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479 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:3 JULY 1996 Sandra B. Rosenthal. Charles Peirce's Pragmatic Pluralism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 177. Board, $16.95. Sandra Rosenthal's Charles Peirce's Pragmatic Pluralism represents a sustained discussion of those aspects of Peirce's philosophy that suggest that he was a philosophical pluralist. The book contains a complex, intricate, and extremely well documented exhibition of how the uniqueness of Peirce's thought places him beyond traditional views labeled as phenomenalist, idealist, and realist. The kind of pluralism--not nominalistic, but "pragmatic pluralism"--underlying Peirce's thought, however, is not a relativistic anti-foundationalism; it affirms nonarhitrary epistemological and metaphysical commitments. The first chapter examines Peirce's conceptions of world, truth, and science. The actual world is a system of facts that must be understood in terms of perceptual and cognitive interactions between interpreting organisms and their environments. Thus, there can be a plurality of worlds, dependent on the perspectives defined by interpreters ' systems of meanings, no one of which needs to be more fundamental than the others. Truth and science too are perspectival, and even the ideal of the convergence of truths is contextual or possible only within frameworks or interpretations. Rosenthal contends, however, that, unlike an extreme Knhnian view, Peirce's notion of change in scientific paradigms is not arbitrary. Knowledge is cumulative, changing in accord with the workability of emerging, as well as established, theoretical networks. The second chapter, "Meaning as Habit," addresses Peirce's conception of the analytic-synthetic distinction as it relates to his conception of meaning as habit. In an interesting and suggestive discussion of mathematical reasoning, Rosenthal considers the role of diagrammatic reasoning and the consequent iconic elements in mathematical deductions. Imagery is crucial to the schematisms that are necessary to the generation of predictive rules covering inexhaustible consequences in the determination of meanings. Crucial for her pluralism thesis is Rosenthal's discussion of the ultimate interpretant and the dynamical object (the ultimate referent') that constrain interpretation. Rosenthal regards the (ultimate) dynamical object as "the whole of evolving nature." The chapter ends with an analysis of the function of percepts in interpretation and their evolution into meanings. Chapter 3, which concerns Peirce's proofs of realism, presents an insightful discussion of Peirce's contention that lawfulness can be directly sensed in a rudimentary experience of temporality--a flow of time--and that laws at any given time are both subject to alteration and organizable in various ways by the selective activity of conceptual schemes. The fourth chapter reinforces the pluralism thesis with the proposal that Peirce regarded his categories as alterable and replaceable: Peirce's phenomenology "not only is fallibilistic, but incorporates an inherent pluralism, for there are in theory always alternative.., ways of organizing phenomena..." (86). Moreover, Peirce sees the categories as applicable to being, or to an independent reality. And this applicability serves as a bridge to the final chapter. BOOK REVIEWS 473 Chapter 4 concerns Peirce's "pragmatic metaphysics" and is the culmination of the development of Rosenthal's pluralism thesis. Together with the observation that the categories are categories of process, and through a close examination of the category of Firstness, she emphasizes the importance of sense-qualities that are inseparable from negative and positive possibilities Cmay-bes" and "would-bes") and their relevance to the controversies over whether Peirce is a realist, an idealist, or a phenomenalist. She says that Peirce did not see that the language he had available from the tradition was not adequate; thus, he proposed that objective idealism is the best answer to the question of whether the universe is mind or matter, even though he in fact repudiated objective idealism. In considering Peirce's cosmology, Rosenthal draws on Peirce's discussions of the law of mind, considering the ineradicable place of spontaneity in the emergence of new intelligibility or the evolution of laws. She concludes with a reiteration of the point that although knowledge involves convergence, convergences are always within a common world that inquirers partially but continually remake. Rosenthal's book is far too rich to do it justice in this short space. It challenges the...

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