Content uploaded by Mark Migotti
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Mark Migotti on Jul 05, 2019
Content may be subject to copyright.
Canadian Journal of Philosophy
Review
Reviewed Work(s): Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism by Christopher Hookway
Review by: Mark Migotti
Source:
Canadian Journal of Philosophy,
Vol. 34, No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 287-310
Published by: Canadian Journal of Philosophy
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40232217
Accessed: 05-07-2019 21:38 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Canadian Journal of Philosophy
is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to
Canadian Journal of Philosophy
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Critical Notice
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 287
Volume 34, Number 2, June 2004, pp. 287-310
CHRISTOPHER HOOKWAY, Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism. Oxford:
Oxford University Press 2000. Pp. viii+313.
Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism [TRP] presents the fruits of Christopher
Hookway's thinking about the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce
since the publication of Peirce in 1985. Unlike the earlier work, this 'does
not pretend to be a general introduction to Peirce's philosophy [but] ...
deals [instead] with a range of important and central issues in more detail
than was possible in that volume' (v).1 As his title indicates, Hookway's
chief aim is to articulate pragmatism's most promising ideas about the
nature of truth and rationality - well, as just noted, for 'pragmatism'
read 'Peirce'; but the wording of the title is not inappropriate given the
regular use of James and Dewey as foils for interpreting Peirce.
Eight of the book's twelve chapters are based on previously published
work, while four appear in print for the first time. Three of these new
chapters, containing the most recent material in the volume, are con-
cerned with Peirce's ideas about truth, and in particular with the pro-
vocative thesis that inquiry well conducted in the indefinitely lone run
1 Page references in parentheses without further qualification are to Truth, Rationality
and Pragmatism. References to works by Peirce are made according to the following
key: The Collected Papers edited by Hartshorne and Weiss (volumes 1-6) and Burke
(volumes 7-8) are referred to by volume number followed by paragraph number;
Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, edited by Fisch, Houser, Kloesel
et. al. as W followed by volume and page number; The Essential Peirce, Volume 1
edited by Houser and Kloesel, Volume 2 by the Peirce Edition Project, as EP followed
by volume and page number; Reasoning and the Logic of Things, edited by Ketner and
Putnam, as RLT followed by page number; and the Annotated Catalogue of the Papers
of Charles S. Peirce, edited by Robin, as MS followed by manuscript number of the
Robin catalogue.
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
288 MarkMigotti
is, not just likely, but destined to yield whatever truth there is concerning
its subject matter. The remaining nine chapters deal with one aspect or
another of a nexus of issues about the nature of inquiry and its objects;
three of them, by my count, deal with issues in metaphysics, specifically,
Peirce's ideas about design and chance (chapter 6), about the relationship
between science and metaphysics (chapter 7), and about God (chapter
11), and the other six with the character of theoretical inquiry and its
place within human affairs generally.
Hookway rightly holds that 'many of the issues raised in Peirce's
papers are of continuing philosophical importance' (20), and he is
throughout the book characteristically successful at weaving scholarly
work on what-Peirce-said-when-and-why-he-said-it together with
philosophical reflection on what we can learn from his best ideas. In what
follows, I will not try to comment on the full gamut of topics dealt with
in TRP, but will instead subject two lines of argument to close scrutiny.
I will take up, in order, Hookway's interpretation of Peirce's theory of
truth, where I will focus on the problem of what Peirce called iDuried
secrets/ and his interpretation of Peirce's conception of the relationship
between theory and practice, where I will focus on the relationship
between the pursuit of truth and the making of 'vitally important'
decisions.
Truth
As Hookway notes at the outset, Peirce's lir-thought about truth is that
'inquiring well and responsibly will take us to [it]' (1-2). In 1878, in the
second paper of a six part series entitled 'Illustrations in the Logic of
Science,' Peirce proposed a test for clarifying the intellectual or cognitive
significance of concepts, the Pragmatic Maxim,2 which, when applied to
the concept of truth, allegedly delivers, not just the relatively uncon-
troversial contention that well-conducted inquiry is our best hope of
getting at the truth, but the provocative thesis that such inquiry (in the
indefinitely long run) must arrive at the truth. Critics have scoffed ever
since, objecting that, to put it in a 17th century way, the view can be
defended only on the assumption of a kind of 'preestablished harmony'
2 The maxim, or 'rule for attaining the third grade of apprehension [of ideas]/ is this:
'Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we con-
ceive the objects of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is
the whole of our conception of the object' (5.4O2/EP1:132).
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Critical Notice of Christopher Hookway Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism 289
between the human mind and the world it seeks to understand;3 in
mid^O^ century jargon, self-styled metaphysical realists find in Peirce's
theory a fatal taint of verificationism, in consequence of which, they
argue, the product is as unsound as the Viennese wares taken off the
philosophical market some five decades ago; and more recently still,
deflationists about truth such as Paul Horwich and Scott Soames argue
(in their different ways) that 'truth is not a contentious metaphysical or
epistemological notion/ a 'successful analysis' of which should T^e laden
with controversial philosophical consequences' (Soames [1999], 229).
Hookway and I think better of Peirce's idea. We are convinced that the
pragmaticist4 method of clarifying concepts is useful, and that we learn
something important when we appreciate the intimate connection be-
tween the notion of truth and the notion of a certain 'activity of thought,'
inquiry, 'by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a foreor-
dained goal' (5.407/EP 138). In genuine inquiry we aim at truth - this
much is mere verbal definition, a piece of lexicography rather than
philosophy; and truth is the 'foreordained goal' of genuine inquiry in the
indefinitely long run, not only its desired destination but its ultimate
destiny - this is the Peircean thesis purportedly rich in philosophical
insight. But what exactly is the nature of this latter, philosophically
pregnant connection between truth and the destined upshot of inquiry?
If it is supposed to be a strict conceptual identity, the thesis seems plainly
open to the objection that there are 'many facets of reality which will be
forever hidden from us, no matter how long and carefully we carry out
our inquiries' (51). If something is hidden from us forever, it will not be
the subject of agreement on the part of inquirers, no matter how pro-
longed and industrious their efforts; but then there is truth that cannot
be accounted for by reference to the fated ultimate agreement of inves-
tigators. This is the problem of buried secrets, much discussed in recent
work on Peirce's account of truth.5
One way with the difficulty, canvassed in Hookway's second chapter
'Truth and the Convergence of Opinion,' is to change the grammatical
3 Peirce does suggest, in his 1870 review of Fraser's edition of Berkeley's works that
the avoidance of any 'improportion between the mind and the thing in itself is a
philosophical desideratum (8.30/EPl:100).
4 'Pragmaticism' was coined by Peirce in 1905 in order to distinguish his version of
pragmatism from those of William James and F.C.S. Schiller (see 5.414/EP2: 334-5).
Though it has not yet been put to very wide use, I think that the neologism meets
the stylistic desideratum of a one- word abbreviation for Teircean pragmatism/
Hence my regular employment of it in what follows.
5 See, for example, Misak (1991), ch. 6; Migotti (1999); DeWaal (1999).
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
290 MarkMigotti
mood in the phrase 'the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed
to by all who investigate' from the indicative to the subjunctive, so that
what Peirce is really identifying with the truth is 'the opinion which
would be - or would have been - ultimately agreed to by all who were to
investigate - or could have investigated/6 This seems to make the exist-
ence of truths beyond the reach of any actual inquiry irrelevant to
Peirce's theory; and since he repeatedly drew attention to the importance
of construing the pragma ticist principle of clarifying ideas subjunctively,
one might conclude that this how Peirce proposed to solve the problem.7
Hookway doubts that a subjunctive reading of the provocative thesis
will dispose of the problem of buried secrets because, first, it leaves
untouched the especially thorny case of states of affairs that could be
inspected only at the cost of destroying them,8 and second 'it is hard to
see how we should interpret the relevant counterfactuals to deal with
propositions about the remote reaches of space or about times before any
minds or inquirers existed' (55). 9 He maintains moreover that Peirce's
reasons for insisting that the pragmatic maxim and the provocative
thesis about truth be read subjunctively have to do, not with the problem
of buried secrets, but with the relationship between dispositions and
their manifestations. Hookway denies, for example, that buried secrets
are on Peirce's mind in the following passage from 1905, in which he
6 I see no way that a subjunctive reading of the pragmatic maxim could permit the
crucial reference to a fated agreement, and this seems to me to provide another
reason such a reading cannot be the last word on the subject.
7 As the following manuscript note from 1872 indicates, Peirce was aware of the
distinction between an indicative and a subjunctive reading of the idea behind the
pragmatic maxim very early on: 'Thus we find the physicists, the exactest of
thinkers, holding in regard to those things which they have studied most exactly,
that their existence depends on their manifestations or rather on their manifestability.
We have only to extend this concept to all real existence and to hold these two facts
to be identical, namely that they exist and that sufficient investigation would lead
to a settled belief in them ...' (MS 204, emphasis added). I am grateful to Rosa
Mayorga for the reference.
8 These are what C.B. Martin (1994) might call 'finkishly' hidden facts. Hookway
refers readers to Shope (1978) for an exposition of the so-called 'conditional fallacy'
allegedly inherent in proposals to analyze the meaning of a class of categorical
statement in terms of the truth of certain subjunctive conditional statements.
9 Cheryl Misak argues that another reason for doubting that Peirce himself would
have been satisfied with a subjunctive solution to the problem of buried secrets is
that it is too powerful; it removes the problem so effortlessly as to call into question
the idea that truth has been linked to inquiry in a philosophically illuminating way
(see Misak (1991), 153-4).
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Critical Notice of Christopher Hookway Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism 291
appears to recant a bold claim made in 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear/
the paper that includes the original published formulations of the prag-
matic maxim and the provocative thesis:
The article of 1878 ["How to ..."] endeavoured to gloze over [the ontological status
of possibilities] ....as unsuited to the exoteric public addressed; or perhaps the writer
wavered in his own mind. He said that if a diamond were to be formed in a bed of
cotton wool, and were to be consumed there without ever having been pressed upon
by any hard edge or point, it would be merely a question of nomenclature whether
that diamond should be said to have been hard or not. No doubt this is true, except
for the abominable falsehood in the word merely, implying that symbols are unreal.
Nomenclature involves classification; and classification is true or false, and the
generals to which it refers are either reals in the one case, or figments in the other
(5.453/EP2:354).
In Hookway's view, Peirce regrets his unfortunate 'merely/ not be-
cause it raises the problem of buried secrets, but because it suggests that
there is only a verbal difference between the ordinary, true, and scien-
tifically important claim that all diamonds are hard and, for example,
the perverse claim that they are all soft until tested for hardness or the
incredible claim that they are all hard except that singular one mentioned
above, formed in cotton wool and consumed without being tested for
hardness (55-6). A subjunctive strategy solves this problem by making
hardness a matter of what would happen were suitable tests applied (or
what would have happened had such tests been made). When the prag-
maticist explains hardness in this way, the ordinary claim about dia-
monds being hard is correctly deemed true, while the other two are
correctly deemed false, there being no reason to think that testing for
hardness does anything to produce hardness, or that a diamond that
happens never to leave a bed of cotton wool is idiosyncratic in respect
of hardness.
In fact, Hookway argues, Peirce was not especially preoccupied by the
problem of buried secrets, and given the aims of his pragmaticism he
was right to give it short shrift (45, 59). As heirs of the century of
philosophical work that has taken place since Peirce's death, we tend to
think that this problem looms larger than it needs to because we assume
that the dispute between some sort of verificationist 'anti-realism' -
according to which reality and truth are, as such and by nature, discov-
erable - and some sort of realist anti-verificationism that denies this -
or at any rate insists on the radical independence of truth and reality
from anything to do with human attempts to fathom them - is of the
very first importance. But, suggests Hookway, albeit more by intimation
than explicit statement, we have not in fact made as much progress on
the fundamental issues as is usually assumed. For all the logical ad-
vances of the past century, Peirce's basic approach to the theory of truth,
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
292 MarkMigotti
refreshingly innocent of today's less than pellucid opposition between
realism and anti-realism, remains defensible.
By way of a framework for displaying the virtues of Peirce's outlook,
Hookway distinguishes three different aims that a theory of truth might
have.10 Inquiry into the notion or nature of truth might, he writes, be
seeking:
1. 'an account of the meaning of the word "true" and its equivalents' (44).
or
2. 'an account of the normative role of the concept of truth in assessing beliefs and
assertions or keeping track of the progress of our investigations' (ibid.).
or
3. 'some heavy-duty metaphysics designed to provide deep philosophical explana-
tions of the relations between thought and reality' (ibid.).
Occasional indications to the contrary notwithstanding, Hookway
maintains, Peirce's provocative thesis about truth is not intended to
perform the first of these tasks. Since it is not meant to be entered in the
'A sentence S is true iff ' fill-in-the-blank competition, it is no mark
against it that it does not fare well in this role, with respect to which
Hookway appears satisfied with 'a minimalist or redundancy theory of
some kind' (80). And though pragmaticism's account of truth naturally
'gives rise to metaphysical questions about the mode of being of the
objects of [inquiry]/ it is in itself, argues Hookway, 'metaphysically
neutral' (ibid.).
According to Hookway, the pragmaticist account of truth responds to
the second of the three theoretical needs identified above, it is meant to
shed light on 'the normative role of the concept of truth.' Beyond what
we learn about truth from minimalist accounts in the manner of Frank
Ramsey, the later Wittgenstein, or Paul Horwich,11 the 'destined upshot'
conception of truth 'links the normative function of the concept to the
fact that in forming a belief or making an assertion we are aware of the
possibility that a subsequent "better" opinion may force us to reconsider
our current view' (77). Epistemically responsible belief and assertion, in
other words, require a commitment to the abandonment of current belief
and the retraction of current assertion in the face of a balance of evidence
turned decisively against them. Since nothing evidence-transcendent
could be a part of the future evidence that already has a potential claim
10 This tripartite distinction seems closely to resemble those of Kirkham (1992) and
Frapolli (1996).
11 Hookway 's list from page 97.
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Critical Notice of Christopher Hookway Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism 293
on our attention as believers, asserters, and inquirers, nothing evidence-
transcendent, according to Peirce as Hookway reads him, can play a role
in the context of belief, assertion, or inquiry; so 'it is no loss that the
[Peircean] pragmatist clarification assigns [to a proposition known to be
verification-transcendent] no content that could be relevant to inquiring
into it' (61).
In Hookway's hands, then, Peirce's provocative thesis appears to be
the claim that //something is inquired into, then the truth about it is to
be identified as that opinion 'which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by
all who investigate.'12 And if something is not inquired into, the prag-
maticist need not provide an account of what its truth or falsity might
consist in; things not inquired into simply fall outside the scope of the
theory. Of propositions whose subjects are events that may or may not
have occurred sufficiently long ago that it would now be impossible to
determine whether they occurred or not, and whose predicates are
whatever you like, we can safely say that they have become verification-
transcendent, and belief in propositions of this sort 'is not a rational
option' (61). '[Peircean] pragmatist clarifications of concepts,' writes
Hookway, 'are attempts to explain what is involved in (or what commit-
ments would result from) believing or asserting that the concept applies
to something' (ibid.): ergo, the pragmaticist clarification of truth cannot
- and need not - say anything one way or the other about verifica-
tion - transcendent truth. This, if I have understood him correctly, is the
nub of Hookway's denial that buried secrets pose any grave threat to
Peirce's provocative thesis about truth. I find it open to objection.
Consider the following claim, U: Much that goes on in the universe
goes unattended (by anyone). The truth of U would explain the existence
of buried secrets, for a typical buried secret is simply something that was
not attended to way back when and cannot be unearthed for attention
now.13 And, true or not, U is believed by virtually everyone, or at least by
Peirce and Hookway and you and me. Buried secrets only pose a problem
for Peirce's theory of truth on the assumption that they exist. So U cannot
be verification-transcendent by Hookway's lights, since if it were, he
would have to conclude that believing it is not a rational option. But how
is it that evidence can speak in favour of U? Its logical form is 'Much F is
12 In Hookway's words, the thesis relevant to the present discussion is expressed as
follows: 'Any evidence that a proposition would not be the object of a stable
long-run consensus among competent inquirers should be taken as evidence that
the proposition is not true' (80).
13 I owe the suggestion that buried or lost facts are a sub-class of unattended facts to
Ali Kazmi.
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
294 MarkMigotti
G,' and the customary way of providing evidence in support of quantifi-
cations of this sort, producing some F that is G, will not do for it. What can
count in favour of the truth of U are states of affairs that themselves
constitute or include evidence of earlier, causally related but wholly
unattended states of affairs, as when my dead plants are exhibit A in
support of the claim that Jones did not water them while I was away, and
when the rampant accumulation of dust in the apartment indicates that
the plants were not so much as looked at over the course of my vacation.
This explanation of the plausibility of U makes the problem of buried
secrets look less distant from the problem of distinguishing epistemically
good generalizations from perverse and incredible ones than Hookway
seems to think. I suspect, in fact, that Hookway's interpretation of the
point of the unscratched diamond example rests on a false dichotomy.
He argues that since the example is aimed at the second of the two
problems just named, it is not aimed at the first. I take it to be aimed at
both at once.14 For my dead plants can constitute evidence for their
unwatered-and-otherwise-unattended existence during the time I was
away only on the assumption that plants do not pop out of existence
when not attended to and back into existence when observed. So the task
of distinguishing 'there are unattended facts' from 'facts become actual
only when and insofar as they are attended to' is recognizably akin, if
not identical, to that of distinguishing 'diamonds are hard' from 'dia-
monds are soft until tested, at which point their hardness increases in
proportion to the pressure with which they are scratched' (56).
It would be surprising if this affinity between the problem of distin-
guishing valid from perverse generalizations and the problem of buried
secrets had not been noticed by Peirce himself. So it is reassuring to turn
back to 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' and read that the fact that 'there
are gems at the bottom of the sea, flowers in the untraveled desert, etc.
are propositions which, like that about a diamond being hard when it is not
pressed, concern much more the arrangement of our language than they
do the meaning of our ideas' (5.409 /EP1: 140, emphasis added).
Since both the problem of buried secrets and the problem of distin-
guishing valid from perverse generalizations have to do with the rela-
tionship between singular facts and events on the one hand and laws,
patterns, and generalizations on the other, a philosopher's treatment of
them will be strongly influenced, if not determined outright, by his
position on the dispute between nominalist and realist views of this
14 More precisely, I take the example to be perfectly well suited for double duty of the
suggested sort. I am not claiming that Peirce consciously thought of it in just the
same way.
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Critical Notice of Christopher Hookway Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism 295
relationship. From, at the latest, the publication in 1868 of his so-called
'cognition series' of papers in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Peirce
was convinced both of the depth and importance of this dispute and of
the superiority of the realist alternative. Nominalism, in his view, is
seductive but false; realism subtle and true.
Though Hookway devotes due attention in TRP to the role played by
Peirce's quite distinctive conception of the dispute between realists and
nominalists in the character and development of his thought, it is unfor-
tunate that he nowhere takes up its bearing on the problem of buried
secrets. He knows, of course, that Peirce regarded the pragmaticist
account of meaning and truth as intimately bound up with a commit-
ment to the reality of 'natural classes' (8.12/EP1:88) from the very
beginning. But he thinks that not until the 1880s, when he recognized
that 'reference to external things is primarily indexical or demonstrative'
(108), was Peirce able finally to put forward a coherent form of realism.
I think better of Peirce's earlier position.
Here is an early statement of the difference between the nominalist
and the realist views of reality as Peirce understood it:
Where is the real, the thing independent of how we think it, to be found? There must
be such a thing, for we find our opinions constrained; there is something, therefore,
which influences our thoughts, and is not created by them.... This thing out of the
mind, which directly influences sensation, and through sensation, thought, because
it is out of the mind, is independent of how we think it, and is, in short, the real.
Here is one view of reality, a very familiar one. And from this point of view it is
clear that the nominalistic answer must be given to the question concerning univer-
sals.... [The] other, or realist conception [of reality], if less familiar, is even more
natural and obvious. All human thought and opinion contains an arbitrary, acci-
dental element, dependent on the limitations in circumstance, power, and bent of
the individual; an element of error in short. But human opinion universally tends
in the long run to a definite form, which is the truth.... This final opinion ... is
independent, not indeed of thought in general, but of all that is arbitrary and
individual in thought; is quite independent of how you, or I, or any number of men
think. Everything, therefore, which will be thought to exist in the final opinion is
real, and nothing else (8.12/EP1:89).15
Peirce here virtually identifies the realist conception of reality with the
provocative pragmaticist thesis that truth is the destined upshot of
genuine inquiry. 6 So it is not surprising to find him later declaring that
15 I am inclined to regard the last three words of this passage as unfortunate, on the
grounds that if buried secrets are possible, then so are realities that are not thought
to exist in the final opinion, and I suspect that Hookway would agree with me.
1 6 That there is a very close connection between realism and pragmaticism is suggested
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
296 MarkMigotti
'pragmaticism could hardly have entered a head that was not already
convinced that there are real generals' (5.503). By the time he said this,
1905, he had come to think that one of nominalism's cardinal flaws was
its failure to distinguish between reality and existence: 'reality means a
certain kind of non-dependence on thought, and so is a cognitionary
character, while existence means reaction with the environment, and so
is a dynamic character; ... the two meanings ... are clearly not the same'
(ibid.). In the early 1870s Peirce marked this contrast differently, taking
mind-independence as such to be the generic hallmark of reality and
subdividing the genus into two distinct species: those realities that are
altogether external to the mind on the one hand, and those that are
neither mind-external nor dependent on the vagaries of any particular
mind or collection of minds on the other. Something is external to the
mind if it 'is what it is, whatever our thoughts may be on any subject' (W3
29, emphasis added); something is real, but not mind-external, if it is
what it is 'independent of how we may think or feel about it'
(8.13/EP1:9O), emphasis in original).
Truth, on the pragmaticist account, is a reality of this second sort. Qua
opinion, it is not external to mind; but qua final opinion, the destined
upshot of the ongoing investigations of the community of inquirers, it is
nonetheless a reality, in no way dependent for its identity on what any
particular individual might think it to be (cf. 5.4O5/EP1:137). While
realism, according to Peirce, is 'highly favorable to a belief in external
realities' (8.13/EP1:9O), just the sort of realities on which the nominalist
focuses exclusively, nominalism cannot account for the knowability of
reality and the accessibility of truth, which means that it makes a
mockery of genuine inquiry, the endeavour to pursue truth and increase
knowledge.17 Realism is favorable to belief in external realities because
the existence of such realities explains why prolonged inquiry tends
necessarily to banish the accidental, arbitrary element of error from the
shared opinions of the community of genuine inquirers. Nominalism is
hard put to explain how reality can be knowable, because it conceives of
a real thing as 'a thing existing independently of all relation to the mind's
conception of it' (8.13/EP1:9O), which makes a real thing something
also by the fact that the 1870 Berkeley review includes an early formulation of the
pragmatic maxim: 'a ... rule for avoiding the deceits of language is this: Do things
fulfil the same function practically? Then let them be signified by the same word?
Do they not? Then let them be distinguished' (8.33/EPl:102).
17 'Indeed, out of a contrite fallibilism combined with a high faith in the reality of
knowledge, and an intense desire to find things out, all my philosophy has always
seemed to me to grow' (1.14).
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Critical Notice of Christopher Hookway Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism 297
'absolutely incognizable in itself (ibid.). That some generals are real,
then, is, according to Peirce, a consequence of pragmaticism because
pragmaticism presupposes that genuine inquiry is possible, and if no
generals were real that possibility would be unintelligible.18
Hookway thinks that until the 1880s Peirce was stymied by the prob-
lem of reconciling the fact that
1 . The real object is what we would believe that object to be if we were to inquire into
it long enough and well enough. (125)
with the fact that
2. The real object of a judgment is always or usually involved in constraining or
producing that judgment through, for example its causal impact on us. (ibid.)
The lurking 'paradox/ as Hookway calls it, is supposed to be brought to
light by considering the following questions: do real objects depend [for
what? MM] on their being stably believed to be such in the indefinitely
long run? Or does the long run stable belief in real objects depend on
them? As my parenthetical interjection is meant to indicate, Peirce's later
distinction between existence and reality reveals an ambiguity in the first
question. If the question is 'do real, existing objects owe their existence,
their ability to interact causally with an environment, to their being
believed to be such in the indefinitely long run?' the answer is 'no, their
external existence is as it is independently of anybody's believing any-
thing.' But if the question is 'do they so depend for their reality' the
pragmaticist-realist answer is 'yes, for reality is "a cognitionary charac-
ter," grounded in the idea of a destined upshot of inquiry/ When we
turn to the second question, does the long run stable belief in real objects
depend on them? The answer is unambiguously 'yes' The l°n8 run
stable belief is not an external reality and does not exist, in the strict
meaning of the term, at all; so there is no ambiguity parallel to that
identified in the first question, and in any case the long run stable opinion
is supposed to take the form it does because independent and externally
existing objects have the characters that they do.19
18 The theory according to which reality is defined by reference to the destined upshot
of inquiry 'is inevitably realistic [...] because general conceptions enter into all
judgments, and therefore into true opinions. Consequently, a thing in the general is
as real as in the concrete7 (8.14/EP1:9O).
19 Paramount among these characters in the present context is 'the power of external
things to affect the senses' (8.12/EP1:89, emphasis deleted) and thereby to ensure
'a general drift in the history of human thought which will lead it to one general
agreement, one catholic consent' (ibid.).
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
298 MarkMigotti
I have, in the preceding paragraph, relied on the mature Peirce's
technical distinction between reality and existence, and I would not, of
course, deny that Peirce made many advances and discoveries over the
course of his long career - about reference, indexicality, and the ultimate
significance of the debate between realism and nominalism among other
things. But I see no unresolved paradox or dissonance in Peirce's 1870
position on the issue at hand. Let it be granted for the sake of argument
that his later philosophy affords him a clearer and deeper explanation of
how it is that externally existing objects can play a role in causing belief
in them to arise and that truth and reality are nevertheless defined by
reference to the destined upshot of inquiry; let us agree that the mature
explanation of this compossibility is more economical in formulation and
more fruitful in consequences than anything available previously. I nev-
ertheless maintain, pace Hookway (cf. 126), that in the Berkeley review
and the aborted Logic Book of the early 1870s Peirce has assembled all the
materials required for a satisfactory account of the matter.
The bearing of all this on the problem of buried secrets is as follows:
buried secrets are possible because human minds can register only a
small portion of all that goes on in the mind-external world; knowledge
is possible because much that goes on there can nevertheless be accu-
rately enough registered by the senses or correctly conjectured or other-
wise validly inferred. And in the indefinitely long run the world cannot
do other than deliver up the truth about that portion of itself investigated
by the ongoing community of genuine inquirers. Thus, in compressed
form, a 'double-aspect' account of Peirce's attempt to integrate meta-
physics and epistemology, to do justice equally to the independence of
truth and reality from thought and to their accessibility to thought.20
To sum up: while Hookway seems to think that pragmaticists can
dismiss the problem of buried secrets with the entirely negative obser-
vation that their doctrine does not entail the claim that 'all truths are
discoverable' (61), I think that we need to go further and provide an
explanation of how U (and its ilk) can be true, one which cannot of course
eviscerate the pragmatic maxim in the process. A remark Peirce makes
immediately after the classic statement of the pragmaticist view of truth
and reality suggests that he would side with me rather than Hookway.
Tt may be said,' admits Peirce, 'that this [pragmaticist] view is directly
opposed to the abstract definition we have given of reality, inasmuch as
it makes the characters of the real to depend on what is ultimately
20 A more detailed account of the view can be found in Migotti 1999. The phrase
'integration of metaphysics and epistemology' was, I understand, coined by Chris-
topher Peacocke.
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Critical Notice of Christopher Hookway Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism 299
thought about them' (5.4O8/EP1:139). Peirce acknowledges here that his
pragmaticist clarifications of truth and reality need to be defended
against the charge that they undermine rather than illuminate the ab-
stract definitions of these concepts. If the charge were to stick, the
application of the pragmatic maxim would not afford us the deepened
understanding of our actual concepts of truth and reality, from which,
as philosophically inclined prospective inquirers, we are supposed to
benefit so substantially, but would instead fob us off with inferior,
anthropocentric replacement concepts. Hookway notes this internal ten-
sion (46-7) but gives it short shrift. I cannot anyway see how limiting
Peirce's theory to the claim that the character of that portion of reality that
comes up for investigation (and that portion only) is dependent on 'the real
fact that investigation is destined to lead, at last, if continued long
enough, to a belief in it' (ibid.) rebuts the objection Peirce himself raises
or solves the problem of buried secrets.
Theory and Practice, or
'Philosophy and the Conduct of Life'
I turn now to Peirce's views on the relationship between 'the project of
pure inquiry'21 and the rest of life.
Unable in the space available to do justice to the welter of topics
involved, I will raise some questions about Hookway's interpretation of
Peirce's view of this relationship by examining closely the argument of
his opening chapter, 'Belief, Confidence, and the Method of Science.'
This paper takes as its point of departure the striking anomaly that
Peirce, the founder of pragmatism - the chief point of which, one
would have thought, was to place action and belief at the centre of the
philosophical stage - can be found, mainly in the 1890s, roundly insist-
ing 'that it [is] unscientific and indeed, improper, for investigators to
believe current scientific results' (21). On the basis of the most extensive
piece in this vein, the first of the eight lectures Peirce gave under the
auspices of the Cambridge Conferences in February and March of 1898,
Thomas Nagel is prompted to declare that '[f]ar from being a pragma-
tist in the currently accepted sense, [Peirce] seems much more of a
Platonist' (Nagel 1997, 127). You don't need to be a regular reader of The
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society to want to know what is going
on.
In the first section of 'Belief, Confidence ...' Hookway brings the
interpretive problem into relief: in the 1890s, especially in 'Philosophy
21 To use Bernard Williams' phrase.
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
300 MarkMigotti
and the Conduct of Life/22 the Cambridge Conference lecture mentioned
above, Peirce contends that 'there is ... no proposition at all in science
which answers to the conception of belief (1.635/RLT:112); in the 1860s
and 70s, especially in 'The Fixation of Belief/ the first of the 'Illustrations
in the Logic of Science' series of 1878/9, he had (a) defined inquiry as 'a
struggle to attain a state of belief [caused by] the irritation of doubt'
(admitting nonetheless 'that this is sometimes not a very apt designa-
tion') and (b) insisted emphatically that: 'the sole object of inquiry [so
understood] is the settlement of opinion' (5.374/EPl:114).
Turning in the second section of the paper to the thesis that science has
no place for the concept of belief, Hookway concludes that Peirce did not
mean to insist that it is wrong tout court for a scientist to believe that a
scientific result is true, but only to deny that scientific inquiry should
ever issue in 'full belief (30). Full belief, 'belief (in the proper and usual
sense)/ says Hookway, 'will always have causes over and above any
reasons we may have for holding if (ibid.). Prominent among such
non-rational causes will be sentiment and instinct, neither of which,
according to 'Philosophy and Conduct/ should be allowed 'any weight
whatsoever in theoretical matters, not the slightest' (1.634/RLT 111). But
Peirce does explicitly grant that the 'accepted propositions [of science]'
are opinions, and an opinion, presumably, is a belief in some sense or to
some degree. According to Hookway, opinions, in this technical sense,
are 'beliefs about which we are tentative or uncommitted, in which case
the grip of the causal processes which have transformed scientific assent
into (weak) belief will not be strong enough to inhibit the further opera-
tion of rational self-control' (31-2). So the 'Philosophy and Conduct'
position is not quite as hopeless as one might have feared.
Turning next to 'The Fixation of Belief/ Hookway argues that the
exclusion of the concept of belief from science, and therefore the tension
between this exclusion and the thesis that inquiry aims at nothing but
belief, is 'prefigured' in the earlier essay itself. According to Hookway,
'Fixation' is riven by two 'competing argumentative strategies' that
Peirce at the time 'could not bring ... together into a coherently structured
whole' (32). Sometimes it appears that Peirce thinks the scientific method
of belief fixation, the method of observation and reasoning, to be
uniquely sustainable because it alone 'provides a non-accidental source
for our opinions [in the realm of external things "upon which our
thinking has no effect"], thereby assuring us that any settled belief it
provides will be truly stable' (34). But sometimes he can be read as
22 Henceforth cited in the text as, 'Philosophy and Conduct/
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Critical Notice of Christopher Hookway Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism 301
seeking to establish the more promising thesis that the method of science
is to be employed only with respect to matters 'that are subjected to
reflective rational monitoring and control' (36).
The paper's fourth section on belief and scientific assent broaches the
idea that Peirce's considered position is that science is grounded not in
faith but in hope. This proposal is found wanting, first because it does
not resolve the internal tension, as it is hard to see how a mere hope could
justify the claim that one who chooses the scientific method of fixing
belief (as his 'logical bride' no less!) 'knows that he has made the right
choice' (5.387/EP1 123, emphasis added),23 and second because hope is
too tenuous an attitude, practically speaking, 'to motivate someone to ...
contribute to scientific activity' (40). In the fifth section, 'Confidence: The
Life of Science,' Hookway first marshals the considerations which, he
thinks, mandate the disappointing conclusion that neither in 'Fixation'
nor in 'Philosophy and Conduct' did Peirce provide a satisfactory an-
swer to the question 'How can we have the confidence in our contribu-
tions which is required if we are to be able to make a serious commitment
to the life of science?' (42), and then reassures us that 'a number of themes
prominent in Peirce's thought after 1900 contribute to a more sophisti-
cated understanding of the "practice of theoretical science'" (ibid.).
This last idea implies that Peirce's philosophy progressed over time,
reaching its zenith in the final decade or so of his life. Hookway endorses
the first claim explicitly and the second implicitly. In his Introduction,
he invites us to 'look at the development of Peirce's thought [in a way
that] ... reflects his own ideas about inquiry' (17). At any particular
juncture, that is, Peirce espouses a congeries of more or less integrated
views. Time passes, and some of these views are disturbed - by, as it
might be, a surprising discovery, or a difficulty unearthed in the process
either of tracing out the consequences of the present 'system,' or of trying
to improve its scope or integrity. Disturbance calls for refinement at least,
and sometimes for outright recantation. In sum: '[the] history of Peirce's
thought is the history of ... new doubts that emerged and ... new ideas
that were employed to settle them' (ibid.).
Hookway discusses 'Philosophy and Conduct' with almost palpable
embarrassment. He regards the thesis that science has no room for the
concept of belief as so implausible on the face of it that one could be
forgiven for dismissing its appearance as 'a temporary lapse from philo-
sophical good sense' (23), and he finds the piece to be shot through with
'exaggerated rhetoric' (29) and marred (a) by argumentation that 'leads
23 The passage is from the final paragraph of 'Fixation/
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
302 MarkMigotti
to ... implausible claims about applied science' (ibid.) and (b) by an
adventitious admixture of Peirce's 'conservative distaste for allowing
any role for rational reflection in practical or political matters' (24). It is
this distaste, Hookway supposes, that leads Peirce to adopt the demon-
strably false view that scientific reasoning has no place in matters of vital
importance.
It is true that the circumstances surrounding the composition of 'Phi-
losophy and Conduct' did not bode well. Peirce had little more than a
month in which to write the lecture, and was more or less assigned his
topic by William James, at whose benevolent instigation the lecture
series had been arranged. On December 18th 1897, Peirce sent James a
synopsis of the eight lectures he proposed to deliver. The opening
discourse, entitled 'Logical Graphs/ was to introduce the audience to 'a
novel method of treating formal logic including the logic of relatives'
(RLT 19). Responding four days later, James admonished Peirce to 'be a
good boy and think a more popular plan out,' remarking as well that 'the
lectures need not by any means form a continuous whole. Separate topics
of a vitally important character would do perfectly well' (RLT 25, emphasis
in original). But however excusable some loose ends, even some stretches
of less than water tight reasoning, would have been, what Peirce came
up with is, I believe, as carefully crafted and searching a piece of
philosophy as any in his corpus. So far from being anomalous, the lecture
seems to me to provide strong evidence for the claim that Peirce's oeuvre
bears throughout the stamp of 'a completely determinate philosophical
sensibility.'24
As we have seen, Hookway's attempt to put the best face possible on
'Philosophy and Conduct' takes the lecture to be concerned chiefly with
'a distinction between "full belief," which is linked to action and the
"vital" concerns of life, and "scientific belief" (or "assent"), which is not'
(26). On this, the most charitable interpretation in the offing, the burden
of the piece is to establish that the method of science must be used
whenever (but only whenever) we reason deliberately and systemati-
cally, thereby aspiring to exercise 'full rational self-control' (37) over our
... well, not over our full beliefs of course, but perhaps over our 'opinions'
in the technical sense noted above. The converse claim that 'it [is] wrong
to trust theory or scientific reflection in connection with "vitally impor-
tant matters," [which] ... should be settled with aid of instinct [and]
sentiment' (14) is treated as an ill-advised corollary to the thesis that links
science to self-control in a way that excludes full belief from both.
24 To use a phrase of Nietzsche's from a letter to Georg Brandes of 8 January 1888
(Nietzsche (1986), 228). Nietzsche was attributing such a sensibility to himself.
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Critical Notice of Christopher Hookway Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism 303
Hookway's objection to Peirce's claim that instinct, sentiment, com-
mon-sense, and tradition do or should hold exclusive sway over vitally
important affairs takes the form of a constructive dilemma. Assume that
'[among] the most pressing vital questions confronting an individual are
those about what fundamental ends to adopt: which projects should we
allow to give shape and meaning to our lives?' (41). Now, either self-con-
trolled rational inquiry can or should be employed in deliberations
between two or more competing fundamental projects, or it can not or
should not be so employed. In the first, positive, alternative 'Peirce [is]
wrong to deny [the] relevance [of self-controlled rational inquiry] to vital
questions' (41); in the second, negative, one, since the life of scientific
inquiry can be among the fundamental projects between which such an
individual might need to choose, and since, on the hypothesis in ques-
tion, sentiment and instinct will determine whether a given individual
embraces or refuses this form of life, 'Peirce's denial that sentiment and
instinct have a role in science is compromised' (ibid.). Q.E.D.
This argument is invalid and rests on a false assumption. To begin with
the first point, the inference from 'in choosing science over other walks of
life we are "guided by sentiment and instinct'" to 'sentiment and instinct
have a role in science' is a non sequitur. What follows from the premiss
in question is the conclusion that sentiment and instinct have a role to
play in bringing people to science, in prompting them to commit them-
selves to it, not that they have a similar role to play in the activity itself,
in what they do when they carry out their commitment.
Attentive readers of TRP may think that this objection is rebutted by
Hookway's assumption that 'once we have adopted the "life of science,"
decisions about which disciplines to work in, which specialties to enter,
and which problems to tackle produce vital dilemmas which are not
wholly solved by reference to the exigencies of funding' (42). But there
are two interlocking reasons for thinking that Peirce would not have
accepted this thesis. The first is that he says so: 'nothing is vital for
science, nothing can be' (RLT 112, first emphasis in original, second
emphasis added). The second reason will take a bit of explaining.
As Hookway notes (23, n.7), 'Philosophy and Conduct' was written
with James's recently published 'The Will to Believe' in mind. It is
therefore significant that in that essay James makes it plain that as far as
he is concerned questions about 'which [scientific] problems to tackle'
are not questions of vital importance. Here is the proof text, in which
James explicates his technical distinction between a momentous and a
trivial option:
Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North Pole expedition,
your option would be momentous; for this would probably be your only similar
opportunity, and your choice now would either exclude you from the North Pole
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
304 MarkMigotti
sort of immortality altogether or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He
who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried
and failed. Per contra, the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when
the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if it later proves unwise.
Such trivial options abound in the scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live
enough to spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent. But if his
experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for his loss of time, no vital
harm being done. (James [1992], 458-9, emphasis added)
James, then, thinks it evident that decisions about how best to direct
one's time and energy within the scientific life are not vital decisions
properly speaking, not decisions with regard to which vital harms or
benefits are at stake. If Peirce had disagreed with James on this point, we
would expect him to have made this known, to his friend and colleague
and to posterity. Since he never did this, and since his own words quoted
above point in precisely the same direction, we can conclude that Peirce
would follow James in rejecting the claim that 'decisions about ... which
problems [in science] to tackle produce vital dilemmas' (42).
Even granting its key assumption, then, the constructive dilemma
argument against Peirce's firm separation of science from vital affairs
fails. Let me turn now to the assumption. If the adjective 'vital' is taken
in the OED's sense 7c, in which the word means 'paramount, supreme,'
it is probably true that 'the questions of whether to be a scientist or
philosopher, an engineer or surgeon, whether to live contentedly with-
out ambition, and so on, are clearly ... vital questions' (41). Practically
speaking, such questions are fundamental, and therefore paramount in
that answers to more local, superficial questions presuppose answers to
them. But this cannot have been the sense that Peirce had in mind in
'Philosophy and Conduct,' or that James had in 'The Will to Believe.'
In the tour de force with which Peirce concludes a draft version of
'Philosophy and Conduct,' he maintains that 'vitally important facts are
of all truths the veriest trifles' (1.673). If 'vital importance' here meant
'supreme importance,' Peirce would be espousing the incoherent doc-
trine that facts of supreme importance of are of negligible importance.25
It is, if you can forgive the jest, vital to understanding the drift of 'Philoso-
phy and Conduct' to realize that it is shot through with sardonic play -
at the expense of his sponsor, James, his alma mater, Harvard, which had
25 Likewise the formulation of the claim found in the delivered version, that 'once you
become inflated with [the idea that "the Eternal is ... a world, a cosmos, in which
the universe of actual existence is nothing but an arbitrary locus"] vital importance
seems to be a very low kind of importance, indeed' (RLT 121).
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Critical Notice of Christopher Hookway Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism 305
refused to host the event on university property, and, presumably not
least, his audience - on different meanings of the word Vital/
Of the nearly two dozen entries apart from 'paramount, supreme'
listed by the OED for the adjective 'vital/ three seem to me have a bearing
on what Peirce is up to in 'Philosophy and Conduct': the first sense,
'consisting in ... that immaterial force or principle which is present in
living beings or organisms and by which they are animated' (emphasis
added), the fourth, which makes no mention of anything immaterial and
in which 'vital' simply means 'of, pertaining, or relating to, accompany-
ing, or characteristic of life,' and the fifth, labeled 'poetical/ in which it
means 'conferring or imparting life or vigor; invigorating, vitalizing;
life-giving.' Consider now the following passage, in which Peirce sets
out to explain the remarkable statement that vitally important truths are
'the veriest trifles':
For the only vitally important matter is my concern, business, and duty - or yours.
Not in the contemplation of "topics of vital importance" but in those universal
things with which philosophy deals, the factors of the universe, is man to find his
highest occupation. To pursue "topics of vital importance" as the first and best can
lead only to one or other of two terminations - either on the one hand what is called,
I hope not justly Americanism, the worship of business, the life in which the
fertilizing stream of genial sentiment dries up or shrinks to a rill of comic tid-bits,
or else on the other hand to monasticism, sleepwalking in this world with no eye
nor heart except for the other. (1.673)
What unites the 'Wall Street Philistine' (1.668) and the somnambulant
monk is an overweening concern for the good of the individual self, a
preoccupation with their 'concern, business, and duty'; the two types
differ only(!) as to whether their business is rampantly to accumulate
Thread and butter, power and pleasure' (5.382 n.l) or scrupulously and
with due ascetic disdain for bread, butter, power or pleasure to prepare
for eternal beatitude.
By the standards of 'Philosophy and Conduct/ then, vital matters
pertain to the survival or thriving of individual entities, either physical
organisms, or, where appropriate, their immortal animators, immaterial
souls;26 and they require as well an intimation of crisis;27 they arise only
26 Not that Peirce need assume that humans have immortal immaterial souls. The
point, familiar from Pascal's wager, is simply that to anyone who believes they do
have (or 'are') such a thing, its health will be as, indeed more, vital an affair as (or
than) the health of the body.
27 In the delivered version of 'Philosophy and Conduct/ Peirce speaks of 'vital crises'
exactly as many times as he speaks of 'vital importance' (the first letters of which,
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
306 MarkMigotti
in circumstances in which survival or thriving are perceived to be at risk.
This is why in both the final and the draft versions of the lecture, Peirce
harps on the philosophy of religion.
If [he writes in a draft] walking in a garden on a dark night, you were suddenly to hear
the voice of your sister crying to you to rescue her from a villain, would you stop to
reason out the metaphysical question of whether it were possible for one mind to
cause material waves of sound and for another mind to perceive them? If you did, the
problem might probably occupy the remainder of your days. In the same way if a man
undergoes any religious experience and hears the call of his Saviour, for him to halt till
he has adjusted a philosophical difficulty would seem to be an analogous sort of thing,
whether you call it stupid or whether you call it disgusting (1 .655).
When we face an imperative of the form 'do thus or face the conse-
quences/ in other words, or more accurately, when we take ourselves to
face such an imperative, metaphysical reasoning is grotesquely out of
place; whether the crisis one faces pertains to one's this-worldly condi-
tion or one's other-worldly fate is not to the point. When it comes to the
'pot-boiling arts,' says Peirce, (to which, he declares, the philosophy of
religion is 'degraded' if it is regarded as practical), it makes no difference
'whether the pot to be boiled is today's or the hereafter's' (1.670).
So, in the sense of 'vital' that Peirce must have been assuming in
'Philosophy and Conduct,' it is not the case that decisions about careers
or life-occupations are, as such, vital affairs.28 Those who at one point or
another in their lives feel 'called' to this or that occupation or life project29
will likely feel themselves in the grip of a vital question as they decide
presumably in mock deference to James, he puts three times in capitals, and [this
time the whole phrase] once in italics), five in each case. He also speaks once of 'great
crises/ once of 'terrible crises/ twice of Vital matters/ once of Vital interest/ and
once of Vital change/
28 And it is striking that in the Introduction to TRP, Hookway too softens his assump-
tion that career or life-occupation choices are as such vital, writing that one of the
things he wanted to do in 'Belief, Confidence ../ was to 'take ... seriously the thought
that participation in science is itself usually the result of a vital decision, the adoption
of a particular way of life' (15, emphasis added). Unless 'participation' can include
dabbling, to choose the life of science certainly is, as such, to adopt a particular way
of life, or at any rate, a particular walk of life. So the 'usually' here must imply that
while more often than not the decision to pursue science is a vital one, on certain
occasions it might not be. But Hookway says nothing about how to distinguish usual
from unusual cases.
29 And, no doubt equally importantly, called away from their present course of life.
Consider as examples a spiritually frustrated junk bond trader who, hearing the call
of his Saviour, abandons Wall Street for a monastery; or, a more painfully actual
instance, a Palestinian teenager who feels called to volunteer for a suicide mission.
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Critical Notice of Christopher Hookway Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism 307
whether or not to heed the call. But consider a bright, socially conscious
undergraduate wondering whether to go to Law School or do a PhD in
philosophy. Such a favored specimen does not necessarily confront what
James would call a forced option, since some universities offer joint
LLD/PhD programs; and even supposing an option that is forced (as,
for example, a choice between attending grad school in philosophy and
working on behalf of the starving in Benin would seem to be), it need not
be momentous, since 'decisions about fundamental projects can be re-
voked' (41) - our fledgling philosopher can grow sick of the academy
and take up the post in Benin, and our apprentice social reformer can
move in the reverse direction.30
Hookway's frustration with 'Philosophy and Conduct' stems, I think,
from his misprising the lecture's priorities. While he allows that Peirce
'was certainly determined to dissociate himself from those who antici-
pated vital benefit from the study of metaphysics and to urge that a true
scientific spirit should govern work in that discipline' (24), he appears
to regard this theme as relatively inconsequential. I take it to be the main
point of the lecture. Responding to James's 'pragmatic' concern that the
audience not be frightened away by abstruse technicalities on the first
evening, Peirce prefaces the dry stuff with an argument for why it is
indispensable, why philosophy can become a respectable branch of
theoretical inquiry only if it resolutely abjures all pretensions to compe-
tence in the realm of urgent practical questions and forswears all temp-
tation to try to serve any end beyond the pursuit of truth and knowledge.
Suppose that one were to reply as follows to the claim that not all cases
of choosing a way or walk of life count as responses to vital questions in
Peirce's sense: the reasoning must be specious, for whenever any of us
asks ourselves 'How should I live? What should I do with (the rest of)
my life?' and mean it, we thereby and thereupon pose to ourselves a
vitally important question, crisis or no crisis. Let it be granted that to ask
oneself seriously what one should do with (the rest of) one's life is to ask
oneself a vitally important question, as it presumably pertains at least to
one's (perceived) thriving, if not one's very survival. Can one really do
this without thereby creating something very like a crisis for oneself? Is
not a signal respect in which this, let us call it, existential question (what
to do with my life?) differs from the hypothetical question (what might I
do with my life?) the fact that the former cannot be seriously posed
without introducing an element of urgency? If time were not of the
essence, could the existential question grip us in just the way we are
30 Hookway, ironically from my perspective, notes this fact and takes it to speak in
favor of his critique of Peirce (cf. 41-2).
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
308 MarkMigotti
supposing that it can and does? Let us answer these rhetorical questions
'no, yes, and no/ and agree that a sense of crisis is always in the offing
when an existential question is posed in a genuinely practical fashion;
we are thus led to yet stronger grounds for preferring my reading of
'Philosophy and Conduct' to Hookway's.
With regard to departments of inquiry other than philosophy (and
perhaps theology), the claim that theoretical knowledge has nothing
useful to say to people in times of existential crisis seems sound. It is not
even clear to me that we can so much as understand how someone
genuinely unsure about 'what fundamental ends to adopt' could find
her burden lifted, or even lightened, by knowledge gleaned from mathe-
matics, or chemistry, or geology, or history, or .... When it comes to
philosophy, though, we are familiar with a venerable, influential, and
lofty tradition dedicated to the view that the chief point and value of the
activity lies in the help it can be to troubled souls in time of need, just the
tradition, in fact, against which Peirce directs his considerable rhetorical
and dialectical energy in 'Philosophy and Conduct.' Hence the two and
a half page long opening paragraph (RLT 105-7) unfavorably comparing
the typical 'early Greek philosopher' found in the pages of Diogenes
Laertius, who thought that philosophy should 'affect life ... forthwith in
the person and soul of the philosopher himself (ibid. 106), to Aristotle,
who sharply distinguished theoretical science from morals and aesthet-
ics; hence the disparaging portrayal of Boethius in a draft version (1.659);
and hence, finally, the firm pronouncement (from the same draft) that
'philosophy ... is, at its highest valuation, nothing more than a branch of
science' (1.663). If philosophy is understood, as Peirce clearly wants his
audience to understand it, as neither more (nor less) than a branch of
theoretical inquiry, his claim that it is useless in times of vital crisis is
unexceptionable.
Now, Hookway may be wrong about Peirce's priorities in 'Philosophy
and Conduct/ but right in his criticisms of its main argument. Perhaps,
to return to an earlier point, Peirce and James are wrong to deny that
vital questions can arise within science. What difference, after all, is there
between the avowedly momentous decision about whether to accept Dr.
Nansen's offer and the case of an MIT scientist who needs to decide
whether to accept an offer from Cal Tech? Suppose our scientist accepts
the offer, because he believes that his chances of winning a Nobel Prize
will thereby improve substantially, even thought the move brings in its
wake a fractious, disgruntled family. What can James mean by suppos-
ing that this poor soul would be 'quit for the loss of time' should the Cal
Tech project turn out after a decade or so to be a bust? How can it be that
the failure of a scientific research program does not inflict vital harm on
those whose careers are bound up with its success? What James means,
to put it in Aristotelian terms, is that while scientists whose pet ideas end
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Critical Notice of Christopher Hookway Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism 309
up in the scrap heap can certainly be said thereby to suffer vital harm
qua this, that, or the other - qua family member and seeker of the Nobel
Prize, in the case of the scientist imagined above, for example - they are
immune to vital harm qua theoretical inquirer.
When James distinguishes momentous from trivial options, he does
so by means of stipulative definitions. A trivial option as James defines
it is not simply an option with insignificant stakes. Rather, there are three
sufficient conditions for an option to count as trivial in this sense, and
the significance of the stakes is only one of them; the other two are
non-uniqueness and reversibility, and it is in virtue of this last feature
especially that the decisions that arise within the course of theoretical
inquiry, about which hypotheses to test, which questions to ask etc.,
qualify as trivial in the taxonomy of 'The Will to Believe/
James's point is, I contend, also Peirce's point in 'Philosophy and
Conduct':
The scientific man is not [in his capacity as scientific man, MM] in the least wedded
to his conclusions. He risks nothing upon them. He stands ready to abandon one or
all as soon as experience opposes them.... It seems probable that any given propo-
sition [to which no competent man today demurs] will remain for a long time on
the list of propositions to be admitted. Still, it may be refuted tomorrow; and if so,
the scientific man will be glad to have got rid of an error. (RLT 112)
It would be remarkable if Peirce thought that someone who for many
years 'cherished' an hypothesis (of his own devising, say) so intensely
as to have 'made it his companion by day and by night, and given to it
his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake'
(5.393/EPl:127) only to have the hypothesis refuted would be, as a
human being, as a matter of emotional fact, pleased at the turn of events.
Qua the man who gave the better part of his life to the hypothesis and
who very much wanted it to be true, he will be devastated. It is only qua
scientific man that he must find the negative result just as useful and
valuable as a positive one would have been. For a scientific man is
identified as such by his stake, not in this or that turning out to be true,
but simply in turning up the truth, whatever it may be; the 'dominant
passion of his ... soul [is] to find out the truth in some department,
regardless of what the color of that truth may be (7.605).31
31 I would like to thank Cheryl Misak, Tom Short, and Terence Penelhum for helpful
comments on a draft of this notice, and Ali Kazmi and Susan Haack for helpful
comments on draft after draft after draft.
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
310 MarkMigotti
References
De Waal, Cornells. 1999. 'Eleven Challenges to the Pragmatic theory of Truth/ Transactions
of the Charles S. Peirce Society 35, 748-66.
Frapoli, Maria-Jose. 1996. "The Logical Enquiry into Truth/ History and Philosophy of Logic
17, 179-98.
James, William. 1992 (1898). 'The Will to Believe/ in William James: Writings 1878-1899. New
York: Library of America.
Kirkham, R. 1992. Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Martin, C.B. 1994. 'Dispositions and Conditionals/ The Philosophical Quarterly 17, 1-8.
Migotti, Mark. 1999. 'Peirce's Double Aspect Theory of Truth/ in Pragmatism, Canadian
Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume, Cheryl Misak, ed. (Calgary: University
of Calgary Press), 75-108.
Misak, Cheryl. 1991. Peirce and the End of Inquiry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nagel, Thomas. 1997. 77a? Last Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1986. Samtliche Briefe: Band 7. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari,
eds. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
Peirce, C.S. 1931-58. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Volumes 1-6 edited by Charles
Hartshorne, and Paul Weiss, volumes 7-8 by Arthur Burks. (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press).
(Amherst MA: University of Massachusetts Press).
al, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Kloesel, volume 2 by the Peirce Edition Project. (Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press).
Shope, Robert K. 1978. 'The Conditional Fallacy in Contemporary Philosophy/ The Journal
of Philosophy 75, 397-413.
Soames, Scott. 1999. Understanding Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MARKMIGOTTI
University of Calgary
Calgary, AB
Canada T2N1N4
This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on Fri, 05 Jul 2019 21:38:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
