Point Omega: Chardin & Peirce

[ish mailian]

p. 364  Peirce thought that our representations can be classified,
filled out, and elaborated in all sorts of ways, that they can even
become “better,” in the sense of “more useful,” as we peel off their
metaphysical husks.  But was can never (as individuals) say that they
are identical with their objects.  This is not just because our
knowledge always “swims,” as Peirce put it, “in a continuum of
uncertainty and of indeterminacy”; it is also because—and this is the
distinctive feature of Peirce’s theory of signs—there are no
prerepresentational objects out there.  Things are themselves signs:
their being signs is a condition of their being things at all.  You
can call this notion counterintuitive, because that is exactly what it
is: it is part of Peirce’s attack on the idea that we can know some
things intuitively—that is, without the mediation of representations.
For Peirce, knowing was inseparable from what he called semiosis, the
making of signs, and of the making of signs there is no end.  If you
look up a word in the dictionary, you find it defined by a string of
other words, the meanings of which can be discovered by looking them
up in a dictionary, leading to more words to be looked up in turn.
There is no exit from the dictionary.  Peirce didn’t simply think that
language is like that.  He thought that the universe is like that.



p. 364  So what did he mean when he accused the Chicago school of
treating truth as a matter of linguistic expression rather than a
matter of fact?  He meant that Dewey had no teleology.  The
evolutionary concept of teleology is confusing.  Darwin’s theory is
teleological in that it conceives of everything about an organism as
designed for a purpose—ultimately, the purpose of survival.  That was
one of the most revolutionary aspects of Darwin’s thinking, and the
source of James and Dewey’s functionalism—their idea that beliefs are
instruments for action.  We don’t act because we have ideas; we have
ideas because we must act, and we act to achieve ends.  But Darwin’s
theory is antiteleological in that it does not conceive of the
universe itself as designed for an end.  Change is continual but not
directional.  Evolutionary development is not guided by anything prior
to or outside of itself.

[Peirce} did not think that chance variation could explain evolution
adequately—he thought God’s love must play a more important role, a
theory he called “agapism,” and derived in part from the Swedenborgian
writings of Henry James Sr.—and he could not imagine a universe devoid
of ultimate meaning.