• 1 See Haack 1994.
• 2 “For two centuries we have been affixing -ist and -ism to words, in order to note sects which exalt (...)

1Charles Peirce, a thinker greatly interested in classification, presents a problem of classification himself. That is, the breadth of his philosophical interests, commitment to an ethics of terminology, deep engagement with the history of philosophy, and experimentalist temperament, can make it difficult to determine which positions he actually held, and at which times. Famously, he re-christened his pragmatism ‘pragmaticism’ to make it safe from kidnappers, but perhaps less generally known is his characterization of his thought as a ‘Critical Common-sensism’ – an effort to mediate or moderate the Kantian and Reidian reactions to Hume.1 Peirce offers two overlapping sets of marks distinguishing his Critical Common-sensism, mostly directed against the Common Sense School. However, there is an element of Reid’s Philosophy of Common Sense that Peirce, and most other commentators, neglect: his appeals to universal grammatical features as evidence for common sense beliefs concerning cognition. In other contexts, though, Peirce is as critical of appeals to language as he is of appeals to psychology. Thus, Peirce’s rejection of what may be called linguisticism, as part of his rejection of psychologism, serves as an additional distinguishing mark of his Critical Common-sensism.2

• 4 CP 5.439 [1905]. Accepting “The Fixation of Belief” (1877) and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878) (...)

5In the next article of the series, “Issues of Pragmaticism,” Peirce asserts these two doctrines “[…] were defended by the writer about nine years before the formulation of pragmaticism [but] may be treated as consequences of the latter belief.”4 He then offers six distinguishing characters:

• 10 CP 5.505 [c. 1905]. Peirce’s imaginary interlocutor, Doctor Y., later adds: “[…] one cannot help se (...)
• 11 CP 5.452 [1905]. In an alternate draft, Peirce makes this point with the claim “Kant (whom I more t (...)
• 12 I would like to thank Vincent Colapietro for pushing this insight.

6Peirce must offer these modifications both to represent his own position and to allay the fears of critics convinced that these two doctrines, “[…] the two rival and opposed ways of answering Hume, are at internecine war, impacificable.”10 At this point, it may seem that Critical Common-sensism is more distinct from the Philosophy of Common Sense than Kant’s Critical Philosophy, but Peirce offers a potentially severe caveat: “The Kantist has only to abjure from the bottom of his heart the proposition that a thing-in-itself can, however indirectly, be conceived; and then correct the details of Kant’s doctrine accordingly, and he will find himself to have become a Critical Common-sensist.”11 That is, removing the ding-an-sich from Kant’s project might demand a complete overhaul rather than a tidying up of details.12

• 13 Kant’s own relation to linguistics and philosophy of language is a complicated affair; see Forster (...)
• 14 W2:153 [1864].
• 15 W2:278, [1869].
• 16 CP 5.444 [1905]. See Sackson 2014 for an excellent summary of views on Reid’s relation to pragmatis (...)
• 17 CP 5.512 [c. 1905].
• 18 Austin (1964: 8).
• 19 CP 5.513 [c. 1905].
• 20 See Lundestad 2006. Rysiew 2002 is more critical of the role Providential Naturalism plays in Reid’ (...)

7This focus on Reid is due, in part, to Peirce’s own shifting preferences.13 In 1864 he wrote that “I hold the Doctrine of Common Sense to be well fitted to Reid’s philosophical caliber and about as effective against any of the honored systems of philosophy as a potato-pop-gun’s contents might be against Gibraltar.”14 Five years later he added “Scotch school of philosophy […] is too old a tree to bear good fruit.”15 However, by 1905 Peirce had revised his assessment and held Reid to be a “subtle but well-balanced intellect […] in the matter of Common Sense.”16 While subtle and well-balanced, Reid lacked Peirce’s logical skill, especially concerning the logic of relatives and the logic of vagueness, and an appreciation for evolution. Our original beliefs, and acritical inferences, are of the nature of instincts; in particular, instincts developed in ‘primitive modes’ of life. This should not be taken to mean only the plains of Africa, as in simplistic forms of evolutionary psychology, as Peirce notes that some of our common sense beliefs “of such a character that they can hardly have entered the minds, say, of Neanderthal men”17 Peirce suggests these ‘primitive’ ways of life are simply our everyday embodied world of “moderate-sized specimens of dry goods.”18 However, “[m]odern science, with its microscopes and telescopes, […] has put us into quite another world […]” and this new world surpasses the adequacy of our common sense beliefs, at least without just criticism.19 Thus, we risk illegitimately importing the practical certainty of our common sense beliefs into domains where they are ill-suited. Furthermore, Reid perhaps overestimates the reliability of our common sense beliefs even within their proper domain, because of his commitment to a form of Providential Naturalism.20 After Darwin, though, we are on safer ground considering people adequately endowed by evolution, rather than well-endowed by our Creator.

• 21 “But fallibilism cannot be appreciated in anything like its true significancy until evolution has b (...)

8In short, Peirce considered Reid’s Philosophy of Common Sense insufficiently fallibilist, in large part due to coming before intellectual and scientific developments with which Peirce was intimately familiar.21 However, there is another element of Reid’s characterization and defense of Common Sense of which Peirce could have been more critical: his appeals to language.

• 22 CP 5.464
• 23 EIP I.I, p. 1.

9As suggested above, Peirce’s pragmaticism deserves the specifying infix in part because it is not a doctrine of metaphysics – “It is merely a method of ascertaining the meanings of hard words and of abstract concepts.”22 Furthermore, Peirce advocates an ethics of terminology modeled on the taxonomic sciences because he sees this as one key to their successful advancement. Reid believes this as well: “There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words. To this chiefly it is owing that we find sects and parties in most branches of science, and disputes which are carried on from age to age, without being brought to an issue.”23 Reid considers philosophers especially prone to this error, as they create ambiguity through using common sense words in uncommon senses:

• 25 EIP II.V.VII, p. 99.

10This care for language is an important element of Reid’s critique of the “way of ideas” as a philosophy contrary to Common Sense. For example, “Perhaps it was unfortunate for Mr Locke that he used the word idea so very frequently as to make it very difficult to give the attention necessary to put it always to the same meaning.”25 In particular, while Locke does note that he includes phantasm, notion, and species under idea, on Reid’s view he fails to note that this equivocation collapses common sense distinctions between the activity of thought and its external objects under the philosophical conception of idea as an immediate or internal object. This Lockean legerdemain culminates in Hume’s contention that there is nothing but ideas (perceptions distinguished into impressions and ideas only by their own force and vivacity). Again, for Reid this violates the common sense belief that thinkers are distinct from the activity of thought, and both are distinct from the external objects of thought.

• 26 IHM II.7, p. 38.
• 27 Most commentators on Reid focus on his defense of common sense via an account of sensation, percept (...)

11However, what interests us here is one of the forms of evidence to which Reid appeals – not only is this tripartite distinction an instinctive common sense belief, but also “It is impossible to trace the origin of this opinion in history: for all languages it interwoven in their original construction.”26 That is, we know this to be a universal judgment of humanity because it is represented in all languages.27 This claim is from Reid’s Inquiry, but he expands upon it in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man:

• 30 EIP II.IX, p. 169.
• 31 EIP II.IX, p. 169.

14One more example: “There are philosophers who maintain […] that a body is nothing but a collection of what we call sensible qualities; and that they neither have nor need any subject.”30 Here Reid’s directly targets Bishop Berkeley and Mr. Hume, and characteristically he rejects their belief “that there should be extension without any thing extended” as an absurdity contrary to a self-evident dictate of his nature.31 However, Reid is not arguing for a some subjective idealism here, as Berkeley would at least accept that these sensible qualities require a perceiving subject. Instead, the ‘subject’ needed is a grammatical one, corresponding to an external object:

• 33 EIP II.IX, p. 170.
• 34 EIP II.XII.II, p. 209-10.
• 35 IHM V.7, p. 82.
• 36 THN 1.4.2: “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when (...)

15Furthermore, Reid contends that if ascribing sensible qualities to subjects were a prejudice, and not an innate principle of our nature, we should see not only individual variation in this belief, but also variations across ages and nations: “[…] but we find no such difference among men. What one man accounts a quality, all men do, and ever did.”33 Perhaps Reid is overstating his case here, for Berkeley and Hume do deny this ‘self-evident’ principle. More generally, Reid acknowledges abnormal variations (‘lunacy’) in belief, but considers these disorders irrelevant to the overall reliability of our senses and common sense judgments.34 In the more polemical voice of his Inquiry, Reid even sides with the vulgar against those philosophers who deny an external world: “[…] too much learning is apt to make men mad; and that the man who seriously entertains this belief, though in other respects he may be a very good man, as a man may be who believes that he is made of glass; yet surely he hath a soft place in his understanding, and hath been hurt by much thinking.”35 Of course, we do not have to go so far, and even Reid notes approvingly that Hume backs away from from such skeptical conclusions.36 While Berkeley and Hume are not on par with a man who believes he is made of glass, they do misuse language.

• 37 EIP I.IV.I.1 & 2, p. 23-4.
• 38 EIP VI.III.III.7, p. 391-5.
• 39 EIP I.IV.I.1, p. 24. Here Reid makes a concession similar to Peirce’s third character of Critical C (...)

16Reid’s commitment to language is strong enough that he makes it one of his fundamental methodological principles. The chief source of knowledge about mind is introspective or phenomenological – “accurate” or “attentive” reflection, in Reid’s parlance. However, there are two subsidiary sources of knowledge: “attention to the structure of language” and “a due attention to the course of human actions and opinions.”37 Commentators on Reid typically focus on his distinction between acquired and natural language, the latter being a universally comprehensible set of natural signs (facial expressions, gestures, and vocal tones), to the neglect of his appeals to universal grammatical features.38 Reid is clear that this is a fallible source of knowledge regarding the human mind, given the variations in languages, “[b]ut whatever we find common to all languages must have a common cause; must be owing to some common notion or sentiment of the human mind.”39 Finally, this principle returns in the essay on Judgment as part of the third means of determining what is a First Principle:

• 41 See Nöth 2000 for a summary of Peirce’s contributions to linguistics.

17Unfortunately, Reid provides no particular examples of these cross-linguistic universals, in the sense of actual comparative linguistics. Furthermore, I have found no indication that Reid was familiar with languages beyond Scots, English, and the philosophical quartet of French, German, Greek, and Latin. This is unsurprising, as in Reid’s day linguistics was just developing as its own field, and philology remained largely devoted to Biblical and Classical texts. In contrast, Peirce was an accomplished, though amateur, linguist, who studied non-Indo-European languages ranging from Arabic to Tagalog.41 His linguistic pursuits led Peirce to a different conclusion regarding the value of linguistics for philosophy, as we shall now see.

• 42 CP 5.85. See also CP 2.19-20; 2.209; 2.389; 3.432; 5.85-87; 7.175.

18Articulating Peirce’s conception of common sense, and thereby his Critical Common-sensism, requires understanding his rejection of psychologism, the notion that logic rests upon psychology. We may first distinguish between two forms of psychologism: the first concerns grounding logic (solely) upon psychological facts, and the second concerns grounding logic upon psychological results; i.e., psychology as a special science. Regarding the former, Peirce’s illustrative target is Christoph Sigwart, who “says that the question of what is good logic and what bad must be in the last resort come down to the question of how we feel: it is a matter of Gefühl, that is, a Quality of Feeling.”42 Peirce consistently lambasts the “German logicians,” again, of which Sigwart is a key example, for reducing logical necessity to a psychological compulsion. While this is not the place to examine Peirce’s arguments against this view, it is important to note his characterization of the forces with which he aligns himself:

• 44 “Psychology must depend in its beginnings upon logic, in order to be psychology and to avoid being (...)
• 45 CP 2.39-50.
• 46 See Brockhaus 1991 and Pelletier et al. 2008 for historical surveys of psychologism; unfortunately, (...)
• 47 The influence of Peirce’s logic, conceived as semeiotic, upon subsequent linguistics and philosophy (...)
• 48 CP 2.389. See also CP 8.189: “Those whom we may roughly call the German school of logicians […] mak (...)
• 49 CP 5.424 Fn P1. One more vocabulary example: Anna Wierzbicka argues against the ‘cultural anglocent (...)
• 50 CP 7.494; see 6.287 for ‘pirate-lingo.’
• 51 E.g., “As a philosophical term [presupposition] translates the German Voraussetzung, and is presuma (...)
• 52 CP 5.611.
• 53 CP 2.220.

20The first form of psychologism thoroughly subjectivizes logic by reducing validity to feeling, while maintaining a veneer of objective necessity by allowing no tribunal other than feeling. The second form of psychologism also threatens logic’s autonomy by basing it upon the scientific results of psychology, in violation of Peirce’s principles of classification.44 For Peirce, both German (e.g., Wolff) and English (e.g., Mill) logicians make the error of reducing logic to psychology, an error which confounds how we ought to reason with how we must reason, or at least with how an immature science thinks we must reason.45 These elements of Peirce’s anti-psychologism are well known.46 Less remarked upon, however, is his rejection of what may be called linguisticism, or the tendency to base logic upon linguistics.47 Again, this is a mistake made by Sigwart, “who holds that logical questions must ultimately be decided by immediate feeling, and that the usages of the German language are the best evidence of what that feeling is.”48 As Peirce notes, this appeal to language causes several problems, starting at the level of vocabulary: “The difficulty of the, at best, difficult problem of the essential nature of a Proposition has been increased, for the Germans, by their Urtheil, confounding, under one designation, the mental assertion with the assertible.”49 In other words, this term confounds the psychological act of judgment with the logical nature of a proposition, which may be asserted – judged to be true – or not. In Peirce’s estimation, English, though a “pirate-lingo” deficient in some areas compared to French and German, provides more accurate terminology because it maintains distinctions drawn from the Scholastics even in common speech.50 However, the particular strengths of English can be diluted by translations based upon similar spellings rather than similar meanings.51 Confusing the form of a word with its content can even happen within the same language, especially over time: “[…] modern readers forget that two or three centuries ago words still familiar suggested quite different ideas from those the same words now suggest.”52 Again, clarifying the meaning of words so as to ensure proper use is one of Peirce’s abiding concerns, as seen in his ethics of terminology and the pragmatic maxim itself. Indeed, since Peirce adopts a dialogic view of the self, attention to language is not only important for communication with others, but also for communicating with ourselves: “[…] so it is wrong to say that a good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is of the essence of it.”53

• 54 “[…] if it is meant that True and Satisfactory are synonyms, it strikes me that it not so much a do (...)

1) Putting idiosyncratic meanings on common words, whether explicitly or not.54

• 55 EIP II.V.VII, p. 1oo. Again, compare CP 7.494.

2) Neglecting changes or differences in meanings across languages or over time due to similar spellings, as when Locke blends the Platonic ἰδέᾱ, Cartesian idée, and English idea.55

• 56 CP 2.280. This neglects signed languages, though Peirce acknowledges their existence at least once: (...)

1) All languages have (largely) replaced mimicry with conventional auditory signs.56

• 57 CP 3.459.

2) All languages must have proper nouns and pronouns.57

• 58 CP 4.435.

3) All languages use a metaphor of ‘inclusion’ to express logical entailment.58

• 59 CP 4.658.

4) All languages make cardinals the fundamental numbers: “Any person whose head is not cracked by too much study of logic will say without hesitation that the cardinals are the original numbers. It is common-sense, and common-sense is the safest guide.”59

• 61 I derived this list from MS 427 [c. 1902], though I have updated Peirce’s terminology. Here are his (...)
• 62 MS 427 slide 909.
• 63 CP 2.69. In a footnote to CP 4.48 Peirce notes the time he spent with Edward Henry Palmer (1840-82) (...)

Accordingly, Peirce in principle agrees with Reid’s appeal to universal grammatical features, if there are any – but no one has made a truly universal survey of languages. Instead, a half dozen European languages, with perhaps Aramaic or Hebrew as outliers, have been taken as a sufficient basis for universal claims. I will say more about why these languages are peculiar, by Peirce’s estimation, below. Peirce, characteristically, sought to remedy in himself a flaw he saw in the reasoning of others, and did attempt to study languages outside of the Indo-European family, including Arabic, Basque, Burmese, Chinese, Nama, Ngarrindjeri, Tagalog, Thai, Tibetan, Sakha, and Xhosa.61 Nonetheless, Peirce was well aware of his limitations as a linguist – “I have not the learning requisite for the subject.”62 In addition to being only an amateur linguist, Peirce recognized that studying languages from grammar books is insufficient because of the ever-present Procrustean bed of Latin grammar. That is, even if one were to study a language such as Xhosa, our entry into that language is affected both by our native grammar and the tendency of European grammarians to cut or stretch other languages to fit within Latin categories. “For that reason, it will not suffice to get one’s idea of an uninflected language from any mere grammar. It is necessary to have some real, living acquaintance with it, in order to appreciate its modes of thought, especially since these will be most difficult for us to grasp.”63 Note again that Peirce suggests an intimate relation between language and modes of thought, a key point to which I will return in the final section.

• 64 CP 2.338. This appears to be Janus Hoppe (unknown dates), who published Die Gesammte Logik (in two (...)
• 65 CP 2.68. See also CP 2.338, 4.438 Fn P1, and 8.242. Old Irish did have a nominative case, though th (...)
• 66 CP 2.68; ‘phaneragamous’ is an old name for spermatophytes, or seed plants. Under current classific (...)
• 67 “But from a logical point of view the terminology of the older grammarians was better, who spoke of (...)
• 68 CP 2.338.
• 69 “In the Old Egyptian language, which seems to come within earshot of the origin of speech, the most (...)
• 70 CP 2.328.
• 71 CP 2.328.

24I have claimed that Peirce goes beyond Reid’s concern with vocabulary to include grammatical structures, with the common ‘philosophical’ languages being ‘peculiar’ by Peirce’s account. Furthermore, these peculiarities delegitimize appeals to language in logic, and perhaps philosophy more broadly: “To treat [propositions] just as they are expressed in this or that language (as Hoppe and some others do) makes of logic a philological, not a philosophical, study. But the canonical forms chosen have been suggested by the usage of a narrow class of languages, and are calculated to lead philosophy astray.”64 Thus, what makes these languages peculiar? Peirce consistently highlights the prevalence of putting subjects in a nominative case. However, he also notes that exceptions to this are readily found even in European languages: “[…] although within that group they would find modes of thought that would somewhat embarrass them, such as the usage of the Gaelic and Old Irish of putting the subject of a sentence in the genitive.”65 He continues by asserting that determining “necessities of thought” from this small group of European languages is “like judging of botanical possibilities by phanerogamous plants.”66 Ignorant of other modes of thought, those who would base logic or philosophy upon language make a necessity out of their own peculiar contingency. What are some consequences of having a strong nominative case? Peirce remarks upon at least three: first, the belief that a proposition has only one subject, and second, the belief that subjects must be nouns. Regarding the first, Peirce contends against the grammarians that a proposition has one predicate, but can have an indefinite number of subjects.67 Regarding the second, conceiving of subjects as common nouns or substantive adjectives hides both the essential role of indices in forming propositions, and the broader nature of indices: “Often, too, the index is not of the nature of a noun. It may be, as we have seen, a mere look or gesture.”68 Third, Peirce will even go so far as to point out superfluousness of the copula, as seen by its absence in many other languages.69 These three considerations are fatal to the traditional conception that the essence of a proposition, and therefore the essence of thought by common supposition, is “S is P” and its various concatenations. Peirce asserts that a desire to find some support for this supposed universal motivates his interest in linguistics: “The author (though with no pretension to being a linguist), has fumbled the grammars of many languages in the search for a language constructed at all in the way in which the logicians go out of their way to teach that all men think.”70 The only candidate he can find is Basque, which has a minimal number of verbs, but this is only one language that almost meets ‘the logicians’ standard, out of dozens Peirce ‘fumbled,’ and thousands in the world; “[t]his seems to refute the logicians’ psychology.”71 In short, the grammatical predispositions of European languages delayed the development of both the logic of relatives and a broader conception of logic as semeiotic.

• 72 CP 7.385 Fn 22.
• 73 MS 690: 160-1.

25The peculiarity of European languages is not all negative for Peirce. Indeed, he claims that the development of common nouns and abstract nouns makes logical and mathematical thinking easier. Unfortunately, he also claims that speakers of language without common nouns are incapable of triadic thought: “With the exercise of a little ingenuity it is possible to express anything in these languages, provided no higher relations than dyadic ones enter. Only very simple propositions can be expressed involving higher relations; and those whose mental education is limited by the powers of these languages are unable to grasp the meaning of a complex triple relation.”72 This is a bizarre claim, but one Peirce takes seriously. For example, in his “The Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents,” he offers a speculative biography of Pythagoras as one of three applications of his method. The details need not concern us here, other than the novel claim that Pythagoras traveled near the borders of India. This exposure to Indian thought (and mathematics) influenced Pythagoras’ devotion to numbers, in part because of a misunderstanding caused by translation from a non-Aryan language into an Aryan one. Specifically, Peirce suggests the most abstract ideas in this non-Aryan language were numbers, but this idea became substantivized when put into Greek. “[The Pythagorean doctrine of numbers] is not mysticism, then, not devotion to chimeras, but an attempt to interpret an infantile philosophy of some non-Aryan, non-Shemitic thinker.”73 This may be improbable, and Peirce himself offers it as a mere hypothesis, an example of “abduction under difficulties.” Nonetheless, we do not have to agree with Peirce to work through his ideas, and it is consistent with claims about language and thought he makes elsewhere.

• 74 Though perhaps not so common, as seen in the need to explicitly teach undergraduates how to transla (...)
• 75 CP 2.69.
• 76 ISL 327.
• 77 ISL 328-9. Sayce identifies Hegel as one who also made this criticism: “Hegel long ago pointed out (...)
• 78 ISL 329-30. This is because languages in the Ural-Altaic family have negative conjugations.
• 79 CP 2.70.

26The “S is P” structure of categorical logic was made common sense by European grammars, which brings us to a provocative question: What if Aristotle had been a Mexican?74 Here is the context: “When Sayce says that ‘had Aristotle been a Mexican, his system of logic would have assumed a wholly different form,’ I am willing to admit that there is a good deal of truth in that. It is lucky that Aristotle’s only language was one that led him into as few errors as did the Greek.”75 Here Peirce considers linguists who claim that logic must rest upon linguistics; in particular, Heymann Steinthal (1823-99) and Reverend Archibald Henry Sayce (1845-1933). Peirce quotes volume 2 of Sayce’s 1880 An Introduction to the Science of Language, which includes gems such as “The philosophy of speech, in the hands of the Greeks, suffered from the introduction of logic into grammar, and revenge was taken by grounding logic upon the definitions of an imperfect grammar.”76 Sayce highlights some of the same imperfections as Peirce, such as “[t]he division of a sentence into two parts, the subject and the predicate, is a mere accident.”77 Not only would Aristotle’s logic been wholly different if he were a Mexican (in this context, Sayce probably means a Nahuan, an indigenous Mesoamerican), if he spoke a language from the Ural-Altaic family he would not have incorrectly analyzed negative propositions!78 However, Sayce goes too far when he implies that logic should rest upon even comparative philology. Instead, Peirce concludes that appeals to language are “inadequate and deceptive evidence” of human psychology, and even if we could determine human psychology by studying language the results would be “utterly useless for the investigation of logical questions.”79

• 80 CP 5.13 Fn P1. Peirce does not doubt the universality of this experience: “If you ask present when, (...)
• 81 Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702-82) coined the term Phänomenologie, but Hegel’s use is the most (...)
• 82 “If philosophy glances now and then at the results of special sciences, it is only as a sort of con (...)

27How does this bear upon common sense? As I showed above, Thomas Reid’s Philosophy of Common Sense rests, in part, on appeals to supposed linguistics universals. In contrast, Peirce’s Critical Common-sensism must be critical of any such claims. This is one reason why Peirce’s phenomenology, the first division of philosophy, “[…] contents itself with so much of experience as pours in upon every man during every hour of his waking life.”80 Furthermore, it offers another reason for re-christening his phenomenology as phaneroscopy. Hegel’s conception of phenomenology, to which the ethics of terminology suggests we should defer, runs the risk of articulating the development of Geist along the logic of German prepositions.81 In contrast, Peirce’s phaneroscopy is a more humble affair, concerning no more – but also no less – than the cenopythagorean categories. Philosophy, especially a philosophy of Critical Common Sense, is a cenoscopic science that rests upon observing daily normal experience, and so while it may “[glance] now and then” at idioscopic sciences like psychology and linguistics, it cannot be justified by those sciences.82

• 83 Joseph Greenberg (1915-2001) offers a list of 45 universals, but nearly all of these are implicativ (...)
• 84 CP 2.150.
• 85 As a consequence, Peirce’s speculative grammar must be truly speculative: “This will amount to what (...)

28Perhaps Reid intended his appeals to universal linguistic features as merely indications of common sense beliefs, rather than a justification for particular common sense beliefs. However, this is in clear tension with his making it one of the primary sources of knowledge regarding the human mind. In addition, it is unclear whether there are any linguistic universals.83 Even Peirce’s own example of a vague common sense belief – “fire burns” – utilizes the very subject-predicate structure he sees as holding back the development of logic. That is, this simple proposition presupposes an ontology in which fire is a thing distinct from the action of burning. This grammatically-supported intuition led to phlogiston, “[t]he most unhappy of physical theories.”84 Fire is not a thing, but rather a process. Furthermore, it is doubtful this ‘common sense’ belief could be directly translated into every other language, for either semantic or syntactic reasons. We are on sturdier ground with the set of experiences denoted by this proposition, but if our ‘modes of thought’ are conditioned by our language, as Peirce consistently claims, then ‘our’ interpretation of this set of experiences may not be the same as those conditioned by different grammars.85 Again, “fire burns” is vague enough to be indubitable, and yet still determined by English grammar to mislead as to the nature of propositions.

• 86 CP 5.314. See also CP 2.220, 2.69, CP 7.385 Fn 22, MS 690: 160-161. “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” is a m (...)
• 87 CP 4.150.
• 88 CP 2.655.

29Peirce is clear that logic, and philosophy in general, cannot rely upon linguistics. However, philosophy must inevitably rely upon language. This paper opens with Peirce’s claim that “my language is the sum total of myself” and throughout I have emphasized other claims committing Peirce to some form of linguistic determinism (e.g., the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”).86 Here is one more: “A person who has learned to think in beta graphs has ideas of the utmost clearness and precision which it is practically impossible to communicate to the mind of a person who has not that advantage.”87 Regardless of how we answer the question of Peirce’s linguistic determinism, we must reckon with how his Critical Common-sensism differs from Reid’s Philosophy of Common Sense in not only coming after Darwin, but also in coming after Humboldt. While we should not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our linguistic hearts, it is unclear how much common sense is left when we recognize how diverse languages, and therefore thinkers, are. Of course, this is a call for further inquiry, as diagnosing a problem is only one step in possibly solving it. I think it also shows that a truly Critical Common-sensism requires a call for further inquirers, especially from cultures and languages underrepresented, if not simply ignored, in philosophy. Our charitable interest in an indefinite community of inquiry should not fail to include people past and present while hoping for those to come.88