1 Nov 1999

"Two Unjustly Neglected Aspects of C.S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Mind"

by Randall R. Dipert

U.S. Military Academy/West Point and

SUNY University at Buffalo

RRDip@aol.com

Few philosophers today know much about Charles Peirce’s metaphysics, although a great many know something about his epistemology, philosophy of science, and logic. Indeed, few Peirce experts have written much on his metaphysics or made it the focus of their research. To an extent, this is understandable. Peirce’s writings were left in a disastrously disorganized state (mostly unpublished), and the crucial papers on metaphysics from his later years have not yet been republished in the first-rate chronological edition, the incomplete Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, edited at Indianapolis by my friends. And then there is Peirce’s writing: an awkward, abrasive, arrogant, eclectic style that demands technical knowledge in diverse fields, especially logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences. His worst personality traits manifested themselves in his highly technical metaphysics—with its idiosyncratic, anti-Cantorian conception of continua, a pecularly mathematical phenomenology, and elaborate views on Darwinian and non-Darwinian evolution, for example. Finally, there is what might appear to be the bizarreness of the theory itself, as we shall see. Peirce was a kind of philosophical swashbuckler, a bold, courageous speculator on philosophical questions beyond most of our temperaments even to ponder. Ours is not the philosophical age of Errol Flynn but the minimalist age of Harrison Ford, with no grand gestures or speeches, just a series of small, no-nonsense gestures: we typically like our philosophy short, neat, "science-like," and isolated from other philosophical issues.

The neglect of Peirce’s metaphysics and theory of mind and body (and also a near-pathological avoidance of bold speculation) is a pity, because I think it is on the border between metaphysics and what we now call philosophy of mind where Peirce made his greatest contributions.

The most extensive contribution that Peirce made to metaphysics, and specifically to the mind-body problem, was in several of his essays in The Monist series of 1891-1893. It is the first and fourth of these papers that will later concern us as a mature expression of his metaphysical views on the mind-body problem. The editors affixed to Volume VI, Scientific Metaphysics, of the Collected Papers a kind of introductory survey by Peirce of the problems of metaphysics, entitled "The Backward State of Metaphysics" (6.1-6) from a later lecture of 1898. We can see some of the issues that interested Peirce from a short list of some of the mind-related questions in metaphysics that Peirce regarded as worth posing:

This peculiar list of questions reveals a certain conception of issues, certain assumptions and preoccupations, that may not exactly be ours. We see an assumption, for example, that sensations, consciousness, or mind in some sense exist and "are to be taken seriously." We see a suggestion that the smallest bits of consciousness, what Peirce elsewhere calls feelings, can be organized and analyzed in no less systematic a way than can be "external" objects—into atoms and along a manifold, for example. And we see the name of a theory, that we are unlikely to encounter in contemporary discussions: hylozoism.

In what follows, I will divide my comments into three sections. In the first section I will discuss what I believe is Peirce’s earliest major contribution to the philosophy of mind: his questioning of certain Cartesian assumptions and methodology. This critique ultimately undermines support for the mind/body distinction. In the second section, I will pose what I call the "Puzzle of the Mind in the History of Philosophy"—a strictly historical puzzle, but a deep one nonetheless, of why the study of the mind and consciousness has fared so well since Descartes and had apparently fared so poorly before. Finally, in the third section I will take up Peirce’s second neglected contribution to the philosophy of mind, namely his metaphysics: the bold speculation he offered as a solution to the mind-body problem.

1. Peirce’s Critique of Descartes’ Universal Doubt

I understand Descartes’ metaphysical doctrine of the distinctness of mind and body to have originated in his epistemology: that the epistemological summum bonum is certainty, and inability to doubt—indubitability—is the criterion of this certainty. While Descartes did not invent the idea of mind as substance, his works crystallized it, and had enormous influence in Early Modern philosophy, and then on all of Western philosophy since. By this I mean that his question of the status of mental and contrasted physical substances or properties took center stage in metaphysics, and more specifically ontology, while other long-standing debates, such as the status of universals and particulars, moved to the backstage.

I would describe Peirce’s chief interest for his entire intellectual life, starting in the 1860’s, as the nature of ideal inquiry—what we might term the scientific method or even the whole of logic, eventually to include ideal forms of interlocking deductive, inductive, and abductive methods. This inquiry into the nature of ideal inquiry early resulted in two major series of articles: the series in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy of 1868-9, and the much more widely read 1878 series in the Popular Science Monthly that included "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear." It is in this latter article where pragmatism—or a proto-pragmatism—had its birth.

What we might now regard as improperly "psychological" conceptions of the nature of belief and doubt form the kernel of Peirce’s highly intentional theory of mind: that inquiry is the process by which we remove ourselves from the irritation of doubt to the stable and pleasant state of belief, and that this inquiry can be conducted better or worse, namely, the stability achieved may be more or less secure and satisfying. Despite a century of work, I do not think our models of "belief-revision" improve much on his model and seem to have probed a good deal less deeply into the very nature of belief and doubt as states of mind than did Peirce.

One component of his conception of doubt that has not been much addressed is his insistent rejection of Descartes’ view of doubt and use of doubting. While there is no single, sustained treatment of the subject, we have these remarks:

"We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices…we actually have…. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial scepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt…. A person may…find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in this case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts." "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," 1868, CW 2: 212.

"We really believe many things, and therefore philosophic doubts upon such matters must be mere pretence and can result in nothing but a show of demonstration of things really taken for granted. Nothing can be gained by gratuitous and fictitious doubts…." "Potentia ex Impotentia," MS 149 judged to be from 1868 in CW 2, 189.

"Now there never would have been any Cartesians in the world if it had been understood that this philosophic doubt must be genuine doubt, and if students [of Descartes] had had any proper self-knowledge. It is plainly impossible to have an unaffected doubt that fire burns,--and one which will resist a few experiments,--unless one is incapable of reasoning." MS 166, "Chapter 2," Winter 1969-70, CW II.356.

I think these claims are both extremely important—in the context of Peirce’s thought and in all of philosophy since Descartes. They also suggest a rich and deep theory of belief and doubt. For example, Peirce seems to be saying that we might claim to doubt X but not really doubt it; more importantly, we might pretend to others, or even ourselves think we doubt X when we don’t really doubt it. That is, we can be mistaken in our second-order judgment of whether we really doubt. There are several reasons why Peirce believes that Cartesian doubt is not real doubt. First, there is a problem with the sweeping content of "doubting everything that arises from the senses." If doubt, like belief, is intentional, what is the exact content of such a doubt—other than its philosophically-laden and possibly purely verbal formulation alone? Can I, in one single mental act, really doubt the set that includes each and every one of my sensory beliefs, and all that follows from them? It seems unlikely that I could ever, in a lifetime, even sort out those that follow from sensory beliefs and those that don’t, let alone hold these all in my mind enough to count as the thought of them, and hence doubting them. Judgments of our own mental states--at least doubt, probably belief as well--are fallible; this accords with Peirce’s more frequently noticed attack on direct knowledge from intuition and on the faulty use of "self-consciousness" in Cartesian thought. Second, Peirce seems to believe that doubt cannot be artificially induced: we doubt X only because we have reason to believe that X might not be so. Not idly, just because the content of a possible doubt can be formulated and verbally posed in a doubtful-sounding way.. Such a reason for doubt would include having a sensory belief whose negation it seems to entail, a conflict with another belief, or with what we believe to be the beliefs of other somewhat reliable inquirers. There is no such impetus to doubt each and every sensory belief. Ironically, I think Peirce’s conception of real doubt is more like what many critics of his fellow pragmatist, William James, have held in their attack on "The Will to Believe." Belief cannot, James’ critics have insisted, simply be willed. Peirce’s point, an earlier and more important point in the history of philosophy, is that doubt cannot be willed.

If I am correct, what Peirce has in mind as an attack on Cartesian skepticism is very much like Wittgenstein’s utterancess on more general philosophical conundra in On Certainty:

"(From #4) But what about a proposition like ‘I know I have a brain’? Can I doubt it? Grounds for doubt are lacking! "

"(From #247.) What would it be like to doubt now whether I have two hands? Why can’t I imagine it at all? What would I believe if I didn’t believe that? So far I have no system at all within which this doubt might exist."

"249. One gives oneself a false picture of doubting [vom Zweifel]."

Neither Peirce nor Wittgenstein reject the Cartesian criterion for what can be certain or known: namely, that which cannot be doubted. (I myself am not convinced that it is correct to understand the epistemological ideal state that usually goes by the name of "certainty" or "knowing" in these terms.) However, both object to schemata of wide-scope doubting when there is nothing to instigate the doubt beyond a kind of philosophical speculation or ax to grind. This is not the sort of real doubt that undermines real certainty.

We must now connect up Peirce’s criticism of Cartesian conceptions of doubt to the deeper metaphysical issues before us, the status and relationship of mind and matter. In Cartesian metaphysics, the ontological status of the subject, the "ego" of the cogito-proposition derives from the fact that we can be certain "it" exists. Upon investigation, the "it" that we can be sure exists is a pure mind, or at least the purely mental attributes of what "I" am. Roughly, this is the ability to "have" experiences. It is the differing epistemological status of the ego-mind on the one hand, and other minds (second-person entities, so to speak) and physical bodies (third-person entities) on the other hand, that Descartes subtly uses to suggest ontological differences. This is an extremely tangled web, intertwining the metaphysical issue of what might exist and the epistemological one of what we can be certain of. As became evident in the later history of philosophy, there may be propositions that are certain, without them pertaining to existing things in a distinct metaphysical realm: one does not have to be a mathematical Platonist to accept that "2+2=4" is "certain." To add spice to this metaphysical-epistemological soup, there may be putatively mental states, such as doubting, that are not certain, or about which our sincere self-ascription can be mistaken. If Peirce and Wittgenstein (and Freud and Nagel) are right, that is.

There is much we could say about the philosophical implications of being able, or not able, to perform, certain mental acts—especially doubting and imagining. I agree with Peirce and Wittgenstein that this is not the sophomoric exercise we teach in Introductory Philosophy, but an extremely complex exercise. Without a well-developed theory of "doubt," what doubt is and what it isn’t, and instead just using some everyday notion, results in a kind of false philosophy. Likewise, there is much that can be said on that promiscuous twin of philosophical doubting, namely, philosophical imagining. What precisely do we mean by ‘imagine.’ What follows from someone’s sincere utterance that this person can imagine X? Yes, I can visualize a zombie’s look and behavior, but not what makes him a Zombie in the philosopher’s sense. Does imagining X entail that X is possible? Doesn’t this depend radically on how precisely (clearly and distinctly in Descartes’ and Leibniz’ parlance) and in what sense X has been imagined? Doesn’t it depend on how well the imaginer understands the logical interconnections of this with other propositions? Does my imagining entail precise imaginability, and does imaginability entail alethic possibility? My own view is that imagination has been invoked without a careful enough investigation of this peculiar mental state, and that what my ability, say, to imagine zombies amounts to is that it could be, for all I know, metaphysically possible that there exist zombies.

2. A Puzzle about the notion of "mind" in the History of Philosophy

One of the more puzzling questions in the history of philosophy is, I believe, why a metaphysics of mind first occurs in Descartes--or in any case, in Early Modern philosophy. Were the Greeks unaware of their own minds? Although they wrote of the psyche’s parts and conflicts, what kind of an entity did they think this psyche was? Given that they seemed to wonder so little what kind of a thing a mind was, the whole issue of the mind-body problem seems to have utterly escaped the Greeks—certainly it is not the central focus of their metaphysical anguish, as it is for us. In this sense, the philosophy of mind is an almost wholly Modern phenomenon. But how could the great Greek philosophers have missed anything so obvious and appealing as the Dream and Evil Demon arguments, and of the metaphysical issues concerning mind that seem to arise from them? Did solipsism and idealism just not occur to them? This seems unlikely. Instead, my conjecture is that there is something in the conceptualization of distinct mind and body that is an artifact of our Modern world view and that was not at home in--perhaps couldn’t even be expressed in--the Greek world view. Roughly, they viewed the world in terms of their first-person minds and mindlike phenomena, whereas we view--or try to view--our minds in terms of unmental, third-person matter. There is no problem of "explaining" the nature of minds, or the relationship of mind to world, if your basic notion of substance includes liveliness, experience, and purpose--or some other narrowed set of basic, mindlike phenomena.

Let us back up a bit. We often find ourselves snickering at animist, or even theistic views of the natural world or human history. Such folk actually believe that everything that happens is to be explained by the hypothesis that it was intentionally brought about by persons like ourselves, only more powerful. What strikes us as silly, as vain anthropomorphizing, is the easy supposition of the proposition that the intentional agents who explain the main features of the the universe are exactly like us. Yet there is a kernel of something eminently sensible in this procedure. The chief desideratum of explanation—often forgotten—is that we should explain what we do not understand in terms of what we understand better. We understand the world of belief, desire, intention and so on at first hand. Perhaps we are also, as part of our social nature, outfitted to use such notions of much-maligned "folk" psychology to understand and predict the behavior of other humans (even other non-human animals), the second-person world. But even in the case of explaining the behavior of other humans, there would be something wrong, a bit too naïve, in assuming that they are exactly like I am, and have the very same beliefs, desires, and personality.

Aristotle and the even earlier Greek scientific thinkers seemed to have grasped something like the account I have related. They came to be acutely aware of--costing Socrates his life--the unsupported and fanciful motives of these supposed gods, and of traits, like gender and lust, that did not seem to be essential to the stories as completely general imputations of motive-behavior sequences. The popularly supposed motives were without evidence and almost comically human--impious in fact. From these mythic concoctions, Aristotle and his predecessors and successors, in a substory that is itself very complicated, extracted the essence of an explanatory germ. This is roughly the view that all substances have an essence, to be identified principally with its goal or telos. This is simultaneously a new theory of persons, that all humans act to achieve a singular end and thus anchors their rationality, and also is the projection of this idealized psychological view for all things worthy of the name, namely that they simply have these (final) ends. Telos in its purest form is perhaps understand as a goal, or correct end, state, not as a "purpose" in our vulgar action-theoretic sense. It is the attempt to extract some pure, minimally necessary explanatory kernel--of telos from what I have called a mentalistically understood "motive"--that gives these Greek theories of nature what is to us their peculiarly "teleological" cast. This Greek picture of the natural world is in fact a fantastically complicated issue in its own right.

We of course also regularly look down on the Greek intellectuals themselves for anthropomorphizing the natural world. And this from the point of view of the Modern, physicalized, cause-effect model. But in a sense, I believe the world-view of the Greek intellectuals retained the necessary features of the only mode of understanding we truly grasp, and that can unify the phenomenal world that includes our own self-conscious mental world. This necessarily includes something like the motive-behavior connection we understand in ourselves and other persons. (I am thus sympathetic to Schopenhauer’s analysis of cause-effect in terms of Will, already hinted at by Kant, but I view the issue of "mentalizing" the world in broader metaphysical and historical terms.) But it is important, first, to underscore the extent to which the Greek is different from, and vastly superior, to the "primitive" world view. It purifies and idealizes motive, no less than gravitational force purifies the pull we feel of our own weight, stripping away the inessential and unsupported all-to-human features. Objects move because of some motive they have: to be somewhere else. This may seem banal to us, but it is notably devoid of speculation and fancy. It may be true that all substances are left with a sort of lingering life- or mental characteristic, but this is completely devoid of any specifically human or other life-form characteristics that I can discern. It has the advantage, which I will argue the Modern scientific world view disastrously lacks, of metaphysically unifying the inner psychic world and the outer world of phenomenal objects and of binding "scientific" explanation to the only connection we feel, and thus best understand, namely of motive (or acknowledged desire) to behavior.

Early Modern philosophy and science came to be suspicious of even this disinfected, Greek imputation of mind-like purpose to the natural world. Medieval "Aristotelian" thought, resisted by Aquinas and a few others, had begun to regress to a grandly personal, even human-like, force in the natural world that contrasted with Aristotle’s own calculatedly bland First Cause and generic, motive-like telos. In yet another sense of a "Copernican" revolution, Modern Science sought to remove the main explanatory techniques from the partially, if antiseptically, mind-like and subjective notion of motive or purpose, and move in one leap toward a world looked upon as a pure, mindless, inert "It ." This third-person "it" is governed by, and hence supposedly explained completely unmentalistic regularities, physical things, their attributes, and natural laws governing them. (Observe that even in this supposedly purified Modern world we preserve a vestige of the first- and second-person world views in the word ‘law’.) The primitive and Greek world views share the conception that the universe is--and can only be understood through supposing it is--like us; the third, Modern view, holds that universe is wholly unlike us, unlike what we imagine and feel our inner life to be. It assumes that the projection of our inner mental life, and of entities having conscious sensations, or of connections like motive-behavior, onto the phenomenal world are wholly specious and overcomable. We can, once and for all, conquer our disgusting anthromorphizing tendencies and come to a neutral, correct view of the world (a view from nowhere-in-particular, to paraphrase Thomas Nagel).

We can pose here what I think is an unsettling question. Do we really understand better the mechanical behavior of billiard balls through a theory of mass and momentum than we understand "why" we reached for that glass of water—or why someone else did?

The palpable successes of this Modern world-view about nature, especially in its mathematicized versions, are well known. Yet this may have more to do with the (accidental) fact that natural science became rigorous and mathematical at the same time in human history when it became "matter-based" The unified, partly neutered mentalistic account of reality never fully flowered: Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (or Renouvier, Bergson and Teilhard) did not trouble themselves with a mathematical theory. We are still owed, to paraphrase Peirce, an atomistic, mathematical account of non-reductionist mental theories before we can meaningfully judge their value.

3. Matter as "Effete Mind"

I believe three facts positioned Peirce to make the bold leap that I see in his philosophy of mind. First, as we have seen, he was critical of the underpinnings of Modern philosophy in Descartes’ method of "widescope doubt." It is only through the dubitability of the external world, and the imaginability of a purely mind-inhabited world, that we come to contemplate the possibility of the mind as a distinct metaphysical substance. Second, Peirce was a student both of the history of science and of the history of philosophy to an extent few in the 19^th century were; in an age in which the stormclouds of anti-historicism and historical know-nothingism were already heading toward Frege and Moore, for example, Peirce was famously interested in, and gravitated toward unfashionable Greek, even mediaeval claims—without merely being a scholar of these dead traditions. Finally, as a fine mathematician himself and the son of a world-renowned one, and as one of the major logicians of the late 19^th century, Peirce understood much better than his merely spiritually-inclined contemporaries, the added value of mathematical, or at least rigorous, theoretical explanation.

In what was clearly intended to be a bold statement of his metaphysics, Peirce writes in the first of The Monist-series articles of 1891:

The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism,

That matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws (6.25)

He argued that the universe consisted of a continuum of atoms whose sole monadic, non-relational feature is their attribute of having feeling, a kind of inarticulate and undirected consciousness. In his phenomenology, upon which his metaphysics is built, this is Firstness. It is not consciousness of anything, but the having of feeling. These feelings sometimes become related to one another by two-place relations, such as through noticing their difference or the "association" of one feeling with another, as with heat with pain. It is through this mechanism that feelings escape their noumenal, indescribable basic monadic character, and become distinguishable or have content. This is the metaphysical analogue of what he called their Secondness, intuitively, their dyadic relatedness. Finally, the relatedness of these feelings changes in lawlike ways, and Peirce believed that the pattern of these changes in the relatedness of monadic feelings was itself a real feature of the world. Secondness may phenomenologically be thought of as the ways colors contrast with one another, or the awareness of cause followed by effect, or of any other simple relational fact. Thirdness is the regularity of such relations, the relation of these relations, especially over time: with D.M. Armstrong and Duns Scotus, and against the Humeans and earlier English nominalists, Peirce believed that these regularities have a reality above the set of cause-effect relations.

As one can probably hear in my summary of his views, there is a lot going on in his metaphysics of mind and matter. An awful lot. One can detect that he is not just concerned with the existence of mind and matter, with ontology, but also with features that have reality beyond particular things and their monadic properties: the reality of their relationships, and especially, the reality of laws "governing" their behavior. He regularly distinguished "reality" from "existence." Immediately beneath this level is lurking his logic of relations, his whole philosophy of science and theory of scientific law, and his phenomenology—including his theory of signs.

In order not to reproduce the failure of Peirce’s own writing—an awkward attempt to solve every problem everywhere—I need to separate strands of his writing and treat these as if they were isolated arguments.

First Argument. It is impossible to reduce the mental to the physical. This in two senses. First, there is a methodological difficulty in attempting to do so, and second, the attempt based on current conceptions of matter, can be seen to fail. Relevant passages are:

The materialistic doctrine seems to me quite as repugnant to

scientific logic as to common sense; since it requires us to

suppose that a certain kind of mechanism will feel, which

would be a hypothesis absolutely irreducible to reason—

an ultimate, inexplicable regularity; while the only

possible justification of any theory is that it should make

things clear and reasonable. 6.24, 1891

This occurs after Peirce has rejected Cartesian Dualism, portraying the choices as being among materialism, idealism, and the then-in-vogue (neutral) monism which he terms "neutralism." This slightly pejorative name is chosen because he regards it as evasive and thus unclarifying, and because "it is sufficiently condemned by Ockham’s Razor…. By placing the inward and outward aspects of substance on a par, it seems to render both primordial." Perhaps a still better explanation is that Peirce’s bold personality would never permit such a wishy-washy metaphysics, a kind of ontological Unitarianism.

In the last article of the 1898 series, "Man’s Glassy Essence," Peirce returns to the relationship between matter and mind. He first gives a multi-page, but now dated, description of what was then known about matter. Peirce’s graduate degree was in chemistry, and he had kept up on his reading, so this is a highly technical account that must have challenged the readership of The Monist. He then gives a slightly less extensive account of what was known about protoplasm, describing at its complex physical characteristics: liquid/semi-solid phase transition, ability to grow (but unlike crystalline growth), what he calls the "life slime’s" ability to assimilate food and expel waste (6.249-253), and its ability to "take habits" (6.254). This is however all a lengthy prelude to this paragraph:

Very extraordinary, certainly, are all these properties of

protoplasm…. But the one which has next to be mentioned,

while equally undeniable, is infinitely more wonderful. It

is that protoplasm feels. We have no direct evidence that

this is true of protoplasm universally, and certainly some

kinds feel far more than others. But there is a fair analogical

inference that all protoplasm feels. It not only feels

but exercises all the functions of mind. 6.255

After several pages in which he explains all the characteristics of protoplasm but feeling, he continues:

There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed

synthetically in the laboratory… [and] it would [then]

present all the characters of natural protoplasm. No

doubt then it would feel. To hesitate to admit this would

be puerile and ultra-puerile. By what element of the

molecular arrangement, then, would that feeling be caused?

This question cannot be evaded or pooh-poohed….

Yet the attempt to deduce it from the three laws of

mechanics… would obviously be futile. It can

never be explained, unless we admit that physical

events are but degraded or undeveloped forms of

psychical events. 6.264

There are several quaint aspects about this passage that make us smile. There is Peirce’s dated physics—the "three laws of mechanics." There is the concern with the chemistry of protoplasm, which perhaps suggests some connection to the vitalist debates of the day. (There is however in Peirce no hint of an attraction to an ineffable elan vital, although there are interesting and deep connections between the debates on reducing life and the reducing consciousness to physical properties, as Chalmers and other have noted.) Probably most peculiar is Peirce’s view that protoplasm is the bearer of consciousness, and thus the implication that one-celled or disorganized multicellular organisms could be conscious. The modern view is of course that consciousness at best occurs in highly organized multicellular organisms, and in particular in those with some threshold neurological complexity. However, whatever theoretical points Peirce is making about intracellular physical organization can be made mutatis mutandis about some other level or kind of physical organization. Furthermore, since all matter for Peirce has some degree of feeling—protoplasm just exhibiting this a little more than "dead" matter--and since he admits that multicellular organization increases and enables phenomenal differentiation of feeling, the difference between Peirce’s view of the nature of consciousness as "structural," as we see in contemporary theorists such as Searle (though for him, physical) and especially in Chalmers, is comparatively minor.

The vast majority of these passages in Peirce support the second version of this argument, that all reductions have to date failed. There is however the first version of the argument, that the materialist-reduction "hypothesis [would be] absolutely irreducible to reason—an ultimate, inexplicable regularity," and therefore is forbidden by methodological reasons. I’ll take a stab at what Peirce might mean. Let us suppose that somewhere in La Jolla, neuroscientists discover that consciousness is uniquely present just when a certain type of neurological organization exists. The two are completely correlated in all the large number of cases they have examined. So, they infer that consciousness consists precisely in this neurological organization. There are two problems with this inference. First, it is likely that their methodology focuses on "higher" forms of consciousness that are self-reported in language or are evidenced by a huge behavioral repertoire that researchers can interpret (e.g., human). They have likely been insensitive to lower and non-standard forms of consciousness, and have discovered only a correlation with the most easily observed or manifested forms of consciousness. Second, even if the only instances of this organization that they can find and test are neurological, this gives no evidence whatsoever that it is not some features of this organization (however instanced) wherein consciousness consists, and not specifically in the neurological organization. This is especially the case if they cannot, as a practical matter, duplicate the organization in other forms, such as in silicon, intracellular interactions, tinker toys, or planetary interactions. Third, the feature of organization F1 that they have identified may, as a matter of logical or physical necessity, occur where and only where feature F2 occurs. F2 may be a mathematically deeper, simpler, and more humanly understandable description of that organization. One intensionally distinguished property like F2 may constitute an "explanation" of something like consciousness when F1, coextensive with it, does not.

Second Argument. The second argument—really a family of arguments—is best described as analogical. Peirce’s own favorite and somewhat idiosyncratic analogy was that the lawlike behavior of ostensibly material objects is like the habit of a conscious creature, trained by experience. They both acquire and display regularities that support counterfactual reasoning. Since the outward behavior is similar, we may infer that the inner "mechanism" is similar, and this includes awareness in the case of our own, better and more intimately understood, habits. So, natural objects likewise have experiences.

These regularities, that we describe in the first and second persons as habits and personality characteristics, are laws of nature when described of the purely outward behavior of natural objects whose inner life we cannot inspect. It is not surprising that Peirce would take seriously these regularities, given his Scholastic Realism and its allied philosophy of science. What is surprising is that he considers them to be manifestations of the same basic phenomenon. But on second thought, this is surely a conservative explanatory hypothesis, as he sometimes says, rather than requiring two distinct mechanisms. Surely my inference that a certain human creature of habit will behave tomorrow much like he did today is a sound one. Furthermore, it is not a sound inference for the reason that I know this human being is purely material, and that matter behaves according to laws of nature. I am justified in my inference even if I reject materialism, and was equally justified well before decent laws of matter were formulated and the entire physical world was supposedly thereby "understood." In fact, except for planetary trajectories, most physical objects in my experience do not behave precisely as I expect them to, or according to the best guesses of experts: notoriously, the performance of my car and its parts.

Although there are Romantic traces of idealism or panpsychism in Peirce’s thought before he developed his realist theory of natural law, it is clearly the basic nature of these regularities among either mental or material interactions that propelled Peirce in the last stages of his life to consider more seriously a unified metaphysics, and in particular a "mentalistic" one. Namely, he viewed habit as the better-understood, or at least more directly experienced, of the supposedly two forms of regularity, and thus regularities in matter are better explained through habits in conscious creatures than vice versa. Not only is habit—or rather the increasing taking of habits—ubiquitous among mind and matter, but this rigidification is not at all a bad thing. Although I do not completely understand all of the inspiration for Peirce’s use of the notion of habit across his entire metaphysics, I suspect the ultimate source is Aristotle’s ethics. In Aristotle, we see a view of moral goodness—something admirable—as consisting not in intellectual gymnastics applied to isolated, complicated moral puzzles, as we sometimes do in Socrates or Kant, but in the inculcation of the correct habits. To be morally good is not just—maybe not even—consciously to puzzle through each dilemma. This view is reinforced when we see that deliberation, ratiocination, or intelligence is seen by Peirce as a purely mechanical affair, quite separate from consciousness and feeling.

On one peculiar point, Peirce bites an amazingly large bullet. It seems that successful creatures initially begin their lives with many spontaneous, experimental acts. These may be physical or intellectual maneuvers. Gradually however, over a long life if they are allowed it, these actions become honed into successful routines that require less and less conscious attention and experimentation. A creature’s conscious control over its intellectual and physical gestures becomes less frequent (except perhaps over high-level goals) as it discovers and rehearses subtlely-tuned scripts for navigating life’s myriad challenges. This view correlates unconstrained inner consciousness with outer spontaneity, and outer regularity with a lack of manifestation of feeling. (Observe that consciousness or feeling, and having behavior affected by feeling, is thus not per se a good thing: in the sense that he does not promote indulging in feelings, externalized as spontaneity, Peirce is not a "Romantic.")

The bullet Peirce bites is this. If creatures develop habits, which fact results in feelings being less displayed in behavior, and if natural laws are "just like" habits, then how has the natural world of so-called matter progressed? Peirce believed that natural laws were once a great deal less regular than they are now, but have gradually become regular. Natural things are themselves organisms. The objects we think are inert are a good deal more regular—less likely to have inner feeling result in spontaneous behavior—than we are. But he argued, in a possibly unique case of prescience for quantum mechanics among fully informed late 19^th century scientists, that while the aberrations from natural law of all "physical" events were asymtotically approaching null, there were now and would always be some such cases of absolute indeterminancy. This he called absolute chance, tychism. This spontaneity or indeterminancy arises from feeling, Firstness, but very rarely for the inorganic entities in the later stages of the universe that are locked into the increasing regularities of Secondness and Thirdness. The "effeteness" of matter occurs not because its feeling is dull, but because its habit-locked feeling is only rarely manifested as spontaneity. The lack of certain types of organization is also a feature of most matter, but this results in differences in the quality of feeling in complex organic settings, rather than quantity of feeling.

The linking of indeterminancy and consciousness in Peirce might make some of us think of the views of Roger Penrose, and what Daniel Dennett has dubbed the New Mysterions. However, the very nature of the explanation is reversed. For Penrose, it is quantum events that somehow induce and thus mysteriously explain consciousness. For Peirce, it is the hypothesis of some monadic property of the basic atoms, which he calls feeling, that brings about indeterminacy. Feeling and consciousness are not so much "explained"—if that is the word for what Penrose is doing—as they are explaining.

Seen in this way, as a sort of inverted Penrose, we might attempt to translate Peirce’s views into disinfected language that is not so off-putting for us. Peirce himself was almost comically aware of this appearance since in his later years he was remarked upon the affinities of his views with those of Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce—whose religious inclinations and lack of training in science, Peirce had often derided. He was also aware that his view had come to resemble some aspects of the "soft" seminary thinking of the American Transcendentalists, especially Emerson. He essentially joked that maybe it was something powerful in the water of the Boston suburbs, since he had been inoculated by his father against this virus.

We might consider "feeling," and whatever the basic property of what defines the mental and psychical, as just this. "Feeling" is to be the name for the basic, single, monadic property of whatever constitutes the single substance of the world. This feeling manifests itself in observed spontaneity or irregularity. Feeling is then nothing but: the cause of what we observe as true spontaneity. In the first person, we experience this as impulse, sensations, emotions and moods that just come over us, and so on—although many of these may simply be products of psychological regularities of which we are not cognizant. In the second person, these are actions that are out of character (in the thoroughly habitualized person), or chaotic behavior and "experimentation." In the third person, these are the rare indeterminate events among what appear to be inert things.

In this formulation, namely as "the single monadic property of substances that is the source of their true lack of regularity," it is clear why Peirce sometimes—later in his life—preferred the term ‘hylozoism.’ This is the universal "liveliness" of substances, and that lies outside of the regularities described by natural laws, space, and time, and thus outside of what we consider the material nature of this substance—as calculated by mechanics since Newton. Or rather, it is the hypothesis that there is such a non-relational property that explains true spontaneity, if there is any true irregularity.

But why would Peirce risk the charge of being a Romantic spiritualist in also identifying this single monadic property with "feeling" in some ordinary sense, with mind and the mental, and even cultivate the identification of his view with that of the zaniest of the German idealists, Schelling and his "Objective Idealism"? First, I believe he discovered that there were deeply similar features that suspiciously paralleled each other in the mental and material world: internal feeling and external spontaneity, internal mental connections such as reasons or associations and external cause and effect, habit and law. These were arresting similarities that had to be explained, and he saw an explanation of the external in terms of the internal as far more conservative and natural. Second, he saw no other way to solve the mind-body problem: no other way to explain the first-person fact that we know that some matter has feeling and experiences. And we do not see sufficient relevant difference between ourselves and any other object to preclude some sort of feeling in it, although we may have good behavioral reasons to exclude various intellectual abilities. Peirce had become suspicious that the Mind/Body and Other Minds problems might be artifacts of flawed Cartesian methods.

Third Argument. As my remarks have perhaps hinted, I think that hardly any first-rate, influential philosophers of the last decades know anything at all that is more than trivial about Peirce. To this extent—except for perversions and caricatures about belief, abduction, relations, and pragmatism—Peirce has had virtually no important, credited influence on philosophy in the 20^th century. I do not mean this as a criticism of the 20^th century, however. Peirce’s peculiar, and peculiarly expressed, metaphysical views reasonably strike one in our neo-positivist era as odd indeed. Furthermore, his best ideas are buried very deeply. One exception to this judgment of Peirce’s minimal direct influence on our major contemporaries is Hilary Putnam. Another is Thomas Nagel in his The Last Word (1997). In reflecting on some passages in Peirce’s 1898 Cambridge Lectures, Nagel sees a non-standard and intriguing account of belief and comments, "Far from being a pragmatist in the currently accepted sense, [Peirce] seems much more of a Platonist….[his] declarations [are] not only eloquent but entirely congenial; but they have a radically antireductionist and realist tendency quite out of keeping with present fashion" (128-9). Later—although without specific reference to Peirce—Nagel writes of "the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind" commenting: "The thought that the relation between mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in our day and age nervous. I believe that this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life" (130).

Peirce is a great deal more specific and careful about the relationship between nature and mind he proposes than Nagel’s comments might be taken to suggest. For Peirce, scientific thought—and any real thought and inquiry—properly begins with a "surprising fact." It is surprises, and only surprises, that cause uneasy doubt, and then properly animate the series of inferences that he characterized as abduction, induction, and deduction. Without such shocks to our consciousness, we are properly happy enough to trot blindly along with our semi-conscious habits of satisfying belief. One deep problem is that we do not always see certain facts for the surprises or odd occurrences they are.

Peirce thought that one such surprising fact was that our science and engineering had been as successful as they have been. More generally, how is it possible, that our concepts to some degree conform to real, or at least useful, aspects of reality, and that our hypotheses actually sometimes work out as highly confirmed? Peirce could have only seen this as a puzzle only through the lens of his notion of abduction. How is it possible that our mere guesses are sometimes—even often—successful, when there are an infinite number of hypothesized propositions that could logically explain (imply) a given set of facts, but an "infinitely small" subset of these that would be confirmed in wider data sets, and thus that are worthy hypotheses? As has been noticed by others, this is an anticipation of Nelson Goodman’s Grue Paradox, and of the notion of "projectable" predicates.

Peirce dismissed biological evolution as statistically unlikely to explain this surprising phenomenon. And besides, this would justify only aspects of thought and action that enhance survival and reproduction, not any successes among our theoretical and specifically philosophical reflections. Furthermore, there is the deeper problem of how we know that evolution is a good and not merely accidental explanation of our data, and how we came to the apparently successful hypothesis of evolution itself: we have to hypothesize that this must be a side-effect of evolution itself, the ability to reason to and recognize as true Darwin’s ideas, a peculiar boot-strapping.

Peirce argued that for our concepts and hypotheses to be as appropriate and successful as they have been, we must hypothesize a relationship between mind and matter. He further proposed that the best explanation of this relationship, which must exist if we are to have any successful thoughts, is that the organization of our thoughts, and of the world, must be similar. In order to be about the world, our concepts and hypotheses must have some of the same structural features that their content has—our thoughts must be like the natural world. And the final inference in this chain is that the best explanation of this necessarily similar structure is that they are the same substance. This "Transcendental Argument" begins with the question of how it is possible to have thoughts about the world, or for any but an infinitesimal proportion of our abduced propositions to be even partly correct, and ends with an argument for (some) shared structural features of mind and matter.

So far, however, this is only an argument for some monism: it seems preposterous to suppose that mind and matter, though separate substances, just happen to have some of the same structural features and patterns. Let us suppose this morphism is explained by the fact that the so-called mental merely mimics the structure of its material substratum: physical structure induces the requisite mental structure. But for thinking to be "enabled," it is not only necessary for mind and matter to share some structure, but also has to be reasonable for us to believe that it shares this structure. Now, for whatever features I suppose are relevant for distinguishing matter from mind—say that matter has to involve forces in space-time—how do I know that matter, and thus mind, does have these features? Only if I assume what is to be demonstrated and explained: that mind already conforms enough to the structure of matter for us to have hit upon the correct ideas of forces, space, and time.

I am not sure, but I believe that thinking is possible only if we assume that the structured objects we think about are like ourselves, rather than ourselves like the objects of our thought. This view is a kind of structural objective idealism of exactly the kind Peirce proposed. True, this line of reasoning does not show that it is true that all the objects of our thought are like ourselves. Instead, it shows we assume this structure, if we successfully think about anything at all. This argument does not precisely show that objects of our thought themselves have feeling. What it shows is that, for us to have thoughts about something, we must suppose that the object is structured like our mind (including its activities), and that this implies "being the same substance," in that troubling phrase. So if we are conscious and have feeling, then so—by more than mere "analogy"—are the objects of our thought (if we have any). And this inference is better founded than one that claims that objects of our thought have the attributes of matter (whatever that is), and thus so do our minds. For surely we know that we have something like consciousness or feeling more assuredly than that material objects are "in" space and move according to forces.

As Nagel notes with surprise, Peirce’s pragmatism has a strong "realist" flavor. To be surprised at this is, however, to confuse pragmatism with empiricism, positivism, or subsequent "anti-metaphysical" (if not anti-philosophical) pragmatisms such as Rorty’s. To suggest that what is true is what is in some sense useful is quite different from saying dogmatically that no proposals for what is real or exists are useful, or that usefulness consists only in what helps us organize and react to sensations from the external world. This latter view is roughly Daniel Dennett’s (and Quine’s) conception of what science rightly does—and also Steven Stich’s of how real science must give up on folk and occult notions.

However, the greatest successes in the history of the natural sciences are far more on the bold, realist, Peircean side of methodology than many seem to think. If we transpose the Dennett-Stich view of mind and psychology to 19^th century chemistry, we get this. "It is absurd to talk about the ‘inside’ of atoms when we cannot look at them. Chemistry must restrict itself to the observable, publicly confirmable, ‘bond-making’ properties of molecules, that is, only invoke valences as explananda, and not invoke speculations about the unobservable occult nature of what gives rise to these bond-making dispositions." Similar arguments could be used to attack the occult notion of "force" (rather than speaking only of objects’ movements in certain environments) or gene. In all of these hypothetical cases, we see a horror of speculating about what may exist behind what we observe. Such skittishness was responsible for Mach’s view of atomic theory that is now near-universally rejected —namely that atoms didn’t exist and we shouldn’t use them in scientific theory. Why do we have such a deep sympathy for a view that, in the science of mind, is almost precisely the analog of Mach’s?

Conclusion

There is a great deal in Peirce with which I agree: the importance of relations; a fluid and broad notion of mathematical structure and of the primacy of mathematics in understanding (over even logic); a rich and human ("psychologistic") conception of all forms of reasoning; and a deeply probing and remarkably developed account of mind and world, including his theory of signs. There are some views I am less happy with: the word "habit," his indeterministic metaphysics, and his related view of continua. I am uncomfortable with his realism about space and time and am dissatisfied with the words "spontaneity" and "feeling."

However, I like the spirit of it, the boldness and the depth. At the same time, it is not the work of an obscurantist, poet, or religion seeker, but that of a man of science and mathematics. Peirce’s is not a positivistic accountant’s view of philosophy, in which a tiny error or shortage of careful argument, or lack of solidarity with the momentarily prevailing views of our colleagues in the natural sciences, is a sign of "craziness." Using William James’ expression, Peirce is more concerned to speculate and to gain truth than he is concerned to avoid error at all cost. Intellectual timidity is not Peirce’s (or the 19^th century’s problem), although it is very much ours. After all, it seems to me that it is one of the luxuries of doing philosophy that bridges and economies do not collapse, and wars are not lost, if we are wrong. Ours is not such a solemn, nervous, business. Our charter is a license, and an obligation, to boldly speculate where no one has gone before. The legacy of Peirce is thus also a meta-philosophical one.

Especially if one reads the Churchlands, Dennett, and perhaps Searle on the theory of the mind, one gets a strong sense of how much they believe our contemporary science knows about the world, and how obviously and directly these theories apply to philosophical problems, and in fact solves them. There is little, if any, humility and wonder: they hold that our present-day science, fully unified down to its subatomic physics, is basically correct and is nearly complete, and this science-endorsed picture is physicalist, they maintain. They are convinced its results apply easily to the mind, and that our difficulties with it all but vanish. These scientistic philosophers have absorbed perhaps more the optimistic language of grant applications than the actual dialectic of cutting-edge physics or neurology. At its finest, often purely mathematically-described, level, it is far from clear that the ultimately simple entities of physics are "physical" or "material" in any traditional sense. Even such philosophical pleasantries as "existing in spacetime" are up for grabs at this theoretical level, and non-dogmatic physicists quickly grant it. The "matter" of physics has become downright spooky. There are deep open-questions, subject to debate, as there have always been—most obviously in cosmology. Finally, anyone who has struggled with an upper-level physics course in mechanics, experiences viscerally, so to speak, some sense of the complexity of the infamous multi-body problem for three or more planets. Now ask whether we "understand well" the behavior of systems of billions of particles, interacting not just gravitationally but in multiple ways and, with quantum properties on top of that. Or do we understand, or are we likely soon to "understand," the behavior of systems with billions of interacting neurons? Some sense of wonder, of open-endedness, and especially offering honest estimates of what we do not know, has long been a hallmark of philosophy and the best science. Chalmers has it. Many of our best-known American philosophers lack it.

Quite apart from the many similarities of Peirce’s views of mind with David Chalmers’ (and some differences that I have glossed over), there is another reason why I welcome Chalmers’ contributions to consciousness. While neither swashbuckling nor "crazy," they are bold, speculative, and— courageous. They exhibit something that we philosophers should be doing more of: developing theories that are not where everyone else is clustered. And, parroting Margaret Thatcher’s advice to George Bush at the outset of the Gulf War, I would urge Chalmers not to go "wobbly" on us. Peirce never did.