Synechism & Law

This chapter examines the role of synechism in Charles S. Pierce's pragmatism. Pierce frequently remarked that his pragmaticism was intimately related to synechism or the doctrine of continuity. Indeed, Peirce’spent the better part of twenty years working out his synechistic cosmology. According to him, synechism as a logical principle forbids one to consider any inexplicability as a possible explanation, and this is nothing more or less than the assumption behind the scientific enterprise as such, namely, that the world is knowable. The synechistic principle does not deny that there is an element of the inexplicable and of the ultimate and brute in the world. This does not, however, block the road of inquiry, but rather stimulates one to generalize from the experience, to form new hypotheses, because one is convinced that the facts can be understood—that they manifest another mode of being other than brutishness, namely, obedience to rationality and to law.

Tychism & Evolution

This concluding chapter looks at Charles S. Pierce's remark that Charles Darwin's ideas must inevitably kill mechanical philosophy. According to him, Darwin's theory—nourished by positive observation—must be deadly to a merely “metaphysical” opinion. Pierce further contended that mechanical determinism and evolutionism are basically incompatible. Mechanical philosophy, an a priori position, is not only unsupported by observational evidence such as Darwin's but positively contradicted by it. The chapter then argues that to admit tychism is to admit growth and development as fundamental to the entire cosmos. Conversely, to hold a thoroughgoing and consistent evolutionary account of the universe, one must admit real chance.

Pragmatism & the Normative Sciences

This chapter discusses Charles S. Pierce's pragmatism. Although Peirce came to recognize the nature and role of the normative sciences only late in his career, still he was convinced that his own account of the hierarchical dependence of logic on ethics and of ethics on esthetics was a discovery of fundamental importance for a correct understanding of his system, and one which distinguished his “pragmaticism” from other less correct interpretations of his own famous maxim. The conclusion one must draw is that despite the relatively short time Peirce’spent working out his conception of normative science, and despite his many hesitations as to what ought to be included under that rubric, he had seen where and how the notion not only fitted into his view of philosophy, but he had also in some way united the whole thing, molding his earlier attempts at formulating the pragmatic maxim into a comprehensive and highly subtle analysis of meaning.