Philosophical Review

Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism: A Study of Peirce's Relation to John Duns Scotus by
John F. Boler
Review by: Richard Rorty
The Philosophical Review, Vol. 75, No. 1 (Jan., 1966), pp. 116-119
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review
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 BOOK REVIEWS

priori that every event has a cause. What we cannot know is whether
there will be any events. According to Kant, the categories are
"constitutive" of experience. Obviously, he did not think them to be
general headings for classifying perceptions.
Bird's theory of categories is not new, though I cannot recall anyone
else who has made the mistake of attributing it to Kant. Clarence
Irving Lewis, in his Mind and the World Order,developed just such a
theory at great length. Lewis, however, realized that his position
involved a rejection of the Kantian theory of the a priori, and he
stated as much explicitly.
With one important exception, Bird's book is of little value to the
student of Kant. It is obscure when it is correct, and not even interest-
ingly wrong. It makes scant use of existing knowledge of the Critique
and therefore represents a step backward in Kant scholarship. Its
major thesis is clearly false.
The exception is an interesting and intelligent chapter (Ch. I)
on Kant's treatment of the concept of a person. Bird makes good use
of the work of Strawson on the subject, and raises some of the problems
which Kant left unresolved. This chapter would have made a fine
journal article.
ROBERT PAUL WOLFF
ColumbiaUniversity

CHARLES PEIRCE AND SCHOLASTIC REALISM: A STUDY'

OF PEIRCE'S RELATION TO JOHN DUNS SCOTUS. By
JOHN F. BOLER. Seattle, University of Washington Press, I963.

PP. xi, 177. $5.00.

This book deals primarily with the following questions. (i) Why did
Peirce think that "scholastic realism"-the doctrine of the existence of
"real generals"-was an important and sound philosophical position?
(2) Why did he single out Duns Scotus as the scholastic whose realism
was most acceptable? (3) Why did he say that it was necessary to
adopt a "more extreme" realism than Scotus'? (4) Why did he think
that pragmatism and scholastic realism were mutually supporting
doctrines? (5) What accounts for his sympathy with absolute idealism?
Professor Boler gives plausible and illuminating answers to the last
four questions, and thereby makes an important contribution to our
understanding of Peirce. Unfortunately, however, he does not get
beyond an unenlightening restatement of Peirce's own answers to the
first, and fundamental, question. Boler agrees with Peirce that "one

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 BOOK REVIEWS

cannot state, in terms of actualities alone, what it is that one knows

now which allows the prediction of the future behavior of certain
things" (p. Ii4). But this seems merely to say that nomological state-
ments are not equivalent to any conjunction of observation reports,
and Boler does not help us see why this fact raises what he calls "the
problem of the scientific object" (p. 154)-the problem which scho-
lastic realism is supposed to solve. Again, he agrees with Peirce that
"a real connection cannot be the conclusion of an inductive process
alone" (p. 86), but this seems to mean merely that not all well-con-
firmed generalizations are projectable hypotheses-a fact which, once
again, seems metaphysically neutral. He quotes Peirce's disarming
admission that the "real generals" to which the realist is committed
cannot consist in "anything but the truth of a general conditional
proposition," but he does not meet the obvious objection that no
"nominalist" denies that some such propositions are true. If one
finds it odd that Peirce did not use his pragmatic criterion of meaning
to dissolve the issue between realists and nominalists, one will find it no
less odd after reading Boler's discussion of this point (pp. 109-I I5).
But if one can temporarily stifle doubt about the existence of a
"problem of the scientific object," then one can profit from Boler's
exegesis of the various perplexing ways in which Peirce chose to ex-
pound and defend his realism. Boler points out the differences between
Scotus and Aquinas which led Peirce to take Scotus as his patron,
and finds interesting analogies between Scotus' notion of a "meta-
physical" mode of being (distinct from "real" and from "logical"
being) and Peirce's notion of a special mode of being belonging to
"Thirds" (that is, laws, habits, powers, ideas, signs, and so forth).
He shows in detail how Peirce and Scotus were at one in thinking such
an intermediate mode of being necessary to "safeguard the objectivity
of our conceptions." (Here again, Boler does not attempt a reply to
those who find such problems and such solutions merely quaint-
except to say that even if "the only way to describe the [Scotistic]
Common Nature is as that funny-looking piece which solves the puzzle,"
nevertheless "this should not be taken as a deprecation of Scotus's
theory" because "one of the strong points of scholastic 'method' is
that when they lacked ostensible 'things' to account for a solution,
they generally proceeded by refining the problem" [p. 5o n.]. This
cryptic passage is one of the very few in which Boler even hints at his
own evaluation of the authors he is discussing.)
After sketching the area of agreement between Peirce and Scotus,
Boler goes on to show that the differences between them reflect the

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 BOOK REVIEWS

fact that by "individual" Scotus meant "primary substance" whereas

Peirce meant "event," and that Scotus' generals were forms, whereas
Peirce's were (primarily) laws. Thus it was possible for Scotus to say
that generals were exemplified by individuals, but necessary for
Peirce to deny this. A substance taken in isolation can exemplify a
Common Nature, but an event taken in isolation (a pure "Second")
cannot exemplify a law. This, Boler shows, is what Peirce had in mind
in saying that "Even Duns Scotus is too nominalistic when he says
that universals are contracted to the mode of individuality in singulars"
(8.208). Again, when Peirce said that pragmatism entails realism,
part of what he meant was simply that pragmatism, by translating
subject-predicate statements into hypothetical statements, shows that
the "generality" of the original statement lies in an implicit reference
to a law rather than to a "common nature." Peirce thought it much
more obvious that laws could not be reduced to events than that
"natures" could not be reduced to primary substances, and so he
thought that the pragmatic theory of meaning removed the last
impediment to our apprehension of the truth of realism.
Taking events rather than substances as basic particulars led also,
Boler shows, to Peirce's flirtation with idealism. Once one decides that
the "things" of common sense are bundles of habits or laws, and that
the events regulated by these laws are bare particulars, then one is
only a step from the view that nothing is real but habits or laws. And
if, like Peirce, one thinks that "idea" and "law" are two ways of
referring to the same kind of thing, then one is only two steps from
saying that only ideas are real. Peirce prided himself on never taking
these steps, but on instead insisting tough-mindedly on the "reality of
Seconds." Boler makes clear, however, that Peirce was as much at a
loss for something to say about the relation between Thirds and Seconds
as were the Absolute Idealists for something to say about the relation
between Reality and Appearance. Had Peirce rigorously followed out
his substitution of events for substances, he might have ended up where
Whitehead did, with an odd, but internally consistent, view. But,
as Boler shows, he combined this shift with a semantics and an episte-
mology which were formulated and argued for largely in terms of a
common-sensical substance metaphysics. The mishmash that resulted
looked enough like Absolute Idealism to allow Peirce to think that he
had appropriated what was valuable in idealism and dropped what
was fallacious.
Since the publication of Murphey's masterly Developmentof Peirce's
Philosophy,it has been evident that Peirce's thought simply does not

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 BOOK REVIEWS

have the organic unity and logical rigor which Peirce claimed for it,
and for which earlier commentators searched in vain. Boler's book
helps us see in more detail both why Peirce was never able to weave his
thoughts together, and why he was usually able to fool himself into
thinking that they formed a seamless web.
RICHARD RORTY
PrincetonUniversity

PHILOSOPHYr POLITICS AND SOCIETY. Second Series. A

collection edited by PETER LASLETT and W. G. RUNCIMAN. Oxford,
Basil Blackwell, I962. Pp. x, 229. 25S.

This volume is a collection of ten essays in political philosophy

selected to exhibit the achievement and the promise of the "analytical"
approach in this area of philosophy. Since there are comparatively
few anthologies in this field, since the range of topics in this anthology
is unusually broad, and, above all, since several of the essays raise
major points of controversial interest or argue their case exceedingly
well, the book is a significant contribution to the current literature of
social and political philosophy.
Its appraisal involves, however, some issues which go beyond an
evaluation of the individual essays. For Laslett and Runciman propose
that this volume serve as a marker of developments in political
philosophy since the publication of its predecessor, Philosophy, Politics
and Society, in 1956-and not so much a marker of development
as a demonstration of the shift in mood, though not quite the procla-
mation of the resurrection, in political philosophy. Accordingly, the
editors conclude their introduction with the following claim:

We feel that if and when a third series called Philosophy,Politics and Society
appears in England it will record an attitude to political philosophy which
has indeed been completely transformed, and that the transformation must
be along the lines implied by the contents of the present volume.

But what lines of development are implied by a collection of essays on a

diversity of topics authored by philosophers, sociologists, and historians ?
Four features which may fairly be said to characterize the attitude
or point of view of the anthology recur: (i) a sense of the possibility
of political theory; (2) a concern with the availability and the rele-
vance of the social sciences for political philosophy; (3) a willingness
to entertain ideological commitment as an aspect of political philos-

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