Conversations on Peirce: Reals and Ideals

Notes

Notes  chapter one peirce on berkeley’s nominalistic platonism Doug Anderson and Peter Groff 1. A number of scholars have tracked Peirce’s accounts of nominalism and realism in full detail. Among other texts, we recommend John Boler’s Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963); Rosa Mayorga’s From Realism to ‘‘Realicism’’ (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007); Claudine Engel-Tiercelin’s ‘‘Vagueness and the Unity of C. S. Peirce’s Realism,’’ Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28, no. 1 (1992): 51–82; and Cornelis de Waal’s ‘‘Peirce’s Nominalist-Realist Distinction, an Untenable Dualism,’’ Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 34, no. 1 (1998): 183–202. Boler provides good historical background for Peirce’s version of realism. Though we think de Waal focuses a bit too exclusively on the distinction between externality and internality, both he and Mayorga show clearly that Peirce’s version of realism is more complex than is sometimes supposed. Finally, Engel-Tiercelin’s essay develops the crucial links between Peirce’s realism and his account of indeterminacy. 2. Realists such as R. B. Perry and R. W. Sellars took nominalism to be at the heart of their thinking. Some recent pragmatists, such as Richard Rorty, make nominalism (at least implicitly) central to their emphasis on contingency. 3. For an excellent treatment of Peirce’s realism and its relation to that of Scotus and other scholastics, see Boler, Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism , and his ‘‘Peirce and Medieval Thought,’’ in Misak, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Peirce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 4. Pragmaticism was a term Peirce used late in his career to distinguish his conception of pragmatism from the pragmatisms of James, Schiller, and others (CP 5.414). {  }  notes to pages 5–12 5. It is perhaps important to keep in mind that for Peirce, borders are continua. Thus, nominalism and realism merge into each other; what becomes important, then, at the border between the two, are matters of emphasis , inflection, and direction. 6. Peirce indicated that he understood Berkeley to deny that there is ‘‘true continuity in the real world,’’ and he took continuity to be exemplary of generality. See Patricia Turrisi, Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The  Lectures on Pragmatism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). 7. Cornelis de Waal, ‘‘The Real Issue between Nominalism and Realism: Peirce and Berkeley Reconsidered,’’ Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 32, no. 3 (summer 1996): 437. 8. Ibid., p. 430. 9. Alexander Campbell Fraser, Selections from Berkeley, Annotated (Oxford : The Clarendon Press, 1899), p. 45. Peirce noted Berkeley’s pragmatism here: ‘‘Every concept is a sign. Of what is it significant? It is significant only of its upshot, of the difference between affirming it and denying it. Thus Berkeley says that he does not deny the existence of matter, that he admits it in the only sense in which it has any meaning and is not mere nonsense, that is, in the only sense in which it has any application to practical life’’ (MS 328, p. 3). 10. Fraser, p. 51. 11. Ibid., p. xxxiii. 12. Peirce’s realism also tries to outflank the question of externality by understanding our ideas to be dimensions of a community of thought. Peirce often tried to get at this by stating that we are in thought; thought is not in us. 13. de Waal, ‘‘The Real Issue,’’ pp. 433–34; see also Peirce, W 2:240. 14. Peirce draws attention to this internal inconsistency throughout Berkeley’s thought. See, for example, MS 641, p. 23. 15. Fraser, p. 74 16. Ibid., p. 229. 17. Because of this movement in Berkeley’s thought, Peirce occasionally suggested that his own ‘‘conditional idealism’’ was a modified version of Berkeley’s. See, for example, MS 322, p. 20. 18. Fraser, p. 16. 19. Ibid., p. 22. 20. In his fourth pragmatism lecture of 1903, Peirce examined other metaphysical systems by assessing which of his three categories they took into notes to pages 12–23  account. For an extended treatment of his own alternate conception of the real, see these 1903 lectures in Turrisi. See also CP 6.237–28 and 5.430–35. For thorough secondary discussions, see Boler, Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism, 117–44 and Christopher Hookway, Peirce (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 36–40 and 112–17. 21. For...