Table Of ContentNUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE
THOMAS J. BATA LI BRARY
TRENT UNIVERSITY
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Charles S. Peirce
From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism
by Karl-Otto Apel
Translated by John Michael Krois
University of Massachusetts Press Amherst, 1981
Introduction and Author's Preface to the English translation
Copyright © 1981 by The University of Massachusetts Press
English translation and Translator's Preface
Copyright © 1981 by John Michael Krois
Originally published in German under the title
Der Denkweg von Charles S. Peirce:
Eine Einführung in den amerikanischen Pragmatismus,
by Karl-Otto Apel, copyright © 1967, 1970 by
Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main
All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
LC 81-3337 ISBN 0-87023-177-4
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
appear on the last page of the book.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the
National Endowment for the Humanities toward the publication
of this book.
Contents
Author's Preface to the English Translation vii
Translator's Preface xiii
Introduction by Richard J. Bernstein xix
PART I. The Philosophical Background of the Rise of Pragmatism in
the Thought of Charles Sanders Peirce
1. Peirce and the Contemporary Function of Pragmatism i
2. The Problem of an Introduction to Peirce's Work as a Whole: The
Four Periods of the Development of His Thought 14
3. The First Period: Peirce and the Tradition, or. From the Critique
of Knowledge to the Critique of Meaning 29
a. Peirce's Criticism of the Tradition and His Alternative:
A Preview 19
b. The "Meaning-Critical" Approach and the New "Theory of
Reality" in the Writings of 1868-69 and 1871 25
c. Fallibilism and Transcendental Deduction: The New Theory
of Knowledge 35
a. The New Theory of Knowledge as an Alternative to Kant's
Critique of Reason 35
b. Peirce's Early Kant Studies (ca. 1860-67) 37
c. The First Essay on the Theory of Knowledge (1868) 42
d. The Second Essay on the Theory of Knowledge (1868) 46
e. The Third Essay on the Theory of Knowledge (1869) and a
Supplement on the Transcendental Deduction of the Validity
of Synthetic Inferences (1878) 47
341208
Contents
VI
4. The Second Period: The Genesis of Meaning-Critical
Pragmatism (1871-78) 54
a. From the Berkeley Review to the Birth of Pragmatism
in the Metaphysical Club (1871-72) 54
b. The New Theory of Inquiry (1872-73 and 1877-78) 58
a. "The Fixation of Belief"(i877) 60
b. "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878) 68
c. The Unresolved Problems of the Second Period:
A Look Ahead 76
PART II. Peirce's Development from Pragmatism to Pragmaticism
5. The Later Peirce: The Last Two Periods in the Development of
His Thought 80
6. Peirce's Late Conception of His System 84
a. The Pragmatic Maxim and the Foundation of the Normative
Sciences 86
b. The Revision of the Semiotic Foundations of the Logic of Inquiry
and Their Incorporation in the Metaphysics of Evolution 99
c. Phenomenology as prima philosophia log
d. Mathematical Logic as the Formal Condition for the
Possibility of Philosophy 119
7. The Third Period: From Pragmatism to the Metaphysics of
Evolution (ca. 1885-98) 134
a. Overture from 1885: The Defense of Meaning-Critical Realism
against Royce's Absolute Idealism and Peirce's Program of a
Metaphysics of Evolution 134
b. The Metaphysics of Evolution (1891 and after) 142
8. The Fourth Period: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism
(ca. 1898-1914) 158
a. The Occasion and Motives for the Reexamination of
Pragmatism (1898-1903) 138
b. The Lectures on Pragmatism (1903): The Three
"Cotary Propositions" 164
c. The Pragmaticism Essays (1905 and after) 176
9. Conclusion: Peirce and the Future of the Philosophy of
Science 191
Notes 197
Bibliography 249
Index 251
Author's Preface
to the English Translation
With the English translation of this book—a book conceived fifteen
years ago in the framework of my German edition of Peirce's writ¬
ings—I am presented with an occasion to recollect about the course of
my thought. How did I actually come to the conception expressed in
this book on Peirce, and what role has my occupation with his phi¬
losophy played for me since its publication? A brief answer to these
questions could be of interest to English-speaking readers of a book
on Peirce written from a German perspective. In addition, it can
also contribute to the clarification of certain, specific aspects of the
following presentation of Peirce's thought.
I do not want to conceal the fact that my perspective has under¬
gone certain shifts in the course of my studies of Peirce. In the begin¬
ning, my concern was merely with presenting the founder of Ameri¬
can Pragmatism to a German audience. For me, this project stood in
the context of an attempt to reconstruct the history of philosophy in a
way that would confront the different, future-directed philosophies that
serve today to actually mediate theory and practice. The philosophies
involved were on one hand, Pragmatism and Existentialism, which
provide the complementarity system that constitutes Western ideol¬
ogy, and on the other hand, Marxism, which, in an orthodox version,
provides the integration system that defines ideology in the East. The
concepts "complementarity" and "integration" refer in this context
to the particular relationship between public and private life and the
relationship between scientific rationality and ethics.
This early background conception for an introduction to Ameri¬
can Pragmatism in fact still formed the outer framework of the Peirce
book, as is indicated on the first and last pages. Yet in the course of
viii Author's Preface to the English Translation
my Peirce studies, that is, as I entered more deeply into Peirce s phi¬
losophy, this historical conception receded into the background. I rec¬
ognized more and more that Peirce was a much less appropriate choice
than William James or John Dewey would have been as the prototype
of American Pragmatism in an ideal comparison with the other two
philosophies of the mediation of theory and practice. As a matter of
fact, for the comparison with Existentialism, William James s thought
(such as in The Will to Believe) is particularly interesting, and for the
comparison with Marxism, John Dewey's philosophy. But what role
can Peirce play in a comparison with those philosophies that are pres¬
ently really effective in the world?
Is Peirce, as the founder of the "pragmatic maxim" for the clarifi¬
cation of meaning and of the principle of "Fallibilism," merely a fore¬
runner of today's "philosophy of science" as it has developed under
the name of "Logical Empiricism" or under Popperianism? This view,
as far as I can see, was the most influential interpretation of Peirce
besides the one according to which he was primarily to be regarded
as the forerunner of James and Dewey. A further, interesting retro¬
spective approach to Peirce saw him as an American Neo-Kantian, a
view expressed, for example, by Jürgen von Kempski and Murray G.
Murphey in their monographs. They granted Peirce great originality,
but credited it to his fundamental misunderstanding of Kant.
All of these retrospective views of Peirce were helpful to me,
especially the last one.1 But I could not accept any of them as a satis¬
factory perspective for interpretation. In particular, a critical analysis
of the last of these perspectives showed that Peirce was an indepen¬
dent thinker of the greatest systematic interest to the contemporary
philosophical situation. Peirce's decade-long attempt to critically re¬
construct Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is, to be sure, anything but
historical or philological, but it does not end with a misunderstanding
of Kant. Nor do I think that it ends, as representatives of a modern,
realistic metaphysics contend, in a restoration of a pre-Kantian type
of ontological, cosmological speculation. The methodological primacy
of the epistemological question of the "grounds of the validity" of
cognition over metaphysics is upheld in Peirce's philosophy to the
end. But this is connected with a semiotic, transcendental-pragmatic
transformation of the logic of cognition into a logic of inquiry.
1. On this, see my essay "From Kant to Peirce: the Semiotic Transformation
of Transcendental Logic," in Proceedings of the Third International Kant Con¬
gress, 1970, ed. Lewis White Beck (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972), pp. 90-104; reprinted
in Kant's Theory of Knowledge, ed. Lewis White Beck (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974),
pp. 23-37; and in Karl-Otto Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy,
trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London, Boston, and Henley: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 77-92.
