Understanding the Qurʾanic Miracle Stories in the Modern Age

Chapter 4: Charles S. Peirce on Pragmatism, Science, and Miracles

4 charles s. peirce on pragmatism, science, and miracles “Stones do not fall from heaven,” said Laplace, although they had been falling upon inhabited ground every day from the earliest times. —Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers It is a great thing for the field of philosophy when a well-trained scientist becomes devoted to its study. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1913), arguably the best American philosopher to date, represents such an immense gain: with an advanced degree in chemistry from Harvard, years of scientific practice at the U.S. Coast Survey, and an early kindled interest in philosophy and logic, Peirce contributed to contemporary philosophy in various fruitful ways. Hookway aptly sums up Peirce’s rich intellectual legacy: [Peirce] is best known to the wider philosophical community for his writings about the nature of truth and for the papers in which he formulated and defended his “pragmatist principle.” He also wrote on probability and the foundations of statistical reasoning and constructed a complex account of meaning and representation which he called “semiotic” or “semeiotic.” Mindful of the Kantian roots of his thought, he relied upon an original theory of categories, one which, from the late 1890s, was grounded in a kind of phenomenological investigation. He also worked on ethics and aesthetics, on the foundations of mathematics, on the nature of mind, and on the construction of an ambitious system of evolutionary metaphysics. This list merely samples his philosophical interests and does not touch on his mathematical and scientific work.1 peirce on pragmatism, science, and miracles 93 As an important thinker in his own right, Peirce is significant for our purposes of engaging with the Qurʾanic miracle stories for a number of reasons . First, as a major philosopher and an accomplished scientist, he offers an invaluable perspective on modern epistemology and scientific method. Moreover, he fills two major gaps that were present in Hume’s tantalizing analysis of natural causality. First, he works out its implications for scientific inquiry, and second, he provides a metaphysical support for Hume’s escape from the skeptical results of such critique. Peirce stabilizes Hume’s fallible epistemology by anchoring it in his own “scientific metaphysics.” It is therefore within the context of a broader framework of scientific epistemology and metaphysics that we shall look at Peirce’s approach to miracle stories and see how he reads them as relevant to the modern mind and scientific praxis. In what follows, we shall start by observing how Peirce develops Hume’s post-skeptical stance, in effect translating into modern terms Ghazali’s medieval breakthrough from rationalism. Pragmatism, Scientific Method, and Natural Order Peirce structured key aspects of his pragmatist thought as a response to rationalism. He saw major problems in the Cartesian tradition inaugurated by the rationalist thinker Descartes (1596–1650), who is considered the first modern philosopher. As a solution to such problems, and as an expression of the inspiration he gained from long years of practicing and reflecting on the method of science, Peirce offered his pragmatist philosophy. Even though Peirce’s criticism of Cartesianism was somewhat modified over the years—and he himself may not have heeded his own criticism early on2 —it stayed at the center of his thought as he tried to work out his alternative to Cartesianism in the forms of pragmatism and “critical commonsensism.” In what follows, we shall attend more closely to the problems he found to be inherent in a rationalist approach, a dominant disposition before the inauguration of the post-skeptical era in Western philosophy. In his early papers, written around 1868–69, Peirce notes that Descartes ’s philosophy marks a departure from scholasticism.3 In this sense, Descartes is the father of modern philosophy (5.264, 1868).4 Peirce thinks that the “father” was right to depart from scholasticism in certain respects, but what he replaced it with, namely Cartesianism, was not good enough. Peirce identifies four major problems with Cartesianism. To start with, 94 reframing the debate on miracles scholastic thought revered authority and saw logic as a primarily analytic affair in which one learned how to break down a given proposition in order to see its coherence with the voice of authority (5.359, 1877). Cartesianism rejected this approach, and rightly so. But then it asserted that philosophy must start with universal doubt, not taking anything for granted. Peirce notes that this move was misguided, for it is simply not...