ABSTRACT

In his 1905 paper ‘What Pragmatism Is’, Peirce affirmed that pragmatism shows that ‘almost every proposition of ontological metaphysics is either meaningless gibberish…or else is absurd’ (5.423). Once all this nonsense is dismissed, philosophy can get down to the serious business of studying ‘problems capable of investigation by the observational methods of the true sciences’. However, from the 1890s, in a series of papers in The Monist and elsewhere, we find Peirce developing a metaphysical theory of his own. Acknowledging a resemblance between his own views and those of Schelling, he defends a form of objective idealism which claims that matter is ‘effete mind’ and involves a complex evolutionary cosmology. In a passage which looks to be the product of armchair ontological metaphysics, he writes,

Although Peirce claims that pragmatism has the advantage over other forms of ‘propepositivism’ in that it allows for a ‘purified’ scientific metaphysics (5.423), it is easy to sympathize with admirers of Peirce’s work in logic and epistemology who are horrified about what Gallie calls ‘the black sheep or white elephant of his philosophy’ (Gallie, 1952, p. 216). Many commentators suggest that these metaphysical writings are simply inconsistent with central themes in his logic (Wiener, 1949, pp. 84-5; Gallie, 1952, ch. 9; Almeder, 1980, ch. IV). Others simply ignore it (Ayer, 1968). Looking back to the metaphysical writings of his youth (CW1 passim; Esposito, 1980; Murphey, 1961; Wiener, 1949), and bearing in mind his religious views and antipathy to the mechanical philosophy and Darwinism, it is easy to conclude that Peirce’s interests drew him in two conflicting directions. He was blinded to the incompatibility of these metaphysical excesses with his work in logic.