Conversations on Peirce: Reals and Ideals

One Peirce on Berkeley’s Nominalistic Platonism

one peirce on berkeley’s nominalistic platonism Doug Anderson and Peter Groff  Peter Groff and I began this piece with a discussion of nominalism in the work of William James. As early as  John Dewey had argued that James was more nominalistic than was Peirce, and that this had some effect on their particular versions of pragmatism. This led us to a consideration of Peirce’s attribution of nominalism to a variety of modern thinkers. We came to focus on Berkeley because his work so clearly exempli fied the ambiguity of Peirce’s response to the British tradition.1 The exemplary role that Bishop Berkeley played in Peirce’s conception of pragmatism is suggested by Peirce’s frequent references to Berkeley’s proto-pragmatic practice. ‘‘It was this medium [the river of pragmatism],’’ Peirce said, ‘‘and not tar water, that gave health and strength to Berkeley’s earlier works, his Theory of Vision and what remains of his Principles’’ (CP 5.11). On another occasion he remarked: ‘‘In 1871, in a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts , I used to preach this principle as a sort of logical gospel, {  }  doug anderson and peter groff representing the unformulated method followed by Berkeley, and in conversation about it I called it ‘Pragmatism’’’ (CP 6.482). This continuity in pragmatic practice has been noted by a number of commentators . However, although he sought to appropriate Berkeley’s proto-pragmatism, Peirce also consistently resisted what he saw as the nominalistic features of Berkeley’s earlier works. He went so far as to identify Berkeley as one of the four great nominalists of the modern period (CP 4.1). Peirce’s double-edged response to Berkeley’s work was of both historical and contemporary importance to him. On the one hand, Berkeley worked in the tradition of nominalism that Peirce believed took its impetus from Ockham’s response to the Scotists: thus, Berkeley was for Peirce an important link in the British tradition that developed and maintained an alliance between ‘‘scientific’’ philosophy and nominalism. It is an alliance that is still maintained by both physical realists and some neo-pragmatists in American thought.2 Peirce took this alliance, which informed the work of nineteenth-century scientific philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and Peirce’s contemporaries Karl Pearson and T. H. Huxley, to be both accidental and mistaken. Thus, the historical interest led directly into Peirce’s own immediate interest: pragmatism and the aims and methods of scientific inquiry. Peirce hoped to bring his own version of scholastic realism back to life as an important ally of science and pragmatism. As Peirce argued: There are certain questions commonly reckoned as metaphysical, and which certainly are so . . . which as soon as pragmatism is once sincerely accepted, cannot logically resist settlement. These are for example, What is reality? Are necessity and contingency real modes of being? Are the laws of nature real? Can they be assumed to be immutable or are they presumably results of evolution ? Is there any real chance, or departure from real law? (EP 2:420) Berkeley was important to this project because 1) his thinking had a pragmatic streak in it that led in the direction of, though never arrived at, a version of scholastic realism; and 2) his work revealed some peirce on berkeley’s nominalistic platonism  difficulties in maintaining a marriage of pragmatism and nominalism , a fact Peirce hoped would not be lost on his pragmatic contemporaries William James and F. C. S. Schiller. The focus on Berkeley clearly raises a number of important issues in interpreting Peirce’s own thinking. We limit our discussion here, however, to examining what Peirce had in mind when he identified Berkeley’s idealism as a nominalistic Platonism. Our thesis is that Peirce saw Berkeley as a kind of mirror image of Scotus. Scotus, Peirce argued, marked out a position that was just the breadth of a hair from nominalism. As we see it, Peirce understood Berkeley’s nominalistic idealism to be a hair’s breadth from realism. Thus, by examining this assessment of Berkeley, we can hope to see more clearly just what was at stake for Peirce in retaining his realist stance over against the likes of Pearson, James, and Schiller. Peirce often identified himself as a Scotistic or scholastic realist, but he just as often noted that Scotus’s realism was as close as one...