “List” (EP1: 1). Indeed, as far as I know, the implications of this for the evolution of Peirce’s thought remain to be explored. 7 Eco’s contribution is a reworking of his thesis of ‘primary iconism,’ first exposited in his 1997 Kant and the Platypus. Eco’s effort in the 1997 book aimed at demonstrating the reality content of the semiotic experience: “My thesis was that, if one defends a theory of interpretation, and precisely because of that, then one must also concede that there is something that can be interpreted” (23). With this, Eco openly declared his positive intentions: his aim was that of supplementing Peirce’s theory with a possible answer to the problem of finding a ground for reality. Peirce’s explicit refusal of a first start of our knowledge of reality – a key-aspect of his philosophy, as pointed out by Paolucci (28) – was rejected by Eco, who feared the involved in an infinite and groundless process of mediation (28). The theory of ‘primary iconism’ was therefore first elaborated to fulfill the need of a ‘ground’ of reality. While keeping to the label of ‘primary iconism,’ Eco now explains this concept in a quite different way, namely as “what cannot be avoided when a subject – an interpretant subject – enters the semiotic process” (32). What cannot be avoided is something that pertains equally to the subject’s cognitive system and to the external world at a given instant t. Eco concludes: “even if primary iconism does not exist cosmologically, it still exists for the subject” (33). To use a Peircean phrase, reality pertains more to ‘the outward clash’ than to ‘the outward’ itself. 8 A different strategy to approach Peirce’s concept of reality (and truth) is to be found in the anthropological shift towards practice and agency that the pragmatic perspective encourages us to assume. This is precisely the attitude that is explored in the rest of the volume. Among the introductory essays, Fabbrichesi applies her anthropological commitment to an account of the self as derivate: the self is not the ground but rather the product of its own actions and choices. Therefore, it becomes possible to distinguish two aspects of being a person, namely personality and individuality. While personality is the series of actions sewed into habits and, as it were, embroidered into the larger fabric of the world, individuality is the still unrelated thing, similar to the thread that may be hanging from the unfinished embroidery. 9 Calcaterra’s contribution (“Epistemology of the Self”) further elaborates on the notion of the agent subject from the perspective of the subject’s external construction. Accordingly, the great innovation of Peirce is his complete dismissal of the dualism between an “internal” and an “external” self, which had permeated the philosophical discourse since Descartes (59). The dualism is eliminated by denying any originality or foundational role to the “internal” side, which becomes an inferential product of the active agent. The construction of the self is achieved through the experience of error (there must be someone who is wrong – I am wrong; 61) and the testimony of the others (“Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” 1868, EP 1). 10 In Brioschi’s essay “The Notion of Reality in Peirce: Between Expectation and Surprise” the real – as Calcaterra’s self – is a derived notion, that may be discovered through its opposite: namely, illusion (82). However, unlike the self which can indeed be built out of false testimony, the real seems to advance a stronger claim towards truth (in the long run): first, by resisting our attempts at thinking arbitrarily of it; and, secondly, by being the object toward which any inquiry, if pursued fairly and long enough, will

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ultimately converge. However, Brioschi notices, there may be a problem in defending those two theses at the same time (88). Intuitively, in order to resist us, something must at least be present to us; however, the truth and the real are to be discovered at the end of the process of inquiry – that is, in the future. Brioschi shows that the two theses can be reconciled, provided that reality is defined through the anthropological analysis of the structure of expectation and surprise. Expectation and surprise are not simply feelings but rather logical attitudes; following Maddalena (2003), Brioschi relates them to the metaphysical categories of Thirdness and Secondness respectively. While Thirdness, showing the regularity of natural laws, grounds expectation, Secondness, that is the subject’s clash with its object, is the metaphysical name for surprise. 11 Maddalena’s discussion of the anti-Kantianism of Peirce (“Peirce, anti-Kantianism, and the synthetic meaning of pragmatism”) has several facets, which are probably best illustrated in his recent The Philosophy of Gesture (2015). I survey the one more closely related to the anthropological leaning of the book. According to Maddalena, “experience as continuity” (71) is the common element to all pragmatism. Experience and common sense are opposed to “,” as shown in the Peircean critique of Cartesianism. Indeed, Maddalena argues, since Kantianism is a form of intellectualism, and since the anti-intellectual attitude is constitutive of both Peirce’s and the pragmatic movement, then by adopting pragmatism one should dispose of Kant and of Descartes at once. This reading of Kant’s philosophy – and of its relation with Peirce’s – is not without critics, especially because Peirce claims to have derived the very term ‘pragmatism’ from Kant (“What pragmatism is,” 1905; EP2: 333) and to value Kant for his practical philosophy more than for his epistemology. The most serious critic to Maddalena’s views is probably Gava (2014). Although Maddalena acknowledges Gava’s criticism of his anti-Kantian reading of Peirce, he does not engage directly with Gava’s argument here. It would be productive for the Peirce community if Maddalena and Gava could give more visibility to their respective positions in a published form. 12 The two contributions by Stango (“The Logic of Ontological Recognition”) and Paolucci (“Logic of Relatives, Semiotics, and Phenomenology”) provide some suggestions on how the connection between logical thought and the world can be established and cultivated. Stango’s ‘logic of ontological recognition’ has the notion of ‘object’ (or of ‘it’) at its core, namely the problem of how the object is recognised as ‘what it is’ by the knowing subject. Paolucci’s contribution is also focused on the role of objects in Peirce’s logic: the passage from the logic of relatives to semiotics is based on the idea that the logic is a logic of relations between objects, as exemplified by chemical models. The logic of relatives thus breaks with the traditional form of propositional logic, proposing a diagrammatic (instead of a sequential) style of reasoning. Those two contributions can be seen also as a critical reaction to Eco’s theory of ‘primary iconism.’ 13 Fadda’s essay, “Peirce and Languages,” is concerned with the role that “natural, historic” languages play in Peircean semiotics, that is the overlap of cultural and of biological dispositions for language in the human animal (127). Fadda proceeds from here outlining the project to apply Peirce’s categories of semiotics, which certainly have a broader concern than language-use, back to linguistics and towards a broader, mostly communicative and visual understanding of language (131), as opposed to the ‘logocentrism’ of Saussure. 14 From the ‘dialogical’ section, only Facchi (“From Peirce to Vailati”) and Petrilli (“Peirce and Welby”) develop this dialogue from a historical perspective. Martone advances a

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possible point of contact with Saussure on the notion of the metaphor, and Caputo pushes the linguistic engagement of Peirce’s thought towards Hjelmselv. A contiguity is found in their mathematical fathers (194), as well as in the role of experience in the semantic content (197). Overall, those contributions fall outside of the discussion of a ‘pragmatist anthropology’ and engage in a philosophical dialogue with other thinkers and traditions of thought. 15 The last section of the book contains instances of application of Peirce’s theories to contemporary subjects or problems. The essays I shall focus on are those of Goldoni, Proni, and Zingale. 16 Goldoni (“Inhabiting the Improvisation”) connects the musical tradition of jazz improvisation with the ability to ‘improvise’ in life gained by experience and built into a sharable, social language (245). Proni (“From Peirce to Sennet: Pragmatism and the Project [of living]” argues that both Peirce and Sennet advance a new concept of human experience. Being experienced goes hand in hand with being aware of one’s own actions, and this awareness brings “skill and dexterity” (255) to the agent, who thus becomes “craftsman” of her own actions. This craftsmanship is recognised as a value to be preserved in the alienated contemporary world. Despite the fact that a personal skill is usually not easily transferable to a community, Proni maintains that craftsmanship’s skills are suitable to be developed socially. This new kind of “shared craftsmanship” unites individual and social planning, interpersonal relations and logic of scientific discovery, as well as a still to be formulated “guidelines for the [optimal] project” (255). This vision, albeit seeming more Utopian than ‘applied’ Peirce, remains open for further development. 17 Finally, Zingale (“This is my design: the Space of Abduction in Planning”) connects design as “a cultural and historical form […] of planned action” (258) with the abductive inference stimulated by the “irritation of doubt.” As Brioschi’s reality was suspended between expectation and surprise, here abduction stems from a particular uneasiness or cause of concern with what is given. Moreover, the “planning imagination,” which is set into motion by concern, is what allows one to “conceive an object, i.e. an artifact,” only together with its possible effects (263). Indeed this conception is open, and future planning may lead to further effects and therefore to different objects. This pragmatic perspective allows Zingale to introduce a very situated, and semiotically grounded concept of design. Zingale’s awareness of the relation that an object has with its environment as well as with the cultural and historical contingency of its users shows a scenario of truly applied pragmatic concepts in the light of a pragmatic anthropology. 18 To conclude, Su Peirce is a very ambitious volume, which captures a relevant part of Peirce’s scholarship in Italy, plus an estimate of how appealing Peirce’s thought can be for contemporary reflections on society and on community, as well as for other academic disciplines. 19 As Fabbrichesi writes (55), Peirce has not met the destiny of the other classical pragmatists. William James (1842-1910), John Dewey (1859-1952) and George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) have today been appropriated by different fields (psychology, education theory, and sociology respectively), while Peirce remains an author ‘for everyone and nobody,’ whose work continually awakes the attention of scholars from the most different backgrounds. Su Peirce will therefore appeal to a wide range of

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scholars, and may set the agenda for further studies in Peirce’s scholarship and its ramifications in other cultural domains.

AUTHORS

CLAUDIA CRISTALLI

University College London claudia.cristalli.15[at]ucl.ac.uk

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Carlin ROMANO, America the Philosophical New York, NY, Random House, 2012, 688 pages

Giovanni Maddalena

REFERENCES

Carlin Romano, America the Philosophical, New York, NY, Random House, 2012, 688 p.

1 Although questionable for its style and method, irritating in its conclusions and judgments, and political in the broad sense of the word, Carlin Romano’s book is a courageous work that fully belongs to the pragmatist tradition. It recalls the style and the tone of some Italian pragmatists like Papini and Prezzolini, whose books lacked perhaps some deep technical tools but were apt to shake the intellectual world and substantially to the point in many critiques. As the Italian pragmatists for their time, Romano points out the pathological weakness of the mainstream professional philosophy and suggests his way out of a sterile fashion of understanding philosophy. This review will tackle his main polemical topic, signal some flaws, and offer a different way out from the situation that Romano indicates.

1. With Isocrates and Rorty Against Analytic Philosophy

2 The pattern of America the Philosophical runs as follows. Philosophy in America started with some profound thinkers – the “cavalcade” of classic pragmatists – who invented something new, a philosophy different from both rationalism and empiricism, related to experience in a special and broad sense. Far from any justificatory and transcendentalist mood, classic pragmatists fostered a discursive, practical understanding of our reasoning that was completely involved with the actual development of science, medicine, education, religion, and politics. When the first wave

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of the cavalcade ended, the philosophical field was taken over by analytic epistemology that transformed a living and interesting philosophy in a technique that ended up in a complete foreignness to relevant existential problems. This move – largely due to neo- positivists and Quine – eclipsed the role of philosophers as public intellectuals.

3 However, the role of leading intellectuals did not remain empty. Many important figures in psychology, education, civil rights movements, literary critique, and communication undertook the task of pointing out topics and changes of mentality that epistemologists deserted. The long and interesting track of these figures singles out a great final alternative between two ways of understanding philosophy: either philosophy is a long justificatory enterprise or it is a practical suasion. Romano presents the alternative with two heroes for each part, so that you can read the radical splitting by confronting Socrates and Isocrates or, in recent times, Rawls and Rorty. 4 Romano takes side with the latter against the former, joining an anti-rationalist movement that has had an important role in the philosophy of the last two centuries. However, the kind of anti-rationalism that Romano advocates inserts him within the most typical pragmatist tradition. Pragmatism is original insofar as it presents a form of rationality different from both the Enlightenment project and the Romantic idealist or Nietzschean evasion from it. Like the great German philosopher, Romano pinpoints Socrates as the image of rationalism. Socrates breaks up reality into pieces, isolating them and then questioning them and accepting only one form of rationality as their justification. According to Romano, this sort of justification runs in all philosophy, from Socrates to Quine passing through Kant. Differently from Nietzsche, though, Romano proposes no revolution of values or superhuman overtaking. On the contrary, Romano wants to align himself with pragmatists by rescuing the Isocratic alternative, which would be to think that “it is far superior to have decent judgments about useful matters, than to have precise knowledge about useless things” (550). What would be the useful matters? Romano lists politics and the issues of citizens (551), moral sensibility (552), education (560). As Romano pictures him, Isocrates is a precursor of Rorty’s ideal of cosmopolitism, well represented nowadays by some of Obama’s speeches. Rhetoric is not a mean to an end but the heart of a philosophy that is aware of its fallibility, of the impossibility of attaining truth in practical vital matters, and of the uselessness of looking for it in theoretical fields.

2. Critical Remarks

5 I have no doubts about the pertinence of Romano’s book to the pragmatist tradition. In 1907 Giuseppe Prezzolini, at the time editor of the “Leonardo” wrote a book called L’arte di persuadere (The art of persuading) advocating the use of lies in public life and defending his statement with a reference to pragmatism. The pragmatist tradition has to do with suasion and practical reasoning: it is the task of pragmatist scholars to articulate and specify these terms. Besides, the broad cultural landscape of characters that Romano presents is worth reading and introduces to many aspects of American culture that should not escape to scholars of pragmatism. Finally, I think that Romano correctly targets the serious problem of the public irrelevance of mainstream epistemology and, notwithstanding his journalistic style, I find his proposal philosophically interesting and worth discussing. That is why I will concentrate my

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critical remarks on what I think is the heart of his proposal hoping to provoke further debates.

6 First, a critical remark has to be addressed on Romano’s method of presenting philosophers and intellectuals. The method is heavily psycho-biographical. As much as it can be interesting and illuminating, philosophies – professional or not – do not coincide with their proponents’ biography and psychological profile. The risk with such an approach is to lean toward moralism, where behavior decides of the worthiness of thought. Fortunately, as Peirce noted in his celebrate Cambridge conference on vital topics, this is an attitude that philosophy abandoned since ancient Greece (EP2: 27-41). If there is something good about the Socratic tradition is that it helped severing personal aspects from scientific organized thought. Then, I agree with Romano in deprecating the excess of this separation in contemporary philosophy, but in general it has been a good device not to link freedom of thought to consistency of behavior, distinguishing lay philosophy from religious activities. Certainly, this reliance on biography comes from the journalistic trail from which Romano’s chapters come and one can understand that people are more interested in psycho-biographical details than in technical account of pattern of thought. However, a little more work on the philosophical technique (and a few less pages) would have added weigh to Romano’s main thesis and would have avoided the pruderie which is always a signal of any kind of moralism, even when it wants to be anti-moralist. 7 Second, as for the content, Romano opens up a possible debate on the nature of philosophy but his solution is not the only option and, above all, it is not the only pragmatist option. Consistently with a fundamental pragmatist insight, Romano understands that irrationalism or are not a real alternative to rationalism. He picks up Rorty’s reading of pragmatism because it seems to be a viable alternative not to give up to reasoning even disagreeing with any form of rationalist project. I agree with the intention but many other options are open. Simply remaining within the pragmatist tradition, different kinds of pragmatist rationality have been presented by Susan Haack, Joe Margolis, Vincent Colapietro, Fernando Zalamea (to quote but an handful of them). All of them tried different ways to refuse the analytic pattern in different degrees and to go towards forms of rationality that would avoid rationalism without abandoning the important results of analytic philosophy. In many of these alternative versions of reasoning there is room for truth and teleology as well as for aesthetics, politics, and education. Papini observed that pragmatism is a method, a corridor that gives access to many rooms in which very different people could be intent to different goals (Papini 1905). Is it not too narrow a view to limit pragmatism to its cosmopolitan political-moral version? Pragmatism is indeed an incomplete project. I think it is Romano’s merit to show this incompleteness through a history of effects related to public life. Pragmatism did not reach a final version of itself and a univocal answer to the challenge of introducing a new form of rationality. Classic pragmatists forged interesting innovative tools like abduction, fallibilism, metaphysical realism, stream of consciousness, radical empiricism, instrumental logic, problem solving method of education, conversation by gestures, and so on. Names are already telling: they tried to combine theory and practice well beyond any previous philosophy. However, they did not realize how much revolutionary their move was and they never reached a full account of this new kind of rationality.

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8 Being unfinished is perhaps one of the biggest sources of interest for pragmatism today. Pragmatist tools can be used for different projects, including a fair amendment of analytic philosophy. I think that Romano blows out this last possibility by underling how much the analytic philosophy is far from seriously engaging political, esthetical, social issues in ways that would be helpful to ordinary people. However, I think that he does not realize that the topic of truth and justice could receive an interesting new spin from pragmatism and become relevant again for discussing politics, esthetics, and social problems. Pragmatists are not necessarily against metaphysics or religion or values. On the contrary, just because they appreciated a full understanding of experience, they grasped the importance of everything that was helping human beings in their acting and discovering the world, in their adjustment to the environment. They really opposed the a-priori metaphysics as well as transcendentalism insofar as related to apriorism; they opposed formal churches but not religious sense; they were against the principle of authority but not against tradition. Therefore, even though Romano’s cosmopolitan way to complete pragmatism is certainly an open possibility, I do not think that this is the most loyal way to classic pragmatism and its original insight. 9 Moreover, I think the figure of the cosmopolitan, open-minded Rortyan liberal ironist is highly questionable in Romano’s own terms insofar as his politics belongs to a small élite of well-educated people so that at the end Romano risks to be entrapped in the same cage of the white-man culture from which he wants to break free. However, Romano poses a serious challenge to any professional philosopher with his question. If what you do and think is so important to our society, how is that it does not arrive to anyone? The long alternative cavalcade in other fields that Romano presents obliges everyone to think about the public import of our theories and inspires to be a little more courageous in proposing our ways to complete pragmatism and to foster our ideals. When James met the Italian pragmatists in Rome in 1905 he wrote to Alice saying that they taught him “courage” (James 2003: 197). I guess he referred to the courage of carrying on ideas and of putting them into practice, without false reverence to anyone. I think that Romano taught us the same lesson.

AUTHORS

GIOVANNI MADDALENA

Università del Molise maddalena[at]unimol.it

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Ulf ZACKARIASSON (ed.), Action, Belief and Inquiry: Pragmatist Perspectives on Science, Society and Religion Nordic Studies in Pragmatism 3, Helsinki, Nordic Pragmatism Network, 2015, 320 pages

Ángel M. Faerna

REFERENCES

Ulf Zackariasson (ed.), Action, Belief and Inquiry: Pragmatist Perspectives on Science, Society and Religion, Nordic Studies in Pragmatism 3, Helsinki, Nordic Pragmatism Network, 2015, 320 p.

1 This book bears witness to the wide range of topics of philosophical interest in which classical as well as contemporary pragmatist philosophers are involved, or to which they have made durable contributions, or simply on which they have an original word to say. Reading the headings of the six parts that make up this volume – Democracy, Normativity, Religion, Action and Habit, Inquiry, and Ontology and Meaning – one has the feeling that no other of the present can afford to provide distinctive, if plural perspectives on such a variety of discussions as this book encompasses; a feeling that gets even deeper when one considers that the list of topics could have been made longer easily by including sections such as on pragmatist ethics, education, philosophy of law, or aesthetics.

2 The three essays collected under the heading “Democracy,” by Mats Bergman, Torjus Midtgarden, and Jón Ólafsson hinge mainly on John Dewey, as everyone would expect. Now, Midtgarden and Ólafsson evade the usual approaches that insist on the unconventional, not ‘narrowly political’ sense of Dewey’s talk of democracy, and – assuming rightly that this is not a reason for dodging direct questions – they confront Dewey with hot topics of contemporary political theory such as liberalism versus

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, pluralism versus multiculturalism, or activism versus institutionalism. As a prior question, the opening essay by Mats Bergman (“Minimal Meliorism: Finding a Balance between Conservative and Progressive Pragmatism”) accounts for the traditional association of pragmatist philosophy with the political ideals of human amelioration and social reform. While this association has good grounds, it raises at least two difficulties. First, those ideals seem at odds with Charles S. Peirce’s conception of philosophy as a non-utilitarian endeavour – i.e. as a purely theoretical activity disconnected of practical concerns –, a point that has led many scholars to the (all too) convenient expedient of splitting pragmatism into a ‘conservative’ and a ‘progressive’ wing. Second, it is not clear whether the reliance of pragmatist thinkers on experimental methods and scientific rationality would not incline their reformism toward a regrettable sort of social engineering that favors authoritarian rather than truly democratic policies. Bergman provides a nuanced discussion of (scientific, societal, metaphysical) meliorism and points to a balance between “the social-melioristic and scientific-conservative temperaments” (25) as a way to overcome the above difficulties and to preserve and improve the transformative impulse of the pragmatic tradition as a whole. Torjus Midtgarden (“John Dewey and Democratic Participation under Modern Conditions”) brings some traits of Dewey’s social ontology – especially, his category of ‘the public(s)’ – to the fore of the contemporary debate on the crisis of representative democracy. Dewey’s insistence on communication and cooperation as the very essence of a democratic society is, though inspired in the old Jeffersonian ideal of direct interactions among members of local communities, still relevant to apprehend the present gap between civil society and the institutional structure, where individuals fail to make their demands bear on politics and legislation. Moreover, the new era of communication technology may open unexpected possibilities to realize Dewey’s idea of a “cooperative inquiry through cognitive division of labour” (39) between lay agents and social scientists, as some recent social movements may illustrate. Jón Ólafsson (“Democracy and the Problem of Pluralism: John Dewey Revisited”) poses a central question in order to assess what democracy is, or should be, according to different traditions in current political theory: is democracy a “form of life” that commits individuals to a particular set of values, or is it only a “procedural device” in order to deal with the diversity of value-options that coexist in modern societies? Ólafsson argues cleverly that this dichotomy – ‘moral’ vs ‘political’ conceptions of democracy – reveals its limitations when applied to Dewey. When commentators criticize Deweyan democracy for being just a moral doctrine deprived of rational cogency (on liberal grounds) within pluralistic societies, they overlook the epistemic component involved in Dewey’s approach – a component that defies simplistic oppositions such as morality versus reasonableness, valuations versus procedures, leading a meaningful life versus engaging in decision- and policy-making. When this fundamental epistemic side of the democratic rationale is taken into account the idea that Dewey’s theory does not fulfill the demands of public reason – i.e. that it only commends itself on moral grounds – fails, for “the diversity of valuations broadens the cognitive base of democratic choice and thus feed[s] into a liberal conception of democracy, rather than a communitarian notion of the good” (52). 3 Part II is devoted to questions on “Normativity.” Henrik Rydenfelt (“Pragmatism, Objectivity and Normative Realism”) and Pentti Määtänen (“Naturalism and Normativity in Pragmatism”) address this topic as it is discussed in two different theoretical contexts: the semantics of value judgments (usually called ‘meta-ethics’ by

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analytic philosophers) and philosophical naturalism in its connection to norms and valuations, respectively. As for the latter, the pragmatic solution to the ‘fact-value problem’ is presented as depending on a crucial shift that Peirce and Dewey made in the way philosophers used to deal with it: instead of presuming that human beings are mental entities confronted to an external physical reality – a picture that makes it almost impossible to conceive values as something more than subjective, mental responses to objective, physical facts –, they took the active organism interacting with the environment as the proper ‘unit of analysis.’ Määtänen explains how this shift helps introduce teleological features in nature and treat values as natural entities in a sense that should not be controversial prima facie for naturalist philosophers. Then Rydenfelt’s contribution could be read as the transposition of this very same point to the more intricate scenario of semantic theory (to reverse the order of these two chapters would have been probably an editorial improvement). His defense of realism concerning normative or moral judgments dispenses with representationalism – the semantic counterpart of the mental/physical picture – and adopts Huw Price’s “global expressivist perspective.” “Global” means here that normative and non-normative claims are put on the same foothold, therefore such perspective does not amount to anti-cognitivism but rather to a re-description of cognitive relations that gets by without the representational picture. Rydenfeldt’s contention is that although expressivism usually risks collapse into a historicist form of relativism of the sort promoted by Richard Rorty, this can be avoided if we complement it with a Peircean account of truth as the aim of inquiry – an account that preserves realism (in its ‘hypothetical’ variation) without falling back into the representationalist view. This move brings Peirce, by Rydenfeldt’s lights, closer to Robert Brandom’s assessment of objectivity “as a normative standard of our assertoric practices rather than by (for the most part) invoking traditional realist notions” (80). 4 The two contributions to Part III, “Religion,” share the view that pragmatism’s best service to this subject is to blaze a trail between traditionally irreconcilable positions such as theism/atheism, /evidentialism, /rationalism, and so on. William James’s ascendency on this opinion is of course unquestionable, and both Ulf Zackariasson (“A Skeptical Pragmatic Engagement with Skeptical Theism”) and Sami Pihlström (“Objectivity in Pragmatist ”) draw heavily on him. Zackariasson focuses on a well delimited topic, namely the as a persistent challenge to theology – and why a recent response to it, labelled ‘skeptical theism,’ should be rejected by pragmatists – whilst Pihlström elaborates more fully on the possibilities opened by pragmatist conceptions of belief, objectivity, rationality, or inquiry (together with some recourse to modern theories of recognition) to unblock entrenched disagreements and favor more promising discussions between believers and non-believers. Both essays ably show the capacity of pragmatist ways of thinking to combat reductionisms, and in the specific case of religious belief to develop a sensitivity to its multiple human dimensions. Nonetheless, they also could be charged with a reproach that reaches back to James himself, namely a tendency to overemphasize the goods that religious beliefs bring to believers’ lives. Zackariasson, for instance, invokes Hume and Kant in support of the pragmatist persuasion that religion cannot be treated as a strictly cognitive affair (141, 143). From this persuasion, both Kant and James set out to look for justification of religious ideas (God, immortality) in the practical use of reason, i.e. in their role as necessary conditions for a conscientious moral life. In James’s case the argument did not adopt a transcendental

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form, of course, but was intended to rest on human experience only. Hence for pragmatists it is an empirical question whether religious belief fosters or, on the contrary, impedes human flourishing, the latter being the conclusion that Hume himself obtained, and such empirical question deserves an examination more detailed and ‘polyphonic,’ so to say, than it receives here. In other words, the pragmatic justification of atheism seems at least as viable prima facie as the pragmatic justification of theism does, and this quandary cannot be solved by philosophical argument only. A second difficulty in these efforts to overcome the theism/atheism- debate and “to see religious believers and atheists as fellow inquirers” – as Zackariasson puts it following Pihlström – is that they tend to underemphasize the imperativeness that is peculiar to religious belief as such. This may not be so important when “the paradigmatic responses transmitted via religious rites, symbols, myths and stories are actually very similar to the paradigmatic responses transmitted in analogous ways in [many very] different non-religious ideologies and humanistic outlooks” (127), but it becomes a major problem when it is not so – and note that it is only when it is not so that the theism/atheism-debate has practical bearings. Again, the objection can be traced back to William James, who seems to have considered religion under an excessively benevolent light. As Ramón del Castillo observes in a recent study: “Some believers would thank James for defending their right to partake in public life without concealing their beliefs. An all too different thing is that they would be ready to obey anything but the will of their respective Gods. James’s [polytheistic] experimentalism presupposes to some extent what it is intended to foster: tolerance.”1 5 The essays presented in Part IV (“Action and Habit”) are specially recommendable to those who wrongly think that pragmatism’s main point is basically easy to grasp, and accordingly easy to dismiss. ‘Action’ and ‘habit’ are recurrent expressions in pragmatist literature, but they have misled critics and even followers who take them in their customary sense, which is rooted in mind/body dualism. Erkki Kilpinen’s “Habit, Action, and Knowledge from the Pragmatist Perspective” is an insightful exposition of the change operated by classical pragmatists – the author calls it “a Copernican revolution” with good reason – in the traditional understanding of habit and its relation to action and intentionality. Here Määtänen’s above remarks on the new ‘unit of analysis’ established by Peirce and Dewey are pertinent once more. The ‘revolutionary’ view is nicely condensed by Kilpinen in a Kant-like fashion –“intentionality without habituality is empty, habituality without intentionality is blind” (160) – and is shown to have received empirical confirmation from ongoing developments in cognitive- and brain-science. After the pragmatist reconceptualization, actions appear as secondary to habits – indeed, they exemplify habits –, where habits are not mindless routines but mind’s “vehicles of cognition” (160, a term borrowed from Määtänen). In a similar vein, Matz Hammarström (“On the Concepts of Trans-action and Intra-action”) insists on the relational character of human action in order to transcend the idea that the agent and what is acted upon are separated, self-contained beings. Dewey used the term ‘trans-action’ to describe the process of knowing as something that involves the full situation of organism- environment, not a mere inter-action between two independent entities, say, the observer and the object observed. Hammerström makes this epistemological point into an onto-epistemological one by appealing to Karen Barad’s sophisticated concept of ‘intra-action’, originally developed in the to deal with such problems as the Bohr-Heisenberg debate on the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

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Thus both Kilpinen’s and Hammerström’s papers point at interesting convergences between important pragmatist insights and empirical science. Frank Martela’s “Pragmatism as an Attitude” is written in a very different key. It builds on the idea that pragmatism is not primarily a theory but an attitude in philosophy, and aims consequently at identifying its actual content. Martela contends that this conception of what pragmatism is was endorsed equally by Peirce, James, Dewey, and Schiller, but this may be objectionable. For instance, it is not clear that when Peirce and Dewey speak of pragmatism as ‘a method’ they are conveying exactly the same idea as James does when he speaks of “a temper of mind” (188, 192). Anyway, Martela’s description of the ‘pragmatist attitude’ identifies central features (experimentalism, anti-absolutism, fallibilism, orientation to outcomes and consequences, acknowledgement of contingency in experience and of our relation to the world as primarily practical and oriented by human interests) that no one would deny to be typically pragmatist. To say that “these beliefs are what we find at the beginning of the philosophical journey of a pragmatist […] not the results of a rigorous philosophical inquiry” (197) is probably right in many cases. From this the author concludes that pragmatism will remain unattractive to those who do not embrace the same beliefs. Now, not all pragmatists will find this sort of psychologism convincing, for beliefs can be changed by experience and reasoning and also by philosophical argument. This is why Peirce added, after acknowledging the humanistic element that F. C. S. Schiller associated with pragmatism, that he did not think “that the doctrine can be proved in that way” (198, n. 6). Martela creates what in my view is an unnecessary and unfair divide when he writes: “This more humane approach to philosophy may not be as exact, analytic or confident as the more idealized way of doing philosophy. But I see it to be a more honest way of doing philosophy, and less an intellectual escape from the particularities of human life” (204). 6 “Inquiry,” the topic dealt with in Part V, is arguably what pragmatism is all about in the end. It was to gain a better understanding of our inquisitive activities as natural beings in all kind of settings that classical pragmatists set out to revise traditional notions of truth, knowledge, thinking, and so on. Accordingly, pragmatism is not so much concerned with epistemology than with logic, if we take logic in the Aristotelian sense as the proper method of inquiring. In this connection, Peirce’s doubt-belief approach to inquiry and Dewey’s treatment of reasoning as a problem-solving task are admittedly the two milestones of pragmatist logic, and the essays in this section revolve around them. Sami Paavola (“Deweyan Approaches to Abduction?”) and Lauri Järvilehto (“The Role of Intuition in Inquiry”) tackle the most intriguing stage of thought, i.e. the process that leads from the statement of a problem to a hypothesis that would solve it. It is intriguing because hypothesis formation is not governed by inductive or deductive reasoning, and this seems to consign this crucial stage of inquiry to psychology rather than logic. Paavola compares Peirce’s concept of ‘abduction’ with Dewey’s characterization of ‘reflective thought’ on this point. Though the differences are clear – Peirce is more interested in identifying the logical element in the process, whilst Dewey takes it mostly as non-inferential and focuses on the dynamics of ‘working hypotheses’ –, similarities and continuities are significant: “The nature of abduction was a constant question for Peirce, and his formulations of abduction were often close to many ‘psychological processes’ like perception, instinct, guessing or insight. On the other hand, Dewey’s ideas about the role of hypotheses, suggestions, or ideas as a part of processes of inquiry are quite close to Peirce’s” (246). Guesswork is precisely the subject

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of Järvilehto’s contribution. Taking advantage of pragmatism’s commitment to naturalism, he bypasses the psychological/logical dichotomy and discusses the point in terms of empirical studies of the human mind. Although the dichotomy may persist as a conceptual problem, its philosophical implications are somewhat defused when one learns that some models of brain functioning – in this case, the dual-processing theory of thought – afford viable explanations of how ‘intuitive’ and ‘discursive’ operations coexist and interplay in one and the same brain/mind. Besides, Järvilehto’s piece is in itself a nice illustration of the non-vicious circle of naturalism: it is only natural that we can use our minds to form hypotheses about how our minds manage to form hypotheses by and large. Margareta Bertilsson, for her part, introduces pragmatist themes in her rich, thoughtful reflection on the theory of explanation (“On Why’s, How’s, and What’s – Why What’s Matter”). Ever since Peirce remarked that even perceptual judgments can rest on abductive inference, that is, that hypotheses are involved even in stating what is there as a matter of bare perception (hypotheses that are extremely fallible, by the way), pragmatist philosophers have insisted that fact- descriptions, far from being the starting point of inquiry and explanation, are integral to it and, in a sense, they constitute its final result. Therefore, the traditional emphasis on why’s and how’s as the key questions in explanation, scientific or within daily affairs, should be corrected: “Inquiry starts out with a bothering What irritating us, as we do not quite know what is going on; but the end of inquiry might also be a more informed What, now in the form of a more ripe hypothesis as to what goes on. In relation to the Why’s and the How’s, What’s appear to us as infinitely open-ended, as a point of reference in which interlocutors in a dialogue help finding a common ground of reference so as to secure further (inter)action” (216). Bertilsson reveals the special benefits of this view to recurrent methodological debates in the philosophy of social sciences, where “the eruptive division […] between structure and agency, constraints and choice, because-of vs. in-order-to motives” (218) creates deep divisions among inquirers as to what social science events are and what counts as explanations of them. (Again, I think that placing Bertilsson’s chapter at the end of this section, not at the beginning, would have formed a better sequence.) 7 Answers to What’s questions are the domain of ontology, thus if pragmatism sees What’s as infinitely open-ended, as Bertilsson puts it, then one can ask exactly in what relation pragmatist philosophy stands to ontological theory. This problem is discussed in Part VI (“Ontology and Meaning”) in the language-centered manner that is characteristic of analytic philosophers, and of analytically-oriented pragmatist philosophers – often called ‘neopragmatists’ – at that. The problem at hand could be phrased as follows: if ontology – or, to use its other name, metaphysics – is an inquiry into what really is, most generally speaking and without reference to particular observations that are always conditioned and, at best, partial, and if pragmatism dismisses absolute views and unconditioned truths altogether, then should not pragmatists reject metaphysics as a whole? Bjørn Ramberg (“Method and Metaphysics: Pragmatist Doubts”) reminds us, however, that “metaphysics belongs to metaphysics” (275), i.e. that the impugnation of metaphysics is in itself a metaphysical statement, for in saying what metaphysics is, even to reject it, one must engage the blatantly metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality. Now, there is a sort of ontological theorizing, Heikki J. Koskinen suggests in “On Quine’s Pragmatic Conception of Ontology,” that can do without essentialism and “global realism” (the idea that ontology depicts the mind-independent structure of reality), this theorizing

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being perfectly within the limits of naturalism, empiricism, fallibilism, and rational responsibility that pragmatism imposes on us. One can see Ramberg’s non- metaphysical reading of Donald Davidson along these lines: Davidson’s attempt to find out the large features of reality by studying the general structure of our language can be co-opted by pragmatists “once [the ascent to explanatory generality] is decoupled from the representationalist framework, from the idea that we are specifying features of global out-looks, features that must be true of any such [global out-look]. There may be, as Davidson acknowledges, many lines of ascent to generality, different ways of specifying structure – what we must turn our backs on is the idea that they will take us from what merely appears to us to be so to what is really real” (277). Once traditional metaphysics is deprived of its representationalist (essentialist, absolutist) pretentions, it loses all that makes the pragmatist stand against it and can be transformed, Ramberg holds following Rorty, in a useful tool for ‘cultural politics,’ i.e. for freeing ourselves of philosophical views that diminish “our active participation in, and thus our willingness and ability to take responsibility for, any particular rendering of our relations to the world, to each other, and to ourselves” (277) and replace them with more promising views. Davidson’s final picture of language as communicative encounters between ‘idiolects,’ where no shared, global view of things is required and meanings are somehow negotiated among participants, would be one of those views (note the parallelism with what Bertilsson says about “finding a common ground of reference so as to secure further (inter)action.” This picture, however, is questioned by Jonathan Knowles in “Davidson versus Chomsky: The Case of Shared Languages.” Knowles argues that Davidson fails to prove that his semantics escape the commitment to irreducibly shared meaning. This would show that “there must be something wrong with Davidson’s overall or ‘ideological’ approach to language and communication, and – assuming that the more general objections to shared languages proffered by Chomsky, and which I take Davidson would endorse, are essentially correct – that there is reason to think that Chomsky’s overall view instead is on the right track” (304). This debate, I would say, involves a wider confrontation between two different understandings of what is at issue in the idea of naturalizing not only language but philosophy in general, an idea that is central to pragmatism. Chomsky’s overall or ideological view sees language as “a specific neural capacity of human beings that manifests itself in our behavior and our conscious intuitions” (317), thus giving pride of place to natural science. Davidson’s approach, in Ramberg’s interpretation at least, points at something different, an ideological view closer to what Dewey called ‘cultural naturalism.’ Looking back at the discussions of the preceding sections – specially those in Parts II, IV and V –, one gets the impression that pragmatist philosophers are more akin to the second ‘ideological’ view, for the ontology they commit to admits such entities as publics, values, habits, ends, that can hardly be tackled by natural sciences – though, of course, they are not intended to challenge them either. This cultural naturalism may be reassured or not by a particular rendering of language, but its entrenchment in pragmatism seems solid.

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NOTES

1. Ramón DEL CASTILLO, (2015), William James, Barcelona, RBA, 141 (my translation).

AUTHORS

ÁNGEL M. FAERNA

Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha angel.faerna[at]uclm.es

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, VIII-2 | 2016