mentally or mathematically defined conditions. Another strand in Peirce’s
thinking was a staple of academic philosophy in American religious colleges
at midcentury: the critique of Humean doubt by the Scottish “common-sense”
philosophy (Reid, Stewart), which had argued for the validity of ordinary faith
in both the order of sensible nature and the existence of God. With his
mathematical tools, Peirce was able to mount a more penetrating critique, both
of sensationist induction and of rationalistic doubt.^56 Peirce in his later years
called his position “critical common-sensism,” as if to imply a blend of Kant
and the Scottish philosophy. Peirce held that “all uncriticizable beliefs are
vague, and cannot be rendered precise without evoking doubt” (Brent, 1993:
300). There is no such thing as a first sensation, for an object takes shape only
after it has been subjected to interpretations via the chain of signs. By the same
token, there is no final cognition because the reinterpretations can go on
endlessly as further sign connections are made and the object thus evoked is
seen in its further ramifications. And since the “object” itself is only a postulate,
a sign hypothesized in order that its consequences might be investigated, there
is neither clear-cut doubt nor clear-cut elements of reality. Vagueness is an
inherent property of the universe, out of which definite concepts and laws can
only evolve.
Pragmatism in the hands of Peirce was just the sort of Idealist block-uni-
verse that James had created his own pragmatism to replace. Peirce allowed
himself to be attached retrospectively to the pragmatist movement, grasping at
a few straws of fame amid his general failure. But even in his embattled old
age, Peirce touted his own “pragmaticism [as] closely allied with Hegelian
absolute idealism,” and claimed that dialectic is a special case of his own triadic
metaphysics (Brent, 1993: 299). Peirce’s socially oriented pragmatism of the
community of researchers resonates with the naturalistic philosophy and soci-
ology of science that developed two generations after his death, but only
because the Idealism that was Peirce’s own intellectual milieu was dead and
forgotten. The naturalistic side of Peirce was developed only in the mid- and
late-twentieth century, after the social and semiotic sciences had expanded; he
is a major philosopher retrospectively because the social conditions which
determined his discoveries were long-term ones, ultimately giving rise to these
independent disciplines. In his day Peirce struggled for recognition, and was
overshadowed by much more clear-cut Idealists such as Royce, and on the
other side by pragmatists such as James and Dewey. The chaos of Peirce’s career
is paralleled by the chaotic nature of his writings: a mass of scattered papers
and voluminous disorderly drafts for a system which was never published. Our
retrospective Peirce the semiotician is a cleaned-up version for modern tastes.
The moment when the American university system was differentiating cre-
ated an opening for the combination of mathematics, philosophy, and religion,
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^679