Reconstruction 10.1 (2010)
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"In Search of a Method: Charles Sanders Peirce's Contribution to Theology" / Donald Gelpi, edited by Nate Hinerman
Abstract
This article asserts that when one re-grounds the approach to the theological method of Catholic Theologian, Bernard Lonergan, S.J., in the pragmatistic logic and semiotic realism of Charles Sanders Peirce, then Lonergan's theory of functional specialties gives the promise of enabling one to describe how various types of theological inquiry relate to other scholarly disciplines through the criteria of agreement, convergence, complementarity, and disagreement.
Introduction
One does not normally associate the name of Charles Peirce with theology, although Peirce, like the later Lonergan, came to take religious experience very seriously indeed. As a young man, Peirce converted from Unitarianism to Episcopalianism; even though he seems to have had a low opinion of the theologians and high churchmen he knew.[1]
Peirce seems to have felt something like a divine vocation to
rethink the foundations of logic, and he devoted himself
single-mindedly to that task until he died. He came to focus on the
intersection of logic, semiotics, and metaphysics. His Neglected
Argument for the Reality of God proposed a philosophical, not a
theological approach to theistic religious beliefs.[2]
Nevertheless, the mature Peirce came to believe that his logic had the
capacity to bring about a wedding between religion and science.[3] In what follows, I shall not
only endorse Peirce's claim, but shall derive from his logic
operational procedures for thinking theologically.
Catholic Theologian Bernard Lonergan, S.J., by contrast, has been
called a ‘theologian's theologian.’ He spent the major part of his
professional career as a theologian reflecting on the problem of method
in theology. One does not normally think of Lonergan as a logician; but
what he called method in theology, the pragmatic philosophical
tradition calls applied logic.
Applied logic differs from formal logic. Formal logic, the kind of
logic, which Peirce developed, studies the laws of reasoning in
general. Peirce, for example, began his logical career by revising the
laws of inferential thinking. He later embellished these earlier
insights with others derived from his discovery and development of a
logic of relations. Applied logic studies the mode of reasoning proper
to a particular scholarly or scientific discipline. Lonergan's theory
of method in theology prescribes normative, operational procedures for
the scholarly discipline of theology and so qualifies as an applied
theological logic.
In what follows, I shall endorse the basic orientation of Lonergan's
applied logic of theology; however, I shall argue that Peirce's formal
logic can be used to clarify Lonergan's approach to method in theology
in several fundamental ways. Thus, through the course of this article,
I shall ponder Lonergan's position critically in light of the
philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce's rethinking of the
foundations of logic requires the revision of both the logical and
epistemological foundations of Lonergan's theory of method in theology;
that revision also will add operational clarity to the functional
specialties at work in Lonergan's method.
What is Theological Method?
Lonergan describes the overall task of theology in the
following terms: "A theology mediates between a cultural
matrix and the significance and role of a religion in that matrix."[1] This description begins the
introduction to Lonergan's ground-breaking treatise on method in
theology. Arguably, no other theoretician or theological method places
the question of inculturation at the heart of the theological
enterprise as explicitly as Lonergan does. The question of
inculturation raises a host of issues, among them the meaning of
culture itself. The term culture has received so many different
definitions, so that anyone who employs the term needs to indicate the
precise sense in which he or she uses it.[4] Most broadly, "culture" can be
viewed as any reality in space and time conditioned by human
communication. Although this definition is vague, the relationships
inherit therein will be amplified later.
Today we are witnessing an unprecedented internationalization of
culture through travel and through the technological enhancement of
communication. The internationalization of culture has muted but not
abolished the geographical rootedness of human cultures; and it
requires local cultures to take into account the best insights, which
other cultures have to offer. Keeping local cultures in dialogue with
other cultures does not always adulterate them. On the contrary, it can
have the positive affect of keeping them from stagnating.
Moreover, philosophical fascination with "experience" and with
"religious experience" as central, unifying philosophical categories
makes the classical philosophical tradition in the United States a rich
source of inculturated theological categories for pursuing what
Lonergan calls "foundational theology."[5] Foundational theology seeks to
articulate how certain theological questions interrelate. Moreover, the
trenchant criticisms which philosophers in this country have voiced
concerning United States values and institutions often converge with
religious critiques of American life.
In approaching the question of method, Lonergan wisely remarks: "Method
is not a set of rules to be followed meticulously by a dolt. It is a
framework for collaborative creativity."[6] Lonergan defines a method as
"a pattern of recurrent and related operations yielding cumulative and
progressive results."[7]
Such a definition of method has much to recommend it. It focuses
attention where it belongs, namely, on the kinds of operations one
needs to perform in order to get a job done. Some jobs seek to
transform the environment in some way or to change society.[8] Other inquiries seek
understanding for the sake of understanding. The latter would do well
to consider the pragmatistic logic of Charles Sanders Peirce.
Lonergan's definition of method accords well with Peirce's pragmatic
maxim, which teaches that one best clarifies the meaning of a
hypothesis by predicting deductively its operational consequences.[9] In other words, in order to
understand clearly the meaning of a particular method, one needs to
understand what that method requires one to do in order to achieve a
desired effect. Unless and until one knows what a method requires one
to do, one fails to understand it clearly and so cannot use it.
Specifying a method's operational procedures, as Peirce's maxim
predicts, endows the term "method"with conceptual clarity and
practical usability.
Since any method's operational procedures provide a unified way of
addressing a problem, those procedures comprise a relational whole and
therefore form an operational pattern. A method's operations recur
because one can apply a successful method to a series of interrelated
problems and get results. Those results have a progressive character
when they yield more and more insight into the kind of reality one is
investigating. They have a cumulative character when one's conclusions
build upon one another.[10]
Functional Specialization in Theology
In his text, Method in Theology,
Lonergan argues that theological method as such, does not exist because
theologians ask at least eight different kinds of questions, whose
answers require a different kind of method for each question's
solution. In other words, Lonergan argues for eight different applied
theological logics.
Lonergan divides his functional theological specialties into mediating
and mediated theology. Mediating theology retrieves a religious or
cultural tradition. On the basis of that retrieval, mediated theology
undertakes the critical reformulation of that tradition. As a result,
mediating theology mediates mediated theology.
Mediating theology divides into four functional specialties: research,
interpretation, history, and dialectic. Research
provides the rest of the theological community with the tools it needs
in order to advance its work. Research theologians engage in religious
archeology, in editing sacred texts, in compiling grammars and
dictionaries of sacred languages. Interpretation
offers an account of what the texts and artifacts provided by research
meant to those who originally created them and what they might mean to
contemporary people living in the new millennium. History
tells the story of a religious community and of a particular culture's
development. Historians face two interrelated scholarly challenges. On
the basis of the surviving evidence, they need to formulate an accurate
chronology of past events. Next, on the basis of that chronology they
need to formulate a causal account of why events took this turn rather
than that, when at some point in the past they might have gone in
either direction.[11] Those who
study the history of religious communities find, however, that those
who hang on a living tradition constantly argue with one another about
what it means. Dialectic seeks to understand the
terms of that ongoing debate by comparing and contrasting the frames of
reference in which different religious thinkers argue. That comparison
seeks to discover where the thinkers in question agree, where their
positions converge and complement one another, and where they disagree.
In the case of real disagreement, dialecticians articulate the terms of
disagreement. The study of dialectic prepares the reformulation of a
religious tradition by clarifying the issues with which mediated
theology must deal.
Mediated theology also divides into four functional specialties:
foundations, doctrines, systematics, and communications. Foundational
theology offers a normative account of the values which lie
at the basis of a religious tradition. It supplies the doctrinal
theologian with the criteria the latter needs to
distinguish between sound and unsound doctrines, sound and unsound
ethical and disciplinary practices. Sound doctrines and practices will
advance the process of initial and ongoing conversion; unsound
doctrines and practices will subvert that same process. Systematic
theology explains the relationship among sound doctrines and
practices. Finally, communications invokes the
normative insights of foundational theology in order to diagnose the
motives for the breakdown of communications in a religious community.[12]
Because Lonergan's theory of method in theology mediates between a
religion and the culture in which that religion roots itself, one needs
to apply the eight functional specialties not only to the retrieval and
reformulation of a religious tradition, but also to the retrieval and
reformulation of the cultural tradition, with which that religious
tradition dialogues.[13]
Lonergan's theory of functional specialties sketches, then, an
ambitious program for retrieving and reformulating a religious
tradition in a specific cultural context. That program requires one to
authenticate religious doctrines before one systematizes them. Three
functional specialties play a key role in the authentication of
doctrines: dialectic, foundations, and doctrines. Dialectical thinking
clarifies the terms of different doctrinal disputes in the history of
the Church. A foundational account
of a
religious tradition provides the criteria which authenticates some
doctrines and discredit others. The functional specialty called
"doctrines" invokes the insights of foundational theology in order to
identify as authentic some doctrinal positions and to discard others.
Lonergan names the operational procedures which structure dialectical
thinking. One needs to assemble, complete, compare, reduce, classify,
and select the materials one is studying dialectically. Lonergan
describes these operations in the following terms:
Assembly includes the researches performed, the interpretations proposed, the histories written, and the events, statements, and movements to which they refer. Completion adds evaluative interpretation and evaluative history; it picks out the one hundred and one "good things" and their opposites....Comparison examines the completed assembly to seek out affinities and oppositions. Reduction finds the same affinity and the same opposition manifested in a number of different manners; from the many manifestations, it moves to the underlying root. Classification determines which of these sources of affinity result from dialectically opposed horizons and which have other grounds. Selection, finally, picks out the affinities and oppositions in dialectically opposed horizons and dismisses other affinities and oppositions.[14]
While one might find the preceding account of the operational
procedures of dialectical theology in need of further logical
specification, it at least gives someone who desires to pursue
dialectical theology, in Lonergan's sense of that term, something to go
on. The assembly of materials for dialectical evaluation clearly
depends on the results of the first three functional specialties of
research, interpretation, and history. Their completion invokes the
prudential judgment of the dialectician. One must decide the relative
importance of the issues one seeks to assess. Comparison requires one
to come to clarity about where real and important agreement and
disagreement have characterized the debates of the past. Reduction
requires one to reach a judgment concerning why such agreement and
disagreement have occurred. Classification requires one to decide when
the presuppositions of different frames of reference so contradict one
another as to exclude one another or when they relate to one another in
some other way. Classification also seeks the motives which underlie
genuine disagreement. It therefore probes the issues which caused
different thinkers to offer contradictory accounts of the same
realities. Selection makes a prudential judgment about the relative
importance of different points of agreement and disagreement.
Unfortunately, when Lonergan gives his account of the applied logic of
foundational theology, he lapses into vagueness. Lonergan argues that,
in the formulation of foundational theology, one needs to employ
transcendental notions derived from philosophy, general theological
categories derived from other sciences and scholarly disciplines other
than theology, which study human religious experience, and special
theological categories derived from reflection on the events which
reveal God to us historically and eschatologically.[16] "Being," "one," "good," and "true" exemplify transcendental notions because one can predicate them
of any reality whatsoever and not just of the members of a particular
genus or species.
In contrast to Lonergan, a foundational theology must invoke more
philosophical categories other than the transcendentals, even though
foundational thinking does indeed need to give an account of the
"Ideal," the "Beautiful," the "True," and the "Good." As Josiah Royce
and Alfred North Whitehead have argued, Christianity is a religion in
search of a metaphysics.[17]
Christianity began as a religious experience which claimed to put one
in a life-giving relationship with God, with oneself, with other
people, and with the world. That means that those who reflect
normatively on that experience need to think inferentially and
consistently about God, oneself, other people, and the world - in other
words, about any reality whatsoever. In order, therefore, to reflect
rationally on Christian religious experience, one needs a metaphysics,
a philosophical theory of the whole.
Charles Peirce urges us to look upon theories of the whole as fallible
hypotheses which elaborate rationally a root metaphor for Being, for
reality.[18] A root
metaphor functions as an imaginative model for reality.[19] Platonism and Aristotelianism
fallaciously compared reality to an idea. Thomas Hobbes fallaciously
equated reality with a machine. Whitehead compared reality with an
organism. Others still have compared reality with an event. In contrast
to these, one may legitimately take "experience" as a root metaphor for
reality, provided one understands the meaning of "experience" in the
triadic categories developed by Charles Peirce.
Moreover, in attempting to develop a theological method, there are two
key methodological questions which Lonergan failed to answer; 1) How
does one integrate the results of different kinds of speculative
disciplines -- philosophy, scientific and scholarly studies of the
human, and theology -- into a coherent theory? 2) How does one think
normatively about the functional specialty known as foundational
theology? Peirce's logic provides key philosophical presuppositions
that address both questions.
Peirce on Inferential Logic
Peirce felt a call to rethink the foundations of logic. He
focused especially on the point at which logic and metaphysics
intersect. In other words, he developed a normative logic which
prescribes how one ought to think if one desires to understand reality
on its own terms. Moreover, Peirce's revision of the foundations of
logic invalidates the transcendental logic which grounds Lonergan's
epistemology, metaphysics, and theory of theological method.[20]
Early in his philosophical development, Peirce undertook a systematic
study of syllogistic reasoning. He came to the conclusion that every
form of inference interrelates a rule, a result, and a case. A rule
offers a conceptual account of some law which one believes to operate
in reality. A result describes facts whose behavior one is trying to
understand. A case characterizes conceptually those facts in a
particular way on the basis of some rule which one assumes to operate
in nature.
Peirce argued that one can reduce any form of inferential reasoning
into three logically irreducible kinds of argument: abduction,
deduction, and induction. All three forms of inference interrelate a
rule, a case, and a result but do so differently and therefore
irreducibly. Abduction, or hypothetical reasoning, concludes to a case.
In other words, it categorizes data in need of explanation in a
particular way on the basis of a law which it believes to operate in
reality. Deduction, or predictive reasoning, concludes to a result. It
foretells that, if a particular abduction has grasped correctly the law
which justifies characterizing the data it is trying to explain, then
other facts, not currently in evidence, will appear at some future date
under specifiable conditions. Induction concludes to a rule. It argues
that, if the deductively predicted facts do appear under the specified
conditions, then the law on which one's initial abduction rests obtains
in reality. If the deductively predicted facts do not appear, then one
must reformulate one's account of the rule which lay at the basis of
one's original abduction.[21]
In Peirce's theory of inference, at the two points where the reasoning
human mind touches reality -- namely, in abductive and inductive
inference -- it could err. Deduction does not deal with reality directly
because it considers only logical possibilities. What, then, makes
abduction and induction fallible? In investigating any complex problem,
one must first decide how much of one's life one wants to dedicate to
its solution. As a consequence, one must formulate one's abductive
explanation of the data one is investigating before one knows for
certain that one has taken all the relevant facts into account.
Moreover, one can verify one's hypothesis only in a representative
sample of the realities one is investigating. In complex questions,
therefore, induction enjoys a measure of probability only. That means
that, even if one verifies one's abduction in a preliminary fashion,
one has no assurance that other facts might not turn up, which will
call one's hypothetical explanation of reality into question.
These logical insights grounded Peirce's doctrine of logical
fallibilism. That doctrine teaches that the human mind has a much
better chance of grasping the truth if it admits it might err than if
it claims an infallibility it does not possess. Fallibilism does not
despair of truth or of the human mind's ability to grasp the real.
Reality will in fact disclose to the investigating mind the laws it
obeys by the way in which it behaves, provided that the human mind
takes the trouble to clarify deductively the operational consequences
of the abductive hypotheses it formulates.[22]
Logical fallibilism has social consequences as well. It entails that
shared systematic inquiry offers the most effective means of fixing
one's beliefs about the real. A community of inquirers committed to the
truth and dedicated to keeping all possible paths of inquiry open has
the capacity to make up for limitations in one's own personal
experience and insight. Such a community offers some compensation for
personal fallibility and advances insight more efficiently than
one-person research.[23]
Peirce argued that this theory of inferential reasoning invalidated
Kantian transcendental logic.[24] Kantian
transcendental logic claimed to deduce a priori
the conditions for the possibility of scientific, ethical, and
aesthetic judgment. In other words, Kantian transcendental logic
recognized only one form of inference: namely, deduction. In fact, in
formulating his account of scientific, ethical, and aesthetic judgment,
Kant only formulated a fallible abduction about how the human mind
works. Because Kant argued a priori, he treated
that abduction as the equivalent of a verified induction about human
cognition while simultaneously calling it a deduction. By Peircean
standards, by treating an abduction like an induction while calling it
a deduction, Kantian transcendental logic endorses perhaps the most
confused formula conceivable for thinking inferentially.
Quite independently of Peirce, Jean Piaget has argued in an analogous
manner. He has pointed out that one can in fact investigate human
consciousness empirically by the simple expedient of asking people how
they think and then verifying or falsifying one's theory of knowledge
in the evidence they supply.[25]
A Peircean Critique of Lonergan
Kantian transcendental logic lies at the basis of Lonergan's
epistemology and theory about method in theology.[26] Its invalidation requires,
then, that one either re-ground philosophically Lonergan's theory of
functional theological specialties in some other valid logic and
epistemology or else abandon it. Important points of convergence
between Lonergan's thought and Peirce's allow one to do the former.
Pierce's logic, with its turn to community, provides a much sounder
philosophical justification for Lonergan's theory of functional
theological specialties than does Lonergan's endorsement of a Kantian
turn to the subject. As we have already seen, Lonergan intends his
theory of method as a framework for collaborative thinking. Like
Peirce, Lonergan endorses shared systematic inquiry as the best method
available to the human mind for fixing theological beliefs about
revelatory events. Peirce's turn to community offers, then, a more
adequate explanation of the kind of shared inquiry the functional
specialties require than does Lonergan's endorsement of the Kantian
turn to the subject. The Kantian turn to the subject requires one, of
course, to deduce a priori the structure of
knowing in general from one's own individual "subjectivity."
Besides demonstrating, the invalidity of the formal logic on which
Lonergan's applied theological logic builds, Peirce's formal logic and
theory of knowledge refute other fundamental presuppositions of
Lonergan's method. Lonergan, for example, claimed to have deduced a
priori an unrevisable starting point for all human thinking.
He identified that allegedly unrevisable starting point with a specific
pattern of operations: experience, understanding, judgment, and
decision. Lonergan deduced a priori the
unrevisability of this pattern with the argument that one cannot revise
one's account of how the human mind thinks without reproducing his
pattern of operations in the very terms and relationships in which he
had described them.[27]
For starters, in Lonergan's epistemology, experience functions largely
in the same way as the sense manifold does in Kant's thought.
Experience for him provides the raw material for rational thinking.
From Transcendental Thomism, Lonergan derived the notion that only the
judgment of the spiritual intellect grasps Being as such.
Like Joseph Maréchal, the founder of Transcendental Thomism, Lonergan
argued that the human mind does not grasp Being until the third set of
operations in his allegedly unrevisable pattern: namely, in the act of
judgment. Judgment in Lonergan corresponds to Peirce's inductive
inference.
Lonergan never studied Peirce's logic. That failure unfortunately kept
him from grasping a truth that Peirce understood clearly: namely, that
the human mind cannot discover anything at the end of an inferential
process which it did not already perceive, albeit vaguely, at the
beginning of that process. In other words, Lonergan errs when he
equivalently argues that one must wait until the act of inductive
inference in order to grasp the real. Abductive, hypothetical reasoning
already grasps reality in its own right, though more vaguely than a
deductively clarified and verified inductive inference.[28]
Moreover, Peirce also argued correctly that strict logical validity
applies only to deductive and inductive inference.[29] Why? Because logic cannot
tell the reasoning mind how to come up with the correct hypothesis.
Logic can only suggest criteria for selecting which hypothesis one
ought to prefer for deductive clarification and inductive testing.
Peirce also recognized that abductive inference engages imaginative
perceptions of reality. In reasoning abductively, the thinking mind
must engage in mind play. Mind play invokes feeling and imagination.
If, then, abductive reasoning grasps reality, though more vaguely than
a deductively clarified and inductively verified inference, then
feeling, human affections, and human imagination do more than provide
the raw materials for rational thinking as Lonergan held. Feeling,
emotion, and imagination all grasp reality in their own right.[30] In fact, as Karl Jung
correctly saw, we judge reality in two ways: rationally and
inferentially, on the one hand, and with our feelings and imaginations,
on the other.[31] Jung's
psychological insight both verifies and amplifies Peirce's logical
insight. Lonergan's failure to grasp these important truths in his own
theory of knowledge explains why his remarks concerning esthetic
experience remain both sparse and derivative. Actually, the human mind
grasps reality both with judgments of feeling and with verified
inductive inferences (not perfectly, and sometimes vaguely, but
nonetheless, something accurate is often grasped).
In forcing significant revisions in Lonergan's allegedly unrevisable
starting point for all thinking, Peirce's logic of inference endows
what Lonergan calls "understanding" with much greater logical precision
than Lonergan himself. It does so by giving a clearer logical account
of the necessary distinction between abductive, deductive, and
inductive inference. One can, then, revise the terms and relations of
Lonergan's supposedly unrevisable pattern of cognitive operations by
the simple expedient of coming up with a better account of how the
human mind actually works than Lonergan did.
Peirce's logic and epistemology require the revision of both the logic
and the epistemology which ground Lonergan's theory of functional
specialties. This need not force one to discard Lonergan's applied
theological logic. It only means that one needs to regroup them in an
adequate formal logic and in a more sound theory of knowledge. Peirce's
inferential logic and the theory of knowledge which it subtends do
precisely that.
The Importance of Cross-Disciplinary Thinking
There is an implicit logic in cross-disciplinary thinking. As
we have seen, Lonergan's definition of method implicitly invokes
Peirce's pragmatic maxim. Peirce's maxim asserts that one clarifies the
meaning of an inferential abduction by predicting deductively the sum
total of its operational consequences. In Lonergan's definition of
method as a pattern of recurring and related operations yielding
cumulative and progressive results, his focus on operations requires
one to clarify the meaning of any method by specifying the sum total of
its operational procedures.
Moreover, when Lonergan assigns to theology the task of mediating
between a religion and the culture in which that religion roots itself,
he implicitly calls for the kind of cross-disciplinary dialogue for
which Peirce's logic of metaphysical thinking also calls. Peirce
undertook his logical division of the sciences in the course of
surveying the state of scientific thinking at the end of the nineteenth
century. His passion for what he called "architectonic" thinking led
him to undertake such a survey. Architectonic thinking ambitions not
only system but comprehensiveness in one's formulation of a fallible
metaphysical hypothesis. Peirce hoped that his survey of the state of
scientific thinking would endow his metaphysical guess at the riddle of
the universe with the kind of architectonic comprehensiveness which he
prized.[32]
Peirce divided scientific knowledge into three generic kinds of
thinking: sciences of discovery, sciences of review, and practical
science. Sciences of discovery advance knowledge. Think of mathematics,
physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc. Sciences of review derive their
theories from reflection on the results of sciences of discovery.
Evolutionary theory exemplifies a science of review, since it draws
upon the results of sciences like biology, archeology, and geology for
its theoretical insights. Practical sciences study how to get things
done. Animal husbandry, engineering, the systematic study of mining or
of agriculture would, for instance, exemplify practical science.[33]
One can, moreover, draw upon Lonergan's thought in order to amplify
Peirce's division of the sciences. Lonergan correctly distinguishes
between science and scholarship. Science invokes mathematical
measurement and employs appropriate technological instruments, and
scholarship does neither. History, literary criticism, and what
universities call the humanities would exemplify scholarly thinking.
The hard sciences like physics and chemistry would exemplify "science"
in the narrow sense of that term.[34]
Peirce divided the sciences of discovery into mathematics, the
coenoscopic sciences, and the idioscopic sciences. Mathematics studies
the realm of possibility in a systematic manner. Peirce called
philosophical thinking "coenoscopic." Peirce adopted the term
"coenoscopic" from Jeremy Bentham. The "coeno" in coenoscopic derives
from the Greek word KOLVOς, or common. In naming philosophical thinking
"coenoscopic" Peirce was insisting on the shared, social character of
the experiences on which philosophy reflects. In effect, the term
grounded philosophical thinking, not in the Cartesian or Kantian turn
to the subject but in Peirce's turn to community. Philosophy develops,
not through solitary deduction a priori of the
structure of human intentionality, but through shred inquiry into
human, social experience.
If philosophy reflects on lived, social experience as lived, the
idioscopic sciences explore limited realms of human experience and
ordinarily use mathematical measurement and specialized instruments in
doing so. Scholarship also reflects in an organized way on limited
realms of experience and so qualifies as idioscopic; but, as we have
seen, scholarship does so without using mathematical measurement or
special instrumentation.
Social psychology and sociology of knowledge are convergent with
Peirce's social, relational logic of philosophical thinking. Peirce's
philosophical logic and metaphysics successfully interpret the results
of social psychology and of the sociology of knowledge, and these two
ideoscopic sciences in turn amplify Peirce's philosophy with their
verified insights.
The philosophical sciences of discovery divide into 1) phenomenology,
2) the three normative sciences of esthetics, ethics, and logic, and 3)
metaphysics. Phenomenology describes whatever appears in lived, social
experience without attempting to distinguish between illusion and
reality. The normative sciences study the kinds of habits one needs to
cultivate in order to make life worth living. The normative science of
esthetics sets the goals for the living of life. Esthetics studies
habits of appreciation. It measures felt perceptions of finite
realities and values against supreme excellence, against what Peirce
called the summum bonum. Ethics reflects on the
goods of action and decision. Ethics studies the kinds of habits of
choice one ought to cultivate if one desires to live for supreme
excellence. Logic ponders the goods of thought. It studies the kinds of
evaluative habits one ought to cultivate so that one can think clearly
about reality in a way which enables one to make sound, realistic
choices which aim at supreme excellence. In effect, Peirce's theory of
the normative sciences requires one to distinguish three different
kinds of ought: appreciative oughts, ethical oughts, and logical
oughts.[35]
An Important Note About Peirce's Phenomenology
Phenomenology describes whatever appears in experience. Logic
has only one contribution to make to phenomenology. It identifies the
most generic descriptive categories the human mind can employ. Peirce
argued that one can reduce any descriptive category to a "quality," a "fact," or a "law."
By a quality Peirce meant an instance of particular suchness. Qualities
correspond to the whole spectrum of human evaluative response. They
include both conscious and unconscious perceptions, sensed
characteristics, emotions, memories, images, concepts, ideals,
principles, conceived strategies, deliberations. One experiences a
quality as such only by abstracting it from the flow of experience. One
might, however, come close to experiencing a quality as such if, on
waking from deep slumber, one heard the distant sound of a train
whistle but felt nothing else for the moment but a certain quality of
sound. Qualities define the how of human
experience. They make us present to ourselves and to the things and
persons in our environment.
In other words, we normally experience a quality as such when we
abstract how we sense or perceive some reality from the reality itself
and from our own minds which do the sensing or perceiving. That process
of abstraction produces what we call an "essence." Thus, I grasp the
essence of a cat when I dissociate the definition of "cat" from the
feline I perceive on the couch and from my own mind which does the
perceiving. That double dissociation produces the conception of felis
silvestris catus, a small, carnivorous mammal that is valued
by humans for its companionship and its ability to hunt vermin and
household pests, and who possesses a light, flexible body and teeth
adapted to killing small prey. That definition exemplifies an essence I
can find listed in any English dictionary.
In and of themselves, qualities exemplify particularity and pure
possibility. Within human experience, they function as intentional
relations. Intentionality endows qualities with a feeling of "of." By
that I mean that we experience them as belonging to the realities they
qualify. Intentional use makes qualities individual, general, probable,
or universal through predication.
If qualities exemplify particular possibilities, facts endow experience
with concreteness and actuality. They make experience this rather than
that. A fact consists of a concrete physical action together with the
concrete physical reaction it evokes. The things we bump into bump
back. As in the case of quality, one never has a pure feeling of
facticity. Sense qualities make us initially present to the factual,
decisive impact of the world upon us. When I feel localized pain in my
banged head, that sensation makes me present to the damage which the
recent transaction between my head and a hard object did to my scalp
and cranium. One might, however, begin to approach an experience of
pure fact if, on attempting to open one's front door and finding it
locked, one went berserk and began to pound it with one's hands and
feet instead of figuring out some other way of entering. The door, of
course only pounds back as my bruised hands testify all too well. Facts
force themselves upon us.
Qualities endow experience with feelings of particular possibilities;
facts, with feelings of concrete actualities. Laws, by contrast, ground
intuitive, inferential, and deliberative human perceptions of real
generality. A law exemplifies a habitual tendency to act either
decisively or evaluatively in a predictable way and under specifiable
circumstances. Laws endow experience with the feeling of "what would
happen if."
In reflecting deductively on the implications of Peirce's logic,
epistemology, and metaphysics, quality, fact,
and law endow human experience with its temporal
structure. Qualities make us present to reality and so ground our
experience of the present moment. As a result, the realm of quality
possesses what Whitehead calls "presentational immediacy." We
experience facts as our immediate past because we sense facts a
fraction of a second after they impinge upon us. The minute character
of the lapse in time between physical impact and sensation has,
however, no practical significance for our dealings with the things we
sense. Laws, tendencies, endow experience with a dynamic orientation to
a future. We perceive tendencies intuitively in common sense thinking,
in poetry, in narrative, in drama, and in the arts. We perceive
tendencies inferentially by formulating hypotheses, clarifying them
deductively, and verifying them inductively. We deal practically with
tendencies through deliberation, i.e., thinking about the advantages
and disadvantages of mutually exclusive options.
Facts and laws make experience spatial. Facts create social and
environmental connectedness. Laws spread as physical things combine
with one another and as organic realities act upon themselves and in
the process grow more continuously complex as they either build into
themselves new, spreading, habitual tendencies or re-enforce old ones.
Hydrogen and oxygen, for example, combine to make water; and living
organisms have the capacity to act on their own bodies and so to grow.
Through the process of digestion, they create within themselves new
tendencies which develop in a felt continuum with the tendencies they
already embody. When I ingest food, I grow physically and for the most
part, rather unconsciously.
The deliberate fixation of a belief illustrates the living person's
capacity for conscious habit-taking. If I cannot decide whether my
interlocutor is telling the truth or habitually lies, I cannot decide
whether or not to believe what the person tells me. Once I decide that
I am dealing with a pathological liar, I build into myself a tendency
not to believe what that person says.[36]
Tendencies can function either autonomously or not autonomously. When,
for example, I digest food, the chemical tendencies which I incorporate
decisively into my body cease to function autonomously and begin to act
as integral parts of me. For that reason, the laws of organic chemistry
differ from the laws of physical chemistry. If a part of my body begins
to act autonomously, we call the growth a tumor or a cancer. A large
tumor or malignant cancer threatens the life of the host body on which
it feeds parasitically. Autonomously functioning realities exemplify
selves. Selves capable of acting with self-conscious responsibility
exemplify human persons.
The Transition from Phenomenology to Metaphysics
We have seen that each of Peirce's normative sciences makes a
contribution to the human mind's ability to grasp reality. In Peirce's
philosophy, however, logic finally effects the transition from a
phenomenological description of reality to metaphysics. Peirce's theory
of inference mediates that transition. Peirce argued that because
qualities make us present to the world and to ourselves, we cannot
seriously doubt their reality if one takes doubt seriously, as Peirce
himself did. Nor can we doubt the actuality of facts when they force
themselves upon us. One who picks up a red-hot plate with one's bare
hand cannot doubt that it is burning one's flesh, if one takes doubt
seriously.
One takes doubt seriously by insisting that it have a realistic motive.
The following qualify as a realistic motive: 1) factual evidence which
falsifies one's belief; 2) the fact that another belief one holds
contradicts another; or 3) the emergence of a more adequate frame of
reference than the one in which one originally fixed one's belief.
Peirce realized, however, that the history of philosophy contains many
minds who denied the reality of real generality, or law. Such thinkers
are called "nominalists." In order to mount a philosophical
demonstration of the reality of law, Peirce turned to his theory of
inference for the light it throws on the human act of perception.
Nominalistic philosophies argue that the human mind only knows concrete
sensible facts. Classical nominalism reduces a universal to the same
concrete word spoken over and over again about some concretely existing
object. In classical nominalism, for example, the idea of "horse"
exemplifies the repetition of the concrete sound which those letters
signify over this maned, long-legged, long-faced, herbivorous, hairy,
hoofed mammal. Conceptual nominalism allows that universals exist but
restricts their existence exclusively to human subjectivity. Kant's
philosophy brought conceptual nominalism to its classical formulation.
In Kant's theory of knowledge, one imposes subjectively derived
universal ideas on subjectively experienced concrete sensibles.
Peirce's inferential logic refutes nominalism by demonstrating that the
human mind perceives more than it senses. When one verifies a
hypothesis inductively, that inferential judgment perceives the law
which explains causally the behavior of whatever one is investigating.
We understand or grasp a law inferentially when we successfully predict
how some reality will act and the conditions under which it will so
act. One could not, however, perceive real generality at the end of a
continuous process of inferential thinking unless one perceived it,
albeit more vaguely, in the act of formulating abductively one's
original hypothesis . From the standpoint of human epistemology,
however, abductions shade into every conscious human act of perception,
which classifies persons and things on the basis of an initial, vague
sense of the laws, or tendencies which ground and explain their
behavior. In other words, at every waking moment, the human mind
perceives the real tendencies which ground the facts it senses.[37]
The categories "quality," "fact," and "law" give interpretative
structure to Peirce's phenomenology. There they function as
descriptive, not as metaphysical, categories. When he transformed the
term "quality" into a metaphysical category which makes realistic
claims, Peirce called it "Firstness" because particular possibilities
simply are what they are and therefore exemplify a certain kind of
ontological simplicity. He called "fact" "Secondness," because
typically facts have the dyadic structure of a concrete action which
evokes a corresponding concrete reaction. Immanent activities like
growth, which lack a corresponding reaction from a source different
from the agent, exemplify what Peirce called "degenerate Secondness."
He called "laws" "Thirdness" because in the act of interpretation,
habitual ways of thinking interrelate evaluations, decisions, and
tendencies imaginatively, inferentially, and deliberatively.
Peirce the fallibilist, however, looked upon his analysis of the act of
perception as offering only an initial verification of the triadic
structure of reality. He realized that he must keep testing his
fallible metaphysical categories both against lived experience and
against the verified results of the idioscopic sciences.[38]
Using Peirce to Complete Lonergan: The Coordination of Categories
The following problem arises: how can one construct and
articulate skillfully a coherent account of human experience with
categories derived from different speculative disciplines which operate
with different and irreducible applied logics[41] : 1) philosophy, 2) scientific
and scholarly studies of humanity and of human religious experience,
and 3) theology.
The more one attempts cross-disciplinary theological thinking, the more
one encounters two different but interrelated problems: 1) one must
coordinate the categories of different disciplines both within each
discipline itself as well as across disciplines, and 2) one must give
an account of how those categories interplay. The coordination of
categories ponders the ways in which categories relate to reality. The
interplay of categories explains how categories derived from different
formal and applied logics interpret one another. Peirce's division of
the sciences is particularly suggestive in illumining the latter
problem.[42]
In explaining how categories relate to reality, the coordination of
categories employs criteria of agreement, convergence, complementarity,
and disagreement. Two categories agree when they assert fundamentally
the same thing about the same reality. They complement one another when
they assert true but different things about the same reality. They
converge when they assert truths about different but interrelated
realities.[43] They
disagree when they assert contradictory things about the same reality.
Categories which disagree invite dialectical reversal. Let us try to
make these logical abstractions concrete by a few examples.
Let us begin with agreement. Two categories agree when they say
fundamentally the same thing about the same reality. One person may
characterize a summer's day as "extremely hot and humid," while another
calls it "muggy and sweltering." No one could seriously doubt, however,
that they basically agree in their assessment of the weather.
Categories complement one another when they say true but different
things about the same reality. The philosophy of art and Jungian
archetypal theory complement one another because they both study
intuitive human thinking. The philosophy of art, however, concerns
itself with how artists shape different media in ways which express
their perceptions of reality and with how critics interpret the
resulting art form.[44] Jungian
archetypal theory studies recurring patterns in human imaginative
perceptions for the light they throw on emotional pathology and
healing. The fact that the two disciplines complement one another
appears in that philosophers and scholarly critics can and do use
Jungian archetypal theory in understanding works of art and literature,[45] while Jungian archetypal
analysis draws in part on artistic and literary criticism in
formulating its clinical hypotheses about the archetypes.[46]
Categories converge when they say true things about different
interrelated realities. For example, different developmental
psychologists investigate different realms of human experience. Some
focus primarily on cognitive development, others on moral development,
others on affective development, others on religious development. To
the extent that any of these theories enjoys empirical verification,
they offer converging portraits of the predictable stages of different
kinds of related human experiences of growth. James Fowler implicitly
invokes this logical principal by drawing on the insights of other
developmental psychologists in formulating his construct of cognitive
religious development.[47]
When categories disagree, they assert contradictory things about the
same reality. Then they invite dialectical reversal. Dialectical
reversal employs three basic methods for getting rid of the
contradiction:
1) One may endorse some categories as true and discard others as false.
Here one coordinates contradictory categories by excluding from
discourse false and misleading categories or categories which rest on
fallacious and untenable logical and methodological principles and
presuppositions. During the Watergate investigations, for example, the
members of the investigating committee found themselves confronted with
a variety of contradictory interpretations of what had actually
happened during the Watergate break-in. As the investigation advanced,
they reached increasing clarity about which testimony to endorse as
true and which to discard as lies.
2) Dialectical reversal may endorse one particular set of categories as
more adequate and discard another as less adequate or as completely
inadequate. Questions of adequacy engage the frame of reference in
which different thinkers use categories. An adequate frame of reference
allows one to ask and answer all the questions one needs to raise in
order to understand the realities one is studying. An inadequate frame
of reference does not allow one to ask and answer all the questions one
needs to raise in order to understand the reality one is investigating.
Truth and falsity do not apply to frames of reference because in
thinking one never asserts the frame of reference as such. Instead,
one's frame of reference defines the presuppositions one brings to an
inquiry.
3) Contradictions arising from inadequate frames of reference allow for
two modes of dialectical reversal. a) One may adopt one frame of
reference for its adequacy and discard another for its inadequacy.
When, for example, the scientific community abandoned alchemy for
careful mathematical measurement and hypothetico-deductive method, they
did so because they found that the latter method allowed them to answer
the kinds of questions about nature they were asking whereas the
methods of alchemy did not. b) One may, after pondering the relative
adequacy and inadequacy of different frames of reference, attempt to
construct a more comprehensive frame of reference which incorporates
the best insights of all of them while simultaneously avoiding their
pitfalls.
The Interplay of Categories
The coordination of categories raises basic problems for
inductive inference as well as for scholarly and intuitive thinking.
The interpretative interplay of categories raises a more complex set of
logical and methodological issues. Peirce regarded as fallible all
metaphysical hypotheses about the nature of reality in general. Any
fact which such a fallible hypothesis cannot interpret or explain
requires one to take it back to the drawing board and either fix it or
discard it. When one formulates a metaphysical hypothesis, therefore,
one has no way of knowing whether or not the one fact which calls one's
theory into question may not lie just beyond one's cognitive horizon.
Moreover, Peirce's division of the sciences of discovery into
coenoscopic and idioscopic requires one to verify or falsify one's
metaphysical abductions in an ongoing way both in lived, human, social
experience as lived and in the results of close (idioscopic) scientific
and scholarly investigations into more restricted realms of human
experience. All the operational consequences of a metaphysical
abduction lie in the realm of interpretation. When one transforms a
root metaphor for reality into a metaphysical definition, one predicts
as a metaphysician that one's definition will interpret any reality
whatever in the sense in which one has defined it philosophically. A
successful metaphysical theory will then interpret
successfully both lived experience as lived and the results
of close scientific and scholarly investigations into reality if it
finds some realities it can interpret as defined philosophically and no
reality which it cannot so interpret. If in addition, one's hypothesis
passes the logical tests of consistency and coherence, then it
qualifies as a working metaphysical hypothesis. Consistency rules out
any contradiction or invalidity in one's theory. Coherence requires a
conceptually unified account of reality in general. A metaphysical
hypothesis enjoys coherence when all of its key terms remain
unintelligible apart from one another.
When, however, a working metaphysical hypothesis successfully
interprets both lived experience as lived and the results of closer
investigations into reality and does so with logically consistent and
coherent categories, it makes a second contribution to
cross-disciplinary thinking about foundational theology. Such a theory
enables one to contextualize both lived experiences and the verified
results of science and scholarship in a comprehensive frame of
reference which successfully interprets them all.
The fact that philosophy engages in normative thinking allows it to
make another positive contribution to the formulation of a
cross-disciplinary theology. The normative insights of esthetics,
ethics, and logic enable one to criticize the
questionable assumptions both of common sense human thinking, which
largely shapes human lived experience as lived, and of focused
scholarly and scientific investigations of different dimensions of
human experience.
Summary
In sum, then, Peirce's philosophy makes three fundamental contributions
to the formulation of a cross-disciplinary approach to theological
methods. It proposes fallible metaphysical hypotheses, which, when they
work, both 1) interpret and 2) contextualize the results of close
(idioscopic) scholarly and scientific investigations into reality. 3)
The normative philosophical sciences provide criteria for questioning
the inadequate assumptions both of common-sense thinking and of those
who engage in idioscopic (scientific and scholarly) speculations.
Peirce's logic requires the verification and falsification of all
hypotheses because events make hypotheses true or false by the way in
which they behave. When things behave in the way in which our
deductively clarified abductions say they will, we certify them as
true. When they do not, we reject those abductions as false. When we
test the truth or falsity of historical abductions, they must interpret
correctly not the future but the past. Historical hypotheses,
therefore, must offer a verifiable account, based on the surviving
evidence, of the way in which persons and things did in fact behave in
the past.
If, then, one must verify or falsify one's metaphysical abductions in
events, then the verified results of scientific and scholarly studies
of created reality judge the applicability and the adequacy of those
same metaphysical abductions in what concerns purely natural events.
Two contributions emerge regarding the contributions close scientific
and scholarly studies of reality make to cross-disciplinary thinking
about theology: 1) the verified results of close scientific and
scholarly studies of finite, created realities must verify
or falsify any philosophical hypothesis about the
nature and operation of natural realities. When those results do verify
one's philosophical categories, they perform a second function: 2) they
amplify them. The following paragraph explains
more.
Peirce's distinction between the coenoscopic and idioscopic sciences
takes on enhanced methodological importance. The coenoscopic, or
philosophical, sciences reflect rationally, inferentially, and
normatively on lived human experience as lived. In other words, the
pursuit of philosophy presupposes an adult human mind capable of
thinking architectonically and rationally about the nature of the real.
The descriptive, normative, or metaphysical probing of adult experience
as lived has nothing to tell the reflective mind about the kinds of
growth experiences the human mind goes through in achieving adult
maturity. For that information, one must look to idioscopic sciences
like individual and social psychology and the sociology of knowledge.
When, therefore, one's metaphysical categories successfully interpret
the verified results of the idioscopic probing of the stages of human
development, those same results amplify one's philosophical account of
human maturation by providing plausible or even probable accounts of
the kinds of development an adult philosopher went through in order to
have the rational maturity to formulate a metaphysical theory of the
whole.
One can argue that something analogous happens when one verifies or
falsifies metaphysical God-talk in the events which disclose God. If
God has acted and continues to act in human history in ways which
manifest something about the Deity's reality (and perhaps God's
intentions), then those events must pass judgment on the fallible
conceptions about God which finite human minds might concoct.
The scholarly discipline of theology investigates in a systematic way
the nature of those events; and, in my judgment, Lonergan's theory of
functional specialties, when re-grounded in Peirce's logic, has
successfully sketched an at least plausible applied logic of scholarly
theological thinking. Peirce's division of the sciences contributes
significantly to understanding the coordination and interplay of
categories in cross disciplinary thinking about theological method.
Notes
[1] Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (8 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931-1958), 6.492-493, 515. [^]
[2] Ibid., 6.452-493. [^]
[3] Ibid., 6.428-450. [^]
[4] Cf. A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York, NY: Vintage Books). [^]
[5] Cf. Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., Grace as Transmuted Experience and Social Process, and Other Essays in North American Theology (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), pp. 1-40. [^]
[6] Lonergan, Method in Theology, p. xi. [^]
[7] Ibid., p. 4. [^]
[8] Such tasks may benefit from invoking John Dewey's instrumentalist logic of practical science. Cf. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1938). See especially, pp. 1-97. Cf. Gelpi, The Gracing of Human Experience, pp. 196-206. [^]
[9] Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.388-410. Cf. Richard Smyth, "The Pragmatic Maxim of 1878," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 13(1977), pp. 93-111; G. Gentry, "Peirce's Early and Later theory of Cognition and Meaning," Philosophical Review, 55(1946), pp. 634-640; Winston H.F. Barnes, "Peirce on 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear'" in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Philip Wiener and Friedrich H. Young (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1952), pp. 53-62; Idus Murphee, "The Theme of Positivism in Peirce's Pragmatism" in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce: Second Series, edited by Edward C. Moore and Richard S. Robin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1964); pp. 226-241; Peter Ochs, "A Pragmatic Method of Reading Confused Philosophic Texts: The Case of Peirce's 'Illustrations,'" Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 25(1989), pp. 251-291. [^]
[10] Lonergan, Method in Theology, pp. 4-6. [^]
[11] Cf. Morton White, Foundations of Historical Knowledge (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1965). [^]
[12] Lonergan, Method in Theology, pp. 125-145. [^]
[13] Cf. Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., Inculturating North American Theology: An Experiment in Foundational Method (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988), pp. 26-27. [^]
[14] Ibid., 249-250. [^]
[16] Ibid., pp. 281-293. [^]
[17] Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (2 vols.; Chicago, IL: Regnery, 1968); Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York, NY: The World Publishing Co., 1967), p. 50. [^]
[18] Cf. Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidences (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1942). [^]
[19] Cf. Ian Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1974). [^]
[20] Cf. David Tracy, The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan (New York, NY: Herder and Herder, 1970). [^]
[21] Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.266-282. Cf. Francis E. Reilly, S.J., Charles Peirce's Theory of Scientific Method (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 1970); H.G. Frankfort, "Peirce's Notion of Abduction," Journal of Philosophy, 55(1958), pp. 593-597; "Peirce's Account of Inquiry," Journal of Philosophy 56(1959), pp. 667-678; Len O'Neill, "Peirce and the Nature of Evidence," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 29(1993), pp. 211-237. [^]
[22] Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.574-604. [^]
[23] Ibid., 5, 384-387. Cf. C.F. Delaney, Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C.S. Peirce (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993); Peter Skagestad, The Road of Inquiry: Charles Peirce's Pragmatic Realism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1981); R.M. Martin, Peirce's Logic of Relations and Other Studies (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1980); I. Murphee, "Peirce: The Experimental Nature of Belief," Journal of Philosophy, 55(1963), pp. 309-317. [^]
[24] Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.452. [^]
[25] Jean Piaget, Insights and Illusions of Philosophy, translated by Wolf Mays (New York, NY: World, 1971). [^]
[26] Lonergan, Method in Theology, pp. 13-25. [^]
[27] Lonergan, Method, 19-20; Insight, 271-278. [^]
[28] Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.18-211. [^]
[29] Ibid., 5.318-357. [^]
[30] Ibid. 1.616-677. [^]
[31] C.G. Jung, Psychological Types, a revision by R.F.C. Hill of the translation by H.G. Baynes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 380-383, 387-388. [^]
[32] Ibid., 6.7-34. [^]
[33] Cf. Beverly Kent, Charles S. Peirce: Logic and the Classification of the Sciences (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1987). [^]
[34] Lonergan, Method in Theology, pp. 274-276. [^]
[35] Cf. Vincent G. Potter, S.J., Charles S. Peirce on Norms and Ideals (Worcester, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967); "Peirce's Analysis of Normative Science," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 1 (1966), pp. 5-32; S. Veyama, "Development of Peirce's Theory of Logic," Journal of Symbolic Logic, 20(1956), p. 170; A.W. Burks, "Peirce's Conception of Logic as a Normative Science," Philosophical Review, 52(1943), pp. 187-193; Richard S. Robin, "Peirce's Doctrine of the Normative Sciences" in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, Second Series, pp. 271-288; Herman Parrett, Peirce and Value Theory: On Peircean Ethics and Aesthetics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989); Larry Holmes, "Peirce on Self-Control," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 1(1966), pp. 112-130; Thomas V. Curley, "The Relation of the Normative Sciences to Peirce's Theory of Inquiry," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society,5(1969), pp. 90-106; Beverly Kent, "Peirce's Esthetics," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 12(1976), pp. 261-283; Catherine Wells Hantzis, "Peirce's Conception of Philosophy: Its Method and Program," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 23(1987), pp. 289-307; Helmut Pape, "Final Causality in Peirce's Semiotics and His Classification of the Sciences," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 29(1993), pp. 581-607. [^]
[36] Cf. David Savan, "On the Origin of Peirce's Phenomenology" in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, pp. 185-194; Isabel S. Stearns, "Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness" in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, pp. 195-208; Charles Hartshorne, "The Relativity of Nonrelativity: Some Reflections on Firstness" in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, pp.215-224; "Charles Peirce's 'One Contribution to Philosophy' and His Most Serious Mistake" in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce: Second Series, pp. 455-474; Charles K McKeon, "Peirce's Scotistic Realism" in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, pp. 238-250; Edward C. Moore, "The Influence of Duns Scotus on Peirce" in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce: Second Series, pp. 430-454; Robert Almeder, "Peirce's Pragmatism and Scotistic Realism," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 9(1973), pp. 3-23. [^]
[37] Peirce, Collected Papers, 5. 180-212. Cf. Nynfa Bosco, "Peirce and Metaphysics" in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce: Second Series, pp. 345-358; Carl Hausman, "In and Out of Peirce's Percepts," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 24(1990), pp. 271-308; Carl Hausman and Douglas B. Anderson, "The Telos of Peirce's Realism: Some Comments on Margolis's "The Passing of Peirce's Realism," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 30(1994), pp.825-838; Kelly J. Wells, "Contra Margolis's Peircean Constructivism: A Peircean Pragmatic Logos," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 30(1994), pp. 839-860. [^]
[38] The idioscopic sciences study limited areas of human experience often with mathematical measurement and special instruments. [^]
[41] Formal logic studies the normative structure of any form of rational thinking; applied logic studies the methods of different kinds of rational thinking. [^]
[42] I have discussed these matters at some length in Inculturating North American Theology: An Experiment in Foundational Method (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988), pp. 147-170. [^]
[43] I have not always used these terms consistently. I therefore offer these definitions as the correct one. [^]
[44] Cf. Alejandro Garcia-Rivera, A Wounded Innocence: Sketches for a Theology of Art (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2003). [^]
[45] For an example of Jungian literary criticism, see: Albert Gelpi, The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1975); A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). [^]
[46] Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, translated by Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955); The Origins and History of Consciousness, translated by R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954). For an example of literary analysis which invokes archetypal theory, see: Albert Gelpi, The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1987). [^]
[47] James W. Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1981). [^]
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