Peirce's View Research Articles

Signs of Logic: Peircean Themes on the Philosophy of Language, Games, and Communication (review)

Reviewed by: Signs of Logic: Peircean Themes on the Philosophy of Language, Games, and Communication Robert W. Burch Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen Signs of Logic: Peircean Themes on the Philosophy of Language, Games, and Communication Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2006. xiv + 496 pp. This compendious volume of fourteen of Pietarinen's essays on Peirce, plus a three-page set of "Final Words" relating to the work of Robert Aumann, is a "must-have" for both the Peirce scholar and any other philosopher who wishes to relate Peirce's thinking on language and logic to other major thinkers and logical themes of the twentieth century (and beyond). The essays extend or complement discussions of Peirce's logic and philosophy of language that have come to be expected from the "Finnish school" of philosophers, which includes Hintikka and Hilpinen, as well as Pietarinen. Nine of the essays (Chapters 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, and 14), comprising about two-thirds of the entire book, are revised and expanded versions of essays that Pietarinen has previously published. The remaining one-third (approximately) of the book is brand new. Chapters 1 and 2 serve as general introductions to the book's major interests. Chapter 6 is on evidence for constructivism in Peirce, as well as several other topics. Chapter 9 compares Peirce's ideas with Wilfred Hodges's "dialogue foundations" and contains a small philosophical dialogue, which has Peirce, Wittgenstein, and Hodges as its characters. Chapter 11 concerns evolutionary semantics and language [End Page 577] games. And the cursory Chapter 15 of "Final Words" predicts that the game-theoretical approach to semantics and Peirce scholarship has an exploding future, like an erupting volcano. From the foregoing one can gather, correctly, that each essay in the book is separately conceived and that the book is not a single continuous line of argumentative development of one or even of a few themes. Still, the essays are similar to one another in two ways, which ways are closely related to each other. First, they all concern the Peircean doctrine that semeiotic and semeiosis constitute the heartland of logic, and that this heartland is vastly richer than the sort of pure mathematical calculi that might mistakenly be taken for logic itself (and were in fact so taken for much of the twentieth century). Second, they all deal with the Peircean insistence that semeiosis is inherently a form of Praxis in which interchanges occur between or among various "agents" or "actors," one of which might be nature itself; so that at the very least logic is dialogic, and so that more generally one may justifiably speak of semeiosis as involving something like a "game." These lines of exploration will surprise no seasoned Peirce scholar, but the special genius of the Finnish "school" of Peirce interpretation from Hintikka forward is to have spotlighted in dramatic fashion the game-theoretical nature of many elements in Peirce's semeiotic. In these essays Pietarinen amply exhibits two attainments of mind that are indispensable for the serious Peirce scholar. One is the object of what we might call "The Eisele Imperative" after the vehement urgings of Carolyn Eisele: this is the possession of some significant degree of sophistication in mathematics. Pietarinen's mathematical skills are plainly sufficient for his discussions of logic and game theory. For example, his Chapter 5 is an excellent technical discussion of Peirce's existential graphs, and his Chapter 7 is an admirable technical discussion of certain aspects of game theory and generalized quantifiers. Another crucial skill needed by the serious Peirce scholar is the object of what we might call "The Pietarinen Corrective" after the practices exemplified in these essays: this is the possession of extremely broad knowledge of recent and contemporary philosophy, especially philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science. Indeed, the breadth of Pietarinen's acquaintance with twentieth century logic and philosophy of language, both "analytic" and "continental," is breathtaking. This allows him scope for comparisons of Peirce's views with an extraordinarily wide, and not always easily anticipated, range of philosophers and philosophic traditions. Pietarinen's range of reference is so extensive that it would be pointless to attempt to discuss in...

Belief, Doubt and Reason: C. S. Peirce on education

In this paper, we explore Peirce's work for insights into a theory of learning and cognition for education. Our focus for this exploration is Peirce's paper The Fixation of Belief (FOB), originally published in 1877 in Popular Science Monthly. We begin by examining Peirce's assertion that the study of logic is essential for understanding thought and reasoning. We explicate Peirce's view of the nature of reasoning itself—the characteristic guiding principles or ‘habits of mind’ that underlie acts of inference, the dimensions of and interaction between doubt and belief, and his four methods of resolving or ‘fixing’ belief (i.e., tenacity, authority, a priori, and experimentation). The four methods are then juxtaposed against current models of teaching and learning such as constructivism, schema theory, situated cognition, and inquiry learning. Finally, we discuss Peirce's modes of inference as they relate educationally to the resolution of doubt and beliefs and offer an example of belief resolution from an experienced teacher in a professional development environment.

'The Single Greatest Cause of Domestic Housefires': On the Hole in Hegel's Aesthetics

Problematising the opposition Hegel makes in his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics between art and science, an opposition which is of course not just Hegel's, this paper attempts to theorise the aesthetics of non-fiction. From considering Wittgenstein and Peirce's views on the logic and aesthetics of being, it turns to consider its author's own writing practice. For I am producing all this, and sending it out into the world in this fashion, as part of my literature search for The 14th Floor , an experimental novel. And this article is actually a letter to my supervisor. Conceived literally as a science experiment, The 14th Floor , and the resultant prac report I will produce about the process of its writing, will aim to undermine something of the illusory divide between art and science, fiction and non-fiction, novelty and knowledge. The article also constitutes a consideration of how we might use the new doctorates in creative arts to stage collisions between traditional knowledges and contemporary creative practices, and so generate the new. I plant a series of autobiographical disruptions into the above, in the form of descriptions of Moscow in late Soviet perestroika , where I lived and first learnt that life blows up, sometimes. And that realities, facts and fictions, follow in its wake.

Peirce on Explanation

There has been a recent focused effort in philosophical scholarship to bridge the perceived divide between pragmatism and analytic philoso- phy. This divide, it has been suggested, is over philosophical doctrines, methods, and even aims. This is not to say there has not been fruitful— even if antagonistic—dialogue between these two philosophical tradi- tions. Clearly there has been, e.g., Russell's famous (or infamous) disputes with James and Dewey. Clearly also, there has been direct philosophical influence from one tradition to the other, e.g., Peirce and Dewey on Quine's naturalistic works. Nevertheless, all too often the seminal works of pragmatists, especially the classical Big Three, have not been mined by analytic philosophers, e.g., Peirce's writings on vagueness or on reference. This neglect has been, I believe, to the detri- ment of analytic philosophy. I intend this paper to be one step in cor- recting this neglect by suggesting both that Peirce's take on (scientific) explanation is a corrective to the prevailing models of explanation and that these models supply (at least in part) fecund additions to Peirce's views. First I will lay out four contemporary models of explanation, fol- lowed by an explication of Peirce's views. Then I will suggest how each of these two approaches (the analytic models and the Peircean model) can help inform the other.

Peirce, signs, and meaning

C.S. Peirce was the founder of pragmatism and a pioneer in the field of semiotics. His work investigated the problem of meaning, which is the core aspect of semiosis as well as a significant issue in many academic fields. Floyd Merrell demonstrates throughout Peirce, Signs, and Meaning that Peirce's views remain dynamically relevant to the analysis of subsequent work in the philosophy of language. Merrell discusses Peirce's thought in relation to that of early twentieth-century philosophers such as Frege, Russell, and Quine, and contemporaries such as Goodman, Putnam, Davidson, and Rorty. In doing so, Merrell demonstrates how quests for meaning inevitably fall victim to vagueness in pursuit of generality, and how vagueness manifests an inevitable tinge of inconsistency, just as generalities always remain incomplete. He suggests that vagueness and incompleteness/generality, overdetermination and underdetermination, and Peirce's phenomenological categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness must be incorporated into notions of sign structure for a proper treatment of meaning. He also argues that the twentieth-century search for meaning has placed overbearing stress on language while ignoring nonlinguistic sign modes and means. Peirce, Signs, and Meaning is an important sequel to Merrell's trilogy, Signs Becoming Signs', Semiosis in the Postmodern Age; and Signs Grow. This book is not only a significant contribution to the field of semiotics, it has much to offer scholars in literature, philosophy, linguistics, cultural studies, and other academic disciplines in which meaning is a central concern.

Ethics at the Limit of Reason

The manner in which deconstruction has recently articulated itself as a philosophy of limit opens discussion as to the broader question of the nature and extent of any philosophy today at the limit of reason. Turning to this broader context and repeating this celebrated Kantian theme allows a contrast between deconstruction and other possibilities of philosophy today at the limit, thereby revealing the sense in which deconstruction can be considered a philosophy of limit. It is my working hypothesis that the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, precisely as a philosophy at the limit,' offering itself in a relation to the tradition different from that of deconstruction, provides a rich and positive account of alterity, and at once takes account of the positive elements of deconstruction.2 This will be shown by ( 1 ) reflecting on the very basis of the commitment of these two forms of philosophy to sense and meaning, (2) by comparing these two differing developments of philosophy as attentive to its limit, and (3) by taking into consideration extensions beyond this limit initiated by Kant and brought to culmination by Ricoeur. It is precisely the tension between limit and extension, so fundamental to Ricoeur's philosophy, that allows his recent ethics, cast against this backdrop, to take place within the polarity between ethical foundations and the moral principle of obligation. And it is in the context of such an ethico-moral philosophy that we must attempt to confront the challenge from deconstruction. If such a challenge is to be accepted in its extreme formulation, the question must be posed regarding the sense in which any ethical philosophy can be considered worthwhile, since it would seem that to deconstruct ethics or to engage it in a deconstructive or "clotural reading" involves a fundamental style of thinking at odds with such a project. Indeed, even the philosophy of Ricoeur is submitted to this sweep of deconstruction. Let us turn now briefly to explore the notion of limit. I do not pretend to treat exhaustively the problem of philosophy at its limit, end, closure or interruption, but merely to shed light on the problem by turning briefly to reflect further on this notion of limit, showing how the positions of Ricoeur and deconstruction fit into that context, thus contrasting these two recent efforts toward ethics or against ethics.4 In focusing on philosophy at the limit, we can bring together and correlate two distinct senses of limit, one emerging from Kant's transcendental idealism, the other from Peirce's view of secondness within interaction. Here we follow the lead of Drucilla Cornell's account.5 The designation of deconstruction as a philosophy of limit in the first sense is somewhat an extrapolation of the Kantian sense of limit.6 Drucilla Cornell's recasting of this designation has the positive effect of exposing the "quasitranscendental conditions" establishing a system as a system, showing that this very establishment implies a "beyond" which is excluded. The system and any determination of meaning allow closure and exclusion at the expense of openness. Hence, deconstruction as a philosophy of limit at the end of metaphysics challenges us to be open to the excluded, thus affording us a "golden opportunity" rather than a crises of termination.' Cornell renders deconstruction as a philosophy of limit that is open to the beyond, to unimagined possibilities, and hence as a call for a radical transformation of the present. This can perhaps be seen to be the other side of the closure. Deconstruction, then, questions traditional philosophy's ability to get at the "beyond" in its discourse, i.e., in its saying of what cannot be Said. The second sense of deconstruction as a philosophy of limit attempts to incorporate C. S. Peirce's notion of secondness in his own opposition to Hegelian idealism. As Cornell says, by secondness Peirce indicates "the materiality that persists beyond any attempt to conceptualize it. …

Kant, Boole and Peirce's Early Metaphysics

Charles Peirce is often credited for being among the first, perhaps even the first, to develop a scientific metaphysics of indeterminism. After rejecting the received view that Peirce developed his views from Darwin and Maxwell, I argue that Peirce's view results from his synthesis of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy and George Boole's contributions to formal logic. Specifically, I claim that Kant's conception of the laws of logic as the basis for his architectonic, when combined with Boole's view of probability, yields Peirce's metaphysics of probabilistic laws. Indeterminism provides, therefore, an excellent illustration of how Peirce attempted to use logic to clarify metaphysical problems.“Since everyone must have conceptions of things in general, it is most important that they should be carefully constructed. I shall enter into no criticism of the different methods of metaphysical research, but shall merely say that in the opinions of several great thinkers, the only successful mode yet lighted upon is that of adopting our logic as our metaphysics”. (W1: 490, 1866)2

Texts on-line

The study of signs is divided between those scholars who use the Saussurian binary sign (semiology) and those who prefer Charles Peirce's tripartite sign (semiotics). The common view of the opposition between the two types of signs does not take into consideration the methodological conditions of applicability of these two types of signs. This is particularly important in the field of literary studies and hence for the preparation of electronic programs for text analysis. The Peircian sign explicitly entails the discovery of a truth of meaning that claims to be universal and not reducible to a collection of opinions based on fragmented information; it also imposes the task of elucidating a transhistorical and universal significantion encoded in a text. Contrary to Peirce's view of the sign, our use of computer programs for text analysis, however, demonstrates that we implicitly treat every literary text as a set of linguistic data (letters, phonemes, syntagmatic segments, etc.) which are reducible to units that can be treated separately. A brief comparison of the results obtained from computer analyses of the French poet Stephane Mallarme's text, “Le Cygne,” with those obtained from two Peircian analyses (by Riffaterre and Champigny) of the same text demonstrates that our current methods of computer textual analysis are based on a Saussurian semiology, which is unidimensional and limited, and that these methods are still quite unable to produce a semiotic interpretation based on a totalizing hierarchy of the text's various discursive components.

Peirce and the autonomy of abductive reasoning

Essential to Peirce's distinction among three kinds of reasoning, deduction, induction and abduction, is the claim that each is correlated to a unique species of validity irreducible to that of the others. In particular, abductive validity cannot be analyzed in either deductive or inductive terms, a consequence of considerable importance for the logical and epistemological scrutiny of scientific methods. But when the full structure of abductive argumentation — as viewed by the mature Peirce — is clarified, every inferential step in the process can be seen to dissolve into familiar forms of deductive and inductive reasoning. Specifically, the final stage is a special type of practical inference which, if correct, is deductively valid, while the creative phase, surprisingly, is not inferential at all. In neither is abduction a type of inference to the best explanation. The result is a major reassessment of the relevance of Peirce's views to contemporary methodological studies.

Peirce and evolution: Comment on O'Hear

After stressing the shortcomings of Darwinian accounts of self‐consciousness and knowledge ‐ i.e. in terms of their survival value ‐ Anthony O'Hear presents Peirce's metaphysical hypotheses on cosmic evolution as an alternative approach that avoids those shortcomings. Although O'Hear does not straightforwardly defend Peirce's views, his argument suggests that only some teleological account of self‐consciousness and knowledge is reasonable. The argument, though correct, is not enough to establish the metaphysical point O'Hear defends. Before developing his metaphysical ideas, Peirce's rejection of natural selection as an explanation for every phenomenon brought him to consider the more appropriate question of how natural selection could give rise to a different kind of evolution. This involved outlining an evolutionary account of the origin of self‐consciousness and of the mechanisms of belief fixation. The point is not one about Peirce, of course, but about the relationship between, on the one hand, biolo...

Veblen on Scientific Creativity: The Influence of Charles S. Peirce

Thorstein Veblen's analysis of scientific method focuses on the nature of scientific creativity. His primary interest was how scientists create hypotheses. An essential task in organizing his analysis is to recognize its fundamental similarity to Charles S. Peirce's theory of inquiry. Once Veblen's conceptualization of scientific inquiry is organized according to Peirce's systematic views on science, Veblen's views are seen to be ordered around the question: How do scientists create? To show that Veblen succeeds in developing a theory of inquiry that focuses on the problem of creativity, it is necessary to show the parallels between his theory and Peirce's. Veblen was a student of Peirce's at Johns Hopkins, but there is little evidence of the latter's influence on him. Nonetheless, I will show that knowledge of Peirce's analysis of creative scientific inquiry advances the understanding of Veblen's philosophy of science; and Veblen's theory of inquiry offers economists a promising logic of inquiry, one that guides and spurs creative advance. After analyzing the parallels between Veblen's and Peirce's views of scientific creativity, I will explain in my conclusion how this novel understanding of Veblen clarifies the fundamental difference between institu

Pragmatism, Science, and Metaphysics

In 1934 Charles W. Morris, then a young philosopher at the University of Chicago, visited Rudolf Carnap in Prague, where the latter was teaching on the science faculty of Charles University. Morris, a philosopher familiar with Peirce's work and himself following the traditions of pragmatism, was impressed with the positivist program. Two years later he played an impor tant role in Carnap's move to a professorship at the University of Chicago.1 In the following year, 1937, Hermann in Paris published a slim but eloquent book by Morris, Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, and Scientific Empiricism. Its thesis was that American pragmatism and European positivism were en tirely complementary philosophical movements, and that the collaboration of the adherents of the two could lead to a new form of scientific empiricism more fruitful than either. Carnap did give this suggestion of Morris cautious lip service in Testability and Meaning,2 his first important paper in the United States. But active intellectual collaboration between members of these two philosophical movements did not, in fact, occur. Indeed, as philosophy developed after the disruptions of World War II, relationships between members of the two groups might best be characterized as marked by mutual misunderstandings and distaste. Morris abandoned his hopes for their fusion and turned his attention to other matters, Carnap continued to develop his own views, and only the International Encyclopedia of the Unified Sciences, which they founded together, remains to testify to such a vision. Without commenting further on what might have been, and the social and political reasons why it may have failed to come about, let us look at those aspects of theory and outlook shared by the two movements, as well as those on which they differed, and see what the substantive problems were. For reasons of simplicity and breadth of scope, attention will be focused on the theories of Peirce and Carnap, with special attention to the details of Peirce's views where these are not as widely known. It is hard to look at the work of Peirce (1839-1914) and Carnap (1891? 1970) without being impressed, as Morris was, by the similarity of spirit they seemed to share?in spite of the fifty years that separated their lives.

Charles Sanders Peirce and Eugen Gomringer: The Concrete Poem as a Sign

Throughout his manifestoes and theoretical writings, Eugen Gomringer, founder of European concrete poetry movement, emphasizes character (zeichencharakter) of concrete poem, referring to poems themselves as schemes (schemata von zeichen) or systems (systeme) (GWKD:286).' But there is no evidence that he ever made a systematic study of semiotics. Implied throughout his statements, though, is a semiotic theory of poem that needs only to be articulated, and at some points clarified and corrected, to make evident striking parallels with theory of signs of Charles Sanders Peirce. Gomringer himself suggests that contemporary poet might well investigate new discipline of semiotics. My purpose is to take him up on this suggestion and to attempt a reading of his poem ping pong applying Peirce's theory of signs. Peirce's view of process of semiosis is triadic. What is involved is mediation of a or representamen between object it represents and interpretant. Peirce defines or representamen as which stands to somebody in some respect or capacity. The something which representamen (or sign) stands is its object. It is not necessary that it stand for that object[. . .]in all respects (2:228),2 but it should bring about in mind that perceives it an interpretant that can function as the of that [object] of which it is itself sign (M599:RR38).3 The representamen and interpretant will stand in a cor-

Pragmatism and The Portrait of a Lady

Peter Jones PRAGMATISM AND THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY In 1868 William James commended his younger brother Henry for recognizing the impossibility of exhaustively displaying a character's feelings or thoughts, and for skillfully implying the existence of such states behind the external acts selected for presentation. Five years later, Henry James himself complained that "many of the discursive portions" of Middlemarch were "too clever by half," the novel being "too often an echo of Messrs Darwin and Huxley." The parallels between Middlemarch and The Portrait ofa Lady are too obvious to need comment here, each novel portraying an ardent, intelligent young woman, herself an egoist of one kind, married to an arid egoist of another kind. Although he admired George Eliot for being "really philosophic," Henry James clearly wanted to fuse any philosophical aspects of his own story more subtly into the overall presentation than he took Eliot to have done. The aims of this article are to show some of the philosophical aspects of The Portrait of a Lady, chiefly in relation to the central character, and to show that the absence from the novel of the detailed epistemologica ! presuppositions evident in Middlemarch can be explained as a result of James's departure from the traditional empiricist views to which George Eliot largely subscribed.2 According to his Preface, written much later, Henry James began to compose The Portrait of a Lady in Florence in the spring of 1879, and was still at work on it a year later. A few years earlier, in 1875, James had met his brother's friend C. S. Peirce in Paris, and for several months they dined together every few days. Peirce told William James that Henry preferred to settle questions rather than to turn them over, and in this respect was not "philosophic." There is no evidence that Henry was familiar with an article Peirce published shortly afterwards, in January, 1878, entitled "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," but the way in which the vacuity of Isabel Archer's ideas is displayed, as we shall see, precisely conforms to Peirce's view that beliefs are really rules for action, and his view that "to develop a thought's meaning, we need 49 50Philosophy and Literature only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance."4 Moreover, the overall presentation of The Portrait ofa Lady conforms to the view of pragmatism as a method, rather than a set of specific results. Beliefs of the central character are shown to be sometimes false, sometimes incoherent, by pragmatistic criteria, and the beliefs of others to be true; understanding is to be reached, if at all, by comparing and contrasting descriptions offered from different points of view and expressed in behavior judged appropriate by the agents. It would be anachronistic to interpret the novel in terms of lectures delivered in 1906, but there are remarks in William James's Pragmatism which help us to determine the kind of attitudes to be contrasted with those of Isabel Archer. First, as William James understands it, pragmatism "is a method only"; "the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts." Second, "true ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify." Third, "purely objective truth ... is nowhere to be found"; "we break the flux of sensible reality, then, at our will. We create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions." Such views, when properly understood, James contended, represented both a less objectionable and a more radical version of the familiar empiricist attitude. In brief, it is an empiricism shorn of its original rationalist elements. Commenting on his brother's book in 1907, Henry James expressed delight in the apparent discovery that he had "unconsciously pragmatised " all his life. However disingenuous that declaration, it is significant that no thesis is presented or argued for in The Portrait of a Lady, no conclusions are drawn from premises, and the few generalizations that occur lack theoretical support; and, of course, if some form of the pragmatic method informed the novel there could be no...

The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 375 The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. By A. J. Ayer. (San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper & Co., 1968. $8.00) A. J. Ayer's treatment of the philosophies of Peirce and James is both complex and puzzling. The complexity of the book is due largely to the detailed criticisms which Ayer brings to bear against many of the views of these men. The reader is asked not only to digest their ideas but also to grapple with Ayer's own in-depth analyses. Thus, The Origins of Pragmatism is not for those who are primarily interested in an easily readable introduction to Peirce and James. It is suited rather for an audience which is experienced in and has a love for careful argumentation and critical testing of epistemological hypotheses. The reader quickly notices Ayer's skill at critical analysis, and one result is that, in a philosophical drama with a cast of three, Ayer himself emerges in the leading role. This result is a factor in the puzzling quality of the book, which revolves around the fact that no clear answers are presented for the following question: What are the main positive theses that Ayer is trying to develop and defend in his study of Peirce and James? Ayer provides expositions of the views of Peirce and James, but no point of great significance is made concerning the place of these men in the history of philosophy. There is also relatively little in the way of comparison and contrast with respect to Peirce and James. In fact, their views are dealt with in two separate sections of the book. Moreover, although many arguments are analyzed and some positive suggestions are made by Ayer on a variety of points (e.g., the nature of belief, pp. 29 ft. and the problem of personal identity, pp. 254 ft.), it is difficult to detect any substantial unifying themes in the work. The book often has the quality of being a collection of statements on diverse problems, and, in addition, when one is through, it is not entirely clear why Ayer chose to write about Peirce and James at all. On what issues does Ayer concentrate in his treatment of Peirce, and what is the overall assessment of Peirce's philosophical contributions? Ayer begins with a discussion of Peirce's theory of truth and meaening and proceeds to an analysis of his philosophy of science and his views concerning categories and signs. The rationale for this progression is that Peirce's theory of truth and meaning ultimately "resolves itself into a defence of scientific method" (p. 62), and this defense, in turn, leads to even more fundamental epistemological concerns which are reflected in his ideas concerning categories and signs. With respect to his overall assessment of Peirce, it is difficult to get a clear reading of Ayer's position. In general, Peirce's views are explained carefully and correctly. In addition, Ayer criticizes Peirce's theories in detail and produces some valuable insights along the way (e.g., see Ayer's analysis of Peirce's attempts to justify induction, pp. 80 frO. As far as Peirce is concerned, however, the results seem to be mainly negative, and the reader is left wondering just why he should be concerned about Peirce. There is little indication of why this man is a figure of genuine philosophical importance. Perhaps the fact that Ayer has chosen to write about him is sufficient evidence of this truth, but beyond that implication, Ayer does little to help the reader to see that Peirce is a philosopher of lasting significance. Ayer's account of James's philosophy moves from a discussion of his doctrine of "the will to believe" and his pragmatic theory of truth to an extended analysis of the 376 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY theory of "radical empiricism" as it is developed in the work Essays in Radical Empiricism. Ayer's chapter on radical empiricism is by far the longest in the book, and it contains lengthy treatments of problems concerning personal identity and the Jamesian doctrine of "pure experience." As an expositor, Ayer seems to do better with Peirce than...

Panpsychism or Evolutionary Materialism

I shall be concerned in this paper with the consideration of panpsychism and of materialism in new forms as alternatives. Extended reference will be made to C. S. Peirce's view of perception as realistic in intention and yet not quite clear as to its mechanism and how it attains objective import. I shall say little about Whitehead as a representative of panpsychism as I have just finished a detailed criticism of his epistemological framework. I shall, however, make comments on William James's radical empiricism as tied in with his view of perception as direct and immediate—roughly speaking, the alternative to Locke's representation of “unperceived things”—and bring in my own theory of sensations as guiding perceiving. Russell's neutral monism, connected historically with James's radical empiricism, will be touched on here in connection with his rejection of materialism. Phenomenalism and materialism exclude each other. Materialism, as an ontology, requires a realistic epistemology. I shall also make some comments on Dewey's biological experientialism. One can often best explain a perspective by means of contrasts.