Theresa and list:
You say:
What I do not agree is with your suggestion that Peirce "decided
subsequently to accommodate himself to Royce's sensibility as much as
possible" (why not the other way round? that Royce, particularly after
Peirce's Lectures of 1898 (the Cambridge Conferences), was influenced by
Peirce?
REPLY:
Of course he was influenced by him! Is there something shameful in Peirce
addressing the interests of the one philosopher capable of understanding him
sufficiently well to promote his philosophy in his own work and in that of
his students? 'Why in the world would Peirce not want to address Royce as
effectively as possible? That is what I am saying. Perhaps it is the word
"accommodate" which confuses you as to my meaning. I am not saying that
Peirce changed his views to agree with Royce but that he was addressing
Royce in a way he thought proper for Royce to understand what his, Peirce's,
views are.
I've been baffled by why you keep misreading my intention, and I think
I understand why, namely, because of a disagreement in our understandings
of Royce and of how Peirce would regard Royce.
I am making a claim about how Peirce would regard Royce that would account
for the way Peirce is addressing the topic of the New Elements, the claim
being that Peirce was addressing Royce himself -- perhaps as one of many
addressees of a similar type, to be sure -- and saying that this accounts
for a similarity I think I perceive in the way Peirce is formulating his
view. You think, though, that this could not be Peirce's aim in composing
the paper as he does because Peirce would not want to accommodate himself to
Royce's interests. Who was Royce -- I imagine you to be saying -- such that
Peirce would take him as implicit addressee of the New Elements? You do not
find that plausible, presumably because you do not think Royce shared
Peirce's interests sufficiently for Peirce to have any motive for doing so.
This is, I think, the basis of our disagreement, and I want to address that
because it may be based on a misunderstanding of what Royce was as a
philosopher and how Peirce regarded him.
This misimpression of Royce may be due to Royce's flowery literary style
which I, too, find unappealing and somewhat difficult to get past at times.
But notwithstanding that, Royce was a true amateur of science, in the
laudatory sense of "amateur", and was professionally the magisterial voice
for science in the philosophy department, with a campus-wide
interdisciplinary influence, cultivated assiduously for years. Moreover,
Royce had already showed his grasp of the importance of Cantor's work on
infinities and continuity in The World and the Individual, published in 1899
(in the Supplementary Essay: The One, The Many, and the Infinite),
especially in connection with the case of the self-representative world map.
Peirce was not only aware of that but had replied to Royce on it shortly
thereafter and then did so again in the specially scheduled Seventh Lecture
of the Harvard Lectures of 1903. There is a definite affinity of that and of
other parts of the Lecture series as well which makes it plausible that the
New Elements was composed in the same compositional project that included
the Harvard Lectures.
The manuscript material for the lectures is such that it is impossible to
tell what version of each lecture was actually delivered or even that the
one delivered is among the surviving drafts. No matter. There is nothing
especially problematic in that. Peirce composed that way. He had some place
he wanted to go, he selected a starting point, and he set out in a trek of
discovery that seemed to him to be a way to go that could get there, though
he corrects himself repeatedly in the process and he may never get to
wherever he first thought of himself as going -- but that is not to say that
he gets nowhere! He wrote as a true discoverer and explorer, and anybody who
has worked with the MS material in depth, as we both have, will have
experienced the peculiar excitement that attempting to follow him on his
self-correcting path can yield precisely because one constantly gets the
sense that the unknown is being carefully, patiently, and ingeniously
explored. This is the pleasure of the hunt, vivifying research by conceiving
it -- living it -- as reSEARCH, in the spirit of the hunt. But I digress.
The point is that Peirce's compositional procedure was such that you can
often quite clearly identify all of those manuscripts that are related to
one another as paths struck out in a single though peculiarly free-flowing
line of inquiry, and there is good reason to believe that the New Elements
is a part of the same particular compositional project or hunt which is
originally focused by the task of composing those public lectures.
Now, going by Patricia Turrisi's account in the volume mentioned, there is
reason to believe that the Seventh Lecture in particular would have been of
special interest to Royce in particular and may well have been addressed
directly to him and to his students. For although it was William James who
set the series up, it was not him or those who might have been primarily
attached to him as students whom Peirce was primarily addressing -- James
didn't even show up for any but the first lecture -- but rather the students
in the department of philosophy who were primarily Royce's students, or at
least this is surely true of the specially scheduled Seventh Lecture in
particular, since the topic substantially includes further discussion of the
topic of the Supplementary Essay in The World and the Individual. Now Peirce
had very good reason to go about this in a way which involved a particular
appeal to Royce's interests because Royce's interests by this time were
Peirce's interests, whose philosophy Royce was constantly tending to conform
himself to in certain respects.
The reason I think disagreement about what Royce was as a philosopher and
what he was for Peirce is at the basis of your misunderstanding of what I am
saying is that in your message you repeatedly cited something or other
pertaining to William James although I said nothing about William James. It
must be, then, that you see an equivalence of sorts of James and Royce in
some relevant respect, and then suppose that an inference is to be drawn
about Royce's relation to Peirce on that basis. Now, since James is
notoriously uneasy both with science in general and mathematics in
particular, your assumption must be that Royce is similarly suspicious of,
perhaps even hostile to, science in general and mathematics in particular;
for this is the hostility alluded to in the material you quote and
reference. But that is not what Royce was all about nor would Peirce have
thought of him in that way. On the contrary, Royce was Peirce's ally,
already beginning to champion his cause.
Why is this important? Because it is in knowing who Peirce was addressing
that we are given the clues we need as to why he is saying them. Of course,
this must be shown in detail in interpreting the text, and I intend to do
this. But Jean-Marc and Bernard are quite mistaken, in my opinion, in their
view that it is better just to start from the text without understanding
such matters of context as this. In this case, that means understanding to
whom Peirce is speaking in what he is saying. I cannot think of what reason
they could give for such an interpretational maxim as that.
Joe Ransdell
----- Original Message -----
From: "Theresa Calvet" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2006 8:07 AM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Joe and list,
Your impression of Peirce's character is probably right, but I still insist
on I what I was trying to say:
In 1905, in "What Pragmatism Is", when Peirce distinguishes pragmaticism
from other species of prope-positivism, he writes (and this was published in
The Monist) the following:
"first, its retention of a purified philosophy; secondly, its full
acceptance of the main body of our instinctive beliefs; and thirdly, its
strenuous insistence upon the truth of scholastic realism (or a close
approximation to that, well-stated by the late Dr. Francis Ellingwood Abbot
in the Introduction to his Scientific Theism)." (EP2, p. 339; CP 5.423).
In this paper, after saying that he had awaited in vain, "for a good many
years, some particularly opportune conjuncture of circumstances that might
serve to recommend his notions of the ethics of terminology", Peirce tells
us that "finding his bantling "pragmatism" so promoted", he "feels it is
time to kiss his child good-bye and relinquish it to its higher destiny,
while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he
begs to announce the birth of the word "pragmaticism", which is ugly enough
to be safe from kidnappers" (EP2, pp. 334-335; CP 5. 414) - Royce is not
once mentioned in this paper.
In "The First Rule of Logic" (the fourth Cambridge College Lecture,
delivered on 21 February 1898), where Peirce puts forward the rule that "in
order to learn you must desire to learn" and, at least implicitly, contrasts
his "Will to Learn" with the "Will to Believe" of James, just after having
recalled ,"one of the most wonderful features of reasoning and one of the
most important philosophemes in the doctrine of science, (...) namely, that
reasoning tends to correct itself, and the more so the more wisely its plan
is laid", and said that "it appears that this marvellous self-correcting
property of Reason, which Hegel made so much of, belongs to every sort of
science, although it appears as essential, intrinsic, and inevitable only in
the highest type of reasoning which is induction. But the logic of relatives
shows that the other types of reasoning, deduction and retroduction are not
so thoroughly unlike induction as they might be thought (...). Namely, in
the logic of relatives, treated let us say, in order to fix our ideas, by
means of those existential graphs of which I gave a slight sketch in the
last lecture, [we] begin a deduction by writing down all the premises. Those
different premises are then brought into one field of assertion, that is,
are colligated, as Whewell would say, or joined into one copulative
proposition. Thereupon, we proceed attentively to observe the graph. It is
as
much an operation of observation as is the observation of bees",
the following bracketing material was struck out : "(I am happy to find
this points receives valuable confirmation of an entirely independent
thinker, whose care and thoroughness gives weight to all he says, Dr.
Francis Ellingwood Abbot)" (EP2, p. 45)
Royce is mentioned in MS 908 "The Basis of Pragmaticism" ("fifth attempt,
probably written in December 1905"):
"I have already given the reasons which convince me that if philosophy is to
be made a science, the very first price we must pay for it must be to
abandon all endeavor to make it literary. We must have a vocabulary in which
every word has a single meaning, whether definite or vague; and to this end
we must not shrink from inventing new words whenever they are really needed.
(...) It was in seeking to fulfill that condition that I invented the word
pragmaticism to denote precisely what I had formerly invented pragmatism to
mean (...). (...) I ventured to recommend that this word should be used to
denote that general opinion about the nature of the clear apprehension of
thought which is shared by those whom all the world calls pragmatists, and
who so call themselves, no matter how one or other of us might state the
substance of that accord. After a good deal of reflection and careful
rereading, I have come to think that the common pragmatistic opinion
aforesaid is that every thought (...) has a meaning beyond the immediate
content of the thought itself, so that it is as absurd to speak of a thought
in itself as it would be to say of a man that he was a husband in himself or
a son in himself, and this not only because thought always refers to a real
or fictitious object, but also because it supposes itself to be
interpretable.
If this analysis of the pragmatistic opinion be correct, the logical breath
of the term pragmatist is hereby enormously enlarged. For it will become
predicable not only of Mr. Royce (who, apart from this analysis, impresses
me quite decidedly as a pragmatist), but also of a large section of the
logical world, -perhaps the majority-, since ancient times" (EP2, pp.
360-361).
I will not recall here what James, on March 31 (1903), five days after
Peirce's first lecture, on pragmatism and the normative sciences, what James
wrote in a letter he sent to Dickinson S. Miller (then a Harvard instructor
in philosophy and psychology, and someone who had sent a letter in support
of Peirce's application to the Carnegie Institution" - one can read that in
Patricia Ann Turrisi (ed.), Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right
Thinking. The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, pp. 10-11 (read also what
James wrote to Mrs. Jacobi in a letter on May 15, 1903, in Patricia Ann
Turrisi's "Introduction", p. 15).
But I will copy here part of the letter that Peirce wrote, in October 1904,
to Christine Ladd-Franklin (then a lecturer in logic and psychology at Johns
Hopkins and one of his former students), also in this "Introduction" (p.17):
"In the spring of 1903 I was invited, by the influence of James, Royce and
Munsterberg to give a course of lectures in Harvard University on
Pragmatism. I had intended to print them; but James said he could not
understand them himself and could not recommend their being printed. I do
not
myself think there is any difficulty in understanding them, but all modern
psychologists are so soaked in sensationalism that they can not understand
anything that does not mean that, and mistranslate into the ideas of
[Wilhelm]
Wundt whatever one says about logic. (...) How can I, to whom nothing seems
so thoroughly real as generals, and who regard Truth and Justice as
literally the most powerful powers in the world,expect to be understood by
the thoroughgoing Wundtian?" (Christine Ladd-Franklin, "Charles S. Peirce at
the Johns Hopkins", The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific
Matters, 13 (1916), pp. 719-720).
What I do not agree is with your suggestion that Peirce "decided
subsequently to accommodate himself to Royce's sensibility as much as
possible" (why not the other way round? that Royce, particularly after
Peirce's Lectures of 1898 (the Cambridge Conferences), was influenced by
Peirce?
Theresa
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