The Merely Symbolic

Abstract

This volume owes its identity to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. So, too, in its way, does the controversy to which I want to draw attention. On the one hand, Peirce has taught us to regard a social system as a system of signs, and so as composed of events whose consequences or significance is never restricted to their particularity or, more generally, to their causal implications. On the other hand, Peirce and his pragmatist colleagues have led us to the view that it is only the particularity, the cash value, of events that count. American social policy makers are notorious in their respect for the bottom line. More technically the signs which are the substance of their conflicts are allowed to have only consequential significance. And although nothing could be more unfair to Peirce than the charge that he took only what he called “thirdness” seriously, this view does reflect a strain in Peirce.