Peirce on Evolutionary Truth

Posted on March 1, 2012
Filed Under Epistemology, OOP, Philosophy | Leave a Comment

I was considering Levi’s great post on Adam’s new book. (I hope to comment on Adam’s book shortly) The issue ends up tying to Latour’s epistemology. Now I confess I know very little Latour – almost nothing beyond what I’ve read from Adam, Levi or Graham Harman’s works. In an earlier post by Levi he had a really interesting discussion of the issue of reference in Latour.

For Latour, this is not correspondence or mirroring of the world into representation. A series of actions on the part of researchers and savanna soil are coordinated, are articulated in order that the code will do more than resemble the soil: “it takes the place of the original situation” (ibid:67).

And

The key point not to be missed, however, is that knowledge is an activity. It involves an activeinterplay with the “materials”, a genesis of forms, and a situating of these materials in forms. This leads me to a further point about philosophical epistemology. Philosophy has a long history of holding practice in disdain. This can be seen in all domains of philosophical thought, and, is very likely, in part, due to the class origins of philosophy, and, in part, the sort of lives philosophers themselves live.

Levi’s main criticism is thus knowing as just a relationship between text and world.

All of this reminded me of Peirce a great deal. I won’t get into Peirce’s conception of epistemology proper, which he saw much more as an idealized situation. However the following gets at Peirce’s view of knowing.

A tabula rasa having been determined as representative of the symbol tha determines it, that tabula rasa tends to become determinate. The vague always tends to become determinate, simply because its vagueness does not determine it to be vague (as the limit of an endless series). In so far as the interpretant is the symbol, as it is in some measure, the determination agrees with that of the symbol. But in so far as it fails to be its better self, it is liable to depart from the meaning of the symbol. Its purpose, however, is to represent th symbol in its representation of its object; and therefore, the determination followed by a further development, in which it becomes corrected. It is of the nature of a sign to be an individual replica and to be in that replica a living general. By virtue of this, the interpretant is animated by the original replica, by the sign it contains, with the power of representing the true character of the object. That the object has at all a character can only consist in a representation that it has so,-a representation having power to live down all opposition. In these two steps, of determination and of correction, the interpretant aims at the object more than at the original replica and may be truer and fuller than the latter. The very entelechy of being lies in being representable. A sign cannot even be false without being a sign and so far as it is a sign it must be true. A symbol is an embryonic reality endowed with power of growth into the very truth, the very entelechy of reality. This appears mystical and mysterious simply because we insist on remaining blind to what is plain, that there can be no reality which has not the life of a symbol. (EP “New Elements”, 323)

Now this can seem mysterious in that he does use terms like representative or replica. However what he is saying is that objects cause signs. Signs are themselves dynamic and grow in terms of what they signify. The ultimate end of a sign is to represent its object. But during the process of sign-development it is more complex. Truth thus is a property of signs (not some ideal immaterial entity like Frege’s conception of proposition)

When a sign signifies it produces an interpretant (a new sign). However this sign has as its object both the original object as well as the sign that produced it. Truth thus arises as signs grow into the reality they are.

This sounds much like Levi’s discussion in his post on Adam of truth in Platonism. There are some differences though. For Plato an entity is true to the degree it approximates its eternal form. Truth is thus a property of objects as they relate to forms. For Peirce the equivalent of eternal form is what signs grow into: their entelechy. So it is the inversion of Plato although with some important similarities. An original object signifies an interpretant. This sign relationship (sign as reference) is itself under growth and is growing to a stable interpretant which is the final form.

Now when we use the word truth we don’t typically think of it in that way. Rather we simply mean a sentence agrees with reality. However what this actually means is that the interpretant of a particular sign and this predestined end to sign-growth are the same. Thus truth grows into a final interpretant.

Now channeling Derrida let me say that for Peirce in one sense this is a final interpretant not in the sense of a onto-theological conception. A truth present. Rather it is always a coming to be truth. In Derrida terms we have an eschatology of a messiah who is always yet to come. Yet also following Derrida I think Peirce ends up with truth as the selection by greater powers. Those greater powers are all the community of signs that lead signs to the interpretations they have. The growth of signs is thus always an assembly of sorts. Signs develop out of this complex web of signs. While truth is what is fated to be, at any given time we can only speak about relative stability within the meaning of particular signs.

Peirce often uses the term entelechy from Aristotle. It might be useful to quote from the Century Dictionary where I believe Peirce wrote the following entry:

ENTELECHY (en-tel’e-ki), n. [( L. entelechia, (Gr. entelecheia, actuality, ( en telei echein, be complete (cf. Enteles, complete, full): ev, in; telei, dat. of telos, end, completion; echein, have, hold, intr. be.]

Realization: opposed to power or potentiality, and nearly the same as energy or act (actuality). The only difference is that entelechy implies a more perfect realization. The idea of entelechy is connected with that of form, the idea of power with that of matter. Thus, iron is potentially in its ore, which to be made iron must be worked; when this is done, the iron exists in entelechy. The development from being in posse or in germ to entelechy takes place, according to Aristotle, by means of a change, the imperfect action or energy, of which the perfected result is the entelechy. Entelechy is, however, either first or second. First entelechy is being in working order; second entelechy is being in action. The soul is said to be the first entelechy of the body, which seems to imply that it grows out of the body as its germ; but the idea more insisted upon is that man without the soul would be but a body, while the soul, once developed, is not lost when the man sleeps. Cudworth terms his plastic nature (which see, under nature) a first entelechy, and Leibniz calls a monad an entelechy.

The following might also be of interest.

It must not be forgotten that Aristotle was an Asclepiad, that is, that he belonged to a family which for generation after generation, from prehistoric times, had had their attention turned to vital phenomena; and he is almost as remarkable for his capacity as a naturalist as he is for his incapacity in physics and mathematics. He must have had prominently before his mind the fact that all eggs are very much alike, and all seeds are very much alike, while the animals that grow out of the one, the plants that grow out of the other, are as different as possible. Accordingly, his dunamis is germinal being, not amounting to existence; while his entelechy is the perfect thing that ought to grow out of that germ. Matter, which he associates with stuff, timber, metal, is that undifferentiated element of a thing which it must possess to have even germinal being. Since matter is, in itself, indeterminate, it is also in itself unknowable; but it is both determinable by form and knowable, even sensible, through form. The notion that the form can antecede matter is, to Aristotle, perfectly ridiculous. It is the result of the development of matter. He looks upon the problem from the point of view of a naturalist. In particular, the soul is an outgrowth of the body. (CP 6.356 (1901) Baldwin’s Dictionary: “Matter and Form”)