The Rule of Reason The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), the founder of Pragmatism, was an Amer- ican philosopher, logician, physicist, and mathematician. Since the publication of his Collected Papers began in 1931, interest in Peirce has grown dramati- cally. His work has found audiences in such disciplines as philosophy, computer science, logic, film studies, semiotics, and literary criticism. While Peirce scholarship has advanced considerably since its earliest days, many controver- sies of interpretation persist, and several of the more obscure aspects of his work remain poorly understood. The Rule of Reason is a collection of original essays examining Peirce's thought by some of the best-known scholars in the field. The contributors inves- tigate outstanding issues and difficulties in his philosophy and situate his views in both their historical and their contemporary contexts. Some of the essays clarify aspects of Peirce's philosophy, some defend its contemporary signifi- cance, and some do both. The essays explore Peirce's work from various per- spectives, considering the philosophical significance of his contributions to logic; the foundations of his philosophical system; his metaphysics and cosmol- ogy; his theories of inquiry and truth; and his theories of mind, agency, and self- hood. JACQUELINE BRUNNING is an associate professor in the Department of Phi- losophy at the University of Toronto. PAUL FORSTER is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. This page intentionally left blank The Rule of Reason The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce EDITED BY Jacqueline Brunning and Paul Forster UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1997 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-0829-1 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-7819-2 (paper) Printed on acid-free paper Toronto Studies in Philosophy Editors: James R. Brown and Calvin Normore Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: The rule of reason (Toronto studies in philosophy) ISBN 0-8020-0829-1 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-7819-2 (pbk.) 1. Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839- 1914 - Criticism and interpretation. I. Brunning, Jacqueline, 1934- . II. Forster, Paul, 1957- . III. Series. B945.P44R85 1997 191 C96-931389-6 University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. In memory of David Savan (1916-1992) This page intentionally left blank Contents ABBREVIATIONS IX ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi Introduction 3 Jacqueline Brunning and Paul Forster The Place of C.S. Peirce in the History of Logical Theory 13 Jaakko Hintikka Inference and Logic According to Peirce 34 Isaac Levi The Logical Foundations of Peirce's Indeterminism 57 Paul Forster A Tarski-Style Semantics for Peirce's Beta Graphs 81 Robert W. Burch The Tinctures and Implicit Quantification over Worlds 96 Jay Zeman Pragmatic Experimentalism and the Derivation of the Categories 120 Sandra B. Rosenthal Classical Pragmatism and Pragmatism's Proof 139 Richard S. Robin The Logical Structure of Idealism: C.S. Peirce's Search for a Logic of Mental Processes 153 Helmut Pape viii Contents Charles Peirce and the Origin of Interpretation 185 Carl R. Hausman Sentiment and Self-Control 201 Christopher Hookway A Political Dimension of Fixing Belief 223 Douglas R. Anderson The First Rule of Reason 241 Susan Haack The Dynamical Object and the Deliberative Subject 262 Vincent M. Colapietro Hypostatic Abstraction in Self-Consciousness 289 T.L. Short David Savan: In Memoriam 309 Calvin G. Normore CONTRIBUTORS 313 Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used throughout this volume for citations from the various editions of Peirce's works. (1.343, 1903) References of this form cite passages in The Collected Papers of Charles Sand- ers Peirce, vols 1-6 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (1931-5); vols 7-8 edited by Arthur Burks (1958) (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). They show the volume number, the paragraph num- ber, and, in some cases, the year in which the passage was written. The example provided refers to volume 1, paragraph 343, written in 1903. (W2:303, 1869) References of this form cite passages in the chronological edition of the Writ- ings of Charles S. Peirce, edited by M.H. Fisch, B.C. Moore, and C.J.W. Kloe- sel et al., 5 vols (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1982-93). They indi- cate the volume number, the page number, and, in some cases, the year in which the passage was written. The example provided refers to volume 2, page 303, written in 1869. (NEM3:124, 1879) References of this form cite passages from The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, edited by Carolyn Eisele, 4 vols (The Hague: Mouton Publishers 1976). They indicate the volume number, the page number, and, in some cases, the year in which the passage was written. The example provided refers to volume 3, page 124, written in 1879. x Abbreviations (HS1:34, 1856) References of this form cite passages from Historical Perspectives on Peirce 's Logic of Science: A History of Science, 2 vols, edited by Carolyn Eisele (Berlin: Mouton-DeGruyter 1985). They indicate the volume number, the page number, and the year in which the passage was written. The example provided refers to volume 1, page 34, written in 1856. (RLT 123) References of this form are to Reasoning and the Logic of Things, edited by Kenneth L. Ketner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1992). They indicate the page number. The lectures in this volume were all written in 1898. (MS145, 1898), (L125, 1898) References such as these cite Peirce's unpublished manuscripts and letters, respectively. The numbers refer to those in Richard Robin's Annotated Cata- logue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1967). Additional details concerning manuscripts, where required, are provided in footnotes to these references. The examples provided refer to manuscript 145 written in 1898 and letter 125 written in 1898, respectively. Acknowledgments Throughout the preparation of this volume, we enjoyed the enthusiastic support of our colleagues in the University of Toronto Philosophy Department, and especially of Calvin Normore and James Brown. We are indebted to the Univer- sity of Toronto Press and to Ron Schoeffel, editor-in-chief, who recognized the merit of this project, and Darlene Zeleney, editor, for her astute guidance and professional assistance. We wish especially to thank Margaret Allen, copy edi- tor, whose intelligent reading and meticulous care greatly improved the text. Our largest debt is to our contributors, who were unusually faithful in meet- ing their deadlines and invariably understanding when we failed to meet ours. Finally, we should like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Department of Philosophy in the University of To- ronto, for the financial support of the Peirce conference held at the University of Toronto in October 1992. All the papers in this collection were either written for that conference, or solicited by the editors for inclusion in the volume. This page intentionally left blank The Rule of Reason The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce This page intentionally left blank Introduction JACQUELINE BRUNNING AND PAUL FORSTER Charles Peirce (1839-1914) never produced a systematic statement of his phi- losophy. Much of his most original philosophical work was never published or even read by his contemporaries. However, while Peirce's influence on the thought of his time was confined to a small group of philosophers and logicians, his knowledge of the intellectual scene of that period was anything but limited. Controversies of detail aside, Peirce attempted to develop and to systematize the most exciting discoveries of his day (several of which were his own) in a broad range of disciplines. Since the publication of his Collected Papers began in 1931, interest in Peirce has grown dramatically. His writings have found audiences in logic, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, semiotics, computer science, literary criticism, and film studies. While Peirce scholarship has advanced con- siderably since its earliest days, many controversies of interpretation persist and several of the more obscure aspects of Peirce's work remain poorly understood. This volume presents a broad selection of work devoted to outstanding issues and difficulties in Peirce's philosophy. Some essays clarify aspects of Peirce's philosophy, some defend its contemporary significance, and some do both. Each is published for the first time here. All but a few are accessible even to those unfamiliar with Peirce's work. This brief introduction provides a sum- mary of their contents. Peirce on Logic and Philosophy The papers that open the volume explore Peirce's contributions to logic and their significance for his broader philosophy. From the time of his introduction to the subject at the age of twelve, Peirce thought of problems in every disci- pline as exercises in logic. He saw logic as the key to understanding the nature 4 Jacqueline Brunning and Paul Forster of knowledge, the operation of the human mind, and even the laws that govern the universe. Peirce's many contributions to formal logic (most notably in quan- tification theory, the logic of relations, statistical inference, modal logic, and number theory) are significant not only in the history of that discipline but also in the development of his philosophical system. Jaakko Hintikka discusses the place of Peirce's work in modern logical thought and situates Peirce's logical writings within the more general frame- work of his 'Pragmaticism' (the term Peirce coined to distinguish his version of pragmatism from that of William James, which he thought to entail relativism). Hintikka divides modern logicians into two groups: those who view language as a universal medium, a veil that stands between subjects and the world, and those who hold a model-theoretical view of language, according to which lan- guage is a reinterpretable calculus.