Chauncey Wright's Theory of Meaning

Chauncey Wright's Theory of Meaning ROBERT GIUFFRIDA CHAUNCEY WRIGHT (1830-1875) was an older contemporary of Charles Peirce and William James, the founders of American Pragmatism. Wright was their early philosophic mentor, but because his own writings were few and somewhat obscure in style, the exact relationship between his doctrines and theirs has not been readily apparent. Beginning in the early decades of this century, there has been a growing interest in Wright's philosophical views, with virtually every prominent scholar in the field of American philosophy devoting some attention to him. The extensive work of E. H. Madden on Wright, in particular, has resulted in the reassessment of him as one of the major figures in the history of American philosophy. This is seen, for example, in Morton White's inclusion of a whole chapter on Wright in his Science and Sentiment in America, a recent book that surveys the ideas of outstanding thinkers in American philosophy.' Chauncey Wright's theory of meaning has been described by many commentators as one of the first modern empiricist theories of meaning, being contrasted with the theory of classical empiricism and likened to subsequent pragmatic and/or positivistic theories. 2 Wright certainly was important for having turned epistemic concerns away from the question of the origin of ideas in past experience to that of their testing, as they appear in hypotheses, in future experience. However, for a time in the literature on Wright there was an overemphasis on him as a precursor of pragmatism, with one commentator even calling him the "founder" of pragmatism. 3 In this connection, Madden has convincingly distinguished Wright's views on meaning from those of the ' New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. 2For example, in chronological order: Morris Cohen, "Later Philosophy," in W. P. Trent et al., eds., The Cambridge History of American Literature (New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1921);Gail Kennedy, "The Pragmatic Naturalism of Chauncey Wright," in Department of Philosophy of Columbia University, ed., Studies in the History ofldeas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), vol. 3; Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Characterof WilliamJames, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1936),vol. 2; Paul Anderson and Max Fisch, Philosophy in America (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1939); Herbert Schneider, A History of American Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); Edward H. Madden, Chauncey Wright and the Foundations of Pragmatism (Seattle: University of Washington Press? 1963), hereafter cited as Foundations; idem, Chauncey Wright (New York: Washington Square Press, 1964). Note, however, the important qualifications that Madden places on his descriptionof Wright as an early empiricist philosopher with a forward-looking orientation. Sidney Ratner, "Evolution and the Rise of the Scientific Spirit in America," Philosophy of Science 3 0936) :104-122. [313] 314 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY pragmatists. Most commentators have also suggested positivistic interpretations of Wright's epistemic views. It is true, as we shall see later, that Wright does bear significant traces of nineteenth-century positivism; however, the notion that he held any variant of the verifiability view of meaning seems unwarranted. Two major theses will be put forward in this paper. First, I will argue that Wright accounted for meaning by a criterion of significance, not by a criterion of cognitive meaningfulness such as was given by Peirce and the verificationists. 4 I will show that Wright was not concerned to reduce the cognitive meanings of propositions to their future experiential consequences, as were Peirce and the verificationists, nor was he, like the verificationists, concerned to eliminate certain propositions as meaningless, contrasting them with other (scientific) propositions that were held to be meaningful. Second, I will hold that, in spite of his professed adherence to "empirical idealism , ''s Wright was a realist and not a fictionalist on the question of the ontological status of the unobservable entities of natural science. This point is closely related to the first one. If Wright had been an early verificationist, one would expect him to have denied the real existence of unobservables. To see why, we need only note that by admitting the real existence of something not directly experienced one admits the nonphenomenal yet cognitive meaningfulness of the term...