Vincent Colapietro

Toward a Pragmatic Conception of Practical Identity

The author of this paper explores a central strand in the complex relationship between Peirce and Kant. He argues, against Kant (especially as reconstructed by Christine Korsgaard), that the practical identity of the self-critical agent who undertakes a Critic of reason (as Peirce insisted upon translating this expression) needs to be conceived in substantive, not purely formal, terms. Thus, insofar as there is a reflexive turn in Peirce, it is quite far from the transcendental turn taken by Immanuel Kant. The identity of the being devoted to redefining the bounds of reason (for the drawing of such bounds is always a historically situated and motivated undertaking) is not that of a disembodied, rational will giving laws to itself. Nor is it that of a being whose passions and especially sentiments are heteronomous determinations of the deliberative agency in question. Rather the identity of this being is that of a somatic, social, and historical agent whose very autonomy not only traces its origin to heteronomy but also ineluctably involves an identification with what, time and again, emerges as other than this agent. A strong claim is made regarding human identity being practical identity (practical identity being understood here as the singular shape acquired by a human being in the complex course of its practical involvements, its participation in the array of practices in and through which such a being carries out its life). An equally strong claim is made regarding the upshot of Peirces decisive movement beyond Kants transcendental project: this movement unquestionably drives toward a compelling account of human agency.

The Space of Sings: C.S. Peirce’s Critique of Psychologism

Despite the efforts of his father, the mathematician Benjamin Peirce, to dissuade him (Brent, 78) from doing so, Charles Peirce devoted himself to logical investigations with a singular passion. Even in his later life, he identified himself most often as a logician.1 From the first moment he spoke publicly on “The Logic of Science”2 to the end of his life, he was strenuously opposed to all attempts to ground logic in psychology (W 1). His opposition to psychologism could not have been more thoroughgoing. This is true even though in looking back upon his own work he in later years discerned some of his own writings to be tainted by this doctrine. For example, in his 1903 lectures on pragmatism, he implicitly recalled the essay in which he first put forth his pragmatic maxim,3 though without naming it. Near the center of Peirce’s pragmatism, in his mature as well as youthful formulation, was a conception of belief borrowed from the Scottish psychologist Alexander Bain (5.12).4 In 1903, he noted: “belief consists mainly in being deliberately prepared to adopt the formula believed in as the guide to action” (5.27). In 1878, he wrote, more simply: “The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit” (5.398). Doubt indicates the disruption of belief and, as such, instigates a struggle to recover the settled state of an efficacious habit. Peirce identified this struggle as the process of inquiry (see, e.g., 5.374). This doubt-belief theory of inquiry was the context in which the pragmatic maxim was first proposed and afterwards always defended. But, when Peirce after 18985 returned to the topic of pragmatism, he was especially sensitive to the transformation of his own logical doctrine into a psychological teaching.6 Hence, in the opening lecture of the 1903 series on this topic, he stressed:

Experience Ceded and Negated

The pragmatist reconstruction of experience was first undertaken and must today be renewed in the name of experience, but not mainly that of experience more adequately conceived or more fully theorized. Rather, this task was originally inaugurated and must now be renewed in the name of experience more vibrantly lived and, quite simply, more fully had. This means wresting our understanding of experience from intellectualist preoccupations. Of far greater importance, it practically means refusing to cede our experience and its interpretations to any authority, including the most invisible form (that of our own habitual selves in their ingenious capacity to make sense out of our experience primarily in terms of entrenched dispositions of interpretation and evaluation). Such a refusal

Conjectures Concerning an Uncertain Faculty Claimed for Humans

C. S. Peirce worked tirelessly toward transforming philosophical discourse into one in which the traditional ideal of demonstrative proof would be eclipsed by an alternative model of rational persuasion. His e¤orts marked a decisive break with deductivism and a thoroughgoing commitment to experimentalism. The Peircean model of rational persuasion is derived from an idealization of the procedures by which experimentalists seek to establish the provisional truths of their communal investigations. This bears directly upon his theory of signs, in at least two ways. First, Peirce’s theory of signs was self-consciously the work of an experimentalist.1 Second, this theory was crafted principally for the purpose of providing the resources for o¤ering a compelling account of experimental inquiry (see, e.g., Colapietro 1987, 1997a). In designing a theory for this goal, Peirce provided the resources for much more than an account of such inquiry. Arguably, he bequeathed to us nothing less than the means by which not only human practices in their myriad forms but also natural processes in their own protean guises are to be described and analyzed. Whether this is so or not, it is clearly the case that Peirce’s theory of signs is, at once, the work of an experimentalist and a work designed for an understanding of how experimentalists ought to comport themselves in the context of inquiry. Peirce conjectured that humans possess an innate capacity or ‘faculty of divining the ways of Nature’ (CP 5.173). ‘To give the lie to his own consciousness of divining the reasons of phenomena would be as silly in a man as it would be in a fledgling bird to refuse to trust its wings, and leave the nest.’ But is it ‘a fact that man possesses this magical faculty?’ (CP 6.476). From Peirce’s perspective, it is a supposition not only worthy of serious, sustained scrutiny but also supported by numerous, intertwined threads of evidence (cf. CP 5.365). That is, it is a provisional fact

Habits, Awareness, and Autonomy

The word consciousness is, if anything, even more ambiguous than habit and more or less closely allied terms or expressions (e.g., disposition, practice, routine, ritual, convention, and pattern of action). The pragmatist consensus regarding habit change (and it is the change of habits, not simply habits, that is at the center of this consensus) encompasses an account of consciousness or awareness in one or more of its most central senses. According to the pragmatists, the arrest of habits intensifies or heightens awareness; and such an alteration of consciousness aids agents in exercising control over both environing circumstances and their somatically rooted habits. That is, consciousness is not a mere epiphenomenon: “it seems to me,” Peirce claims, “that it exercises a real function in self-control” (c. 1906, CP 5.493). In addition to the intimate connection between arrested action and heightened awareness, however, we must also consider the integration of habits and the emergent, precarious, and yet quite effective form of autonomy characteristic of human agents. While the consensus in question involves a shift in perspective, one from consciousness to habituation and hence the alteration of habits, it does not simply jettison the concept of consciousness. It rather tries to explain consciousness in reference to the operation, dissolution, and modification of habits.

Ubiquitous Mediation and Critical Interventions: Reflections on the Function of Signs and the Purposes of Peirce's Semeiotic

From a pragmatist perspective, the inaugural concern of Peirces formal theory mediation? representation? translation? cannot be separated from the eventual form in which this theory ought to be cast. Moreover, it cannot be severed from the emerging goals of an evolving process of theoretical elaboration. Peirces semeiotic culminates in methodeutic. The form in which the theory of signs is most appropriately cast is arguably a reflexive, normative inquiry into the conditions and forms of inquiry. It is, however, possibly something wider-a rhetoric inclusive of more than the discourses and disciplines of the experimental sciences i.e., a rhetoric inclusive of artistic works no less than practical communication. An account of the most rudimentary and pervasive form of semiosis grammar in Peirces sense being one of the names for this account must ultimately give way to a nuanced understanding of historical practices such as experimental inquiry, artistic innovation, practical discourse, and possibly much else.

THE «INNER» LIFE OF THE SOCIAL SELF: AGENCY, SOCIALITY, AND REFLEXIVITY

Questo saggio offre un ritratto pragmatista del se e dunque una descrizione che parte dalla premessa per cui il se e anzitutto un attore sociale incarnato, situato, che possiede la capacita di un’effettiva autocritica. Cosi, oltre a evidenziare il ruolo dell’azione, l’autore sottolinea anche quello della socialita e della riflessivita. A differenza di molti ritratti abbozzati da altri autori pragmatisti, quello presente cerca di rendere una piu completa giustizia alla dimensione «interiore» della soggettivita umana, soprattutto attraverso la costruzione dell’interiorita come riflessivita (il rapporto del se con se stesso)

The Ineffable, the Individual, and the Intelligible: Peircean Reflections on the Innate Ingenuity of the Human Animal

Our embodied minds frame and act on hypotheses as spontaneously as our lungs inhale and exhale. The ceaseless rhythm involved in the inhalation and exhalation of breath might itself be taken as a metaphor for the framing and testing of hypotheses. The give-and-take of this physiological function exhibits what the semiotic function of human conjecture functionally is—a dialogue with the world, truly a give-and-take. In being semiotic, however, this function does not cease to be somatic; indeed, it is at once a semiotic, somatic, situated, and historical function. So, even our most causal, hence our most unreflective movements, embody our hypotheses—for example, our hand assuredly reaching for the handle of a door is guided by a conjecture, no less than that same organ frantically trying to clutch a limb as we are tumbling down a steep incline. Explicitly formulated and critically assessed hypotheses are the exceptions to the rule, whereas thoroughly tacit, irreducibly somatic conjectures define the rule in this case. Our movements are in effect conjectures. The space in which they take place is ineluctably a space of signs (an expression deliberately used to recall the use of “the space of reasons” by Wilfrid Sellars and other philosophers).

The life of significance: Cultivating ingenuity no less than signs

Abstract Victoria Lady Welbys notion of wit plays a pivotal role in her voluminous writings and, accordingly, in Susan Petrillis illuminating expositions of the most relevant texts bearing on this central notion. The author of this essay translates Welbys conception of wit into ingenuity and shows how this translation aids us in appreciating the salience and subtlety of Welbys notion. He also follows up on a suggestion offered by C. S. Peirce in his review of Welbys What Is Meaning? (the suggestion that the primitive mind of our remote ancestors was hardly as deficient an instrument as such theorists as E. B. Tylor and Herbert Spencer depicted this mind). Moreover, he takes seriously Welbys insistence upon the gendered character of the specific form of human ingenuity to which she devoted her greatest attention. Finally, the author notes how the cultivation of ingenuity, precisely in Welbys sense, is inextricably linked to the cultivation of signs and especially symbols.

The ongoing critique of dialogical reason

Despite its length and ambition, there is little that is excessive in the pejorative sense about Semiotics Unbounded. If anything, it might have here and there been even more expansive. I say this though I am strongly disposed to think that such lengthy works are almost always crimes against readers. This book is however anything but such a crime. It almost entirely escapes being excessive in the bad sense (the elimination of occasional repetitions would have saved it completely from this defect through surfeit). Even so, as part of their e¤ort to make otherness central to their project, the authors celebrate excess and related values. The relationship to otherness is, they assert, ‘a relationship of excess, surplus, transcendence with respect to objectifying thought’ (p. 300). It releases one from ‘the relations between subject and object,’ also from the closed relation of ‘equal exchange.’ While itself a celebration of excess, Semiotics Unbounded thus succeeds in avoiding being too verbose or digressive, too excessive in one or another way. While also a celebration of ephemerality, it is likely to make a lasting contribution to the ongoing work of serious theorists in a number of fields. While critical of even the most sophisticated attempts to identify semiotics with a theory focusing on equal exchange, univocal significance, and even the merely rough equivalence between the diacritical signs in one code with those in another, the authors take great pains to define clearly their central terms, thereby in e¤ect allowing readers unfamiliar with semiotics to break the code. But there is no contradiction here: establishing the meaning of words, expressions, and utterances is never simply a matter of decodification — it always involves interpretation of a potentially open-ended nature. Preliminary definitions need not be anything more than inaugural placements making subsequent moves possible, the series of such moves being interpretant routes of