Joshua Wilson Black

This thesis develops and defends a Peircean conception of the task of metaphysics and critically compares it with recent anti-metaphysical forms of pragmatism. Peirce characterises metaphysics in terms of its place within his hierarchical classification of the sciences. According to the classification, metaphysics depends on logic for principles and provides principles to the natural and social sciences. This arrangement of the sciences is defended by appeal to Peirce's account of philosophy as 'cenoscopy'. The dependence of the natural and social sciences on cenoscopy is then argued for on the basis of Peirce's rejection of psychologism and in terms of the necessity of abductive inference. Peirce's position is then compared with recent forms of pragmatism. While it is less naturalistic, Peirce's position is defended on pragmatist grounds. An account of Peirce on truth is then developed. Peirce's account of truth in terms of an ideal limit of inquiry is defended as consistent with recent, more deflationary, approaches. The truth of 'abstract propositions' is a matter of local indefeasibility. These abstract propositions are related to the 'absolute truth', understood as a single non-abstract proposition. The truth of this proposition is then understood in terms of an identity theory. Two conceptions of Peircean metaphysics are presented. Both are 'abductive'. Their task is to explain the possibility of success in inquiry. However, only one proposal accepts the notion of an absolute truth. The 'absolutist' proposal is defended as an interpretation of Peirce and as a contemporary option for pragmatist philosophers. The thesis concludes by comparing recent anti-metaphysical arguments due to Huw Price with the Peircean position. Room for the absolutist proposal is defended by means of an account of recent exchanges between Price and Robert Brandom on dispositional modality.

Mainstream philosophy has seen a recent flowering in discussions of intellectualism which revisits Gilbert Ryle’s famous distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’, and challenges his argument that the former cannot be reduced to the latter. These debates so far appear not to have engaged with pragmatist philosophy in any substantial way, which is curious as the relation between theory and practice is one of pragmatism’s main themes. Accordingly, this paper examines the contemporary debate in the light of Charles Peirce’s habit-based epistemology. We argue both that knowing-that can be understood as a particularly sophisticated form of knowing-how, and that all bodily competencies—if sufficiently deliberately developed—can be analysed as instantiating propositional structure broadly conceived. In this way, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism are seen to be not opposed, and both true, although Peirce’s original naturalistic account of propositional structure does lead him to reject what we shall call ‘linguistic intellectualism’.

The availability of large digital archives of historical newspaper content has transformed the historical sciences. However, the scale of these archives can limit the direct application of advanced text processing methods. Even if it is computationally feasible to apply sophisticated language processing to an entire digital archive, if the material of interest is a small fraction of the archive, the results are unlikely to be useful. Methods for generating smaller specialized corpora from large archives are required to solve this problem. This article presents such a method for historical newspaper archives digitized using the METS/ALTO XML standard (Veridian Software, n.d.). The method is an ‘iterative bootstrapping’ approach in which candidate corpora are evaluated using text mining techniques, items are manually labelled, and Naïve Bayes text classifiers are trained and applied in order to produce new candidate corpora. The method is illustrated by a case study that investigates philosophical content, broadly construed, in pre-1900 English-language New Zealand newspapers. Extensive code is provided in Supplementary Materials.

This paper presents a methodology for exploring systematic co-variation of vowels using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). As a case study, we examine and build on Brand et al.'s (2021) study of systematic co-variation amongst the monophthongs of New Zealand English (NZE) across speakers born over a 118-year time period. We present PCA as a methodology, with information aimed at readers who may themselves want to use it in a related context. We consider tests for the appropriateness of PCA, how to select Principal Components, and how to interpret them once they have been found. At each stage, we provide code in the R programing language to enable readers to both follow our analysis and apply the same methods to their own data.

In “Metaphysics, Science, and Self-Control” (2000[1989]), Christopher Hookway presents an interpretation of the purpose and methods of Peirce’s metaphysics. On Hookway’s account, Peircean metaphysics proceeds by articulating features of common sense upon which scientific hypothesis generation depends. This grants the metaphysician a critical orientation toward hypotheses from the special sciences that violate common sense. However, Hookway also claims that the role of commonsense beliefs diminishes as the sciences move into areas of experience that are radically different from the areas in which human common sense evolved. At this point, the metaphysician is free to appeal to cutting-edge scientific results. This chapter sets out Hookway’s account of Peirce’s metaphysics, as developed in “Metaphysics, Science, and Self-Control,” and challenges his claim that the role of the “common” diminishes as the sciences develop. With Hookway, I center my attention on Peirce’s account of metaphysics in 1906’s “The Basis of Pragmaticism in the Normative Sciences.” There Peirce characterizes philosophy as “cenoscopy,” the observational science of the common, and claims that metaphysics completes cenoscopy and “welds” into the special sciences. I argue that that characterization of metaphysics in terms of its relationship with other sciences requires us to account for (i) the difference between metaphysics and its neighbors, (ii) their common nature as “sciences,” and (iii) their interactions with one another. These three demands provide a scaffold for critical engagement with Hookway’s interpretation. I argue that Hookway’s account of the role of common sense in Peirce’s metaphysics leads him to insufficiently account for the difference in methods that Peirce posits between metaphysics and the special sciences and for their appropriate interaction. I argue that a better interpretation of Peirce’s metaphysics, and its interactions with the special sciences, is achieved by emphasizing Peirce’s account of common experience, understood in terms of the experience that would be common to a scientific intelligence, rather than his account of commonsense belief. I argue that common sense beliefs are only interesting to the Peircean metaphysician in so far as they provide access to common experience.