Peirce's Transformation of Kant

Although C. S. Peirce is generally regarded as the founder of American pragmatism, the fragmentary and incomplete character of many of his texts makes it hard to glimpse any systematic or coherent philosophy of pragmatism in them. One might respond to this state of affairs by interpreting Peirce in the light of the views of other pragmatists, in particular, of William James. While this interpretive strategy certainly gives one a handle on at least aspects of Peirce's philosophy, it has one decided disadvantage: it leads one to portray Peirce as simply the first in a line of thought which extends more or less continuously through James, Mead, and Dewey to Quine and even Richard Rorty. It is thus fated to obscure such discontinuities of philosophical intention and doctrine as might exist between Peirce and the later pragmatists. We have good reason to suspect the existence of such discontinuities. Late in his life Peirce himself felt that other writers who had begun calling themselves pragmatists had so misunderstood what he meant by the term that his own philosophy was in danger of being confused with theirs; in consequence, he renamed his doctrine pragmaticism in order to emphasize its difference from the doctrines of other so-called pragmatists.(1) This fact is a clear indication that we need another strategy of interpretation, one which will reveal a more systematic and coherent side to Peirce's philosophy, in the light of which the difference upon which Peirce himself insisted will become more clearly visible and intelligible. In this paper, I seek to identify just such an alternative strategy and then to sketch with its help an alternative picture of Peirce. Specifically, I seek to show how one might interpret Peirce's philosophy as possessing a decidedly Kantian character or architectonic in virtue of which there must be a fundamental discontinuity between his thought and that of James and those later writers who see themselves as belonging to the one tradition of American pragmatism initiated by Peirce. I will do this by adopting and elaborating the interpretation of Peirce articulated by the contemporary German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel in his book, Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism.(2) My claim will not be that the Apel-inspired picture of Peirce which I wish to sketch here is the only possible one; the frequent difficulty and incompleteness of Peirce's texts presumably make it futile to hope for a single definitive interpretation of him. Nonetheless, I do believe, first, that such a view of Peirce finds support in at least some, if not all, of his texts; and second, that it portrays him as an interesting and original thinker who is attempting to overcome the traditional concept of theoretical knowledge as episteme(3) while not rejecting, as is currently fashionable, the very idea of theory as knowledge of how things really are. Much of what I say comes from Apel, and where that is the case, I have indicated it. At the same time, Apel's interpretation is itself rather scanty and even obscure; in order to overcome these difficulties, I have engaged in more than a little creative reconstruction of my own. In particular, the account I give in section III of what Peirce means by semiosis is not to be found in Apel, although many things he says suggest aspects of it. Nor does Apel ever explicitly describe Peirce's central problem in the way I do in section IV, namely, as the problem of showing how theoretical inquiry is possible once one has made that break with the traditional concept of theory as episteme which Apel calls Peirce's semiotic transformation of the theory of knowledge. The views expressed in sections VI and VII should not be attributed to Apel. This is particularly true of the claim I make in section VII, namely, that a consensus theory of truth, whether Peirce's or anyone else's, is best understood not as offering an alternative to the traditional correspondence theory, but rather as making this latter criterially relevant. …