But what, finally, of the Metaphysical Club at Cambridge, in which pragmatism was born? According to the best evidence we now have, it was founded not later than January 1872, after Peirce’s return from Washington. The introduction to volume 3 will resume the story at that point. But from a consecutive and careful reading of the present volume it will already be evident that pragmatism was the natural and logical next step.
II
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy Papers
C. F. DELANEY
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy papers of 1868–69 fall into two quite distinct groups. The first set is composed of a series of interchanges between C. S. Peirce and W. T. Harris (the editor of the journal) on issues of logic and speculative metaphysics that emerge from the philosophy of Hegel. The second set of papers, quite different in tone, consists of Peirce’s classic papers on cognition and reality, and the relatively neglected concluding paper of the series on the grounds of validity of the laws of logic.
1.
The Peirce-Harris exchange on Hegelian logic and metaphysics was occasioned by Harris’s review article entitled “Paul Janet and Hegel” which appeared in his own journal. This was a long critical review of Janet’s Etudes sur la dialectique dans Platon et dans Hegel, published in Paris in 1860. The exchange itself consists of letters from Peirce to Harris, two of which the latter transformed into dialectically structured discussion articles for his journal.
After some extensive preliminaries about the spread of Hegelianism, the original Harris article (like Janet’s book that it reviews) focuses on Hegel’s logic and follows Janet’s tripartite division into “The Beginning,” “The Becoming,” and “The Dialectic.” In the section labeled “The Becoming” Harris takes issue with Janet’s account of the relation of Being and Nothing and the consequent genesis of Becoming. This is the problem that interested Peirce, and in his initial letter (24 January 1868) he takes issue with Harris’s own account of the matter. These comments, together with his own replies, Harris published under the title “Nominalism versus Realism.”
Peirce’s criticisms take the form of five inquiries seeking clarification. Initially he raises some general questions about Harris’s doctrine of abstraction; then he raises three sets of questions about what he understands to be Harris’s three arguments for the identity of Being and Nothing; finally he suggests, contrary to what he takes to be Harris’s view, that the ordinary logical strictures against contradiction should at least have the presumption in their favor. Harris’s response to these criticisms is most interesting, particularly in the light of Peirce’s mature philosophy. He maintains that the tone of Peirce’s initial set of questions about abstraction suggests that Peirce is committed both to nominalism and to a doctrine of immediacy, and that Peirce’s consequent specific criticisms of his three arguments bear his suspicion out. Peirce’s specific objections draw on formal logic’s strictures against contradiction which, Harris maintains, are only adequate to the immediate world of independent things. But, Harris concludes, if one is to be a true speculative philosopher one must transcend this nominalism and become a realist.
Needless to say, Peirce thought that this response totally missed the point. In his follow-up letter, he makes the suggestion that a great deal of the misunderstanding between them may flow from certain unclarities with regard to the term “determined” as it functions in the discussion of Being and its determinations. He distinguishes several senses of “determine,” “abstract,” and “contradiction” in an attempt to move the discussion forward. Again, Harris published these comments together with his own terse responses, this time under the title “What Is Meant by ‘Determined’.”
One of the most obvious characteristics of this interchange on Hegel’s logic is the marked difference between Harris’s sympathy with the dialectical logic of the Hegelian tradition and Peirce’s employment of ordinary formal logic. Harris’s request that Peirce do something for his journal on the rationale of the objective validity of the laws of logic is a happy outgrowth of this basic difference between the two. In his letter of 9 April 1868 Peirce responds that he has already devoted considerable time to this subject and could not adequately treat the issue in less than three articles. He enclosed the first of his three classic 1868 papers on cognition.
2.
Peirce’s 1868 papers on cognition, reality, and logical validity bring up the questions that were to be central throughout his whole philosophical career. In these he articulates his many-faceted attack on the spirit of Cartesianism, a spirit which he sees dominating most of modern philosophy. The Cartesian concern with skeptical doubt, individual justification, immediate knowledge and certainty (which traits he also saw in the empiricists), he seeks to replace by a view of knowledge that was through and through mediate, that construed knowledge as both an historical and communal human activity. From this perspective on knowledge, he proceeds to work through a concept of intersubjectivity to a full-blown account of objectivity, truth, reality, and the basis of the validity of the laws of logic.
The first piece included here is MS 148, consisting of three separately titled sections listed as “Questions on Reality” in the Contents. The third section, entitled “Questions concerning Reality,” is an early version of the first published paper in the series, “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” but it is most interesting in its own right. In the first place, it is an heroic attempt to handle in a unified way all the issues that would eventually be divided among the three published papers in the 1868–69 series. The unity of the overall project is brought out forcefully in the introductory paragraph of the piece. Here Peirce makes the point that the logician’s initial concern is with the forms of language but that he must inevitably push on from here to consider what we think, that is, the manner of reality itself; and, as a precondition for this inquiry, must get clear about the proper method for ascertaining how we think. His order of treatment, then, is, first, to give an account of cognition; secondly, to give an account of truth and reality; and, finally, to deal with some issues of formal logic. It is instructive to note that all three of these topics are treated under the general heading “Questions concerning Reality,” indicating a metaphysical thrust that might be overlooked given the final titles: “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” and “Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic: Further Consequences of Four Incapacities.”14 It is further instructive to glance over the twelve questions Peirce poses for himself in the outline given in the first section of MS 148 and observe how they reappear in the three published pieces.
The first six questions have to do with an account of thinking and with the methodology appropriate in generating such an account; and it is these six questions that make up the substance of the first published paper in the series, “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man.” The central issue is whether we have any immediate knowledge at all (of ourselves, our mental states, or the external world) and Peirce answers in the negative. In the process he distinguishes between intuition (cognition not determined by a previous cognition) and introspection (internal cognition not determined by external cognition) and defends an account of knowledge construed as a thoroughly mediated inferential sign process. A linchpin of his argument is a methodological stance that favors any account of mental activity that abides by the normal conventions of theory construction, a stance which shifts the burden of proof to those accounts wherein some special faculties are claimed for man. Peirce concludes by adding as a novel seventh question some summary material that appears at the end of “Questions concerning Reality” dealing with some general arguments against the thesis that there is no cognition not determined by a previous cognition.
There are two short pieces entitled “Potentia ex Impotentia” also included here. These are early versions of beginnings of the second published paper, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” and again are interesting in their own right because of some methodological points therein. First, Peirce makes the general comment that on the one hand we should begin our philosophizing simply with those beliefs we have no reason