Charles S. Peirce: On Norms and Ideals

By Vincent G. Potter

In recent years, Charles Sanders Peirce has emerged, in the eyes of philosophers both in America and abroad, as one of America’s major philosophical thinkers. His work has forced us back to philosophical reflection about those basic issues that inevitably confront us as human beings, especially in an age of science. Peirce’s concern for experience, for what is actually encountered, means that his philosophy, even in its most technical aspects, forms a reflective commentary on actual life and on the world in which it is lived.

In Charles S. Peirce: On Norms and Ideals, Potter argues that Peirce’s doctrine of the normative sciences is essential to his pragmatism. No part of Peirce’s philosophy is bolder than his attempt to establish esthetics, ethics, and logic as the three normative sciences and to argue for the priority of esthetics among the trio. Logic, Potter cites, is normative because it governs thought and aims at truth; ethics is normative because it analyzes the ends to which thought should be directed; esthetics is normative and fundamental because it considers what it means to be an end of something good in itself. This study shows that pierce took seriously the trinity of normative sciences and demonstrates that these categories apply both to the conduct of man and to the workings of the cosmos.

Professor Potter combines sympathetic and informed exposition with straightforward criticism and he deals in a sensible manner with the gaps and inconsistencies in Peirce’s thought. His study shows that Peirce was above all a cosmological and ontological thinker, one who combined science both as a method and as result with a conception of reasonable actions to form a comprehensive theory of reality. Peirce’s pragmatism, although it has to do with "action and the achievement of results, is not a glorification of action but rather a theory of the dynamic nature of things in which the "ideal" dimension of reality – laws, nature of things, tendencies, and ends – has genuine power for directing the cosmic order, including man, toward reasonable goals.

Charles S. Peirce: On Norms and Ideals is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Sep 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9780823282838

Vincent G. Potter

Vincent G. Potter was Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University; and editor of International Philosophical Quarterly.

Book preview

I

Pragmatism & the Normative Sciences

Introduction

IF ONE WERE ASKED to justify beginning a study of Peirce’s pragmatism with a consideration of the normative sciences, perhaps the most simple and effective reply would be to point out that this is the way Peirce himself chose to expound pragmatism in his Harvard lectures of 1903. The first lecture was entitled Pragmatism: The Normative Sciences. But why did Peirce elect to begin thus? Was it merely that he had to start somewhere, or did he think that the normative sciences in some way furnished the key to all that was to follow?

Although Peirce came to recognize the nature and role of the normative sciences only late in his career, still he was convinced that his own account of the hierarchical dependence of logic on ethics and of ethics on esthetics was a discovery of fundamental importance for a correct understanding of his system, and one which distinguished his pragmaticism from other less correct interpretations of his own famous maxim. It would be a basic mistake to think that because Peirce’s exposition of that role was short and unsatisfactory, it is not an integral part of what he conceived to be his architectonic system. It would perhaps be more correct to say that Peirce’s realization of the place of these sciences put in his hands the capstone which unified all that he had been trying to do more or less successfully for some forty years. At least Peirce himself seems to have looked at it in this