Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 6. Charles S. Peirce
1890, that reality extends to the non-cognitive realm of actuality; and his admission in 1897 that even possibility is real. In line with Murphey’s understanding of the importance of Peirce’s logical discoveries of the mid-1880s, Fisch notes that Peirce had taken large strides toward acknowledging the reality of secondness with his 1884–85 acceptance of the necessity of indexes for logic and his 1885 reaction to Royce’s idealism (W5: sels. 30, 33), but he believes it was not until about 1890, when he accepted Scotus’s haecceities, that he saw that ultimate reality should be ascribed to seconds.62 It seems likely, however, that Fisch’s principal reason for locating this important intellectual event in about 1890 was his belief, following Hartshorne and Weiss, that Peirce’s “A Guess at the Riddle” had been composed then. It was there, in the chapter on physics, that Peirce stated clearly for the first time that what “Scotus calls the hæcceities of things, the hereness and nowness of them, are indeed ultimate” (p. 205). But it now seems much more likely that Peirce composed that important chapter as early as 1887 or 1888, and that he had started his “Guess,” as “One, Two, Three,” by 1886. These considerations, as well as the many references to the necessity of indices for logic, beginning as early as 1881 (W4:251), and his work, beginning as early as 1886, on definitions for “haecceity” and “scotism” for the Century Dictionary (see W5:389), all suggest that Peirce’s acceptance of the reality of secondness is better dated “around 1887” than “around 1890.” Accordingly, the step to Murphey’s fourth phase and Fisch’s second stage occurred near the beginning of the years covered by the present volume so that the writings in W6 may be viewed as inaugurating what Fisch calls Peirce’s period of two-category realism.
Fisch’s account of Peirce’s journey from nominalism to a robust realism has been challenged by a number of scholars, including Don D. Roberts, Fred Michael, and, most recently, T. L. Short. Roberts argued in 1970, soon after Fisch’s account first appeared, that there is no compelling reason for concluding that Peirce ever was an out and out nominalist and that it would be safer to conclude that he was always a realist. Roberts accepted, however, that there were nominalistic elements in Peirce’s thought.63 Michael agrees with Fisch that Peirce was at first a nominalist, but argues that his nominalism continued until the mid-1880s, when he became a realist by taking the crucial step of accepting that there are singulars outside of cognition—what Fisch identifies as accepting the reality of secondness. Earlier declarations of realism were, at most, nominal.64 Short, the most recent dissenter to Fisch’s account, argues that in at least one important sense, Peirce remained a nominalist all his life, namely, in his “continuing inclination toward a ‘nominalism’ that identifies reality with a world external to cognition.” Peirce’s “nominalism,” rather than something to be overcome, was an important component of Peirce’s realism, actually contributing to its depth.65 These are valuable studies, each contributing important insights concerning Peirce’s development as a philosopher, and the disagreements, though going much deeper, serve to highlight the difficulty in reaching consensus on the meaning of “nominalism” and “realism” and on what constitutes a significant change with respect to these two positions. But whatever labels they use, these scholars all agree that there was a significant development within Peirce’s thought and that the repercussions that followed his introduction of logical quantifiers in the mid-1880s clearly constitute one of his major periods of change. Another would come around 1897 when he accepted that there are generals external to thought, a change that would breathe new life into his slumbering pragmatism.
Thus the present volume, most notably with “A Guess at the Riddle” (sels. 22–28), inaugurates a new period of philosophy for Peirce, one distinguished by a commitment to a thoroughgoing architectonic approach based on his categories. The difficult task of reforming his entire system of thought, always with an eye for improving it, would occupy Peirce for the remainder of his life. Having accepted the reality of seconds, Peirce could begin to build an account of perception that would make sense of direct acquaintance with reality and that would provide reason to hope that inquiry could be guided toward the truth by the obstinacy of reality rather than by a conception of it. In his definition of “real” for the Century Dictionary, Peirce distinguished between “real objects … external to the mind,” which are “independent altogether of our thought,” and internal objects which “depend upon thought,” though “not upon thought about them.” By 1903, this distinction became a basic feature of his semeiotic (EP2:276) and by 1906 it had turned into the now familiar dynamical object/immediate object duo (EP2:477).
Among the other noteworthy ideas that seem to have originated or come much more clearly into focus during this period, we find in Peirce a growing conviction that instinct and evolutionary attunement to the laws of nature—to the “objective reason embodied in the laws of nature”—give humans a predisposition for guessing nature’s laws (sels. 8, 15) and explain the importance of common sense (sel. 44). Peirce’s intensive work on reduction of observational data and modeling of hydrodynamic effects for his gravity reports, and perhaps even his critique of the design of Gurney’s “experiment” to prove telepathic phenomena (sels. 16, 18), strengthened his conviction that probable reasoning is “the logic of the physical sciences,” as he proclaimed in his definition of “probability” in the Century Dictionary. We find Peirce placing more stress on regulative principles, perhaps a step toward his later recognition of the normativity of logic, and on intellectual hopes (see sel. 28 and W5:221–34). There is an indication in some of the W6 writings that Peirce has begun moving toward his later accommodation with religion and his innovative theological ideas (sels. 14, 22, 23, 44). In science, including even his work for the Coast Survey, Peirce’s interest shows a definite turn toward dynamic and process-oriented concerns and, also, toward foundational and cosmological questions (sels. 25–28, 31, 36). Peirce reveals a timely grasp of the crisis that was developing in physics at the end of the 19th century66 and perceptively recommended that progress would depend on a better understanding of physical matter at the molecular level and on fruitful new theories (sels. 28, 31). Peirce offered his “guess” as a candidate for a new paradigm in physics and began a book intended to promote and justify its embrace (sel. 31).
Peirce’s 1887 polemic against Herbert Spencer’s “mechanical notion of the universe” (sel. 14) provided his first occasion for stating his case against the doctrine of necessity,67 and turned him into a public critic of necessitarianism, even a prophet of its doom. Peirce’s aggressive rejection of mechanical causation as adequate for the explanation of growth and development, forced him to defend a teleological form of evolution and moved him in the direction of a theory of sign action, or semiosis. Peirce’s “guess at the riddle,” as expressed about 1888, was that “three elements are active in the world: first, chance; second, law; and third, habit-taking”; there was not yet any explicit inclusion of signs among the basic components of the universe. But he was already committed to a close analogy between the growth of mind and the growth of physical law and he would make that connection explicit in 1892 when he proclaimed his tychistic thesis that matter is specialized or “effete” mind (R 972; see also, EP1:312). At least by 1907, Peirce would recognize that the end of semiosis of the highest kind is an intellectual habit, which realization may lead us to wonder whether the third basic element that is active in the universe, habit-taking, is a form of semiosis, and if that is what imparts the teleological current that Peirce finds in evolution.
In 1887, in a sketch of his “A Guess at the Riddle,” Peirce noted that he wanted a “vignette of the Sphynx” placed below the title.68 Then after stating his guess in Chapter VII, he added, “Such is our guess of the secret of the sphynx.” On 5 April 1890, almost two years after he had put his manuscript aside, Jem wrote to him from Egypt: “I am now passing a few days on the edge of the desert & directly at the base of the Great Pyramid. It is by far the most stupendous structure I have ever seen, and the Sphinx is more imposing than I ever thought possible…. no calm that living man can experience approaches the sublime sweet god-like serenity of the sphinx under the full moon.” Although Peirce’s Sphinx was no doubt the one of Greek mythology, Jem’s letter would have moved him, and it must have been difficult not to take up his manuscript again; but he was working on “Logic and Spiritualism” for The Forum, and was still hard