Paul Forster, Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 259pp., $82.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521118996.
[Credit: originally from NDPR Reviews, please visit the review there as well.]
Reviewed by Nathan Houser, Indiana University
Charles Peirce is an enigmatic figure in philosophy. He is widely
regarded to have been important historically and to have continuing
relevance, but what his influence was and how he is still relevant
remains unsettled. Key ideas and insights from Peirce are frequently
featured in contemporary research ranging across much of philosophy, and
across other disciplines, yet when these ideas are considered together,
it is difficult to see how they can belong to one system of thought. A
notable accomplishment of Paul Forster, in the book under review, is
that he has achieved a comprehensive account of most of Peirce's leading
ideas in a way that gives the reader a grasp of how everything fits
together in the context of Peirce's battle against nominalism. This is
no mere device for unifying Peirce's wide-ranging ideas; his opposition
to nominalism motivated him as nothing else did and, as Forster shows,
is central to his philosophical program. While Peirce's argument against
nominalism was strictly philosophical, his objection to it extended
beyond logic to what he regarded as the undesirable consequences of
nominalism for civilization. This gave Peirce a sense of urgency in his
effort to provide a realist alternative for philosophy and science.
Peirce understood nominalism in the broad anti-realist sense usually
attributed to William of Ockham, as the view that reality consists
exclusively of concrete particulars and that universality and generality
have to do only with names and their significations. This view
relegates properties, abstract entities, kinds, relations, laws of
nature, and so on, to a conceptual existence at most. Peirce believed
nominalism (including what he referred to as "the daughters of
nominalism": sensationalism, phenomenalism, individualism, and
materialism) to be seriously flawed and a great threat to the
advancement of science and civilization. His alternative was a nuanced
realism that distinguished reality from existence and that could admit
general and abstract entities as reals without attributing to them
direct (efficient) causal powers. Peirce held that these non-existent
reals could influence the course of events by means of final causation
(conceived somewhat after Aristotle's conception),[1]and
that to banish them from ontology, as nominalists require, is virtually
to eliminate the ground for scientific prediction as well as to
underwrite a skeptical ethos unsupportive of moral agency.
Forster begins his systematic account of Peirce's argument against
nominalism with a review of his treatment of logic as the science of
inquiry. Peirce held that notwithstanding claims to the contrary,
nominalism, as well as realism, rests on metaphysical assumptions; and
he held that "logic provides the only secure basis for metaphysics" (p.
13). Logic, on Peirce's account, concerns the principles of right
reasoning broadly speaking and therefore deals not only with deduction
but with abductive and inductive forms of reasoning. "Logicians, on
Peirce's view, seek to uncover the nature of concepts, the principles by
which concepts combine in propositions and the principles by which
propositions combine to yield warranted inferences" (p. 13). Although
Peirce was a staunch proponent of the view that human life and thought
is continuous with the rest of nature, he rejected the idea that the
science of inquiry is a natural science. Logic is "an a priori science
of formal, universal, necessary norms that license metaphysical
conclusions" (p. 23). Peirce believed that logical/mathematical proofs
are independent of any results of the natural sciences and rely on what
he called "diagrammatic reasoning," operations on symbolic relational
constructions of a kind with the geometric diagrams Euclid used in
proving his theorems of geometry. Diagrams put one in direct contact
with the relations under investigation and facilitate observation and
experimentation of a kind with inquiry in the natural sciences.
Forster next examines Peirce's non-standard treatment of continuity
and his claim that every general concept defines a continuum (p. 43). On
Peirce's view, a continuum is not a collection of individual points,
however dense, for between any two points on a continuous line there is
room for any multitude of points ("the elements of continua, though
distinguishable, are not discrete" (p. 57)). There are no individual
points on a truly continuous line until a selection is made, in effect
marking a place on the line and thereby creating a discontinuity; "the
nominalist's attempt to define continuity as a kind of collection is
doomed to fail."[2] According
to Forster, Peirce's criticism of the nominalist account of continuity
applies also to the nominalist account of general concepts. Generality
is a form of continuity: "just as a true continuum is defined by a
description that delimits a space of possible elements, so a general
concept is defined by a characteristic that delimits a space of possible
objects" (p. 60) and not by a collection of individuals. So far,
Peirce's argument is formal and demonstrates only that laws and general
concepts define continua without yet making any ontological claims.
The next step in Forster's account of Peirce's general argument
against nominalism is a demonstration of the inadequacy of theories of
cognitive content which attempt to account for the meaning of general
concepts with reference only to individuals or sets of individuals.
Peirce insists that "the notion of continuity is essential to
understanding the testable content of any cognitive claim" (p. 66). His
alternative theory, his pragmatic theory of meaning, associates the
meaning of a concept with "the conceivable experimental consequences of
its application to an object" and posits that the "conditionals that
specify these consequences imply lawful relations between the acts
involved in carrying out experiments and the results they produce" (pp.
72-73). Forster reminds us that continuity, on Peirce's account, cannot
be reduced to a collection of individuals so "the content of these laws
exceeds any collection of claims about individuals" (p. 73). This
challenges the nominalist account of cognitive content.
The initial argument Peirce gave for his pragmatism, published in 1877-78,[3] was
based on his conception of belief, derived from Alexander Bain's idea
that beliefs are habits of action (p. 78), along with certain
psychological principles. Peirce later discounted his original argument
as psychologistic and devised new arguments based exclusively on formal
(non-material) considerations. Drawing from Peirce's writings of the
period of his original argument, Forster was able to reconstruct a
strictly formal (a priori) argument for pragmatism that does not limit
conceivability to material conditions: "the idea is to argue that given a
proper analysis of inquiry certain general conditions must obtain in
the world if inquiry is to be possible" (p. 80, n. 5). Forster's
reconstruction is based on Peirce's identification of conceptions with
signs and the claim that every sign represents an object as having
certain characteristics and conveys this information through
interpretation (an indirect effect of the sign's object on the
interpreter).
Forster works through his proof in great detail showing what is
essential for general conceptions to have cognitive meaning; among other
requirements, meaningful cognitions must not only predicate
characteristics of their objects but must also have an index to fix
denotation. According to Forster, the "core of Peirce's theory of
cognitive content" is expressed in the so-called "pragmatic maxim" which
is a conditional of the form, "If act A were performed under conditions C, result R would
occur," and this is the guiding maxim of "a theory of the meaning of
those signs that are essential to the pursuit of truth by means of
inquiry" (p. 66). Forster concludes his discussion of the proof by
claiming that Peirce's pragmatic maxim implies that symbols (signs that
make truth claims) "are meaningful only in a world governed by general
laws or habits . . . a world in which objects behave in predictable ways
when actions of a certain kind are performed on them under appropriate
conditions" (p. 105). In the world as conceived by the nominalist, "the
conditions for the application of concepts would never be fulfilled" (p.
77).
Having articulated Peirce's method for applying concepts (symbols)
meaningfully to an actual world, Forster takes up the question of the
role of experience in inquiry. Though contact with the external world
may be direct, it is only through sensory and perceptual processes that
experience can inform inquiry. The sensory given in experience, the
percept, has no cognitive content but simply compels attention and
triggers developed habits for using general terms. It is the general
terms (propositional signs) triggered by percepts that constitute
perceptual judgments and profess to represent objects and states of
affairs. "Peirce takes perceptual judgments to be the first premises of
knowledge -- the ultimate source of evidence in inquiry" (p. 128). He
regards perceptual judgments as limit cases of abductive hypotheses
which are justified not by how they are caused but on how well they
accord with future experience. "For Peirce, then, the problem of
verifying perceptual judgments is a special case of the problem of
verifying hypotheses generally, a problem his theory of induction is
intended to solve" (p. 146). Forster reviews Peirce's defense of
induction as a self-corrective method and how abduction, induction, and
deduction work together in inquiry.
Up to this point (through Ch. 7), Forster has reconstructed Peirce's
logical argument for the intelligibility and verifiability of his
hypothesis that laws and general kinds are real, and has demonstrated
that Peirce's pragmatism "shows that the reality of laws is implied by
the truth of any symbol" (p. 155). Forster is now almost ready to take
up the central question of the reality of laws: does Peirce have a
convincing justification for his claim that laws are real? Why does he
think this is true? But first Forster gives a critique of the principal
nominalist conceptions of truth and an account of Peirce's alternative
which "challenges the foundations of the nominalist conception of
knowledge" (p. 157). According to Peirce, each of the traditional
nominalist theories, correspondence, coherence, consensus, and
instrumental reliability, "rightly identify essential elements of truth"
(p. 174) which are all "essential conditions of the truth of a symbol"
(161). Forster claims that these competing nominalist accounts are
reconciled in Peirce's pragmatic theory of truth which holds that "truth
is a property that attaches to symbols that represent real objects" (p.
174).
Forster is now ready to address the crucial question: are laws real
and how can they be accounted for? Peirce's alternative to nominalism
was predicated on a positive answer to this question. Several factors
come into play. Though Peirce was convinced that laws were part of the
furniture of the universe, he was bound by his theory of inquiry to find
a way to explain how they came to be. Nothing was to be admitted as
inexplicable. But, as Forster points out, Peirce was confronted with
this dilemma:
if the lawfulness of the universe is explicable, it seems there must
be laws in terms of which the explanation is couched. But in that case
lawfulness is explained in terms that presuppose it, and the explanation
fails to account for lawfulness in general. On the other hand, if we
posit a state prior to the emergence of lawfulness in which there are no
laws operative, then we are left with no principles to appeal to in
accounting for the emergence of laws. Whichever horn of the dilemma
Peirce embraces, it seems he must violate the principles of rational
inquiry (pp. 181-82).
Peirce's solution was to posit an original lawless chaos without any
order but with an incipient tendency for habit-taking, "a potential for
orderliness as yet unrealized but tending towards realization" (p. 184).
The emergence of order in the cosmos could only have started by
accident, as a spontaneous chance occurrence, but once started it would
have strengthened "with the result that laws come increasingly to
determine the course of events" (p. 183). According to Peirce, then,
laws of nature are products of an ongoing evolution and their emergence
results from an original tendency to form habits. Peirce's account of
the evolution of laws explains what he calls the growth of
reasonableness in the order of things.
Peirce's cosmology is much debated and is frequently disparaged.
Although Forster acknowledges that Peirce's cosmology is "among the most
difficult and controversial elements of his philosophy" (p. 176), even
calling it "hideously obscure" (p. 184), he contends that it as an
integral part of Peirce's philosophical system and an important part of
his case against nominalism. It should be noted that Peirce was a
scientist by profession and was well learned in late nineteenth-century
physics. Although his cosmology may be properly said to be a
metaphysical cosmology, it is not unreasonable to regard Peirce's effort
as an early attempt to formulate a modern physical cosmology.[4] According to Forster, Peirce's cosmological views result from the application of his mathematical
analysis of continuity, his theory of symbols and his account of the
method of inquiry to the question of the nature of being. On this
reading, his account of reality is an attempt to draw out the
implications of the hypothesis he calls 'synechism' -- the view that the
continuity implied by laws affirmed in true symbols is real. . . .
Synechism is an especially important hypothesis to consider, he thinks,
because if it is correct, then, far from being ontologically
superfluous, as the nominalist supposes, laws (i.e., true continua) form
part of the order of things and, indeed, are essential to its
intelligibility (p. 177).
Of special significance for Peirce was the need to posit chance as
operative in the universe: "laws result from the working out of a
tendency to generalize events that happen by chance" (p. 205). This view
of chance as operative in nature was the central tenet of Peirce's
doctrine of tychism and the basis for his objection to determinism.
Peirce believed that "the prevalence of appeals to statistical laws in
the kinetic theory of gases, evolution and social science" provided
grounds for questioning whether the laws of nature are as exact as
nominalists claim (p. 207). The issue for Peirce is not whether absolute
chance causes events, a position he does not hold, but "whether the
laws operative in the universe are deterministic -- in which case the
order of events could not be other than it is -- or whether instead they
are merely statistical" (pp. 212-13). Forster points out that Peirce's
tychism provides a better basis for explaining growth, variety,
lawfulness, and consciousness than the necessitarian hypothesis adopted
by nominalism.
Forster concludes with some ethical considerations. Peirce's realism
tends to favor community good over individual good, favored by
nominalism. Peirce challenges the distinction that nominalists draw
between facts and values and between theory and practice. He argues that
the principles of inquiry are norms of conduct and "takes himself to
have demonstrated the coherence of the idea of a science of norms and
undermined the nominalist's view that normative questions are beyond the
scope of rational inquiry" (p. 237). Finally, Peirce argues that truth
is an intrinsic good and that to "attain truth is to attain
reasonableness in the way of belief," and that reasonableness "is the
only end that is unconditional and universal" (p. 237).
The preceding is a mere sketch of Forster's detailed account of the
system of philosophy Peirce developed as an alternative to the received
nominalism of his day (to some extent still dominant). This is the best
and most comprehensive account to date of Peirce's challenge to
nominalism, and it is a handy introduction to Peirce's philosophy in
general. Forster correctly emphasizes Peirce's synechism, the view that
continuity is the overall key conception, and he convincingly makes
pragmatism a central component of Peirce's philosophy rather than a
stand-alone theory of meaning as it has sometimes been regarded.
But there are shortcomings that must be mentioned; most notably
Forster's mixing of references to Peirce's early and later writings and,
to some extent, a neglect of Peirce's more developed ideas. For
example, Forster makes frequent reference to symbols as the class of
intellectual signs that pragmatism addresses, but it will be known to
readers acquainted with Peirce's late semiotic writings that there are
several kinds of symbolic signs, including arguments, and it might be
wondered whether Forster means to refer to all of them. Also, there are
some signs that are not symbols (e.g., different classes of legisigns)
which are general signs and might be supposed to be subject to pragmatic
analysis. One wonders whether Forster had Peirce's early work in mind
where he used just three classes of signs: icons, indexes, and symbols.
Another example is what Forster says about Peirce's proof of pragmatism.
He concentrates on Peirce's earliest proof, which Peirce found to be
inadequate, and neglects his later sustained attempts to formulate more
satisfactory proofs. Forster ingeniously reconstructs an alternative to
Peirce's early proof based on his early semiotic conceptions, but he
doesn't mention that in 1907 Peirce constructed his own proof of
pragmatism also based on an analysis of semiotic conceptions.[5] These
shortcomings, as well as Forster's decision, however practical, not to
examine related work of other scholars, detract from the usefulness of
his book as a sourcebook for Peirce's main theories and doctrines. But
as an account of Peirce's answer to nominalism and as a general account
of Peirce's overall system of philosophy, Forster's book is a notable
accomplishment.
[1] For a recent treatment of Peirce's conception of final causation, see T. L. Short, Peirce's Theory of Signs (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
[2] For a discussion of Peirce's theory of continuity see Hilary Putnam's "Comments on the Lectures" in Peirce's Reasoning and the Logic of Things, ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1992).
[3] "The Fixation of Belief," Popular Science Monthly 12 (Nov. 1877): 1-15 and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," Popular Science Monthly 12 (Jan. 1878): 286-302; these papers are reprinted, with variations, in Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, eds. N. Houser and C. Kloesel (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 109-141.
[4] For critical examinations of Peirce's cosmology, see Andrew Reynolds, Peirce's Scientific Metaphysics (Vanderbilt University Press, 2002) and T. L. Short, Peirce's Theory of Signs (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Chs. 4 & 5, and Short's "Did Peirce Have a Cosmology?" Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 46 (2010): 521-543.
[5] See "Pragmatism," in Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, eds. Peirce Edition Project (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 398 -- 433.
Paul Forster, Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 259pp., $82.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521118996. 