Peirce on the Uses of History by Tullio Viola

Author:Tullio Viola
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2020-10-12T15:15:48.659000+00:00

The Ethics of Terminology

A consequence of the interpretation just advanced is that Peirce’s conservatism is, first of all, a philosophical attitude toward social life that is neither necessarily reactionary nor necessarily opposed to a more rationalistic tendency to reform. Rather, the two attitudes may coexist in our handling of social institutions. A corroboration of this reading comes from Peirce’s work on a quite peculiar form of social institution, namely scientific terminology.86 Once again, we observe that Peirce’s interest in the traditional problems of social philosophy tends to be displaced onto issues that concern scientific inquiry and the use of symbols. Science and scientific symbols are the social institutions that Peirce most cared about.

Historically, Peirce’s work on terminology can be construed as a prosecution of his extensive lexicographic research, as well as of his work for the Office of Weights and Measures, a department of the United States Coast Survey (see Chapter 1). As with all the activities he undertook, Peirce explicitly reflected on the logical and epistemological principles underlying his occupation.87 In this case, the leading question was precisely how to manage a system of symbols in such a way as to strike a rational balance between conservation and innovation.88 Many years later, in the “Syllabusˮ of 1903, this question became the object of a genuine philosophical study, which Peirce labelled the “ethics of terminology.”89 He meant in particular the terminology of philosophy, with all the complexities related to this term that we have already discussed. On the one hand, philosophy is a scientific discipline like all others and ought, therefore, to rest on a technical vocabulary (which Peirce saw best exemplified in the terminology of Scholasticism). On the other hand, it needs to retain a strong relation with ordinary language and common sense, in virtue of its “cenoscopic” nature.

The philosophical assumptions behind Peirce’s ethics of terminology are a set of ideas about thought and meaning that we have already encountered in Chapter 3. For one thing, symbols are not a mere clothing of thought, but its essence. Hence, a sound use of symbols dovetails with sound thinking. For another, symbols find themselves in a state of constant change.

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