| | Michael,
Look at Peirce's stages of conception, which are somewhat borrowed from Hegel. First "conception" as thing existing independent of other things. ... I checked out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for CS Peirce online. This appears to be a relevant section ["..." stands for an introduced break]:
... it must be kept in mind that Peirce was always a realist of the Kantian“empirical” sort and not a Kantian “transcendental realist.” His realism is similar to what Hilary Putnam has called “internal realism.” (As was said, Peirce was also a realist in quite another sense of he word: he was a realist or an anti-nominalist in the medieval sense.)
Peirce's Hegelianism, to which he increasingly admitted as he approached his most mature philosophy, is more difficult to understand than his Kantianism, partly because it is everywhere intimately tied to his entire late theory of signs (semeiotic) and sign use (semeiosis), as well as to his evolutionism and to his rather puzzling doctrine of mind. There are at least four major components of his Hegelian idealism. ... First, for Peirce the world of appearances, which he calls “the phaneron,” is a world consisting entirely of signs. Signs are qualities, relations, features, items, events, states, regularities, habits, laws, and so on that have meanings, significances, or interpretations. ... Second, a sign is one term in a threesome of terms that are indissolubly connected with each other by a crucial triadic relation that Peirce calls “the sign relation.” The sign itself (also called the representamen) is the term in the sign relation that is ordinarily said to represent or mean something. The other two terms in this relation are called the object and the interpretant. The object is what would ordinarily would be said to be the “thing” meant or signified or represented by the sign, what the sign is a signof. The interpretant of a sign is said by Peirce to be thatto which the sign represents the object. What exactly Peirce means by the interpretant is difficult to pin down. It is something like a mind, a mental act, a mental state, or a feature or quality of mind; at all events the interpretant is something ineliminably mental. ... Third, the interpretant of a sign, by virtue of the very definition Peirce gives of the sign-relation, must itself be a sign, and a sign moreover of the very same object that is (or: was) represented by the (original) sign. In effect, then, the interpretant is a second signifier of the object, only one that now has an overtly mental status. But, merely in being a sign of the original object, this second sign must itself have (Peirce uses the word“determine”) an interpretant, which then in turn is a new, third sign of the object, and again is one with an overtly mental status. And so on. Thus, if there is any sign at all of any object, then there is an infinite sequence of signs of that same object. So, everything in the phaneron, because it is a sign, begins an infinite sequence of mental interpretants of an object.
But now, there is a fourth component of Peirce's idealism: Peirce makes everything in the phaneron evolutionary. The whole system evolves. Three figures from the history of culture loomed exceedingly large in the intellectual development of Peirce and in the cultural atmosphere of the period in which Peirce was most active: Hegel in philosophy, Lyell in geology, and Darwin (along with Alfred Russel Wallace) in biology. These thinkers, of course, all have a single theme in common: evolution. Hegel described an evolution of ideas, Lyell an evolution of geological structures, and Darwin an evolution of biological species and varieties. Peirce absorbed it all. Peirce's entire thinking, early on and later, is permeated with the evolutionary idea, which he extended generally, that is to say, beyond the confines of any particular subject matter. For Peirce, the entire universe and everything in it is an evolutionary product. ... Indeed, he conceived that even the most firmly entrenched of nature's habits (for example, even those habits that are typically called “natural laws”) have themselves evolved, and accordingly can and should be subjects of philosophical and scientific inquiry.
According to this Stanford entry, Peirce was not a nominalist. And yet, if pressed on the issue of "natural kinds" (something nominalists disavow), he would say that natural kinds are evolutionarily "nominalistic" (that they are not absolutes, but vary and change with the winds of time). So, it seems his evolutionary overview collapses onto his "internal realism" and defeats it.
For illustration of this effect, think of a snow globe. When you shake up a snow globe, it appears as if it is snowing on the inside. You might even say that, in the sense of snow globes, it really and truly is "snowing" on the inside. But alas, you cannot make it snow in the literal sense, simply by shaking up a snow globe. What you can do is arrive at a truth or an event that is limited by the boundaries of the globe and -- outside of that globe -- you really have no truth of snow, or power to initiate snowing as a process (even if it is true on the inside).
When Peirce claims that he is an epistemological realist in the medieval sense (or when an entry like this claims that of him), then it must be brought to attention that that is not true in a holistic or global context, but only in a narrow and limited one (like the inside of a small snow globe). In spite of this entry, I will still claim that thinkers such as Peirce -- indeed, all pragmatists -- are 'mitigated nominalists.' Peirce's epistemological realism is no more real or true than the fake snow inside of a self-contained snow globe.
Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 2/27, 6:26pm)
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