The first critical call on record for “the great American novel” (by novelist John W. DeForest in 1868) names Uncle Tom's Cabin as the closest approximation yet. Small wonder. One can imagine at least four reasons why, especially in the aftermath of the Civil War. First, the novel's foregrounding of slavery as the defining national issue. Second, the book's sensational impact, provoking a vast array of imitations and refutations, perhaps even the Civil War itself (if we take seriously Abraham Lincoln's bon mot). Third, its record-breaking sales, which demonstrated the reality of national literary emergence as a hard economic fact: the United States was now the largest book market in the English-speaking world. And fourth, the novel's panoramic reach, combining the geographical scope of a Whitman with the sociological profusion of a Dickens.

This last was the point that especially interested DeForest. Though he scoffed at the books idealizing exoticization of Tom and Eva, he praised “the national breadth to the picture, truthful outlining of character, natural speaking, and plenty of strong feeling.” By contrast, all the other authors on his radar screen seemed provincial, even the incomparable Nathaniel Hawthorne; and he was harshly dismissive of Stowe’s own regionalist turn as well. (“Stricken with timidity, the author shrank into her native New England.”)

This chapter attempts to tease out some of the extra-musical meanings in Bruckner's symphonies by seeking to understand how the sacred character of his music is constructed, and how religious thought, especially relating to the dualism darkness/light, may have influenced Bruckner's compositional practice. It is well known that both light and darkness have important sacred connotations. Light is associated with goodness, morality, and salvation. In contrast, darkness has connotations of immorality (especially lust), evil, and hell. Bruckner's early familiarity with conventions for signifying light can be seen in the Offertory of his Requiem of 1849. Immediately following an agitated setting of ‘ne absorbeat eas tartarus, ne cadant in obscurum’, the C minor of ‘tartarus’ is exchanged for C major for the words ‘sed signifer sanctus Michael repraesentet eas in lucem sanctam’. A similar change from minor to major occurs at the word ‘Lux’ in the Agnus Dei of the same work.

Life is associated with light – ‘the light of life’ – as death is with darkness (the ‘shadow of death’ being a common image). We find associations of C minor with death in the ‘funeral marches’ in the slow movements of the Fourth and the Sixth (its third theme). We can be certain about what the climax of the Adagio of the Seventh represented for Bruckner, since the ‘Non confundar’ theme of his Te Deum is quoted, and he described the beginning of the coda as ‘funeral music for the Master’.

Types, characteristics, and schemas

In a study of the symphony published in the 1960s, Bruckner was subjected to a unique treatment. In place of the consideration of whole works applied to other composers, Deryck Cooke described a ‘composite’ Bruckner symphony: the Adagio of the Seventh, the Scherzo of the Eighth, and the outer movements of the Third (thereby providing the opportunity to demonstrate the phenomenon of thematic linkage). The strategy was rather clever: by accepting ‘a grain of truth’ in the hoary old idea that Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, Cooke demonstrated the variety of ‘characteristics’ that existed within movement ‘types’. Since then, the same strategy has appeared in different contexts, though the question of the ‘schema’ behind Bruckner's symphonies has never entirely been resolved, apart from the firm adherence to four movements. The question affects form far more than other aspect of Bruckner's works, and will be considered in detail in Chapter 12. Nonetheless, attempts to define the ‘essence’ of Bruckner the symphonist have also tended to involve the taxonomy of a fairly narrow collection of characteristics and influences (the contrast between formal schema and characteristics is developed further in Chapter 13 by Margaret Notley).

Marlowe was barely cold before people began the process of trying to make meanings of both his death and life. He was stabbed to death on Wednesday 30 May 1593. On Sunday 23 June 1593, less than a month later, George Peele was paid £3 by the Earl of Northumberland, who may well have known Marlowe personally, for his poem The Honour of the Garter, which praised both Marlowe and his friend Thomas Watson, who had died in late 1592. Four days later, Thursday 27 June, was the date affixed by Marlowe's friend (and possible collaborator) Thomas Nashe to the end of his The Unfortunate Traveller (though it was not published until 1594), which draws a parallel between Marlowe and the notoriously lascivious Italian poet Ludovico Aretino. The Unfortunate Traveller also refers to the supposed necromancer Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and his entertainment for the Emperor Charles V, episodes which seem to be echoed in Doctor Faustus. Indeed, Marlowe seems to have been playing on Nashe's mind, because 8 September saw the entry in the Stationers' Register of his Christ's tears over Jerusalem, which castigates atheism and may have been an attempt to dissociate himself from his dangerous acquaintance.

Meanwhile, on 6 July of the same year, Marlowe’s Edward II had been licensed for publication by William Jones (no known quarto was published until 1594, but there may have been an earlier one which is now lost), and on 28 September Hero and Leander was entered in the Stationers’ Register by John Wolf; it must already have been circulating in manuscript, though, because on 22 October Thomas Edwards’s Narcissus, praising Watson and Marlowe and showing clear signs of knowledge of Hero and Leander, was entered in the Stationers’ Register, also by John Wolf.

Christopher Marlowe's contemporaries recalled a conflicted figure. 'Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell', wrote a student playwright at Cambridge, 'Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell.' Other living witnesses lined up on either side of this divide. The poet George Peele called the dead playwright 'the Muses' darling'. William Shakespeare hailed the author of the magical verse, 'Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?' Ben Jonson praised the inventor of 'Marlowe's mighty line'. Michael Drayton, another poet, proclaimed that Marlowe 'Had in him those brave translunary things, / That the first Poets have'. Marlowe's enemies were just as adamant about his vices. During the months leading up to Marlowe's death, the pamphleteer Robert Greene publicly predicted that if the 'famous gracer of tragedians' did not repent his blasphemies God would soon strike him down. Just a few days before Marlowe was murdered, the spy Richard Baines informed Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council that the playwright was a proselytizing atheist, a counterfeiter, and a consumer of 'boys and tobacco'. Protestant ministers viewed Marlowe's violent end in his twenty-ninth year as an act of divine vengeance. Marlowe had 'denied God and his son Christ', declared Thomas Beard, 'But see what a hook the Lord put in the nostrils of this barking dog.'

Four hundred years later, we can agree about Marlowe’s artistic genius, but the story of his wayward life remains elusive. He left no first-person utterances behind for us to interpret (the sole exception is a cryptic Latin dedication to the Countess of Pembroke). The facts of his adult life are few, scattered, and of doubtful accuracy. Only one of his works was published during his lifetime, and his name appears nowhere on the text. Despite his many encounters with the law, Marlowe seldom went to trial and was never convicted of anything.

INTRODUCTION

“Who originated the term pragmatism, I or you? Where did it first appear in print? What do you understand by it?” Charles Peirce asked his friend William James in a letter on November 10, 1900 (CP 8.253; Perry 1935/1936: II, 407 n5). On November 26, 1900, James replied: “You invented 'pragmatism' for which I gave you full credit in a lecture entitled 'Philosophical conceptions and practical results.'”The published version of that lecture (1898) is very likely to have been the first place where the term “pragmatism” was used in print, and James was the first philosopher known as a pragmatist. The pragmatist movement was largely developed by James, although Dewey, Royce, and even Schiller may have had an original and independent role to play in its formation. Nonetheless, James referred to Peirce's earlier unpublished usage of the term and acknowledged Peirce as the first to formulate a pragmatistic doctrine in the discussions of the Cambridge “Metaphysical Club” in the early 1870s.

Peirce's understanding of perception is crucial in situating his philosophy within a broad range of issues. Yet a cursory reading of Peirce seems to indicate that what he says about perception is both incomplete and inconsistent, leading both to an early neglect of his account of perception and to widely varying interpretations of his claims, as interest in them began to grow. The following analysis of Peirce's view of perception will try to resolve the ambiguities by bringing into focus the systematic completeness of Peirce's understanding of the process of perceiving and the object of perception, at the same time showing its relevance for a range of contemporary issues.

Peirce holds that the scientific method is the only genuine method of fixing belief, for it is the only method by which beliefs must be tested and corrected by what experience presents (CP 5.384). And the very first stage of scientific inquiry requires human creativity. Peirce calls the process of creative hypothesis formation ‘abduction’ to distinguish it from the inductive process of data collection. He rejects the claims of British Empiricism, that knowledge begins with first impressions of sense. He also rejects the claims, such as that put forth by Descartes, that it begins with immediate cognitions or indubitable intuitions. All knowledge begins with perception, but perception is not the having of brute givens. Rather, there is a creative element in perceptual awareness, an interpretive creativity brought by the perceiver.

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, I show how Peirce's model of mind is grounded in his semeiotic, or general doctrine of signs, a grounding made possible by the logical priority, in Peirce's thought, of the concept of sign over the concept of mind. I then compare this model of mind with some more recent doctrines and theories, and conclude with some comments on Peirce's relevance for cognitive science, including both artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction.

PEIRCE’S DOCTRINE OF SIGNS

Peirce’s doctrine of thought signs was first introduced in his justly famous 1868 articles in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy and later developed in greater detail from 1895 until Peirce’s death in 1914. In his 1868 papers Peirce specifically targeted Descartes and Cartesianism, and argued that we have no ability to think without signs. This argument presupposes a prior argument that all self-knowledge can be accounted for as inferences from external facts and that there is thus no reason to posit any power of introspection (CP 5.247–9). We need, therefore, to look to external facts for evidence of our own thoughts, and it is then a near-tautology to conclude that the only thoughts so evidenced are in the form of signs: “If we seek the light of external facts, the only cases of thought which we can find are of thought in signs” (CP 5.251).

Logic may well be the single most important key to understanding Peirce's thought and influence. It was his deductive logic that brought him an international reputation in his lifetime and led to conspicuous references to his work by figures such as Peano, Schröoder, Russell, Venn, Jevons, and Clifford. Peirce's highest, and in fact only, academic position was as lecturer in logic at Johns Hopkins University. He himself said on numerous occasions - when he wasn't emphasizing his role as a working scientist with the Coast Survey, that is - that he was mainly a logician. He called his existential graphs his chef d'oeuvre. Logic, especially the logic of relations, played a central role in the development of his philosophy. His three Categories were based on, and shown to be fundamental by, the logic of relations. The logic of relations is central to his analysis of the fundamental triadic notion of his semeiotics, “__ signifies __to __.” He saw his theory of scientific method as just logic, broadly construed. And of pragmatism itself, he often repeated that it was nothing more than the ideal fixation of belief, and this was the very goal of logic.

In 1905 in a letter to F. C. S. Schiller, Charles Peirce responded to Schiller's attempt to define “pragmatism”: “I would let it grow and then say it is what a certain group of thinkers who seem to understand one another think, and thus make it the name of a natural class in the Natural History fashion” (MS L390 p. 3). We might follow Peirce's suggestion in giving an account of pragmatic philosophy of religion. If we do so, we find Peirce's work marking out a middle position among the work of the other American pragmatists. At one extreme we find John Dewey who, in A Common Faith, defended a minimal notion of religiosity in which “God”stood for the power of actualizing human ideals. Dewey explicitly rejected both supernaturalism and the church. Next on the spectrum we find William James who likewise downplayed the importance of the church. However, in The Varieties of Religious Experience and elsewhere, James described and defended the importance of traditional kinds of individual religious experience. At the other extreme position stands Josiah Royce, whom both Schiller and Peirce included among the pragmatists (MS L390 p. 2). Royce's “absolute pragmatism” initially provided philosophical argumentation in defense of a religious outlook; later, in The Problem of Christianity, Royce, working under the influence of Peirce, developed the importance of the church as a “beloved community.”In this “natural class” Peirce's philosophy of religion stands somewhere between those of James and Royce. In this essay, I would like to mark out some of the defining features of this mediating position and to show that it is a fitting piece of Peirce's philosophical architectonic.

INTRODUCTION

Most contemporary philosophers who are sympathetic to pragmatism are anxious to distance themselves from Peirce's pragmatic clarification of the concept of truth as 'the opinion which is fated to be agreed to by all who investigate'. This reluctance is found both in those who follow Dewey and James in giving little role to a 'realist' notion of truth in accounting for our cognitive evaluations and in those who do not take this direction. Why does the suggestion that truth is a matter of fated convergence of opinion seem so unpromising to pragmatists other then Peirce?

One problem concerns ‘buried secrets’ or ‘lost facts’. It seems evident that there are many truths which, we are sure, would not be discovered, however long we inquire into them. Another is that it seems to yield a strange view of what makes some propositions true: whether it is true that an inch of rain fell on the morning of the Battle of Hastings depends upon what evidence will turn up in the future rather than upon meteorological conditions in southern England nearly a thousand years ago. It is also charged that Peirce’s theory obscures an insight which many find central to what makes pragmatism attractive. James’s pluralism suggests that our practical concerns and aesthetic interests have a role in determining whether a system of beliefs agrees with reality; perhaps there are different versions of reality which answer to different practical concerns and are not in competition.

Introduction

Peirce's knowledge of and attitude toward medieval thought was clearly unusual among his peers, and it contains some interesting surprises. His critical remarks, of course, while more colorful than most, are not unexpected.

Moreover, he seems to think the entire era was, with the possible exception of Roger Bacon, lacking in a scientific appreciation or outlook.

Peirce’s criticism of the later decadent scholasticism is of special interest for its reference to the followers of Scotus who had gained control of the universities and were given (by the humanists) the sarcastic title of “dunses” or “dunces” (CP 1.17–18, 1903; 2.166– 8, 1902). They “set up their idle logical distinctions as precluding all physical inquiry” (CP 6.361, 1902). And while they were on the right side of the realist–nominalist issue, “their dunsical opposition to the new learning and their dreadful corruption of the university disgusted the new men” (CP 7.666, 1903).

At the same time, Peirce’s putdown of the humanists’ reaction to the scholastics is if possible even more rude. The Dunses defended their position “with a logical accuracy, born of centuries of study, with which the new men were utterly incapable of coping”; they needed to formulate objections to the Dunses’ positions, but it was “a business for which they were utterly unfitted” (CP 6.361). The humanists, he says “were weak thinkers” (CP 1.18). “The renaissance . . . condemned the scholastic terms as not being Ciceronian, with the result of making renaissance philosophy as soft and savorless as a sage pudding” (CP 7.494 n9, c1898).

INTRODUCTION

Charles Sanders Peirce was the founder of pragmatism - the view that our theories must be linked to experience or practice. His work is staggering in its breadth and much of it lies in a huge bulk of manuscripts and scraps. His few published papers include those of the 1870s series in Popular Science Monthly called “Illustrations of the Logic of Science,”most notably “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” and “The Fixation of Belief.”His Lowell Lectures in 1898 and 1903 and his Harvard Pragmatism Lectures in 1903 also contain essential material. But much of what is important is only now being published in the definitive chronological edition: The Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce.

Peirce was a difficult man and this was no doubt partly responsible for his being frozen out of what he most desired: a permanent academic position. He worked instead for the U.S. Coast Survey – his scientific and mathematical endeavors there had a significant influence on his logic, on his work in statistical inference, and on his epistemology and metaphysics. He is perhaps best known today for his theory of truth and his semeiotics, as well as for his influence on William James and John Dewey. But because of the scattered nature of his work and because he was always out of the academic mainstream, many of his contributions are just now coming to light.

PROBABLE DEDUCTION

Peirce wrote extensively on deduction, induction, and hypothesis beginning with the Harvard Lectures of 1865 and Lowell Lectures of 1866. The ideas that he examined in those early discussions were reworked over nearly two decades until the comprehensive statement of his view contained in “A Theory of Probable Inference” of 1883 that was included in the Studies in Logic, by the Members of the Johns Hopkins University and is reprinted in W 4, 408-450. This remarkable paper developed a version of the Neyman-Pearson account of confidence interval estimation that incorporated the main elements of the rationale offered for its adoption in the early 1930s and presented it as an account of inductive inference.

In his retrospective reflection on the question of induction in 1902 (CP 2.102), Peirce revealed satisfaction with the views on induction advanced in 1883 and this attitude is confirmed in other remarks from that period. However, Peirce did express dissatisfaction concerning his notion of “Hypothetic Inference.” Although Peirce called it Hypothetic Inference or Hypothesis from 1865 to 1883 and later, in 1902, Peirce replaced the term “Hypothesis” with “Abduction.”

“The Fixation of Belief” was published in 1877 as a popular essay. But Peirce must have attributed to it not simply the literary felicity that we find in it, but high philosophical importance. For in the ensuing decades he constantly returned to this paper as a focus for the clarification of his thoughts, either entering corrections and amplifications or else adapting it to new philosophical initiatives. Some of the amendments were designed to adjust the essay to the projects of “The Grand Logic”and “The Search for a Method.”