Peirce, James, and a Pragmatic Philosophy of Religion by Woell John W.;

Author:Woell, John W.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Chapter 4

Inquiry, Metaphysics, and Rationality

This project has, thus far, relied on an implicit distinction that is worth making explicit here through an example borrowed from Lars Hertzberg. Consider the following two claims: “Caesar crossed the Rubicon,” and “Caesar is a prime number.” In the former instance, the meaning of the words and the sense of the sentence seem obvious. However, this is only of psychological significance; we have simply managed to pick out determinate meanings for each of the words in the claim such that the claim as a whole makes sense.1 This need not point us in the direction of making larger philosophical claims regarding what can and what cannot make sense. In the latter instance, “Caesar is a prime number,” it seems we have uttered nonsense; however, it is entirely possible to provide a context in which the latter claim makes sense. In “The Sense Is Where You Find It,” Hertzberg offers the following way of doing so:

Imagine the following conversation between two judges at a dog show:

A: What are the prime contenders in this class?

B: Well, Caesar is a prime number.

A: Which one is that?

B: It’s number 53.

A: Yes, you’re right, of course, 53 really is a prime number.2

Although Hertzberg admits that the example is “a bit strained,” it allows us to see both that “Caesar is a prime number” can be given a sense and that “53 is a prime number” can be given a sense that is independent of its use in mathematics. The larger point to be made here is that utterances, which appear prima facie to have a particular sense or to have no sense at all, may have a different sense than originally thought, or may have a sense when thought to have had none. Nonsense is as context-dependent as sense.

The rhetorical strategy of the last two chapters has been to show that Peirce and James found the particular conceptions to which those chapters were addressed to be philosophically problematic within the contexts from which they were supposed to derive their senses. Although Peirce and James have both been read often enough as standing outside the early modern European philosophical tradition or as offering practical objections to philosophical doctrines within that tradition, I have tried to show that their objections are philosophical in nature, revealing difficulties internal to the use of the concepts of mind and the thing-in-itself, respectively. To this point, the project has been largely critical and only minimally constructive.

Part of the difficulty in the task in which I have engaged thus far is that isolating Peirce’s and James’s pragmatism from their other philosophical ideas is considerably more difficult than simply leaving a room and entering a hall, if I may push James’s metaphor from Pragmatism. The work of the last two chapters has been primarily to demonstrate that Peirce and James were not only happy to do without philosophical concepts that are quite deeply imbedded in contemporary epistemological and metaphysical discussions, but also worked to show that the concepts

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