Abstract
In the seminal essay “Pragmatism”, Peirce discusses the end of interpretation in terms of the ultimate logical interpretant, which is varyingly characterized as habit or habit-change. While it is broadly accepted that his conception of pragmatic meaning rests on habit, the precise role of habit-change in his account of conceptual purport has not been examined in detail. In this chapter, I address this issue, which turns out to be closely linked to the pivotal question of the purpose of Peircean pragmatism itself. My primary aim is to demonstrate that Peirce’s pragmatic account of the interpretant surpasses that of mere explication of habitual meaning, something that can be teased out from an embryonic account of three logical interpretants, sketched in “Pragmatism” and supported by certain suggestive references to first, second, and third pragmatistic interpretation in other writings. This investigation not only exposes the hitherto overlooked fact that Peirce recognizes a stage of conceptual clarification beyond that of the ultimate logical interpretant; it also paves the way for a reassessment of the significance of the pragmatist approach within a broader developmental-normative framework aimed at the improvements of our habits.
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Notes
- 1.
In 1905, Peirce designates his own position as “pragmaticism” in order to distinguish it from other forms of pragmatism. It is a “special and limited form of pragmatism, in which the pragmatism is restricted to the determining of the meaning of concepts (particularly of philosophic concepts)” (Supplement to the Century Dictionary 1909; Houser 2010: 112). Thus, this narrower type is still intended to be a part of the larger pragmatist family (CP 8.205–206 [c. 1905]; cf. Houser 2010). In several later writings (e.g., in MS 318), Peirce actually reverts to using the generic name “pragmatism” also for his own position. Although there are often good reasons to underline Peirce’s narrower conception, I will mostly speak of his “pragmatism” in this article, as I feel that the themes to be discussed ultimately pertain to pragmatist thought in a broader sense that is not exclusively Peircean. When referring to Peirce’s theory of signs, I will use the spelling “semiotic” rather than the more idiosyncratic version “semeiotic” (both variants occur frequently in his writings).
- 2.
See the entries for “pragmatism”, “pragmaticism”, and “maxim of pragmatism” in The Commens Dictionary (http://www.commens.org/dictionary). For a more systematic attempt to articulate this dual aspect as objective disposition and agentive resolution, see the reconstructions of the pragmatic maxim in Stango (2015).
- 3.
In “Reason’s Rules” (c. 1902–1903), Peirce actually distinguishes elucidations, understood as “courses of thought calculated to awaken consciousness of beliefs that have always existed”, from arguments, by which he means “courses of thought calculated to create beliefs” (MS 596: 22). This equates elucidation with explication as “Socratic Midwifery”, a process leading to a more distinct apprehension of the conceptions we already entertain. Put differently, explicatory interpretation is a matter of establishing that terms or other symbols are equivalent “incarnations” of an original meaning (W 1: 465 [1866]). Thus, nothing new “can ever be learned by analyzing definitions”; their function is solely to provide intellectual economy by putting existing beliefs into order (W 3: 260 [1878]). Later in this article, I will outline a distinction between explication and elucidation as phases of second-stage clarification.
- 4.
Here, Peirce employs “signification” indistinctly as a synonym for both “interpretant” and “meaning”. In other contexts (e.g., HP 2: 810 [1904]), Peirce delimits “signification” to the image-aspect of meaning, or its “depth”.
- 5.
This aspect of Peirce’s theory on interpretants, most fully developed in MS 318, has received hardly any attention at all. One reason for this neglect is the fact that the relevant text has been badly cut up in the Collected Papers (in 5.481, to be exact), in effect joining completely different portions of the manuscript—and without letting the reader know that Peirce’s discussion of second and third logical interpretant has been omitted. It may also have been taken as just another variant of the three grades of clarity—familiarity, distinctness, and pragmatistic exposition—outlined in many of Peirce’s writings (e.g., W 3: 258–266 [1878]; MS 835 [c. 1895], CP 3.457 [1897]; EP 2: 496–7 [1909]; MS 649: 1–2 [1910]). However, while the 1907 description of the logical interpretants and the better-known account of clearness are closely related, they are not precisely equivalent. The most substantial difference is that Peirce’s identification of three logical interpretants primarily describes the process of deliberation involved in the adoption and modification of habits, rather than degrees of clarity of meaning per se. It should be noted that he explicitly rejects the notion that the grades of clearness would be stages in the sense that a higher grade supersedes a lower one (MS 649: 1–2). Still, when looking at the matter from the point of view of habit-change, it does make sense to speak of phases or stages of an unfolding course of elucidation, as long as it is understood as a cumulative process, where the earlier moments do not lose their relevance along the way.
- 6.
As far as I know, Peirce does not make this connection. It should also be noted that the way I employ the terms “explication” and “elucidation” here does not accord with all of Peirce’s uses. In “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (1908), he distinguishes explication as a primary part of deduction from deductive demonstration or argumentation, which is then divided into corollarial and theorematic reasoning; the first step explicates the hypothesis by logical analysis “to render it as perfectly distinct as possible” (EP 2: 441). This should be compared to his earlier qualified acceptance of “Kant’s dictum that necessary reasoning is merely explicatory of the meaning of the terms of the premisses” (EP 2: 218 [1903]).
- 7.
Unfortunately, only two short scraps of Peirce’s treatment of the third logical interpretant have survived in MS 318. I do not know whether he developed the idea elsewhere; but he does suggest that his discussion would eventually lead to a differentiation of three subtypes of this interpretant. It is possible that he thought about this in analogy with the three kinds of induction (e.g., CP 2.756–759 [c. 1908]).
- 8.
In an earlier reading, I connected habit-change primarily with the third logical interpretant (cf. Bergman 2012). This was motivated by the worry (noted at the beginning of this article) that Peirce had confused product and process; and my tentative solution was to associate habit and habit-change with different logical interpretants. This proposal was based on a too-narrow understanding of Peirce’s conception of habit-change, for such modifications are purportedly achieved on the level of second as well as third pragmatistic interpretation. Also, I did not consider that the notion of habit-change could be construed as broader than that of habit from a developmental point of view.
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Bergman, M. (2016). Beyond Explication: Meaning and Habit-Change in Peirce’s Pragmatism. In: West, D., Anderson, M. (eds) Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45920-2_11
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