Peirce's Scientific Metaphysics: The Philosophy of Chance, Law, and Evolution

Chapter 1. Philosophical and Scientific Background

5 1 PhilosophicalandScientificBackground Behind physics is the more ancient and honorable tradition of attempts to understand where the world came from, where it is going, and why. P. J. E. Peebles (1993, 3) Modern cosmology seeks to understand the laws and the historical development of the universe at large. But it is characteristic of the modern approach to cosmology that one concentrates, first and foremost, on inorganic physical structures, only later passing on to organic structures and the necessary conditions for their possibility. To the extent that it is attempted at all, the consideration of mind and mental phenomena is left until the very last. However, if we try to understand Peirce’s cosmological writings from this modern perspective , we will almost surely fail to understand him and will find his theory most confusing, for Peirce’s approach to the problem of cosmology is entirely opposite to the modern one. He begins with the mind and mental phenomena—the area he called “psychics”— and from there goes on to consider the more familiar topics of physics . Peirce always saw himself primarily as a logician. And logic, as he understood it, is the study of the processes of thought, specifically as this involves different forms of inference.1 But as we will see, for Peirce, to study logic is also to study the structure of the world at large. Naturphilosophie,Evolution, and the Law of Large Numbers It was Peirce’s ambition to construct a philosophical system in the tradition of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. This systematic account of the most general features of reality would be capable of accommodating all the best scientific theories and results of his time. Because Peirce was a figure of the nineteenth century, it is not surprising that 6 Peirce’s Scientific Metaphysics many of that century’s most striking ideas occupy a significant place in his philosophy. I have on occasion been asked to describe briefly what Peirce’s broader metaphysical philosophy is all about. (Most philosophers at least have a general idea of what his pragmatism is about.) I have searched for a succinct and informative answer to this question, and here is what I think is an interesting encapsulation of Peirce’s metaphysical system: It is “Hegelian dialectical idealism meets Darwinian evolution and statistical thermodynamics.” That may initially strike one as a hopelessly incongruent assemblage of ideas. The description is, I admit, not entirely accurate, for Peirce was no orthodox Hegelian. He was sympathetic with key aspects of Hegel’s philosophy, as we shall see shortly. But he identified his own philosophy much more closely with Hegel’s younger colleague, Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854). I mention Hegel (1770–1831) in my description only because he is more familiar than Schelling to most people, and there are obvious similarities in their respective philosophies. Both are important figures in that tradition of German idealism referred to as Naturphilosophie. And I will be taking seriously here Peirce’s own remark that his philosophy might plausibly be viewed as “Schellingism transformed in the light of modern physics” (6.415). My brief description also mentions Darwin (1809–82) rather than Lamarck (1744–1829). Both were champions of the idea of evolution, though Peirce’s own sympathies lay much nearer to Lamarck’s teleological account than to Darwin’s mechanistic theory of natural selection. Peirce, however, was struck by the essentially statistical nature of Darwin’s explanation of how evolution occurs within natural populations. As for statistical thermodynamics , Peirce was duly impressed by all the fruitful applications of statistical method within his time. But Maxwell and Boltzmann ’s explanation of irreversible phenomena by appeal to the idea that statistical laws can emerge from the “chance” encounter of millions of molecules was for Peirce, I believe, the crowning achievement that brought together all the irreversible trends of development and evolution that composed the common theme of Naturphilosophie and evolution theory. It was at once precise and scientific, without being antithetical to the idea of a goal-directed development and evolution of real novelty in the world. Writing at the turn of the last century, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann described the preceding hundred years as “Darwin’s century.” Philosophical and Scientific Background 7 He did so because the nineteenth century had been characterized by a novel awareness of the concepts of time and change. If there was any Zeitgeist characteristic of the nineteenth century, the idea of...