Notes on The Cambridge Companion to Peirce

Notes on The Cambridge Companion to Peirce1 RlSTO HlLPINEN This collection contains the editor's introductory essay "Charles Sanders Peirce (1839—1914)" and 11 papers on different aspects of Peirce's philosophy. Cheryl Misak's introductory paper is a good survey of Peirce's philosophy: the pragmatic theory of meaning and the pragmatic maxim, the theory of inquiry, the theory of signs, phenomenology (theory of categories ) and metaphysics, and Peirce's logic.2 Peirce made important contributions to formal and philosophical logic, epistemology, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of language , and shaped the development of these fields in the 20th century. His work in these areas was based on and unified by his theory of signs and his pragmatic theory of meaning. Peirce was almost exclusively a "theoretical " philosopher in the sense that he did not contribute much to the development of moral or social theory. However, from Cheryl Misak's second essay "Peirce on Vital Matters" we learn that he made perceptive remarks on morality and the nature of moral deliberation and inquiry. It is also interesting to note that Peirce called his view about morality "sentimentalism " and regarded our moral rules and practices as being based on "sentimental induction " (CP 1.633). Peirce's sentimentalism is quite different from that of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume, from whom contemporary moral sentimentalists have derived their inspiration. Peirce's views about the philosophy of religion seem more interesting than what he has to say about ethics and social philosophy. Douglas Anderson observes in his contribution "Peirce's Common Sense Marriage of Religion and Science" that Peirce "did not write a single text that he identified as his philosophy of religion " (p. 175); however, Peirce made interestTRANSACTIONS OFTHE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY Vol. 41, No. 4 ©2005 ing observations about the belief in God and the relationship between sei- Z ence and religion. One of Peirce's best known essays concerning religious f? matters was "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" (1908, CP o 6.452—485), where he suggests that the belief in God is based on an ,, inchoate form of the reasoning which leads to the formation of explanatory "■hypotheses in science and everyday life (Anderson, pp. 176—77). Peirce a called this inference form "abduction" or "retroduction" (CP 6.488). The J" main difference between the two kinds of abduction is that religious beliefs, 0S like commonsense beliefs, are instinctive and immediate, but in scientific Q abduction our natural ability to make good guesses is enhanced by the prin- -g ciples of the logic of abduction. (The nature of abductive reasoning will be |discussed in the next section.) Peirce also made interesting conceptual obser- ? vations about the consequences of the vagueness of religious concepts and 53 beliefs (pp. 178—79) and about the nature of God. For example, he made a 3 distinction between the reality and the existence of God: Peirce accepted the » reality of God, but thought that God cannot be said to exist in the "strict pa philosophical sense of 'react with the other like things in the environment'." ¡q (CP 6.495.) The distinction between existence and reality was an essential feature of Peirce's scholastic (or Scotistic) realism. This is one of the topics ET discussed by John Boler in his essay "Peirce and Medieval Thought". Peirce Ξ was influenced by the works John Duns Scotus and other 13 th and 14th » century scholastic philosophers, and called himself "an Aristotelian of the scholastic wing, approaching Scotism, but much further in the direction of scholastic realism" (CP 5.77 n.I; Boler, pp. 65—66). In his paper "Peirce's Place in the Pragmatist Tradition", Sami Pihlstöm regards "the pragmatist tradition" as a movement "largely developed by James" and shaped by John Dewey, Josiah Royce, F. C. S. Schiller, and the recent "neopragmatists" Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty. In a book devoted to Peirce, the "pragmatist tradition" might also be understood as a research tradition inspired by Peirce's pragmatic epistemology, philosophy of science, and theory of signs. The pragmatist tradition in the latter sense contains many interesting branches and developments. For example, Columbia University's "pragmatist tradition" leads from Dewey...