Peirce on the Norms of Judgement

VARGAS, EVELYN

Paris

Congreso; Second European Pragmatism Conference; 2015

European Pragmatism Association

According to an increasingly widespread view, the pragmatist approach to inquiry, interms of a logic of inquiry that focuses on our epistemic practices, can shed light on questionsconcerning epistemic norms. The advantages of Dewey´s view over the traditional viewof human reasoning, for example, have been emphasized insofar as our reasoning practicescan be grounded by describing how rational agents appeal to reason in problematic situationsthat require the use of their judgmental capacity (Frega 2010). However, another prominentrepresentative of the pragmatist tradition, namely, Charles S. Peirce, objected to Dewey´sconception of the logic of inquiry as a natural history on the ground that The eect ofteaching that such a Natural History can take the place of a normative science of thoughtmust be to render the rules of reasoning lax" CP 8. 240). Although some Peirce scholarshave suggested that the dierences between their views is not as great as Peirce claimed(Colapietro 2002), it remains unclear whether Peirce´s conception of logic as a normative scienceis compatible with Dewey´s views. An important disagreement concerns the nature ofthe norms governing belief formation and the grounds of their authority. Even if they agreethat norms governing our doxastic states are to be recognized in their concrete applications,and thus in our reasoning practices, it is dicult to see how to account for their validity.One possible interpretation of the way in which particular cases relate to the rules governingthem is, of course, Kant´s doctrine of the capacity of judgment. In eect, he denes thecognitive faculty of judgment as he faculty of subsuming under rules; that is, of distinguishingwhether something does or does not stand under a given rule (casus datae legis)" (A132 /B171). In the Third Critique, he distinguishes between a reective and a determinativefunction of this faculty. While determination consists in subsuming the particularunder a rule that is given, ... if only the particular is given and judgment has to nd theuniversal for it, then this faculty is merely reective (KU 5: 179; 18{19)." In a recent study,R. Smyth (2002) proposes to interpret Peirce´s conception of logic as a normative sciencein terms of Kant´s critical doctrine of common sense in the Third Critique since Kantianethics and aesthetics had a considerable bearing on Peirce´s epistemological strategy in hisown philosophy" (297). Smyth compares Kant´s analysis of mathematical reasoning in KU62 with Peirce´s conception of diagrammatic reasoning (295). The practice of reasoning byparadigmatic examples can be regarded as an exercise of the capacity of judgment in itsreective function because a particular geometrical gure can be conceived as falling undera law without `seeing´ the law under which it falls. At the same time, Smyth´s interpretationascribes to Peirce a distinction made by Kant between what justies our knowledge of a normand what makes the norm valid; while we know the norm according to which the reasoningis correct in the particular case, and while the reasons by which we justify its correctnessdo not depend on knowledge that is extrinsic to the particular act of reasoning, what makesthe norm valid does not depend on how we know it (303). Now an act of reective judgmentconsists in making a claim for its universal validity (KU, XX), that is, a reective judgmentdemands universal assent but this universality is grounded on the common sense. This prescriptiveforce is prior to the particular acts to which it applies in the sense that it cannot belimited to particular instantiations. But the source of the prescriptive force that is found inparticular cases is exactly what has to be accounted for. The demand for the agreement ofothers that is made by the aesthetic judgment and that presupposes the idea of a commonsense (KU 22) cannot provide the ground for logical reasoning at the risk of turning it intoa judgment of taste. Peirce thought that his semiotic conception of reasoning would providea better understanding of the norms governing our inferential practices; thus, it is only interms of that conception, which regards inference as the minimal unit of thought, that itis posible to explain how generality can be present in particular instances. Consequently, Iwill analyze the way in which Kant conceived the problem of eliciting norms from particularinstances (for the specic case of the role of reective judgment in geometrical constructionsin KU 62) in order to present the dierences with Peirce´s solution.