Introduction to the 2020 Peirce Section

1 Peirce and his difficult legacy

Who is the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced? The answer “Charles S Peirce” is uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating. Mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor, psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short-story writer; phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician [and] metaphysician […] He was, for a few examples, […] the first metrologist to use a wave-length of light as a unit of measure, the inventor of the quincuncial projection of the sphere, the first known conceiver of the design and theory of an electric switching-circuit computer, and the founder of ‘the economy of research’. He is the only system-building philosopher in the Americas who has been both competent and productive in logic, in mathematics, and in a wide range of sciences. If he has had any equals in that respect in the entire history of philosophy, they do not number more than two. (Fisch in Sebeok and Sebeok 1981: 17) ^[1]

It is clear enough by now, nearly forty years since Max Fisch wrote these words, that Peirce’s genius is being increasingly recognized in the 21st century. Many people have articulated the importance of Peircean ideas for the kinds of questions that define modern thought and research – the kind of inquiries, of pathways, which we now, over a hundred years since Peirce’s death, find ourselves on – and they have done so better than I can here. ^[2]

The one thing I can say is that Peirce was an expansive thinker, and perhaps this, more than anything else, is what is being noticed and valued today in an academic environment plagued with the rampant territorialization of knowledge practices. This expansiveness is framed by Peirce’s philosophical commitment to synechism (the doctrine of continuity): a research program that strives to seek continuities in place of assumed discontinuities (body–mind, nature–culture, mind–matter, etc.). As explained in Esposito’s (2005) excellent entry for “Synechism” in The Commens encyclopedia: “As a research program, synechism is a scientific maxim to seek continuities where discontinuities are thought to be permanent and to seek semiotic [triadic] relations where only dyadic [mechanical] relations are thought to exist.” Although Peirce’s contributions are far from being fully acknowledged in either science or philosophy, he is at least generally recognized as the founder of Philosophical Pragmatism. However, and without going into it here, a lack of understanding of synechism and its role in Peirce’s life and thought contributes to a prevalent relativistic reading of pragmatism, and the reason for Peirce’s insistence in later years on changing the name to pragmaticism – a name, he said, “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (CP 5.414 [1905]). As explained further by Esposito (2005), in actuality “[s]ynechism and pragmatism mutually support each other: synechism provides a theoretical rationale for pragmatism, while use of the pragmatic maxim to identify conceivable consequences of experimental activity enriches the content of the theory by revealing and creating relationships” (my italics).

The trans-disciplinary nature of Peirce’s research program, which Fisch highlights, is, I think, central to the renewed interest in Peirce studies today – with semiotics and its various branches, often being considered transdisciplinary in nature (cf. Seif 2017; Deely and Semetsky 2017). Why trans-and not just plain old interdisciplinarity? Because inter- is not enough – as Peirce demonstrated through his synechism and his semiotics (which some would consider a meta-discipline framing all learning and inquiry processes in nature and culture alike). We need integrated and holistic approaches that transcend the simple piecing together of “closed disciplinary perspectives” (Ingold 2017: 75): “In every case, the inter-, the focus on between-ness, is complicit in setting up the borders it is alleged to cross” (Ingold 2017: 75). Here, knowledge and inquiry appear “not as a continent divided into territories or fields of study but as a tangled mesh of ongoing pathways or lines of interest” (Ingold 2017: 74), pathways, we should add, moving together through time.

Peirce, throughout his life, pursued continuities everywhere he could find them. And no doubt, it was Peirce’s prevalent commitment to the continuity and connectedness of thought and action and the immensity of his knowledge of many subjects and disciplines that make him such a profoundly difficult thinker to study. This was indeed reflected in Peirce’s very working method: manuscripts which, at a particular page/ point, branch off in several directions, often with no definitive final version, as well as inquiries and studies that transcend written language itself, embracing multimodal approaches (pictures, graphs, diagrams, colors, etc.). De Tienne (1997: 260) highlights this essential characteristic of Peirce’s personality/work in his article “The Peirce papers: How to pick up manuscripts that fell on the floor”:

[H]e was driven to write, all the time, and the beauty, or the genius, of it was that he never wrote anything simply for the sake of blackening paper – but always for the sake of furthering human thought, whatever the topic was. This is reflected in Peirce’s compositional habits. A careful word-manipulator, Peirce constantly struggled for the precise turn of phrase, for le mot juste, and in that regard he was rarely satisfied with his writing…. But this may be because Peirce was fundamentally an explorer a “backwoodsman” to use his own words, a pioneer always venturing in uncharted land. Many of the surviving documents reflect the explorer’s attitude, which is very much that of the experimentalist, or of the speleogist mapping a new cave: he will try every path, descend into the deepest pits, and only a cul-de-sac will force him back out and into a new direction.

Add to this the issue of Peirce’s actual material legacy – the massive corpus of manuscripts (most unpublished in his lifetime) and their fabled mistreatments and ill fortune; ^[3] the inadequate accessibility to much of this work afforded by the standard published Peirce volumes; and the additional problem that many of these “writings” transcend traditional print media for the fact that they are, as mentioned, multimodal – and you’re ripe for a very difficult scholarly situation! ^[4]

2 Enter Mary Keeler

As any Peirce scholar knows (particularly anyone who has tried to study his late, post 1900 period), the standard Peirce collections are shockingly incomplete and interpretatively misleading. ^[5] It was a recognition of this problem and a huge frustration with the difficulties of making Peirce more accessible, that first led me to the work of Mary Keeler, and eventually, to commission from her this series of short articles for the Peirce Section – on improving access to the Peircean corpus, as well as imagining new possibilities for its communication, re-presentation, and in fact, its technological augmentation.

An account from the first of Keeler’s two short articles published in this issue shows plainly why such re-imaginings are needed in Peirce studies:

Certainly, search and retrieval of the material in print form is a nightmare, made endurable only by the quality of the content. Peirce's method of writing, particularly in his later years, was such that almost any topic might be introduced and discussed in almost any given manuscript, regardless of its nominal topic, which makes it often necessary to search through the manuscripts (in photocopy or microfilm) page by page, hoping the right guess has been made about where to search, since the manuscript labels are not usually helpful, and it is impossible to work through the entire 100,000 pages. Days can be spent in search of a dimly remembered but crucially important passage, sometimes to no avail. Much the same can be said of the Collected Papers edition, still the only overall presentation of his writings available to most readers; even though now in electronic form, its indices and principles of arrangement are far from adequate for scholarly purposes. Its topical arrangement disrupts original series of papers, both published and unpublished. Different parts of the same manuscript appear in different volumes (to reflect the volumes’ respective topics), and many of the selections are either not dated at all or dated inaccurately. Worst of all, parts of different manuscripts are sometimes grafted together (without mention), consisting of writings composed more than three decades apart. As a scholarly tool it is unreliable, obscurantist, and often entirely frustrating […]

Through her in-progress online handbook Discovering the future in the past, ^[6] from which this series of articles is adapted, Keeler is rising to meet these persistent inadequacies so that in posterity we may come to fully realize and appreciate “The hidden treasure” in the Peirce archives. Keeler has said that her task with this handbook was to take a good solid look at what can be done with the Peirce pages (in terms of access, archiving, representation, communication, and dissemination), based on and learning from what has been done already. According to Keeler, one of the principle reasons that Peirce scholarship has not yet fully solved “The manuscript challenge,” is precisely because we have not fully adopted Peirce’s own commitment to inquiry and learning, embodied by his mutually supporting synechism and pragmaticism.

Learning, after all does not simply happen in the brain/mind of the organism. As Peirce indeed recognized, learning proceeds through the action/transformation of signs (semiosis), a relation between organism-environment (cf. Olteanu and Campbell 2018; Campbell 2019). What got me interested in Peirce, as an educationalist and scholar/teacher interested in learning, was precisely this basic orientation toward process and complementarity. This is expressed in the growth and evolution of signification (semiosis), connected to the way organisms come to know (or “model”) their world – and, on a wider level, connected to the “generalizing tendency” of the universe itself – the tendency of meaning to grow. This is to recognize, with anthropologist Michael Ling (cited in Campbell 2018: 563) that “we each are elements, we each are ‘learning processes’ in a larger ‘cosmic’ process of learning (the universe coming to understand itself)”. ^[7] Learning here is not narrowly symbolic nor anthropocentric – as the phenomenon is often treated in the legacy of semiotics (semiology) stemming from de Saussure. As noted recently by Semetsky (2019: 3), the Peircean tradition “sees in semiosis a broader and much more fundamental process, involving the material universe itself in human semiosis and considering semiosis in our species a part of semiosis in nature.”

I think, at least subconsciously (or, abductively), it was this shared recognition of the importance of a broader semiotic conception of learning that initially attracted me to Mary Keeler’s work and her advocacy for the Peirce manuscripts. Keeler emphasizes that the task of reconstructing, preserving, and utilizing Peirce’s manuscripts actually requires the kind of commitment to pragmatism as a method of (right) thinking that Peirce advocated for. She explains in these articles that this process builds upon and enhances experiential leaning, economizing and channeling future inquiry, while adapting to new challenges and the fact that meaning grows:

[H]is scientific work led him to conceive pragmatism as a method of thinking for continuing the process of inquiry, with truth as the logical limit, to improve (or economize) the natural trial-and-error procedure of learning by experience. He created a graphical notation tool, Existential Graphs (EGs), as a topology of logic for observing and demonstrating this process of dialogic reasoning. He referred to EGs as the “lens” and to pragmatism as the “compass,” the tool and method of research needed to demonstrate his general theory of signs, providing the capability to explore how knowledge continues to grow through careful observation and strategic conceptualization in collaborative learning.

Following from these recognitions in Peirce’s mature work, the task before us as Peirce scholars is thus, in large measure, educational – we must begin to channel our learning, collectively and collaboratively, to accomplish the difficult work of preserving and utilizing the Peircean corpus to its fullest possible extent. What Keeler is ultimately imagining in these articles (and her corresponding handbook) is indeed as expansive as Peirce’s vision: a kind of augmented “living” multimodal digital text, that remembers and learns from the inquiry processes that researchers undertake with it. This is an approach to research and knowledge dissemination, she specifies, in itself “guided by Peircean principles of inquiry.”

In this edition of the Chinese Semiotic Studies Peirce Section, Keeler presents the first two articles in a series of four.

The first article, The hidden treasure of C. S. Peirce’s manuscripts, describes the general state of affairs currently confronting Peirce scholarship. Keeler is careful to pay special attention to the “significance of Peirce’s multimodal writings (including colorful graphics and text), along with his convoluted processes of inquiry in the development of his philosophy […] to indicate why the textual experiments in his manuscripts defy the limitations of conventional publishing.” This constitutes the what – and knowing what exactly we are up against is valuable learning for any scholar utilizing Peirce today. To truly accomplish this difficult interpretative, hermeneutic labor, we first must ensure that we have a sense of what kind of thinker Peirce was, and therefore we must ensure that it is possible to trace Peirce’s own intellectual research/ life journey:

With full and effective access to his corpus, scholars could trace the evolution of Peirce’s philosophy from its origins in his early, published essays (where they must struggle to grasp awkward forms of its expression) through its eloquent later expressions, based on his growing semiotic perspective demonstrated in diagrammatic form. His graphical logic was never completed, and we have only indications of how it contributed to his philosophical study of scientific inquiry, or “intelligence capable of learning by experience.” (MS 798; CP 2.227 [1897])

Alas, and as mentioned above, this is extremely difficult with Peirce: as his philosophical work and ideas were never put together or consolidated into a book during his lifetime – and, because of this, the volumes and editions published since his death tend to be highly selective. Furthermore, as Keeler highlights, “[v]ery few hardy scholars have studied the estimated 50,000 unpublished pages he wrote from 1900 until his death in 1914.”

In her second article, “Pragmatically improving access to Peirce’s archive,” Keeler continues providing some expanded details around what technology could be used to improve/augment the current conditions of access, and through this, she begins to frame the how of her project. Through interviewing Leslie Morris, the Gore Vidal Curator of Modern Manuscripts at Harvard, and two researchers in the technology of knowledge representation, Keeler argues for the creation of a collaborative, ontological approach to cataloguing the archive, “[a]s more than a database, an ontology must functionally represent the conceptual perspectives of its users, and continue to evolve as users’ inquiry evolves.” Keeler explains further that with

[…] collaborative development through network communication, scholars and editors can first correct the catalogue entries [a large issue in itself], using additions and alterations accumulated during the decades of print-edition editing. Concurrently, an ontology of the collection (or a comprehensive conceptual framework that relates the data in a coherent structure, or logical representation) can be constructed as the basis for interrelating the catalogue entries conceptually to accommodate diverse disciplinary perspectives.

This last point is indeed important with Peirce scholarship. Peirce is currently being studied in a vast array of fields, each using, interpreting, and reconstructing Peirce in distinctive (and sometimes disparate) ways (from mathematics, computer science, to biology, anthropology, and education, to name just a few). A transdisciplinary approach to access and cataloguing is essential.

In her next two articles (to be published in the subsequent issue of Chinese Semiotic Studies), Keeler continues these explorations by taking a more detailed look at Peirce’s social theory of logic and his economics of research, asking along the way “what sort of access Peirce might hope would ultimately be possible in representing his ideas.” In these essays she further exemplifies the difficulties of interpreting Peirce from currently available materials and poses challenging considerations about what “we want out of technological augmentation.”

I think it is extremely important that Peirce scholars begin engaging seriously with these issues around access, dissemination, and representation that Keeler raises in these articles. They weigh heavily upon any attempt to seriously interpret and engage with Peircean thought in the 21st century. As noted by Horace Kallen, cited and discussed further in Houser (1989), ideas and scholars get carried forward, not through some inevitable process of cultural transmission, but because real people rise to the call:

Somebody gets picked up; he has vocal and persuasive disciples; a school gets set up; reports are written — they may be forgotten and lost altogether, or they may be carried on by organizations of power, the way Shakespeare is carried on, the way the Bible used to be carried on. Who reads the Bible now since the Church has lost control of education? And who would be reading Shakespeare now if there were not entrance examinations for college requiring the reading of two or three of Shakespeare's plays? The vehicles of communication and the relevancy of selected material are what make the difference. What was Peirce's place in the history of philosophy? What was it in 1910? And then along came these kids who were sure that they knew more about Peirce than Dewey and James did, and provided the correct view of Peirce, having edited his works; and Peirce now has a vogue. Well, why does he have a vogue? Why Plato or Aristotle or anybody? Somebody chooses to push the damn thing.