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Varieties of Synechism: Peirce and James on MindWorld Continuity

Rosa M. Calcaterra

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Volume 25, Number

4, 2011, pp. 412-424 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/jsp.2011.0023

For additional information about this article

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varieties of synechism 413

Deweys ght against the false antitheses that appear throughout Western

philosophical tradition. This is the enlightening standpoint that we have to

assume in order to understand the naturalistic vein that runs through theworks of all classic pragmatists, from Charles S. Peirce and William James

to Dewey, Mead, and Clarence Irving Lewis.

Many authors have emphasized the differences between Peirces and

Jamess pragmatism. However, we should ask whether focusing on these

aspects is really useful in order to clarify their particular suggestions about

contemporary philosophical issues. I believe, instead, that their speculative

contrasts should be considered as different ways of working out a com-

mon set of assumptions and objectives. These ways, rather than recipro-cally exclusive, prove the fecundity of the pragmatist perspective of the two

founders. Therefore, I will now try to apply this interpretative hypothesis,

focusing on Jamess and Peirces efforts to go beyond the dualistic approach

to the relationship between mind and world.

In both classic and contemporary pragmatists the link between mind

and world is subjected to their understanding of evolutionism and in

particular Darwins theory. Although with quite different emphases, this

aspect is present throughout the work of Peirce and James, so much so thatDarwins evolutionism has to be regarded as a constitutive element in the

genesis of pragmatism. It is worth recalling that Darwins biology, along with

Alexander Bains psychology, animated the discussions of the famous Meta-

physical Club, the original scenario of pragmatism. As it is well known,

Chauncey Wright, a personal friend and lively interlocutor of Darwin,

had a major role in the club itself. Peirce called him the coryphaeus

of the young intellectuals who belonged to the Metaphysical Club and the

boxing master of their debates on science, philosophy, religion, and law.From an overall point of view, one can say that the pragmatist recep-

tion of Darwins evolutionism consisted mainly in developing an antidu-

alistic style of thinking, which involved both the logical-semantic and the

ontological-metaphysical elds. Now, a rst step in examining the purpose

of this philosophical attitude concerns Peirces synechism, the logical and

metaphysical theory of continuity that constitutesusing his own words

the cornerstone of his thought.

The working out of the concept of continuity goes back to the so-calledanti-Cartesian essays of 186869, in which Peirce grounded his cognitive

semiotics, and extends to the last writings insistently devoted to establish-

ing a structural link between his pragmatism and his new form of realism


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rosa m. calcaterra414

based on the category of continuity. The category of continuity involves the

concept of chance-spontaneity introduced in a famous essay from 1891,

The Doctrine of Necessity Examined. Here Peirce introduces the idea ofchance because he nds that the factual analysis of objective reality does

not account for the issue of diversication in nature. The same lack of

explanation occurs when we try to understand how the necessary laws that

rule all natural phenomena came about.

From a logical point of view, both questions can only be considered

in relation to one another, and both go beyond the possible accounts of

science. Peirces suggestion is to consider the idea of chance-spontaneity

not as opposed to the idea that the universe is governed by principles oflegality or necessity but, rather, as a metaphysical conjecture that could

offer an alternative to determinism, which often intrudes in evolutionary

theories, as, for example, happens in Spencers theory.

Therefore, Peirce argues that the category of chance-spontaneity

implies a degree of regularity, which is indeed noticeable in evolutionary

continuity, namely, in the increasing complexity of reality, as shown by

the diversication of nature. The crucial point is that the effectiveness of

chance-spontaneity is considered to be an intrinsic element in the evolu-tion of nature and not as its only cause: in other words, the spontaneity

of nature, which does not coincide with absolute randomness, explains

changes in the objective world. In fact, each natural specication makes

sense in relation to the overall natural order.

Peirce was well aware that the entanglement between chance-

spontaneity and law was not a sufcient answer to all the questions about

the relationships between psychic and physical facts. This is an issue

that coincides with the question about a single human beings realitywithin the evolution of the universe. The theory of synechism aims at

offering logical and epistemological tools that help in addressing pre-

cisely these questions. That is why Peirce builds a new theory of a mathe-

matical continuumbased on an examination that takes into consideration

Aristotle, Kant, and, especially, Cantor. According to Peirces theory, the

mathematical continuum is not the largest set but the true continuity of

which any series of points is a realization. In this way, any series, and also

its interruptions, can be considered part of the continuum. The impor-tance of this mathematical theory of continuity for setting an antidualistic

relationship between mind and world, between physical and mental,

is quite clear. In particular, the mathematical foundation of synechism


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is the ontological equivalent of the methodological signicance Peirce

assigns to it.

Peirce is absolutely right in saying that of all conceptions Continuityis by far the most difcult for Philosophy to handle because there has never

been a satisfactory denition of it.1 That is why he concentrated all his efforts

on trying to achieve it, especially during the mature phase of his research.

However, synechism is to him primarily a method of investigation, a

scientic-philosophical attitude that has to be implemented and increased.

In a manuscript from 1892, the founder of pragmatism claims to refer to

the ancient meaning of the word sinechisis, so that synechismindicates con-

tinuity of parts brought about by surgery, thus suggesting that continuityis the result of a conceptual organization that would bring out unknown or

hidden relationships and interexchanges.2 The synechisthe continues

does not wish to exterminate the conception of twoness; rather, he is hos-

tile to dualism as the philosophy which performs its analysis with an axe,

leaving as the ultimate elements, unrelated chunks of being. To be sure,

the very concept of ultimate element is contrary, according to Peirce, to the

spirit of scientic research. The following passage is especially interesting

regarding this point: In particular, the synechistwill not admit that physicaland psychical phenomena are entirely distinct,whether as belonging to dif-

ferent categories of substance, or as entirely separate sides of one shield,

but will insist that all phenomena are of one character, though some are

more mental and spontaneous, others more material and regular. Still, all

alike present that mixture of freedom and constraint, which allows them to

be, nay, makes them to be teleological or purposive.3

The intrinsic unity of freedom/spontaneity and necessity/law is, for

Peirce, a working hypothesis, that is, an open question that he is ask-ing in The Architecture of Theories while trying to dene the legality of

the theoretical-scientic classication of natural facts. However, setting

aside the difculties implied in Peirces cosmology, here it is worthwhile

to note the epistemological centrality of the concept of law: namely, the

claim that this concept constitutes the link between the evolution of the

objective world and operations of the mind through which the world itself

can be known. On the other hand, precisely because of the inextricable

link between freedom/spontaneity and necessity/law, the evolutionarycontinuum is nothing less than the justicatory hypothesis of the other

cornerstone of his thought: fallibilism. This second premise is the insur-

mountable normative criterion of scientic research, a criterion to which


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Peirce entrusts the authentic spirit of science, its specic epistemic and

ethical validity. The principle of continuity is the idea of fallibilism objec-

tied, he afrms.4 And in a letter to William James, Peirce sums up hisposition as follows: The idea of continuity traced through the history of

the Human Mind, and shown to be the great idea which has been working

itself out. . . . Modern science due to it exclusively. A great part, if not all, of

evolution in all departments, and at all times, probably to be ascribed to the

action of this principle. . . . The great opponent of this philosophy has been

in history, and is in logic, infallibilism, whether in its milder ecclesiastic

form, or in its more dire scientist and materialistic apparitions.5

In Peirces jargon, the term scientism is the name given to the dog-matic lack of philosophical awareness about the complexity of cognitive

processes: more precisely, scientism fails to recognize the semiotic nature

of cognitive propositions or the conceptually mediated characteristic of

truths and realities that human knowledge might achieve. At the same

time, this dogmatic attitude is the unavoidable consequence of the deter-

ministic conception of the natural world, according to which nature is a col-

lection of entities governed by rigid material relations of cause and effect,

settled ab eternaland ad eternum.On the contrary, Peirces evolutionary cosmology entails the plastic-

ity of nature, the pure spontaneity of life as a character of the universe,

acting always and everywhere though restrained within narrow bounds by

law, producing innitesimal departures from law continually, and great

ones with innite infrequency.6 Most important, notwithstanding Peirces

obsolete language, in his famous essay Mans Glassy Essence, one can

nd surprising insights that anticipate the antimechanistic attitude of con-

temporary biology. In this essay Peirce talks about the ability of the proto-plasm to feel, a capacity that can break through the mere mechanism of

reproduction. In a nutshell, the theoretical meaning of synechism, a topic

that is crucial in Peirces cosmology, consists in asserting the fundamental

unity of existence or in conceiving of the differences between phenomena

and aspects of reality not as ontological fractures but as different expres-

sions of its development, the essential characteristic of any real entity.

Much like Peirces, Jamess efforts to overcome the dichotomies of

subject/object, mental/physical, and empirical/conceptual involve a meta-physical hypothesis. I am referring in particular to Jamess theory that all of

reality, as well as the whole fabric of our experience, is multifaceted and yet

continuous, that is, that reality consists of a unique stuff. This is the view


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James maintained in the Essays in Radical Empiricism, and Bertrand Russell

assumed it afterward in his neutral monism.

Certainly, Jamess theory does not amount to maintaining a generalstuff of which experience at large is made. Such an assertion would mean

to endorse a metaphysical monism (of a spiritualist or materialist kind),

which would fail to grasp the vast multiplicity of relations that constitute

the objective world. Monism would also miss the activity of human intelli-

gence: the particularities and the differences of meaning that permeate the

accomplishments of our mind. In other words, what would be missed is

the acknowledgment of discontinuities, which characterize reality, and the

deep unity of the vital ow that the stream of thought consists ofnamely,itsfringes as well as the differences between transitive and substantive

phases. This is, in brief, the core of Jamess radical empiricism, a perspec-

tive in which the rejection of the atomistic conception of sensory experi-

ence (previously formulated in the Principles of Psychology) merges with the

rm refusal of Descartess psychophysical dualism and with the argument

against the efforts of rationalism to correct its incoherencies by the addi-

tion of trans-experiential agents of unication, substances, intellectual cat-

egories, and powers, or Selves.7

I am not going over these issues here, but I would at least emphasize

the strict correlation of Jamess struggle against rationalist abstractions

with the principle of fallibilism, which is by far the strongest point of his

philosophical alliance with Peirce. Jamess fallibilism is declared even as

long ago as the famous paper The Sentiment of Rationality, where the

main argument is against the construction of absolutist metaphysics. Here

James has in mind any kind of philosophical effort to build metaphysical

systems. These attempts try to include overall reality in exclusive princi-ples such as the matter or the spirit, understood as exclusive founda-

tional elements of the life of the universe. This argument accounts also for

Jamess attack on materialism and idealism, on cosmic pessimism, and

on the philosophical optimism la Wolff or la Spencer. And this attack

matches up with Jamess emphasis on the inadequacy of theoretical-logical

classications when understood as an explanation for the complexity of

human experience.

James implemented this philosophical perspective throughout hisepistemological work. In particular, he did it through his proposal for a new

form of correspondentism that, on the one hand, guarantees the realist

implications of the empiricist tradition and, on the other hand, makes a


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claim for the interactive, progressive character of the relationship among

mind, reality, and truth. In fact, he addresses his criticism to the intellec-

tualist version of the correspondence theory of knowledge, namely, thestatic interpretation of the threefold relationship mindrealitytruth,

whereas what is needed is a tight connection between our claims about

truth and facts and the real process of their validation (valid-action). The

following passage is illuminating:

In the realm of truth-processes facts come independently and deter-

mine our beliefs provisionally. But these beliefs make us act, and as

fast as they do so, they bring into sight or into existence new facts,which re-determine the beliefs accordingly. So the whole coil and ball

of truth, as it rolls up, is the product of a double inuence. Truths

emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to

them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indif-

ferent) and so on indenitely. The facts themselves meanwhile are

not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start

and terminate among them.8

We should pay special attention to the inextricable connection between

Jamess condence in the experimental methods and Peirces principle of

fallibilism. Here I will only point out the connection of Jamess contro-

versial concept of pure experience to his deep sense of the fallibility of

human knowledge and to the social conception of epistemic justications.

In fact, the importance of Jamess radical empiricism to the contemporary

debate between naturalists and antinaturalists lies in these relationships. In

particular, Jamess radical empiricism is relevant to a philosophical outlookrespectful of the specicity of human beings as well as of their insepa-

rableness from the living processes of nature. This perspective runs all the

way through the complex interplay between philosophy and experimental

psychology in Jamess opus magnum, The Principles of Psychology, where

he treats many topics of contemporary psychological research with more

critical attention than many contemporary cognitive scholars of science.

Just to give an example, I mention Jamess constant invitation to con-

sider the entanglement of any cognitive assertion about reality with thenetwork of conceptual, empirical, and biological factors that together

make up the activities of the human mind. The human serpent is every-

where, he tells us in Pragmatism.9 He had already thoroughly outlined


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such a perspective in the Principles, especially in the pages dedicated to the

intentionality of mind. He then analyzed the mind both as cognitive function

and as volition or as function directed to objects that exist outside the mind,which in turn are selected according to various vital needs of human subjects.

A uid image of reality was thus outlined. In the chapter The Perception

of Reality, this uid image was offered as an alternative to the idea of an

objective world independent from us with which our concepts should agree

unconditionally, regardless of their capacity to engage our needs and inter-

ests or their consistency with interactive experiences with the environment.

Following Lotzes philosophy, James tended to maintain that nature does

not establish a hierarchy of beings but, instead, offers a variety of forms oflife, so that mans position in the natural world should be identied by our

specic capacities and performances.10

Certainly, the scientic resources of psychology can satisfactorily detect

human capacities to grasp the facts of external reality. Yet it is difcult to

understand how much our mental structuresour logical and semantic

categoriesare the result of a purely causal relationship between the accu-

mulated experience of the human species and the functioning of the brain.

In particular, according to James it is true that experimental psychologycan enlighten us about the organic basis of a series of mental phenomena

such as elementary sensations, certain emotions, and even ideas of space,

time, or causality; however, the relationship between knowing subject and

known object necessarily requires the same conceptual tools that scientic

psychology should account for.

We are touching here on a crucial divergence between psycholo-

gism and antipsychologism, between descriptive and normative,

and, nally, between philosophy and experimental psychology: in a typicalJamesian spirit, we should recognize that the debate is still unresolved by

or, at most, can be resolved only in principle by recent developments in

neuroscience.11 On the other hand, the invitation to be cautious about the

supposed certainties of scientic psychology is only apparently in contrast

with the strong condence in the methodology of natural sciences that old

and new pragmatists maintain. As for James, sufce it to say that the incipit

of the Principles of Psychology is a statement in favor of the experimental

method, or a positivistic point of view.Nonetheless, James is aware that many of the issues concerning the

mental domain imply an unavoidable blending of psychophysiological

research with metaphysics. In other words, mentalist vocabulary inevitably


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intrudes into the propositions of experimental psychology. Given the

amazing results in neurosciences today, it may perhaps appear extrava-

gant to quote the nal statement ofPsychology: Briefer Course, but I nd itextremely helpful:

When we talk of psychology as a natural science, we must not

assume that that means a sort of psychology that stands at last on

solid ground. It means just the reverse; it means a psychology par-

ticularly fragile, and into which the waters of metaphysical criticism

leak at every joint, a psychology all of whose elementary assumptions

and data must be reconsidered in wider connections and translatedinto other terms. It is, in short, a phrase of difdence, and not of

arrogance; and it is indeed strange to hear people talk triumphantly

of the New Psychology, and write Histories of Psychology, when

into the real elements and forces which the word covers not the rst

glimpse of clear insight exists.12

As Hilary Putnam notes, the famous line There are more things in

heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy maywell represent the pluriverse emerging from the theory of perception that

James maintained in his Essays in Radical Empiricism.13 Indeed, the James-

ian concept of pluriverse brings a signicant contribution to the current

debate on the relationship between philosophy and experimental psychol-

ogy, or between mind and nature, supporting a nonreductionist form of

naturalism. An appropriate clarication of this assertion would require,

of course, an overall examination of Jamess epistemology, but clearly this

task exceeds the purpose of the present essay. I will only recall here thecentrality of the agent in Jamess work. James tried to demonstrate that

there are different kinds of relationships among truth, mind, and real-

ity; otherwise, we would need to presuppose an absolute or transcendent

truth/reality to which knowledge should conform regardless of the intra-

and intersubjective activities of individual human minds and the practices

that justify theoretical-scientic claims.

Commenting on the theory of radical empiricism, Putnam points out

in it those elements that are relevant to fundamental philosophical issuesthat still have to be resolved.14 Among these, the most relevant one is that

there is an interface between the knower and everything outside, an idea

that he himself acknowledges that he has defended for a long time.15 In


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particular, in the essay Jamess Theory of Perception, Putnam stresses the

importance of fallibilism and the social conception of epistemic justica-

tion but above all underlines Jamess effort to discard the meaning of theterm experience that has always prevailed in the Anglo-Saxon philosophical

world, namely, the meaning according to which experience is equivalent

to some sort of feeling.16 For my part, I would say that Jamess conception of

experience is an essential step in overcoming the contrast between empiri-

cal and conceptual elements of knowledge. As I previously mentioned, for

James these two aspects merge in the continuity between observational

facts and their logical-scientic settlement.

As Putnam suggests in the essay Jamess Theory of Perception,James has to be considered the rst post-Cartesian philosopher who rejects

the idea that perceptions require an interface,17 and accordingly, his state-

ments in favor of epistemological realism are quite strong. In The Meaning

of Truth, he not only claims, once again, that it is necessary to postulate

reality as a prerequisite of pragmatist philosophy but also stresses that

the agreement of our ideas with reality consists in testing external reality

by acquaintance.18 Moreover, and this is the most signicant point, James

challenges the traditional belief that immediacy coincides with incor-rigibility: hence, he states the criterion of intersubjective verication as

an essential prerequisite of any assertion about reality. This is indeed the

crucial aspect of the distinction between real and illusory, exemplied by

the case of an imaginary re in the Essays in Radical Empiricism.

The lexicon of current cognitive science replaces the expression

sensory data with perceptual states, without, however, affecting the

keystones of the traditional theory of perceptions, namely, the understand-

ing of them as something that is within us and regards appearances.To avoid this way of thinking we have to distinguish natural realism

from direct realism. In the rst case, objects of veridical perceptions

are conceived as external things or aspects of a reality that is outside

the subject. This traditional viewalso in the revised version of analytic

philosophyimplies the emphasis on the subjective nature of perceptual

experiences. Direct realism la James, instead, rejects the idea that truthful

perceptions are simply subjective affections; more exactly: Jamess idea

is that the traditional claim that we must conceive of our sensory experi-ences as intermediaries between us and the world has no sound arguments

to support it and, worse, makes it impossible to see how persons can be in

genuine cognitive contact with a world at all.19


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Post-Cartesian philosophy neglected this point of view for a long time.

It reappeared in the early twentieth century thanks to Moore, Russell, and

the American realists (Perry and Mountague), and then it disappeared againuntil Austin, Strawson, Sellars, and McDowell defended it in a new form.

However, according to Putnam, the dominant view in Anglo-American

philosophy of mind is a combination of materialism and Cartesianism

(Cartesianism cum materialism, he says), consisting in replacing the

theory of perception with the problem of the way in which language relates

to the world. Such a combination (which Putnam ascribes to Austin and

Fodor as well as to Dennett and Davidson) does not change the dichotomy

inside/outside that pervades traditional representationalism.20

Nor have theories that dene the perceptual and representational

functions as brain processes been able to offer a satisfactory solution to the

subject because they assume that there is an interface between mind and

world. On the contrary, this interface is what we should overcome by adopt-

ing a perspective that, on the one hand, recognizes what both mentalists

and materialists consider as a problem and, on the other hand, refuses to

give up perceptions as a direct contact with the surrounding environment.

What matters most is to escape reductionism, in other words, to aban-don the rigid alternatives that constitute the main source of philosophical

paradoxes: Rejecting Cartesianism cum materialism does not, of course,

mean going back to Cartesian dualism itself. We should not think that if we

refuse to identify the mind with the brain we will nd ourselves commit-

ted to thinking of it as an immaterial part of us; mind talk, I urged, is best

understood as talk of certain abilities we possess, abilities that depend upon

our brains and upon various transactions between the environment and the

organism but that do not have to be reductively explained using the vocabu-lary of physics and biology, or even the vocabulary of computer science.21

Jamess suggestion to check the conformity of the contents of percep-

tion with the aspects of external reality they represent sets us free from

the dichotomy subject/object and from the separation internal/external

and mind/world, namely, all those dualisms that Jamess radical empiri-

cism and natural realism tried to contrast. With Peirce, James introduces

new heuristic criteria such as the social dimension, the interweaving of

logical and empirical factors of knowledge, and the role of agency in thedynamics of cognitive processes. All other core issues of Western philo-

sophical thought have been shaped on the basis of these dichotomies. The

blending of realism and pragmatism that Putnam suggests that we should


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adopt is possibly a way for rewriting these issues according to synechism,

the principle upon which the most original insight of the founders of

pragmatism relies: their fallibilistic, while antiskeptic, approach to thepotentialities of human reason.

notes

1. C. S. Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things, ed. K. Ketner and H. Putnam

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 242.

2. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, vols. 16, ed. P. Weiss and C. Hartshorne

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 193135), and vols. 78, ed. A. W. Burks

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 7:565.

3. Ibid., 7:570.

4. Ibid., 1:171.

5. The passage is in a letter from Charles Sanders Peirce to William James.

Letters are classied according to the catalog R. S. Robin, Annotated Catalogue of

the Papers of Charles S. Peirce (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967),

L 224, CSP-WJ, December 26, 1893.

6. Peirce, Collected Papers, 6:60.

7. W. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

1984), 43.

8. W. James, The Works of William James. Pragmatism(Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1975), 108.

9. Ibid., 37.

10. For Lotzes inuence on Jamess thought, see S. Franzese, Luomo indetermi-

nato. Saggio su William James (Rome: DAnselmi, 2000), 30ff.; C. Hookway, Lotze

and the Classical Pragmatists, European Journal of Pragmatism and American

Philosophy 1 (2010): 4452.

11. See T. Nagel, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Philosophical Review4 (1974):

43550; N. Block, Comparing the Major Theories of Consciousness, in The

Cognitive Neurosciences IV, ed. Michael Gazzaniga (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009),

111122.

12. W. James, Psychology: Briefer Course (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1984), 400.

13. H. Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1990), 41316.

14. For a more detailed account of Putnams interpretation of Jamesian

thought, see R. M. Calcaterra, Il James di Putnam, in Pragmatismo e Filosoa

analitica. Differenze e interazioni, ed. R. M. Calcaterra (Macerata, Italy: Quodlibet,

2006), 20725.

15. H. Putnam, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and the World(New York:

Columbia University Press, 1999), 36.


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16. Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 40747.

17. Ibid.

18. See W. James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism(New York:Prometheus Books, 1997), 190ff.

19. Putnam, Threefold Cord, 1011.

20. Ibid., 100102.

21. Ibid., 44.

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