A Reader’s Guide to the First Paragraph of Section III of C.S. Peirce’s “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”
This article is a guide to the first paragraph of section III of C. S. Peirce’s 1878 “How To Make Our Ideas Clear”. As a guide, it aims to explicate and restate what is in the original.
1: Introduction
Section III of Charles Sanders Peirce’s (CSP) “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (HTM) is devoted to applying the pragmatic maxim (PM) to a selection of conceptions from physics: hardness, weight, and force. PM was first expressed in the immediately preceding paragraph:
PM: “Consider what effects, which 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.”
In other words: our conceptions should comprise the practical effects alone, according to their probabilities—effects are everything and are actual. The first paragraph of section III of HTM (FP3) is a demonstration of PM as a practical method to the physical conception of hardness in particular.
Section III of HTM has nine paragraphs. Seven paragraphs are on force. Weight gets one relatively short paragraph. Hardness gets one very long paragraph with FP3. FP3 is one of the longest paragraphs in HTM at 21-sentences long and there are at least a couple things happening in FP3. One is to highlight the logical bounds of the pragmatic definition of hardness with some examples. Another function of FP3 is to demonstrate the application of PM as a general practical method of evaluating and handling questions encountered in our experience. Call these two functions F1 and F2:
F1: To highlight the logical bounds of the pragmatic conception of hardness.
F2. The demonstration of a practical method of evaluating questions.
FP3 is devoted to asking and answering questions—he uses the word 12 times in FP3. Peirce fulfills F1 and F2 through considering four questions (and a few forays into the “realm of logic”, more on later):
Q1: What is hardness, according to the third grade of clearness?
Q2: “Would it be false to say that [the cushion-diamond] was soft?”
Q3: What if the resistance to scratching is not an enduring property, but an object's resistance increases until the scratch point? Would this be hard?
Q4: Could you have done otherwise than you did in an instance that you are ashamed of? Does it mean anything to consider what would have happened if you had done something different?
Q1 is the nominal topic and purpose of FP3: how do we apply PM to hardness. Peirce answers Q1 right off the bat in the 2nd sentence: “that it will not be scratched by many other substances.” Q2-4 are hypothetical questions: “question[s] of what would occur under circumstances which do not actually arise”. Peirce calls these “arrangements of language”1, but they can also be called hypothetical, counterfactual, or subjunctive cases. Q4 is the odd question out of the 4 that is not about hardness and is thus obviously doing something else in a section on scientific conceptions in physics. Q4 brings F1 and F2 into distinct relief. Q2-3 both serve F1 and F2. Q4 serves F2 alone.
Peirce doesn’t separate these 4 questions as a set. I have chosen 4 questions to focus on. CSP also never explicitly answers Q2-4; he is elusive. CSP also doesn’t distinguish two functions as I have. I think Peirce expects that it’s obvious or that we will be carried by the drift of the discussion and should be able to fill the rest in ourselves. This article presumes that maybe it is obvious to some people, but some people would prefer it spelled out in excruciating detail. This presumption frames the objective of the present article: to fill in the gaps of FP3. In this guide I aim to explicate2 FP3 through these two functions and four questions. In the remainder of this article, I will cover all of these in turn and finish with some assorted thoughts.
Finally a few disclaimers. This guide was researched and written with almost complete ignorance of secondary literature on CSP, HTM, and FP3, other than reading Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club and a couple other articles, and chatting with Peirceans on Twitter. That is an admission, a limitation, and hopefully a benefit. The benefit is that this article doesn’t presume the reader already knows any subsequent works in pragmatism. I don’t possess that, so I don’t have to feign ignorance.3 Instead, I have opted to offer a charitable explication of FP3 in light of nothing other than HTM and the paragraph itself. Thus, I hope that the learning curve for this guide is not steep.
I must also note at the very outset that FP3 contains conceptions that Peirce later considered immature. Peirce later said that he is too “nominalistic” in HTM and particularly in FP3.4 The primary expression of nominalism in HTM is in FP3: “There is absolutely no difference between a hard thing and a soft thing so long as they are not brought to the test” (ital. mine). Tests produce effects, evidence, results, facts — what actually makes a difference for us. For Peirce in FP3, when a diamond is not tested, it is neither hard nor soft. There are two aspects to Peirce’s nominalism in FP3. One is the role of probability and particularity in Q1-4. Q2 and Q4 describe particular cases and Q1 and Q3 are general. There is also a temporal aspect to the nominalism at work in FP3. In the remainder of this article I will explicate each Q1-4 and F1/2, focusing on the temporal, probable/particular, and nominalistic aspects of each. I end with some assorted thoughts on FP3.
Peirce also calls them “arrangements of facts”, but this latter term is not so intuitive.
Explication is opposite to summary. A summary aims to condense what is in the original without adding anything. Explication aims to expand on what is in the original without adding anything.
Once one already possesses such breadth of knowledge, it becomes difficult-to-impossible to return to a more naïve and pure reading of a text.
Peirce said in a letter that "everybody ought to be a nominalist at first, and to continue in that opinion until he is driven out of it by the force majeure of irreconcilable facts."