Charles Sanders Peirce - Philosophy: Metaphysics

Philosophy: Metaphysics

Some noted articles

• The Monist Metaphysical Series (1891–93)
  • The Architecture of Theories (1891)
  • The Doctrine of Necessity Examined (1892)
  • The Law of Mind (1892)
  • Man's Glassy Essence (1892)
  • Evolutionary Love (1893)
• Immortality in the Light of Synechism (1893 MS)

Peirce divided metaphysics into (1) ontology or general metaphysics, (2) psychical or religious metaphysics, and (3) physical metaphysics.

Ontology. Peirce was a Scholastic Realist, declaring for the reality of generals as early as 1868. Regarding modalities (possibility, necessity, etc.), he came in later years to regard himself as having wavered earlier as to just how positively real the modalities are. In his 1897 "The Logic of Relatives" he wrote:

I formerly defined the possible as that which in a given state of information (real or feigned) we do not know not to be true. But this definition today seems to me only a twisted phrase which, by means of two negatives, conceals an anacoluthon. We know in advance of experience that certain things are not true, because we see they are impossible.

Peirce retained, as useful for some purposes, the definitions in terms of information states, but insisted that the pragmaticist is committed to a strong modal realism by conceiving of objects in terms of predictive general conditional propositions about how they would behave under certain circumstances.

Psychical or Religious Metaphysics. Peirce believed in God, and characterized such belief as founded in an instinct explorable in musing over the worlds of ideas, brute facts, and evolving habits — and it is a belief in God not as an actual or existent being (in Peirce's sense of those words), but all the same as a real being. In "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" (1908), Peirce sketches, for God's reality, an argument to a hypothesis of God as the Necessary Being, a hypothesis which he describes in terms of how it would tend to develop and become compelling in musement and inquiry by a normal person who is led, by the hypothesis, to consider as being purposed the features of the worlds of ideas, brute facts, and evolving habits (for example scientific progress), such that the thought of such purposefulness will "stand or fall with the hypothesis"; meanwhile, according to Peirce, the hypothesis, in supposing an "infinitely incomprehensible" being, starts off at odds with its own nature as a purportively true conception, and so, no matter how much the hypothesis grows, it both (A) inevitably regards itself as partly true, partly vague, and as continuing to define itself without limit, and (B) inevitably has God appearing likewise vague but growing, though God as the Necessary Being is not vague or growing; but the hypothesis will hold it to be more false to say the opposite, that God is purposeless. Peirce also argued that the will is free and (see Synechism) that there is at least an attenuated kind of immortality.

Physical Metaphysics. Peirce held the view, which he called objective idealism, that "matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws". Peirce asserted the reality of (1) absolute chance (his tychist view), (2) mechanical necessity (anancist view), and (3) that which he called the law of love (agapist view), echoing his categories Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, respectively. He held that fortuitous variation (which he also called "sporting"), mechanical necessity, and creative love are the three modes of evolution (modes called "tychasm", "anancasm", and "agapasm") of the cosmos and its parts. He found his conception of agapasm embodied in Lamarckian evolution; the overall idea in any case is that of evolution tending toward an end or goal, and it could also be the evolution of a mind or a society; it is the kind of evolution which manifests workings of mind in some general sense. He said that overall he was a synechist, holding with reality of continuity, especially of space, time, and law.