1Although Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is usually hailed as the father of pragmatism, the name was not first coined by him on his initiative. Peirce’s active exposition of pragmatism was more motivated by William James (1842-1910). In 1898, James delivered a speech entitled “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” at the annual conference of the Philosophical Union of the University of California in Berkeley, where he first announced the term “pragmatism” in public and credited Peirce as its original interpreter (James 2011: 67). After that, Peirce began to think more actively about pragmatism, only to find that the popular interpretation on that term had deviated from his original intention. Therefore, Peirce intensively explained the implication of pragmatism twice, namely in 1903 and from 1905 to 1907, and finally coined another name, “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers,” i.e., pragmaticism, to show the difference between his thought and prevalent notions (EP 2.334-45). However, as it was argued by Ralph Perry, the pragmatist movement was primarily the result of James’s misunderstanding of Peirce (Perry 1935: 407). Peirce’s pragmatism became obscured because scholars have long neglected to interpret him from his own perspective. This paper aims to directly examine Peirce’s pragmatism, reassess its significance, and restore its scientific dimension.
2Jon Alan Schmidt (2020) sorted out Peirce’s 61 expositions of pragmatism, noting at least 13 important revisions and 47 essential restatements. Apel (1981), Fisch (1986: 114-37), and Short (2017) provide more formulations. But here, we will only try to pick out Peirce’s four expressions of pragmatism to reveal in general the development of Peirce’s thinking about pragmatism. It should be clarified that we do not intend to view the four expositions as four stages in the development of Peircean pragmatism, but merely as a glimpse into the process in which Peirce considered pragmatism. Peirce made his first statement in the period from 1877-1878, which was permeated with psychologism, which allowed for the possibility of a common misunderstanding, namely to see an action as the action of an individual, and thus the statement of psychological “satisfaction” of that individual as a criterion for the success of that action. In the period 1893-1902, we can read Peirce’s sporadic revisions to his first presentation, in which Peirce came to mainly stress that an act was collective rather than individual, thus opposing psychologism. In the third formulation in the Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism (1903), Peirce regarded pragmatism as the method of normative science, as a logical (i.e., abductive) principle in which all traces of psychologism were eliminated. In the fourth development in the serial Monist papers from 1905 to 1907, Peirce rejected pragmatism as a concrete, practical philosophy, identifying pragmatism as the science of general phenomena and attempting to express it in terms of semiotics. We can see that all these statements made by Peirce were moving away from psychologism and toward the community’s scientific inquiry into general phenomena. Therefore, pragmatism in Peirce is a scientific inquiry method providing universal knowledge. Revisiting Peirce’s pragmatism will bring us a more scientific pragmatism.
3Between 1877 and 1878, Peirce published a series of six articles generally titled “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” in the Popular Science Monthly. Peirce first discussed the pragmatic approach (although the term “pragmatism” was not yet in use) in his articles “The Fixation of Belief” (November 1877, EP 1.109-23) and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (January 1878, EP 1.124-41) in succession. Peirce’s statement in the latter essay has been viewed as the announcement of the “maxim of pragmatism” that heralded the birth of this school:
It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (EP 1.132)
4Peirce’s formulation was primarily intended to provide a way to determine the meaning of concepts and thus fix beliefs. “Our beliefs guide our desires and shape our actions” (EP 1.114). A belief does not necessarily lead to an actual action, but it “is […] some habit which will determine our actions,” and lead to a stable state of peace and pleasure (ibid.). When we doubt the outcome of some reasoning, we enter a state of unease and make further reasoning until the unease as such is removed. Belief leads to action, and doubt to further reasoning. Peirce called the process from doubt to belief “inquiry,” the only purpose of which is to determine belief (EP 1.115).
5Herewith we can draw the first feature of the 1878 version of pragmatism in Peirce: pragmatism emphasizes the unity of knowledge and action; knowledge consists of beliefs that can successfully guide action; and the practical level of action will bring the input of new experience, thus promoting the adjustment of belief and the development of knowledge. So, knowledge and action are in a dynamic process of mutual promotion. This view of Peirce is greatly different from the Cartesian dualist epistemological framework and thus constitutes the second feature of pragmatism, namely anti-Cartesianism. Peirce denied the following four human capabilities: first, the intuition in terms of internal knowledge or cognition (belief, imagination, feeling, etc.); second, the intuition about any knowledge (independent of the previous one); third, the capability to think without signs; and fourth, the capability to have the conception of the absolutely incognizable (EP 1.30). In fact, Peirce aimed to attack Cartesianism, rejecting the Cartesian conception as follows: we have clear, explicit ideas and self-awareness, and herewith intuitions, from which knowledge can derive directly. In contrast, Peirce believed that all knowledge remained in a continuous process of reasoning, that the signs that thinking appeals could only obtain their meanings in a series of reasoning, and that knowledge because of thinking would necessarily appear as a network of reasoning.
6This leads us to the third feature of Peircean pragmatism, namely, anti-foundationalism. Knowledge is presented in a network of reasoning, and therefore, we do not have to appeal to the absolutely incognizable thing-in-itself as the basis of knowledge. If our knowledge, concepts, and beliefs are all within the same network of reasoning, anything that does not relate to any concept or knowledge is simply inconceivable; if the thing-in-itself implies absolute unknowability, it cannot serve as a reasoning premise for any concept or knowledge, nor can it exist in the network of our concepts at all. Therefore, we do not need things in themselves.
7We are incapable of being intuitive, but we are able to fix our beliefs in action. We do not have to appeal to any stubbornness, authority, or a priori methods in doing clear thinking and clear reasoning (EP 1.115-23). According to the 1878 version of the maxim of pragmatism, all possible practical effects of a concept constitute the entire meaning of that concept. By “effect,” here, we should understand an actual, sensible effect, and especially an effect on human practice. This raises the possibility of misinterpreting Peirce: we can focus on individual actions to understand effects in the sense of individual psychological feelings. Peirce expressed his regrets several times about the imprudence in his 1878 statement and repeatedly revised his articulation of pragmatism. But we must not ignore a more important attempt hidden in this formulation of Peirce, namely the intention to provide a logical approach to facilitate scientific inquiries. This brings us to the fourth critical feature of Peirce’s 1878 version of pragmatism that must be emphasized. In other words, pragmatism is a scientific criterion of inquiry designed to help the inquirer devote himself to the practical significance of scientific concepts and theories, without getting lost in a maze of jargon.
8In addition, the fifth pivotal feature, which is worth our emphasis, is that pragmatism provides the third or highest level of clarity. According to Peirce, the first level of clarity suggests that men can recognize a certain concept or idea thanks to their familiarity with it. Clarity as such simply requires a sense of familiarity, even without requiring a true understanding of that concept. The second level of clarity arises in grasping the meaning of a concept through the analysis of abstract definitions. The third level of clarity refers to the precision obtained through the investigation of a certain concept in a pragmatic way. To achieve this kind of clarity, it is still insufficient to be able to identify a concept and give a clear definition; instead, we must also become aware of the practical consequences of the concept. Given this pragmatic perspective, we are required not only to be sensibly familiar with objects and rationally grasp the meanings of related concepts, but also to be able to grasp it at the level of action, which returns to the first feature, namely the unity of knowledge and action. It should be noted that Marco Stango (2015) has suggested that in Peirce’s later accounts of pragmatism he introduced a fourth grade of clarity, which is closely related to the normative understanding of pragmatism that we will discuss later. Overall, Peirce’s 1878 version of pragmatism rejected both the Cartesian dualist framework and foundationalism, emphasizing pragmatism as a method of scientific inquiry, in which scientific knowledge through a dynamic unity of knowing and doing reaches the top level of a clear understanding of conceptual meanings. However, this expression of Peirce can easily make people recognize the practical effect in light of individual actions and relevant individual psychological states and thus lead to psychological and positivist misinterpretation. Eliminating the suspicion of psychologism and emphasizing the logical features of science is a general goal that Peirce later expressed multiple times.
9From March to May 1903, at the invitation of James, Peirce gave seven lectures at Harvard under the general title Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism. Peirce took this opportunity to rephrase pragmatism in the context of the normative sciences. But before that, Peirce had done some sporadic thinking about it, and we can dig out from his clarification some of the ideas that he would elaborate on afterward.
10First, Peirce had a specific anti-psychologist position, holding that we must not judge the success or failure of scientific inquiries because of individual thinking and feeling. In 1890, James published his two-volume work The Principles of Psychology. And in 1891, Peirce wrote a book review in which he commented, “Prof. James’s thought is highly original, or at least novel; but it is originality of the destructive kind” (Peirce 2010: 232). Peirce did not believe that preserving the scientific integrity of psychology necessitated limiting its scope to individual mental processes or phenomena. Instead, he contended that for psychology to qualify as a science, it must engage with general objects, such as habit, which he defined as a mode of action. In short, Peirce regarded the success of an action, rather than the satisfaction of individual psychological feelings, as the criterion for the effectiveness of practice.
11Second, in 1893, Peirce began to consider the relationship between ethics and logic as two normative sciences. In a related discussion, he argued that the psychological satisfaction of the individual was not the ultimate end of an action: “Individual action is a means and not our end. Individual pleasure is not our end; we are all putting our shoulders to the wheel for an end that none of us can catch more than a glimpse at – that which the generations are working out. But we can see that the development of embodied ideas is what it will consist in” (CP 5.402, n.2). Scientific inquiry has an end towards which it is directed, an end beyond all real individuals. Of this end we can only give a general description, and the process towards this end requires the efforts of the scientific community from generation to generation.
12Third, in his 1896 review of James’s The Will to Believe (published the same year), Peirce made more efforts to clarify that we do not understand the meanings of concepts in view of individual reactions but determine them in light of the community’s general description of the end. James dedicated his book The Will to Believe to his old friend Peirce. However, Peirce did not seem to be happy about this, and he made the following complaints or criticisms in the said book review: (1) James had extended the pragmatic approach too far, and it is necessary for us to stop to think about it; (2) James failed to see that action itself had its ends beyond individual psychology, and that we can only describe such ends in general terms; by appealing to the maxim of pragmatism, we gain the recognition of a general idea; (3) Therefore, the meaning of a concept does not consist in the reactions of individuals at all, but in how those reactions promote the development of reasonableness (CP 5.3). Peirce’s pragmatism obtains a general understanding in light of the actions of the community rather than individuals, and in Vincent Porter’s view, it is a sign that Peirce had begun to introduce the function of norms into pragmatism, and that pragmatism is a method of scientifically interpreting general phenomena within the scope of a normative community (Potter 1967: 53). We will explore the normative character of pragmatism in our discussion of Peirce’s 1903 formulation.
13Fourthly, in his series of lectures “Reasoning and the Logic of Things” at the Cambridge Conferences in 1898, Peirce wrote, “unless there has been some logical process in nature whereby the laws of nature have been brought about. Since, therefore, it is a corollary from the First Rule of Reasoning that we must not make hypotheses that will stop inquiry, it follows that we are bound to hope that such a logical process of the evolution of law in nature may be discovered and that it is our duty as scientific men to search for it” (Peirce 1992: 223). Scientific inquiry is about such a law, and pragmatism as a method of exploring them is undoubtedly unable to find a basis in individual actions and psychological feelings. The universe is necessarily well-ordered, and everything tends to acquire a certain habit. It should be noted that Peirce used the word “habit” in a very broad sense, which refers in general to the tendency that everything repeats the patterns of actions that occurred before (CP 1.409). The habit of our actions also implies universality somehow, and it does not refer to individual psychological tendencies.
14In short, as evidenced in Peirce’s sporadic discussions, he rejected the idea of understanding concepts solely in terms of individual actions and feelings. Pragmatism, as a scientific method of inquiry, seeks to determine the general meaning of a concept by appealing to the actions of the community. Peirce’s further elaboration and development of these ideas will become clearer in the following two expositions.
15In 1903, Peirce elaborated on his understanding of normative science – including logic, ethics, and aesthetics – as well as pragmatism in the Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism. His account at this time is characterized by the following key points: (a) he regarded pragmatism as the methodological foundation of all normative sciences; (b) since abduction is viewed as the logic of pragmatism, he focused his discussion on the case of perceptual judgment; and (c) pragmatism can also be applied to the analysis of phenomena. In the fourth statement of 1905-1907, Peirce mainly employed signs to analyze phenomena, from which he derived the maxim of pragmatism. For this reason, we leave (c) to the next section, and only deal with (a) and (b) right here.
16Regarding (a), Peirce rephrased the principle of pragmatism as follows:
Every theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the imperative mood. (EP 2.135)
17A statement in the form of subjunctive mood with virtual conditionals implies that we understand thinking in terms of “what to do” (e.g., if X, then Y), which is actually a logical inquiry into “how to think.” However, logic itself does not address why we should reason logically; this question arises from the requirement for self-control in ethical action. Furthermore, ethically guided, self-controlled action ultimately aims at the supreme good (summum bonum), which, in turn, belongs to the realm of aesthetics. Normative sciences are “normative” in that they are inquiries into “what ought to be” (CP 1.281). All of this relates to a particular kind of action directed toward specific ends or purposes, involving self-controlled reasoning in the process of achieving them, while “Normative Science treats of the laws of the relation of phenomena to ends; that is, it treats of Phenomena in their Secondness,” which are the inquiries into “ought-to” (CP 5.123). Logic is concerned with the ends of seeking truth, ethics with the pursuit of goodness and the criterion for right conduct, and aesthetics with the beauty of supreme good (CP 5.121). In the inquiries of normative sciences, one of the reasoning methods that we need to appeal to is abduction, which will be explained in detail in section (b) below. As we will also see, pragmatism takes precisely the logical form of abduction, and in this sense, it serves as the method of inquiry for all normative sciences.
18In Peirce’s 1903 statement, however, we mainly observe a strong connection between pragmatism and logic. According to Peirce himself, he only began to recognize the importance of ethics in 1883 but did not formally posit ethics as a normative science until 1899. Around 1894, Peirce began to identify a close connection between logic and ethics. As for ethics and aesthetics, he frankly confessed that his consideration in this respect was far less sophisticated than his thinking about logic. Even in his Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism in 1903, Peirce was inclined to believe that there was a normative science of aesthetics, but he was not yet convinced about it (see EP 2.200; CP 2.198, 5.111, 5.129; Potter 1967: 52). Therefore, our discussion will be primarily framed from a logical perspective.
19In the case of virtual conditionals, actions expressed in conditional form can only succeed to a certain extent. This means that, in the case of X, Y will occur with a certain probability. Regarding the idea of probability, Peirce explained: “In order, then, that probability should mean anything, it will be requisite to specify to what species of event it refers and to what genus of event it refers” (EP 2.137). Thus, probability reveals the species-genus relationship of events rather than the causality between individual ones. In this sense, Peircean pragmatism is concerned with the universal correlation between events; their effects (as they are shown in the practice) do not refer to the single occurrence of phenomena, and our practical understanding has the more general purpose of seeking truth, goodness, and beauty. In fact, Peirce also discussed the modal relations between events, stating that “It also refers to a long run, that is, to an indefinitely long series of occurrences taken together in the order of their occurrence in possible experience” (EP 2.138). Peirce assigned the presentation of possible events to the future. Hence, from a pragmatic perspective, this means that action involves exploring not only how reality will unfold but also how it could unfold, thereby making the inquiry more “scientific.”
20Concerning (b), Peirce gave another of his famous presentations of pragmatism:
The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason. (EP 2.241)
21The gate of perception and the gate of action establish two criteria for rational understanding: the elements of a concept must be effectively captured in perception and subsequently lead to success in action. From the discussion of (a), we see that a general purpose can be found in actions and that perceptual judgments must therefore have a universal effect. How, then, does a perceptual judgment acquire its universal form? Peirce’s solution is to appeal to abduction, which represents the logical form of pragmatism. His argument unfolds as follows:
(i) Perception is the premise of self-control, while the latter means the beginning of cognition;
(ii) Without the recourse to abductive reasoning to give perceptual judgments, the percept will escape an explanation;
(iii) Abduction is a kind of reasoning that makes assumptions about phenomena. It is limited by logic rather than based on subjective psychological feelings;
(iv) Overall, the maxim of pragmatism fully encompasses the logic of abductive reasoning.
- 1 In Peirce’s theory of perception, he introduced the concept of the percipuum in order to clarify th (...)
22Regarding (i), Peirce stated, “the perceptive judgment is the result of a process, although of a process not sufficiently conscious to be controlled, or to state it more truly, not controllable and therefore not fully conscious,” “But self-control is the character which distinguishes reasoning from the processes by which perceptual judgments are formed, and self-control of any kind is purely inhibitory. It originates nothing” (EP 2.227, 233). In a perceptual judgment, conceptual elements are accidentally and arbitrarily presented in consciousness and can only be captured in a self-controlled action. A lack of self-control will be a wasteland of knowledge, and when we incorporate captured elements into the operation of rational understanding, we appeal to the logical method of abduction to explain them. Therefore, with respect to (ii), “If the percept or perceptual judgment were of a nature entirely unrelated to abduction, one would expect that the percept would be entirely free from any characters that are proper to interpretations” (EP 2.229).1
23In reference to (iii), “Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea” (CP 5.171). The newly imported ideas represent an understanding of new experiences, which involves the application and elucidation of the law. We can understand this in reference to the following form of abduction:
A surprising fact was observed;
If A is true, C is naturally also true;
Therefore, it is justified to assume that A is true. (CP 5.189)
- 2 For a discussion of the development of Peirce’s explication of abduction, see Anderson 1986.
24Herewith it can be seen that abduction is a kind of reasoning intended to offer some reasons towards a hypothesis, rather than reasoning from a hypothesis that belongs to the category of inductive reasoning. Some scholars have argued, often called the autonomy thesis of abduction, that Peirce’s abduction actually constitutes a third mode of inference, independent of both deduction and induction. Jaakko Hintikka (1998), for example, developed an “epistemic logic” that emphasizes strategic principles while defending the autonomy of Peirce’s abductive reasoning. In comparison to its relationship with deduction, the relationship between abduction and induction is more difficult to distinguish. However, Peirce observed that the inductive practices used in the natural sciences generally involve generalizing from existing data rather than explaining them.2 As Kuni T. Fann emphasized (2020: 5), “Natural scientists do not ‘start from’ hypotheses. They start from data. Peirce’s theory of abduction is concerned with the reasoning which starts from data and moves towards hypotheses.” In this statement, the “hypothesis” is often introduced as a law to explain remarkable phenomena. Whether the hypothesis is truly acceptable depends on its explanatory power; that is, the validity of the “law” established by abduction is supported by the results derived from the law itself. This aligns with the pragmatic claim that the meaning of a concept is explained by the practical effects it produces. This is one of the main reasons why Peirce equated pragmatism with abduction. From the perceptual material such as fact C, we propose the hypothesis that if A, then C, and thus arrive at a completely new understanding of A. In this sense, abduction is also a kind of expanded and comprehensive reasoning that directly integrates external sensible objects into internal rational vision. C enters the doors of perception, and then A opens the doors of action. Peirce noted the hypotheses in the abductive reasoning is considered “as explanations of phenomena held as hopeful suggestions; and furthermore, this is all that the maxim of pragmatism really pretends to do, at least so far as it is confined to logic, and is not understood as a proposition in psychology” (EP 2.234). Fundamentally, in Peirce, assumptions are made not on the basis of individual psychological feelings, but in line with the instinct and reason derived from the actions responding to the world through the observance of the laws of the universe, and abductive reasoning makes use of the light of our understanding to gradually illuminate the countenance of the world.
25Finally, with regard to (iv), Peirce concluded, “Thus, the maxim of pragmatism, if true, fully covers the entire logic of abduction” (EP 2.235). Peirce treated the maxim of pragmatism as the logic of abduction mainly for the following reasons: 1) Both of them depend on empirical observation; 2) They are consistent in form, with the maxim of pragmatism going from concept to effect, and the logic of abduction from hypothesis to fact; 3) Both have the same purpose, which is to provide an effective method of scientific inquiry; and 4) Both require the recognition of real generality and possibility. Following the maxim of pragmatism, people put forward hypotheses at the point of ignorance and then force their way toward the truth through repeated tests, revision, and improvement of those hypotheses, all of which are based on experiments. In summary, Peirce’s third formulation of pragmatism aims to provide us with a general understanding of phenomena, and as a means of the normative sciences, pragmatism motivates us to perform purposeful acts, which are seen not as individual, but as general inquiries of the scientific community. Peircean pragmatism represents indeed a more scientific approach.
26Between 1905 and 1907, Peirce published a series of papers in The Monist magazine on the general subject of “pragmatism.” During this period, Peirce had several unpublished manuscripts that were ready for publication. Peirce extensively reflected on pragmatism, analyzing phenomena through signs for the first time and refining its key features.
27Peirce challenged some of the attitudes towards pragmatism at that time. Firstly, he stood out against the idea that equated pragmatism with practicism or practicalism, and this standpoint was due to his inheritance of Kantian philosophy. Peirce emphasized that in Kant, praktisch (practical) and pragmatisch (pragmatic) had entirely different meanings. Specifically, the former belongs to a priori field of thinking, no kind of a posteriori experiment can lay a foundation for it, and rational criticism was the only thing we could do respecting the practice like that, while the latter was related to the specific purpose of human beings and meant the field of actions (EP 2.332-3). Secondly, Peirce thus emphasized that in practical action, rational cognition and rational purpose represent two sides of the same coin, which was the key feature of pragmatism and the reason for its name (EP 2.333). Thirdly, Peircean pragmatism never emphasized the role of individual psychological experience, and this made Peirce different from James; likewise, it did not one-sidedly emphasize the pivotal position of the human agents in the cognition of the world, which made him different from F.C.S. Schiller. In order to tell his pragmatism apart from the other versions of their kind, Peirce had to give up the name “pragmatism” and coined a new term that was ugly enough to avoid being misused, namely “pragmaticism” (EP 2.334-5). We will use the term pragmaticism below for Peirce’s fourth expression of pragmatism.
28In addition, Peirce emphasized again the importance of self-control, “where no self-control is possible there will be no self-reproach,” but “My pragmatism, having nothing to do with qualities of feeling, permits me to hold that the predication of such a quality is just what it seems […],” while the presentation of things as “what it seems” are just phenomena. Therefore, what we analyze is simply the phenomena (EP 2.337, 401). Peirce went further to emphasize two points. One was “that a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is ‘saying to himself,’ that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time,” and the other was that “When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language” (EP 2.338). In short, human beings are absolutely not isolated individuals; instead, they are social in nature, thinking by means of signs, and thinking about phenomena by means of signs.
29In appealing to signs to think about phenomena, pragmaticism entered the stage in the way that people explore phenomena through experiments and thus bring about meanings, while the purpose of pragmaticism is to propose hypotheses, clarify meanings, and result in understanding. Here are three important points to highlight. First, the object of an experimental inquiry refers to general phenomena rather than specific events, and pragmaticism only talks about the general kinds of experimental phenomena. Peirce wrote, “he does not mean any particular event that did happen to somebody in the dead past, but what surely will happen to everybody in the living future who shall fulfill certain conditions. The phenomenon consists in the fact that when an experimentalist shall come to act according to a certain scheme that he has in mind, then will something else happen, and shatter the doubts of sceptics” (EP 2.340). It is true that phenomena are rich in sensible attributes, but pragmaticism “does not intend to define the phenomenal equivalents of words and general ideas, but, on the contrary, eliminates their sential element, and endeavors to define the rational purport, and this it finds in the purposive bearing of the word or proposition in question” (EP 2.341). This leads to the second point, namely that pragmaticism aims to provide an understanding of general phenomena and clarify the meaning of relevant words or propositions. The third point, however, is that what pragmaticism was trying to clarify at this time is actually the meaning of a sign, not the meaning of a conception as in the 1878 version. Peirce described pragmaticism as follows:
The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol. (EP 2.341)
30We may refer to this interpretation of pragmatism as “semiotic pragmatism,” which necessitates a brief description of signs.
31In the last decade of his career, Peirce spent considerable time explaining and developing his semiotic philosophy. He defined the sign as such: “A Sign, or Representamen, is a First which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, as to be capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the same triadic relation to its Object in which it stands itself to the same Object” (CP 2.274). In this definition, Peirce disclosed the triadic structure of signs as follows:
Illustration 1: Two Graphs of Triadic Structures
Source: authors.
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32From the angle of causality, the object here defines the sign, the sign defines the interpretant, and thus the object indirectly defines the interpretant; in other words, objects produce signs, which produce interpretants, and this means that objects indirectly produce interpretants. Signs are a medium connecting objects and interpretants. Importing Peirce’s argument that “thoughts are signs,” we conclude that thoughts are the medium between objects and interpretants. As Peirce explained, “Grant, then, that every thought is a sign. Now the essential nature of a sign is that it mediates between its Object, which is supposed to determine it and to be, in some sense, the cause of it, and its Meaning […] the object and the interpretant being the two correlates of every sign […] the object is the antecedent, the interpretant the consequent of the sign” (MS 318: 328-32). Moreover, Peirce stated that the meaning of signs lies in their interpretants (EP 2.218). Correspondingly, the significations of signs are just the results of signs, i.e., interpretants.
- 3 Misak (1991: 19) explains how, in Peirce’s philosophy, belief is also a kind of habit; on the basis (...)
33But what is an interpretant? The interpretant here in Peirce is undoubtedly closely related to the mind, which is a typical actor capable of receiving signs. The interpretant of a certain sign is just the effect that the sign produces in the mind of the person involved. However, not all the effects in the mind can be regarded as the meaning of the sign. As Peirce analyzed, signs can have such effects on agents as emotions (or feelings) or actions; the former are the effects produced by listening to a certain piece of music (the sign), while the latter are the concrete effects (the concrete action of putting down weapons) produced by the imperative statement such as “lay down the weapon” as a sign. None of these two kinds of effects constitutes the meanings of intellectual concepts or the signs of intellectual intention. The intellectual intention of a sign refers specifically to those mental effects associated with habit change. They constitute some effects concerning the habitual and general tendency toward behavior, rather than the individual behavior itself.3 And once again we see in semiotic pragmatism the universality that “general modality” really means.
34Semiotic pragmatism interprets the conceivable meaning of a sign (that corresponds to the “concept” in the earlier version) as the interpretant it produces, i.e., the effect that works on a habit. In Peirce’s view, the interpretant of a sign can itself be used as a sign to specify another interpretant so as to point to the same object, and so on indefinitely (CP 2.303). In other words, the intellectual meaning of a sign will be formed by the infinite network of interpretants (a network of signs indeed) that it creates, and this infinite network of interpretants is simply the infinite habitual tendency, that is, the possibility of how one “would” act. It can be shown in the illustration below:
Illustration 2: Interpretants as Consequences
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35Semiotic pragmatism is an inquiry into the infinitely growing space of meaning. The growth of signs will show us the structure of general phenomena and thus bring about a common understanding of general phenomena. Of course, the growth of signs has to resort to the inquiries of the scientific community, which combines semiotic pragmatism with the third expression of pragmatism made with the help of normative science.
36In summary, according to semiotic pragmatism, Peirce cared about general phenomena rather than the objects of a particular mind. The effect of practice is not a specific action or fact, but the general tendency to act and a general type of facts. As a methodology, semiotic pragmatism makes both a predictable and an uncertain future possible at the same time, as scientific inquiry presents and elucidates an infinitely expanding space of meanings expanded from signs.
37Peirce called himself a pragmatist or a person embracing pragmatic philosophy in two slightly different contexts: in a narrow sense, pragmatism is a logical method of clarifying the meaning of signs and concepts, but broadly speaking, any philosophical theory that follows the pragmatic approach can be regarded as a pragmatic philosophy. In a broad sense, Peirce argued that pragmatism “appears to have been virtually the philosophy of Socrates” and an “an old way of thinking” that had been practiced by all of Spinoza, Berkeley, and Kant (CP 6.490). However, we should not extend Peircean pragmatism too broadly to what James called a “corridor” where all kinds of theories can roam (James 1949: 54). In a narrow sense, Peirce emphasized throughout his career that pragmatism is a method of using scientific logic to clarify the meanings of concepts. For him, pragmatism belongs to the branch of logic inside the normative sciences’ classification, and normative sciences are based on phenomenology, so Peirce’s clarification of pragmatism progressed to the discussion about normative science and phenomenology. From this point of view, as the main aspects of Peircean philosophy are characteristic of pragmatism, we can properly call Peirce’s thought pragmatic philosophy, and the review of Peircean pragmatism constitutes a prerequisite for “re-mining the gold mine” of Peirce’s thought.