Who's a Pragmatist: Royce and Peirce at the Turn of the Century

Douglas R. Anderson Who's a Pragmatist: Royce and Peirce at the Turn of the Century Introduction Ultimately, it may not matter much who is or is not a pragmatist. There are some reasonable political motivations at any given time for wanting or not wanting to be counted as among the pragmatists, depending on whether pragmatism is or is not in vogue. But if we ask how the question "who is a pragmatist?" was answered by Josiah Royce, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey in the early years of the twentieth century, we find some interesting answers that we can use to help sketch a picture of where their respective philosophical commitments lay. It's an interesting heuristic tool. Seeing how they answered the question helps us sharpen the boundaries and borders among their respective outlooks. The foci of my own particular query are Royce's and Peirce's notions of a method of inquiry and their respective assessments of what Peirce called his "scholastic realism." Here I follow Peirce who in a 1905 letter to Mario Calderoni wrote that "Pragamaticism [the "first kind of pragmatism"] is not a system of philosophy. It is only a method of thinking." A method, he stated, that also "best comports" with his common sensism and, consequendy, his scholastic realism (CP 8.206-208). And in 1904 Peirce had similarly written to William James: "The most important consequence of it [pragmatism], by far ... is that under the conception of reality we must abandon nominalism" (CP 8.258). My hunch is that though there are clear continuities among their views, Peirce explicidy marked out and developed a strong middle ground between Royce's "absolute pragmatism" and Dewey's "instrumentalism." Holding this middle ground was important precisely because it allowed Peirce to capture a wider range of human experience and natural history than he believed was captured by Royce or Dewey in their more extreme moments. In his recent essay "Peirce's Place in the Pragmatist Tradition," Sami Pihlström maintains that there were many more affinities among the early pragmatists than is sometimes acknowledged. Here he follows in the tradition of John E. Smith, Max Fisch, and H.S. Thayer among others. I agree with Pihlström's observation and thus begin by answering my own question with Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Summer, 2005, Vol. XLI, No. 3 468 Douglas R. Anderson the claim that all of the above are pragmatists, and I would add to the mix without hesitation William James and F.CS. Schiller. What's interesting to me is that not all the early pragmatists answered in this fashion. I am not referring here to Peirce's well known renaming of his own position as pragmaticism. On the contrary, it appears that Peirce was more inclusive than his pragmatic kin. Royce, after first rejecting pragmatism as James and Peirce initially presented it, later commandeered it by transforming it into what he believed was its only workable form. Dewey in turn traced the development of Royce's thought arguing that Royce, contrary to his claim, had never been a pragmatist. Royce initially attacked the pragmatic method in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy where he argued that inquiry — the quest for truth and the avoidance of error — could not be conducted in the absence of an absolute judge. His argument there was a reduction to the condition of the possibility of error and it was of a sort that Peirce would have classified as a priori. For Royce, "The conditions that determine the possibility of error must themselves be absolute truth ..." (RA, p. 385), and the central condition he found was the actual presence of an "absolute judge" whose judgment was inclusive of all finite judgments. The "truth" he claimed to find was this: "All reality must be present to the Unity of the Infinite Though f (RA, p. 433). Part of what I hope to show is that though this "truth" underwent extensive reconstruction over the course of Royce's career — much of it under the influence of Peirce's thought — it was never fully abandoned. And it is just this unreconstructed part of Royce's outiook that established the border...