Mats Bergman: C. S. Peirce on Interpretation and Collateral Experience

Over the years, the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce has come to mean widely different things to different people. In fact, it would be difficult to find another relatively recent philosopher who has attracted such a motley collection of friends and foes as Peirce. Pragmatists of various stripes have seen him as a worthy pioneer or a questionable expounder of outmoded ideas. Parts of his philosophy have been acceptable to logical positivists, others to poststructuralists; but his philosophical corpus has also been dismissed as too fragmentary and internally incoherent to serve as anything but a collection of disconnected insights. At the same time, recent work by more specialised investigators of Peirce’s thought has revealed that his philosophy may be more cohesive than has been claimed (see, e.g., Savan 1983; Hausman 1993; Parker 1998). Ever since Peirce’s writings were rescued from philosophical oblivion about 70 years ago, a debate concerning the character and consistency of his corpus has flourished.1 The fluctuations between extreme poles of interpretation in earlier readings of Peirce can at least partly be explained by the fact that his philosophy was rarely taken on it