Kósmos Noetós: Ivo Assad Ibri

Philosophical Studies Series
Ivo Assad Ibri
Kósmos
Noetós
The Metaphysical Architecture of
Charles S. Peirce
Volume 131
Editor-in-Chief
Luciano Floridi, University of Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute, United Kingdom
Mariarosaria Taddeo, University of Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute, United Kingdom
Executive Editorial Board

Patrick Allo, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Massimo Durante, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy
Phyllis Illari, University College London, United Kingdom
Shannon Vallor, Santa Clara University
Board of Consulting Editors

Lynne Rudder Baker, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Stewart Cohen, Arizona State University, Tempe
Radu Bogdan, Tulane University
Marian David, University of Notre Dame
John M. Fischer, University of California at Riverside
Keith Lehrer, University of Arizona, Tucson
Denise Meyerson, Macquarie University
François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod, EHESS, Paris
Mark Sainsbury, University of Texas at Austin
Barry Smith, State University of New York at Buffalo
Nicholas D. Smith, Lewis & Clark College
Linda Zagzebski, University of Oklahoma
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/6459
Ivo Assad Ibri
Kósmos Noetós
The Metaphysical Architecture
of Charles S. Peirce
Ivo Assad Ibri
Philosophy Department
Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo
São Paulo, Brazil
Translation from the Portuguese language edition: “Kósmos noetós: a arquitetura metafísica de
Charles S. Peirce” by Ivo Assad Ibri © Paulus Editora, 2015. All rights reserved. Translated by
Henry Mallett.
ISSN 0921-8599 ISSN 2542-8349 (electronic)

ISBN 978-3-319-66313-5 ISBN 978-3-319-66314-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66314-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950287
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors
or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims
in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Printed on acid-free paper
This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To my children Gabriel (who knew so much
about me), Clara and Conrado.
Foreword
In 1879, a review of the state of philosophy in the United States appeared in Mind,
the first and then only British journal of philosophy1. The author of that review,
G. Stanley Hall, explained that even though Americans seemed prone to indepen-
dent thinking, the dogmatism and practical spirit “characteristic of American life”
were obstacles to free philosophical inquiry. What philosophy there was in the
United States was mainly imported from Europe and was typically shaped to con-
form with, even to promote, theological aims and presuppositions. So far, Americans
had not satisfied Emerson’s call “to extend America’s independence from Europe
beyond the political realm to the sphere of thought and culture.”2 But Hall was glad
to be able to report a promising development for the future of philosophy in America.
Religious dogmatism, an unrelenting stumbling-block to the advancement of phi-
losophy, seemed to be losing out in critical venues to the spirit of science and a new
platform for philosophy was emerging.
Hall, a former student of William James at Harvard and the first person in
America to earn a Ph.D. in psychology, was an enthusiastic promoter of a scientific
approach to philosophy. A new philosophical movement led by lawyers and scien-
tific men was underway in the United States and Hall was among the first to recog-
nize that Charles S. Peirce was the intellectual leader of this new movement, born in
the deliberations of the famous Cambridge Metaphysical Club. The story of this
remarkable club is the story of a paradigm shift in American thought. When Peirce
and his friend, William James, founded the club in 1871, the devastating Civil War
and the assassination of President Lincoln were still painfully concrete and the
Darwinian controversy was raging. As Louis Menand explained in his Pulitzer Prize
winning book, The Metaphysical Club,3 the social and cultural upheaval of these
1
G. Stanley Hall. “Philosophy in the United States.” In: Mind, vol. 4 (1879): 89–105.
2
Emerson’s oration, “The American Scholar,” was delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society in
Cambridge on 31 August 1837. It is included in many Emerson anthologies including Ralph Waldo
Emerson; Essays & Lectures, The Library of America, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Viking Press,
1983), pp. 53–71.
3
Louis Menand. The Metaphysical Club (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
vii
viii Foreword
mid-nineteenth century years undermined confidence in absolutes and ideas of

permanence and shifted philosophical reflection from a yearning for foundations
and origins to an emphasis on growth and consequences. Traditional values had
failed in the face of the brute finality of capricious experience. The advancement of
knowledge seemed destined to depend more on new experimental methods in sci-
ence than on reasoning from first principles.
In his review, Hall proclaimed to the readers of Mind that “about a year ago Mr.
C S. Peirce” began publishing a series of papers that set out a comprehensive pro-
gram which “promises to be one of the most important of American contributions to
philosophy.” Hall was drawing attention to the series Peirce was publishing in
Popular Science Monthly under the general title, “Illustrations of the Logic of
Science,” the first two papers being the famous “The Fixation of Belief” and “How
to Make Our Ideas Clear” which, together, Hillary Putnam described as “the mani-
festo of pragmatism.”4 These were the papers drawn up from Peirce’s communica-
tions to the Metaphysical Club and they carried forward an anti-Cartesian
reconstruction of philosophy that Peirce had begun a decade earlier.5 Hall recog-
nized in Peirce’s revolutionary thought the basis for a new scientific philosophy
freed from a priori metaphysical presuppositions that impede the advancement of
knowledge.
Hall devoted a surprisingly large portion of his review to a summary of Peirce’s
“analysis of the advancement of knowledge through a circular, or rather an onward-
spiraling process that begins with the ‘irritation of doubt,’ proceeds to the establish-
ment of ‘belief,’ and culminates in ‘action’ and the consequent establishment of a
more or less trustworthy ‘habit,’ before returning, in time, to further doubt, belief,
action, and modification of habit.”6 Hall summarized Peirce’s pragmatic account of
meaning by explaining that “beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of
action to which they give rise” and that “there is no distinction of meaning so fine
as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.”7 He went on to point
out some of the key tenets of Peirce’s new program noting in particular that syn-
thetic inference involves both inductive and hypothetical (what Peirce would later
4
Peirce introduced his pragmatism in a series of six papers published in 1877 and 1878 in the
Popular Science Monthly. These six papers, as a group, were planned as a book to be titled
“Illustrations of the Logic of Science” and have been reprinted in the main editions of Peirce’s
writings (e.g.: W, 3.242–338; EP, 1.109–199). For Putnam remark see Giovanna Borradori, The
American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty,
Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1994), p. 62.
5
According to Richard Bernstein in The Pragmatic Turn (Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2010), prag-
matism was born in 1868 in the pages of Peirce’s Journal of Speculative Philosophy series, in
which Peirce argued that all thought is in signs and where he made a strong case against intuitive
cognition (W, 2.193–272; also in EP, 1.11–82).
6
David E. Leary, “Between Peirce (1878) and James (1898): G. Stanley Hall, the Origins of
Pragmatism, and the History of Psychology.” In: Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,
vol. 45.1 (2009): 5–20. Leary gives a good account of Hall’s review and of Hall’s conversion to
pragmatism almost 20 years before William James gave his famous address in Berkeley promoting
pragmatism.
7
Hall, 1879, p. 102.
Foreword ix
call “abductive”) reasoning and that “As all knowledge comes from synthetic
inference which can by no means be reduced to deduction, it is inferred that all
human certainty consists merely in our knowing that the processes by which our
knowledge has been derived are such as must generally lead to true conclusions.”8
Finally, Hall noted Peirce’s seminal claim that “Interest in an indefinite community,
recognition of the possibility of this interest being made supreme, and hope in the
unlimited continuance of intellectual activity are the indispensable requirements of
Logic.”9
Hall’s bold prediction that Peirce was producing one of the most important
American contributions to philosophy proved to be unerring. Peirce’s comprehen-
sive pragmatic philosophy, scientifically informed and grounded in semiotic real-
ism, has without question become America’s great contribution to philosophy—as
more and more scholars from around the world turn to Peirce for philosophical
illumination he has emerged as a central figure of America’s intellectual heritage.
When reflecting on the state of philosophy in the mid-1930s, the great mathematical
logician who coauthored Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, and one of
the greatest metaphysicians of the twentieth century, Alfred North Whitehead,
maintained that European philosophy had “gone dry” and that the center of living
philosophy had shifted to America: “My belief is that the effective founders of the
renaissance in American philosophy are Charles Peirce and William James.”10
But how American, really, was this new philosophy coming out of New England?
Max H. Fisch has argued that the movement beginning in the Metaphysical Club
and continuing until the Second World War was truly a classic period in American
thought and that the resulting philosophy does embody and promote the essential
characteristics of its national culture.11 It has become routine to regard Peirce as the
progenitor of this classic period and to designate Peirce’s philosophy, along with
that of James and other classic philosophers, under the rubric “American philoso-
phy.” Classic American philosophy is typically equated with pragmatism and is sup-
posed to name a unique approach to philosophical problems. Of course it is true, as
Ralph Barton Perry pointed out, that a nation’s history, ethnic origin, and natural
environment are likely to be “reflected in the type of philosophy that [tends to] pre-
dominate and to prevail” in that country,12 and it is true that pragmatism as com-
monly conceived reflects some typical characteristics of the American character,
some of them less than laudatory. But as the Brazilian philosopher, João Cruz Costa,
so astutely wondered, can there really be “such a thing as an American philosophy
8
Hall, 1879, p. 103.
9
Ibid.
10
From a letter of 2 January 1936 to Charles Hartshorne. In: Victor Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead:
The Man and His Work – Volume II: 1910–1947, ed. J. B. Schneewind (The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990), p. 345.
11
Max H. Fisch. Classic American Philosophers (Appleton-Century Crofts, 1951. Reissued by
Fordham University Press in 1996).
12
Ralph B. Perry. “Is There a North-American Philosophy?” In: Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, vol. 9.3 (1949): 356–369.
x Foreword
any more than there can be an American arithmetic or physics.”13 However much a
great philosophy may reflect the national origins and cultural nurture of its author
and proponents, isn’t it in the deeper revelations of more universal structures and
truths that its lasting greatness resides? Yes, Peirce was an American philosopher
but his philosophy transcends nationality.
Peirce’s work was internationally recognized to be important from the start,
especially his work in science and logic, and also his writings on pragmatism, but
during the mid-twentieth century period of dominance of analytic philosophy the
classic American philosophers fell out of fashion. Nevertheless, the signal impor-
tance of Peirce’s philosophy was never doubted and his influence is on the increase.
Peirce’s current stature as an international philosopher was born out in 2014 at a
world congress that met in Lowell, Massachusetts, a century after his death, to com-
memorate his intellectual legacy. Over 250 scholars from over 25 countries partici-
pated in those meetings which were sponsored by organizations from around the
world, including the Center for Pragmatism Studies at the Pontifical Catholic
University of São Paulo (PUCSP), founded in 1998 by the author of the book at
hand. Around mid-twentieth century, Peirce began to enter the intellectual life of
Brazil, principally in studies concerning semiotics and communication. Thanks ini-
tially to Decio Pignatari, but more significantly to the sustained research and teach-
ing career of Lucia Santaella, São Paulo Catholic University became an international
center for the study of Peirce’s theory of signs and the fountainhead for the spread
of interest in Peirce’s semiotics throughout Brazil.14 All the while, Ivo Ibri, the
author of the present work, sought to understand the ontological ground of Peirce’s
thought, convinced that his more foundational approach could bring a broader
understanding to both semiotics and pragmatism. This line of research made Brazil
a hub for studies in Peirce’s comprehensive philosophy.
Ibri’s international reputation as a Peirce scholar is amplified by three extraordi-
nary institutional achievements. In 1998, as mentioned above, he founded the Center
for Pragmatism Studies (Centro de Estudos de Pragmatismo) which promotes
research in classical and contemporary pragmatism, especially in connection with
logic, ethics, and aesthetics. Although Peirce is not the exclusive focus of the center,
he is a principal focus. In connection with the center’s mission, Ibri initiated annual
Meetings on Pragmatism, which in 2000 became International Meetings on
Pragmatism. These meetings bring international scholars to Brazil to meet and dia-
logue with Brazilian professors and students about pragmatism and especially about
Peirce. According to Santaella, “With these meetings on Pragmatism, Ivo Ibri cer-
tainly put the Catholic University of São Paulo in the world map of Peirce studies.”15
Magnifying the impact of the International Meetings on Pragmatism and the
13
From Edgar H. Henderson’s review of Costa’s A History of Ideas in Brazil: The Development
of Philosophy in Brazil and the Evolution of National History. In: Journal of the History of
Philosophy, Vol. 4.4 (1966): 342–344.
14
Lucia Santaella. “Peirce’s Reception in Brazil.” In: European Journal of Pragmatism and
American Philosophy, vol. 6.1 (2014): 34–38.
15
Santaella, 2014, p. 4.
Foreword xi
importance of his center, in 2000 Ibri instituted a new journal, Cognitio, a journal of
philosophy that reflects the mission of the center while remaining open to fruitful
dialog with other philosophical trends. In its 17 years of publication, Cognitio’s list
of authors reads like a veritable who’s who of leading Peirce scholars.
As important as these achievements have been in providing an institutional base
for Peirce’s philosophy in Brazil, Ibri’s influence on Peirce studies is anchored in
his own scholarship and teaching. The comprehensive study of Peirce’s philosophy
in Brazil can be traced to Ibri’s mid-1980s work on Peirce’s metaphysics and cos-
mology and it has flourished with his ongoing research and through the scores of
students who have studied Peirce under his guidance. Ibri’s research publications on
the whole have dealt comprehensively with Peirce’s thought, exploring the founda-
tions of his pragmatism while treating Peirce in the systematic way that his philoso-
phy requires. Ibri brings an aesthetic sensibility to his writings on Peirce that is
profoundly consonant with Peirce’s own philosophical approach.
In the book at hand, an English translation of the updated 2015 edition of his
1992 classic, Kósmos Noetós, Ibri invites his readers to join in his dialog with Peirce
as he masterfully probes Peirce’s astute and penetrating guess at the riddle of the
universe. In 1888, Peirce speculated that “three elements are active in the world:
first, chance; second, law; and third, habit-taking”—such, he said, “is our guess of
the secret of the sphinx.”16 Peirce’s guess was motivated by the application of his
famous categories, firstness, secondness, and thirdness, to cosmology. The trajec-
tory of Ibri’s book follows the manifestation of Peirce’s categories beginning in “the
world of appearance,” through “the world as reality,” concluding with “the know-
able world.” Following this path, Ibri examines and explains many of the principal
doctrines of Peirce’s philosophy and provides a unifying conceptual structure for
understanding their key tenets. One of the cornerstones of this unifying structure is
Ibri’s treatment of Peirce’s doctrine of chance with respect to phenomenological,
epistemological, and ontological indeterminism. Another cornerstone is his treat-
ment of Peirce’s objective idealism which unifies Peirce’s conception of mind with
his conception of physical matter, and even with his epistemology and therefore
also with his pragmatism. The upshot of Ibri’s carefully orchestrated interlacing of
key Peirce doctrines is, as Ibri claims, the articulation of a realism-idealism that
accounts for the intelligible universe for which his book is named: Kósmos Noetós.
Now, with this English translation of a Brazilian classic, we see that Peirce is indeed
a philosopher without borders.
Indiana University, Indianapolis, USA Nathan Houser
16
EP, 1.277; CP, 1.409–410.
Preface to the English Edition
Good philosophy is part of history as are most good wines. It hardly becomes
extemporaneous or loses quality over time. It can be said that remarkable aspects
continue to be discovered in the philosophies that preceded contemporary produc-
tion, and many themes extracted from them have proven proverbially current.
Perhaps philosophy should only be concerned with updating studies, commentaries,
and interpretations made on the various doctrines that its history has enshrined,
without needing to say that their authors’ ideas are solely confined to the historical
context in which they were conceived. Something in philosophy, apparently inher-
ent to Art, hovers over time, disdaining it, detaching from it its deeper meaning,
perhaps for continuing to touch on what is always dearest to men: the understanding
of life, its true values, the meaning of their existence, and of a universe in which
human dimension totally occupies anonymous points in space and time.
This book was originally written when the studies on Peirce’s philosophy were
still in their inception. Therefore, they contributed little or almost nothing to clarify
aspects of what was thematically under its focus, namely, the passage from the
Peircean phenomenology to a realistic ontology. Thus, as mentioned in the original
Preface, in the sequence available to the readers, the strategy of the writing devel-
oped through an intimate and direct dialogue with Peirce’s work, a pleasurably heu-
ristic adventure through original texts, until then mostly unexplored by the scholars.
This path redeemed an interactive network of concepts that revealed, in Peircean
works, an architecturally designed underlying theoretical system that, from his ear-
liest production through to his mature years, progressively refined vocabulary
inadequacies.
In the previous issue of this book, incidentally, there was a final chapter totally
devoted to some of the main commentaries on some topics of Peirce’s work, where
I sought to show that many concepts, lacking a referral to the theoretical system that
shaped Peirce’s thoughts, were then exposed in a way that provided little aid for
their elucidation. Over two decades passed and the quantity and level of the analy-
ses of Peircean thought could no longer be ignored. Notwithstanding this fact, in
this edition we retained the original format of a direct dialogue with the Peirce’s
work, excluding commentators in the various passages where, occasionally, they
xiii
xiv Preface to the English Edition
might be proper. Alternatively, we opted suggestively for the inclusion in the final
references of a wide range of literature on commentaries that could possibly relate
to each one of the chapters of this book, enabling readers interested in Peircean
research to examine these studies by themselves.
In the dialogue with some Peircean scholars, a question arose on the absence of
Semiotics as a means for the passage from Phenomenology to Peirce’s Metaphysics.
Indeed, this work does not explicitly expound on Semiotics. Readers, however, will
not overlook the fact that the fulfillment of a theory of reality in the author’s thought
makes full use of what Peirce called a process of inquiry, evidenced by the logical
modes that appear in the classification of the signs according to interpretants,
namely, abduction, deduction, and induction. Peirce’s Metaphysics is, effectively, a
good example of conceptual constructions that makes abundant use of these three
modes, implying that Semiotics is implicitly mediating its conception.
On the other hand, the emphasis on Peircean realism, characterized by what I
have called in various subsequent essays the symmetry of categories, enables us to
think of Semiotics not only in its classificatory nuance, but in an extensive form of
language concept beyond a logocentrism in which all beings of the universe, in their
own dimension, express themselves significantly through intentional actions. In
addition, in order to do so, they process signs of the existential ocean in which they
are immersed, and with which they vitally have to communicate in an interpretative
saga, whose message is consolidated under the form of conduct. This way of rethink-
ing Semiotics is underpinned in Peirce’s realist ontology beyond an anthropocen-
trism that insists in symmetrizing man and Nature under a tacit Cartesianism, based
on a relationship of substantial estrangement. This use of Semiotics on natural
objects, as a stethoscope that gives the word to a living organism, is no longer on a
kind of speculative adventure that would assume it as extendable to Nature, but a
science that, by providing logical support to the symmetry of categories, can also
necessarily be reinterpreted in light of such symmetry. This nonfoundational circu-
larity is typical of Peirce’s philosophy, being no more than the consequence of the
logical overlapping of myriad doctrines created by him.
Like coffee powder over boiling water that has to be decanted in order to be
drunk, good philosophy requires its most promising ideas to be decanted in mind in
order to assume its heuristic possibility and reveal its semantic magnitude, reward-
ing the patience of the wait. Peirce bequeathed many seeds, whose fertilization
requires a long period of interaction with his philosophy. Seeds that suggest con-
stant thoughts on the consequences of his theoretical system in various fields of
culture, such as Art and Psychoanalysis for example, way beyond the confinement
of his philosophy to clashes of interpretations, characterized by a conceptual topol-
ogy whose fragmentation deters the consideration of its underlying theoretical
network. Rethinking Art in light of a realist ontology promises to convey a very
original aspect of the interpretation of aesthetic experience. In turn, Psychoanalysis,
reviewed under a semiotic-pragmatic nexus between internal and external worlds,
challenges us to consider the homeostatic play between logical and emotional
interpretants.
Preface to the English Edition xv
Perhaps in a more macroscopic dimension, Peirce, with his cosmic philosophy,

offers the grounds to enable a reconceptualization of the Man-Nature relationship, in
a necessary and unavoidable reconciliation, fully motivational in contemporaneity.
What German romanticism claimed as the need to reconsider what Nature would
be, Peirce, for a good reason inspired by Schelling, consolidated it by conceiving a
philosophy that justifies an equality of rights to the characters of that relationship.
Despite the fact that all these considerations establish a lengthy task to under-
take, the seeds bequeathed by Peirce’s philosophy provide a heuristic path promis-
ing an inexhaustible horizon of discoveries. May the reading of this book contribute
to the visualization of this path, bringing with it an understanding of the reasons
why Peirce’s thoughts disseminate throughout all world centers where good
philosophies are cultivated.
São Paulo, Brazil Ivo Assad Ibri

Preface to the First Edition
Il n’y a de long ouvrage que celui qu’on n’ose pas commencer.

Il devient cauchemar.
BAUDELAIRE, Mon Couer Mis a Nu
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) never finished or published a book. His work,
equivalent in volume to that of Leibniz, constitutes essays published in periodi-
cals comprising, mostly, manuscripts that are now under the care of the Department
of Philosophy of Harvard University. Totaling approximately 4000 pages of the
author’s works, in 1931–1935 and 1958, the University published1 texts that cover
Peirce’s thought in a noteworthy manner, endeavoring to divide them thematically in
the best possible way.
As a pioneering work, less than 20 years after the author’s death it would be quite
unreasonable to expect a perfect organization of the texts that reveal, in not a few
chapters, an interpenetration of philosophical areas that make its reading particu-
larly difficult. A marked example that can be mentioned is the selection of texts
under the general title of Phenomenology,2 where works in Logic and Metaphysics
are improperly mixed. In an excellent collection of texts based on the Collected
Papers and edited by Buchler,3 there is a significant evidence of the bad delineation
of Phenomenology due to problems of thematic overlapping. The editor observes:
In phenomenology numerous difficulties emerge, chiefly relating to the delineation of the
three categories. That of Firstness suffers from considerable ambiguity, that of Thirdness
from obscurity.4
1
Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur Burks (org.), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders
Peirce, Cambridge: Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1931–35 & 1958, 8 vols.
2
CP, 1.284–572. We will use the usual reference to this work: CP indicates Collected Papers; the
first number corresponds to the volume, and the second to the paragraph.
3
Justus Buchler (org.), The Philosophy of Peirce; Selected Writings, NY: Ams Press, 1978.
4
Justus Buchler, op. cit., “Introduction”, p. XVI. The Peircean categories will be conceptualized in
Chap. 1 of this essay.
xvii
xviii Preface to the First Edition
We transcribe this passage literally merely to illustrate, exemplarily, our view-

point that commentators are often led to attribute intrinsic confusion to the author’s
work when, in effect, it derives from the way the texts are organized. We could only
distinguish nonpertinent elements to phenomenology when we resorted to the
classification and interdependence of the various disciplines of Philosophy under
the author’s view. Although this observation refers to Phenomenology, similar dif-
ficulties can be found in the reading of other themes contained in the main available
source of Peirce’s works, the Collected Papers.
As most of the students of the author’s thought, we focused on the points on
which he is better known: Semiotics and Pragmatism. We were especially interested
in the development of a heuristic Logic and its relationship with a Philosophy of
Mathematics. Through this prism we encountered not only the difficulties already
referred to and related to the organization of the texts, but, above all, myriad con-
cepts that seemed to require a systemic approach. On the other hand, attempts to
focus thematically on the points that, initially, moved out interest in the author’s
study, seemed unsatisfactory5 for seeking psychological grounds for a question of
an essentially logical substratum.
Also, we found that the thematic approach difficulties of the author were not
solely confined to the realm of a heuristic Logic, extending, in effect, to a more
general sphere. Referring to commentators of Peirce’s work regarded as classic, we
have seen that, in their great majority, they conclude that there are uncertain and
obscure points in the author’s thought, frequently denouncing logically contradict-
ing positions, such as the fact of Peirce declaring himself, simultaneously, as a real-
ist and an idealist.
The disseminated habit of starting a study of Peircean thought by the (un)known
doctrines of Semiotics and Pragmatism, to our mind, leads to a poor and fragmented
understanding of Peirce’s work. To begin such a study by examining Semiotics, a
general theory of the signs, to which the author intends the statute of a Logic, may
lead readers to a purely taxonomic science, a strange classificatory matrix of repre-
sentations, disfiguring its true function in Peirce’s philosophical picture. Pragmatism,
in turn, as a thematic point of study, has been subjected to misjudgments since its
genesis.6 On the one hand, they interpret it as a utilitarian rule and, on the other, as
a transcendental principle.7
On our first contact with Semiotics and Pragmatism, we were under the impres-
sion that we were in the Field of a Philosophy of language, in particular, and of
meaning, in general, notwithstanding the indefinitions outlined in a variety of
5
On these attempts there is, for example, Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery,
Cambridge at UP, 1958.
6
For a discussion on this aspect, see Chap. 6.
7
We found this was more evident in German commentators. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas,
Conhecimento e Interesse, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1982, translated by José N. Heck, p. 109–155;
and Karl-Otto Apel, “C. S. Peirce and the Post-Tarskian Problem of an Adequate Explication of the
Meaning of the Truth: Towards a Transcendental – Pragmatic Theory of Truth”, Transactions of the
Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. XVIII, n. 1, 1982, p. 3–17.
Preface to the First Edition xix
possible interpretations. To illustrate this indefinition, we imagined applying, with

strange precision, a metaphor based on the attempt of drawing a circumference
through two points only, and obtaining, as known, not one but infinite possible
figures of that type. Similar to the rule of elementary geometry, a full understanding
of those doctrines requires a third point that would allow the univocal circumscrip-
tion of Peirce’s thought, and which constitutes effectively a focal and enlightening
point of all others: the author’s Metaphysics.
From these considerations derives the central hypothesis of this essay. From one
angle, he says that the frequent reading errors originate from the nonexistence of a
reference system as a conceptual matrix capable of providing clear thematic
approaches, as is often available to authors classically involved in the History of
Philosophy. Based on this hypothesis, on another angle, we sought to redeem this
system in the nature of the metaphysical grounds of Peircean philosophy.
Accepting this task was like trying to solve a puzzle.
The first pieces were separated from a tangle of texts that constitutes what the
editors of the Collected Papers called Phenomenology, with the intention of creat-
ing the categorial matrix of the Peircean system and obtain a translucid delineation
of the concept of experience contained in it. The interlacing of these initial pieces is
addressed in Chap. 1.
Chapter 2, which begins what we will call the second part of this essay, expands
on the metaphysical concepts of existence and reality and grounds the author’s real-
ism, preparing an adequate structure to assemble the pieces regarding the Peircean
doctrines of Absolute Chance and Evolutionism. These doctrines comprise Chap. 3.
Chapter 4 sets forth the specially misunderstood theories within the author’s
metaphysical system – Objective Idealism. Together with the Theory of the
Continuum, Peirce’s Idealism is the backbone of the body of that system, supporting
the nucleus of this essay – Cosmology. Regarded by some scholars as the “white
elephant” of Peircean Metaphysics,8 it incorporates the fifth chapter. In the endeavor
of assembling the puzzle, we found, at a certain point in that chapter, that the texts
available in the Collected Papers would not suffice. The remaining and necessary
pieces were found in a work9 that gathered Peircean texts in the domain of
Mathematics and Philosophy, distinct from those that constituted the Harvard pub-
lication. Announcing myriad consequences philosophically noteworthy, from which
we explore only a few in the strict scope of this essay, Cosmology prepares the
conceptual ground for a reconstruction of Pragmatism seen under the ontological
lights of Metaphysics, distancing from the doctrine of narrow and reductionist inter-
pretations. As a third and final part of the essay, the sixth chapter, Pragmatism, is
announced as a logical method that permeates the entire Metaphysics, within which
the three modes of argument that Peirce calls Abduction, Deduction, and Induction
are implied. From this point in the reconstruction of Pragmatism, the chapter begins
8
The adjective “white elephant” was used, for example, by Gallie, 1952.
9
Carolyn Eisele (ed.), The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, The Hague: Mouton
Publishers, 1976, 5 vols; vol. 4. We will refer to this work in the abbreviated form NEM, associated
with the corresponding page of the fourth volume of the referred edition.
xx Preface to the First Edition
to expound on the author’s Objective Logic, which translates into an ontological

Logic structured in those three modes of argument.
Not having had any assistance from commentators for a reassembly of Peirce’s
metaphysical system,10 the work, as readers will see, focuses directly on the reading
and analysis of the author’s texts.
Peirce is an unknown and little known author. For this reason, from the beginning
we decided to literally transcribe passages of his work with a view, above all, to
include his arguments directly in the body of the work, aware that the published
originals of his writings are rarely present in private libraries or Brazilian universi-
ties. Nevertheless, this method provided a structural link between the author’s text
and our own writing that, if broken, would greatly metamorphosize the unity we
intended for this essay. Readers themselves will be able to verify this, imagining,
throughout the reading of the following chapters, the exclusion of the bulk of the
transcriptions.
With the object of further clarifying some points for interested scholars in the
analysis of this essay, it should be observed that, among Peircean specialists, it
became common practice to refer to the dates when the original texts of the author
were conceived. This practice assures, frequently, a close link to what we com-
mented earlier on the nearly invariably unsuccessful thematic approach to Peircean
thought. In many cases, what is intended in effect is to attribute the apparent contra-
dictions in the logical interlacing of the author’s theories to his occasional changes
of philosophical viewpoints during his lifetime, endeavoring to find, in the fragmen-
tation of the work, the justification for certain problems that are really interpreta-
tional. This habit of dating Peircean texts, apparently, could be reorganized
chronologically in a project designed for a twenty-volume edition.11 Commendable
under a series of aspects, this initiative seems to be committed to the current of
opinion that, falsely, found in the young Peirce a philosopher, and in the mature
Peirce, another, totally differentiated by substantially opposing views.
We intentionally omitted the dates of the cited texts, albeit mindful of their link-
age to the most different stages of the author’s life. Despite recognizing that, under
certain forms of thematic approach, it is interesting to show readers the evolution of
Peircean thought in the construction of specific concepts, the dating of texts did not
seem important in our proposed field of research. Also, during the preparation of
10
Indeed, at the time of the first edition of this book, the literature on Peirce’s Metaphysics
comprised sparse commentaries that lacked the theoretical system that we then intended to
reconstruct.
11
Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce: A Chronological edition. Edited by Max Fisch, Edward
C. Moore, Christian Kloesel, Nathan Houser, André De Tienne, et al., 8 vols., Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1982–2010. We will refer to this work in the abbreviated form W, fol-
lowed by the number of the volume and page. Also the work The Essential Peirce, organized in two
volumes, and in chronological order: The Essential Peirce: selected philosophical writings, v. 1.
HOUSER, Nathan; Kloesel, Christian (eds.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992c.
The Essential Peirce: selected philosophical writings, v. 2. The Peirce Edition Project (ed.).
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. We will refer to this work in the abbreviated form
EP, followed by the number of the volume and page.
Preface to the First Edition xxi
this essay, we did not find two or more authors, but in reality encountered a thought
whose logical consistency we invite readers to put to the test.
We must acknowledge, nevertheless, that in the beginning of his philosophical
career, the author’s acute interest in Psychology and the strong influence of Kant’s
thought led him to use, on the one hand, an often psychological and subjective ter-
minology12 and, on the other, to consider the Kantian division of judgments in the
original formulations of the three modes of argument, stressing the synthetic and
heuristic nature of abduction and induction.13 His discovery of a “General Algebra
of Logic” applicable to the Relatives, which occurred between 1885 and 1890,14 to
us it seems a key moment in his thought that was becoming tendentially more objec-
tive, in the ontological sense of the word. Also, by calling himself a “nominalist”
due to the content of some of his young essays, we see him in reality as only “less
realist,” since ontological realism was his absolute position since his early thoughts.
In conclusion, we would like to emphasize that in parallel with a system of fun-
damentals, which, in your work hypothesis, is a necessary condition of possibility
for thematic approaches, Peirce’s Metaphysics is, in itself, a logical architecture
whose soundness forms an admirable duet with its content.
We acknowledge the ambitiousness of this Project. This ambition, however,
derives solely from our not having found another logical path than that of endeavor-
ing to reconstruct a system of fundamentals that could serve as a conceptual
netword, in a future essay, for the points that, initially, moved us in the direction of
the author.
We invite readers to verify for themselves that Peirce is a deep author and of
great interest to philosophical research. We hope we have contributed toward his
opportune dissemination.
São Paulo, Brazil Ivo Assad Ibri
12
See, for example, texts from his youth, such as “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed
For Man” (CP, 5.213–263; EP, 1.11–27; W, 2.193–211) and “Some Consequences of Four
Incapacities” (CP, 5.264–317; EP, 1.28–55; W, 2.211–242), both from 1868.
13
Distancing radically from Kant’s thought in his maturity, although never being a transcendental-
ist, Peirce reviewed his thoughts on the three modes of argument. See his self-critique in NEM,
p. 22–23.
14
Cf. Pierre Thibaud, La Logique de Charles Sanders Peirce. De l’Algèbre aux Graphes, Aix-en-
Provence: Editions de l’Université de Provence, 1975, p. 84–85.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Rodrigo Vieira de Almeida, Nicholas Lee Guardiano and Tobias
Augusto Rosa Faria for their collaboration in making very helpful suggestions for the
English version of this edition.
xxiii
Contents
Part I The World as Appearance

1 Phenomenology: The Categories of Experience�� 3
Part II The World as Reality

2 Realism and the Categorial Conception of the World�� 17
3 Ontological Indeterminism and the Evolutionist Matrix �� 33
4 Objective Idealism and the Continuum �� 45
5 Cosmology: The Ontological Ground of the Categories�� 57
Part III The Knowable World

6 Pragmatism and Objective Logic �� 77
7 The Lesson of the Universe �� 99
Bibliography �� 103
xxv
Part I
The World as Appearance
Chapter 1
Phenomenology: The Categories of Experience
Mais le devoir de conscience était si ardu, que m’imposaient

ces impressions de forme, de parfum ou de couler – de tâcher
d’apercevoir ce qui se cachait derrière elles.
PROUST, Du Côté de Chez Swann
The Sciences, for Peirce, are divided into three major classes: Mathematics,
Philosophy, and Idioscopy or Special Sciences.1
Mathematics is a science that builds its objects in the shape of hypotheses,
extracting from them necessary consequences without, however, addressing actual
issues. On the other end of Peirce’s classification, Idioscopy grounds its construc-
tions on special observations, as do Physics, Physiology, Chemistry, etc. Finally,
Philosophy is that middle branch of the sciences that examines daily experiences,
seeking to establish what is true about them:
Class II is philosophy, which deals with positive truth, indeed, yet contents itself with
observations such as come within the range of every man’s normal experience, and for the
most part in every waking hour of his life.2
Within Philosophy, three groups of sciences encompass its subdivision:

Phenomenology, Normative Sciences, and, finally, Metaphysics. According to
Peirce, Phenomenology is the first of the positive sciences of Philosophy, also
referred to by him as Phaneroscopy or The Doctrine of Categories. Phaneroscopy,
or Phenomenology, delineates itself as a science that proposes to make an inventory
of the characteristics of the phanerons or phenomena, dividing them into three
major classes or categories, as we will see.
Let us start by explaining what Peirce means by phaneron:
[…] by phaneron I mean the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present
to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not.3
1
Not part of the scope of this essay; the reader may find a detailed analysis of Peirce’s classification
of the sciences in CP, 1.180–283, and in NEM, pp. 188–193. The classification herein only encom-
passes what the author calls Sciences of Discovery.
2
CP, 1.241.
3
CP, 1.284. Thus, it can be stated that: (i) the perception of an object is a phenomenon, (ii) a dream
is a phenomenon, and (iii) a thought is a phenomenon. Whatever it is, in other words, from the
senses, or whatever is thinkable or conceivable, is a phenomenon.
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 3

I.A. Ibri, Kósmos Noetós, Philosophical Studies Series 131,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66314-2_1
4 1 Phenomenology: The Categories of Experience
Proposing to inventory classes of daily experiences naturally brings to light the

question of the possibility of this objective. Where will the idiosyncrasy of one’s
own individual experience enter? Would it not resist being encompassed by gener-
alizations? Besides, one may add to this the question of the concept of experience
itself: what, in fact, does Peirce mean by it?
To the first question, one may respond by stating that the particular aspect of
experience is irrelevant in the establishment of a category, since Phenomenology
subsumes a general mode of being that permeates experience as a whole.
Intending to acquire, on the other hand, the status of a science, the discoveries of
Phenomenology may be put to the test by the reader itself, since the universe of
phenomenological experience identifies itself with the daily experience of each and
every human being; the categories may, thus, be confirmed by the personal observa-
tions of each subject, divesting the Peircean Phenomenology of any dogmatic bases
or of postulations of truths.
As for the Peircean concept of experience, let us see what the author himself has
to say:
What is the experience upon which high philosophy is based?
For any one of the special sciences, experience is that which the observational art of that
science directly reveals. This is connected with and assimilated to knowledge already in our
possession and otherwise derived, and thereby receives an interpretation, or theory. But in
philosophy there is no special observational art, and there is no knowledge antecedently
acquired in the light of which experience is to be interpreted. The interpretation itself is
experience […] But in high philosophy, experience is the entire cognitive result of living
[…]4 [Further:] Experience is the course of life.5
Thus, to define experience as the entire cognitive result of our living, at the level
of Philosophy, presupposes it capable of sowing concepts that shape human con-
duct. Regarding this issue, Peirce says:
Experience is our only teacher. Far be it from me to enunciate any doctrine of a tabula rasa.
For […] there manifestly is not one drop of principle in the whole vast reservoir of established
scientific theory that has sprung from any other source than the power of the human mind to
originate ideas that are true. But this power, for all it has accomplished, is so feeble that as
ideas flow their springs in the soul, the truths are almost drowned in a flood of false notions;
and that which experience does is gradually, and by a sort of fractionation, to precipitate and
filter off the false ideas, eliminating them and letting the truth pour on in its mighty current.6
We may anticipate that experience, thus conceptualized, stands as a corrective

factor of thought, and this characteristic, acknowledged by Peirce, is one of the pil-
lars of his entire philosophy, as this essay aims at showing.
Now, as it has just been shown,3 Phenomenology does not claim to be a science of
reality, but only seeks to scrutinize the classes of phanerons that permeate common
experience while keeping within the bounds of their appearances. Not requiring a
4
CP, 7.527.
5
CP, 1.426. See also CP, 4.91.
6
CP, 5.50; EP, 2.153.
1 Phenomenology: The Categories of Experience 5
special mode for observing experience, what kinds of queries, nevertheless, are
required for phenomenological research?
This is what Peirce tries to make clear with:
Be it understood, then, that what we have to do, as students of phenomenology, is simply to
open our mental eyes and look well at the phenomenon and say what are the characteristics
that are never wanting in it, whether that phenomenon be something that outward experi-
ences forces upon our attention, or whether it be the wildest of dreams, or whether it be the
most abstract and general of the conclusions of science.7
The phenomenological world, characterizing itself as indifferently interior and

exterior, requires a vision devoid of any theoretical apparatus:
The faculties which we must endeavor to gather for this work are three. The first and fore-
most is that rare faculty, the faculty of seeing what stares one in the face, just as it presents
itself, unreplaced by any interpretation […] This is the faculty of the artist who sees for
example the apparent colors of nature as they appear [...]8
As first faculty, Peirce requires from a student of Phenomenology the capacity of

seeing, perhaps the same as that which Fernando Pessoa sought to express in:
The essential is to know how to see,
To know how to see without thinking,
To know how to see when one sees [...]9
This requires, according to the poet, to learn how to unlearn a certain form of
mediatory intoxication that clouds the primary aspects of experience.
Two other faculties are also required:
The second faculty we must strive to arm ourselves with is a resolute discrimination which
fastens itself like a bulldog upon the particular feature that we are studying, follows it wher-
ever it may lurk, and detects it beneath all its disguises.
The third faculty we shall need is the generalizing power of the mathematician who
produces the abstract formula that comprehends the very essence of the feature under exam-
ination purified from all admixture of extraneous and irrelevant accompaniments.10
Thus, the second faculty tries to collect the incidence of a particular feature,
while the third may take it as general and relevant to the entire phenomenon.
Phenomenology, by intending to shape the ways of being of all experience into
basic categories, does not seem to be capable of submitting to any other method but
that constituted, fundamentally, by the collection of elements of noteworthy inci-
dence, and by the posterior generalization of their characteristics. The three faculties
7
CP, 5.41; EP, 2.147.
8
CP, 5.42; EP, 2.147.
9
Fernando Pessoa (Alberto Caeiro) – O Guardador de Rebanhos, XXIV, Lisboa, Edições Ática,
1979. In Poemas Inconjuntos, Caeiro writes: “I should see them, only see them; /See them until I
can no longer think about them, /See them without time, or space, /A seeing that is able to do
without everything but what one sees/This is the science of seeing, which is none.” The original in
Portuguese is: “Eu devia vê-las, apenas vê-las; /Vê-las até não poder pensar nelas, /Vê-las sem
tempo, nem espaço, /Ver podendo dispensar tudo menos o que se vê/É esta a ciência de ver, que
não é nenhuma.”
10
CP, 5.42; EP, 2.147.
required may thus be summarized as seeing, heeding, and generalizing, divesting

observation of mediatory-type resources. The extreme simplicity of these items
anticipates one of the fundamental features of Peirce’s philosophy: given that the
commonplace can be immediately experienced in such wise, we see that common
sense will become the touchstone in the construction of Peirce’s thought. Besides
that, by making life its laboratory, of which its tools are the three aforementioned
faculties, Phenomenology becomes a science that can be easily practiced.
By reducing the modes of being of experience to three universal categories,
Peirce demonstrates, in more than one passage, their irreducibility and sufficiency.11
For the sake of clarity, let us first examine what comprises the second category.
It seems obvious that from our earliest experience of being in the world we per-
ceive that the course of things is not subject to our will and that it often contradicts
the idea we make of it:
We are continually bumping up against hard fact. We expected one thing, or passively took
it for granted, and had the image of it in our minds, but experience forces that idea into the
background, and compels us to think quite differently.12
There is in this element of experience a consciousness of duality between two

things: one that acts and another that reacts in the manner of binary forces:
You get this kind of consciousness in some approach to purity when you put your shoulder
against a door and try to force it open. You have a sense of resistance and at the same time
a sense of effort. There can be no resistance without effort; there can be no effort without
resistance. They are only two ways of describing the same experience. It is a double
consciousness.13
And so it is that in this second aspect of the phenomenon emerges the idea of
other, of alter, or alterity; and along with it comes the idea of negation from the
elementary idea that things are not what we want them to be nor established by our
conceptions. The “binarity” present in this opposing-itself-to-consciousness brings
with it the idea of a second in relation to it, and constitutes a direct, unmediated
experience. It seems that something reacts against us, making us experience a harsh
duality, or an element of conflict which consists in “[…] mutual action between two
things regardless of any sort of third or medium, and, in particular, regardless of any
law of action.”14
This experience of a reaction involving negation is described by Peirce as brute,
for it directly involves the power of a second, which is characterized by being this
thing and not that thing. The direct experience with this that is not that occurs in a
particular crosscut of time and space shaping the outline of this object, which is
forced and reacts against consciousness as something individual:
11
As, for example, in CP, 5.82–92 and 7.537; EP, 2.176–178.
12
CP, 1.324.
13
Idem, ibidem.
14
CP, 1.322.
[…] a reaction has an individuality. It happens only once. If it is repeated, the repetition is
another occurrence, no matter how like the first it may be.15 [Further:] A reaction is some-
thing which occurs hic et nunc […] It is an individual event […]16
This individual character of this second aspect, which opposes itself here and
now to the subject and confers to it an experience of duality, becomes to the ego its
negation, that is, a non-ego: “We become aware of the I by becoming aware of the
not-I.”17
The world as exteriority thus takes, in the experience that is under the second
category, the character of the non-ego due to its mark of alterity revealed in an
unmediated manner. This conception foretells that Peirce distances himself radi-
cally from Cartesianism, since the existence of the ego is given by negation in an
immediate experience, and not through a doubt conceptually formulated and only
solvable by the immanent mediation of the cogito. The Cartesian procedure, the
beginning of which is characterized by a false doubt, is, in the Peircean view, an
unstable foundation for the genesis of a philosophy, for “we do not intend, in phi-
losophy, to doubt that which we do not doubt in our hearts.”18
As for doubting, Peirce states that it is an experience of binarity in which the
negative element exerts its force. This binarity is etymologically present in the word
itself:
Among the inner shapes which binarity assumes are those of the doubts that are forced upon
our minds. The very word “doubt”, or “dubito”, is the frequentative of “duhibeo”—i.e., duo
habeo, and thus exhibits its binarity. If we did not struggle against doubt, we should not seek
the truth.19
Also under the second category is all the past experience upon which one has no
modifying power, that is, what one has been through, and which as such amounts to
a plurality of occurrences, an agglomerate of individual fragments constrained as
crosscuts in time and space. That being so, the past exerts its compulsion upon
consciousness:
If you complain to the Past that it is wrong and unreasonable, it laughs. It does not care a
snap of the finger for Reason. Its force is brute force.20 [Further:] the past contains only a
certain collection of such cases that have occurred […]21 The past consists of the sum of
faits accomplis […] For the Past really acts upon us […] precisely as an Existent object
acts.22
15
CP, 7.538.
16
CP, 7.532.
17
CP, 1.324; my italics.
18
CP, 5.265; W, 2.212; EP, 1.28–29, the entire paragraph mentions cogito. The Peircean critique
of the grounds of Cartesianism is in Chap. 6.
19
CP, 2.84, the issue concerning doubt and belief is also addressed in Chap. 6.
20
CP, 2.84.
21
CP, 2.148.
22
CP, 5.459 in French, in the Collected Papers text.
It thus seems legitimate to state that past experience has a status of alterity in
relation to consciousness, and thus takes on the role of an internal non-ego. This
realization leads to a crucial question. When we see that our interiority is permeated
with a collection of particulars, of experienced individuals, constituting an alter
which has the status of a non-ego, imposed by the experience which is “the course
of life,” we are left with to ask: what, then, is the ego? In addition to that question,
how do we conciliate the idea of the past as non-ego with the following passage:
“The past, as previously remarked, is the ego. My recent past is my predominating
ego.”23
The only solution to these questions, in our view, lies in regarding the ego as hav-
ing a general nature that inductively derives from the collection of particulars which
constitute the non-ego and are opposed to it. Thus, in the last quotation, the past as
predominating ego is one’s generalized past and is, therefore, mediated in a general
representation which, as such, acquires the status of a cognitive result of living. The
brute force of the past thus is constrained to its factual aspect; its factual resistance
is similar to that of a stone we wished to alter through simple acts of volition or
thought. Nevertheless, to mediate the past in a representation is to place it in a uni-
verse of intelligibility, which reveals a dynamic of evolutionary learning in the flow
of time.24 With this in mind, we can already anticipate that the particular–general
duality is the central issue in the entire Peircean philosophy, as this book will further
endeavor to expose. The ego as non-ego mediated in a general representation and
derived from the factuality of lived experience has the nature of thought, that is,
once the fabric of thought contains the generality of the concept. The interpretation
acquired through experience, with its general interlacing and in its identity with the
ego, suggests that Peirce will establish, on the one hand, an identity between the
idea of man and the idea of general representation,25 and on the other hand, experi-
ence under its hue of alterity, the universe of the second category, becoming, thus,
the fulcrum of thought: “The idea of other, of not, becomes a very pivot of thought.
To this element I give the name of Secondness.”26
Secondness brings at its core the idea of a second in relation to a first. And in the
idea of first is configured the category that Peirce calls firstness. The word “first”
itself suggests that under this category there is no other, that is, the experience that
typifies it does not bring alterity with it: “The idea of First is predominant in the
ideas of freshness, life, freedom. Free is that which has no other behind it, determin-
ing its actions [...]”.27
23
CP, 7.536.
24
The Peircean concepts of representation and learning will be addressed in this book. For the time
being, we may understand representation as something that replaces or has taken the place of
another, and learning as a process of acquiring concepts and altering conduct.
25
On this point, see CP, 5.310–317 and 7.580–593; W, 2.238–242 and 1.490–500.
26
CP, 1.324.
27
CP, 1.302.
Thus, an experience of the first element in the phenomenon is not itself

c haracterized by a feeling of duality forced upon consciousness. Banned from this
category are the ideas of compulsion and force. But what are the phenomenologi-
cally first elements?
Among phanerons there are certain qualities of feeling, such as the color of magenta, the
odor of attar, the sound of a railway whistle, the taste of quinine, the quality of the emotion
upon contemplating a fine mathematical demonstration, the quality of feeling of love, etc.28
To the Peircean eye, such qualities in the phenomenon are what they are with no
reference or relation to anything else. This state of consciousness of experiencing a
mere quality, such as a color or a sound, characterizes itself as an immediate experi-
ence in which there is, for this same consciousness, no flux of time. Simple in itself,
such an original state of consciousness is neither affected by the past as alterity, nor
by the future through the intentionality of a plan, which is of the nature of thought
in its third aspect. It is a consciousness which in its rupture with past and future is
what it is with reference to nothing else:
[…] it is plain enough that all that is immediately present to a man is what is in his mind in
the present instant. His whole life is in the present. But when he asks what is the content of
the present instant, his question always comes too late. The present has gone by, and what
remains of it is greatly metamorphosed.29
To introduce any analytical instance in the mind, in order to conceptually mea-

sure the contents of feeling, is to lose it in its presentness, since analysis involves
comparison with past experience. This is precisely Peirce’s concept of feeling:
By a feeling, I mean an instance of that kind of consciousness which involves no analysis,
comparison or any process whatsoever, nor consists in whole or in part of any act by which
one stretch of consciousness is distinguished from another, which has its own positive qual-
ity which consists in nothing else, and which is of itself all that it is […]
[I]f this feeling is present during a lapse of time, it is wholly and equally present at every
moment of that time.30
Thus, the unconditionality of feeling in relation to time distinguishes it from

something factual. This makes of it only a state of immediate consciousness:
28
CP, 1.304.
29
CP, 1.310. Fernando Pessoa, under the heteronym of Alberto Caeiro, poet of presentness, wrote:
“Rather the flight of the fowl, which passes and leaves no trace, /Than the passing of the animal,
which remains recollectable on the ground. /The fowl passes and forgets, and so must be. /The
animal, where it is no longer, which is no good. /Remembering is a treachery to Nature/For yester-
day’s Nature is no Nature at all. /Fly by, fowl, fly by and teach me how to do it.”
The original in Portuguese is: “Antes o vôo da ave, que passa e não deixa rastro, /Que a pas-
sagem do animal, que fica lembrada no chão. /A ave passa e esquece, e assim deve ser. /O animal,
onde já não está e por isso de nada serve, /Mostra que já esteve, o que não serve para nada. /A
recordação é uma traição à Natureza. /Porque a Natureza de ontem não é Natureza. /O que foi não
é nada, e lembrar é não ver. /Passa, ave, passa e ensina-me a passar!” (Op. Cit. – XLIII).
30
CP,1.306.
A feeling, then, is not an event, a happening, a coming to pass, since a coming to pass
cannot be such unless there was a time when it had not come to pass; and so it is not in itself
all that it is, but is relative to a previous state. A feeling is a state, which is in its entirety in
every moment of time as long as it endures.31
This distinctive aspect of all qualities of feeling makes them, as phenomena,

absolutely first. It is what Peirce calls suchness on account of its being, as quality,
exactly what it is and nothing else. With the exclusion of the aspects of factuality of
the past and of intentionality toward the future, the logical form of this state of con-
sciousness is that of mere possibility:
That mere quality, or suchness, is not in itself an occurrence, as seeing a red object is; it is
a mere may-be. Its only being consists in the fact that there might be such a peculiar, posi-
tive, suchness in a phaneron.32
The faculty of seeing required as a tool for phenomenological research is essen-

tial in order to experience the qualities of the world such as they appear. One requires
a poetic way of looking, without mediations:
Go out under the blue dome of heaven and look at what is present as it appears to the artist’s
eye. The poetic mood approaches the state in which the present appears as it is present [...].
Is poetry so abstract and colorless? The present is just what it is regardless of the absent,
regardless of past and future [...].
The quality of feeling is the true psychical representative of the first category of the
immediate as it is in its immediacy, of the present in its direct positive presentness […]. The
first category, then, is Quality of Feeling, or whatever is such as it is positively and regard-
less of aught else.33
This psychical representative of immediacy recalls to mind that Phenomenology

crosses the internal and external worlds undifferentiatedly inventorying the entirety
of that which appears in the phaneron and thus in the widest universe of experience.
The idea of freedom associated with the first category stems from this unconditioned
nature of the phaneron, of being what it is in itself and for itself, in an immediate
consciousness that breaks with time. In the condition of being just what it is, it is
unique, without parts, isolated from any other, and one. Nevertheless, there is a
countless diversity of qualities of feeling which, evidently, cannot simultaneously
manifest themselves in a single consciousness alone due to their unique experiential
status:
Qualities of feeling show myriad-fold variety, far beyond what the psychologists admit.
This variety however is in them only insofar as they are compared and gathered into collec-
tions. But as they are in their presentness, each is sole and unique; and all the others are
absolute nothingness to it—or rather much less than nothingness, for not even a recognition
as absent things or as fictions is accorded to them.34
31
CP, 1.307.
32
CP, 1.304. The logical character of possibility implied in the qualities is analyzed in Chap. 5.
33
CP, 5.44. EP, 2.149.
34
CP, 5.44. EP, 2.150.
It is a typical feature of the first category that this variety expresses itself through
its freedom to be: “Freedom can only manifest itself in unlimited and uncontrolled
variety and multiplicity.”35
Also, merely opening our eyes suffices us to see the extraordinary variety shown
by nature in its forms and colors, widely distributed everywhere:
It is curious how certain facts escape us because they are so pervading and ubiquitous; just
as the ancients imagined the music of the spheres was not heard because it was heard all
the time.
But will not somebody kindly tell the rest of the audience what is the most marked and
obtrusive character of nature? Of course, I mean the variety of nature.36
In due course, we shall see that among the elements inventoried in the world of
appearances, the variety of nature emerges as pivotal for the logical construction of
Peircean evolutionism.37 There can be no other subsumption of this aspect of the
phenomenon but firstness:
Now I don’t know that it is logically accurate to say that this marvelous and infinite diversity
and manifoldness of things is a sign of spontaneity […]. I would rather say it is spontaneity.
I don’t know what you can make out of the meaning of spontaneity but newness, freshness,
and diversity.38
One can see that the term spontaneity is defined under the concept of the first
category, here employed to name the variety presented by nature.
An interesting point to be noticed is that the exterior multiplicity shows a
simultaneity of which the multiplicity of qualities and feelings does not take part,
that is, each one of them has its own presentness in a consciousness, and its variety
possesses, as a condition of possibility, a subsequent inventory that assembles them
in a collection. This in turn raises a question concerning the objectivity of time.
Such a question is based on the fact that the character of firstness of the quality of
feeling is provided by the rupture with time promoted in a consciousness that feels.
Being the exterior variety under the same phenomenological way of being, how
does time objectively interpose itself in exteriority? What kind of rupture, if any, is
characterized in the external flow of time in order to subsume the variety of nature
under the same category? Bearing in mind that these questions emerge almost natu-
rally during the course of the phenomenological inventory, we shall leave them
temporarily unanswered.39 Here, it is important to observe that we are at the level of
the scrutiny of appearances that characterizes Phenomenology, and the emergence
of the above questions shows the force of experience in its making one think them.
Thus, a kind of continuity is outlined between experience and thought that integrates
the latter into the cognitive result of living.40 To the extent that we are compelled to
35
CP, 1.302.
36
CP, 1.159; my italics. As can be seen, this is an excerpt from a conference.
37
See Chap. 3.
38
CP, 1.160. Peirce, at times, calls this free element, which is characteristic of firstness, Originality.
See, for example, CP, 2.85: “The world is full of this element of irresponsible, free, Originality.”
39
The answer to these questions is in Chap. 5.
40
See note 4 to this chapter.
relate the idea of a rupture of time internal to consciousness with the possibility of
this rupture occurring in the sphere of objective time, we are promoting the media-
tion between two ideas by linking them to a general concept. This general concept
emerges as a third element not to be confused with those elements placed in rela-
tion. The mediating element so described is the third and last class of the phenom-
enological universe, the third category or Thirdness. The concept of mediation
under the third category is explicit: “Thirdness, in the sense of the category, is the
same as mediation.”41
The experience of mediating between two things Peirce translates into an experi-
ence of synthesis, into a synthesizing consciousness:
It seems, then, that the true categories of consciousness are: first, feeling, the consciousness
which can be included with an instant of time, passive consciousness of quality, without
recognition or analysis; second, consciousness of an interruption into the field of conscious-
ness, sense of resistance, of an external fact, of another something; third, synthetic con-
sciousness, binding time together, sense of learning, thought.42
The question about the possibility of a rupture in objective time as similar to

what occurs in the consciousness that experiences a quality of feeling, comes to
mind as a doubt, which, as earlier explained, is a duality requiring an answer-
seeking mediation. The mind has a tendency toward generalization which seeks to
subsume into the concept a greater number of phenomena, making it, therefore,
more general. At the same time, to experience such a synthesis brings with it the
sense of learning, of producing a new mediating concept in consciousness constitu-
tive of the nature of cognition. This experience as a third mode of the phenomenon
carries with it, unlike the immediate experiences of first and second, a sense of the
flow of time that is characteristic of the development of the cognitive process:
But that element of cognition which is neither feeling nor the polar sense, is the conscious-
ness of a process, and this in the form of the sense of learning, of acquiring, of mental
growth is eminently characteristic of cognition. This is a kind of consciousness, which can-
not be immediate, because it covers a time, and that not merely because it continues through
every instant of that time, but because it cannot be contracted into an instant. It differs from
immediate consciousness, as a melody does from one prolonged note. Neither can the con-
sciousness of the two sides of an instant, of a sudden occurrence, in its individual reality,
possibly embrace the consciousness of a process. This is the consciousness that binds our
life together. It is the consciousness of synthesis.”43 [Further:] All flow of time involves
learning; and all learning involves the flow of time.44
Accordingly, we conclude that every cognitive phenomenon as the apprehension

of a third mediating element involves the flow of time. Although p henomenologically
synthetic consciousness is temporal, the author does not make time a form of internal
sense, and therefore rejects any interpretation of the synthesis as transcendental.45
41
CP, 1.328.
42
43
CP, 1.381; EP, 1.260; W, 6.185–186; my italics.
44
CP, 7.536.
45
See, for example, CP, 6.96. An analysis of the objectivity of time is in Chap. 5.
Here, Peirce, although a great admirer of Kant, moves radically away from
Kantianism, as we will endeavor to show in the following chapters.
Returning to the nature of cognition, which involves a synthesis in time, we
already know that it is a generalizing mediation and subsumed as experience under
thirdness. Being of the nature of the concept and thought, the cognitive element
must be general and have the status of representation. That the concept of represen-
tation falls under the third category is explicit:
Category the Third is the Idea of that which is such as it is a being a Third, or Medium,
between a Second and its First. That is to say, it is Representation as an element of the
phenomenon.46 [Further:] Thirdness is nothing but the character of an object which embod-
ies Betweeness or Mediation in its simplest and most rudimentary form; and I use it as the
name of that element of the phenomenon which is predominant wherever Mediation is
predominant, and which reaches its fullness in Representation.47 [And] Thirdness, as I use
the term, is only a synonym for Representation […].48
General representation, mediation, thought, synthesis, and cognition thus share

the same phenomenological way of being. It seems legitimate to infer that the tem-
poral course of experience as the cognitive result of living translates into the acquisi-
tion of thirdness, that is, of mediations whose constructions of the world, as we have
seen, merge with the concept of ego itself—instance of generalizations originating
in the individual factuality of secondness, the experienced plurality that constitutes
the non-ego. It also seems that experience structures a vector directed toward third-
ness in its compulsive force of making one think that, expressed in general represen-
tations that constitute mediating thought.
As an element of mediation, a thought process cannot be uncoupled from the past
and divested of intentionality for a future. In the past, we find the crosscuts of time
and space as conditions of possibility for lived factuality, and which, when medi-
ated, become by way of generalization the fabric of the ego, which is, as we have
just seen, of the nature of thought, of thirdness. On the other hand, cognition must
be linked with the future as shaper of conduct, that is, of action which reduces the
bruteness of factuality to intelligibility. Thus, with the cogency of these consider-
ations, we foresee ourselves faced with the confrontation between general and
particular elements, insofar as the generality of thirdness is the representation of
particulars that will mediate future action—action that will occur in a crosscut of
time and space, by which the universe of the individuals of secondness is character-
ized. This conceptualization equates with the Aristotelian49 definition of the
universal, which Peirce regards as satisfactory: “What is a general? The Aristotelian
definition is good enough. It is quod aptum natum est praedicari de pluribus.”50,51
46
CP, 5.66. EP, 2.160.
47
CP, 5.104; EP, 2.183; my italics.
48
CP, 5.105; EP, 2.184; my italics.
49
On Interpretation, VII.
50
“That which is naturally apt to be predicated of many.”
51
CP, 5.151. EP, 2.208.
This being-predicated-of-many bespeaks the final link between representation

and generality insofar as the individual, in its manifoldness, is contained in the rela-
tions of the concept.
Phenomenology shows, therefore, that thirdness seems to have an extensionality
in time, drawn by its nature of mediating instance between the lived past and action-
able future. Far from being a metaphysical claim, then, it says that it is pertinent to
the universality of experience to conform action to some type of purport that con-
sists in the nature of the concept. The student of Peircean Phenomenology may, with
the faculties which are required from him/her to this end, confirm the veracity of
his/her observation that “Five minutes of our waking life will hardly pass without
our making some kind of prediction.”52
Armed with these three faculties of seeing, heeding, and generalizing, let us
observe, on the other hand, that nature exhibits regularities by its behavior in time,
along with a countless variety subsumed under the first category. How naturally do
some people place their sunglasses handy the night before for tomorrow’s sunshine,
or sow the field to harvest that fruit (and no other), or even purchase clothing at
reduced prices in the summer for the future winter? Can we possibly demote these
acts by supposing that they demonstrate a belief in something merely potential and
argue that the extent of these regularities observed in nature is indemonstrable? It
does not seem an easy task. Strictly in the phenomenological sphere, by an inven-
tory of the classes of experience, we are rather compelled to link purposeful human
actions to the destined future regularities of the external world.
However, within the bounds of Phenomenology, we shall confine ourselves to
subsume those regularities under the third category, based on the fact that the obser-
vation of this phenomenon occurs in time and that the observational consciousness
that reveals its flow falls under thirdness. By observing that human action is gener-
ally full of expectations engendered in successful experiences within the regulari-
ties already verified in the world, we are not trespassing on the frontiers of an
inventory of appearances. To investigate the reality of thirdness, and thus to suppose
that there is something of a general nature in the exteriority to which our thought
conforms, is no longer the task of Phenomenology, but that of Metaphysics.
52
CP, 1.26.
Part II
The World as Reality
Chapter 2
Realism and the Categorial Conception
of the World
J’ai crée les fêtes, tous les triomphes, tous les drames. J’ai
essayé d’inventer de nouvelles fluers, de nouveaux astres, de
nouvelles langues. J’ai cru acquérir des pouvoirs surnaturels.
Eh bien! je dois enterrer mon imagination et mes souvenirs!
Une belle gloire d’artiste et de conteur emportée! Moi! moi que
me suis dit mage ou ange, dispensé de toute morale, je suis
rendu u sol, avec un devoir à chercher, et la réalité rugueuse à
éteindre!
RIMBAUD, Une Saison en Enfer
Peirce’s Phenomenology, as simply confined to the universe of appearances,

indifferently scrutinizes the elements relevant to the entirety of experience, whether
of an interior or exterior nature. The phenomenological inventory of experience
identifies three modes of being of the phenomenon, and these constitute Peirce’s
three phenomenological categories. The first category was delineated as that ele-
ment of the phenomenon represented by the qualities of feeling in the inner sphere,
and by the diversity and variety of the world’s qualities in the outer sphere.
Secondness, in turn, brought with it the experience of alterity, the idea of other, of
brute force, which is characterized by the reaction of an individual object against a
first consciousness, which becomes the fulcrum of all thoughts. In thought as third-
ness is configured the experience of mediation between a first and a second, and
which is extensive in time insofar as it is general and maintains a link between past
and future. The regularities observed in the world translated themselves as phenom-
ena of thirdness, since they required a consciousness that experiences in time, and
thus is distinct from those forms of consciousness that are under the immediacy of
the first and second categories.
Phenomenology so expounded as a science of appearances quite fittingly can be
considered a naïve science, given the simplicity of its observations. Perhaps, it
should be contested as a science, given that this title instills the most sophisticated
abstractions and conclusions of logical nature. The reply is that phenomenological
research possesses a scientific character, attributed by Peirce, due to the universality
intended by the categories of experience and by the fact that they may be put to the
test by any observer.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66314-2_2
18 2 Realism and the Categorial Conception of the World
On the other hand, how can there be a science where there is no underlying
Logic? Peirce addresses this question in more than one passage where he estab-
lishes the relation of dependence to be from the second to the first, that is, it is Logic
that seeks its elements in Phenomenology, and not otherwise:
This science of Phenomenology, then, must be taken as the basis upon which
normative science1 is to be erected, and accordingly must claim our first attention.
This science of Phenomenology is in my view the most primal of all the positive sciences.
That is, it is not based, as to its principles, upon any other positive science. By a positive
science I mean an inquiry which seeks for positive knowledge; that is, for such knowledge
as may conveniently be expressed in a categorical proposition.2 [Further:] Logic […] as a
normative science ought to be found to repose upon Phenomenology.
[…] in fact the problems of logic cannot be solved without taking advantage of the
teachings of Mathematics, of Phenomenology, and of Ethics.3
As a science of appearances, Phenomenology neither says what it is nor what it

should be, requiring, thus, a Logic that bears out its arguments; it merely recognizes
and classifies that which is ubiquitously before every consciousness. Its nature is
much keener than that of Mathematics whose hypothetical character does not appeal
to the factual universe, yet rather draws from within its own hypotheses the neces-
sarily derived consequences. The statements of Mathematics, unlike those of Logic,
are not about any state of things other than those that it proposes to itself as prob-
lems. It is in this uncoupling with the reality of the world that, in our opinion, lies a
certain affinity of Phenomenology with Mathematics, as Peirce’s thought intends:
“Phenomenology […] which stands right on the border of the purely hypothetical
science of mathematics, hardly makes any explicit assertions.”4
By “hardly makes any explicit assertions,” we mean that Phenomenology does
not truly intend to come to any conclusion except that there are certain appearances
given. It should also be made explicit that the term category, which Peirce confesses
having derived from his studies of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel,5 cannot have within
Phenomenology, as it has been designed, the scope of logical modes— such as pos-
sibility and necessity—which are properly developed in Logic and Metaphysics.
The conception of a category in the realm of Peirce’s Phenomenology is confined to
the modes of the being of appearances, while for Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, it is
more fittingly applied within their respective Logics.6
However, by accepting the invitation of experience to its making us think that, we
enter the cognitive universe of Metaphysics, that is, the universe of thought that will
1
Logic, Ethics, and Aesthetics.
2
CP, 5.39; EP, 2.144; see also CP, 2.197, 2.214, and 8.297.
3
NEM, p. 193.
4
NEM, p. 196; see also CP, 5.40.
5
CP, 1.300.
6
Regarding this matter, the reader may consult Manley Thompson’s definition of the word in The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 2, NY, Macmillan, 1967, pp. 46–45. This is not the place to dis-
cuss the ontological character that also permeates the logic of Aristotle and Hegel, but solely to
establish the distinction between the phenomenological genesis of the Peircean categories and the
logical genesis of the categories of the three authors mentioned.
2 Realism and the Categorial Conception of the World 19
seek the underlying reality in the inventory of appearances. Thus, we propose in this
chapter to develop the beginning of a wide-ranging answer to the question: what
must the world be like so as to appear to me as it does? An investigation of this
nature cannot do without Logic, as Phenomenology can. To seek a world responsi-
ble for the three dimensions of experience is to seek an explanatory scheme, that is,
a theory that matches this same experience. It thus seems that Metaphysics, as the
science of reality and not just of appearances, must have its own peculiar procedure,
and one that is analogous to the strategy of a special science:
Order III consists of metaphysics, whose attitude toward the universe is nearly that of the
special science (anciently, physics was it designations), from which it is mainly distin-
guished, by its confining itself to such parts of physics and of psychics as can be established
without special means of observation. But these are very peculiar parts, extremely unlike
the rest.7
But then, as a kind of special science, the arguments of Metaphysics must submit
to the scrutiny of Logic, a point that Peirce insists upon in many passages of his
work, and while referring particularly to Kant who believes Metaphysics may be
possible provided it is grounded on the science of Logic.8 In the words of Peirce:
Indeed, it may be said that there has hardly been a metaphysician of the first rank who has
not made logic his stepping-stone to metaphysics.9 [Further:] To me, it seems that a meta-
physics not founded on the science of logic is of all branches of scientific inquiry the most
shaky and insecure, and altogether unfit for the support of so important a subject as logic,
which is, in its turn, to be used as the support of the exactest sciences in their deepest and
nicest questions10 [and thus] to found logic on metaphysics is a crazy scheme.11
Peirce accordingly saves a primary space for both Logic and Metaphysics within
Philosophy:
Logic is a branch of philosophy. That is to say it is an experiential, or positive science, but
a science which rests on no special observations, based on special observational means, but
on phenomena which lie open to the observation of every man, every day and hour. There
are two main branches of philosophy, Logic, or the philosophy of thought, and Metaphysics,
or the philosophy of being.12
Logic, in the Peircean view, as an experiential or positive science, cannot for this
very reason arbitrarily adopt its premises as hypotheses built in its own interiority, as
Mathematics does. This seems to be the major difference between Logic and
Mathematics and, more generally, between Mathematics and Philosophy:
Mathematics does not need to take up any hypothesis that is not crystal clear. Unfortunately,
Philosophy cannot choose its first principles at will, but has to accept them as they are.13
7
CP, 1.282.
8
See, for example, CP, 3.454 and 3.487.
9
CP, 2.121.
10
CP, 2.36; see also CP, 1.487, 1.624; EP, 2.30 and 1.625; EP, 2.31.
11
CP, 2.168; Peirce at CP, 2.37–38 also shows how some philosophical systems base Logic on
Metaphysics.
12
13
CP, 4.176; see also CP, 2.191.
In its character as a positive science, Philosophy deals with matters of fact,

being compelled by experience, and by Logic as one of its branches, to think
about them; from this compulsion concerning the premises adopted, Mathematics
is exempt:
Mathematics is not a positive science; for the mathematician holds himself free to say that
A is B or that A is not B, the only obligation upon him being, that as long as he says A is B,
he is to hold to it, consistently. But logic begins to be a positive science; since there are
some things in regard to which the logician is not free to suppose that they are not, but
acknowledges a compulsion upon him to assert the one and deny the others. Thus, the logi-
cian is forced by positive observation to admit that there is such a thing as doubt, that some
propositions are false, etc. But with this compulsion comes a corresponding responsibility
upon him not to admit anything which he is not forced to admit.14
This passage highlights an element of alterity inherent in Peirce’s own concept

of the normative role of Logic such that we may conclude that it also will be present
in Metaphysics as the science of the real.
By asserting that Logic is a positive science, which underlies both Metaphysics
and Idioscopy, Peirce is not divesting it of its role as an overseer of the formal rules
of correct reasoning, although he does extend its domain beyond the merely formal
aspect of thought.15 In its critical aspect as it relates to the validity of arguments, it
is concerned with the “conditions that determine that reasoning is sound,”16 while in
its normative aspect with “the theory of correct reasoning, of how reasoning must
be and not of what it is like.”17
Besides inserting itself within Metaphysics as a guide of reasoning, Logic, as
conceived by Peirce, reveals its ontological character.18 That is what can be inferred
from:
Metaphysics consists in the results of the absolute acceptance of logical principles not
merely as regulatively valid, but as truths of being. Accordingly, it is to be assumed that the
universe has an explanation, the function of which, like that of every logical explanation, is
to unify its observed variety. It follows that the root of all being is One; and so far as differ-
ent subjects have a common character they partake of an identical being.19
This passage directly reminds us how in the previous chapter we were led to
conjecture concerning the possibility of a synthesis of objective time and its rupture
within the variety observed in the world, as experienced in the immediate con-
sciousness of firstness, as if compelled to the synthesis of the phenomena under the
being of the same category. Experience seems to suggest its unity by an almost
irrefusable invitation to think its reality. In what conceptual terrain are we entering,
14
15
On the “formal” aspect of thought, we shall comment in Chap. 7, “The Lesson of the Universe.”
16
CP, 2.1.
17
CP, 2.7.
18
On the ontological nature of Peircean logic, see Chap. 6.
19
CP, 1.487.
however, when proposing to investigate what this world must be like in order for it
to appear as it does to me?
What is understood by reality in Peirce’s philosophy and what specifically is a
science of Metaphysics that intends to make the real its object? Furthermore, to
achieve this end, what questions are appropriate to this science? In addition, why
has the course of history bequeathed to Metaphysics a nonscientific label? Let us
start answering these questions with the help of Peirce’s speculations on the causes
of the historical ruination of this vector of investigation:
[...] there is one highly abstract science which is in a deplorably backward condition. I mean
Metaphysics…. The common opinion has been that Metaphysics is backward because it is
intrinsically beyond the reach of human cognition. But that, I think I can clearly discern, is
a complete mistake. Why should metaphysics be so difficult? Because it is abstract? But the
abstracter a science is, the easier it is, both as a general rule of experience and as a corollary
from logical principles.
Mathematics, which is far more abstract than metaphysics, is certainly far more devel-
oped than any special science; and the same is true, though less tremendously so, of logic.
But it will be said that metaphysics is inscrutable because its objects are not open to obser-
vation. This is doubtless true of some systems of metaphysics, though not to the extent that
is supposed to be true. The things that any science discovers are beyond the reach of direct
observation. We cannot see energy, or the attraction of gravitation, or the flying molecules
of gases, or the luminiferous ether, or the forests of a carbonaceous era, nor the explosions
in nerve cells. It is only the premises of science, not its conclusions, which are directly
observed.20
One can infer here that Peirce strays substantially from Comte’s positivism,
which holds that the premises of empirical science are solely confined to direct
observation. Let us reinforce this distinction by directly observing Peirce’s critique
of Comte:
When, in 1839, Auguste Comte laid down the rule that no hypothesis ought to be enter-
tained which was not capable of verification, it was far from receiving general acceptance.
But this was chiefly because Comte did not make it clear, nor did he apparently understand,
what verification consisted in. He seemed to think, and it was generally understood, that
what was meant was that the hypothesis should contain no facts of a kind not open to direct
observation. That position would leave the memory of the past as something not so much as
to be entertained as plausible.21
However, the Metaphysics Peirce has in mind, as scientific, aims at founding

itself, as any positive science must, upon experience:
But metaphysics, even bad metaphysics, really rests on observations, whether consciously
or not; and the only reason that this is not universally recognized is that it rests upon kinds
of phenomena with which every man’s experience is so saturated that he usually pays no
particular attention to them. The data of metaphysics are not less open to observation,
but immeasurably more so, than the data, say, of the very highly developed science of
20
21
CP, 7.91; my italics. See also CP, 2.511n, 5.597 and 7.203.
a stronomy [...]. I think we must abandon the idea that metaphysics is backward owing to
any intrinsic difficulty of it.22
What strange music of the spheres are we always hearing and, for this reason, we
no longer hear? Of what is our experience so saturated that we barely are aware of
it? The answers to these questions will constitute the touchstone that is Peircean
Metaphysics: human conduct in the world. Exposure to Peirce’s metaphysics itself
brings a certain means of deintoxification to our ears. In the meantime, let us go
on with the considerations of the author regarding the condition of backward
Metaphysics:
In my opinion the chief cause of its backward condition is that its leading professors have
been theologians. Were they simply Christian ministers the effect of intrusting very impor-
tant scientific business to their hands would be quite as bad as if the same number of Wall
Street promoters and Broad Street brokers were appointed to perform the task. The unfit-
ness in the one case, as in the other, would consist in those persons having no idea of any
broader interests than the personal interests of some person or collection of persons. Both
classes are practical men. Now it is quite impossible for the practical man to comprehend
what science is about unless he becomes as a little child and is born again.23
Metaphysics, he goes on to say, has as its task “to study the more general aspects
of reality and the real objects.”24 Elsewhere, while drawing his concept of reality
from that of the scholastic John Duns Scotus in which there are components of both
generality and alterity, he writes:
Scotus added a great deal to the language of logic. Of this invention is the word reality,25[and]
reality is that mode of being by virtue of which the real thing is as it is irrespectively of what
any mind or any definite collection of minds may represent it to be.26 [Further:] Objects are
divided into figments, dreams, etc., on the one hand, and realities on the other. The former
are those which exist only inasmuch as you or I or some man imagines them; the latter are
those which have an existence independent of your mind or mine or that any number of
persons. The real is that which is not whatever we happen to think it, but is unaffected by
what we may think of it.27
Two points must be emphasized here. The first one, already pointed out, is the
presence of the element of alterity, which permeates the Peircean concept of actual
reality. The other one is that nonreal objects, made up of that which human imagination
22
CP, 6.2; my italics. See also CP, 3.406.
23
CP, 6.3. Continuing in this paragraph, Peirce goes on to comment that the teaching of Metaphysics
acquired in the course of History a dogmatic hue as it was in the hands of theologians, and thus
distanced itself from the scientific process required for addressing their relevant issues. A practical
man would be distinct from a scientific man in seeking a dogmatic conformity of a theory to his
primary beliefs. True science establishes its beliefs from the analysis of experience in seeking an
explanatory theory about it.
24
CP, 6.6.
25
CP, 4.28; see also CP, 6.495. Despite his criticism of theologians, Peirce shows, throughout vari-
ous passages, great admiration for the work of Scotus in the realm of Metaphysics and Logic.
26
CP, 5.565.
27
CP, 8.12; EP, 1.87–88; W, 2.467–468.
or the unconscious engenders, have no compulsive force on consciousness. There is

no sense of exteriority28 in them—namely, that sense of reaction promptly experi-
enced and which, as a second to consciousness, actually persists and insists against
it. The real objects are alter, and so remain independent of the thought that represents
them. Whereas, the oneiric and fictitious universe constructs the representation of its
object and makes of it what it is itself. When the representations vanish, their objects
vanish with them. It seems fitting to extend this idea to the universes of Art and
Mathematics, which are alike since they engender within themselves the objects of
their representations. To say that reality, as conceptualized, is out of keeping with
them, seems a waste of time. To claim that alterity in Art and Mathematics may con-
sist in the decision of the artist of choosing the color, shape, musical note, or precise
word for a poem, and on the other hand, in the compulsion that a problem exerts on
the mind of the mathematician, is to divest alterity of its logical character, thereby
ascribing a psychological trait to it. The dualities are, nonetheless, from phenomeno-
logical experience. However, as soon as the project of artistic or mathematical con-
struction is fulfilled, so is the insistence of the object. This is not the idea of a genuine
second to consciousness. The latter keeps insisting upon consciousness, demanding
mediation. This indubitably is the mark which typifies the Peircean concept of real-
ity, namely secondness which brings the other as negation:
In the idea of reality, Secondness is predominant; for the real is that which insists upon
forcing its way to recognition as something other than the mind's creation,29 [and] what is
reality? There would not be such a thing as truth unless there were something which is as it
is independently of how we may think it to be. That is the reality, and we have to inquire
what its nature is. We speak of hard facts. We wish our knowledge to conform to hard facts.
Now, the ‘hardness’ of facts lies in the insistency of the percept, its entirely irrational
insistency,—the element of Secondness in it. That is a very important factor of reality.30
These passages clearly show that alterity is the condition of possibility for the act
of considering something objectively true. Must one, however, deprive Mathematics
of any attribute of truth, since genuine alterity does not characterize its represen
tations? To answer this question, it suffices to consider the fact that mathematical
objects are built within their own “language game,” to borrow Wittgenstein’s con-
cept. As such, mathematical truths derive from the consistency of their construc-
tions within the syntax that this science imposes on itself. The attribute of truth in
the positive sciences, such as is the case with Philosophy, must reside, in Peirce’s
view, in a form of adequacy of the representation to an object that is exterior to it,31
so long as we wish our knowledge to conform to hard facts.
The element of secondness implied in the Peircean concept of reality leads us to
the class of experience that Phenomenology calls attention to under this category.
From the experience of reaction against consciousness, as typical of the action of a
second over a subject, what is the metaphysical step that makes this category of
28
For the character of identification between reality and exteriority, see CP, 6.327–328.
29
CP, 1.325.
30
31
This will be discussed in Chap. 6.
appearances a way of being of the world? This is what Peirce makes explicit in the
following passage:
Although in all direct experience of reaction, an ego, a something within, is one member of
the pair, yet we attribute reactions to objects outside of us. When we say that a thing exists,
what we mean is that it reacts upon other things. That we transfer to it our direct experience
of reaction is shown by our saying that one thing acts upon another. It is our hypothesis to
explain the phenomena,—a hypothesis, which like the working hypothesis of a scientific
inquiry, we may not believe to be altogether true, but which is useful in enabling us to con-
ceive of what takes place.32 [And also in:] This notion, of being such as other things make
us, is such a prominent part of our life that we conceive other things also to exist by virtue
of their reactions against each other.33
One could object that the metaphysical hypothesis of the existence of things
conjectured from the experience that reveals our own ego as not being another is
absolutely unnecessary once we see that things act among themselves. Nevertheless,
the mere act of seeing interaction among other individuals is not necessarily an
experience of secondness. The variety and diversity of nature can simply be seen in
their dynamic character, that is, in the multiplicity of actions and reactions that it
reveals to vision, which is of the form of the experiencing consciousness under the
phenomenologically first way of being. Thus, the concept of existence is necessary,
no longer just under a phenomenological point of view, but under a metaphysical
one, where it serves as an explanatory hypothesis of the direct experience that
reveals our own character of individuals.
Well, with this step, Peirce is not transgressing the universe of possible experi-
ence to which Kant confined Metaphysics, but only accepting the irresistible invita-
tion from experience to make us think beyond that:
We are dealing not only with the matter of possible experience, but experience in the full
acceptation of the term as something not merely affecting the senses but also as the subject
of thought.34
As subject of thought, experience leads the mind to the task of gathering the
multiplicity into unity,35 and synthesizing, under the same way of being, the indi-
vidualities of subject and object, which are both subsumed under the same category
that encompasses, in its interior, the metaphysical concept of existence:
Whatever exists, ex-sists, that is, really acts upon other existents, so obtains a self-identity,
and is definitely individual.36 [Further:] The existent is that which reacts against other
things.37
32
33
CP, 1.324.
34
CP, 6.40. EP, 1.300–301; W, 8.113–114.
35
See note 19 in this Chapter.
36
CP, 5.429; EP, 2.341–342; see also CP, 3.612.
37
CP, 8.191.
Thus, existence is characterized by its binary oppositions in which each thing is

on account of not being another:
Existence is that mode of being which lies in opposition to another. To say that a table exists
is to say that it is hard, heavy, opaque, resonant, that is, produces immediate effects upon
the senses, and also that it produces purely physical effects, attracts the earth (that is, is
heavy), dynamically reacts against other things (that is, has inertia), resists pressure (that is,
is elastic),38 has a definite capacity for heat, etc. To say there is a phantom table by the side
of it incapable of affecting any senses or of producing any physical effects whatever, is to
speak of an imaginary table. A thing without oppositions ipso facto does not exist.39
One may without hesitation state that the objects of imagination, in which math-
ematical and artistic objects, as well as those of the entire human oneiric universe
are included, do not exist. The objection that, for instance, a sculpture or any other
work of art exists as a thing serves only to trivialize the issue. The existence of these
objects does not characterize Art as such, nor does it distinguish it from other human
activities which similarly produce singular objects.
Under this view of what has been conceptualized as existence, Art has the liberty
to conform its objects to representation in an arbitrary manner, and in a way that is
devoid of any necessity of relation to external reality. Human feeling and thought
can, in this way, be the subject of experience, thus inverting, somehow, the real
sense of the logical vector that typifies alterity. The same is exactly the case
with Mathematics. If certain mathematical forms are found in nature, as Galileo
reasoned,40 this does not make of the science a science of reality, but only, perhaps,
of possible reality. In any case, to suppose that mathematical relations exist is to
take a metaphysical step beyond the realm of existence as the locus of the individual
and of alterity.
From the mark of alterity present in the conception of reality adopted by Peirce,
we have entered necessarily the second category in which the metaphysical idea of
existence is established—one which gathers under one sole concept both human
existence and the individual existence of exteriority. Nonetheless, is the conception
of reality to be confined to the conception of existence? Or, from another point of
view, does reality display itself solely in the plurality of singulars that constitutes
the universe of that which exists?
In order to answer these questions, we must remember that there are two attri-
butes accompanying the idea of reality: alterity and insistence upon consciousness.
Furthermore, the apprehension of insistence by its very nature requires a flow of
38
For the sake of exactness of concept, the elasticity of a body is characterized by the full revers-
ibility of its deformity after the action ceases, and not by its capacity of absorbing pressure.
39
40
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the Universe—which stands continually open
to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and
interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its
characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impos-
sible to understand a single word of it; without these one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.”
In O Ensaiador, São Paulo, April, 1979, translated into Portuguese by Helda Barraco, p. 119.
time, and, as such, this mark of reality is not delimited as an actual experience of the
second category.
The insistence of reality upon consciousness is characterized as a regularity that,
phenomenologically, places it under the third category, as highlighted in the previ-
ous chapter. Such an acknowledgment of the insistence of an experience requires a
comparing intellect that mediates the immediateness of each occurrence of this
experience, that is, an intellect that no longer takes it as an immediate experience,
but as a generalized representation that recognizes the relation between its occur-
rences. Thus, as experience, existence loses its individual character when general-
ized in a relation that is the context itself of a general representation.
Peirce also expresses this in the following way:
A reaction is something which occurs “hic et nunc.” It happens but once. If it is repeated,
that makes two reactions. If it is continued for some time that, as will be shown below,
involves the third category [...]. A reaction cannot be generalized without entirely losing its
character as a reaction.41
Thus, the permanence of a reaction transforms it into thirdness by becoming a

regularity in time.
This characteristic trait of reality, namely its insistence, which makes reality
force itself upon consciousness for its cognition, seems to suggest, in its nuance of
regularity, that thought as mediation establishes its own condition of possibility.
In other words, exterior generality is grounded by the generality of thought as medi-
ating representation. Taking this as a hypothesis, one can logically conclude that the
Peircean conception of reality has two axial predicates: alterity and generality. It
necessarily follows that such a conception cannot be confined to secondness, which,
in the metaphysical sphere, subsumes existence under the universe of individuals
that only react among themselves and upon experiencing consciousness.
The generality required by the conception of reality leads to two questions—the
second of which is crucial to Peirce’s philosophy. The first addresses the distinction
between reality and existence. The second, implicit in what has been previously
expounded, refers to the ontological possibility of a generality. This latter issue refers
us back to the controversy of the universals, that is, the disputatio between nominal-
ism and realism.42 Deriving his conception of reality from Scotus, the exponent of
scholastic realism, Peirce will declare himself nothing other than a realist43:
The author of the present treatise is a Scotistic realist. He entirely approved the brief state-
ment of Dr. F. E. Abbott in his Scientific Theism that Realism is implied in modern science.
41
42
An excellent historical redemption of this issue can be found in C.A. Ribeiro do Nascimento “A
Querela dos Universais Revisitada,” Cadernos PUC No. 13, São Paulo, Educ-Cortez, 1981.
43
We mention here the Scotist content of Peircean realism, not only because Peirce insistently
assumed this position on these terms, but also to distinguish it from the nuances that contemporary
realism has acquired. Nowadays, a realist doctrine is one that presupposes an exteriority of objects
independent of our modes of representation (see, for example, Karl Popper, Conhecimento
Objetivo, São Paulo, Itatiaia-USP, 1975, translated by Milton Amado, pp. 45–51). Not an object of
this book, the reader may examine the interface between Peirce’s and Scotus’ realisms in John
Boler, Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism––A Study of Peirce’s Relation to John Duns Scotus
(Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1963).
In calling himself a Scotist, the writer does not mean that he is going back to the general
views of 600 years back; he merely means that the point of metaphysics upon which Scotus
chiefly insisted and which has since passed out of mind, is a very important point, insepa-
rably bound up with the most important point to be insisted upon today.44 [Further:] I am
myself a scholastic realist of a somewhat extreme stripe.45
One can infer that Peirce intends to show that the question of the universals refers
not only to relations between the term and its referent, but also, in a larger scope, to
relations between the general and the particular, from the viewpoints of both Logic
and Metaphysics. Thus understood, his statement that the problem of nominalism
and realism extends to modern science translates itself into a concern for the onto-
logical meaning of scientific theories, which, as representations of the world, place
themselves in relation to existent individuals and also, alternatively, to real natural
laws, that is, to the attributes of both alterity and generality.
This is the actual crux of the matter: the relations between the general and the
particular, from an ontological point of view, express, as we understand it, an ancient
question of classical Greek philosophy that Peirce intends to repropose and to focus
on not merely within the bounds in which it was addressed when it emerged in the
Middle Ages.
Therefore, the question of the universals, now at hand, is not misplaced within
Peircean Metaphysics. On the contrary, the latter has revealed its roots in Pheno
menology where the conceptions of experience as subject of thought and of alterity
subsumed under the second category have led to the metaphysical hypothesis of
existence, and to the partial reduction of reality to this category. Something more is
required as the condition of the possibility of thought—not only the reaction indica-
tive of the negation of the other, but also its insistence.
Therefore, the insistence of reaction, which implicates a consciousness in time
that acknowledges it as regular, and, by so doing, comparatively recognizes indi-
vidual reactions in a relation of similarity, seems to be the ground of all mediative
thought in its logical positivity.
Also, from this we can infer that the third category, not solely in its phenomeno-
logical but now ontological ground, intertwines itself within an objective rule that
subsumes the individuals which are correlated to it under a real regularity that
remains alter to consciousness. This is, to our mind, the argument that justifies
Peircean realism, which may be called architectonic since it derives from all the
conceptions hitherto logically expounded: the mere can be of the mediative phe-
nomenon that has its logical ground in the must be of real generality. It hence is
shown that Logic, in its status as normative and positive science, lays the founda-
tions in the domain of Philosophy that confer solidity to the metaphysical edifice.
A nominalist might object, however, claiming that the plurality of reactions in
time is merely organized into a general concept by the perceiving intellect, and thus
that the mental operation precludes that the object of thought itself is general.
44
CP, 4.50; the treatise Peirce refers to is his never completed Grand Logic of 1893. The passage
belongs to Chap. 6 of that work, “The Essence of Reasoning” (CP, 4.21–84).
45
CP, 5.470.
It seems to us, however, that this argument does not take into account that the
concept thus formed, through the observation of individuals and their subsequent con-
joinment by a mind, should have its validity proven in the future. In other words, a
contingent arrangement of individuals which do not keep a certain level of perma-
nence or constancy in time will render that concept false.
To restrict to the intellect the power of organizing individuals would even deprive
them, as phenomena, of their basic experiential mark—namely, alterity. Let us con-
sider this counterargument in the words of the author:
[...] let a law of nature—say the law of gravitation—remain a mere uniformity—a mere
formula establishing a relation between terms—and what in the world should induce a
stone, which is not a term nor a concept but just a plain thing, to act in conformity to that
uniformity?
I should ask the objector whether he was a nominalist or a scholastic realist. If he is a
nominalist, he holds that laws are mere generals, that is, formulae relating to mere terms;
and ordinary good sense ought to force him to acknowledge that there are real connections
between individual things regardless of mere formulae. Now any real connection whatso-
ever between individual things involves a reaction between them in the sense of this cate-
gory. The objector may, however, take somewhat stronger ground by confessing himself to
be a scholastic realist, holding that generals may be real. A law of nature, then, will be
regarded by him as having a sort of esse in futuro. That is to say they will have a present
reality which consists in the fact that events will happen according to the formulation of
those laws.46
In these passages, it is perfectly clear that Peirce holds that the generality of the
law cannot be confined to a merely subjective representation of a contingent arran
gement of individuals. The validity of this representation may be ephemeral. It is
rather the future observation of the pertinent class of events that confers veracity to
it, that is, confers to it an intrinsic predictive character concerning the way in which
those individuals will act. The conformity of the prediction with the course of events
in time makes one think that the rule contained in the representation is real, that is,
that it corresponds to an objective rule of the world.
This esse in futuro of the rule or law is what confers its two attributes of reality:
alterity, which is capable of d enying the merely subjective character of the represen-
tation; and generality, which makes it extensive in time, and thus accounts for the
predicate of a multiplicity of individuals, according to the Aristotelian definition of
general adopted by Peirce.
Not without reason, therefore, Peirce insists on adding the word “mere” to all
that refers to the nominalist point of view, therewith acknowledging its lack of com-
mitment to a representation having a general and ontological reality. That is what is
at stake in the following:
But the general proposition that all solid bodies fall in the absence of any upward forces or
pressure, this formula I say, is of the nature of a representation. Our nominalistic friends
would be the last to dispute that. They will go so far as to say that it is a mere representa-
tion—the word mere meaning that to be represented and really to be are two very different
things; and that this formula has no being except a being represented. It certainly is of the
nature of a representation. That is undeniable, I grant. And it is equally undeniable that that
46
CP, 5.48; EP, 2.152–153.
which is of the nature of a representation is not ipso facto real. In that respect there is a great
contrast between an object of reaction and an object of representation. Whatever reacts is
ipso facto real. But an object of representation is not ipso facto real. If I were to predict that
on my letting go of the stone it would fly up in the air, that would be mere fiction; and the
proof that it was so would be obtained by simply trying the experiment.47
It is remarkable how this passage reaffirms the indissolubility of the binary of

generality–alterity attributed to reality. The simple or mere fact that a representa-
tion is general does not confer any ontological status to it; it must still undergo the
alterity of experience and extensivity in time.
The necessarily predictive hue of representation makes it permanently directed
toward the course of experience in futuro. It does not seem sensible to deny that this
is the reason why scientific theories are, throughout history, replaced by others. Such
substitution occurs when one notices that the rule contained in representation does
not correspond to the rule evidenced by the conduct of the individuals across time.
In the history of the experimental sciences, theories are not replaced by an arbi-
trary act, but by the alterity of the experience that denies its representation, either
because it is imperfect or because it is altogether wrong. It is this, we believe, that
makes of experience the subject of true thought. Any other relation between theory
and experience would appear as rather odd:
If the facts won’t agree with the Theory, so much the worse for them. They are bad facts.
This sounds to me childish, I confess. It is like an infant that beats an inanimate object that
hurts it.48
The condition of possibility of any cognition is a real generality that grounds it.
The fact that we know something means that we can reasonably predict the course
of future experience. To know something is to know of something nonexistent,
something latent in its coming to be, that is, potential in nature.
To know in effect that a stone will drop as soon as I let go of it is to know some-
thing that has not occurred yet.
But:
[...] how can I know what is going to happen? You certainly do not think that it is by clair-
voyance, as if the future event by its existential reactiveness could affect me directly, as in
an experience of it, as an event scarcely past might affect me. You know very well that there
is nothing of the sort in this case. Still, it remains true that I do know that that stone will
drop, as a fact, as soon as I let go my hold. If I truly know anything, that which I know must
be real.49
If we admit that our way of acting should keep some kind of relation with what
we think, and further that alterity and extensivity (esse in futuro) are fundamental
factors of experience, then to suppose that reality does not contain general elements
or laws will lead us, through logical coherence, to “abstain from all prediction,
however qualified, by a confession of fallibility.”50
47
CP, 5.96; EP, 2.181–182.
48
CP, 5.116; EP, 2.191–192.
49
CP, 5.94; EP, 2.181.
50
CP, 5.216.
There is something in this “confession of fallibility” that preempts the temporariness

of representation.51 Fallible would be the representation that does not adjust to the
observable course of e xperience, which, from potency to act, reveals the error of the
prediction.
Real generality is thus the condition of the third category of reality—that is, it is
that which explains the experience of mediation identified in the inventory of
appearances of Phenomenology. Logic guides Metaphysics in its assertion that
general entities are real, since real regularity is the condition of possibility for medi-
ation. The individual in its secondness as such is not reducible to thought, nor is a
plurality of individuals without general relations that subsume them in time. The
reality of thirdness, that is, the metaphysical hypothesis that generals are real, is
forced on cognition by experience; the being of these generals “consists in their
becoming possible objects of thought, whereby particulars can be thought.”52
A world that does not allow the intellect to generalize would be a chaotic world,
one constituted of individuals by themselves and for themselves. The absence of
generals and real relations having permanence in time would constitute a world of
particular existentce of unpredictable conduct––one perhaps in which even the
names of the roses would be without meaning; for to plan today to give tomorrow
one of them as a gift, could mean giving an object perfumed with the foul stench of
the sewers.
And why would not, in such a world, a queen be turned into a sheep? Outside of
fiction, we believe that even Lewis Carroll would agree that:
Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence
or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing.53
Well, it seems clear to us that that which cannot be thought will be unable to have
any meaning. Assuming, for the moment, that the meaning of something must be
general,54 we can proceed to say that this is the semantic meaning of “chaos is pure
nothing.”
Where there is no principle of order in existence, there also shall consequently be
no possibility of mediation; in other words, any representation as third element,
whether in the form of a real law or manifestations of thought, shall be devoid of any
condition of possibility. So, if generality is not, meaning will not be, given our pre-
vious admission which refers meaning to the universe of thirdness. Such is evi-
denced in: “the word means is almost an exact synonym of the word third.”55
We are now able to establish a clear distinction between reality and existence
from the viewpoint of Peircean Philosophy.
All experience of reaction against consciousness and all reaction of objects
among themselves fall under the dyadic concept of existence. Under that concept we
51
For the fallibilism of knowledge, see Chap. 3.
52
CP, 7.535.
53
54
Chapter 6 discusses the concept of meaning at the level of Peircean pragmatism.
55
CP, 1.532.
have found, with its roots already outlined in Phenomenology, the idea of other, of
alter, of negation, or, in short, of alterity.
But the partial reduction of the conception of reality to simply the idea of existence
must be due, as we believe it has been proven, to the fact that thought acquires the
attribute of generality of which the second is devoid. That which exists, exists in its
particularity as fragments of space and time; it exists because it is this thing and not
another. We have seen, nonetheless, that the intelligibility of existence has its condi-
tion of possibility in its subsumption under the regularities of conduct—which is to
say that the individuals must be in a general relation so as to be reducible to thought.
It thus seems legitimate to infer that existence is mere brute force devoid of regu-
larity, whereas in the general representation of its individuality it loses its reactive
character and becomes thinkable. However, it also follows that representation is not
reducible to any multiplicity of individuals whatsoever56; as mediative element in
consciousness, it will have a predictive potential, and as real generality it will
subsume the future conduct of existing individuals. This extensionality of general
representation for a future eventuality, its esse in futuro, gives it a potential character
which is distinct from the individuals it represents due to the very existence of the
latter.57
In conclusion, reality as generality is of the nature of representation for inscrib-
ing in itself the future conduct of existence; its character is potency, a permanent
coming into being, whereas the nature of existence, on the other hand, is act,
determination as an individual. As an act subsumed under a power, existence is the
particularization of a generality; it is the way potentiality determines itself:
Existence, then, is a special mode of reality, which, whatever other characteristics it pos-
sesses, has that of being absolutely determinate.58
Could existence, however, be fully subsumed under the real generality of natural
laws? If so, this fact surely would lead us to a conception of a mechanistic world of
which its conduct in time and flow of events are written in a determinate rule or
system of rules.
But Phenomenology has revealed a class of experience subsumed under the first
category, firstness, even while secondness and thirdness have been metaphysically
grounded on the order of the must be, as reality of law and determination of exis-
tence. It then is fitting to ask: what is the ontological space of firstness? What is
there in the world for it to appear in its element of variety, as inventoried in
Phenomenology? Further, might this element derive from the laws of nature? Let us
see the position of the author on these questions:
Let me ask you a little question. Can the operation of law create diversity where there was
no diversity before? Obviously not; under given circumstances mechanical law prescribes
one determinate result. I could easily prove this by the principles of analytical mechanics.
56
See Chap. 4.
57
Chapter 4 provides a more in-depth analysis of the Peircean concepts of potentiality and
actuality.
58
CP, 6.349; see also CP, 6.495 and 5.503.
But that is needless. You can see for yourselves that law prescribes like results under like
circumstances. That is what the word law implies. So then, all this exuberant diversity of
nature cannot be the result of law.59
Again, Logic leads Metaphysics to the admission of a principle of fortuitousness

that produces the variety phenomenologically verified in nature, rather than suppos-
ing that nature is strictly governed by physical laws. It thus is that the required space
is opened up for firstness in the metaphysical sphere, that is, for an ontological
principle of Chance that will fall under that category, while in tandem with the con-
cept of law that logically prevents it from being taken as the cause of asymmetries.
From the theory of probabilities we know that independent events are those that
occur without any relation to the events that precede them, and, on the other hand,
without conditioning the way of being of those that follow. This is the very concept
of fortuitous distribution that imports the idea of first as conceptualized in
Phenomenology—it has no other which conditions its way of being:
For it is of the nature of Chance to be First and that which is First is Chance; and fortuitous
distribution, that is, utter irregularity, is the only thing which it is legitimate to explain by
the absence of any reason to the contrary.60
There are, however, some crucial issues which remain to be addressed, such as a
possible mutual engendering between Law and Chance, besides those deriving from
the rupture of strict causality within Peircean Metaphysics. In addition, how do we
take the principle of Chance as an explicative idea?
Postponing the development of these issues for the proper sequence of this book,
let us systematize the three categories in the metaphysical sphere by conceiving of
them as Chance, Existence, and Law. These are the foundational ways of being that
intertwine within the reality of how, according to the author, the world appears to us.
59
CP, 1.161; see also CP, 6.553.
60
Chapter 3
Ontological Indeterminism
and the Evolutionist Matrix
Arrancarle un jirón de clave, hundirle en el peor de los casos la

flecha de la hipótesis, la antecipación del eclipse, reunir en un
puño mental las riendas de esa multitud de caballos
centelleantes y hostiles.
CORTÁZAR, Prosa del Observatorio
At the end of Chap. 2, we deliberately left some questions unanswered. Their

development will enable us to analyze some central points of Peircean Metaphysics:
its indeterministic ontology and evolutionism.
The concept of Chance was described, somewhat vaguely, as a principle respon-
sible for the diversity and variety present in nature and already inventoried in the
phenomenological sphere.1 When we refer to Chance as a “responsible principle,”
we do not intend to confer on it the attribute of “cause,” which, rather, is appropriately
applicable to the idea of law. Chance as a principle is a way of being associated with
the irregularity and asymmetry pertaining to what is immediately present in facts.
Provisionally, we may take the concept of Chance as the way of being of a fortuitous
distribution, similar to that obtained in any equiprobable experiment, as for example
in the game of dice. In this kind of game, we know there is no reason for one to bet
on one result rather than on another. Such a cautionary belief is grounded on the fact
that each result is independent, one particular event not depending on the preceding
one, nor providing the defining conditions for the following one. It is this mode of
being conferring freedom on each particular act that we call Chance.
In Peirce’s own words:
Chance, then, as an objective phenomenon, is a property of a distribution. That is to say,
there is a large collection consisting say, of colored things and of white things. Chance is a
particular manner of distributions of color among all the things.2
1
In support of the concept of Chance, the development of the ideas of continuity and potentiality
is also required. These concepts will be explained in Chap. 4.
2
CP, 6.74. The doctrine of Ontological Chance, Peirce called Tychism, from the Greek týchê
(Chance).

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66314-2_3
34 3 Ontological Indeterminism and the Evolutionist Matrix
As a property of a distribution, Chance is something general, yet divested of the

logical necessity that characterizes the implication of law. Nothing makes it neces-
sary for the result of a throw of dice to be this and not that. Thus, under the modal
viewpoint, we associate the ideas of Chance and possibility.3 Possibility itself, on
the other hand, can also be associated with the ideas of freedom and spontaneity.
It seems evident that, as a “free painter of things,” Chance is that which may
objectively be subsumed under the first category, for it is of its very nature to be
first.4 As an objective principle, it subsumes the diversity and variety of nature, mak-
ing the secondness of the fact not strictly governed by the thirdness of law; existence
thus possesses an element of spontaneity, conferred by the firstness of chance:
It is evident, for instance, that we can have no reason to think that every phenomenon in all
its minutest details is precisely determined by a law. That there is an arbitrary element in the
universe we see —namely, its variety. This variety must be attributed to spontaneity in some
form.5
This appears to be one of the movements of the music of the spheres never heard
because it is always heard. We are so used to the wild distribution of colors and
forms in nature that we take it for granted. This asymmetry and irregularity present
in phenomena are, to Peirce, of an intensity even greater than that of regularity:
Nature is not regular. No disorder would be less orderly than the existing arrangement. It is
true that the special laws and regularities are innumerable; but nobody thinks of the irregu-
larities, which are infinitely more frequent. Every fact true of any one thing in the universe
is related to every fact true of every other. But the immense majority of these relations are
fortuitous and irregular. A man in China bought a cow three days and five minutes after a
Greenlander had sneezed. Is that abstract circumstance connected with any regularity what-
ever? And are not such relations infinitely more frequent than those which are regular?6
[Further:] From this point of view, uniformity is seen to be really a highly exceptional
phenomenon. But we pay no attention to irregular relationships, as having no interest for
us,7 [and] nobody is surprised that the trees in a forest do not form a regular pattern, or asks
for any explanation of such a fact.
[...] mere irregularity, where no definite regularity is expected, creates no surprise nor
excites any curiosity.8
Nevertheless, this movement of the music never heard seems to be the crux of the
matter as to whether to accept strict causality as underlying every phenomenon. It is
clear that the Peircean Philosophy rejects the idea of a strictly causal world, one
governed, in its minutest details, by a system of laws. Once the ontological space for
secondness and thirdness has been found, in the form of existence and law, respec-
tively, one could even expect that, for the sake of harmony in its logical construction,
Peirce’s metaphysical universe contains Chance as the way of being of firstness.
3
In Chap. 4, the relations between possibility and generality will be highlighted.
4
Refer to note 60 in Chap. 2.
5
CP, 6.30; EP, 1.296; W, 8.109.
6
CP, 5.342; EP, 1.75–76; W, 2.264–265; my italics.
7
CP, 1.406; EP, 1.276; W, 6.206–207.
8
CP, 7.189.
3 Ontological Indeterminism and the Evolutionist Matrix 35
Before further delving into the questions of causality and the relations between
Chance and law, let us see how it is possible to reprise from Phenomenology the
idea of quality, and to integrate it with the concept of chance. Phenomenology sub-
sumes under the concept of firstness all immediate experience characterized by a
quality of feeling that is associated with, in the sphere of consciousness, an internal
rupture of the sense of time. The manifold qualities of feelings, however, cannot be
immediately experienced in consciousness; their multiplicity and variety only
appear mediately when represented and compared. It is from the external point of
view that their multiplicity and variety appear simultaneously. Nature’s wild distri-
bution of colors and forms is apprehended in the pure act of “seeing”—or “hear-
ing”—the “first movement” of the music of the spheres. Or to return to our former
metaphor, it seems fitting to state that multiplicity is the result of the whims of the
“free painter” we have called Chance—that is, it is the result of the way in which
qualities first appear in individuals. A question, however, remains: what are quali-
ties, not as present in things, but as raw materials for that “free painter?” Internally,
we know each in the form of a feeling, therefore, in having an immaterial nature.
To some daemon of Maxwell that could penetrate our interior and watch over us, the
unity of feeling typified by a quality would be something particular; it would be that
quality and not another. However, for the consciousness of the experiencing subject,
that quality upon being experienced is not recognized as a reaction against this and not
that. The being of this raw material of the “free painter” is a quality that is independent
of the materiality of any fact.
Let us see Peirce’s words on this issue:
The qualities, in so far as they are general, are somewhat vague and potential. But an occur-
rence is perfectly individual. It happens here and now. A permanent fact is less purely
individual; yet so far as it is actual, its permanence and generality only consist in its being
there at every individual instant. Qualities are concerned in facts but they do not make up
facts. Facts also concern subjects which are material substances. We do not see them as we
see qualities, that is, they are not in the very potentiality and essence of sense. But we feel
facts resist our will. That is why facts are proverbially called brutal. Now mere qualities do
not resist. It is the matter that resists. Even in actual sensation there is a reaction. Now mere
qualities, unmaterialized, cannot actually react.9
Although the question “what is a quality?” still has not been answered, it seems
important that we re-emphasize two aspects of this passage. The permanence of a
fact makes it have the status of law; its insistence as an individual upon conscious-
ness consists in remaining stationary in time, and requiring that its states be related
as both reality and representation. On the other hand, a mere quality does not react,
as it exemplarily does not in interiority. Let us now return to the question:
What is, then, a quality? Before answering this, it will be well to say what it is not. It is not
anything which is dependent, in its being, upon mind, whether in the form of sense or in that
of thought. Nor is it dependent, in its being, upon the fact that some material thing possesses
it. That quality is dependent upon sense is the great error of the conceptualists. That it is
dependent upon the subject in which it is realized is the great error of all the nominalistic
schools. A quality is a mere abstract potentiality; and the error of those schools lies in hold-
ing that the potential, or possible, is nothing but what the actual makes it to be.

9
[…] that the quality of red depends on anybody actually seeing it, so that red things are
no longer red in the dark, is a denial of common sense.10 [Further:] we see that the idea of a
quality is the idea of a phenomenon or partial phenomenon considered as a monad, without
reference to its parts or components and without reference to anything else. We must not
consider whether it exists, or is only imaginary, because existence depends on its subject
having a place in the general system of the universe. An element separated from everything
else and in no world but itself, may be said, when we come to reflect upon its isolation, to
be merely potential. But we must not even attend to any determinate absence of other
things; we are to consider the total as a unit. We may term this aspect of a phenomenon the
monadic aspect of it. The quality is what presents itself in the monadic aspect.11
There is here a question that resembles a paradox. To state that a quality is what
it is, in its merely potential state, whether it be felt or thought, gives it, almost cat-
egorically, an element of otherness that it lacked until now, like everything that was
subsumed within the first category. Nonetheless, although it is not experienced as
alterity, to attribute to it a dependency on the senses would seem to involve a logical
contradiction. Such a contradiction suggests itself when considering that Chance is
a way of being of the distribution of qualities in individuals. To confine the qualities
to the yoke of the mind is as if we imagined the reality of the “free painter” to
depend on our lending him the paints for his work. Well, to state that the variety and
multiplicity of the world have their metaphysical reality in the first category is to
state that this very same world possesses a way of making multiplicity and variety
the acts of some potency. Making itself always subject of thought, experience leads
us to think of chance and quality as attributes of the world. On the other hand, what
sense would the question previously formulated have regarding the relations
between law and Chance? If we confined chance and quality to subjectivity with
statutory power, that question would translate itself into an issue concerning the
possible relations between something real and something of the nature of a dream.
Far from us to affirm that there are no possible links between dream and reality,
nevertheless, let us recall that we are in the universe of Metaphysics and Logic, and
not of Psychology. In this universe of inquiry, we are trying to answer the question:
what should the world be like? Chance as the “property of a distribution” requires
the potentiality of something to be distributed: the quality in the fact, that which is
first in that which is second. Under the first category, then, we believe it is legitimate
to consider the pair Chance–quality as indissoluble.
Observe that Peirce emphasizes the monadic aspect of quality. In the interior of
Logic, he also will ground the ideas of dyad and triad, subsumed, as expected, under
the categories of secondness and thirdness, respectively.12 In the meantime, we will
understand the ideas of monad, dyad, and triad as logical elements associated with
quality, reaction, and mediation. Against this background, we can now delve into
the question concerning the ontological conception of the idea of Chance, which
10
CP, 1.422.
11
CP, 1.424.
12
As regards an in-depth analysis of the concepts of dyad and triad, see CP, 1.441–520.
Peirce opposes to the vision of a world ruled by strict causality.13 Rebutting the
belief that strict causality is one of the instinctive beliefs of humankind, our author
indicates that the idea of Chance was already familiar to some ancient thinkers:
Strange to say, there are many people who will have a difficulty in conceiving of an element
of lawlessness in the universe, and who may perhaps be tempted to reckon the doctrine of
the perfect rule of causality as one of the original instinctive beliefs, like that of space hav-
ing three dimensions. Far from that, it is historically altogether a modern notion, a loose
inference from the discoveries of science. Aristotle14 often lays it down that some things are
determined by causes while others happen by chance. Lucretius,15 following Democritus,
supposes his primordial atoms to deviate from their rectilinear trajectories just fortuitously,
and without any reason at all. To the ancients, there was nothing strange in such notions;
they were matters of course; the strange thing would have been to have said that there was
no chance. So we are under no inward necessity of believing in perfect causality if we do
not find any facts to bear it out.16
It seems, then, that the never heard music of the spheres applies, as a metaphor,
more appropriately to modernity. Indeed, the entire post-Renaissance science
affirmed itself as mechanistic by investing in the belief in strict causality. A world
construed as a large Cartesian machine that is governed by the laws of mechanics
remained as a model until the beginning of the nineteenth century, even in the study
of electricity and magnetism until the discovery of electromagnetism by Maxwell.
This mechanistic worldview, however, was not solely confined to classical science.
Remember that Einstein never admitted the ontological concept of Chance, rather
insisting that the object of scientific inquiry was strictly ruled by consummate phys-
ical laws. He held that the evolution of knowledge would eventually unravel the
indetermination of the representation of that object. The game of dice would be
confined only to the epistemological universe, but foreign to the world and to God.
For his part, Peirce placed the issue of indetermination in the ontological sphere and
not merely under the epistemic point of view. The belief in a universe totally ruled
by the laws of Physics assumes the status of a simple postulate:
When I have asked thinking men what reason they had to believe that every fact in the uni-
verse is precisely determined by law, the first answer has usually been that the proposition is
a “presupposition” or postulate of scientific reasoning. Well, if that is the best that can be said
for it, the belief is doomed. Suppose it be “postulated”: that does not make it true, nor so
much as afford the slightest rational motive for yielding it any credence. It is as if a man
should come to borrow money, and when asked for his security, should reply he “postulated”
the loan.17
13
In the essays titled “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (CP, 6.35–65; EP, 1.298–311; W,
8.111–125), “Causation and Force” (CP, 6.66–87), and “Variety and Uniformity” (CP, 6.88–101),
dated 1892, 1898, and 1903, respectively, Peirce historically redeems the question of Ontological
Chance by emphatically criticizing the doctrine of strict causality present in some philosophies.
14
I.e., in Physica, 195b, 31–198. 13.
15
Book II, 1.216–93 (both references are in the edition of the Collected Papers).
16
CP, 1.403; EP, 1.274; W, 6.204.
17
CP, 6.39; EP, 1.300; W, 8.113.
Reflecting on the content of experience that exhibits the variety and multiplicity
of nature, there in fact does not seem to be any positive ground for such a postulate
of strict causality. The mechanistic postulate abstains from the experiential uni-
verse, leading to transcendentality as justification for its thesis of strict causation:
I do not believe that anybody, except for those in a state of case-hardened ignorance
concerning the logic of science, can maintain that the precise and universal conformity of
facts to law is clearly proved, or even rendered particularly probable, by any observations
hitherto made. In this way, the determined advocate of exact regularity will soon find him-
self driven to a priori reasons to support his thesis.18
However, how can we know whether an a priori argument is true? Let us again
consult the opinion of our author:
But, it will be said, you forget the laws which are known to us a priori, the axioms of geom-
etry, the principles of logic, the maxims of causality, and the like. Those are absolutely
certain, without exception and exact. To this I reply that it seems to me there is the most
positive historic proof that innate truths are particularly uncertain and mixed up with error,
and therefore a fortiori not without exception. This historical proof is, of course, not
infallible; but it is very strong. Therefore, I ask how do you know that a priori truth is cer-
tain, exceptionless, and exact? You cannot know it by reasoning. For that would be subject
to uncertainty and inexactitude. Then, it must amount to this that you know it a priori; that
is, you take a priori judgments at their own valuation, without criticism or credentials. That
is barring the gate of inquiry.19
By rejecting the a priori form of justification, the option would be left for us to
state that if we could eliminate the errors of observation and if we were at a final
stage of inquiry, then we could forgo the theory of probability and the logic of for-
tuitous events as crude models of the representation of reality. But such a point of
view, in essence, is the same that grounded Einsteinian faith in a determined world
having its flow in time derived, by logical necessity, from the laws that govern it.
Peirce, as a laboratory man skilled in the interface between theory and experiment,
argues against that viewpoint, and does so in a simple, but to our mind, convincing
manner:
Try to verify any law of nature and you will find that the more precise your observations,
the more certain they will be to show irregular departures from law.
We are accustomed to ascribe these, and I do not say wrongly, to errors of observation;
yet we cannot usually account for such errors in any antecedently probable way. Trace their
causes back far enough, and you will be forced to admit they are always due to arbitrary
determination, or chance.20
Peirce’s argument here overturns the deterministic faith that would preach that
the evolution of representation will fatally bottom out in absolute causal determina-
tion. A more diligent inquiry, he goes on to argue, evolves toward the indetermination
18
CP, 6.48; EP, 1.305; W, 8.118.
19
CP, 1.144.
20
CP, 6.46; EP, 1.304; W, 8.118; my italics.
of the investigated object, becoming the subject of its own representation. The
precision of experience leads to the discovery of the imprecision of the world.21
Another way in which the inconceivability of ontological Chance could be
argued is that the variety observed in the phenomenon is the result of the various
circumstances in which the laws of nature are applied. Peirce, however, rebuts this
objection by observing that the increasing complexity of the universe cannot be the
result of law. By complexity he means the rise in variety, confirmed by the sciences
such as Natural History and Geology. Let us verify this counterargument in the
words of the author:
You think all the arbitrary specifications of the universe were introduced in one dose, in the
beginning, if there was a beginning, and that the variety and complication of nature has
always been just as much as it is now. But I, for my part, think that the diversification, the
specification, has been continually taking place. Should you condescend to ask me why I so
think, I should give my reasons as follows:
1. Question any science which deals with the course of time. Consider the life of an
individual animal or plant, or of a mind. Glance at the history of states, of institutions, of lan-
guage, of ideas. Examine the successions of forms shown by paleontology, the history of the
globe as set forth in geology, of what the astronomer is able to make out concerning the changes
of stellar systems. Everywhere the main fact is growth and increasing complexity.22
The combined evidence of such considerations leads Peirce to attribute diversity

to a principle that actually acts in nature:
From these broad and ubiquitous facts we may fairly infer, by the most unexceptionable
logic, that there is probably in nature some agency by which the complexity and diversity
of things can be increased [...].23
We could add a point to this argument, something Peirce apparently did not
explore—at least as far as we have been able to gather from his published works—
namely, how could one explain the origin of the “diversity of circumstances” in
which laws of nature operate? In a world governed by strict causality, what would
support the supposition of this “one dose” of diversification modally exempt from
necessity? It appears to us a logical contradiction to admit a “diversity,” of any kind,
in a type of Cartesian machine ruled by the laws of Physics, as exemplified in the
conception of world that Peirce labels necessitarian. Logic, in its role of guiding
metaphysical inquiry, must refuse the argument of “diversity of circumstances” due
to its very inconsistency.
The more we reflect on them, the more these conceptions of a universe strictly
ruled by law lead us to consequences that are difficult to be accepted rationally. Let
us try to imagine that in this causal universe Einstein’s faith has materialized in
a science capable of representing its objects in their minutest details—that is, in a
hypothetical situation that would have reached the final truth of all physical theories.
Such an ultimate stage of determination would enable the prediction of the course of
21
Chance as a “measure of our ignorance” is denied by Peirce in various passages. See, for exam-
ple, CP 6.54–56, 6.74, and 6.612; EP, 1.306–307; W, 8.120.
22
CP, 6.57–58; EP, 1.307–308; W, 8.122. In the text, Peirce is rebutting the objection of a fictitious
opponent.
23
Ibid.
phenomena in any and every of its nuances. In particular, there would be no reason
to exclude from its scope the entire internal phenomenological universe, including
the qualities of feelings and the intentionalities of thought, which would be deduct-
ible from the laws of the system:
Thus, given the state of the universe in the original nebula, and given the laws of mechanics,
a sufficiently powerful mind could deduce from these data the precise form of every curli-
cue of every letter I am now writing [...].24
We can imagine that in such a world a poet could have access to a kind of Ministry
of Prediction, as a citizen, perhaps, of an Orwellian society ruled by a Big Brother,
and there he could be informed about the poem he will write within a strictly
determined period of time, subsumed as he would be under a complex system of
equations interacting with another descriptive system of the future course of the
world. As well, the powerful computer of such a Ministry could supply the predicted
life story of any common citizen and be capable of deciding whether his or her his-
tory would or would not be worth living. The object of Orwell’s Big Brother utopia
or of Huxley’s Brave New World—fulfillment of their perfect society—would cer-
tainly be attained, not through a process of selective state intervention, but through
the individual and his/her self-chosen participation in such a society, which consists
of only those citizens whose “predicted life program” were full of happy events.
However, by admitting the reality of the first category, the postulate of a strictly
causal and epistemologically determined world—in which it would not seem
implausible to conceive of an Orwellian or Huxleyan society as just described—
falls into a flagrant logical contradiction: the inability to accommodate the uncondi-
tional status of the quality of our feelings that is the actual nuance of internal
consciousness. The putative ontologically determined and epistemologically deter-
mined world succumbs to that ubiquitous trait of experience revealed under the first
phenomenological category.
Another form in which the necessitarian argument emerges is the dichotomized
one that conceives a universe that is ontologically determined, yet epistemologically
indeterminable—that is, one that interposes between the external universe and con-
sciousness the specter of the incognizable. The refutation of this argument centers
on the epistemological role that Peirce attributes to a hypothesis. To state that some-
thing is incognizable is to suppose it is inexplicable, since an explanation conceptu-
ally accomplishes the duty of predicting the conduct of the object. In other words,
to assert the ultimate status of the laws of nature to be incognizable is to advance an
explicative hypothesis that contradicts its own explanatory role:
[...] to suppose a thing inexplicable is not only to fail to explain it, and so to make an unjus-
tifiable hypothesis, but much worse, it is to set up a barrier across the road of science and to
forbid all attempt to understand the phenomenon.25
Given this synopsis of the arguments against the objectivity of the idea of Chance,
let us resume the question why Chance, as a metaphysical hypothesis, performs its
24
CP, 6.37; EP, 1.299; W, 8.112.
25
CP, 6.171.
epistemological role in reducing the multiplicity of experience to the unity of

concept. On the one hand, as previously indicated, Chance, as the property of a
distribution of the qualities in things, subsumes the variety and diversity of exis-
tence. On the other hand, we are given the answer to the question formulated at the
end of Chap. 2 concerning the relations between Chance and Law. Such an answer,
curious enough, begins with a question to those who defend the argument of a
totally determined world—namely, what is the genesis of the laws of nature that
determine them? To affirm the incognizability of the origin of the laws is to fall back
into the self-contradictory hypothesis that explains nothing. Or to ascribe it to the
gesture of a Creator raises the question concerning His intentions. As his Creatures,
we would have to discard the attribute of Love as a possible purpose of His, since it
would be hardly thinkable in the above imagined Orwellian or Huxleyan world. It
would be a strange deity that assigns to the human the possibility of ignorance and
error in a world that does not err. Finally, does it not seem absurd to ask: what does
He want from us if, on the one hand, we confine ourselves to perennial ignorance of
the structure of a world that evanesces from the realm of the intelligible, or, on the
other hand, contradicting what experience shows, we submit to the brute fact of
interior and exterior firstness which is subsumed into law? Rather, in the necessitar-
ian conception of the universe, under all its vestments, it is difficult to imagine any
possible place for God:
We suppose that what we haven’t examined is like what we have examined, and that these
laws are absolute, and the whole universe is a boundless machine working by the blind laws
of mechanics. This is a philosophy which leaves no room for a God! No, indeed! It leaves
even human consciousness, which cannot well be denied to exist, as a perfectly idle and
functionless flâneur in the world, with no possible influence upon anything—not even upon
itself.26
Thus, in short, a world strictly determined by law should lead to the following
consequences:
(a) if determinable, we fall into an Orwellian or Huxleyan universe;
(b) if indeterminable, the specter of the incognizable emerges—a hypothesis that
explains nothing and thus contradicts itself;
(c) when questioned on the origin of the ontological determination, that is, on the
genesis of the laws, the advocates of alternatives “a” or “b” are led to either:
(c1) the work of a Creator, though unintelligible; or
(c2) incognizability.
It seems that in all these options there is the common trace of final irreducibility
of our experience to thought. Well, according to all that has been shown, those argu-
ments culminating on a theme of unintelligibility place themselves as irremovable
brute forces against consciousness, preventing the mediative function of thirdness.
This is exactly what Peirce conceptualizes as “setting up a barrier across the road of
inquiry.” Finally, there remains to be known how Peirce “re-opens the road of
26
inquiry,” by advancing his hypothesis that positively fulfills its role, that is, explains
the origin of the laws of nature:
What kind of explanation can there be then? I answer, we may still hope for an evolutionary
explanation. We may suppose that the laws of nature are the result of an evolutionary pro-
cess.27 [Further:] But if the laws of nature are the result of evolution, this evolutionary
process must be still in progress. For it cannot be complete as long as the constants of the
laws have reached no ultimate possible limit. But if the laws of nature are still in process of
evolution from a state of things in the indefinitely distant past in which there were no laws,
it must be that events are not even now absolutely regulated by law.28
This passage postulates the relationship sought between chance and law, the lat-
ter deriving from the former. Well, since the evolutionary process has not ended,
there is a fortuitous element that prevents the total subsumption of events into causal
determination. By opening the door to this explanatory hypothesis, one of the cru-
cial points of the Peircean Philosophy—namely its Evolutionism—is evinced. From
the perspective of the categories, to say that the laws of nature derive from a chaotic
state of things allows one to infer that real thirdness results, evolutionarily, from
secondness, which characterizes existence, prompted in its origin by firstness, which
subsumes Chance.29 This preliminary conclusion involving the interlacing of the
categories is one of the consequences that raises the question on how the generality
of thirdness can come into being in the particularity of existence. In other words,
what does Peirce mean by Evolutionism and what is its governing principle?
Let us again consult our author’s own words:
But if the laws of nature are the result of evolution, this evolution must proceed according
to some principle; and this principle will itself be of the nature of a law. But it must be such
a law that it can evolve or develop itself.
Evidently it must be a tendency toward generalization—a generalizing tendency [...].
Now the generalizing tendency is the great law of mind, the law of association, the law of
habit-taking [...]. Hence I was led to the hypothesis that the laws of universe have been
formed under a universal tendency of all things toward generalization and habit-taking.30
From this hypothesis concerning the evolutionary origin of the laws of nature
derives two noteworthy consequences—one metaphysical in character, and the
other, epistemological. On the metaphysical trajectory, in the previous chapter we
had already admitted that existence and, in particular, material exteriority in its
plurality have their conduct determined, albeit partially, by the generality of law.
Now, supposing the genesis of real thirdness involving a habit-taking tendency, and
admitting this tendency as an eminent law of the mental universe, one may c onjecture
on the mental nature of matter or, perhaps more widely, on a possible common
matrix between the mental and material universes.31
27
CP, 7.512.
28
CP, 7.514.
29
As for the ontogenesis of categories, please see Chap. 5.
30
CP, 7.515.
31
See Chap. 4 for further discussion on this topic.
The second consequence is engendered in the fact that if the laws of nature are in
a process of evolution from a state of things originating in absolute Chance, their
interlacing as objects of knowledge is devoid of final determination. Epistemo
logically, it would be absurd to expect that the representation of those laws contained
a determination that evolution has still not conferred upon them. Thus, experience, as
subject of thought, will not be able to impose the logic of strict necessity on its own
representations. If the character of the universe is not strictly causal, that is, if its
future course is not inscribed in the past, how can one expect that the sciences, which
produce its symbolical representations, have the power of predicting it with the
exactness that the universe itself does not possess? If scientifically we have erred—
and history has shown to what extent we have erred—we are also, in the Peircean
Philosophy, before a universe that errs. To our mind, that is exactly the meaning of
the comparison of deviations of facts with errors of observation in relation to the laws
of nature:
Meantime, if law is a result of evolution, which is a process lasting through all time, it fol-
lows that no law is absolute. That is, we must suppose that the phenomena themselves
involve departures from law analogous to errors of observation.32
In another respect, this is the metaphysical ground of an epistemological doctrine

that Peirce calls Fallibilism, which affirms our knowledge to be fallible and accord-
ingly banishes the specter of absolute certainty in matters of fact:
All positive reasoning is of the nature of judging the proportion of something in a whole
collection by the proportion found in a sample. Accordingly, there are three things to which
we can never hope to attain by reasoning, namely, absolute certainty, absolute exactitude,
absolute universality.33 [Further:] In those sciences of measurement which are the least
subject to error—metrology, geodesy, and metrical astronomy—no man of self-respect ever
now states his result, without affixing to it its probable error; and if this practice is not fol-
lowed in other sciences it is because in those the probable errors are too vast to be estimat-
ed.34 [And:] infallibility in scientific matters seems to me irresistibly comical [...].35
In no other way could be the position of Peirce on the inexactness of scientific

knowledge. This attribute of exactness can only have the maximum dimension of
the represented object, thereby making the theory of probability a genuine instru-
ment in the construction of representations. The description of the laws cannot tres-
pass the limits in which they themselves operate, conferring upon the facts that
concern them a rate of frequency that makes them reasonably regular. It seems that
the maxim, errare humanum est, could quite legitimately in the Peircean Philosophy
be extrapolated to encompass the world, without presupposing humans who “err”
before an object that is strictly ruled by perfect laws.
The ontological substratum of Fallibilism is, on the one hand, the acknowledg-
ment of Chance as a real principle, responsible for the distancing of the fact in
32
CP, 6.101.
33
CP, 1.141.
34
CP, 1.9.
35
Ibid.
relation to law, and, on the other hand, the interlacing between Chance and law
configuring Evolutionism. Evolutionism, as it is conceptualized, is thus the core of
Fallibilism. As Peirce wrote: “fallibilism cannot be appreciated in anything like its
true significance until evolution has been considered.”36
This epistemological doctrine in the Peircean Philosophy was, to some extent,
already in the nineteenth century a preview of what contemporarily has come to be
called indeterminism, but, in Peirce’s case, with the nuance of a metaphysical
ground of which the majority of our more modern epistemologies are devoid.
Considering that it is historically undeniable that human knowledge grows, the
extension of Evolutionism from the metaphysical realm to the epistemological
domain is easily apprehensible. The word growth itself brings with it the germ of
Evolutionism: “Evolution means nothing but growth in the widest sense of that
word.”37
But what exactly does this growth mean?
On the one hand, we can say growth of the laws of nature, and, on the other hand,
growth of the representation of these laws. Categorially, one can in both cases speak
of growth in thirdness, the locus of a quasimodally necessary generality, whether in
the sphere of consciousness or in the sphere of the world. In short, Fallibilism “is the
doctrine that our knowledge is never absolute, but it is as if always swimming in a
continuum of uncertainty and indeterminacy.”38 This “continuum of uncertainty and
indeterminacy,” besides representing the temporariness of representation, announces
a key concept in the Peircean Philosophy, namely Continuity39—presaging that
something continuous should embody the potentiality of the future, as the vector of
evolution does. So, the admission of the objectivity of Chance not only represents
an explicative hypothesis for the diversity observed in nature, but also answers the
question concerning the origin of the laws of nature themselves. On the other hand,
from this hypothesis derives noteworthy epistemological and metaphysical conse-
quences, such as the doctrine of Fallibilism and the mental character of matter, by
assimilating the laws that subsume it into habits acquired in the course of time. This
issue, together with the central concept of continuity, discussed hereinafter, consti-
tutes one of the stories of Peirce’s multileveled metaphysical edifice.
36
CP, 1.173.
37
CP, 1.174.
38
CP, 1.171.
39
See Chap. 4.
Chapter 4
Objective Idealism and the Continuum
¡Oh dicha de entender, mayor que la de imaginar o la de sentir!

BORGES, La Escritura del Dios
The previous chapter showed that Evolutionism translates itself into the conception
of growth as thirdness, both in the ontological sphere and in the sphere of con-
sciousness. This evolutionary conception emerged as an answer to the question
concerning the ontogenesis of the laws of nature, and its logical fabric started with
the admission of objective Chance as a way of being of the distribution of qualities
in existence.
Peirce’s radical realism, grounded on his conception of the binomium of general-
ity–alterity, does not consummate itself in a causal idea of the world; rather, it pre-
supposes a dynamic universe having a vector that points toward the development of
a natural mediation in the form of law and the mediation of cognitive thought.
However, evolutionism brought about a remarkable consequence of making the
emergence of the laws identify with nature’s tendency toward the acquisition of
habits, which undeniably is an eidetic1 predicate. This predicate, typifying a primor-
dial rule of the mind, led to a conjecture about a matrix possessing an eidetic sub-
stratum with a material exteriority. With it, we seem to be anticipating an idealism
of an ontological, objective content, which would make of the eidos something not
merely accidental but essential to the world.
Although we are still far from outlining clearly the content of this idealism, we
will try to show how its germs were contained in the exposition of Peirce’s realism.
In that exposition, the reality of thirdness—that is, the ontological character of the
laws of nature that govern the conduct of the world—was described as a condition
of possibility for thought. In other words, it was shown that the possibility of media-
tion requires real generality. Once admitted that the particular is not reducible to
reason, it follows that the object of thought must be general, in effect corroborating
Plato’s and Aristotle’s teachings that “science is science of the universal.”
The exercise of thought thus requires the Noêtón, the intelligible, an object that
once it is experienced establishes itself as subject of thought in the construction of
1
We use the term eidetic in the Platonic sense of eidos, meaning the structure of the Real and its
intelligibility.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66314-2_4
46 4 Objective Idealism and the Continuum
its own concept. Well, then, by admitting a general object, architect of its own
representation, it seems difficult to deny its eidetic nature: “[…] what we think can-
not, possibly, be of a different nature from thought itself.”2
Also, what we positively think does not depend on our thought as central fulcrum
for the reality of the world: “[…] that which truth represents is a reality. This reality
being cognizable and understandable, it is of the nature of thought.”3
To admit that the object is real and of the nature of thought is to admit it as
general, alter, and eidetic. Already familiar to us from the exposition of realism,
the first and second terms represent the conduct of the individual and at the same
time divest such representation of any power of establishing the object. The third,
on the other hand, is the condition for the intelligibility of the object.
It thus becomes clear that Peirce’s conception of reality includes, in addition to
the object that is thought, thought itself. Understanding, as a faculty of reason, does
not impose on the orbit of the object nor does it mold it with its rules, as Kant pro-
poses. Quite the contrary, understanding, as phenomenon, leads to the eidetic “must
be” of the object, in Peircean Philosophy. Such is the gist of some passages of
Peirce’s commentary on Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science.4 There, the author’s
position seems clear to us concerning the substratum of ideality that permeates the
entire object of thought:
In point of fact, it is not Professor Pearson’s opponents but he himself who has not thor-
oughly assimilated the truth that everything we can in any way take cognizance of is purely
mental. This is betrayed in many little ways, as, for instance, when he makes his answer to
the question, whether the law of gravitation ruled the motion of the planets before Newton
was born, to turn upon the circumstance that the law of gravitation is a formula expressive
of the notion of the planets ‘that in terms of purely mental conception’, as if there could be
a conception of anything not purely mental. Repeatedly, when he has proved the content of
an idea to be mental, he seems to think he has proved its object to be of human origin.5
Given experience as subject of thought—the agent that makes us think that—our

reflection on the intellectual content of an idea regarding a real object leads us to
conceive it as eidetic. Intelligence is only possible concerning the intelligible.
A logical contradiction hovers over the supposition that the character of ideality
present in natural laws is of human origin. To say the least, it seems unfounded given
the question of alterity required by the Peircean conception of reality. Equally
unfounded would be to lend to the object a character of ideality without assigning in
this very loan the generality that all mediative idea contains—another flagrant nega-
tion of realism. The eidetic quality is not confined to objects inside consciousness,
but extends toward exteriority as the condition that makes mediation possible.
This is Peirce’s firm position:
Nature only appears intelligible so far as it appears rational, that is, so far as its processes
are seen to be like processes of thought.6
2
CP, 6.639.
3
4
CP, 8.132–156; also published in EP, 57–66, with omissions of the paragraphs CP, 8.153–156.
5
CP, 8.145; EP, 2.62–63; my italics.
6
4 Objective Idealism and the Continuum 47
There seems to be a kind of rigid shield establishing an insurmountable

e strangement between subject and object in nominalist philosophies. It is as if an
inner eye while scrutinizing the fabric of thought in seeking the possibility of the
being of such thought forgot to turn outward toward alterity. The ideality of realism
requires an eye that contemplates both sides of that shield:
The third category of elements of phenomena consists of what we call laws when we con-
template them from the outside only, but which, when we see both sides of the shield we call
thoughts.7
To say nothing of the radical act of removing it:

We are accustomed to speak of an external universe and an inner world of thought. But they
are merely vicinities with no real boundary line between then.8
Thus, to Peirce, realism is more than the admission of universals. The reflection
on the fabric of reality reveals its intellectual nature. The natural affinity between
representation and reality eliminates the nominalist barrier between subject and
object, or between consciousness and world. This “absence of borders” between
interiority and exteriority had already been foretold in Phenomenology. Let us recall
that the phenomenon under the three categories contemplates the internal and exter-
nal worlds without differentiation. By making the intelligibility of the world the
eidetic core of real generality, one is simply metaphysically subsuming law and
cognitive mediation under thirdness, recognizing in the former the nature of thought.
Firstness, on the other hand, in the sphere of Phenomenology, brings in its core
the immediate unity of the qualities of feeling and the variety of the world, under the
common seal of the freedom of being. Well, then, it would be fitting to ask: does not
the connaturality admitted under the third category between exteriority and interior-
ity, between the interior and the exterior worlds, extend to firstness? In other words,
would variety and feeling be connatural by being under the same phenomenological
mode of being? Would there be a common metaphysical matrix that makes Chance
of the same nature as feeling? At this moment, however, we shall defer answering
these questions and focus on the relationship between mind and matter raised in the
previous chapter.9 From the evolutionist theory, we know that acquired habits,
which govern the plurality of existent things, are the genesis of the laws of nature.
The acquisition of a habit, however, represents a typical tendency of the mental
universe, whose logical fabric is of the nature of generalization. The concept of law
as a habit of conduct, as a matrix of its eidetic substratum, is firmly attuned to its
intelligibility. Intelligence performs its intellectual role on something of its nature.
However, the key to the relationship between mind and matter rests on the admis-
sion that if the material universe possesses natural laws in the form of habits of
conduct, one must conceive it as a form of mind. This is the central argument for the
7
8
CP, 7.438.
9
In order to address these questions, a study of the metaphysical nature of feeling is required,
which will be explored in Chap. 5.
doctrine Peirce calls Objective Idealism, which is his conception of a universe with
an eidetic backdrop:
The old dualistic notion of mind and matter, so prominent in Cartesianism, as two radically
different kinds of substance, will hardly find defenders to-day. Rejecting this, we are driven
to some form of hylopathy, otherwise called monism. Then the question arises whether
physical laws on the one hand and the psychical laws on the other, are to be taken:
(a) as independent, a doctrine often called monism, but which I would name neutralism; or,
(b) the psychical law as derived and special, the physical law alone as primordial, which is mate-
rialism; or,
(c) the physical law as derived and special, the psychical law alone as primordial, which is
idealism.10
Having distinguished the possibilities of relationship between mind and matter,
it remains to be clarified how psychical law and physical law differ. Before that,
however, let us see the author’s analysis of each of the three alternatives:
The materialistic doctrine seems to me quite as repugnant to scientific logic as to common
sense; since it requires us to suppose that a certain kind of mechanism will feel, which
would be a hypothesis absolutely irreducible to reason—an ultimate, inexplicable regular-
ity; while the only possible justification of any theory is that it should make things clear and
reasonable. Neutralism is sufficiently condemned by the logical maxim known as Ockham’s
razor, i.e., that not more independent elements are to be supposed than necessary. By plac-
ing the inward and outward aspects of substance on a par, it seems to render both primor-
dial. The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is
effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws.11
Assuming that Peirce’s position on the relationship between mind and matter is
now clear to the reader, it will be timely here to more deeply delve not only into the
distinction between psychical and physical law, but also into the relationship
between mechanism and materialism.12 Let us begin with the distinction between
these two types of law. Evolutionism itself has shown that a law that is eidetic in
nature is formed by the tendency to acquire habits. Under a logical viewpoint, a
habit is a general rule of conduct and its acquisition is a process of generalization,
therefore having the nature of an inductive argument. While being a general rule of
conduct, psychical law coincides with physical law, since the latter also subsumes
the conduct of the individuals to which it is related. However, a physical law is a
crystallized habit, that is, according to the hypothesis of Evolutionism, it in itself is
the result of a process of generalization typifying what a psychical law is. Let us
consider this argument in the author’s words:
The law of habit exhibits a striking contrast to all physical laws in the character of its com-
mands. A physical law is absolute. What it requires is an exact relation. Thus, a physical
force introduces into a motion a component motion to be combined with the rest by the
10
CP, 6.24; EP, 1.292; W, 8.105.
11
CP, 6.24–5; EP, 1.292–293; W, 8.105–106; my italics.
12
There is no evidence that Peirce has ever had, even superficially, any contact with Marx’s works.
The term “materialism” is employed by the author in its explicit sense, unrelated to the doctrine of
Dialectic Materialism.
parallelogram of forces; but the component motion must actually take place exactly as
required by the law of force. On the other hand, no exact conformity is required by the
mental law. Nay, exact conformity would be in downright conflict with the law, since it
would instantly crystallize thought and prevent all further formation of habit. The law of
mind only makes a given feeling more likely to arise.13
In the interior universe, one may expect that an acquired habit, as the representa-
tion of a rule of conduct, should be broken whenever an experience shows that the
concept underlying the action is wrong. This is the corrective factor of experience
and the very definition of the predicate of “force” with which it was imbued in the
exposition of Phenomenology: “[…] what experience forces a man to think, of
course, he must think.”14
The sense of learning, of synthesis, of the expansion and improvement of con-
cepts will be the proper meaning of evolution itself only if the mental character of
consciousness has the necessary plasticity to grow, breaking old habits which are
inadequate to the liveliness and dynamics of our own existence. The fact that we err
and proceed to correct our errors is one of the mind’s pivotal actions:
This tendency to error, when you put it under the microscope of reflection, is seen to consist
of fortuitous variations of our actions in time. But it is apt to escape our attention that on
such fortuitous variations our intellect is nourished and grows. For without such fortuitous
variations, habit-taking would be impossible; and intellect consists in a plasticity of
habit.15
This fortuitous variation is revealed in that dynamic liveliness, necessary to

mental life:
Everybody knows that the long continuance of a routine of habit makes us lethargic, while
a succession of surprises wonderfully brightens the ideas. Where there is a motion, where
history is a-making, there is the focus of mental activity, and it has been said that the arts
and sciences reside within the temple of Janus, waking when that is open, but slumbering
when it is closed.16
Now, regarding the connection between materialism and mechanism, let us recall
from Chap. 3 that the second category taken by itself supports ontological determin-
ism, which is the doctrine that conceptualizes a universe strictly ruled by a causal
structure. As we saw, this doctrine leaves unanswered the question of the origin of the
laws of nature; neither does it explain the diversity of nature, which is phenomeno-
logically verified. Around it hovers, almost necessarily, the specter of the incog-
nizable. Well, to the extent that mechanism does not concede any ontological room
for firstness, it also does not acknowledge, in the phenomenon of the unity of
quale-consciousness—characterized by the qualities of feeling—anything of the
nature of the unconditioned. It seems legitimate to infer that, within this reductionist
doctrine, every psychical phenomenon will be subsumed under physical laws.
Nothing else can be the consequence of materialism, presuming that such a doctrine
13
CP, 6.23; EP, 1.292; W, 8.105.
14
CP, 2.138.
15
CP, 6.86; see also CP, 6.148; EP, 1.329; W, 8.152–153.
16
CP, 6.301; EP, 1.361; W, 8.193.
makes of m atter and its laws the primordial elements of the universe. With this
supposition, every phenomenon of the mental universe would succumb to the rule of
physical laws. In what concerns our analysis of consequents, Logic thus leads us to
identify materialism and mechanism as twin doctrines.
Peircean thought, on the contrary, requires an autonomous space for the phenom-
enon of feeling. The unfolding of Peirce’s system has shown that reflection on the
phenomenon of feeling plays a primary role in the arguments that are contrary to
absolute causality. Of the different alternatives of the relationship between mind and
matter, the one that therefore makes of matter an “effete mind” seems to be the only
one that logically unifies the concepts so far expounded, while keeping Peirce’s
phenomenological–metaphysical categorial structure intact. By assuming the hypo
thesis of the origin of the laws of nature as acquired habits, we are implicitly admit-
ting that the matrix of real thirdness is an eidetic one. This is one of the reasons why
the term “objective” is a predicate of Peirce’s idealism, for it acquires an ontological
meaning unlike other kinds of idealisms, such as the doctrines of Berkeley and
Kant, which possess a subjective hue. By overcoming the dichotomy between mind
and matter, Peirce’s idealism also breaks with a situation that makes consciousness
a passive spectator, incapable of reducing to intelligibility a world strictly guided by
blind mechanical laws.17
Here we are engaged in a method of inquiry which seeks to remove topical
singularities of reductive secondness that prevent the exercise of thought:
This method promises to render the totality of things thinkable; and it is plain that there is
no other way of explaining anything than to show it traces its lineage to the womb of
thought […] This is what is called idealism.18
This eidetic matrix, which permeates subject and object, consciousness and
world, will in fact become the womb of the nature of thought, thus requiring that
Metaphysics enters the domain of Cosmogenesis.19
Objective Idealism is thus a doctrine that removes a discontinuity between mind
and matter, and opens up a space for reflection concerning an equally key concept
in Peircean Metaphysics—that of continuity.20 The second part of this chapter will
focus on discussing this concept.
In “Mind and Matter” (MS 937), Peirce proposes:
Now, in obedience to the principle, or maxim, of continuity, that we ought to assume things
to be continuous as far as we can, it has been urged that we ought to suppose a continuity
between the characters of mind and matter, so that matter would be nothing but mind that
had such indurated habits as to cause it to act with a peculiarly high degree of mechanical
regularity, or routine.21
17
See CP, 7.559–560.
18
CP, 7.563–564.
19
See Chap. 5.
20
CP, 6.272–286.
21
CP, 6.277.
What, then, is continuity? “We all have some idea of continuity. Continuity is
fluidity, the merging of parts into parts.”22
We can thus foresee that continuity refers to generality and not to a plurality of
individuals; it is an interpretation of the merging of parts into parts, identifying it
with a system of relations keen to thirdness. Peirce applies the term Synechism to
define the doctrine of continuity by employing “the English form of the Greek
[word] synechismós, from synechés, continuous.”23
This, too, imports the close relation of Synechism with Objective Idealism by
eschewing the sundering of mind and matter and, more broadly, rejecting any form
of dualism:
Synechism, even in its less stalwart forms, can never abide dualism.
In particular, the synechist will not admit that physical and psychical phenomena are
entirely distinct—whether as belonging to different categories of substance, or as entirely
separate sides of one shield—but will insist that all phenomena are of one character, though
some are more mental and spontaneous, others more material and regular.24
We have already established that in Peircean Philosophy the incognizable emerges

as a topical singularity, a discontinuity irreducible to reason, thereby constituting a
hypothesis that explains nothing and, as such, is logically self-contradictory. Evidence
of Peirce moving away from Kantism extends to his refusal to admit incognizable
entities per se as producers of the phenomenon, thereby making all and every nou-
menal cause also of a phenomenological nature:
Synechism certainly has no concern with any incognizable; but it will not admit a sharp
sundering of phenomena from substrates. That which underlies a phenomenon and deter-
mines it, thereby is, itself, in a measure, a phenomenon.25
Although we are still working with a not so precise notion of continuity, and one
from which we extracted its relation to the idea of generality, its link to the third cat-
egory again seems evident: “Continuity represents Thirdness almost to perfection.”26
From Evolutionism we learned that ontological thirdness—the ground of
Peircean realism—is constituted of natural laws and implicates a structuring pro-
cess, which in turn makes us suppose that a perfect continuity would be a final
crystallization of the third category. In any case, emphasizing the link between con-
tinuity and generality, Peirce, in other passages,27 identifies continuity with the way
of being of a whole and not of the individuals that constitute a plurality.
In Phenomenology, however, we saw that the conception of mediation brings
with it the idea of synthesis, of learning. Well, then, to the extent that Synechism
rejects dualisms—not in the categorial sense of the direct experience evidenced by
Phenomenology, but in dualisms that presuppose the impossibility of the interposition
22
CP, 1.164.
23
CP, 7.565; EP, 2.1.
24
CP, 7.570; EP, 2.2.
25
CP, 7.569; EP, 2.2.
26
CP, 1.337.
27
See, for example, CP, 4.219–221.
of a third mediative element—it places them in a continuous flow by reducing the

brutality of the fact to the intelligibility of representations.
On the other hand, Fallibilism alone had already shown the temporariness of
representations, placing them in a continuous and corrective flow imposed by the
history of the subjects that experience produces in its role of “making us think that.”
To learn means nothing more than to be in a continuous and corrective flow of our
positive conceptions: “all apprehension of continuity involves a consciousness of
learning.”28
And why not also say, it involves the idea of growth associated with the idea of
the evolution of thirdness itself?
Some of the ideas of prominent Thirdness which, owing to their great importance in phi-
losophy and in science, require attentive study are generality, infinity, continuity, diffusion,
growth, and intelligence.29
Here we should also note that coalesced into predicates almost naturally synthe-
sizable to the concept of thirdness, the idea of infinity, for the first time, emerges. In
fact, to the extent that we have conceptualized it, in the foundation of realism, it is
to be expected that the esse in futuro of the potential character of the third category
in the ontological sphere, which also is the condition of possibility of the predictive
character of thought, does not identify with the finitude and definition of existing
individuals. Let us recall that existence as secondness is a special mode of reality, a
holder of alterity, but devoid of generality, since it comprises a plurality of facts. By
associating thirdness and infinity, thirdness and continuity, it is transitively inferred
that the ideas of infinity and continuity are co-implicative:
You will readily see that the idea of continuity involves the idea of infinity […] Continuity
involves infinity in the strictest sense, and infinity even in a less strict sense goes beyond the
possibility of direct experience.30
Well, “beyond direct experience” is mediate experience, reaffirming the close

link between thirdness and continuity.
We also have indicated that thirdness is not reducible to the second category, as
reality is not reducible to existence. As any individual loses its identity in a general-
ity, it does not seem possible to identify the finitude of the individual in a contin-
uum, since it would be a topical singularity, a discontinuity in something typically
general. This we believe is the gist of the following passage from the author’s work:
[…] a line, for example, contains no points until the continuity is broken by marking the
points. It seems necessary to say that a continuum, where it is continuous and unbroken,
contains no definite parts; that its parts are created in the act of defining them and the pre-
cise definition of them breaks the continuity.31
By being “predicate of many,” a general does not provide any conditions that will
make a subject more identifiable than others in the universe of subjects synthesizable
28
CP, 7.536.
29
30
CP, 1.166–167; my italics.
31
CP, 6.168.
to it. In other words, the generality of a continuum is absolutely undefined in its

reference to any individual to which it may be related. In particular, nonexistence is
a topical discontinuity that breaks the main characteristic of this indefinition of the
continuum. It is not without reason that in the Kantian concept of continuity, Peirce
identifies a flaw associated with nonexistence:
What is continuity? Kant32 confounds it with infinite divisibility, saying that the essential
character of a continuous series is that between any two members of it a third can always be
found. This is an analysis beautifully clear and definite; but, unfortunately, it breaks down
under the first test. For according to this, the entire series of rational fractions arranged in
the order of their magnitude would be an infinite series, although the rational fractions are
numerable, while the points of a line are innumerable.33
Obviously Peirce is not denying here that the series of rationales is infinite; ratio-
nal infinity is numerable, but not continuous. Infinite divisibility does not assure
continuity due to the nonexistence of irrational numbers associated with the innu-
merability of the points of the line. Although infinity is associated with the idea of
continuity, we may conclude that it is a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for
defining continuity. Therefore, an infinite collection of individuals does not con
stitute a continuity; such identification seems as inappropriate as confounding
plurality with generality. This is precisely what seems to be the case in:
Breaking grains of sand more and more will only make the sand more broken. It will not
weld the grains into unbroken continuity.34 [And] A true continuum is something whose
possibilities of determination no multitude of individuals can exhaust.35
Analyzing Aristotle’s definition36—a continuum is something whose parts have

a common limit37—Peirce considers that the combination of the Kantian and
Aristotelian conceptions can produce a full definition of that concept,38 eliminating
the possibility of finding elements of one class that are not subsumed to continuity.
Thus, the Peircean definition would be: a continuum is something infinitely divisi-
ble, whose parts have a common limit.
32
Critique of Pure Reason; A169, B221 (original note in the text). In these paragraphs in Kant’s
work we find: “Every sensation, therefore, and likewise every reality in (the field of) appearance,
however small it may be, has a degree, that is, an intensive magnitude which can always be dimin-
ished. Between reality and negation there is continuity of possible realities and of smaller possible
perceptions. Every colour, as for instance red, has a degree which, however small it may be, is
never the smallest; and so with heat, the moment of gravity, etc. The property of magnitudes by
which no part of them is the smallest possible, that is, by which no part is simple, is called their
continuity.” We have used the English translation by Norman Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason, NY; MacMillan, 1978, from the A and B editions of this work by Kant.
33
CP, 6.120; EP, 1.320; W, 8.143; also see CP, 3.569 and 4.121.
34
CP, 6.168.
35
CP, 6.170.
36
Cf. Physica 227a10; Metaphysica 1069a5.
37
See CP, 6.122; EP, 1.321; W, 8.144.
38
Cf. CP, 4.122–123.
So far we have associated the idea of continuity with the third category that has
as its logical fabric the necessity imposed by a rule that subsumes the individuals
relevant to its universe. This association was achieved through the vector of
generality, common to both concepts. Under the viewpoint of logical modality, one
could ask whether it is valid to link possibility to continuity, with the intention of
extending the concept of continuity to Peirce’s first category.
We have previously acknowledged ontological Chance as a way of being of the
distribution of qualities in things, characterizing it as a real principle responsible for
the world’s diversity. As a way of being, a principle should be considered general,
and, in terms of modality, be associated with possibility, and not with necessity,
with law. With these observations, the link between firstness and possibility seems
to be unequivocal. However, resuming our question, would it be legitimate to blend
firstness and continuity? It seems that the generality of the possible is the crux of
this question. Let us resort to the author’s words:
When we say that of all possible throws of a pair of dice one thirty-sixth part will show
sixes, the collection of possible throws which have not been made is a collection of which
the individual units have no distinct identity. It is impossible so to designate a single one of
those possible throws that have not been throws that the designation shall be applicable to
only one definite possible throw; and this impossibility does not spring from any incapacity
of ours, but from the fact that in their own nature those throws are not individually distinct.
The possible is necessarily general; and no amount of general specification can reduce a
general class of possibilities to an individual case. It is only actuality, the force of existence,
which bursts the fluidity of the general and produces a discrete unit. Since Kant it has been
a very widespread idea that it is time and space which introduce continuity into nature. But
this is an anacoluthon. Time and space are continuous because they embody conditions of
possibility, and the possible is general, and continuity and generality are two names for the
same absence of distinction of individuals.39
The reverse side of the impossibility of identification of individual cases with

either generality or continuity imports the identity of these two concepts and also
clarifies the relationship between firstness and continuity. Recalling that existence,
whose way of being is the second category, is the locus of the individual, it seems
fitting also to state that continuity extends solely to the first and third categories.
Thus, secondness, which is represented by the universe of existing individuals in
which each one is definitely this for not being that, translates into a plurality of acts
with two potentialities: firstness and thirdness.
Based on the concepts expounded, we believe that it is possible to state that the
continuity of Law and Chance converge on the discontinuous character of existence,
as such outlining a logical vector from the undetermined general to the determined
individual. This is a focal point where the categories can be logically related to pos-
sibility, determination, and necessity, in this order, and where the first and third
modes are covered by the generality of a continuum.
There still remains for us to consider Peirce’s critique of the transcendentalist
conception of space and time, by way of linking it to the doctrine of Synechism.
Initially, however, we must recall that Phenomenology has shown that mediate
39
CP, 4.172; my italics. See also CP, 5.526–532 and 7.209.
experience, characterizing thirdness, occurs temporally—that is to say, the

construction of general representation is only possible in the flow of time. Admitting
the generality or continuity of the concept, it seems necessary to acknowledge the
continuity of time in the interiority of consciousness, since time is the condition of
possibility for mediative thought. Furthermore, as for space, we must add that the
succession of percepts in consciousness occurs spatially, thereby weaving the
space–temporality continuum of the concept.
From the external viewpoint, however, we have already admitted that the condi-
tion of possibility of all cognitive mediation is a reality interwoven by generality
and alterity, predicates to which Objective Idealism adds intelligibility. With this
premise, there seems to emerge a logical contradiction in imagining that the spatial–
temporal structure of exteriority would translate into an aggregate of places and
instances, that is, into a discontinuous plurality. Like the internal universe, that
which is accomplished in the world having the nature of thought requires the same
conditions of possibility.
By not admitting space and time as real continua, they would remain confined to
the category of existence, to the discontinuity of secondness, thus divesting, in a
flagrant logical absurdity, the spatial–temporal structure of objective thirdness. Real
space and time embody conditions of possibility40 for real thirdness, and the latter
enables representation in consciousness, making that spatial–temporal continuity to
mediately be the condition of possibility for mediative thought. The crux of this
argument orbits around the realism adopted by Peirce who admits the internal mean-
ing of space and time continua, thus making it possible to move away from Kantism
by grounding the conditions of a real continuum of the same nature. The existential
modes of space and time,41 comprised of the factual plurality that requires the pro-
verbial hic et nunc, are confined to the fragmentation that typifies secondness.
To bring this home, Peirce contends that the belief that Achilles will overtake the
turtle is part of our experience42; the continuity of space and time ensures the con-
tinuum of velocity. It is not by the addition of discrete instances and points that
Zeno’s smile will be wiped off.
Evolutionism, nevertheless, reveals that there is no plausible reason to suppose
that any continua, including those of space and time, are perfect. Remember that in
the discussion of Phenomenology we speculated on the possibility of there being
some form of rupture in real time, similar to what is found in the interior experience
of firstness. This as yet unresolved issue43 acquires greater weight when we recall
that all that is linked to thirdness is subsumed under an evolutionary process, thus
preventing the completion of any real continuum. As a concept of mathematical
genesis, continuity enters both Metaphysics and Epistemology as a sharp logical
40
Cf. also CP, 1.412, 4.498–499, 6.92, and 8.114; EP, 1.278; W, 6.209.
41
Cf. CP, 5.458–459 and 5.463; EP, 2.357–358 and 2.359.
42
Cf. CP, 6.177–182.
43
See the unfolding of this issue in Chap. 5.
weapon: “When we come to study the principle of continuity, we will gain a more
ontological conception of knowledge and of reality.”44
In the realm of such a “more ontological conception of knowledge,” we have
already explored Fallibilism, a doctrine that revealed its ties with Synechism by
showing that all cognitive representation is in a continuum of uncertainty and
indetermination,45 making it tend toward the future in an evolutionary process, since
“[i]t is of the nature of thought to grow.”46
On the other hand, the ontological ground of Fallibilism is implicated in the
reality of firstness. The object of knowledge, on being made the subject of thought,
imposes the limits for determining its representation.
As for the conception of reality, Synechism has revealed its close relationship
with the question of universals, to the extent that the author has carried it over to the
universe of that doctrine: “Thus, the question of nominalism and realism has taken
this shape: Are any continua real?”47
And from another perspective, by eliminating the rupture between mind and mat-
ter and by affirming them under a common substratum, Objective Idealism has asso-
ciated itself with Synechism, making the entirety of thinkable things a continuous
and evolutionary flow.
With the next step of the metaphysical inquiry, the issue of ontogenesis emerges,
and this also is supported by the principle of continuity: “If all things are continu-
ous, the universe must have undergone a continuous growth from non-existence to
existence.”48
This supposition, the subject of Chap. 5, requires the commitment to keep open
the road of inquiry, by not blocking it with unexplainables. The incognizable is a
topical singularity that Synechism undermines as absolutely meaningless to episte-
mology. Not without reason, therefore, Peirce has made this commitment the first
and only rule of reason:
Upon this first, and in one sense, the only rule of reason, that in order to learn you must
desire to learn and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think,
there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city
of philosophy: Do not block the road of inquiry.49
44
CP, 4.62.
45
See note 38 in Chap. 3.
46
CP, 2.32.
47
NEM, p. 343.
48
CP, 1.175.
49
Chapter 5
Cosmology: The Ontological Ground
of the Categories
Something mysteriously formed,

Born before heaven and earth,
In the silence and the void,
Standing alone and unchanging,
Ever present and in motion.
LAO TSU, Tao Te Ching (XXV)
In Chap. 4, we saw that the doctrine of Synechism holds that the concept of the
continuum extends from the ontological to the epistemic. The phenomenological
inventory in Peircean Logic is a classification of consequents. The search for its
antecedents is a task of a general theory of reality, that is, Metaphysics. In that
search, Synechism assumes a chief role by establishing continuity between mind
and matter, the very ground of Objective Idealism, and by unraveling the conditions
of possibility of Evolutionism—potentialities engendering actualities in the con-
tinuum of space and time.
On the epistemic side, the refusal of the incognizable as a principle of explana-
tion means the refusal of the brutality of the unexplainable; thought and representa-
tion refute that asphyxia. On the contrary, the search for the general antecedents of
the universe of experience follows the course of a special science, which erects
hypotheses capable of being confronted with the class of facts that they purport to
explain. This procedure ensures the banishment of topical singularities of represen-
tation, and ensures the maintenance of the continuum between knowledge and
world: a world undergoing evolution, and a knowledge under evolution. Cross sec-
tions of both these domains with regard to the problematic of time reveal an incom-
pleteness and tension with the future.
The vector of their coming-into-being is explained by the interpretation of
Evolutionism itself, from which the provenance of law stemming from Chance as a
tendency of habit-taking is extracted—a hypothesis logically attuned to the matrix
of the ideality of the world.
Once the ontogenesis of the laws of nature as real generalities—possessing logi-
cal necessity as its fabric—is established, crucial questions remain concerning the

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66314-2_5
58 5 Cosmology: The Ontological Ground of the Categories
construction of the ontogenesis of the continuum of possibilities. Metaphysics must

cross the gateway into Cosmology, retroducting the first principle of the continuum:
“How, then, could such a continuum have been derived?”1
Such a question should pave the way to a logical hypothesis:
Looking upon the course of logic as a whole we see that it proceeds from the question to the
answer—from the vague to the definite. And so likewise all the evolution we know of
proceeds from the vague to the definite. The indeterminate future becomes the irrevocable
past. In Spencer's phrase the undifferentiated differentiates itself. The homogeneous puts on
heterogeneity. However it may be in special cases, then we must suppose that as a rule the
continuum has been derived from a more general continuum, a continuum of higher
generality.2
Time makes, from potency, act. But time, as the condition of possibility of the
passage from the indefinite to the definite, is a continuum itself, and, as such,
requires that some form of regularity qualifies its being. There is no real time with-
out the reality of law or regularity: they are concomitant. In the Peircean system,
ontological realism involves the objectivity of the general and of time; to reduce
them to, rather, the epistemic subject is to fall into some form of nominalism. Peirce
carefully addresses this question concerning time as representing the possibility of
building a cosmogenesis:
Metaphysics has to account for the whole universe of being. It has, therefore, to do
something like supposing a state of things in which that universe did not exist, and consider
how it could have arisen. However, this statement needs amendment. For time is itself an
organized something, having its law or regularity; so that time itself is a part of that universe
whose origin is to be considered. We have therefore to suppose a state of things before time
was organized. Accordingly, when we speak of the universe as “arising” we do not mean
that literally. We mean to speak of some kind of sequence, say an objective logical conse-
quence; but we do not mean in speaking of the first stages of creation before time was
organized, to use “before,” “after,” “arising,” and such words in the temporal sense. But for
the sake of the commodity of speech we may avail ourselves of these words.3
This small paragraph, from “The Logic of Events” of 1898,4 anticipates the care-
ful logical articulation that Peirce devoted to his Cosmology. What is fundamental
for the purpose of this work is to track, pari passu, the following paragraphs:
The initial condition, before the universe existed, was not a state of pure abstract being. On
the contrary it was a state of just nothing at all, not even a state of emptiness, for even empti-
ness is something. If we are to proceed in a logical and scientific manner, we must, in order
to account for the whole universe, suppose an initial condition in which the whole universe
was non-existent, and therefore a state of absolute nothing.5 [Further:] We start, then, with
nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of negation. For not means other than, and
other is merely a synonym of the ordinal numeral. As such it implies a first; while the pres-
ent pure zero is prior to every first.6
1
CP, 6.191.
2
Ibid.
3
CP, 6.214.
4
In CP, 6; Chapter 8, Objective Logic, paragraph 1, “The Origin of the Universe”.
5
CP, 6.215.
6
CP, 6.217.
5 Cosmology: The Ontological Ground of the Categories 59
Thus is outlined something that predates the categories themselves, something

that presages firstness as first. Its construction, however, in the logical sequence,
still will undergo other considerations:
The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, every-
thing. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing,
no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole
universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited
possibility—boundless possibility.
There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom. So of potential

being there was in that initial state no lack.7
This full, boundless freedom is well characterized by not identifying with any
absence of a being. Such would be a topical singularity of the nature of a duality;
and duality typifies existence as the second category of phenomena. This initial state
before time, as a mode of being of law, also certainly is previous to a physical space,
whether conceived tridimensionally or quadridimensionally. Any such dimensional-
ity is a limited one and, as such, finite; it does not fit with an absolute nothing.
What, then, could have originated this beginning?
Now the question arises, what necessarily resulted from that state of things? But the only
sane answer is that where freedom was boundless nothing in particular necessarily
resulted [...].8
Logical necessity in fact requires some form of rule that constrains the subse-
quent being in the sequence, that is, that compels it to an ontological mode engraved
in the previous one. Obviously nothing of this character can derive from an
absolutely free state of things. Where there is no law, there is no restraint. But a
constrictive mode is a deductive kind of argument: from two premises, a necessary
conclusion is extracted. This precisely is what Peirce announces in his cosmogene-
sis: a boundless universe of possibilities cannot be worked out at the level of deduc-
tive necessity. Rather, the ontological traces of a Logic of possibilities, a hypothetical
Logic, are outlined. A Logic of the ontogenesis of the laws, that is, an inductive one,
also will be outlined. Nevertheless, in Peirce’s radical realism, these logical forms
are grounded in the world, that is, are objective:
Every attempt to understand anything—every research,—supposes, or at least hopes that
the very objects of study themselves are subject to a logic more or less identical with that
which we employ.9
What else could one expect from a universe with a background nuanced by ideal-
ity? This point will require a more detailed analysis. Let us leave it for the time
being in its incompleteness, and return to Cosmology.
7
Ibid.
8
CP, 6.218.
9
CP, 6.189; see the explanation of Peirce’s Objective Logic in Chap. 6.
By refusing the mode of logical deductivity in the formation of the universe,

Peirce clearly moves away from Hegel. He denies any necessary derivation of the
sequence to the absolute nothing:
[...] In this proposition lies the prime difference between my objective logic and that of
Hegel.10 He says, if there is any sense in philosophy at all, the whole universe and every
feature of it, however minute, is rational, and was constrained to be as it is by the logic of
events, so that there is no principle of action in the universe. But I reply, this line of thought,
though it begins rightly, is not exact. A logical slip is committed; and the conclusion reached
is manifestly at variance with observation. It is true that the whole universe and every fea-
ture of it must be regarded as rational, that is as brought about by the logic of events. But it
does not follow that it is “constrained” to be as it is by the logic of events; for the logic of
evolution and of life need not be supposed to be of that wooden kind that absolutely con-
strains a given conclusion. The logic may be that of the inductive or hypothetic inference
[…] The effect of this error of Hegel is that he is forced to deny [the] fundamental character
of two elements of experience which cannot result from deductive logic.11
In Chap. 3, we emphasized that a world ruled strictly by law would self-deduce

itself from the past to the future, allowing no room for the spontaneity of the phe-
nomenon, that is, for the first mode of being, firstness. Hegel’s philosophy is a
mechanistic system that Phaneroscopy does not underwrite, and that Objective
Idealism and Synechism reject in their status within a science of the real, or doctrine
of Metaphysics. The logical overlapping of Cosmology in the Peircean system thus
could not admit, from the very beginning, a constraining element of the sequence of
events. Let us see, then, what the next event could be:
I say that nothing “necessarily” resulted from the Nothing of boundless freedom. That is,
nothing according to deductive logic. But such is not the logic of freedom or possibility.
The logic of freedom, or potentiality, is that it shall annul itself. For if it does not annul
itself, it remains a completely idle and do-nothing potentiality; and a completely idle poten-
tiality is annulled by its complete idleness.12
A potentiality that does not become actuality is something that annihilates itself.
The germ of Pragmatism is announced in a very strange way to those who consider
it a merely utilitarian rule. We shall examine this more minutely in a later chapter
dedicated to the metaphysical grounding of that doctrine. Some kind of game must
be played, lest it be disqualified as such. A magical kind of die with an infinite num-
ber of sides must be prepared for some kind of decision—to define itself away from
indefinition that destroys itself. That some decision has been taken is clearly dem-
onstrated by the fact that we are now thinking of it. But which? This existence, in an
immediate manner? A radical singularity, immediately after an unbounded potenti-
ality? Surely there must be some form of mediative gradation to more topical modes
of this initial potentiality, in order to logically accept that every continuum is derived
from a more general continuum, as we saw above.
10
Cf. CP, 5.79 (original note of the Collected Papers edition); EP, 2.164.
11
12
No other is Peirce’s way:

I do not mean that potentiality immediately results in actuality. Mediately perhaps it does;
but what immediately resulted was that unbounded potentiality became potentiality of this
or that sort—that is, of some quality.13
Now, we saw in Phaneroscopy that quality has the mode of being of suchness. No
other could be the step of an unlimited potentiality which, at first, derives nothing
necessarily from itself. We are, however, far from a universe of dualities that char-
acterizes the second category. The cosmogenesis must participate in an eidetic con-
tinuum, preceding the dual nature of existence, in order to, then, derive it. If, from a
continuum of unlimited potentiality and, therefore, of boundless generality, derives
a potentiality “of this or that sort,” at this stage there must be some degree of singu-
larization, albeit arbitrary:
Thus the zero of bare possibility, by evolutionary logic, leapt into the unit of some quality.
This was hypothetic inference. Its form was: Something is possible, Red is something; Red
is possible.14
Such a qualitative red is not necessary, but possible. The hypothetical inference
is substantiated by what it can be; its conclusion maintains the integrity of the spon-
taneous, since quality is a mere possibility.
Phaneroscopy had highlighted that a quality of feeling is a holistic suchness. Its
characterization does not allow any duality; in the unity of consciousness, there is
no sense of reaction: “[...] feeling is simply a quality of immediate consciousness.”15
It is through this angle of quality and feeling as modes of unity that Peirce will
go on to reprise the ideality of the world:
[...] quality is a consciousness. I do not say a waking consciousness—but still, something of
the nature of consciousness. A sleeping consciousness, perhaps. A possibility, then, or
potentiality, is a particular tinge of consciousness; but it is a tinge of consciousness, a poten-
tial consciousness.16
This is, to our mind, one of the crucial points for understanding Peircean
Cosmology; the overlap between continuity, potentiality, possibility, quality, feel-
ing, unity, and consciousness must be sufficiently clear so that, from it, one can
determine the genesis of ideality and the logical emergence of the categories. Our
next step will be to examine what a quality-consciousness or, as Peirce calls it, a
quale-consciousness, is. Before that, however, it would be advisable for us to reprise
certain other remarks from previous chapters, particularly those in regard to
Ontological Indeterminism and Synechism.
All potentiality, we already know, is of the nature of a continuum. On the other
hand, law and Chance express themselves as necessity and possibility, respectively.
13
CP, 6.220.
14
Ibid.
15
CP, 1.306.
16
CP, 6.221.
Well, every continuum, to the exact extent that individuals are not distinguishable in
it, is such that there is no plurality capable of exhausting it; it is not yet subsumed
into a temporal sequence as possibility. Pure possibility is not a regularity in time. It
thus seems to be committed only to the present. As potentiality, in its ontological
incompleteness, it can become actualized in the future, but it does not necessarily
intend the present act for a future act—contrariwise does the potentiality of law.
This is the case, rather, of an equiprobable distribution in which there is no temporal
condition between events. The potential equiprobability of a continuum exempts it
from any ordinal relations between the individuals that it can produce.
Such considerations come close to a paradox, since a continuum of independent
or equiprobable events, which typifies what we have defined as Absolute Chance, on
the one hand, conspires with the present for not being deducible from the past, and,
on the other hand, points toward the future as a potential fabric. The solution, we
think, lies in the fact that the individuals of a continuum of possibilities are not
governed by a rule, although such a continuum, as Absolute Chance that cuts the
flow of time at a present instant, leaves a mark in the event that possesses temporal
permanence. If one admits the continuous flow of time from the past to the future
without a topical discontinuity in the present, there is no ontological room for
Chance, which by its very nature is that which casts off any ordered and causal
sequence. Although we have followed the trail of a reflection on the nature of a
continuum of possibilities, Peirce argues from another angle as well:
When we ask why chance produces permanent effects, the natural answer which escapes
from our lips is that it is because of the independence of different instants of time. A change
having been made, there is no particular reason why it should ever be unmade. If a man has
won a napoleon at a gaming table he is no more likely to lose it than he was to lose a napo-
leon at the outset. But we have no sooner let slip the remark about the independence of the
instants of time than we are shocked by it…. And although it may be said that continuity
consists in a binding together of things that are different and remain different, so that they
are in a measure dependent on one another and yet in a measure independent, yet this is
only true of finite parts of the continuum, not of the ultimate elements nor even of the infini-
tesimal parts. Yet it undoubtedly is true that the permanence of chance effects is due to the
independence of the instants of time. How are we to resolve this puzzle? The solution of it
lies in this, that time has a point of discontinuity at the present. This discontinuity appears
in one form in conservative actions where the actual instant differs from all other instants
absolutely, while those others only differ in degree; and the same discontinuity appears in
another form in all non-conservative action, where the past is broken off from the future as
it is in our consciousness.17
It is thus that the solution to the question raised in the first chapter is announced,
namely the one concerning the possibility of the rupture of objective time similar to
what is revealed in the interior experience of firstness. We believe this to be the
matrix that galvanizes the myriad concepts that initially emerge in Phaneroscopy,
presenting themselves in the Logic of events and converging in a theory of reality,
all of them subsumed under the first category. Only this matrix is capable of shaping
17
the presentness of the unconditioned. As the mode of being of monadic qualities, it

identifies itself with the nature of immediate consciousness—that consciousness
that is for itself, without mediating itself in time. Its space is that of a discontinuity
between past and future, created by the very nature of its possible potentiality,
which, as a continuum of possibilities, exempts itself from the past and does not
intentionalize itself toward the future. Only to this extent do we deem possible the
identity between a continuum of qualities and immediate consciousness. This, we
believe, is the substratum of the mental genesis of the universe, preceding, more-
over, any dualities that characterize existence as the locus of the individual. The step
from absolute nothing to a potentiality of qualities means the occurrence of simply
some determination, some manner of the unlimited limiting itself, while still being
devoid of any trace of a logically necessary form that would determine its next step.
Let us revert now to quale-consciousness, first and foremost pursuing the idea of
unity that suffuses the universe of quality and the consciousness thereof, and with
that reprising the metaphysical meaning of feeling:
If a man is blind to the red and violet elements of light and only sees the green element, then
all things appear of one color to him, and that color is a green of colorific intensity beyond
anything that we with normal eyes can see or imagine. Such is the color that all things look
to him. Yet since all things look alike in this respect, it never attracts his attention in the
least. He may be said to be dead to it. If the man is at the same time deaf, without smell and
taste, and devoid of skin sensations, then it is probable the green will be still more chro-
matic; for I suppose colors are for us somewhat diluted by skin sensations. But for the very
reason that it is his own kind of sensation, he will only be the more completely oblivious of
its quale […] This illustration puts into a high light the distinction between two kinds of
consciousness, the quale-consciousness and that kind of consciousness which is intensified
by attention, which objectively considered, I call vividness, and as a faculty we may call
liveliness.18
Quale-consciousness thus seems to consist in the unity of a feeling, and is identi-

fied with the idea of quality of feeling; the consciousness of this feeling does not
posit itself as something distinct from the quality that characterizes it. There is no
duality, since that would be of the comparative nature of a past experience to the one
that appears at present. Insofar as this experience of unity is solely present, it does
not bear any binary relations, whether in reference to the past or the future. From
this, moreover, derives the impossibility of a relation of mediation of a third charac-
terizing a connection between past, present, or future. A quality in its unity has as a
reference only its own interiority:
Each quale is in itself what it is for itself, without reference to any other. It is absurd to say
that one quale in itself is considered like or unlike another. Nevertheless, comparing con-
sciousness does pronounce them to be alike. They are alike to the comparing consciousness,
though neither alike nor unlike in themselves.19 [Further:] In so far as qualia can be said to
have anything in common, that which belongs to one and all is unity [...].20
18
CP, 6.222.
19
CP, 6.224.
20
CP, 6.225.
To the same extent that a cluster of individuals cannot make a continuum, unity
is not a plurality:
But it ought to be evident that no unity can originate in concentration. If there is no unity in
a mass of gas, it cannot acquire unity merely by being condensed to half its volume [...].21
The gathering of feelings in a quale-consciousness reveals itself as a unity where

a synthesis is promoted:
Perhaps it may be thought that hypnotic phenomena show that subconscious feelings are
not unified. But I maintain on the contrary that those phenomena exhibit the very opposite
peculiarity. They are unified so far as they are brought into one quale-consciousness at all;
and that is why different personalities are formed. Of course, each personality is based on a
"bundle of habits," such as has been said that man is a bundle of habits. But a bundle of
habits would not have the unity of self-consciousness. That unity must be given as a centre
for the habits.22
This unity seems to constitute itself as a reference which enables the operation of
a habit whose fabric is a logical rule. Here, Peirce moves away from Kant, who
states that logical operation is the origin of all synthetic unity.23 To state that
synthetic unity precedes every logical operation and constitutes, unlike Kant’s tran-
scendentalism, the condition of possibility for such an operation, reveals itself as
proverbially harmonious with the cosmogenesis.
Boundless potentiality, if it requires any logical consistency, becomes a potenti-
ality of some type in order not to wallow in its own uselessness. But that does not
mean that it occurs due to some necessary rule, and by that one that is foreign to the
unity of a continuum of possibilities. But what promotes unity in interiority?
The brain shows no central cell. The unity of consciousness is therefore not of physiological
origin. It can only be metaphysical. So far as feelings have any continuity, it is the meta-
physical nature to have a unity.24
The rebuttal to mechanism in Chap. 3 highlighted the unconditionality of any

state of feeling in relation to another, and this disallowed us to suppose any physi-
ological origin for quale-consciousness. By inserting mind and matter in a common
generatrix, nothing is logically left than to state the origin of the unity as metaphysi-
cal, and as containing the way of being of spontaneity, which characterizes the first
category. The quality that identifies with immediate consciousness, being of the
nature of feeling and unity as potentiality of the possible, makes, of this feeling, a
continuum of possibilities. In a continuum, we already know that there are no iden-
tifiable individualities, thus making quale-consciousness exempt from any dualities.
Peirce never intended to give any status other than a logical one to this amalgam of
unity and quale-consciousness:
I say then that this unity is logical in this sense, that to feel, to be immediately conscious, so
far as possible, without any reaction nor any reflection, logically supposes one consciousness
21
CP, 6.227.
22
23
Cf. CP, 6.233.
24
CP, 2.228; my italics. See Chap. 4, n. 9.
and not two nor more. To be consciousness of scarlet and magenta at the same time is either
to compare them or set them over against one another and so to introduce another kind of
consciousness than the mere quale-consciousness, or it is to merge them into one general
feeling in which the scarlet and magenta are not separately recognized, and thus preserve
the unity of quale-consciousness.25
The link of quale-consciousness to the first category makes it absolutely present,

which provides an angle from which one can reprise the idea that a possible poten-
tial involves presentness as a discontinuity between past and future:
In quale-consciousness there is but one quality, but one element. It is entirely simple. Thus
consciousness, so far as it can be contained in an instant of time, is an example of quale-
consciousness. Now everybody who has begun to think about consciousness at all has
remarked that the present so conceived is absolutely severed from past and future. That is,
the past and the future are utterly absent in the sense in which I am conscious of the now.
So I might express my truth by saying—The Now is one, and but one.26
This discontinuity of time, a logically necessary consequence due to the

a dmission of the first category, at the same time is the refusal of necessitarianism.
Presentness engenders the new element which has not been inscribed in the past,
and which makes no reference to the future. In this, and in no other sense, consists
the assertion that a quality is what it is for itself. Its unity and elementarity exempt
it from any constrictive way of being. How, then, to subsume, under the same cate-
gory, two elements that seem to be opposed, such as variety and unity? The answer
to this question—already formulated in the previous chapter27—must reprise the
metaphysical origin of the unity of quale-consciousness. That is, the variety and
unity of the quality of feeling constitute an immediate consciousness as features of
a single mode of being:
[...] I now call attention to a remarkable consequence of it […] Namely it follows that there
is no check upon the utmost variety and diversity of quale-consciousness as it appears to
the comparing intellect. For if consciousness is to blend with consciousness, there must be
common elements. But if it has nothing in itself but just itself, it is sui generis and is cut
loose from all need of agreeing with anything. Whatever is absolutely simple must be abso-
lutely free; for a law over it must apply to some common feature of it. And if it has no fea-
ture, no law can seize upon it. It is totus, teres, atque rotundus.28 And thus it is that that very
same logical element of experience, the quale-element, which appears upon the inside as
unity, when viewed from the outside is seen as variety.29
What could correspond to a set of actions of a potentiality of the possible?

Certainly, multiplicity without regularities; a regular way of being rather would
imply the subsumption of a continuum to the necessary fabric of a law. The link
between Chance and diversity—established in the chapter on Indeterminism
25
CP, 6.230; in the rest of this paragraph, Peirce insists on the truth of this argument, making it, as
he acknowledges, almost a tautology.
26
27
See Chap. 4.
28
Perfect, well-balanced, and harmonic.
29
(Chap. 3)—leads to the relation between Chance and the unity of a continuum of
possibilities. This unity, as a quality, is the translucid feeling of the nature of an
immediate consciousness. Thence will follow:
Wherever chance-spontaneity is found, there in the same proportion feeling exists. In fact,
chance is but the outward aspect of that which within itself is feeling.30
In the same way that one passes from the bedroom to the living room in one’s
home, Peirce seeks the elements that substantiate his hypotheses indifferentially in
the experiences of interiority and exteriority, moving between the two environments
with the ease of someone who regards them as merely conventionally separate, but
in truth united on the same foundations and under the same ceiling. To our mind,
this is one of the extraordinary consequences of Objective Idealism. The eidetic
fabric pervades throughout the world in a primordial, and not a special, way. This is
what makes him preconfigure quale-consciousness as fundamental for the under-
standing of that which substantiates the first step of the cosmogenesis. And this step
has the nature of immediate consciousness, a world of interiority whose intrinsic
fabric is the unity of a feeling. This anthropomorphic trait of Peircean Philosophy,
which shocks classic commentators31 of his work, we deem is not only the essence
of his Cosmology, but also an element that pervades all his other doctrines, such as
his Objective Idealism and the construction of his Objective Logic.
To refuse Objective Idealism is to demolish, as we have demonstrated, the cate-
gorial structure of Peircean thought; such a destruction would surely bring about the
logical collapse of the other doctrines. Thus, the rejection of anthropomorphism as
unacceptable should ultimately extend to the whole Peircean philosophical system.
Strangely enough, there are those who consider certain aspects of his work as
admirably true doctrines while others as unfortunately obscure and inconsistent.
However, if uniformities grow out of variety by a tendency to acquire habits—an
evident law of the universe of internal ideality objectively projected—why should
Cosmology be constructed by any other principles?
Following this quasi-digression, let us return to the next steps of the cosmogen-
esis, with the intent to investigate how some form of discretization of the continuum
of qualities could have occurred. Out of the absolutely boundless nothing, as a
potentiality of infinite possibilities and dimensions, a continuum of qualities is, as
we know, formed. But a continuum, by its own nature, is something general; thus,
what is generated are generalized qualities:
[...] Every quality in itself is absolutely severed from every other. It has no relations, no
parts, no degrees of intensity. It is nothing but what it is for itself; and it cannot be repre-
sented or expressed in anything else as it is for itself.
30
CP, 6.265; EP, 1.348; W, 8.180–181; my italics.
31
See, for example, W.B. Gallie, Peirce and Pragmatism (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1952),
Chap. 9, “Peirce’s Metaphysics.” Among the noteworthy passages, there is the following: “Perhaps
the most obvious criticism to be made is that Peirce’s cosmogonic principle is couched in such
openly—one might almost say shamelessly—anthropomorphic terms” (p. 221). We regard the
entire chapter as a complete misinterpretation.
But quality generalized, as it is in the continuum of quality, is essentially represented.

Without being represented in something else, it cannot be what it is. There is that essential
feature of duality in it. The quality, or tinge of consciousness, which seems, and the
quale-consciousness, which feels that quality, are now two, because the quality, being
generalized, and continuity we remember is generality, is capable of entering different
consciousnesses.
Indeed, though it is distinguishable from consciousness by this very plurality, yet it can-
not be in its generalized state without the possibility of being felt.32 [Further:] Since the
world of quality can be represented in a consciousness there can be a multitude of such
representations, upon the same principle upon which the unity of immediate consciousness
viewed from without is seen to be limitlessly manifold.33 [And:] every complexus of quali-
ties is a quality [...] Not only every complex of qualities but every generalization of such
complexes is a possible quality. Every such quality makes a dimension of the continuum of
quality [...].34
Peirce, however, shows that there is no such thing as a continuum of dimensions,

whereby each is a quality resulting from a complex of qualities,35 and implying that
an arbitrary selection of these dimensions would subsume the others. Such a result
is a consequence of the Logic of events, which leads to
[...] existence, the arbitrary, blind, reaction against all others of accidental combinations of
qualities […] Individual existence depends upon the circumstance that not all that is
possible is possible in conjunction [...] The thisness of it consists in its reacting upon the
consciousness and crowding out other possibilities from so reacting.36
If a quality is in itself and for itself, it can only be part of a continuum that is
represented, for only a consciousness that feels can guarantee the unity of the mul-
tiplicity of the possible, which constitutes that continuum itself. This step, starting
from the unlimited possibilities of nothing, is of the nature of generality, since quali-
ties are possible, and since a continuum subsumes them as a representation that
assures their unity as a complex of qualities. This unity also is a quality, the hue of
consciousness, the quale-consciousness, in short, the continuum-representation that
constitutes the generality of that complex of possibilities. If there is any aspect of
duality in this, it surely is not yet of the nature of secondness, but solely of the dis-
tinction, yet nonseparation, between representation as single consciousness and a
complex of qualities that is possible variety itself.
But if every complex is a dimension of this continuum, the impossibility of a
single general representation of possible dimensions leads to an arbitrary form of
selection of these complexes—that is, the consciousness of unity awakens to some
particular thing and that objects to its own single and general nature. Some arbitrary
way of selecting these complexes will make it this and not that. This aspect of posi-
tive determination involves an implicit alterity in the way of being of secondness,
the category of individual existence. And that which individualizes itself dualizes
32
NEM, p. 133.
33
NEM, p. 134.
34
NEM, p. 135.
35
Ibid.
36
NEM, p. 135; my italics.
itself due to the existence of the other that makes it a singularity. Existence involves
choice; that which is multifaceted dies in its transition from potentiality to actuality
taking on the concreteness of one facet. The Sartrean anguish of choosing occurs,
indeed, in the world:
It has often been said that the difference between the real world and a dream is that the real
world coheres and is consistent. Undoubtedly this is the principal characteristic. The real
events conspire as it were against the unreal ones, because there is not room for all.37
Such is the course of an Objective Logic in which the defined follows upon the
vague and undefined. It is clear that the individual becomes all that is not another,
thus characterizing the duality that typifies the term “second”:
[…] existence has its root in pairing. As soon as duality appears, as in contrast between the
quality and the feeling of the quality, there is already an adumbration or prophetic type of
real. But it is the composite of pairing in exclusion of another pair with the banding or pair-
ing together of such exclusive pairs which produces thisness.
[…] The thisness of the accident of the world of existence is positively repugnant to
generality. It is so because of its intrinsic duality; and if you call it individual you are forget-
ting one term of the pair.38
This passage shows that it is inadmissible to regard the individual as a unity.

Unity is what precisely makes it no longer to be this, diluting its idiosyncrasy in the
continuum of a consciousness. To be this is to object to this unity that promotes the
loss of its intrinsic duality:
[...] a this is an object, but it only is so, by virtue of being in reaction with a subject. A this
is accidental; but it only is so in comparison with the continuum of possibility from which
it is arbitrarily selected. A this is something positive and insistent, but it only is so by push-
ing other things aside and so making a place for itself in the universe. Thisness, in short, is
reaction. Whatever reacts against something else is a this.
Reaction is duality [...] Every reaction is antigeneral. It is this act. It is act not power.
Secondness, not firstness.39
The reaction provoked is between qualities, and this reaction characterizes sec-
ondness in its brutal arbitrariness. Nevertheless, in the same way that a plane is a
bidimensional singularity in relation to a tridimensional space, and a line on a plane
is, in relation to the plane, also a topical discontinuity, each one of these elements in
themselves is a continuum in the dimension to which it belongs.40
From a continuum of infinite possibilities of qualities, some singularities stand
out, the kind that can be gathered into continua of dimensionality, defined in some
manner. Why would such formations occur? For no other reason than owing to the
eidetic tendency of the acquisition of habits; it will substantiate forms of general
regularity, which constitute thirdness:
We place ourselves, then, at the beginning of time. Qualities are already possible. Actual
existence has begun. Accidental reactions are taking place. Several continua are established.
37
38
NEM, pp. 135–136.
39
NEM, pp.136–137.
40
See also CP, 6.203.
A tendency toward generalization is operative. But as yet no thing can be said to exist; much
less any personal consciousness. The accidental reactions are purely accidental, unregulated
in any degree by law, the work of blind and brutal chance.
But now the tendency toward generalization which is already operative, and which
indeed is more ancient than actual existence itself, begins to group the accidental reactions
into fragmentary continua. Into continua, because such is the logical nature of generaliza-
tion. Into fragmentary continua because the tendency to generalization has to fight the law-
less brutality of chance with its youthful freakishness, and ebullient vivacity.
[...] This was the earliest of the laws of nature and was and still is continually strength-
ening itself. A habit of acquiring habits began to be established, and a habit of strengthening
the habit of acquiring habits, and a habit of strengthening that habit, and so on ad
infinitum.41
Prior to generalization, each quality by itself and for itself is of the nature of a
consciousness identified with a quality of feeling. This quality of feeling is distinct
from, albeit not separate from, quality in itself. It brings the germ of the
representation-represented duality, although no quality is interposed as an object for
a consciousness that feels it. Actual duality occurs in the rupture of infinite dimen-
sionality into singularities that form, through the acquisition of habits, continua of
more restricted dimensionality:
[...] accidental reactions though they are breaches of generality may come to be generalized
to a certain extent. They will all extend into that dimension of successive copies which
distinguishes the continuum of possible feelings from the continuum of possible quality.
They necessarily must do so, since in the order of logical development that dimension
results subsequently to the accidental reactions themselves and they will be copies along
with the body of the continuum of possible quality.42
This chaos of depersonalized feelings contains, however, the vector of the acqui-
sition of habits and, thus, the germ of regularity. Out of this step comes time, having
its condition of possibility substantiated by events that to some degree are regular.
This is what one concludes from:
The dimension of successive copies of feeling, so far as it applies to accidental reactions,
I identify with Time.43 [And] time consists in a regularity in the relations of interacting feel-
ings. The first chaos consisted in an infinite multitude of unrelated feelings. As there was no
continuity about them, it was, as it were, a powder of feelings [...] There was no real time
so far as there was no regularity, but there is no more falsity in using the language of time
than in saying that a quantity is zero.44
Thus, the formation of continua leads to the formation of time itself. The general
entity that constitutes a continuum now is of the nature of a potentiality of the neces-
sary, since—as we saw in the previous chapter—such is the actual structure of law. It
will regulate the conduct of future events through the mediation of a rule. Its genesis
is Chance; its highly intellectual fabric is one of the points that fascinated Peirce and
41
NEM, pp. 139–140.
42
NEM, pp. 137–138.
43
NEM, p. 138.
44
CP, 8.318; this is a passage from an unfinished letter to Christine Ladd-Franklin, dated 1891, in
which Peirce attempts to sum up his Cosmology.
made him assert it as one of the grounds of his Objective Idealism, thereby refuting,
from this evolutionary position, the unexplainability of its appearance:
The main difference between, say Herbert Spencer’s theory and mine is, that he restricts
evolution to certain elements of the universe, and gives it a merely secondary position as a
corollary of physical law of the “persistence of force,” thus making that law something
absolutely inexplicable and inscrutable, and barricading the roadway of inquiry by pro-
nouncing at the outset that nothing can be found out about that, notwithstanding that that
law presents intellectual relations which stimulate scientific curiosity in the highest degree;
while I on the other hand say let us try, let us inquire, and see whether or no we cannot find
out how law came about with its curious intellectual and mathematical character, and how
all the laws of the universe as well as all the facts of universe came to be as they are. Logic
calls upon us to do this.
We must either throw away scientific methods or we must apply them where they have
not been applied before, for that is precisely what the scientific method prescribes for us and
what the scientific spirit implore us to do.45
This curious intellectual fabric, which is experientially verified in scientific

investigation and which has as its object none other than the laws that regulate a
class of phenomena, reaffirms, in a distinctly harmonious way, the doctrines of
Objective Idealism and Evolutionism that explain the genesis of thirdness. The
hypothesis of the eidetic nature of the tendency of acquiring habits breaks the dual-
ity between interiority and exteriority, as mentioned before.
Thus, the above-mentioned anthropomorphism is a genuinely derived one, and
not a premise that is far from having the support of experience—namely, that same
experience that evidences the ontological indetermism and the intelligent character
of natural laws. For, it precisely is this that seems to break the narrow boundaries of
the ordinary meaning of experience,46 by now delineating it as a continuum of the
inner and outer worlds, which thus allows for the search of elements that support
theories of an objective nature. Let us recall, above all, that cosmogenesis, such as
it is constructed, starts with a potentiality of an inner nature:
The first thing which our inquiry demands is that we shall bring to it a clear and distinct idea
of what habit and the acquiring of habit are. This we can only learn by studying these things
where we see them in formation in the human mind. In doing this I am not much afraid of
specializing too much and of assuming that the universe has characters which belong only
to nervous protoplasm in a complicated organism. For we must remember that the organism
has not made the mind, but is only adapted to it. It has become adapted to it by an evolution-
ary process so that it is not far from correct to say that it is the mind that has made the
organism.47 [Further:] The distinction between the inner and the outer worlds antedates
Time [...]. The inner world that I mean is something very primitive. The original quality in
itself with its immediate unity belonged to that inner world, a world of possibilities, Plato’s
world. The accidental reaction awoke it into a consciousness of duality, of struggle and
therefore of antagonism between an inner and an outer. Thus, the inner world was first, and
45
46
Similar to the passages referred to in Phenomenology, we can also mention: “to admit that expe-
rience is the only source of any kind of knowledge, I grant it at once, provided only that by experi-
ence he means personal history, life. But if he wants me to admit that inner experience is nothing
[…] he asks what cannot be granted” (Peirce here refers to Stuart Mill; CP, 4.91).
47
its unity comes from that firstness. The outer world [is] second [...].48 [And finally:] That is
why I make bold to go to the human mind to learn the nature of a great cosmical
element.49
If the beauty of a construction were sufficient to ensure its veracity, the latter,
independent of other considerations that grant it a logical structure, would be bathed
in truth. Nevertheless, it is the uberty of the coherent and compatible hypotheses
of Peirce’s doctrines that brings about a myriad of philosophically remarkable
consequences.
For example, it would be quite acceptable, from what we have just seen, to
replace the term “Anthropomorphism”—a term that shocks unaware readers of
Peirce’s work, who attribute to him, perhaps, a mythical naivety similar to Hesiod’s
theories—with “Cosmomorphism,” thereby reversing the focus from the human to
its matrix, the Cosmos.
The investigation of interiority, indifferently having as r eferences the inner and
outer worlds, thus will reprise, through the cosmological vector, the ontological
meaning of the term “reflection,” namely, that human knowledge mirrors itself in
thinking about the world. At no time, however, will this investigation abdicate from
its logical character:
But even from the human mind we only collect external information about habit. Our
knowledge of its inner nature must come to us from logic. For habit is generalization.50
Peirce’s work contains exhaustive studies on the nature of habit.51 For our pur-
poses, let us see some passages:
That habit alone can produce development I do not believe. It is catastrophe, accident, reac-
tion which brings habit into an active condition and creates a habit of changing habits. To
learn is to acquire a habit. What makes men learn? Not merely the sight of what they are
accustomed to, but perpetual new experiences which throws them into a habit of tossing
aside old ideas and forming new ones.52 [Continuing:] Therefore in considering how the
universe would develop under the influence of a tendency to take habits, we must not con-
tent ourselves with merely calculating by the doctrine of chances what sort of accidents
would happen the oftenest, but while not neglecting this factor we must also take into
account the logical development of tendencies already in germ, which will make one appro-
priate accident outweigh millions of ordinary ones.53
Thus, the Chance that tinges an event in the present, which characterizes its
inscription in the continuum of a law that is not a strict one, is the only element
capable of breaking a habit, by undoing its conservative eidetic fabric and provok-
ing the acquisition of a new one, that is, by a tendency of generalization. This is the
substratum of the ontogenesis of the law, or of the categorial mode of thirdness in
its necessary potentiality. Such is the course of the evolution in which this universe
48
Ibid; my italics.
49
Ibid; my italics.
50
NEM, p. 142.
51
See, for example, CP, 7.468–523.
52
53
NEM, p. 143.
emerges by accident, rather than by some necessary Logic. The latter, on the
contrary, is formed in time and with time.
What is significant here is the Peircean rereading of Plato, linking the world of
Forms to the vague potentiality of cosmogenesis, and considering existence not as
an imperfect projection of perfect Ideas but, on the contrary, as a “theater of reac-
tions” in which those Ideas develop:
[...] we must suppose that the existing universe, with all its arbitrary secondness, is an off-
shoot from, or an arbitrary determination of, a world of ideas, a Platonic world; not that our
superior logic has enabled us to reach up to a world of forms to which the real universe, with
its feebler logic, was inadequate.
The evolutionary process is, therefore, not a mere evolution of the existing universe, but
rather a process by which the very Platonic forms themselves have become or are becoming
developed. We shall naturally suppose, of course, that existence is a stage of evolution. This
existence is presumably but a special existence. We need not suppose that every form needs
for its evolution to emerge into this world but only that it needs to enter into some theatre of
reactions, of which this is one.54
The fertility of Peircean Cosmology logically leads to a conjecture concerning

the possible existence of other universes. If the universe is this universe, in its genet-
ically arbitrary nature, why would there not be others where possible reactions and
combinations of qualities are completely distinct from it? This strange evolutionary
Platonism further is confirmed in:
In short, if we are going to read the universe as a result of evolution at all, we must think
that not merely the existing universe, that locus in the cosmos to which our reactions are
limited, but the whole Platonic world, which in itself is equally real, is evolutionary in its
origin, too [...].55
We are limited to this universe, a residue of a boundless potentiality of a feeling

of infinite dimensionality, constrained to the dimension of our own experience:
We can hardly but suppose that those sense-qualities that we now experience, color, odors,
sounds, feelings of every description, loves, griefs, surprise, are but the relics of an ancient
ruined continuum of qualities, like a few columns standing here and there in testimony that
here some old-world forum with is basilica and temples had once made a magnificent
ensemble. And just as that forum, before it was actually built, had had a vague under exis-
tence in the mind of him who planned its construction, so too the cosmos of sense-qualities,
which would have you to suppose in some early stage of being was as real as your personal
life is this minute, had in an antecedent stage of development a vaguer being, before the
relations of its dimensions became definite and contracted.56
At this level of constraint, however, the world seems to breathe through the space
of firstness. A substratum of ideality and evolution, it becomes the vital elixir of
the growth of habit, whose intellectual and generalized fabric in its turn shapes the
growth of thirdness. In addition, as a result of this Objective Idealism, matter must
be considered as a specialized form of mind. Peirce comments on the position of
54
CP, 6.192–195.
55
CP, 6.200.
56
CP, 6.197.
some objectors to his theory who only partially attribute a fortuitous behavior, an
original residue of living nature, to the physical universe:
[...] They do not perceive that that which offends them is not the Firstness in the swerving
atoms, because they themselves are just as much advocates of Firstness as the ancient
Atomists were. But what they cannot accept is the attribution of this firstness to things
perfectly dead and material. Now I am quite with them there. I think too that whatever is
First is ipso facto sentient. If it make atoms swerve—as I do—I make them swerve but very
little, because I conceive they are not absolutely dead [...]
[...] dead matter would be merely the final result of the complete induration of habit
reducing the free play of feeling and the brute irrationality of effort to complete death. Now
I would suppose that that result of evolution is not quite complete even in our beakers and
crucibles.
Thus, when I speak of chance, I only employ a mathematical term to express with accu-
racy the characteristics of freedom or spontaneity.57
There is a singularity in the flow of time, as has been previously indicated, that
constitutes the transversal occurrence of Chance in the phenomenon. In the same
way that the formation of continua occurs evolutionarily, in the course of evolution
time will tend to be consummated as a perfect continuum. This asymptotic conse-
quence of the evolutionary vector will bring about the tendency of the elimination
of the discontinuity that characterizes the present, completing the subsumption of
the future with the past.
This logical consequence of Peircean Metaphysics would lead to a total predomi-
nance of thirdness over existence, in which Chance itself will be entirely eliminated.
This is what may be inferred from:
At any time, however, an element of pure chance survives and will remain until the world
becomes an absolutely perfect, rational, and symmetrical system, in which mind is at last
crystallized in the infinitely distant future.58
Peircean Cosmology, along with providing the ontological grounds for the cate-
gories, brings about remarkable consequences to the doctrines that will follow in the
coming chapters of this book. We have already anticipated the explanation that
Peirce advocates of the modes of argument that constitute his Objective Logic, as
well as the radical formulation of his realistic philosophy. Perhaps less evidently,
preceding the presentation of his Objective Logic, Peircean Pragmatism has
received, from Cosmology in particular and from Metaphysics in general, amplifi-
cations that allow a better ontological understanding of that doctrine, rendering the
narrower interpretations of it impertinent and disparaging.
57
58
CP, 6.33; EP, 1.297; W, 8.110.
Part III
The Knowable World
Chapter 6
Pragmatism and Objective Logic
Mas isso, tão em-pé, tão perto, ainda nuveava, nos ocultos do
futuro. Quem sabe o que essas pedras em redor estão
aquecendo, e que em uma hora vão transformar, de dentro da
dureza delas, como pássaro nascido?
GUIMARÃES ROSA, Grande Sertão: Veredas
One of the most interesting points revealed by Peircean Cosmology is that it can be
considered a kind of foreshadowing of his Pragmatism. Such a point is found at
the beginning of the cosmogenesis1 in the relation between potency and act, and the
implication that a potentiality that remains as such, without any form of actualiza-
tion, is absolutely useless, invalidated by its own idleness.
While revealing an anthropomorphic construction, assumed by the author
himself,2 Cosmology tried to find experiential elements, both in the internal and
external worlds, to corroborate metaphysical hypotheses, and to do so more radi-
cally than any other doctrine that preceded it in our sequence of the presentation of
Peircean thought. Thus, upon reaching that point in Cosmology, it was inevitable for
us to think that, not rarely, the human being, endowed with some virtual capacity for
a certain type of behavior, not infrequently watches the extinguishing of that poten-
tiality by the flow of time without materializing it in some way. For the purposes of
what we intend to reflect upon here, it does not seem pertinent, however, to track the
possible myriad reasons by which such phenomena occur. It will suffice to notice
that they are not infrequent, not only in observations derived from social acquain-
tance, but also in the personal sphere of our own interiority. In actuality it appears
that what is required is some theater of reactions where apprenticeship and
1
See Chap. 5.
2
“I hear you say: This smacks too much of an anthropomorphic conception. I reply that every
scientific explanation of a natural phenomenon is a hypothesis that there is something in nature to
which the human reason is analogous; and that it really is so all the successes of science in its
applications to human convenience are witnesses” (CP, 1.316). The author in various passages
defends anthropomorphism, which essentially is the connaturality between the subject of thought
and the object of thought. See, for example, CP, 5.47 and 8.191; EP, 2.152. Observe that, for logi-
cal reasons, we proposed in the previous chapter replacing the word Anthropomorphism with
Cosmomorphism (see Chap. 5).

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66314-2_6
78 6 Pragmatism and Objective Logic
e volutionary growth acquire their conditions of possibility—where potentiality as

first is exercised in the alterity of an other, and engenders its form of intelligent
accomplishment.
In this regard, it would be fitting to ask the virtual artist what is the worth of his
never-written poem, or his unpainted painting, or uncomposed music, confined to an
internal and external silence? The reality that destroys the potency is consumed in
the decision of sculpt the shape of dream: there is no room for both.3 The self-
destruction of the uselessness of doing nothing conversely seems to suggest the
actualization of a potency to forge its useful character, enveloping its idea of mean-
ing in some form of useful action that has an end in itself. At the same time that
Pragmatism is herein foreshadowed, this latter consideration allows us to assess the
most frequent wrongful interpretation of that theory.
At this point, then, it would be advisable to delve into the doctrine of Pragmatism,
endeavoring to discover its relations with such initial considerations. First, let us see
what the author called the maxim of that doctrine to consist in, by resorting to his
own words:
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the
object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our
conception of the object.4
Before analyzing the maxim’s meaning, let us observe the curiously frequent use
of the word “conceive” in its various forms. Is this intentional or merely stylistic?
This is how our author justifies it:
Note that in these three lines one finds, “conceivably,” “conceive,” “conception,” “concep-
tion,” “conception.” Now I find there are many people who detect the authorship of my
unsigned creeds; and I doubt not that one of the marks of my style by which they do so is
my inordinate reluctance to repeat a word. This employment five times over of derivates of
concipere must then have had a purpose. In point of fact it had two. One was to show that I
was speaking of meaning in no other sense than that of intellectual purport. The other was
to avoid all danger of being understood as attempting to explain a concept by percepts,
images, schemata, or by anything but concepts. I did not, therefore, mean to say that acts,
which are more strictly singular than anything, could constitute the purport, or adequate
proper interpretation, of any symbol.5,6
As we have already foreseen in a previous chapter, Peirce’s position seems per-

fectly clear as to the generality of the meaning of a concept by referring it to third-
ness.7 However, the first question, which naturally arises here, is what it is that the
author understands by “practical bearings.” It is precisely here that the current con-
fusions about the pragmatic meaning of a concept seem to lie, namely, in interpretations
3
See Chap. 5, n37.
4
CP 5.402, 5.2, 5.438, and 8.201n3; EP, 1.132; W, 3.266.
5
A detailed conceptualization of symbol can be examined by the reader at CP, 2.292–302; EP,
2.274. For the purposes of this chapter, we may understand it as the general representation of the
nature of a concept.
6
CP, 5.402n3.
7
See Chap. 2.
6 Pragmatism and Objective Logic 79
concerning all forms of action for action’s sake, or, more broadly, concerning a
plurality of acts while simultaneously confining the meaning of a general concept to
a particular instance.
Let us once more resort to the author’s words:
In 1896 William James published his Will to Believe, and later his Philosophical Conceptions
and Practical Results, which pushed this method to such extremes as must tend to give us
pause. The doctrine appears to assume that the end of man is action—a stoical axiom which,
to the present writer at the age of sixty, does not recommend itself so forcibly as it did at
thirty. If it be admitted, on the contrary, that action wants an end, and that that end must be
something of a general description, then the spirit of the maxim itself, which is that we must
look to the upshot of our concepts in order rightly to apprehend them, would direct us
towards something different from practical facts, namely, to general ideas, as the true inter-
preters of our thought.8 [Further:] if pragmaticism9 really made Doing to be the Be-all and
the End-all of life, that would be its death. For to say that we live for the mere sake of action,
as action, regardless of the thought it carries out, would be to say that there is no such thing
as rational purport.10
Cosmology has shown that the growth of real thirdness has, as one of its condi-
tions of possibility, a theater of reactions. From the factuality of existence derives
the eidetic fabric of law—that is to say, from the plurality of acts derives the con-
tinuum of the connatural potency of thought. Redeeming this metaphysical vector,
it would be strange to suppose that the idea of meaning were confined to second-
ness. Rather, it is the thought that action transmits that is the essence itself of expe-
rience in its “making us think that.” This makes action a stage of thought, similar to
the way Metaphysics has shown that existence is a special mode of reality. Thus, it
is intentional action that becomes the rational purpose of the concept. These consid-
erations are reinforced by the following passages of the author’s work:
Pragmatism is correct doctrine only in so far as it is recognized that material action is the
mere husk of ideas.
[…] But the end of thought is action only in so far as the end of action is another thought.11
[And:] [...] of the two implications of pragmatism that concepts are purposive, and that their
meaning lies in their conceivable practical bearings, the former is the more fundamental. I
think, however, that the doctrine would be quite estropieé without the latter point. By “prac-
tical” I mean apt to affect conduct, and by conduct, voluntary action that is self-controlled,
i.e., controlled by adequate deliberations.12
Insofar as the concept of an object is consummated in the entirety of its conceiv-

able effects on conduct, the enunciation of the maxim suggests that the meaning of
that concept is the general mode in which human conduct is shaped by it. We should
acknowledge, however, that other forms of Peirce’s enunciation of the maxim of
8
9
Due to wrongful interpretations of the doctrine, Peirce changed its name to Pragmaticism
(see CP, 5.414; EP, 2.334–335).
10
CP, 5.429; EP, 2.341; my italics.
11
12
CP, 8.322.
Pragmatism might have greatly facilitated the reducibility of the idea of meaning to
a mere secondness of action. One of those forms is expressed as follows:
In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what
practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that con
ception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the
conception.13
The word sum here might perhaps suggest to an uninformed reader that the mean-
ing of a general concept may be equivalent to a cluster of individuals. We know,
however, that such equivalence is made illegitimate by the doctrine of Synechism.
Believing that it is no longer necessary to linger over the often misinterpreted
points of Pragmatism, let us now further pursue its proper understanding and explain
the context to which it applies.
We know that the meaning of a concept is the totality of conceivable practical
consequences on conduct, and that the action resulting from it is imbued with that
eidetic element capable of shaping a future thought and thus realizing the rational
purpose of the concept. There is, thus, an intellectual element that permeates the
intentioned conduct. Nevertheless, it would be fitting to ask:
Now in what does the intellectual character of conduct consist? Clearly in its harmony of
the eye of reason; that is, in the fact that the mind in contemplating it shall find a harmony
of purposes in it. In other words it must be capable of rational interpretation to a future
thought. Thus, thought is rational only so far as it recommends itself to a possible future
thought. Or, in other words, the rationality of thought lies in its reference to a possible
future.14
It thus is legitimate to infer that the meaning of a concept is imbued with an esse
in futuro such that, together with its attribute of generality, constitutes its subsump-
tion under the third category.
In the grounding of Peircean realism,15 we had stressed that the esse in futuro of
all cognitive mediation was intertwined with its essentially predictive character.
Well, from this perspective, a positive concept—that is, one that supposes to corre-
spond to a real object—must predict the future course of experience. This is, we
believe, the crux of what the author conceptualizes as conceivable practical conse-
quences. On the other hand, the instance of action—that is, the instance of the hic et
nunc of experience—will reveal if there is a real conformation of that prediction.
Insofar as such a correspondence is verified between a theoretical prediction and the
temporal course of facts, a strengthening of the concept is established in the form of
a belief, and, insofar as this does not occur, a doubt about its veracity. On this point—
which we consider vital for a complete understanding of Peircean Pragmatism—it is
worth clarifying what the author means by belief and doubt:
We generally know when we wish to ask a question and when we wish to pronounce a judg-
ment, for there is a dissimilarity between the sensation of doubting and that of believing.
But this is not all which distinguishes doubt from belief. There is a practical difference. Our
beliefs guide our desires and shape our actions.
13
14
CP, 7.361; my italics. See also CP, 8.191.
15
See Chap. 2.
[…] The feeling of believing is a more or less sure indication of there being established in
our nature some habit which will determine our actions. Doubt never has such an effect.16
It is clear how Peirce makes use of the pragmatic maxim to analyze the concepts
of doubt and belief. There is a practical difference that is consummated in the effects
upon conduct. While a belief establishes a positive habit of action, doubt is distin-
guished from it by not influencing conduct in the same way. But what precisely
characterizes a doubt? Let us see what the author says:
Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass
into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish
to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else. On the contrary, we cling tenaciously, not
merely to believing, but to believing just what we do believe.17
Here we must pause to recall Peirce’s Objective Idealism. That doctrine consid-
ers matter a “specialized and partially deadened mind,”18 and dominated by inveter-
ate habits that have become physical laws. Accordingly, attachment to a belief
assumes the form of an inveterate habit, which is an expression of the homeostatic
tendency of the mind that brings it closer to a material stage. Conversely, it is legiti-
mate to infer that the mind’s vivacity lies in its capacity to break habits, by recogniz-
ing, in the novelty of experience, its element of mutability, which may become the
subject of a new belief. Here, again, is the core of Peirce’s conception of learning,
appearing in the plasticity and temporariness of the habit-taking tendency of the
mind, whose evolutionary trait will be its live capacity of altering its own conduct.
The inclination toward the acquisition of a habit is the generalizing character of
mind; indeed, it is what defines it as such. Nevertheless, we could perhaps say that
the maturity of the mind, or its level of vivacity, is expressed in its capacity of chang-
ing from one habit to another whenever experience shows that there is a flagrant
disharmony between conceived practical consequences and real practical conse-
quences. This disharmony, the foundation of a genuine doubt, must be the fulcrum
of a new attempt to adequately represent the object. Therefore, genuine doubt,
besides bringing that experiential element of alterity, performs a positive role
together with belief:
Thus, both doubt and belief have positive effects upon us, though very different ones. Belief
does not make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in some
certain way, when the occasion arises. Doubt has not the least effect of this sort, but stimu-
lates us to action until it is destroyed.19
On the other hand, it is precisely the method of Pragmatism that will distinguish
between beliefs:
The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit, and different beliefs are distinguished
by the different modes of action to which they give rise.20
16
CP, 5.370–371; EP, 1.114; W, 3.247; my italics.
17
CP, 5.372; EP, 1.114; W, 3.247.
18
CP, 6.102; EP, 312; W, 8.135.
19
CP, 5.373; EP, 1.114; W, 3.247.
20
CP, 5.398; EP, 1.129–130; W, 3.263–264; see also CP, 4.53.
An important epistemological point is suggested when we discern the author’s

p osition on the formation of cognition as it is expressed in his reflections on the way
something general is materialized and made definite in an existence. It is the same
mode of action of a belief that enables us, on the one hand, to know it, and, on the
other hand, to distinguish it. The interior world can only become cognizable by
the way in which it becomes existent in some plurality of acts.
In Peirce’s words: “It is in the external world that we directly observe. What
passes within we only know as it is mirrored in external objects.”21
Now as explained in previous passages, as an evolutionary process, the cognitive
process always requires an experiential universe that can establish the meaning and
veracity of a concept, albeit fallible and subject to a corrective mechanism imposed
by experience itself. From this standpoint, we believe it is legitimate to infer that
practical consequences may be interpreted as experiential consequences, extraordi-
narily harmonizing the relations between experience and cognition, due to the fact
that the experiential act places itself as subject for a coming thought. This point is,
unmistakably, one of the incidental connections between Kantism and Peirce’s
Philosophy. Kant, by confining Metaphysics to the universe of possible experience,
sought to put an end to unanswerable philosophical discussions, that is, to concepts
generated by reason that have consequences not identifiable within the sphere of the
phenomenon. No other seems to be one of the manifest inspirations of the doctrine
of Pragmatism:
The writer was led to the maxim by reflection upon Kant’s Critic of the Pure Reason,22
[And:] His limitation of them23 to possible experience is pragmatism in the general sense.24
Notwithstanding all the distinctions that have already been established between
Peircean Philosophy and Kantian Transcendentalism, Pragmatism, in so far as it
seeks to extricate meaningless concepts from those endowed with meaning, estab-
lishes itself as a logical means of performing the task proposed by Kant:
Pragmatism makes or ought to make no pretension to throwing positive light on any prob-
lem. It is merely a logical maxim for laying the dust of pseudo problems, and thus enabling
us to discern what pertinent facts the phenomena may present. But this is a good half of the
task of philosophy.25
[Further:] Pragmatism is not a system of Philosophy. It is only a method of thinking26 [and]
pragmatism solves no real problem. It only shows that supposed problems are not real
problems [...]
The effect of pragmatism here is simply to open our minds to receiving any evidence, not
to furnish evidence.27
21
CP, 8.144. See my comments on the ontological redemption of the word “reflection” in Chap. 5.
22
CP, 5.3.
23
Peirce, in the context of this passage, refers to the conceptions of space, time, and the categories
of Kant.
24
CP, 5.525.
25
CP, 8.186.
26
CP, 8.206.
27
CP, 8.259.
Based on these two passages, it seems relevant to observe that the mere reference
to Peirce as the founder of Pragmatism would only establish him as a logician and
not as a philosopher. Pragmatism as such is unequivocally not a philosophical sys-
tem, but solely a method of the philosophical analysis of theoretical systems. We
believe this is one of the reasons, along with some others referred to above, for a
misunderstanding of the purposes of that doctrine.
But, having exposed the near totality of the Peircean metaphysical matrix, it
would be interesting to show how Pragmatism implicitly permeated some of its
concepts in the form of an acute instrument of analysis. In the author’s own words,
none other is the main force of the doctrine:
Pragmaticism, then, is a theory of logical analysis, or true definition; and its merits are
greatest in its application to the highest metaphysical conceptions.28
Before starting a pragmatistic analysis of some of the metaphysical concepts hith-

erto expounded, let us first recall that in Phenomenology the idea of existing is given
in direct experience, namely, an experience of reaction against consciousness, as a
revealer of the other, the non-ego, and thus evincing, through negation, the existential
positivity of the subject. When explaining that point,29 we commented that Peirce
was substantially moving away from Cartesianism, while establishing the theory of
the existence of things as a metaphysical hypothesis, one that assumed that individu-
als react among themselves as well as against consciousness. Through the perspec-
tive of the metaphysical conception of existence, Peirce’s critique of the Cartesian
cogito has, as background music, the second movement of the music of the spheres—
never heard but always heard—whose tempo is defined by the belief–conduct rela-
tion, which we can now say functions as conductor of the doctrine of Pragmatism.
That music is not confined to the critique of Cartesianism, but is ubiquitous and
resonates throughout the Peircean rejection of all skepticism, which is not engen-
dered in the fulcrum of a genuine thought-experience. In the words of the author:
Many and many a philosopher seems to think that taking a piece of paper and writing down
“I doubt that” is doubting it, or that it is a thing he can do in a minute as soon as he decides
what he wants to doubt. Descartes convinced himself that the safest way was to “begin” by
doubting everything, and accordingly he tells us he straightway did so, except only his je
pense, which he borrowed from St. Augustine. Well I guess not, for genuine doubt does not
talk of beginning with doubting.
The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which has to be acquired with difficulty; and
his genuine doubts will go much further than those of any Cartesian. What he does not
doubt, about ordinary matters of everybody’s life, he is apt to find that no well matured man
doubts.30
It is a common objection that Descartes solely had intended to develop a logical

strategy of philosophical analysis, with the cogito representing the proposition of a
method, without wishing to solve a real doubt. The subterfuges of make-believe
philosophies, as Peirce calls them, are, however, placed by him under the lens of
28
CP, 6.490; EP, 2.447; see also CP, 5.423; EP, 2.338.
29
See Chap. 1, and n18.
30
CP, 6.498.
Logic in various passages of his work.31 Logic, as a positive science, will be linked
to the factuality of conduct so as to judge the relevance of doubt. Let us see an exem-
plary passage on this point:
What happens to any veracious young thinker is that on the first day on which his thoughts
are turned that way, he remarks that there are a multitude of things that he does not doubt;
and it will not be long before he finds that what he does not doubt, he cannot doubt, until he
meets with some definitive reason for doubting it. Let him fancy that he doubts whether he
will be alive the next day, and though this is far from being certain, yet he will soon catch
himself making preparations for this next day’s life without the smallest misgiving on the
subject.32 [Further:] remembering that genuine doubt cannot be created by a mere effort of
will, but must be compassed through experience.33
At the end of our comments on Phenomenology, we noted that it would not be

easy to dissuade people from some habits of conduct that reveal an implicit belief in
the extension of certain natural regularities from the past to the future. Indeed, one
could say that the belief that guides action is based on an incompetence to doubt.
Doubt is not from the realm of volition, and belief will remain a habit of action until
experience generates a genuine doubt. The flagrant dissonance between the conceiv-
able practical consequences of a dubious proposition having its genesis in reason
and the actually verifiable practical consequences, reveals, pragmatically, a false
doubt.
Returning to the question of the cogito, let us recall that the grounding of real-
ism—the realization that we really think, that is, that mediative thought is really
possible—led us to infer the condition of possibility of thought comprised of an
objective generality. Therefore, we can affirm that the most evident discovery of the
cogito is not alterity, but rather, real generality. We do not believe that Peirce would
reject changing the Cartesian maxim to I think, therefore universals are real, which
expresses that the possibility of mediative thought as phenomenon reveals an object
endowed with a principle of order, of the nature of thought itself. Alterity, however,
is the negative logical aspect of thought, or that experiential element that is strik-
ingly evident in denying the practical consequences of false mediation. Another key
issue of Peircean Metaphysics addressed by Pragmatism is the question of univer-
sals. Let us recall that the adoption of realism, and the resulting rejection of nomi-
nalism, occurred as a result of an analysis of the conceivable consequences of the
two doctrines. Reprising our earlier reflections on nominalism, recall that we were
necessarily led to the following points:
1. If generality were only an interior attribute of the mind, the entire outside uni-
verse would consist of existing individuals without general relations among
them. As we have asserted, real relations represent a condition of possibility for
thought, and thus the exercise of cognitive mediation is impossible in a nominal-
ist world.
31
See, for example, CP, 5.416 and 5.459; EP, 2.335–336 and 2.357–358.
32
33
2. By attributing to the mind the power of organizing the sensitive multiplicity into
the concept, or by depriving exteriority of some ontological principle of order,
one denies, along with real generality, a ubiquitous trait of experience, namely
alterity. The object would be subsumed to a rule created by the subject.
We believe that Peirce would agree that these two conceivable consequences
extracted from nominalism suffice to render it false. Now, a false proposition, that
is, a proposition in which its falsehood is believed, is powerless to shape conduct.
And a conception that has consequences that do not exert any conceivable influence
on conduct is, according to Pragmatism, devoid of any possibility of meaning; the
crux of possible meaning, rather, lies in an esse in futuro that is grounded on the
correspondence between representation and the temporal course of experience.
Also, Peirce’s Pragmatism was implicit in his analysis of mechanism, as wit-
nessed in our chapter regarding the foundation of Objective Idealism.34 The refu
tation of a mechanical world governed by strict causality occurred by assessing the
theory’s consequences, which betrayed certain flagrant contradictions, among
which were traces of irreducibility to reason. The comparison between mechanism
and materialism disclosed the same consequences, thereby suggesting a conflation
of those two theories. This precisely exhibits the core of Pragmatism as method, that
is, its role of making clear and distinct the meaning of concepts by discerning them
through the differentiation of their experiential consequences:
The intellectual significance of beliefs lies wholly in the conclusions that may be drawn
from them, and ultimately in their effects upon our conduct. For there does not seem to be
any important distinction between two propositions which never can yield different practi-
cal results.35
In Peirce’s Pragmatism, one could say that the doctrine of ontological Chance
forges its meaning in the phenomenon of the diversity of nature, along with many
other consequences that harmonize logical points of Metaphysics in the eyes of
reason, such as the coimplication of the three categories. On the contrary, what logi-
cally represents the common matrix between nominalism and mechanism is the fact
that such doctrines, as explanatory hypotheses, do not perform their required role,
that is, they do not answer the question, what should the world be like to appear like
this to me? But what does it mean not to answer this question? We believe it is noth-
ing more than not to be able to deal with experience—or, according to the pragmatic
maxim, that the practical consequences of those theories do not correspond to the
phenomenal universe they are meant to explain. It seems unnecessary to remind
ourselves that mediative thought is possible, and that the variety of the world and
the unconditionality of the quality of feeling are phenomena that require an explana-
tion acceptable to reason. Nevertheless, while their acceptability to reason is beyond
what may be modally necessary, it does reach the universe of possibilities. The
doctrine of the ontological principle of Chance, for example, endeavored to clarify
34
Cf. Chap. 4.
35
CP, 7. 360.
that to explain a certain trait of the phenomenon as casual and not causal in no way
contravenes its acceptability to reason or represents an explicative incompetence. It
seems clear that in Peircean thought the vector of explanation has its source in the
phenomenon. To suppose strict causality as an explicative hypothesis for the asym-
metry of nature is not to contravene the possible experience, but to contravene the
possible concept. For its veracity, the theory of mechanism would require a phe-
nomenal universe other than this one. We cannot believe, however, that there are bad
facts and good theories.
The essence of Pragmatism lies in this harmonious correspondence between
phenomenon and concept, and in such a way that the errors imposed upon this cor-
respondence, representing a pseudoharmony, will be corrected in the course of
experience in time which is toward the esse in futuro that characterizes the contin-
uum of meaning.
While exploring the doctrines that comprise Peirce’s Metaphysics in a possible
rereading, we invite the reader to further find the method of Pragmatism involved in
the adoption of the theories of Evolutionism, Objective Idealism, and Synechism,
by extracting their respective real and conceivable practical consequences. But at
this point we propose to spare the reader a redundant synopsis of those doctrines in
which the pragmatic maxim is set. Nevertheless, it does not seem useless at least to
point out that the coimplication of Chance and law derives from Evolutionism, and
that the vectorial source of this doctrine is the phenomenon of a partial subsumption
of the facts to real thirdness.
Peircean Idealism, in turn, acquires its meaning from a reflection on the intelligi-
bility of the world, and accounts for the eidetic genesis of the laws of nature which
are grounded on the tendency to acquire habits. However, let us now devote a spe-
cial space to showing the analytical effectiveness of Pragmatism in the author’s
reflection on the meaning of the word “incognizable.”
Our previous consideration of the concept of the incognizable noted that the
hypothesis of it was self-contradictory in that it explained nothing. Similarly,
Synechism showed the irreducibility to reason of a topical singularity characterized
by the absolute impossibility of cognition. In what concerns our present stage of
analysis, let us first review the maxim of Pragmatism:
[…] a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively
in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life; so that, since obviously nothing that
might not result from experiment can have any direct bearing upon conduct, if one can
define accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or
denial of a concept could imply, one will have therein a complete definition of the concept,
and there is absolutely nothing more in it.36
We believe that Peirce’s words “and there is absolutely nothing more in it” pre-
cisely affirm that the totality of experiential consequences of a concept is the con-
cept itself, in the manner that the being of a substance identifies itself with the
36
CP, 5.412; EP, 2.332.
totality of its phenomenological manifestation37—an affirmation which, under

another guise, had already surfaced in the chapter on Synechism.38
By admitting that experience determines the concept as an object of thought,
what concept of the absolutely incognizable could possibly be built? Let us see the
author’s answer:
[…] all our conceptions are obtained by abstractions and combinations of cognitions first
occurring in judgments of experience. Accordingly, there can be no conception of the abso-
lutely incognizable, since nothing of that sort occurs in experience. But the meaning of a
term is the conception which it conveys. Hence, a term can have no such meaning.39
The radical lack of meaning of the absolutely incognizable is the result of the fact
that the cognoscibility of an object requires some form of experiential manifestation
that imposes its substratum of reality on thought. From this point, there mediately
derives a necessary relation between intelligibility, or cognoscibility, and meaning:
[…] the absolutely incognizable is absolutely inconceivable […] It is, therefore, a meaning-
less word; and, consequently, whatever is meant by any term as the real is cognizable in
some degree, and so is of the nature of a cognition, in the objective sense of that term.40
What is real places itself before the mind as cognizable, and Objective Idealism
assures the connaturality between reality and cognition. The self-contradictory aspect
of the hypothesis of the incognizable having been shown, there is, from another per-
spective, Peirce’s demonstration that the term itself involves a logical contradiction:
Not, then, or what is other than, if a concept, is a concept of the cognizable. Hence, not-
cognizable, if a concept, is a concept of the form A, not-A, and is, at least, self-contradictory.
Thus, ignorance and error can only be conceived as correlative to a real knowledge and truth,
which latter are of the nature of cognitions. Over against any cognition, there is an unknown but
knowable reality; but over against all possible cognition, there is only the self-contradictory.
In short, “cognizability” (in its widest sense) and “being” are not merely metaphysically
the same, but are synonymous terms.41
This remarkable consequence may seem strange to those who have not explored
Peircean Metaphysics. Arguably, it is inadequate to enter the author’s thought solely
through Pragmatism since such a course could lead to, to say the least, a misunder-
standing of its real domain and meaning.
The passage suggests that that which is real—that is, alter, general, and intelligi-
ble—is relative to the mind as a point of equivalence between being and being
cognizable. In view of what has just been articulated, however, to affirm that reality
is relative to the mind does not assert any link of dependency of the real in relation
to the mind. Indeed:
[…] there is no thing which is in-itself in the sense of not being relative to the mind, though
things which are relative to the mind doubtless are, apart from the relation.42
37
See CP, 5.313; EP, 1.53-54; W, 2.240–241.
38
See Chap. 4, n24.
39
40
CP, 5.310; EP, 1.51–52; W, 2.238; my italics.
41
42
CP, 5.311; EP, 1.52; W, 2.238–239.
Thus, the condition of being relative to the human mind, which represents one of
the grounds of the Copernican Revolution proposed by Kant—drawing the orbit of
the object around reason—should be reunderstood in Peircean Philosophy in terms
of being connatural with thought, as a consequence of his Objective Idealism and as
grounded on the intelligibility of the world.
The central aspect of the issue of incognizability is not solved by stating that enti-
ties in themselves produce a phenomenological universe, which, in the language of
Kantian Transcendentalism, constitutes the realm of possible experience circumscrib-
ing all knowledge. On the contrary, the crux of the question consists in the search for
a possible concept of the cognizability of those entities. In this search, Peirce is led to
regard the concept of incognizability as devoid of meaning. Thus, either the in-itself
has its being materialized in its total phenomenological manifestation, or it will have
nothing conceptualized about it. In this respect, the author is, once again, clear:
The Ding an sich, however, can neither be indicated nor found. Consequently, no proposi-
tion can refer to it, and nothing true or false can be predicated of it. Therefore, all references
to it must be thrown out as meaningless surplusage.43
Between what the human mind creates in its interiority and what it actually dis-
covers in exteriority, there is a necessary transition through the alterity of experi-
ence, an element capable of denying and correcting false representation. This
transition between creation and discovery has its condition of possibility in an
experiential universe that sculpts the real form of the concept in the representation
of the possible universe of mere imagination. However, if nothing true or false may
be affirmed about the absolutely incognizable, it is because it places itself beyond
the possibility of any discovery, and “what is absolutely beyond discovery, whether
direct and specific or indirect and general, must be considered non-existent.”44
Although not intending an in-depth analysis of the issue here, at this point we
must recall that the interest of contemporary philosophy in a Logic of scientific dis-
covery seems to flow through nominalist canals, in contrast with Peirce’s position
that only an object that can be discovered—by a Metaphysics that affirms the real
possibility of objects of representation—can give birth to a genuinely heuristic
Logic.45
From another perspective, not only for the sake of terminology, but mainly to
prevent thought from being scarred by the barbs of linguistic imprecision, let us
reconsider that it is improper to say that Art and Mathematics discover real objects.
Recalling, as aforementioned,46 that if mathematical and artistic objects do not
necessarily exist, we must then confine them to the realm of creation; such a cir-
cumscription of humankind’s cultural production characterizes an uncommitment
to the contingency of this experiential universe evidenced by Peircean Cosmology.
43
CP, 5.525.
44
45
This issue is diluted throughout the author’s work. See, for example, the lecture “Pragmatism and
Abduction” at CP, 5.180–212; EP, 2.226–241.
46
See Chap. 2.
These comments are not digressive when they raise the question: would the
incognizable entities, then, be created objects, since they stand beyond any possible
scientific discovery? For the solution to this question, we should notice that it is
always possible to develop enunciations of mathematical or artistic objects, although
they remain in a hypothetical universe.
Nevertheless, the impossibility of developing scientific propositions about inc-
ognizable entities47 is a modal impossibility, that is, nothing possible or necessary
can be predicated of them. Thus, the nonexistence of these entities, as proposed by
Peirce, must not be understood as the absence of something that could be enunci-
ated, but only as the absolute ineffability of a nothing irreducible to thought. And
what cannot be thought cannot be said. To the silence preached by Wittgenstein,
Peirce adjoins the radical impossibility of meaning.
It is opportune at this point, we believe, to rescue a more synthetic conception of
Pragmatism. One way of undertaking this task will involve, what is to our view, a
reflection on the deeper meaning of the expression, “harmony in the eyes of reason.”
The second movement of the music of the spheres revealed the intimate relationship
between belief and conduct, on the one hand, and, under a more general appearance,
between phenomenon and explanatory theory of its reality, on the other hand. The
falsehood of some doctrines, in the light of the pragmatic maxim, came up in the
disharmony between the concept and its real and conceivable experiential conse-
quences. Thus, it seems legitimate to infer that the “harmony in the eyes of reason”
that is required by Pragmatism interlaces itself in a synthetic correspondence
between theory and experiment, whether of an actual or possible nature. However,
the central point for a perfect understanding of Pragmatism remains Peirce’s real-
ism, for to affirm in a synthetic manner that the pragmatic maxim indicates a harmo-
nious relationship between theory and experiment always involves the reaffirmation
that theory is not a mere saving of appearances, but the representation of a real
object. Therefore, from the theory that engenders the experiential consequences of
the real represented object, which becomes actual for an experiencing conscious-
ness, there is the common vein of the relation between the general and the
particular.
Here, again, we have a key point of Peircean Philosophy. All the architectonic
linking of subject and object leads us to think that Pragmatism is not confined to a
logical rule having an exclusively epistemic range, but equally applies to the struc-
ture of the world itself. In sum, insofar as the doctrine represents a logical link
between the general and the particular, and recognizes generality in the reality of the
first and third categories, we can say that Pragmatism, in its metaphysical hue, rep-
resents the relation between firstness and thirdness, and both with the existential
factuality of secondness. Based on these considerations, it seems possible to re-
enunciate the maxim of the doctrine, no longer through the prism of the determina-
tion of the meaning that impregnates the concepts in their positivity, but rather under
the perspective of the determination of the reality of general or continuous entities.
47
See n43.
One such possible re-enunciation would be: The totality of the phenomenological
manifestation of a continuum constitutes its reality. Two other metaphysical forms
of the maxim could also be: a continuum of possibilities or necessities constitutes
its reality in the totality of its existential concreteness; and, the being of a continuum
is given by the totality of its phenomenological manifestation, that is, by its
cognizability.
Although we have already discussed some of the points that follow, let us allow
ourselves a certain degree of redundancy for the sake of clarity. First, we should
remember that a continuum of possibilities does not prescribe one type of concrete-
ness more than another; its acts are typical of any fortuitous distribution. There is,
however, one necessary element: the need for the continuum to manifest itself
phenomenologically—the general must, somehow, singularize itself. As was the case
in the cosmogenesis, some game must be played so that the uselessness of doing noth-
ing does not result in a self-extinction of potentiality. It is never enough to say that this
Universe, as Peircean Cosmology has demonstrated, is an experiential consequence
of a conception that derived from a continuum of possibilities. When we say that the
act of a potential of possibilities is not a necessary act, it should be understood that
such potency is not exempt from acting, but rather only from acting in a given manner
and not in another. That is why we have set aside considerable space to reflect on the
incognizable; the remarkable consequence of Pragmatism, identifying being and
being cognizable, announced that the process of making real necessarily requires
becoming exterior in a theater of reactions, which in turn is the very condition of the
possibility of evolution. Despite the risk of nausea, growth requires the Other; from
dream to reality there necessarily is the passage through the chisel of Existence.
In this explanation of the metaphysical content of the maxim of Pragmatism, it is
left for us to reflect on its application to a continuum grounded in logical necessity.
We should start with a question: would it be possible for a continuum of necessity
not to determine itself existentially? In other words, could thirdness not become
secondness? If we reflect a little on Peirce’s Evolutionism and Cosmology, the
answer to this question is obviously a negative one. From those doctrines, we know
that thirdness constitutes a cluster of habits acquired from an existence involving
absolute Chance. Thus, since Existence precedes Law in the sequence of cosmogen-
esis, the continuum of necessity, in which the third category consists, has its being
totally given phenomenologically. The author’s words are clear on this point:
“A law, then, which never will operate, has no positive existence.”48
Not without reason, the author places the verb operate in the future tense; let us
remember the esse in futuro, which is the essence of the continuum of the third
category.
The metaphysical dimension of Pragmatism thus explained, there remains to
state on record that this scope of the doctrine should no longer seem strange in view
of the development of Peircean Metaphysics. When we admit that the limits of
knowing are the limits of real being, we must necessarily acknowledge a depen-
dence of the epistemic realm on the metaphysical one. A point, however, still
48
CP, 5.545.
remains for reflection. When we realize that Pragmatism, as a logical rule with an
epistemic hue that regards the determinations of the meaning of concepts, also
applies to the coimplication between real categories, we are compelled to reprise the
hypothesis concerning the similarity between a Logic that permeates reasoning and
one that shapes the Universe itself. Such a hypothesis, we beg the reader to recall,
had already surfaced in the development of Cosmogony.49
Prior to Cosmology, Objective Idealism, by coloring the world with ideality and
intelligibility, had already announced a connaturality between the forms of thought
and the object thought. On the other hand, in the description of the continua that
interlace the first and third categories, we have employed the modal forms of pos-
sibility and necessity in endeavoring to find the explanation for what an ontological
Logic might be.
At the level of a Logic of arguments, the reducibility of the maxim of Pragmatism
to a necessary relation between the particular and the general implicitly entails the
condition of possibility of the inductive argument. The temporal course of experi-
ence, in its singularity, induces the generality of a concept, whereas the plurality of
acts induces the cognition of potency. This too has been the essence of the doctrine
of Pragmatism. It is explicitly present in the following passage of the author’s work:
“the validity of induction depends upon the necessary relation between the general
and the singular. It is precisely this which is the support of Pragmatism.”50
Preceding the search for the very fabric adequate to an ontological Logic, it
would be convenient beforehand to verify the author’s view on the forms of argu-
ment that comprise the modes of reasoning.
In one of the lectures given by Peirce on Pragmatism,51 he distinguishes three
types of reasoning under the form of three logical arguments:
These three kinds of reasoning are Abduction, Induction, and Deduction. Deduction is the
only necessary reasoning. It is the reasoning of mathematics. It starts from a hypothesis, the
truth or falsity of which has nothing to do with the reasoning; and of course its conclusions
are equally ideal [...] Induction is the experimental testing of a theory. The justification of it
is that, although the conclusion at any stage of the investigation may be more or less errone-
ous, yet the further application of the same method must correct the error. The only thing
that Induction accomplishes is to determine the value of a quantity. It sets out with a theory
and it measures the degree of concordance of that theory with fact. It never can originate
any idea whatever. No more can Deduction. All the ideas of science come to it by the way
of Abduction. Abduction consists in studying facts and devising a theory to explain them.
Its only justification is that if we are ever to understand things at all, it must be in that way.52
All we have to do is to go carefully through this passage of the author’s work to

discover that, although their definitions emerge here for the first time, these three
types of reasoning, corresponding to three forms of argument, are very familiar.
Indeed, after presenting the refined logical architecture of the Peircean doctrines, it
49
See Chap. 5, n9.
50
CP, 5.170; EP, 2.216.
51
“The Three Kinds of Goodness,” CP, 5.120–150; EP, 2.196–207; this is the fifth lecture of the
Cambridge lecture series of 1903.
52
CP, 5.145; EP, 2.205; my italics.
would be strange to encounter forms of reasoning never employed before. At any

rate, we have been employing the terms deduction, induction, and hypothesis in
their usual logical sense. In effect, Peirce’s view does not differ very much, under a
strictly formal point of view, from the current consideration of the first two types of
reasoning, while having developed, however, more markedly original points with
respect to a heuristic Logic or Logic of hypothesis, the mode of argument which he
calls Abduction. In any case, on this point, we intend here solely to consider these
three types of argument from the perspective of an ontological Logic.
Beginning with the deductive argument, we already know that it is a necessary
form of reasoning, such as the syllogism in Barbara.53 The author, however, in one
of his criticisms of Kant, calls our attention to the fact that a deductive strategy can-
not be reduced to the simplicity of Barbara:
[...] Kant imagined that all necessary reasoning was of the type of a syllogism in Barbara.
Nothing could be more ridiculously in conflict with well-known facts.54 For had that been
the case, any person with a good logical head would be able instantly to see whether a given
conclusion followed from given premises or not; and moreover the number of conclusions
from a small number of premises would be very moderate. Now it is true that when Kant
wrote, Legendre and Gauss had not shown what a countless multitude of theorems are
deducible from the very few premises of arithmetic. I suppose we must excuse him, there-
fore, for not knowing this.55
Concentrating, however, on the points that strictly concern the sequence of this
work, we must say that the maxim of Pragmatism—although demonstrated in its
broadest sense as a relation between the particular and the general which thus makes
it, for this very reason, more ajoined with induction—keeps close ties with the
deductive argument. We must remember that the second form of its enunciation56
explicitly mentions that practical consequences are necessarily extracted from the
concept that has its meaning under investigation. In other words, the consequences
are deduced from it.
As previously shown, we know that Induction is a type of argument that is
implied in the formulation of Pragmatism, and that it represents a generalization
from a plurality of singulars. Through this process, the fabric of the ego is woven
after the fragmentation of experienced facts, together with the inductive formation
of all beliefs that mold conduct. Experience as the cognitive result of living induces
the formation of mediative cognition, whereby this process represents, as already
seen, the basic law of mind. In Peircean realism, the validity of induction is grounded
on the real generality of the investigated object. In other words, if generality is real,
generalization acquires its most legitimate logical right; and
53
For those not so familiar with the terminology of the Aristotelian theory of syllogism, Barbara is
the name given by scholastics to the deductive argument having the formula:
All A is B
All C is A
All C is B.
54
Cf. CP, 4.427. Original note from Collected Papers Edition
55
CP, 5.178; EP, 2.219.
56
See n13.
Now to say that generality is primordial, but generalization not, is like saying that diversity
is primordial but diversification not. It turns logic upside down.57
However, if the conclusion of the investigation is wrong, this will be revealed by

the continued application of the method itself, since every mediative concept in its
essential esse in futuro must face the ultimate course of experience, thus undergoing
a self-correcting process. Fallibilism itself has already announced the temporariness
of all positive theory; and Evolutionism has shown that the theory of probabilities
constitutes the adequate fabric for the representation of an object permeated by
Chance. Thus, the inductive argument must lead to a conclusion that is no more than
probable and properly related to its statistical character. This is what the author
affirms in the following passage:
Induction may be defined as an argument […] which assumes that that is true of a whole
collection which is true of a number of instances taken from it at random. This might be
called statistical argument.58
We still ought to make some comments concerning the hypothetical or abductive

argument, which Peirce at times calls retroductive, as in the following passage:
“Retroduction is the provisional adoption of a hypothesis, because every possible
consequence of it is capable of experimental verification [...].”59
As an originary argument, that is, as genesis of an explicative theory of facts,
abductive reasoning moves from observed experience to the construction of a con-
cept. We cannot, at this point, analyze how this process occurs, but rather can only
observe that the abductive vector is the opposite of the inductive one. Induction, we
already know, departs from a theory in search of facts that corroborate its veracity.
This fundamental difference, which, according to the author, is not always clear to
the scholars of Logic, he comments on:
Abduction makes its start from the facts, without, at the outset, having any particular theory
in view, though it is motived by the feeling that a theory is needed to explain the surprising
facts. Induction makes its start from a hypothesis which seems to recommend itself, without
at the outset having any particular facts in view, though it feels the need of facts to support
the theory. Abduction seeks a theory. Induction seeks for facts. In abduction the consideration
of the facts suggests the hypothesis. In induction the study of the hypothesis suggests the
experiments which bring to light the very facts to which the hypothesis had pointed.60
It would be fitting, now, to ask: given the relationships of deduction and induc-
tion with Pragmatism, what is the link between abduction and that doctrine? We
know that the role of a hypothesis is to explain facts. But what does this really
mean? We believe it is no more than a correspondence between experiential conse-
quences extracted from it and the facts that it proposes to explain. From this point
of view, the maxim of Pragmatism will act as a factor of choice and decision between
competing hypotheses or even, through an inductive process, will make the merely
57
CP, 6.262; EP, 1.346–347; W, 8.179; my italics.
58
CP, 5.275; EP, 1.33; W, 2.217; my italics.
59
CP, 1.68.
60
hypothetical, which is translatable into the merely possible, into an effectively

operative theory—that is, a theory with correct predictive power of the future course
of experience. In short, from the hypothesis to the belief in a theory there is the
necessary transition from the possible to the probable, since this is the character
that, according to Fallibilism, every positive concept must have. This nuance of
possibility, which comprises every hypothesis in its genesis, is present in the very
formulation of the abductive argument: “The surprising fact, C, is what is observed;
however, if A were true, C would be normal. Therefore, there is reason to suspect
that A is true.”61
Now, this suspicion in the guise of mere possibility must be corroborated in
futuro by the class of phenomena over which induction will work. Let us now give
the author his voice who substantiates the ideas that link Pragmatism to the abduc-
tive argument:
If you carefully consider the question of pragmatism you will see that it is nothing else than
the question of the logic of abduction. That is, pragmatism proposes a certain maxim which,
if sound, must render needless any further rule as to the admissibility of hypotheses to rank
as hypotheses, that is to say, as explanations of phenomena held as hopeful suggestions;
and, furthermore, this is all that the maxim of pragmatism really pretends to do, at least so
far as it is confined to logic, and is not understood as a proposition in psychology. For the
maxim of pragmatism is that a conception can have no logical effect or import differing
from that of a second conception except so far as, taken in connection with other concep-
tions and intentions, it might conceivably modify our practical conduct differently from that
second conception.62
Once having established the close relationships between the types of reasoning
and Pragmatism, we have to recover the fact that, under the modal viewpoint, deduc-
tion is associated with necessity, and abduction with logical possibility. However,
the question naturally arises: what is the modal space of induction? We believe that,
insofar as an inductive inference is only probable, it must contain possibility and
necessity, and each at respective levels of intensity, which are, on the one hand,
established by the experimental volume of observations (called sample size in the
theory of probabilities), and, on the other hand, by the limits of real determination
that define the object of investigation itself. In sum:
Deduction proves that something “must” be; Induction shows that something “actually” is
operative; Abduction merely suggests that something “may be.”63
We presume that the approach concerning the three forms of argument is in strict
compliance with the task of considering them in their relation to Pragmatism, and,
to a secondary degree, serves to prepare the conceptual stage for a reflection on
Logic in its ontological hue, which Peirce calls Objective Logic.
Given the foundation of Peircean realism, we have often observed that the uni-
verse of Law, that is, the universe of real Thirdness, appears to be a potentiality
61
CP, 5.189; EP, 2.231; my italics.
62
CP, 5.196; EP, 2.234–235; my italics.
63
CP, 5.171; EP, 2.216.
whose logical fabric is necessity. Given the above discussion on the forms of
argument, we are led to associate Law with Deduction, since the latter has the char-
acter of necessary inference. Notwithstanding the near naturality of this association,
we also are compelled to inquire: how precisely does it occur?
Let us resort to the author’s answer:
We usually conceive nature to be perpetually making deductions in Barbara. This is our
natural and anthropomorphic metaphysics. We conceive that there are Laws of Nature,
which are her Rules or major premises. We conceive that Cases arise under these laws; these
cases consist in the predication, or occurrence, of “causes,” which are the middle terms of
the syllogisms. And finally we conceive that the occurrence of these causes, by virtue of the
laws of Nature, results in effects which are the conclusions of the syllogisms.64
The best thing to do now will be to formulate an example that may clarify this
p assage of Peirce’s work. So, let us take Einstein’s famous law of the equivalence
between matter and energy, and try to place its operation in a syllogistic form, as the
author suggests:
RULE OR LAW: Energy equals matter times the speed of light squared.
CASE: An electron in corpuscular state becomes a wave.
RESULT OR EFFECT: The energy contained in this wave equals the mass of the electron
times the speed of light squared.
In the economical terms of mathematics, we have:

RULE: E = mc2.
CASE: Given me (electron mass).
RESULT: Then Ee = mec2 (Where Ee is the energy contained in me).65
It thus is shown that the law in itself is not a deductive argument, but rather par-
ticipates in one as its major premise, which Peirce calls the Rule. For the Case we
understand the conditions of the existentialization of the Law—that is, that which
the author calls the Cause, which should be associated with the Aristotelian concept
of efficient cause. Through this Aristotelian prism, the Rule or Law would represent
the formal cause in the syllogism. It thus is that one of the elements of Peirce’s
objective Logic is construed as the mode of operation of a law on the individuals
that it subsumes, and in the form of an argument of the nature of deduction. As we
know that the modes of argument constitute a triad, let us now see what the author
has in store regarding induction and abduction in their objective content:
I have not succeeded in persuading my contemporaries to believe that Nature also makes
inductions and retroductions. They seem to think that her mind66 is in the infantile stage of
Aristotelian and Stoic philosophers. I point out that Evolution wherever it takes place is one
vast succession of generalizations, by which matter is becoming subjected to ever higher
and higher Laws; and I point to the infinite variety of nature as testifying to her Originality
64
65
This example, in its extreme simplicity, is meant solely as an illustration. The reader may verify
the veracity of Peirce’s proposal using more complex examples.
66
Peirce refers to the mind of nature.
or power of Retroduction. But so far, the old ideas are too ingrained. Very few accept my
message.67
We dare, nevertheless, to suppose that Peirce has, at this point of his work,
already acquired his credentials from the reader, so that we may carry on reflecting
seriously on his message. Thus, we are promptly led to reprising his Evolutionism
that represented the growth of thirdness in the form of the acquisition of habits, that
is, in the form of generalizations that are of an inductive nature. The homeostatic
tendency of Nature is expressed by its eidetic substratum in forming continua of
necessity, but in a succession having as its ultimate final cause is the crystallization
of thirdness, as accounted in Cosmology.
Also, let us recall that at the beginning of the cosmogenesis the hypothetical
argument in its ontological form was announced on the occasion of the transition
from the freely unlimited Nothing to a potentiality of some sort. In effect, we tried
to show the modal nature of Abduction in the exposition of the triad of arguments,
that is, to show its pertinence in establishing a parallel between the originary char-
acter of the representations and that which appeared at the origin of the Universe
itself.
Adopting the validity of this modal parallel, we are compelled to think that, if the
genesis of the world was not accomplished through the constriction of a rule, then
there would not seem to be any rules that condition the formulation of an explicative
hypothesis. This consideration is related to an earlier question that was left unan-
swered68 when discussing the process through which a new idea of positive media-
tion emerges––what we call, a hypothesis.
Contending that the solution to this question is immediately given, since there is
an argument that typifies Abduction, as just seen, is absolutely not the same as intro-
ducing a rule that provides, by itself, the formulation of a new idea. However, as this
point is only mediately relevant to Objective Logic, we propose to confine the ques-
tion of how a hypothesis emerges to this type of negative commentary so far woven.
It seems clear, however, that although a hypothetical proposition in its general
aspect is subsumed under the third category, the unconditionality of its emergence
also links it to firstness, suggesting that we reflect on the matrix of the logical
composition of the categories.69 From a different angle, the attribution of a mind to
Nature is explicit in this last passage of the author’s work; and this fact should not
surprise those who have attentively studied Peirce’s Objective Idealism and
Cosmology.
Reinforcing, now, the connaturality of that attribution, the doctrine of Objective
Logic is added to those two doctrines, and as such states that the Universe contains
a logical process of its own and is, for this reason, real, that is, independent of the
idiosyncrasy of human thought. And:
67
68
See n45.
69
On this point, see Peirce CP, 1.530–544.
[...] so far as there is any reality, what that reality consists in is this: that there is in the being
of things something which corresponds to the process of reasoning, that the world lives, and
moves, and has its being in a logic of events.70
To conclude this chapter, we need to only add a few more lines to bring to the
mind of the reader the essence of Pragmatism, now that it is demonstrated that it
does not constitute a philosophical system, but rather the logical substratum that
permeates Peirce’s entire Metaphysics.
In the beginning of this chapter, Pragmatism, by being announced through a
relation between potency and act, represented the logical importance of the exteri-
orization of every continuum, as the condition for its reality, on the one hand, and
its meaning in a representation, on the other hand. In this close interlacing of reality
and cognizability, we believe that the doctrine assumes its true status, clearly
revealing its distance from all kinds of utilitarianism by virtue of being an end in
itself, and furthermore, from the materialism to which the doctrine has been led by
incorrect interpretations. Its remotest origins, of which the author reminds us, if
they were known by all its interpreters, would surely prevent misunderstandings:
“It is only an application of the sole principle of logic which was recommended by
Jesus; ‘By their fruits shall you know them.’”71
70
NEM, pp. 343–344; my italics.
71
CP, 5.402n1; my italics.
Chapter 7
The Lesson of the Universe
Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost
in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the winter
lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
T. S. ELIOT, The Dry Salvages
Under the premise that Peirce’s Metaphysics was evidenced as a foundational system,
we find a final combination of concepts unnecessary, considering the limited space
we set aside at the end of this book. It seems important, however, in these concluding
remarks, to emphasize the Fallibilism that asserts that our knowledge is “always float-
ing on a continuum of uncertainty and indeterminacy,” meaning nothing more than a
permanent opening to an evolutionary correction of our representations. Therefore,
the answer to our question “how ought the world be to seem so to me?”, like all and
every answer to a positive question, exhales the odor of the hypothetical.
As we have seen, the abductive argument, which carries out the task of establish-
ing hypothesis, promptly breaks through the brute force of the unexplainable, and
its importance within the logical sphere of the author becomes easily perceptible, in
view of the radical Peircean denial of the unknowable and of all that can obstruct the
path of investigation. The abductive vector has its origin designed in experience and
its meaning defined by an explanatory theory. None other is the meaning that we
applied to the expository sequence of this book: from Phenomenology, constituted
by the inventory of modes of being of all experience, to Metaphysics, a general
theory of reality, the vector of hypothesis is engendered.
By asserting his Metaphysics as scientific, Peirce intended merely to confer to it
a character similar to any special science, making Logic and the phenomenal uni-
verse the cornerstones for the construction of his theories. Effectively, then, this
hypothetical odor spreads not only in the interior of Metaphysics, but also invades
the ambience of all positive science. This seems to be the grand finale of the music
of the spheres. By admitting that all science has, as a purpose, a real cut of thirdness
adapted to its specialty, we realize why realism is implied in modern science1 and,
thus, that object does not differ in nature from metaphysical objects.
See Chap. 2.
1

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66314-2_7
100 7 The Lesson of the Universe
Nevertheless, from modernity to the present time, Metaphysics became a kind of

philosophically obscene word, although human behavior is steeped in metaphysical
expectations, even in the simple act of consulting a recipe to make a pie, an evident
virtual object that requires, in order to be successful, that its ingredients be sub-
jected to real laws, ensuring the continuance of general predicates of the past. But
we always hear this and, ergo, we never seem to listen.
We dare to say that Peirce’s works redeem a space lost by Philosophy: the space
to think the world in its reality, and in a way that promotes, again, closeness to the
universe of the sciences, in an interaction that heralds being the most prolific. To our
mind, Peircean Metaphysics does not conflict with contemporary science. Quite the
contrary, on the one hand it anticipates, in full effectiveness of Newton’s mechanics
in the nineteenth century, the current acknowledgment of a principle of chance pres-
ent in phenomena linked to the structure of matter, and, on the other hand, it theo-
rizes on a prematerial universe, whose evolution does not in any way contradict the
cosmologies of which we are now aware. A detailed interlacing of modern Physics
and Metaphysics, as we know from Peircean works, is a point for an instigating
future research.
A great part of contemporary Philosophy seems to have retired to the apparently
safe haven of language and its inner Logic, in an attitude based on the fact that
everything we may know must be represented and, as such, be subject to a grammar
that shapes every system of representation. Having the world as object is, thus,
transformed in having language as object, confining a major part of Philosophy to
the universes of syntax, semantics, and the so-called “formal” Logic.
Notwithstanding the legitimacy of language as a philosophical object, to the
point of constituting one of the fields of investigation of thinkers of the stature of
Wittgenstein, the price that some currents of Philosophy pay for that confinement
seems to be extremely high. From one point of view, they seem to numb themselves
in the generality internal to representations, forgetting to reflect on the positive con-
ditions of possibility that validates the general statute of language and, hence, of
thought itself, bringing to its project a nominalist content in the widest sense of the
relations between the particular and the general. From another, this kind of tran-
scendentalism at the level of language seems to be, again, surrounded by the specter
of the unknown as, to be aware of what could virtually be contained in the structure
of representation, presupposes that something possibly could not. However, the
Peircean vector is guided in the opposite direction. It is the world order that enables
the order of representation; that is the reality that enables the phenomenon of media-
tion. And whatever is beyond any possibility of being represented does not exist, in
accordance with the precept of identity between being and being knowable, as evi-
denced in Pragmatism.
Thus, being is not being represented, but being representable. For no other rea-
son, the full understanding of a general theory of the signs should be consummated
through a general theory of the object, such as it was interlaced within the full
answer to the question on the structure of reality.
7 The Lesson of the Universe 101
Metaphysics will enlighten the understanding of semiotics, and one of the focal
points of light comes from the fact that the form of the object imposes on the
modally possible form of the sign. When we mention the word form with an
explicitly ontological character of morphé, we must also observe that such a char-
acter was lost throughout history. The formal predicate no longer has the nature
attributed by Aristotle, referring now only to syntactic relations, internal to the
Logic of languages.2
On the other hand, it is also important to re-establish that it is licit to replace the
Kantian idea of possible experience by that of possible concept,3 since the true form
of the concept ultimately derives from the factual conditions provided by a state of
real things, although Peirce did not directly formulate such a consequence. By tac-
itly conceptualizing, from the idea of possible concept, an idea of truth contrived in
the correlation representation of object, we are not shutting the modal door of pos-
sibility to the universe of thought. Recalling the original motivation of this book, it
must be borne in mind that initially seeking a heuristic Logic and its relations with
a Philosophy of Mathematics,4 Metaphysics revealed the universe of possibility that
permeates the former, and that of ideality that constitutes the latter. As one of the
paths that were delineated for the progress of this investigation, we mediately fore-
see the relationship between Mathematics and Abduction with the reality of an evo-
lutionary Cosmos, in which the real world revealed itself as a fragment of an ideal
world of possibilities.5
When we refer, again, to the point that we view as the central core of this book,
Cosmology, it is proper to comment on some aspects that, in the chapter, may have
intrigued readers. We believe that one of them is the relationship of a Genesis with
its Creator, an issue that we omitted for not being relevant to the purpose of our
research, although appropriate in Peircean Metaphysics.6 Another aspect revealed
by Cosmology is the end of the evolution of the Universe which is consummated in
the crystallization of thirdness. Although we have only dwelled on the procedural
aspect of evolution, circumscribing it to the system of ideas that we developed, an
analysis of the meaning of that final cause that seems to falsely suggest an apologe
tically rationalist character in Peirce, would require a deep analysis of the relations
between Logic, Ethics, and Aesthetics in the realm of the author’s Philosophy,
crossing the limits we imposed to this book. Nevertheless, we can assure that this is
one of the most fascinating points of the Peircean works, open to future approaches.
2
In this connection, see the explicit comment by Dumitriu, Anton–History of Logic, Tunbridge
Wells, Kent: Abacus Press, 1977, 4 vols. 2, pp. 151–158.
3
Review this point already discussed in Chap. 6.
4
Cf. Preface of this book.
5
Cf. CP, 3.527. Regarding this paragraph, see the interesting essay by Sandra B. Rosenthal, “The
Pragmatic World of Charles Peirce,” Transactions of The Charles Peirce Society, vol. XIX, n. 1,
1983, pp. 13–22.
6
Examine this point in the excellent essay by Lauro F. Barbosa da Silveira, “Cosmos Evolutivo e
Plano da Criação na Filosofia Peirciana,” Trans/Form/Ação, n. 8, são Paulo, UNESP, 1985.
102 7 The Lesson of the Universe
We would further stress that, as the very substance of Peirce’s Cosmorphism, the
dissolution of the frontiers between interiority and exteriority foreshadowed in
Phenomenology, grounded on Objective Idealism and radically assumed in
Cosmogenesis, raises inevitably the idea of growth through a mirroring of (in)
thought in (of) the world. Not by chance,
[...] thought is the mirror of being, the law that the end of being and highest reality is the
living impersonation of the idea that evolution generates,7 [and] the only end of science, as
such, is to learn the lesson that the universe has to teach it.8
This lesson, no matter how hard it is to learn it, should ultimately prevail, if we
definitely acknowledge the power of experience and otherness. Similar to how, for
long periods, we take for granted the illusions of the dream in the personal history
of every one of us, the history of humanity reveals how long we cling to the false
theories of the world. However, “The essence of truth lies in its resistance to being
ignored.”9
It behooves us to be willing to learn. Perhaps, we may start by listening to the
revealing music of the spheres emanating from this Kósmos Noetós10 that Peirce
bequeathed us.
7
8
CP, 5.589; EP, 2.53–54; my italics.
9
10
The title of this book, Kósmos Noetós (Intelligible Universe) was inspired by the reading of
Plato’s Timaeus.
Bibliography
Charles Sanders Peirce’s Works Consulted
PEIRCE, Charles Sanders Peirce. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. edited by Charles
Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1931–35 e 1958, 8 vols. (We refer to this work in the usual manner: CP indicates
Collected Papers; the first number designates the volume, and the second the paragraph.)
_______. Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce: A Chronological edition. Edited by Max Fisch,
Edward C. Moore, Christian Kloesel, Nathan Houser, André De Tienne et al. 8 vols.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982–2010. (Referred as W, followed by the number
of the volume and number of the page.)
_______. The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce. Edited by Carolyn Eisele. The
Hague, Mouton Publishers, 1976, vol. 4. (Referral to this work, throughout the work is made
under the abbreviated form NEM, associated with the corresponding page of the 4th volume
of the edition used.)
_______. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. vol. 1 Edited by Nathan Houser
and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. (Referred to as EP, fol-
lowed by the corresponding number of the volume and number of the page.)
_______. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. vol. 2 Edited by the Peirce
Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. (Referred to as EP, followed by
the corresponding number of the volume and number of the page.)
_______. Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science. Edited by Carolyn Eisele. Berlin,
New York, Amsterdam: Mouton, 1985, 2 vols.
_______. Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria
Lady Welby. Edited by Charles Hardwick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.
_______. Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to the Nation. Edited by Kenneth Ketner and
James Edward Cook. Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1975–1987, 4 vols.
_______. Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Confer- ences / Lectures of 1898.
Edited by Kenneth Ketner. Cambridge: Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1992.
_______. Studies in Logic by Members of Johns Hopkins University (1883). Edited by Charles
Sanders Peirce. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1983.
_______. Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Richard Robin (org.). The
University of Massachusetts Press, 1967.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66314-2
104 Bibliography
Other Essays by the Author
IBRI, Ivo A. The Ontology of Action in Peirce’s Philosophy. In Elka Traykova, Paul Cobley,
Miryana Yanakieva, Raya Kuncheva, Andrey Tashev (eds.) The Statues of Thought. In Honorem
Professor Ivan Mladenov, Sofia: Publishing Centre “Boyan Penev”, 2015.
_______. The Continuity of Life: on Peirce’s Objective Idealism. In: Peirce and BioSemiotics: A
Guess at the Riddle of Life, Vinicius Romanini; Eliseo Fernándes (eds.), Springer Dordrecht
Heidelberg New York London, 2014.
_______. The Heuristic Power of Agapism in Peirce’s Philosophy. In: Nóema, v. 4, n. 2, 2013.
_______. Neopragmatism viewed by pragmaticism. In: European Journal of Pragmatism and
American Philosophy, 1, 181–192, 2013.
_______. Semiotics and Epistemology: The Pragmatic Ground of Communication. In: Rosa
M. Calcaterra (org.). New Perspectives on Pragmatism and Analytic Philosophy. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, p. 71–82, 2011.
_______. Reflections on Practical Otherness: Peirce and Applied Sciences. In: Henrik Rydenfelt;
Mats Bergman (orgs.). Ideas in Action: Proceedings of the Applying Peirce Conference. 1ª ed.
Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatism Network, v. 1, p. 74–85, 2010.
_______. Peircean Seeds for a Philosophy of Art. In: Semiotics: “The Semiotics of Space” –
Haworth, K, Hogue J., Sbrocchi, L. G. (editors). Legas Publishers, New York, 2010; pp.1–16,
2010.
_______. Choices, Dogmatisms and Bets – Justifying Peirce’s Realism. In: Veritas, PUCRs, v 57,
n. 2: 51–61, 2012.
_______. Reflections on a Poetic Ground in Peirce’s Philosophy. In: Transactions of the Charles
S. Peirce Society, v. 45, n. 3, p. 273–307, 2009.
_______. O Significado de Primeiridade em Schelling, Schopenhauer e Peirce. In: Cognitio, São
Paulo, v. 9, n. 2, p. 223–234. jul./dec. 2008.
_______. Causalidade e Vida: Uma Visão Crítica do Determinismo. In: J. G. Coelho; M. E.
Q. Gonzalez; M. C. Broens (orgs.). Encontro com as Ciências Cognitivas. São Paulo: Cultura
Acadêmica, v. 5, p. 346–360, 2007.
_______. The Heuristic Exclusivity of Abduction in Peirce’s Philosophy. In: Semiotics and
Philosophy in C. S. Peirce. Edited by Rossella Fabbrichesi Leo and Susana Marietti. Cambridge:
Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006.
_______. Pragmatismo e Realismo: a semiótica como transgressão da linguagem. In: Cognitio,
São Paulo, v. 7, n. 2, p. 247–259, jul./dec. 2006.
_______. O Amor Criativo Como Princípio Heurístico na Filosofia de Peirce. In: Cognitio, São
Paulo, v. 6, n. 2, p. 187–199, jul./dec. 2005.
_______. Semiótica e Pragmatismo: interfaces teóricas. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 5, n. 2, p. 168–
179, jul./dec. 2004.
_______. Pragmatismo e a Possibilidade da Metafísica. In: Cognitio, são Paulo, v. 4, n.1, p. 9–14,
2003.
_______. Tópicos para uma Poética da Alteridade. In: Ordem e Vertigem. Anais do Centro Cultural
do Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, v. 02, p. 07–12, 2003.
_______. Considerações sobre o Estatuto da Ética no Pragmatismo de Charles s. Peirce. In:
Síntese, Belo Horizonte, v. 29, n. 93, p. 117–123, 2002.
_______. Finitude e Existência em Fichte. In: Hypnos, São Paulo, v. 8, p. 93–103, 2002.
_______. A vital importância da primeiridade na filosofia de Peirce. In: Cognitio, são Paulo, n. 3,
p. 46–52, nov. 2002.
_______. Ser e Aparecer na Filosofia de Peirce: o estatuto da fenomenologia. In: Cognitio, São
Paulo, n. 2, p. 67–76, 1st Sem. 2001.
_______. Sobre a incerteza. In: Trans/Form/Ação, n. 23, p. 97–104, 2000.
_______. As Consequências de Consequências Práticas. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, ano 1, n. 1,
p. 30–37, 2nd Sem. 2000.
Bibliography 105
_______. Sobre a identidade Ideal-Real na filosofia de Charles S. Peirce. In: Cognitio, São Paulo,
n. 1, p. 38–45, 2nd Sem. 2000.
_______. Verdade e Continuum. In: Hypnos, São Paulo, v. 5, p. 280–289, 1999.
_______. A Física da Physis. In: Hypnos, São Paulo, v. 2, p. 23–32, 1996.
Bibliographic Suggestions
For other analyses on the subject matters addressed in this book, we suggest the following readings:
Biographical Elements
ANDERSON, Douglas R. Strands of System: the Philosophy of Charles Peirce. Indiana: Purdue
University Press, 1995. Chapter 1.
BRENT, Joseph. Charles Sanders Peirce: a Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
FISCH, Max Harold. Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism: Essays by Max Fisch. Edited by Kenneth
Laine Katner and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
GALLIE, W. B. Peirce and Pragmatism. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1952. Chapter 2.
On this theme, we would strongly recommend reading all the Introductions to the Writings of
Charles Sanders Peirce: A Chronological Edition. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
volumes 1–8, 1982–2010.
Chapter 1: Phenomenology: The Categories of Experience
ANDERSON, Douglas R. Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Peirce. Indiana: Purdue
ATKINS, Richard Kenneth. Restructuring the sciences: Peirce’s Categories and His Classifications
of the sciences. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v. 42, n. 4. p. 483–500,
2006.
______. An “Entirely Different Series of Categories”: Peirce’s Material Categories. In: Transactions
of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v. 46, n. 1, p. 92–110, 2010.
______.The Pleasures of Goodness: Peircean Aesthetics in light of Kant’s critique of the Power of
Judgment. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 9, n. 1, p. 13–25, jan.-jun. 2008.
BLACHOWICZ, James. Realism and Idealism in Peirce’s Categories. In: Transactions of the
Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v. 8, n. 4, p. 199–213, 1972.
BUZZELLI, Donald E. The Argument of Peirce’s “New List of Categories”. In: Transactions of
the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v. 8, n. 2, p. 63–89, 1972.
COLAPIETRO, Vincent M. Peirce’s Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human
Subjectivity. New York: State University of New York Press, 1989.
DE TIENNE, André. Peirce’s Early Method of Finding the Categories. In: Transactions of the
______. Peirce’s Definition of the Phaneron. In: Charles Sanders Peirce and the Philosophy of
Science: Papers from the Harvard Sesquicentennial Congress. Edited by Edward C. Moore.
Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1993.
EISELE, Carolyn. Studies in the Scientific and Mathematical Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce. The
Hague: Mouton, 1979.
106 Bibliography
ESPOSITO, Joseph. Evolutionary Metaphysics: The Development of Peirce’s Theory of

Categories. Athens: Ohio University Press. Chapters 1, 2 and 3.
______. The Development of Peirce’s Categories. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce
Society, v. 15, n. 1, p. 51–60, 1979.
FABBRICHESI, Rossela. Il Concetto di Relazione in Peirce: Dalla Genesi Categoriale alla
Notazione Logico-Diagrammatica. Milano: Editoriale Jaca Book, 1992.
HANTZIS, Catharine Wells. Peirce’s Conception of Philosophy: Its Method and Its Program. In:
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, v. 23, n. 2, p. 289–307. 1987.
HAUSMAN, Carl R. Charles Sanders Peirce’s Evolutionary Philosophy.Cambridge, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1993. Chapter 3.
______. Value and Peircean Categories. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v.
15, n. 3, p. 203–224, 1979.
HOOKWAY, Christopher. Peirce. The Arguments of the Philosophers. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1985. Chapter 3.
HOUSER, Nathan. Peirce’s General Taxonomy of Consciousness. In: Transactions of the Charles
Sanders Peirce Society, v. 19, n. 4, p. 331–359, 1983.
KRAUSSER, Peter. The Three Fundamental Structural Categories of Charles s. Peirce. In:
Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v. 13, n. 3, p. 189–215, 1977.
MICHAEL, Fred. The Deduction of Categories in Peirce’s “New List”. In: Transactions of the
PARKER, Kelly. The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998.
Chapters 5 and 8.
ROSENTHAL, Sandra. Pragmatic Experimentalism and the Derivation of the Categories. In: The
Rule of Reason: The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by Jacqueline Brunning and
Paul Forster. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
STAAT, Wim. On Abduction, Deduction, Induction and the Categories. In: Transactions of the
Charles S. Peirce Society, v. 34, n. 2, p. 225–238, 1993.
Turrisl, Patricia A. Peirce’s Logic of Discovery: Abduction and the Universal Categories. In:
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, v. 26, n. 4, p. 465–498, 1990.
WIENER, Philip P.; YOUNG, Frederic H. (eds.) Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders
Peirce. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1952.
Chapter 2: Realism and the Categorial Conception of the World
ALMEDER, Robert. The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce: A Critical Introduction. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1980. Chapters 2 and 5.
______. The Epistemological Realism of Charles Peirce. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders
Peirce Society, v. 11, n. 1, p. 3–17, 1975.
ALTSHULER, Bruce. Peirce’s Theory of Truth and the Revolt Against Realism. In: Transactions
of Charles S. Peirce Society, v. p. 34–56, 1982.
BOLER, John F. Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism: A Study of Peirce’s Relation to John
Duns Scotus. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963.
BUCHLER, Justus. Charles Peirce’s Empiricism. London, Kegan Paul: Trenck, Trubner & Co.
Ltd., 1939.
DAVIS, William H. Peirce’s Epistemology. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1972.
DELANEY, Cornelius. Peirce on Science and Metaphysics: Overview of a Synoptic Vision. In:
Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 3, p. 11–21, nov. 2002.
______. Peirce on the Conditions of the Possibility of Science. In: Charles Sanders Peirce and the
Philosophy of Science: Papers from the Harvard Sesquicentennial Congress. Edited by Edward
C. Moore. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1993.
Bibliography 107
______. Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce. Notre Dame,
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. Part II, Chapter 3; Part III, Chapters 1 and 2.
DILEO, Jeffrey. Peirce’s Haecceitism. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v.
27, n. 1, p. 79–109, 1991.
FORSTER, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011. Chapters 1, 3 and 8.
FORSTER, Paul D. Peirce on the Progress and Authority of Science. In: Transactions of the
HAUSMAN, Carl R. Charles Sanders Peirce’s Evolutionary Philosophy. Cambridge, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1993. Chapters 4 and 5.
______. Peirce’s Evolutionary Realism. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v.
27, n. 4, p. 475–500, 1991.
______. Charles Peirce’s Evolutionary Realism as a Process Philosophy. In: Transactions of the
______. In and Out of Peirce’s Percepts. In: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, v. 26,
n. 3, p. 271–309, 1990.
______. Peirce’s Semeiotic Applied to Perception – the Role of Dynamic Objects and Percepts in
Perceptual Interpretation. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 7, n. 2, p. 231–246. jul.-dec. 2006.
JACQUES, Robert A. On the Reality of Seconds. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce
Society, v. 28, n. 4, p. 757–766, 1992.
KEMP-PRITCHARD, Ilona. Peirce on Individuation. In: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society, v. 14, n. 2, p. 83–100, 1978.
LANE, Robert. on Peirce’s Early Realism. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society,
v. 40, n. 4. p. 575–605, 2004.
MARGOLIS, Joseph. The Passing of Peirce’s Realism. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders
______. The Unraveling of Scientism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century.
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003.
MAYORGA, Rosa Maria Perez-Teran. From Realism to “Realicism”: the Metaphysics of Charles
Sanders Peirce. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007.
MEYERS, Robert G. Peirce’s “Cheerful Hope” and the Varieties of Realism. In: Transactions of
MICHAEL, Emily. Peirce on Individuals. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society,
v. 12, n. 4. p. 321–329, 1976.
MICHAEL, Fred. Two Forms of Scholastic Realism in Peirce’s Philosophy. In: Transactions of the
MIGOTTI, Mark. Reconciling Realism and Pragmatism. In: From Time and Chance to
Consciousness: studies in the Metaphysics of Charles Peirce. Edited by Edward C. Moore and
Richard S. Robin. Oxford Providence, USA: Berg Publishers, Ltd., 1994.
MOORE, Edward. On the World as General. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce
Society, v. 4, n. 2, p. 90–101, 1968.
MOORE, Matthew. Scotistic Structures. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 11, n. 1, p. 79–100, jan.-jun. 2010.
MURPHEY, Murray. On Peirce’s Metaphysics. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce
Society, v. 1, n. 1, p. 12–26, 1965.
OCHS, Peter. Peirce’s Metaphysical Equivalent of War. In: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society, v. 17, n. 3, p. 247–258, 1991.
PARKER, Kelly. Peirce’s Semeiotic and Ontology. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce
Society, v. 30, n. 1, p. 51–76, 1994.
POTTER, Vincent G. Peirce’s Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Fordham University Press,
1996. Chapter 6.
108 Bibliography
RAPOSA, Michael L. Habits and Essences. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society,
v. 20, n. 2, p. 147–167, 1984.
RESCHER, Nicholas. Peirce’s Philosophy of Science: Critical Studies in His Theory of Induction
and Scientific Method. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978. Chapters
1 and 2.
RILEY, Gresham. Peirce’s Theory of Individuals. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce
Society, v. 10, n. 3, p. 135–165, 1974.
ROBERTS, Don D. On Peirce’s Realism. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society,
v. 6, n. 2, p. 67–83, 1970.
ROSENTHAL, Sandra B. The “Would-be” Present of C. S. Peirce. In: Transactions of the Charles
______. Temporality, Perceptual Experience and Peirce’s “Proofs” of Realism. In: Transactions of
the Charles S. Peirce Society, v. 20, n. 4, p. 435–451, 1984.
SILVEIRA, Lauro Frederico Barbosa da. Observe-se o Fenômeno: forma e realidade na semiótica
de Peirce. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 5, n. 2, p. 194–199, jul.-dec. 2004.
_____. On the Interpretants of the Dicent Signs. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 6, n. 2, p. 209–219,
jul.-dec. 2005.
SMYTH, Richard A. Reading Peirce Reading. Oxford, New York: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, Inc., 1997. Chapters 3, 4 and 6.
STEARNS, Isabel. The Apparent Amphiboly of Peirce’s Reality. In: Transactions of the Charles
TIERCELIN, Claudine. Peirce’s Realistic Approach to Mathematics: or, Can One Be a Realist
Without Being a Platonist? In: Charles Sanders Peirce and the Philosophy of Science: Papers
from the Harvard Sesquicentennial Congress. Edited by Edward C. Moore. Tuscaloosa,
Alabama: the University of Alabama Press, 1993.
Chapter 3: Ontological Indeterminism and the Evolutionist Matrix
ALBORN, Timothy L. Peirce’s Evolutionary Logic: Continuity, Indeterminacy and the Natural
Order. In: Transactions of Charles S. Peirce Society, v. 25, n. 1, p. 1–28, 1989.
ANDERSON, Douglas R. Creativity and the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce. Dordrecht, Netherlands:
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987.
BRAKEL, J. Van. Peirce’s Limited Belief in Chance. In: From Time and Chance to Consciousness:
Studies in the Metaphysics of Charles Peirce. Edited by Edward C. Moore and Richard
S. Robin. Oxford Providence, USA: Berg Publishers, Ltd., 1994.
BURKS, Arthur W. Chance, Cause, Reason: an Inquiry into the Nature of Scientific Evidence.
Chicago at UP, 1977.
COSCULLUELA, Victor. Peirce on Tychism and Determinism. In: Transactions of the Charles
DELANEY, C. F. Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce. Notre
Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. Part III, Chapter 3.
FEIBLEMAN, James K. An Introduction to Peirce’s Philosophy. Cambridge: The MIT Press,
1970.
FORSTER, Paul. The Logical Foundations of Peirce’s Indeterminism. In: The Rule of Reason:
The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by Jacqueline Brunning and Paul Forster.
Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
_____. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press,
2011. Chapter 10.
GOUDGE, Thomas A. The Thought of C. S. Peirce. Toronto: The University of Toronto Press,
1950.
Bibliography 109
HANSON, Norwood Russell. Patterns of Discovery. Cambridge at UP, 1958.

McNEILL, John W. Peirce on the Possibility of a Chance World. In: Transactions of the Charles
MARGOLIS, Joseph. Rethinking Peirce’s Fallibilism. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders
Peirce Society, v. 43, n. 2, p. 229–249. 2007.
REYNOLDS, Andrew. Peirce’s Scientific Metaphysics: the Philosophy of Chance, Law, and
Evolution. Vanderbilt, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Chalters 1 and 4.
Chapter 4: Objective Idealism and the Continuum
ALTSHULER, Bruce. Peirce’s Theory of Truth and His Early Idealism. In: Transactions of the
ALMEDER, Robert. The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce: A Critical Introduction. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1980. Chapter 4.
ANDERSON, Douglas R; HAUSMAN, Carl R. Conversations on Peirce. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2012. Conversation 3: Cultural Considerations.
DILWORTH, David A. Elective Metaphysical Affinities: Emerson’s ‘Natural History of Intellect’
and Peirce’s Synechism. In: Cognitio, são Paulo, v. 11, n. 1, p. 22–47, jan.-jun. 2010.
______. Peirce’s Objective Idealism: A Reply to T. L. Short “What was Peirce’s Objective
Idealism”. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 12, n. 1, p. 53–74, jan-jun. 2011.
ESPOSITO, Joseph. Evolutionary Metaphysics: the Development of Peirce’s Theory of Categories.
Athens: Ohio University Press. Chapter 5.
______. Peirce and Naturphilosophie. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society,
v. 13, n. 2. p. 122–141, 1977.
GUARDIANO, Nicholas. The Intelligibility of Peirce’s Metaphysics of Objective Idealism. In:
Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 12, n. 2, p. 187–204, jul-dec. 2011.
HALTON, Eugene. Mind Matters. In: Symbolic Interaction, v. 31, n. 2, p. 119–141, 2008.
HAACK, Susan. Not Cynicism, But Synechism. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce
Society, v. 41, n. 2, p. 239–253, 2005.
HAVENEL, Jérôme. Peirce’s Clarifications of Continuity. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders
KRUSE, Felicia E. Peirce, God and the “Transcendentalist Virus”. In: Transactions of the Charles
LANE, Robert. The Final Incapacity: Peirce on Intuition and the Continuity of Mind and Matter
(Part 1). In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 12, n. 1, p. 105–119, jan.-jun. 2011.
______. The Final Incapacity: Peirce on Intuition and the Continuity of Mind and Matter (Part 2).
In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 12, n. 2, p. 237–256, jul.-dec. 2011.
LOCKE, Gordon. Peirce’s Metaphysics: Evolution, Synechism, and the Mathematical Conception
of the Continuum. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v. 36, n. 1, p. 133–
147, 2000.
MCCARTHY, Jeremiah. Semiotic Idealism. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce
Society, v. 20, n. 4, p. 395–434, 1984.
MEYERS, Robert G. Peirce’s Doubts about Idealism. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders
MOORE, Matthew E. the Genesis of the Peircean Continuum. In: Transactions of the Charles
MYRVOLD, Wayne C. Peirce on Cantor’s Paradox and the Continuum. In: Transactions of the
PAPE, Helmut. The Logical Structure of Idealism: C. S. Peirce’s Search for a Logic of Mental
Process. In: The Rule of Reason: the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by Jacqueline
Brunning and Paul Forster. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
110 Bibliography
______. Love’s Power and the Causality of Mind: C. S. Peirce on the Place of Mind and Culture in
Evolution. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v. 33, n. 1, p. 59–90, 1997.
PETERSON, John. Can Peirce Be a Pragmaticist and an Idealist? In: Transactions of the Charles
POTTER, Vincent G. Peirce’s Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Fordham University Press,
1996. Chapter 8.
POTTER, Vincent G.; SHIELDS, S. J. and Paul. Peirce’s Definitions of Continuity. In: Transactions
of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v. 13, n. 1, p. 20–34, 1977.
ROSA, António Machuco. O Conceito de Continuidade em Charles S. Peirce. Lisboa: Fundação
Calouste Gulbenkian, 2003. Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4.
SEBEOK, Thomas A. The Play of Musement. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
SFEMDPNI-MENTZOU, Demetra. Peirce on Continuity and Laws of Nature. In: Transactions of
SHERIFF, John K. Charles Sanders Peirce’s Guess at the Riddle. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press. Chapters 2 and 6.
SHORT, Thomas. What was Peirce’s Objective Idealism? In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 11, n. 2,
p. 333–346, jul-dec. 2010.
______. Reading Peirce Differently: A Response to David Dilworth. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 12,
n. 2, p. 257–271, jul-dec. 2011
SILVEIRA, Lauro Frederico Barbosa Da. Continuity and Discontinuity in Boundary Issues. In:
Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 10, n. 2, p. 139–152, jan.-jun. 2009
SKAGESTAD, Peter. Peirce’s Inkstand as an Eternal Embodiment of Mind. In: Transactions of the
STAAB, Janice M. Questions Concerning Peirce’s Agapic Continuity. In: Transactions of the
STEPHENS, Lynn G. Noumenal Qualia: C. S. Peirce on our Epistemic Access to Feelings. In:
Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v. 21, n. 1, p. 95–109, 1985.
TIERCELIN, Claudine. Peirce’s Objective Idealism: A Defense. In: Transactions of the Charles
Chapter 5: Cosmology: The Ontological Ground of the Categories
CAPEL, Milic. C. S. Peirce’s Different Approaches to the Problem of Time. In: From Time and
Chance to Consciousness: Studies in the Metaphysics of Charles Peirce. Edited by Edward
C. Moore and Richard S. Robin. Oxford Providence, USA: Berg Publishers, Ltd., 1994.
CHRISTIANSEN, Peder Voetmann. Habit Formation as Symmetry Breaking in the Early Universe.
In: Sign Systems Studies, v. 30, n. 1, p. 347-360, 2002.
FINKELSTEIN, David. The First Flash of the Big Bang: The Evolution of Evolution. In: From
Time and Chance to Consciousness: Studies in the Metaphysics of Charles Peirce. Edited by
Edward C. Moore and Richard S. Robin. Oxford Providence, USA: Berg Publishers Ltd., 1994.
FORSTER, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge
GALLIE, W. B. Peirce and Pragmatism. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1952. Chapters 8 and 9.
______. Design and Chance: The Evolution of Peirce’s Evolutionary Cosmology. In: Transactions
of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v. 33, n. 1, p. 1-34, 1997.
KRUSE, Felicia E. Is Cosmic Evolution Semiosis? In: From Time and Chance to Consciousness:
Studies in the Metaphysics of Charles Peirce. Edited by Edward C. Moore and Richard
S. Robin. Oxford Providence, USA: Berg Publishers Ltd., 1994.
Bibliography 111
______. Nature and Semiosis. In: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, v. 26, n. 2, p. 211-
224, 1990.
ORANGE, Donna M. Peirce’s Conception of God: A Developmental Study. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984.
REYNOLDS, Andrew. Peirce’s Scientific Metaphysics: The Philosophy of Chance, Law, and
Evolution. Vanderbilt, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Chapter 5.
ROSA, António Machuco. O Conceito de Continuidade em Charles S. Peirce. Lisboa: Fundação
Calouste Gulbenkian, 2003. Chapter 5.
SHERIFF, John K. Charles Sanders Peirce’s Guess at the Riddle. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press. Chapter 1.
SILVEIRA, Lauro Frederico Barbosa da. Cosmos Evolutivo e Plano da Criação na Filosofia
Peirciana. In: Trans/Form/Ação, São Paulo. n. 8, p. 1-24, 1985.
______. Acaso, Existência e Lei num Universo em Evolução. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, n. 1, p. 127-
137, 2000.
SHORT, Thomas. Did Peirce have a Cosmology? In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce
Society, v. 46, n. 4, p. 521-543, 2010.
SUITS, Bernard. Doubts About Peirce’s Cosmology. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders
Peirce Society, v. 15, n. 4, p. 311-321, 1979.
TURLEY, Peter. Peirce’s Cosmology. New York: Philosophical Library, 1977.
VENTIMIGLIA, Michael. Reclaiming the Peircean Cosmology: Existential Abduction and the
Growth of the Self. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v. 44, n. 4, p. 661-
680, 2008.
Chapter 6: Pragmatism and Objective Logic
ALTSHULER, Bruce. The Nature of Peirce’s Pragmatism. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders
Peirce Society, v. 14, n. 3, p. 147-175, 1978.
APEL, Karl-Otto. From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1981.
______. C. S. Peirce and the Post-Tarskian Problem of Adequate Explication of the Meaning of the
Truth: Towards a Transcendental-Pragmatic Theory of Truth. In: Transactions of the Charles
S. Peirce Society, v. 18, n. 1, p. 3-17, 1982.
CALCATERRA, Rosa Maria. Logical Normativity and Individual Accountability: Remarks on
Peirce’s Perspective. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 11, n. 1, p. 11-21, jan-jun. 2010.
DELANEU, C. F. Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce. Notre
Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. Part I, Chapters 1 and 2.
De TIENNE, André. Information in Formation: A Peircean Approach. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v.
6, n. 2, p. 149-165, jul-dec. 2005.
ESPOSITO, Joseph. Evolutionary Metaphysics: the Development of Peirce’s Theory of Categories.
Athens: Ohio University Press. Chapters 6 and 7.
FABBRICHESI, Rossella. The Greek Roots of Pragmatism: A new name for an old way of think-
ing. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 9, n. 2, p. 205-221, jul-dec. 2008.
FORSTER, Paul. The Logic of Pragmatism: A Neglected Argument for Peirce’s Pragmatic Maxim.
In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, v. 39, n. 4. p. 525-545, 2003.
HAUSMAN, Carl R. Charles Sanders Peirce’s Evolutionary Philosophy. Cambridge, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1993. Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2.
HILPINEN, Risto. On a Pragmatic Theory of Meaning and Knowledge. In: Cognitio, São Paulo,
v. 5, n. 2, p. 135-149, jul/dec. 2004.
112 Bibliography
______. Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce. Oxford: Claredon, 2000.
______. The Pragmatist Maxim and the Proof of Pragmatism. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 6, n. 1,
p. 25-42, jan-jun. 2005.
______. The Pragmatist Maxim and the Proof of Pragmatism (2): After 1903. In: Cognitio, São
Paulo, v. 9, n. 1, p. 57-72, jan-jun. 2008.
______. The Pragmatist Maxim and the Proof of Pragmatism (3): Habits and Interpretants. In:
Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 12, n. 1, p. 89- 104, jan-jun. 2011.
HOUSER, Nathan. Peirce as Logician. In: Studies in the Logic of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited
by Nathan Houser, Don D. Roberts, and James van Evra. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1997.
______. Introduction. In: The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, v. 1. Edited by
Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
______. Introduction. In: The Essential Peirce Selected Philosophical Writings, v. 2. Edited by the
Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
______. Introduction. In: Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce: A Chronological Edition, v. 8.
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010.
______. Pragmatism and the Loss of Innocence. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 4, n. 2, p. 197-210,
jul-dec. 2003.
KENT, Beverley. Charles S. Peirce: Logic and the Classification of the Sciences. Kingston and
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987.
KEVELSON, Roberta. Charles S. Peirce’s Method of Methods. Amsterdam: Philadelphia, John
Benjamins Publishing, 1987.
LISZKA, James Jakób. Rethinking the Pragmatic Theory of Meaning. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, v.
10, n. 1, p. 61-79, jan-jun. 2009.
MARGOLIS, Joseph. Peirce’s View of the Vague and the Definite. In: Charles Sanders Peirce
and the Philosophy of Science: Papers from the Harvard Sesquicentennial Congress. Edited by
Edward C.Moore. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1993.
MISAK, C. J. Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991.
PAPE, Helmut. Thinking and Acting. The Logical Background of Peirce’s Pragmatism. In:
Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 10, n. 1, p. 91-104, jan-jun. 2009.
RESCHER, Nicholas. Peirce’s Philosophy of Science: Critical Studies in His Theory of Induc
tion and Scientific Method. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978.
Chapter 3.
ROBERTS, Don, D. The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce. The Hague: Mouton, 1973.
ROSENTHAL, Sandra B. Charles Peirce’s Pragmatic Pluralism. New York: State University, 1994.
______. The Pragmatic World of Charles Peirce. In: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce
Society, v. 19, n. 1, p. 13-22, 1983.
SANTAELLA, Lucia. A assinatura das Coisas: Peirce e a Literatura. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1992.
______. O Método Anticartesiano de C. S. Peirce. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2004.
SILVEIRA, Lauro Frederico Barbosa da. Curso de Semiótica Geral. São Paulo: Editora Quartier
Latin, 2007, Chapters 5 and 6.
______. O Caráter Dialógico e Social do Signo e do Pensamento em Peirce. In: Anais do 1º
Colóquio Luso-Brasileiro de Semiótica. Niterói: Universidade Federal Fluminense, 1986.
______. Em Busca dos Fundamentos da Universalidade da Necessidade da Semiótica e do
Pragmatismo de C. S. Peirce. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, n. 1, p. 117-126, 2nd Sem. 2000.
______. Os Primeiros Passos Rumo à Verdade. In: Cognitio, São Paulo, n. 3, p. 107-114,
nov. 2002.
THIBAUD, Pierre. La Logique de Charles Sanders Peirce. De l’Algèbre aux Graphes. Aix-en-
Provence: Editions de l’Université de Provence, 1975.
TIERCELIN, Claudine. Le Doute en Question: Parades Pragmatistes au Défi Sceptique. Paris:
Éditions de L’Éclat, 2005.
Bibliography 113
Other Works Consulted
ARMSTRONG, D. M. Nominalism and Realism: Universals & Scientific Realism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980, 2 vols.
APEL, Karl-Otto. La Transformaction de La Filosofia. Traducción de Joaquim Chamorro, Jesus
Conill y Adela Cortina Orts. Madrid: Taurus Ediciones, 2 vols., 1985.
ARISTOTLE. Metaphysics. English translation by H. Tredennick. The Loeb Classical Library.
London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1975, 2 vols.
_______. On Interpretation. English translation by H. Tredennick. The Loeb Classical Library.
London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1973
_______. Physics. English translation by Rev. P. Wicksteed and F. M. Conford. The Loeb Classical
Library. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1970, 2 vols.
BAUDELAIRE, Charles. Oeuvres Complètes. Paris : Robert Laffont, 1980.
BARROW, John D.; SILK, Joseph. A Mão Esquerda da Criação. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1988.
BORGES, Jorge L. El Aleph. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1981.
BORN, Max. The Restless Universe. New York: Dover Publications, 1951.
BOWIE, Andrew. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: an Introduction. London: Routledge,
Kegan Paul, 1993.
BOYER, Carl B. A History of Mathematics. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1968.
BREHIER, Emile. História da Filosofia. Translated by Eduardo Sucupira Filho. São Paulo: Ed.
Mestre Jou, 1977, 2 vols.
BRITTAN Jr., Gordon, G. Kant’s Theory of Science. Princeton at UP, 1978.
CHOMSKY, Noam. Syntactic Structures. The Hage: Mouton, 1969.
CORTAZAR, Julio. Prosa del Observatorio. Libro Commemorativo del Año Internacional del
Libro. Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 1972.
DIAMOND, A. S. Historia y Origenes del Lenguaje. Traducción de Francisco Romero. Madrid:
Alianza Editorial, 1974.
DIRAC, Paul. Directions in Physics. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1978.
DUMITRIU, Anton. History of Logic. Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Abacus Press, 1977, 4 vols.
ECCLES, John C. The Self-Conscious Mind and the Brain. In: The Self and its Brain. Berlin,
New York, Heilderberg: Springer-Verlag, 1977, p. 355-376.
ELIOT, T. S. Collected Poems/1909-1962. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1963.
ESPOSITO, Joseph L. Schelling’s Idealism and Philosophy of Nature. Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 1977.
FICHTE, Johann G. A Doutrina-Da-Ciência de 1794 e Outros Escritos. Translated by Rubens
Rodrigues Torres Filho. São Paulo: Nova Cultural, 1988.
FINDLAY, J.N. Kant and the Transcendental Object: a Hermeneutic Study. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1981.
GALILEI, Galileu. O Ensaiador. Translation by Helda Barraco. São Paulo: April, 1979.
GOMPERZ, Theodor. The Greek Thinkers, a History of Ancient Philosophy. Translated by Laurie
Magnus. London: John Murray, First Published 1901; 1969, 4 vols.
GRIBBIN, John. Genesis: As Origens do Homem e do Universo. Translated by João Guilherme
Linke. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, 1983.
GROLIER, Eric de. Nas Origens da Linguagem. In: Philippe Brenot (ed.). As Origens. Lisboa:
Editorial Presença, 1991.
HABERMAS, Jürgen. Conhecimento e Interesse. Tranlated by Jose N. Heck. Rio de Janeiro:
Zahar, 1982.
HANSON, Norwood R. Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of
Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
HARTMANN, Nicolai. A Filosofia do Idealismo Alemão. Tranlated by José Gonçalves Belo.
Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1983.
HOYLE, Fred. The Intelligent Universe. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983.
114 Bibliography
HUME, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. L. A. Selby Bigge (ed.). Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977.
_______. A Treatise of Human Nature. L. A. Selby Bigge (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
_______. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Translation by James Ellington.
New York: Boobs-Merrill, 1970.
KANT, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. English translation by Norman Kemp Smith. NY:
Macmillan, 1978.
_______. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. English translation by James Ellington.
NY: Boobs-Merril Co, 1970.
KENNY, Antony. Wittgenstein. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977.
KNEALE, W. E M. O Desenvolvimento da Lógica. Translated by M. A. Lourenço. Lisboa:
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1962.
KRÜGER, Lorenz et alii (eds.). The Probabilistic Revolution. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990,
2 vols.
LEBRUN, Gérard. Sobre Kant. Tranlated by José Oscar Almeida Morais, Maria Regina Avelar
Coelho da Rocha and Rubens Rodrigues Torres Filho. São Paulo: Iluminuras/EDUSP, 1993.
LOVEJOY, Arthur. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Nascimento, C. A. Ribeiro do. A Querela dos Universais Revisitada. In: Cadernos PUC, n. 13, São
Paulo, Educ-Cortez, 1981.
PATON, H. J. Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience. New York: The Humanities Press, 1965, 2 vols.
PESSOA, Fernando. Poemas de Alberto Caeiro. Lisboa: Edições Ática, 1979.
PLATÃO. Timaeus. The Loeb Classical Library. English translation by Rev. R. G. Bury. London:
William Heinemann Ltd. 1975.
_______. Parmenides. The Loeb Classical Library. English translation by H N. Fowler. London:
William Heinemann Ltd., 1977.
POPPER, Karl. Conhecimento Objetivo. Translation by Milton Amado. São Paulo: Itatiaia –
USP, 1975.
PROUST, Marcel. A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. Paris: Gallimard, 1954, 8 vols.
ROBIN, Richard S. Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Massachusetts at
UP, 1967.
SARTRE, J. Paul. L’Existencialisme Est un Humanisme. Paris: Les Editions Nagel, 1970.
_______. La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard, 1938.
SCHELLING, Friedrich W. J. Obras Escolhidas. Translated by Rubens Rodrigues Torres Filho.
São Paulo: Nova Cultural, 1989.
SCHELLING, Friedrich W. J. Recherches Philosophiques sur l’Essence de la Liberté Humaine.
Traduction de Georges Politzer. Paris: F. Rieder, 1926.
______. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. Translation by Errol E. Harris and P. Heath. Cambridge
at UP, 1988.
______. System of Transcendental Idealism. Translation by P. Heath. Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1978.
______. Idealism and the Endgames of Theory: Three Essays. Translation and Introduction by
Thomas Pfau. New York: Suny Press, 1993.
SCHILLER, Friedrich. A Educação Estética do Homem Numa Série de Cartas. Translation by
Roberto Schwarz e Márcio Suzuki. São Paulo: Iluminuras, 1990.
STRUIK, Dirk J. A Concise History of Mathematics. New York: Dover Publications, 1967.
RIMBAUD, Arthur. Une Saison en Enfer. Paris, Gallimard, 1984.
ROSA, J. Guimarães. Grande Sertão: Veredas. São Paulo: April, 1983.
TAYLOR, A. E. Plato: The man and his Work. London: Methuen & Co Ltd. 1978.
THOMPSON, Manley. Categories. In: The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. NY: Macmillan, 1967,
8 vols., vol. 2.
TSU, Lao. Tao Te Ching. English translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. NY: Vintage
Books, 1972.
WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translation by José Arthur Giannotti.
São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional– UsP, 1968.
______. Investigações Filosóficas. Translation by José Carlos Bruni. São Paulo: April, 1975.

Kósmos Noetós: Ivo Assad Ibri

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Título original

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Kósmos Noetós: Ivo Assad Ibri

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Philosophical Studies Series

Executive Editorial Board

Board of Consulting Editors

ISSN 0921-8599 ISSN 2542-8349 (electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950287

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017

Printed on acid-free paper

This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature

mid-nineteenth century years undermined confidence in absolutes and ideas of

Indiana University, Indianapolis, USA Nathan Houser

Perhaps in a more macroscopic dimension, Peirce, with his cosmic philosophy,

São Paulo, Brazil Ivo Assad Ibri

Il n’y a de long ouvrage que celui qu’on n’ose pas commencer.

We transcribe this passage literally merely to illustrate, exemplarily, our view-

possible interpretations. To illustrate this indefinition, we imagined applying, with

to expound on the author’s Objective Logic, which translates into an ontological

São Paulo, Brazil Ivo Assad Ibri

Part I The World as Appearance

Part II The World as Reality

Part III The Knowable World

Mais le devoir de conscience était si ardu, que m’imposaient

Within Philosophy, three groups of sciences encompass its subdivision:

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 3

Proposing to inventory classes of daily experiences naturally brings to light the

We may anticipate that experience, thus conceptualized, stands as a corrective

The phenomenological world, characterizing itself as indifferently interior and

As first faculty, Peirce requires from a student of Phenomenology the capacity of

required may thus be summarized as seeing, heeding, and generalizing, divesting

There is in this element of experience a consciousness of duality between two

Thus, an experience of the first element in the phenomenon is not itself

To introduce any analytical instance in the mind, in order to conceptually mea-

Thus, the unconditionality of feeling in relation to time distinguishes it from

This distinctive aspect of all qualities of feeling makes them, as phenomena,

The faculty of seeing required as a tool for phenomenological research is essen-

This psychical representative of immediacy recalls to mind that Phenomenology

The question about the possibility of a rupture in objective time as similar to

Accordingly, we conclude that every cognitive phenomenon as the apprehension

General representation, mediation, thought, synthesis, and cognition thus share

This being-predicated-of-many bespeaks the final link between representation

Peirce’s Phenomenology, as simply confined to the universe of appearances,

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 17

As a science of appearances, Phenomenology neither says what it is nor what it

In its character as a positive science, Philosophy deals with matters of fact,

This passage highlights an element of alterity inherent in Peirce’s own concept

However, the Metaphysics Peirce has in mind, as scientific, aims at founding

or the unconscious engenders, have no compulsive force on consciousness. There is

Thus, existence is characterized by its binary oppositions in which each thing is

Thus, the permanence of a reaction transforms it into thirdness by becoming a

It is remarkable how this passage reaffirms the indissolubility of the binary of

There is something in this “confession of fallibility” that preempts the temporariness

Again, Logic leads Metaphysics to the admission of a principle of fortuitousness

Arrancarle un jirón de clave, hundirle en el peor de los casos la

At the end of Chap. 2, we deliberately left some questions unanswered. Their

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 33

As a property of a distribution, Chance is something general, yet divested of the

CP, 1.419; my italics.

The combined evidence of such considerations leads Peirce to attribute diversity

epistemological role in reducing the multiplicity of experience to the unity of

In another respect, this is the metaphysical ground of an epistemological doctrine

In no other way could be the position of Peirce on the inexactness of scientific

¡Oh dicha de entender, mayor que la de imaginar o la de sentir!

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 45

Given experience as subject of thought—the agent that makes us think that—our

Indiana University, Indianapolis, USA Nathan Houser

São Paulo, Brazil Ivo Assad Ibri

São Paulo, Brazil Ivo Assad Ibri

e volutionary growth acquire their conditions of possibility—where potentiality as