Peirce's Theory of Scientific Discovery: A System of Logic Conceived as Semiotic (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 307 would find Marx the most interesting subject, and considering his contribution to the "suicide of spirit," Mah's attention to him is perfectly justified. LAWRENCE S. STEPELEVICH Villanova University Richard Tursman. Peirce's Theory of Scientific Discovery: A System of Logic Conceived as Semiotic. Peirce Studies, No. 3. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Pp. xi + 16o. $25.00. Tursman has provided a work that is a significant guide to understanding a difficult and complex area of Peirce's philosophical thought, and a guide both to locating the position of Peirce's thought with respect to the intellectual currents of his own time, and to marking out for us today a distinctively pragmatistic philosophy of science. Tursman's general project can be seen as attempting to address several of the eight "unfinished tasks of Peircean semeiotic scholarship" indicated by Max Fisch? Among those tasks important for understanding Tursman's direction are that of showing how, for Peirce, the analysis of the logic of science was to be situated in a semiotic framework , and revealing what we might have seen if Peirce had finished his own A System of Logic, Considered as Semiotic. Tursman's subtitle should suggest that the last of these suggested tasks is a central concern, and he employs the very organizing principle suggested by Fisch for Peirce's own work. 2 This principle is the division of Peirce's theory of signs into Speculative Grammar, Critic, and Speculative Rhetoric. What Tursman's analysis shows is how Peirce constructed a system of logic within semiotic, and how the semiotic was constructed within a larger framework of the analysis of the most general features of experience. This, as Fisch suggests, is what would have been the outcome of Peirce's own unfinished System of Logic.~ The explication of Peirce's method of inquiry (the interrelated functions of abductive , deductive, and inductive inference, governed by the Pragmatic Maxim) is one of the most thorough available. One of the most important contributions Tursman's examination makes is the treatment of the illative relation (transitivity) and its function in Peirce's system (72-8o). Within the Peircean account of the method of science and its shift in focus from existentially particular cognitive antecedents for knowledge toward a focus on the results of inquiry, the importance of the illafive relation emerges. The illative relation is, for Peirce, the primary semiotic relation because it is the/aw of inference that grounds the leading principles which inform abduction, deduction, and induction, and thereby governs the relations of signs with other signs. ' Max H. Fisch, "Peirce's General Theory of Signs," in Peirce,Semewtw,andPragmatism:Essays by Max H. Fisch,ed. Kenneth Lane Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 35o-52. Max H. Fisch, "The 'Proof' of Pragmatism," in Peirce,Semeiotic,and Pragmatism, 373-74. 3 Fisch, "Peirce's General Theory of Signs," 34i. 308 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:2 APRIL 199o Tursman thus shows us how intricately involved the interrelations among Peirce's categories, his theory of signs, and his account of the method of science really are. Understanding precisely what these interrelations are and how they function is, however , crucial to understanding Peirce's philosophical thought, and specifically, his account of the method of science. We should be able to see, for example, the differences between Peirce's account of inquiry and both positivistic and the various "postpositivistic " approaches to the method of science. Tursman's book makes one other important contribution that should be noticed. It is commonly thought that Peirce said very little in a systematic fashion about the third branch of his semiotic, Speculative Rhetoric. The amount of secondary literature on Speculative Rhetoric, moreover, is quite small. Tursman's treatment of Speculative Rhetoric in the last three chapters of his book marks a substantial addition to the available material. Peirce characterized Speculative Rhetoric as being concerned both with the laws of inference that govern the relations of signs with signs, and the theory of the method of inquiry. What this suggests, I think, is that Peirce in fact said quite a lot about Speculative Rhetoric, much of it far more systematically...