Yes, Clark. We note that Peirce was a verificationist about meaning in the first chapter of Every Thing Must Go. We called this, as Peirce did himself, a sort of positivism. I thought that was potentially misleading, and wanted to change it, but didn’t get a chance.
John Collier Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Associate Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal http://web.ncf.ca/collier From: Clark Goble [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, 14 February 2017 1:48 AM To: Peirce-L <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Nominalism vs. Realism - On Feb 11, 2017, at 6:40 PM, John Collier <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Full blown logical empiricism arises only with verificationism, which I think was the biggest error ever made by otherwise sensible philosophers. We are still suffering the consequences. I hasten to add that, although he was sometimes read that way (perhaps, for example, by Rescher and Putnam) Peirce was no verificationist. We see remnants in opposition views to logical positivism that try to reduce things to social phenomena, which I see as making precisely the same error. He was a verificationalist about meaning not about truth. Which is a pretty key difference. What counts as verification was much looser than the positivists allowed too. To my eyes that’s a plus not a negative. I rather like Misak’s book Verificationism: Its History and Prospects on that topic. She does a really good job contrasting Peirce with not only the logical positivists but many other groups tied to verificationalism. I think the reason we can’t abandon verificationalism is that implicit to such a conception is the recognition that our beliefs are tied to our experience. While some of the later neopragmatists like Rorty tried to jettison the place of experience I think it has a pretty key place in pragmatism. Where Peirce succeeds where others failed is both due to the richer notion of experience in Peirce (and arguably also Dewey) as well as recognition of belief as a process of change rather than a more static slice for analysis. That static element that comes out of the traditional logic of foundationalism started with Descartes is what really causes verificationalism to go astray IMO.
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