Peirce in the 21st Century

s philosophy finds its footing in this new millennium, there is some reason to suppose that Peirce will play a larger role in setting its course than anyone would have expected during most of the half-century that followed the 1951 publication of Quines "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." There are many reasons ~Ρϕ ίγΓΰ \ν\ tnP for this welcome prospect, not least of which is the rising profile of pragmatism world- O 7 c¿. (^pyifai/v·*·, wide—even at home. It's hard to say what got y things turned around. My favorite candidate is Nathan Houser Artificial Intelligence, that minor movement within the now ubiquitous Computer Revolution . Suddenly it became respectable again to talk about the difference between mind and body (our software and hardware), to worry about qualitative consciousness, to consider the relation between "information," the AI analog of beliefs, and procedures for certain performances, to consider new logics for information acquisition and integration, and even to investigate the apparent necessity that information be situated in some specified world and linked to it indexically. A curious upshot of this late effort to understand how actual entities, whether artifactual or biological , could possibly develop into, or be designed to be, "thinking, believing beings," and what that really amounts to, soon had philosophers like Dan Dennett and Paul Churchland, along with many others, working on problems that connect in deep ways they surely didn't foresee with the concerns of the participants of the old Cambridge Metaphysical Club. Some of our mainstream philosophers are beginning to understand that the old pragmatists may have been onto something. (The mainstream philosophy I have in mind is the American analytic tradition that counts Carnap and Quine among its founding fathers, reveres figures like Sellars and Davidson, is carried on today by TRANSACTIONS OFTHE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY Vol. 41, No. 4 ©2005 1^ scientistic philosophers like Dennett and the Churchlands, and even accepts Z neopragmatists like Putnam and Rorty as part of the family.) O The expanding common ground between contemporary American phiJ ~~* losophy and early pragmatism may explain why Peirce's stock appears to be ^7 rising. More than any of the other first-generation pragmatists, Peirce seems ^, almost to belong to the family of analytic philosophers—though only, I y) would say, as a rather distant relative, a great uncle perhaps and one best not V mentioned in polite conversation. But close enough that parts of his work survival, let alone wide-spread acceptance, without dedicated and capable ¡f 4 ñ' promoters. η The story Margolis tells is largely concerned with the battles and in- gtrigues of recent philosophy in America, to some extent pitting the neoprag- gmatists against their more scientistic brethren, as well as against themselves. ^0 But in a curious sense it is the story of a battle of ideas being waged between «Γ* contemporary American philosophers and the classic pragmatists, whose O ideas refuse to give up the ghost. Margolis recognizes that early pragmatism £ in America, along with neo-Kantianism and Hegelianism in Europe, repre- ^ sents a high-water mark for world thought. The defining characteristic of β pragmatism, he believes, is its anti-Cartesianism. But for Margolis, Carte- ^ sianism is more nuanced than the usual dualism: as he puts it, "in the Amer- > ican setting, 'Cartesianism' is not dualistic," but is "usually materialistically inclined" (2002, p. 38). A sure sign of Cartesianism, on this view, is a commitment to a robust realism that purports to make a clean cut between cog- q nizers and the cognized. As such, and quite surprisingly, Margolis finds that « American philosophy has been blindly creeping back to Descartes. ¡° Another important feature of early pragmatism was its naturalism. This is a common understanding. But the naturalism of early pragmatism was a pretty weak affair, on Margolis's view: "a conceptual scruple," shared with such heterogeneous doctrines as positivism and Marxism, amounting to a refusal to admit non-natural or supernatural resources in the descriptive or explanatory discourse of any truth-bearing kind" (2002, p. 6). Margolis seems not to have grasped how great was the impact of Darwinian naturalism on the members of the Metaphysical Club and that the originality of their views grew largely out of their commitment...