November 8th to 11th,2004

2nd DAY -Tuesday - November 9th, 2004 - 7 p.m.
2nd Session
1st Lecture

Peirce on the Medievals: Realism, Power and Inference
Prof. Dr. John Boler
Department of Philosophy - University of Washington, United States of America

[Abstract]
After some brief introductory remarks, where I call attention to the ambivalence in Peirce's attitude towards medieval thinkers - some high praise, some harsh criticism - my paper divides into three unequal parts. In the first and longest, which following Augustine I call "Retreatments" (Retractationes), I consider some criticisms of my book Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism. Three of these are reflected in the position of Max Fisch though, as one would expect, his criticism is very generously and graciously presented there. (Cf., Peirce, Semiotic and Pragmatism, edited by Ketner & Kloesel) Fisch thinks Peirce: (1) converted to realism from an original nominalism, (2) dropped his references to "scholastic realism" during his middle period when some of his most important ideas were developing, and (3) returned to the issue later on but with a realism that went far beyond the early position.
My book had presented Peirce's scholastic realism as if it were a single position from first to last. And I want to adjust that in the light of Fisch's points. The first, as I shall explain, does not seem to me a significant matter, but reflects an immature and uncritical assumption of the nominalist label which Peirce drops in his examined, mature (and continuing) writings. To meet the second and third of Fisch's criticisms, however, I now want to distinguish his scholastic realism from his on-going development of realism. (Certainly, Peirce's extensive use of "nominalism" as a critical label goes far beyond what medieval realists had in mind.) To this end, I offer a more restricted and precise meaning to "scholastic realism" - roughly an anti-platonism in which the common nature is found as an element in things. That meaning does, I think, remain constant for Peirce; though I agree with Fisch that this is only a part of his developing realism. What does change, I think, is Peirce's self-described "Scotism," where the emphasis shifts from, roughly put, commonness to thisness: i.e., Thirdness to Secondness.
In the second part of the paper, I bring out the connection between the scholastic notion of potentiality and Peirce's "would-be's." Interestingly enough (to me), this is not an influence that Peirce himself acknowledges. Peirce is rather dismissive of the scholastic (and Aristotelian) notion of form. Had he seen hylomorphism in the context of powers, I suggest, he might have developed a more nuanced account of his differences from the earlier theory.
In a final, brief and more speculative section of the paper, I use Peirce's shift from a subject-predicate logic, in the light of his criticism of the limited outlook of the scholastics, as a conceit for viewing Peirce's three kinds of inference (deduction, induction and abduction) as an essential part of the structure of his theory of the mind. It is inference, I claim, that ultimately grounds Peirce's sign theory.

Center for Pragmatism Studies
Philosophy Graduate Program
Departament of Philosophy
Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo - Brazil