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

Conclusion

176 7 Conclusion The Universe as an argument is necessarily a great work of art, a great poem—for every fine argument is a poem and a symphony—just as every true poem is a sound argument. (5.119) There is an ongoing dispute within Peirce scholarship between those, on the one hand, who make the charge that his philosophy as a whole is inconsistent and at odds with itself in its ambitions (e.g., Goudge, 1950; Gallie, 1952; Apel, 1987; Murphy, 1993) and those, on the other, who argue that it is highly systematic and coherent (e.g., Corrington, 1993; Hausman, 1993; Rosenthal, 1994; Anderson, 1995; Parker, 1998). Like Hookway (1985), I am sympathetic to both parties, to varying degrees. There can be no doubt, after having witnessed the recurrence of key philosophical themes throughout and their eventual convergence within the cosmology, that Peirce’s thought is highly systematic. Yet neither can it be denied that there are deep tensions in his philosophy when considered as a whole. Goudge (1950) first launched the thesis that there are two distinct and incompatible strains in Peirce’s philosophy. He identified these as distinct personalities, referring to them as the “Naturalistic ” Peirce and the “Transcendentalist” Peirce. The naturalistic tendency in Peirce’s thought is positivistic, and its best-known symptom is the pragmatic theory of meaning. It is concerned with the clarification of ideas so that they might be put to positive empirical test. It expresses what might be called the “British” tendency in Peirce’s thought. The transcendentalist tendency is metaphysical and is best known for producing the evolutionary cosmology. It is highly speculative and difficult to see how it might ever be put to an experimental test. This we might call the “German” aspect of Peirce’s thought. In an effort to reconcile these two seemingly irreconcilable forces, I Conclusion 177 make the following observation: Both tendencies in Peirce’s thought, the “good” and the “bad” (as people have been wont to view them), are direct products of sound methodological principles, each of which we are indebted to Peirce for their development and emphasis . The principle of pragmatism implores us to make our ideas precise and unambiguous so that we do not waste time arguing in circles over mere verbal ambiguity or vagueness.1 The influence of this doctrine on such movements as verificationism and operationalism is testimony to its philosophical sobriety. But at the root of Peirce’s much less popular metaphysics is a methodological principle of equal soundness—namely, the first rule of inquiry. It implores us not to accept any positive matter of fact as inexplicable or self-evident . He insisted that it is no explanation at all to pronounce a thing to be absolutely inexplicable. To do so is to commit oneself to an opinion “which no reasoning can ever justify or excuse” (RLT, 180), for it is the express aim of reasoning about natural phenomena to render it intelligible. It is this latter methodological principle that impelled Peirce to seek an explanation for the degree of natural law and orderliness we find in the universe, and for the relationship between psychical and physical properties. This was a pursuit that, as we have seen, required speculations of rather heroic proportions . That it required such bold conjecture does raise the question whether it is in fact sound advice to seek an explanation for every proposition purporting to make a statement of fact. It may be that much of the difficulty people experience (myself included) in facing Peirce’s cosmological writings arises from his strict realism about laws coupled with the first rule of reason. For once laws themselves are admitted as phenomena to be explained, the very things that we typically turn to for explanations become useless to us, and we exhaust ourselves in the attempt to perform an impossible explanatory regress, much like the snake that begins to consume its own tail. But perhaps even more difficult for modern readers to swallow is his anthropomorphic thesis that nature ought to display rational features characteristic of human intelligence. A central tenet of the modern scientific attitude (closely akin to the positivism and agnosticism of Peirce’s day) is that we ought not to project our own peculiarly human qualities onto the natural world. To do just that, however , is very much a central mode of operation, according to at least 178 Peirce’s Scientific Metaphysics...