Conversations on Peirce: Reals and Ideals

Three Two Peircean Realisms Some Comments on Margolis

three two peircean realisms Some Comments on Margolis Carl R. Hausman and Doug Anderson  When Joe Margolis’s essay ‘‘The Passing of Peirce’s Realism’’ first appeared in the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Carl and I read it separately and, for somewhat different reasons, resisted Margolis ’s assessment of Peirce. We then entered into a discussion of whether our separate resistances to Margolis’s position were of a piece. Despite our disagreements here with Margolis’s reading of Peirce, we both greatly admire his philosophical work and appreciate his ability to catalyze our own reflections. We turn now from considering Peirce’s realism in relation to the work of his contemporaries to a consideration of a commentary by our contemporary Joseph Margolis, who in recent years has undertaken to bring analytic philosophy and pragmatism into conversation. Margolis’s article ‘‘The Passing of Peirce’s Realism’’ provides us with a close probing of Peirce’s views on the reality of generals. In his attempt to bring Peirce’s realism into the context of {  } two peircean realisms  contemporary debates, however, Margolis seems to us to overlook an important dimension of Peirce’s philosophy; thus he makes some dubious assumptions in his treatment of Peirce’s version of realism. He misses Peirce’s conception of the integration of the dynamic reality with the dynamic development of thought. One reason for the oversight may be an excessive dependence on the early stages of Peirce’s view, especially that which is evident in his 1871 review of Fraser’s edition of Berkeley (CP 8.7–38). Margolis tends to treat Peirce’s version of realism as a foundationalist and static view of the reality of generals in nature, and he dismisses (as mythical) the crucial role of the evolution of generals into the indefinite long run. Similarly, Margolis ignores Peirce’s conception of conditionality, or the ‘‘would-be’’ character of generality. He thus underemphasizes the importance of the would-be function of generals in Peirce’s version of scholastic realism and in the epistemological and ontological status of the final opinion. Our major concern in the present chapter is to address these points. We also aim to raise some questions about the larger philosophical issues presented in Margolis’s essay. Before turning to these points in Margolis’s critique, we should mention a lacuna that frames and infects Margolis’s treatment of the question of realism: his silence about what he means by the term realism . One must infer from the discussion that the dominant meaning he presupposes consists in what may be called external realism, or the view that inquiry is directed toward a structured system of laws that is real in the sense of existing apart from mental processes and the framework internal to what the consciousness of the inquirer confronts . A second sense of realism, and one that is crucial to Peirce, may be called cosmological or perhaps more appropriately cosmic realism , by which we refer to the view that the universe is or has an aspect that is extramental. Peirce’s cosmic realism is not simply the notion of a final opinion (which Margolis recognizes), but is that notion of an infinitely encounterable excess to thought (which is not, apparently , recognized by Margolis). Cosmic realism is developed in an original way by Peirce. To be sure, the two senses of realism may overlap , but they are clearly distinguishable, particularly in the context of  carl r. hausman and doug anderson Margolis’s discussion. One can be a scholastic realist without being a realist about the cosmos. For instance, one can be a Hegelian or Lotzean objective idealist and still affirm scholastic realism. This point is important, because Margolis skirts the dimension of Peirce’s philosophy according to which he is committed at once to a form of scholastic realism and also to a unique kind of cosmic realism with respect to his conception of the evolutionary structure of the universe. Understanding Peirce’s thought as a whole, as difficult as this may be, requires, we think, seeing that these two forms of realism are inseparable for him. We trust that the significance of this point will become clearer in the main part of our discussion. I Margolis’s central objection to Peirce turns on the idea that Peirce’s realism depends on a final matching of thought, triadically constituted (thirdness in...