The Frontier and Fallibilism: Toward "A More Perfect Union" of Peirce's Philosophy

The Frontier and Fallibilism

Toward the close of the nineteenth century, just as American pragmatism began to approach its classic form, Frederick Jackson Turner penned what was to become the single most famous definition (of his day) of the American character. In the lead essay of his book The Frontier in American History, Turner tells us that "the frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization" (56). What he means is that the idea of the frontier—not the confrontation of slavery or the experience of European colonization—was the most significant factor in the formation of what has come to be seen as uniquely American.

By "frontier," Turner means that curious zone in which "wilderness" and "civilization" meet and exercise a profound and genuinely novel influence on one another. For Turner, the frontier is really many frontiers, each a new world created again and again at the shifting boundary between wilderness and civilization—then at the point of disappearing even as it was remembered most compellingly. The recently popularized American ideal of a "more perfect union" expresses the hope that such worlds can be joined in a powerful new unity in which the two American "mind-sets" George Santayana famously identified might be effectively harmonized (186-215).

This continual renewal of the frontier caused the American outlook to be, in large part, one of constant innovation and practicality; attitudes that run throughout the melioristic philosophies advanced by many of its most famous philosophers (here, I have in mind primarily John Dewey and his present-day followers such as Hilary Putnam). The crux of Turner's argument is that inherited strategies for navigating the world often need to be abandoned on a new frontier; ideas and practices must meet the demands of unique environments, solutions produced at the last frontier are subject to revision or rejection if infelicitous and remain forever at risk of being outflanked. Traditionally, Americans—both in philosophy and in public life—emphasize the positive, innovative, and progressive side of this outlook. And yet, even this optimism rests on a darker recognition of the perils of the frontier, of risk and limited vision, whether figurative or literal; habitual fixities risk utter failure in the "wilderness" of actual life and inquiry. This, I believe, is the more compelling, but often overlooked, theme captured in the pragmatic doctrine of fallibilism. It is this darker theme that Douglas Anderson identifies when he says that the "original pragmatic attitude, appropriating the mystery but rejecting the necessity of Hellenic fate, is about the gambling nature of human endeavor. This means it is also about a willingness to countenance the possibility of failure, loss, and losing . . . pragmatism asks us to accept the reality of loss" (Anderson, Philosophy Americana 21).

I find a suggestive clue regarding Charles Peirce's articulation of fallibilism and its insistence on the hazards of chance and the inexhaustibility of the world we sample in experience in Turner's account of the significance of the frontier in American thought and theory. I introduce the comparison lightly, to suggest something of the cultural importance of Peirce's developing account of pragmatism and fallibilism.

Peirce studies have often been motivated by the urge to explain synechism, the doctrine of continuity, at the expense of fallibilism.¹ However, in a recent exchange with Nathan Houser on the prospects of American philosophy in the twenty-first century, Joseph Margolis makes the intriguing claim that fallibilism is actually the "linchpin" of Peirce's philosophical system (see Margolis, "Peirce's Fallibilism"; Margolis, "Rethinking"). This argument is provocative both because it reverses the traditional order of importance regarding fallibilism and synechism, and because it is not immediately clear how this ostensibly negative epistemological doctrine (that is, one which seems, at first, merely to stress the limits of knowledge) could actually motivate and condition the speculative elements of Peirce's metaphysics and semiotics.

In this article, I assess the warrant and promise of this "linchpin" claim by tracing Peirce's development of fallibilism during the 1880s and 1890s, a period in which he becomes increasingly occupied with the...