Levi is out swinging (in the most entertaining way possible; I love it when he gets on a roll, and I do agree with him on much of it).
Of course, there’s not much new in what he says (that hasn’t been said by Left-realists for the last few decades, and by Latour more recently). But of course it still needs to be said (in some circles, like to Left anti-realists) and it’s better said by constructivist realists (like Bryant, Latour, et al.) than by anti-constructivists (on the Right or Left). Constructivist realism — a realism that avows the constructedness (enactedness, emergentness, historicity) of everything, from quarks to civilizations to universes — is where things are at. (Which is why I appreciate Levi’s philosophizing so much.)
The comments that follow his post include some rejoinders from Peircians (like Mark Crosby and Matt Segall), who don’t like Bryant’s seeming characterization of Charles Sanders Peirce as an anti- or non-realist. In response, Levi writes that “we never really see Pierce employed outside the humanities.” Here he needs to be corrected.
The fields of biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics, et al. are almost entirely “outside the humanities.” They consist of biologists, ecologists, zoologists, complex systems scientists, as well as “semioticians” (of various kinds) and philosophers of various stripes.
(For instance, the Wikipedia entry for biosemiotics, in its history section, includes the following paragraph:
The contemporary period (as initiated by Copenhagen-Tartu school) include biologists Jesper Hoffmeyer, Kalevi Kull, Claus Emmeche, Terrence Deacon, Luis Bruni, Alexei Sharov, Søren Brier, Marcello Barbieri, Anton Markos, Howard Pattee, Yair Neuman, Timo Maran, semioticians Donald Favareau, Martin Krampen, Frederik Stjernfelt, Floyd Merrell, Myrdene Anderson, Lucia Santaella, Marcel Danesi, Winfried Nöth, philosophers John Deely, John Collier, Tommi Vehkavaara, Günther Witzany, and complex systems scientists Peter Cariani, Michael Conrad, Cliff Joslyn, Luis M. Rocha, et al.)
That these interdisciplinary fields are not widely known is no reason why they should be ignored. (But one could also surmise that they aren’t widely known in the humanities in part because they aren’t in the humanities.)
But let’s look at the question more broadly, and more empirically.
A search for “Peirce C S” in the ScienceDirect database — which consists mostly of scientific journal articles, though there is a category for “Arts and Humanities” and another for “Social Sciences” — returns a total of 7,884 articles. Of these, only 1 in 10 (794) come up when the search is limited to Arts and Humanities journals; and just over 1 in 10 (1,054) come up in a search limited to Social Science journals. (The latter two lists overlap, as a combined search for “Arts and Humanities” and “Social Science” journals returns 1,392 listings.)
If we assume — probably overgenerously — that as many as 80% of the non-Arts and Humanities returns are not to Charles Sanders Peirce but to some other Peirce (leaving 1400 that are to CSP), and — no doubt overgenerously — that all of the Arts and Humanities returns are to C. S. Peirce, that would still leave twice as many* CSP articles in the non-Arts and Humanities fields — meaning, in the physical, medical, behavioral, and biological sciences plus the social sciences (only 450 or so, once you subtract the Arts & Humanities/Social Sciences overlap) and engineering — than in the Arts and Humanities.
What are some of these journals? The first dozen that come up in the total list (including Arts and Humanities) are Language Sciences, Information Sciences, Historia Mathematica (a journal that comes up a lot), Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, Handbook in the History of Logic, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Mathematics, Biosystems, and Design Studies.
(I’ve skipped any references that clearly are to another Peirce — such as CSP’s father, astronomer and mathematician Benjamin Peirce, whose “Peirce decomposition for associative algebras” comes up frequently in algebra and maths journals. Fortunately, there were only a handful of non-CSP references in the first 50 articles listed.)
What this tells us is that Peirce is known outside the humanities. This should be no surprise, since his reputation is largely an outgrowth of his work in logic, mathematics, geography, philosophy and methodology of science, geodesy, and — here’s where the humanists come in — pragmatism and semiotics. To claim that he is not a realist doesn’t really hold water.
The real question (as Matt points out) is, what kind of realist was he? And that’s where things get interesting.
* [edited after the original article was posted]
has “agapism” faded away as folks get more realist-ic in the sciences?
Thanks for the shout out, Adrian. Perhaps the more cogent question is whether there can be a non-correlationist version of Peirce. I think it’s very difficult to make this case given that he advocates a pan-semiotic conception of being and that he understands signs as “something that signifies something to someone” (“A sign is something which stands for another thing to a mind”, Logic as a Study of Signs). So here, I think, are the positives in Peirce:
1) His correlationism isn’t restricted to mind, but as the biosemioticians have made abundantly clear, to any type of organism that relates to the world about it. In this regard, he’s posthumanist.
2) His semiotics isn’t restricted to the signifier or language, but includes a variety of different types of signs beyond symbols.
I’m aware that Peirce advocates an updated version of Medieval realism, holding to the reality of universals. Of course– and I know you know this but some of the Peircophiles online have completely missed this point –this is not what discussions of realism are about among the new materialists and the speculative realists, so it should be set aside. The realist question is whether or not we can talk intelligibly about beings independent of signifying relations or correlation.
As an aside– and I know you know this as well –I think people sometimes get confused about correlationism and anti-realism. They seem to take correlationism and anti-realism as the thesis that there is nothing independent of correlations and then protest “but x believes in the existence of noumena or Firstness, etc”. In other words, they confuse correlationism with subjective idealism vis a vis Berkeley (who himself didn’t advocate that kind of subjective idealism by virtue of the place of God in his onto-epistemology). That, however, is not the crux. The issue is whether or not we can speak intelligibly about being independently of correlation, or whether anything we say of being is restricted to being for us (thereby containing an implicit skepticism to the effect that whether beings might be this way independent of us is a question we can never answer).
I find myself in a difficult position. On the one hand, I want all the toys I get from correlationists such as Peirce, Uexkull (who actually has a strong realist dimension in his thought), the heirs of Saussure, Luhmann, etc. I have no intention of abandoning the analysis of semiospheres or umwelts and never have. On the other hand, I want a framework that staunchly rejects the skepticism that arises from these observer-centered forms of analysis, with their implicit claim to reduce being(s) to correlates of these forms of apprehension. How to square those two things is the issue I’m grappling with. Of course, vitalism of any sort is off the table for me (hence the rejections of Whitehead and Peirce’s “agapism”; while admiring much else in these thinkers… That vitalistic stuff, I think, is just animistic nonsense on stilts).
Thinks for the references to other thinkers working in the Peircian tradition. A number of these I personally wouldn’t recognize as being outside the humanities (e.g., John Deely), while some of those listed in biology I would see as being fringe in that discipline, at best; but I’ll have to dig deeper.
hey Levi, this may be too simplistic ( my grasp of metaphysics is quite limited) but isn’t there a kind of pragmatist middle-ground available in that we can develop explanations about (orientations towards) others that are good/useful enough given our
interests-in/interactions-with them? Not sure how we really have any-thing else to compare them to, measure them against?
thanks, Dirk
dmf,
Sure, I think that’s what we do all the time. What I’ve been trying to get at lately is the way in which the reflexive turn has come to function as a sort of a priori in contemporary politics that has generated a sort of strategic skepticism that allows all sorts of policy to be avoided (and I’m talking about the United States when I say this).
By the reflexive turn, I’m referring to modes of critical analysis that instruct us to analyze the observer rather than what’s observed. Examples of this are extremely common in climate change discussions. You will hear the climate change skeptic say “climate change scientists are just people pursuing grant money who have to say these things in order to get those cushy grants”. In this way, they draw attention to the observer of climate, and attribute ugly, dishonest motives. In this way they’re able to call into question the observed.
Rather than the pragmatist give and take that you’re talking about, the reflexive turn instead undermines that communicative give and take from the outside, because the shift to the observer and how the observer observes casts doubt on all things observed by revealing the contingency of distinctions that allow the observation to take place. As a result, the ability to respond to things like climate change are halted from the outset before a discussion even takes place. Paradoxically, the critical tools of post-structuralist thought, deconstruction, critical theory, etc., get enlisted for reactionary ends rather than emancipatory ones.
it’s my sense that most folks (regardless of affiliations) are all too well adapted in/to the conservative trends of gossip-worlds/pecking-orders, and will use whatever tools are at hand to try and more or less keep the same old same old going.
To tie in with AI’s comment below we are going to be working with people on the fringes (hopefully with those that stand-out for good reasons) or just beating our heads against the walls of institutionalized life, there isn’t a code/theory that in and of itself escapes such traps/uses so we need to figure out how to shape/enact our works in ways that have the kinds of broad/deep impacts needed against such outsized foes/forces. May be a fools errand but given the alternatives…
Levi –
I think that any debate over a possible “non-correlationist version of Peirce” would get us bogged down into the debate over whether or not there are real (as opposed to aggregate) entities that have no interiority whatsoever, i.e., no capacity to take account of anything.
If we accept Peirce’s definition of a sign as “something that signifies something to someone” (or to “a mind”), but also accept that that “someone” can be anything — anything with a capacity to register something else (taking that “something else” as a sign for its own registration/response of what it stands for) — then it is correlationism all the way down, but a correlationism that is utterly non-anthropocentric. Human consciousness is, in this sense, only a (particularly complex and evolved) variation of prehension, or relation (and correlation).
I’m content (more or less) with that kind of correlationism, but I know that you are not. However, I’m not convinced that that kind of “pan-correlationism” is at all opposed to realism. It is opposed to a materialism that swallows all ideality into matter (i.e., that assumes that everything there is about a thing is what’s visible of it to an outsider). For Peirce, however, the material and the ideal were just two sides of the same activity (i.e., of semiosis). So the observed material world is what we can see of other things, but it’s not the *entirety* of those other things — far from it. (Matter, as Peirce put it, is “effete mind,” mind that has become so habituated that, to all intents and purposes *for us*, it appears absolutely uncreative.)
You write: “The issue is whether or not we can speak intelligibly about being independently of correlation, or whether anything we say of being is restricted to being for us”
Here, again, is that same difference: I don’t see “being independently of correlation” as the only alternative to “being” that “is restricted to being for us.” That’s because I don’t see the “us” (by which I presume you mean humans, right?) as being the only kind of entity capable of correlation. I just don’t see why the first issue — correlation versus non-correlation — always seems to morph into the second — human and always only human correlation versus “anti-correlationism.” That’s why I find the “anti-correlationist” stance to be too blunt and clumsy a tool to be very useful. Relations, and correlations, of all sorts need to be the focus of metaphysical analysis; it’s only the human-correlationist-centrism that’s become a problem.
“I want a framework that staunchly rejects the skepticism that arises from these observer-centered forms of analysis, with their implicit claim to reduce being(s) to correlates of these forms of apprehension.”
Here, I would say that there’s a difference between an “observer-centered form of analysis” and a form of analysis that understands observation — as one from of subjectivity — as inherently connected to being (or objectivity). The latter doesn’t necessitate skepticism; it just necessitates the kind of relativism (constructive-realist relativism) that Latour, Stengers, et al. call “cosmopolitics.” I’m as opposed as you are to “reduc[ing] being(s) to correlates of these forms of apprehension.” But these forms of apprehension need to be theorized as central to all forms of (ap)prehension that make up the activity of the universe.
Finally, you are right that most of the biologists, et al, mentioned are “fringe” in their disciplines; the Peircians are a minority in every scientific discipline they can be found in. But I think that the philosophers of any stripe — by which I mean those whose scientific research and/or theorizing directly applies or references philosophical sources — are a minority within any scientific discipline, and my hope is that it only takes a certain number of them, doing productive and convincing work, to nourish the sort of paradigm shifts (or counter-hegemonies) we’d like to see.
Adrian,
Actually we’re in quite a bit of agreement. When I use the term “observer”, it’s completely neutral, containing no reference to a particular type of observer. An observer can be humans, corporations, moths, trees, etc. All observers will share certain things in common; namely, they will only relate to a partial slice of being, e.g., my cats can hear and see things I can’t, etc. So basically I’m on the same page with respect to the posthumanism you’re talking about.
We’d diverge a bit in treating every entity that exists as observers. Thus, for example, I don’t think that rocks, stars, black holes, hydrogen atoms, etc., are observers. While these entities indeed relate causally to other entities, a causal relation is not yet an observer relation. In my view, we can only speak of an observer where absence can take on a semiotic role in a system. For example, among certain species of fish the absence of male counterparts can initiate processes where some set of the population undergoes a gender transformation. Where a causal relation implies some sort of direct interaction– and I realize quantum mechanics tells us a more complicated story –in the case of an observer we don’t need these sorts of direct interactions. Here I hasten to add that I’m not suggesting that causation is absent in semiotic relations. Rather, I’m saying there’s an asymmetry here that can be expressed as follows:
This is a far more complicated story than I’m outlining here so hopefully these remarks will be sufficient to give you the gist of where I’m coming from. Contra Whitehead (or Harman), not every entity is a subject or seat of experience in my view (I reject pan-psychism).
Back to the issue of correlationism. The issue with correlationism, I think, is not whether one being relates to another being. I think it’s rather obvious that in order to know something one being must relate to another being. The question is whether this relation involves a “restriction clause” to the effect that “property x belonging to entity q known by observer y is restricted to or only true for observer y.” In other words, the question is one of whether property x belongs to entity q regardless of whether or not observer y observes q, or whether the attribution of x to q is only valid for y.
Correlationism says “x is true of q only for y.” There is, of course, a weak and a strong version of this thesis. The strong version says that there is no truth of x belonging to q independent of y. In other words, it says that being itself is entirely different than what it is for the observer. This seems to be what Kant suggests of space and time, for example, where he says directly that being-in-itself has no structure of space and time whatsoever. The weak version instead espouses a sort of skepticism. It says, for example, that hydrogen atoms might have the characteristics that we observe in them, but that we can never know whether or not this is in fact the case because “we can never get outside of our observing to observe whether or not our observations correspond to what we observe”. This is a rather benign thesis until we begin to look at how it functions in theology, religion, and philosophy of religion as establishing that minimal doubt in a materialist universe– i.e., “while everything appears to be completely material and governed by causality, but it might be that there is still all sorts of supernatural phenomena at work” –to blunt a physicalist account of being. In short, the problem with correlationism isn’t that it claims an observer must relate to being to know it, but rather that it claims that our claims are only true for that observer.
Hi Adrian, thanks for the stats on Peirce and the sciences. Furlough has provided me with some time to make a bit of progress with ECOLOGIES OF THE MOVING IMAGE (but also rereading THE DEMOCRACY OF OBJECTS ; )
Most likely, many readers here have experienced GRAVITY, but I hardly think it’s the masterpiece some reviewers have gushed about (“astonishing verisimilitude and unsettling emotional depth”, raved Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post). Although director Alfonso Cuaron’s film seems to hypostasize the earth, world, cosmos triad, it’s about as unrealistic as you can get!
On the other hand, for me, WADJDA (Haifaa al Mansour’s film starring 10-year-old Waad Mohammed as the Arabian girl who defies conventions to ride a bicycle) was a much more moving masterpiece! I wouldn’t call it “agapism”, but some sort of love is needed to make it through the Desert of the Real (scene blowing by on a highway in the final shot).
Anyway, I better get back to the books because, most likely, I’ll soon be preoccupied making up for lost time at my day job (feeling more like a civil slave rather than a civil servant ; (