Bibliography

The Basis of Pragmaticism

One of the most useful and at the same time one of the most arduous of the labors of cenoscopy consists in starting with a familiar but vague concept and searching out and defining the nearest definite concept of sufficient breadth for the purposes of metaphysics. Treating in this way the concept of action, and at the same time generalizing it so as not to confine it to temporal conditions, we get a concept which may very well be named action in the philosophical sense. It will be defined as a surd dyadic relation by which one correlate, the patient, receives a special determination, while the other correlate, the agent, receives thereby, or perhaps we should say therein, no special determination. The determination is special in the sense that in default of the relation the patient would not have been so determined. Thus, the completing of B by A is an action in the philosophical sense, in which A [is] the agent and B the patient. Duality consists in such action of A upon B together with a reciprocal action of the same completing nature of B upon A.

The double relation of equiparance which constitutes duality is surd. It may be described in words, but those words can only be understood by means of reference to certain experiences; just as a person may be told that a piece of textile fabric is a yard wide, yet can never know what is meant except through an experience immediate or mediate of a certain bar laid up in the Westminster palace. The experiences [that] acquaint us with action are of two varieties, experiences of active effort and experiences of passive surprise.

Two meanings of the term ‘philosophy’ call for our particular notice. The two meanings agree in making philosophical knowledge positive, that is in making it a knowledge of things real, in opposition to mathematical knowledge, which is knowledge of the consequences of arbitrary hypotheses; and they further agree in making philosophical truth extremely general. But in other respects they differ as widely as they well could. For one of them, which is better entitled (except by usage) to being distinguished as philosophia prima than is ontology, embraces all that positive science which rests upon familiar experience and does not search out occult or rare phenomena; while the other, which has been called philosophia ultima, embraces all that truth which is derivable by collating the results of the different special sciences, but which is too broad to be perfectly established by any one of them. The former is well named by Jeremy Bentham’s term cenoscopy […], the latter goes by the name of synthetic philosophy.

A concept is a symbol present to the imagination, – that is, more correctly speaking, of which a particular instance might be present to the imagination.

…the only kind of relation which could be veritably described to a person who had no experience of it is a relation of reason. A relation of reason is not purely dyadic: it is a relation through a sign: that is why it is dicible. Consequently the relation involved in duality is not dicible, but surd; and duality must contain as an ingredient of it a surd disquiparance.

A relation of reason is not purely dyadic: it is a relation through a sign: that is why it is dicible. Consequently the relation involved in duality is not dicible, but surd; and duality must contain as an ingredient of it a surd disquiparance.

[—]

The double relation of equiparance which constitutes duality is surd. It may be described in words, but those words can only be understood by means of reference to certain experiences; just as a person may be told that a piece of textile fabric is a yard wide, yet can never know what is meant except through an experience immediate or mediate of a certain bar laid up in the Westminster palace.

…an equiparance; that is, the relation of B to A is essentially the same as that of A to B, so far as the duality of the pair is concerned. But no equiparance whatever, with the exception of the very few that are necessary, such as identity, coexistence, etc., is a logically simple relation.

The October remarks made the proper distinction between the two kinds of indeterminacy, viz: indefiniteness and generality, of which the former consists in the sign’s not sufficiently expressing itself to allow of an indubitable determinate interpretation, while the latter turns over to the interpreter the right to complete the determination as he pleases. [—]

The October remarks, with a view to brevity, omitted to mention that both indefiniteness and generality might primarily affect either the logical breadth or the logical depth of the sign to [which] they belong.

The word “science” has three principal acceptions, to wit:

Firstly, men educated in Jesuit and similar colleges often use the term in the sense of the Greek ἐπιστήμη, the Latin scientia; that is to say, to denote knowledge for certain. [—]

Secondly, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Coleridge so defined it in the opening dissertation to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, non-scientific people have generally understood “science” to mean systematized knowledge.

Thirdly, in the mouths of scientific men themselves “science” means the concrete body of their own proper activities, in seeking such truth as seems to them highly worthy of life-long devotion, and in pursuing it by the most critically chosen methods, including all the help both general and special that they can obtain from one another’s information and reflection.

The present writer will call science in this third sense heuretic science…

When we speak of the depth, or signification, of a sign we are resorting to hypostatic abstraction, that process whereby we regard a thought as a thing, make an interpretant sign the object of a sign. It has been a butt of ridicule since Molière’s dying week, and the depth of a writer on philosophy can conveniently be sounded by his disposition to make fun of the basis of voluntary inhibition, which is the chief characteristic of mankind. For cautious thinkers will not be in haste to deride a kind of thinking that is evidently founded upon observation, – namely, upon observation of a sign. At any rate, whenever we speak of a predicate we are representing a thought as a thing, as a substantia, since the concepts of substance and subject are one, its concomitants only being different in the two cases. It is needful to remark this in the present connexion, because, were it not for hypostatic abstraction, there could be no generality of a predicate, since a sign which should make its interpreter its deputy to determine its signification at his pleasure would not signify anything, unless nothing be its significate. But hypostatic abstraction (the product of which may be termed a hypostasis) renders general classes of predicates possible, and classes of those classes, and so on, in a manner which the dull and lazy brood of modern logicians has failed to investigate sufficiently, not to say altogether.

The October remarks made the proper distinction between the two kinds of indeterminacy, viz: indefiniteness and generality, of which the former consists in the sign’s not sufficiently expressing itself to allow of an indubitable determinate interpretation, while the latter turns over to the interpreter the right to complete the determination as he pleases. [—]

The October remarks, with a view to brevity, omitted to mention that both indefiniteness and generality might primarily affect either the logical breadth or the logical depth of the sign to [which] they belong.

Logic is no doubt a science of “thought”; but “thought,” in that sense, is no more internal than it is external. Logic is the science of truth and falsity. But truth and falsity belong as much to propositions printed in books as to propositions in the human consciousness. The fact that a proposition is conscious or unconscious does not affect its truth or falsity.

But it may be said that logic is the theory of reasoning, and that reasoning can only be performed by a mind. That is certainly true, and must be true; for if anything could independently reason, it would be what we understand by a mind. But it does not follow that the phenomena that psychologists discover have any bearing upon the theory of reasoning. [—]

Logic includes a study of reasoning, it is true, and reasoning may be regarded,-not quite correctly, but we may waive that point, – as a psychical process. If we are to admit that, however, we must say that logic is not an all round study of reasoning, but only of the conditions of reasoning being bad or good, and if good to what degree, and in what application. Now good reasoning is reasoning which attains its purpose. Its purpose is to supply a guide for conduct, – and thinking, being an active operation, is a species of conduct, – in case no percept from which a judgment could have been directly formed, is at hand. Its object is to say what the reasoner either will think when that percept occurs, or what he would think if it did occur. The psychological process of reasoning is wholly aside from the purpose of logic.

…to say that one term, say u, is logically simpler than another, say w, means precisely that the affirmation of w concerning any subject implies the affirmative truth of u concerning the same subject, while the affirmation of u does not reciprocally imply the affirmative truth of w; and it may be remarked, by the way, that disquiparance is thus necessarily involved in logical simplicity: but we need not argue from that principle.

…medium of communication is a species of medium, and a medium is a species of third. [—]

A medium of communication is something, A, which being acted upon by something else, N, in its turn acts upon something, I, in a manner involving its determination by N, so that I shall thereby, through A and only through A, be acted upon by N.

Metaphysics is the proper designation for the third and completing department of cenoscopy, which in places welds itself into idioscopy, or special science. Its business is to study the most general features of reality and real objects. [—] Here let us set down almost at random a small specimen of the questions of metaphysics which press, not for hasty answers, but for industrious and solid investigation: …

[A sign] must be determined to correspond, according to some principle, and by some species of causation, with something else, called its Object. In a word, whether physically, rationally, or otherwise directly or indirectly, its Object, as agent, acts upon the sign, as patient.

Two meanings of the term ‘philosophy’ call for our particular notice. The two meanings agree in making philosophical knowledge positive, that is in making it a knowledge of things real, in opposition to mathematical knowledge, which is knowledge of the consequences of arbitrary hypotheses; and they further agree in making philosophical truth extremely general. But in other respects they differ as widely as they well could. For one of them, which is better entitled (except by usage) to being distinguished as philosophia prima than is ontology, embraces all that positive science which rests upon familiar experience and does not search out occult or rare phenomena; while the other, which has been called philosophia ultima, embraces all that truth which is derivable by collating the results of the different special sciences, but which is too broad to be perfectly established by any one of them. The former is well named by Jeremy Bentham’s term cenoscopy […], the latter goes by the name of synthetic philosophy.

The present writer will call […] science which differs from [heuretic science] in all the important respects which result from investigation being pursued, not because of the august nature of the truth sought, but for the sake of some anticipated utility of it to some man or men, practical science…

… quasi-mind is an object which from whatever standpoint it be examined, must evidently have, like anything else, its special qualities of susceptibility to determination.

…what is true by virtue of a relation of reason is representative, that is, is of the nature of a sign.

…since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Coleridge so defined it in the opening dissertation to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, non-scientific people have generally understood “science” to mean systematized knowledge.

[—]

The present writer [—] will call science in the Coleridgean sense retrospective science.

The word “science” has three principal acceptions, to wit:

Firstly, men educated in Jesuit and similar colleges often use the term in the sense of the Greek ἐπιστήμη, the Latin scientia; that is to say, to denote knowledge for certain. [—]

Secondly, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Coleridge so defined it in the opening dissertation to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, non-scientific people have generally understood “science” to mean systematized knowledge.

Thirdly, in the mouths of scientific men themselves “science” means the concrete body of their own proper activities, in seeking such truth as seems to them highly worthy of life-long devotion, and in pursuing it by the most critically chosen methods, including all the help both general and special that they can obtain from one another’s information and reflection.

A sign is plainly a species of medium of communication, and medium of communication is a species of medium, and a medium is a species of third. [—]

A medium of communication is something, A, which being acted upon by something else, N, in its turn acts upon something, I, in a manner involving its determination by N, so that I shall thereby, through A and only through A, be acted upon by N.

We can say, at once, that a sign must have these three characters: First, it must be a recognizable object in itself. Secondly, it must be determined to correspond, according to some principle, and by some species of causation, with something else, called its Object. In a word, whether physically, rationally, or otherwise, directly or indirectly, its Object, as agent, acts upon the sign, as patient. [—] But thirdly, the Sign, in its turn, acts upon the Interpreter-mind, or the quasi-mind corresponding thereto, and produces the Interpretant; and this action is essentially relative to the Object.

…whenever we speak of a predicate we are representing a thought as a thing, as a substantia, since the concepts of substance and subject are one, its concomitants only being different in the two cases.

Relations are truly, though not very lucidly, said to be either relations of reason or relations in re. The latter expression the more obtrusively fails to hit its nail squarely on the head. It would be better to say that relations are either dicible or surd. For the only kind of relation which could be veritably described to a person who had no experience of it is a relation of reason. A relation of reason is not purely dyadic: it is a relation through a sign: that is why it is dicible. Consequently the relation involved in duality is not dicible, but surd; and duality must contain as an ingredient of it a surd disquiparance.

…a conceptual duality is no true duality, inasmuch as it involves a reference to a third correlate, namely, to the conception. Therefore, in the analysis just given, all reference to conceptual relations must be struck out. True duality is a real or surd relation.

Two meanings of the term ‘philosophy’ call for our particular notice. The two meanings agree in making philosophical knowledge positive, that is in making it a knowledge of things real, in opposition to mathematical knowledge, which is knowledge of the consequences of arbitrary hypotheses; and they further agree in making philosophical truth extremely general. But in other respects they differ as widely as they well could. For one of them, which is better entitled (except by usage) to being distinguished as philosophia prima than is ontology, embraces all that positive science which rests upon familiar experience and does not search out occult or rare phenomena; while the other, which has been called philosophia ultima, embraces all that truth which is derivable by collating the results of the different special sciences, but which is too broad to be perfectly established by any one of them. The former is well named by Jeremy Bentham’s term cenoscopy […], the latter goes by the name of synthetic philosophy.