Peirce/Marx: Dialogue between Pragmatism and Marxism - Left Curve

Published in Left Curve no. 37 (2013)
www.leftcurve.org
Peirce/Marx: Project for a Dialogue
between Pragmatism & Marxism
E. San Juan, Jr.
If we can trust to the lessons of the history of the human mind, of the history of habits of life, development does
not take place chiefly by imperceptible changes but by revolutions... That habit alone can produce development I do
not believe. It is catastrophe, accident, reaction which brings habit into an active condition and creates a habit of
changing habits.—Charles Sanders Peirce, The New Elements of Mathematics, ed. by Carolyn Eisele
(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979): 142.
Why Peirce and Marx? But why not? As we
approach the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution and
the death anniversary of the United States’s most insightful
philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), it
might be a wise ecumenical gesture to review the fraught,
even contentious, relation between Marxism and pragmaticism.
A precautionary word: I use Peirce’s “ugly”
rubric “pragmaticism” to distinguish it from the vulgarized
co-opted use of the term to classify the world-views
of William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and latter-day
saints of neoconservative instrumentalism. Indeed
postmodern neopragmatism—despite Cornel West’s
(1993) conciliatory defense—serves today as the ideology
of globalized predatory capitalism par excellence. Peirce
who subtly denounced U.S. imperialist annexation of the
Philippines in 1899 would be appalled by Rorty’s unconscionable
jingoist ethnocentrism.
Early on Peirce felt scandalized that he had become
an overnight celebrity due to James’s popularization of
selected formulas and idioms ostensibly derived from
Peirce. In 1878, Peirce qualified the Cartesian requirement
for ideas to be clear and distinct with a third criterion
for propositions to be meaningful, namely, practical
consequences. The phrase “practical consequences” (in
the sense of a guide to future practice, not current usefulness
for private ends) has become the source of persistent
misconstruals. Peirce stated: “Consider what effects,
which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive
the object of our conception to have. Then our
conception of these effects is the whole of our conception
of the object” (1998, 146). In one of his last caveats on
how to interpret the maxim, he stipulated that the elements
of every concept in logical thought enter "at the
gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive
action" (998, 241) or "controlled conduct" with
an ethical rationality. In this context, John Dewey's term
"instrumentalism" is not only rebarbative but inappropriate
for Peirce's world-view.
In the widely-quoted Pragmatism, William James
offered a cheap psychological fix: “Ideas become true just
so far as they help us get into satisfactory relations with
other parts of our experience” (1955, 12). This is a feelgood
recipe for mass consumption. James’s valorization
of self-centered expediency or pivate utility compelled
Peirce to disclaim any complicity with it. The lesson
seems clear. We need to rectify not only our terms
but also their references or designata, better yet, their
interpretants if we hope to rescue pragmaticism from
transmogrification, and re-establish a fruitful dialogic
transaction between these two streams of radical or nonconformist
thought.
Amateur of Suspicion
Suspicion if not outright hostility has characterized
the participants of this dialogue. Obviously the task of
comparison cannot be done outside already sedimented
parameters, doctrinally charged contexts, and polemical
presuppositions. One can try only at the risk of exacerbating,
or even confounding, the motives and goals of
such a dialogue. Perhaps the most provocative scholarly
review of this fraught relation to date was Brian Lloyd’s
Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of
American Marxism 1890-1922 (1997), which aroused
predominanly adversarial reactions. Obviously Lloyd
restricted himself only to a limited period and wellknown
protagonists, not even seriously engaging with
Peirce’s theses and arguments. As Michael Denning correctly
remarked, Lloyd begged the question of pragmatism’s
originality by subjecting the “theoretical acumen”
of one of its applications, Debsian socialist program, to
the “litmus tests of the European war and the Bolshevik
Revolution.” Lacking the historical specificities grounding
the emergence of such phenomena as revolutionary
industrial unionism, Veblen, radical Darwinism, etc.,
Lloyd failed to explain the exact measure in which such
theories acquired their rationale from the interplay of
100

social forces, intellectuals, and historical legacies. That is
why Lloyd excludes such players as W.E.B. Du Bois and
C.L.R. James in his narrative of anti-capitalist ideas and
movements, not to speak of late-nineteenth century anticolonialists
such as the Filipino Isabelo de los Reyes and
the Cuban Jose Marti.
Right off, I should warn the reader that I am not
concerned here with elaborating on the virtues or inadequacies
of Lloyd’s work (which deserves a separate essay).
The point simply is to underscore the importance of this
heuristic attempt to find analogues, if not echoes, of
materialist dialectics in Peirce’s speculations. A cognate
enterprise focused on a single figure which may profitably
be compared with Lloyd is Christopher Phelps’
Young Sidney Hook: Pragmatist and Marxist (1997). Again,
I will refer to Hook only insofar as his inflection of pragmatist
motifs might be useful in demarcating it from
Peirce’s innovative proposals..
This schematic mapping also involves the more troubling
question of Marxism and its historical interpretation
and concrete realization. This pertains to the
multiple marxisms, not just “Western Marxism” (Lukács,
Gramsci, Adorno). Aside from disavowing any longing
for some authentic or true marxism, I believe something
can be gained by socialist militants becoming familiar
with Peirce’s semiotics and the value of his normative
realism in the critique of fashionable Nietzschean/
Heideggerian avantgardism, for example, or its parodies.
We cannot escape Karl Korsch’s advice that Marxism be
grasped as centered on historical specification (1971).
This coincides with Lukács’ own insight that Marxism
is really the unity of theory and practice hinging on
the dialectical/historical method of analyzing systemic
change (1971). Neither Lenin’s axioms nor the Bolshevik
paradigm can serve as the universal measure of the
potential value of Peirce’s original discoveries. Nor can
the failures of its alleged proponents be considered decisive
in spelling the end of a complex research program
first envisioned by Peirce as the clarification of meaning
or of the purport of propositions claiming to be substantive
knowledge (on the Peircean linkage of theory and
praxis, see Apel 1995).
We are engaged here with the history of ideas/theories
in their historical grounding and sociopolitical resonance.
Just as Marx sought to fuse theory and practice,
dismantling the conventional disjunction of traditional
materialism and pietistic idealism, Peirce conceived his
task as a singular if necessary one: it is that of defining
the proper vocation of the philosopher/public intellectual
as the discoverer of testable knowledge by a community
of inquirers. To put it another way, it is essentially the
resolution of philosophy’s salient and enduring problems
by reconstructing the foundations of logic, of the scientific
method, within an evolutionary communal perspective.
By the same token, pragmatism also has to be judged
in terms of historical specificity and local efficacity. Its
practictioners, from Peirce and James to Dewey, Mead,
and others, need to be framed in the historical context of
the cultural, political and economic conflicts of their
times, that is, the concrete contradictions in the U.S.
social formation within the global historical process.
Accordingly, our itinerary will be tentative and provisional,
treated basically as steps in the interminable road of
inquiry, heeding Peirce's slogan not to block that road.
Expelled from the Orthodox Sanctuary
We might inquire less on how pragmatism became
the object of attack by Marxist critics as on what key
ideas seem most objectionable. A history of misconstruals
can eventually be drawn up after sketching the “bones of
contention.” Elaborations of these crucial anathemas and
oppositions may be cited here. Apart from the somewhat
inept condemnation of pragmatism as a “philosophy of
imperialism” mounted by Harry K. Wells in 1954, one
may cite the Trotskyite George Novback’s treatise,
“Dialectical Materialism vs. Pragmatism: The Logic of
John Dewey” (1974; later published as a book in 1975)
and the orthodox British Marxist’s Maurice Conforth’s
Science Versus Idealism: In Defense of Philosophy against
Positivism and Pragmatism (1962; reprinted in 1975).
As late as 1976, John Hoffman lumps pragmatism as a
species of “subjective idealism” (145) similar to empiricism,
phenomenalism, and positivism. This is long after
the 1967 publication of Karl-Otto Apel's judicious summing-up
of Peirce's philosophy and its refutation of
neopositivism and crude empiricism ascribed to Peirce. A
survey of the attacks against pragmatism as consolidated
in John Dewey’s instrumentalism, but also implicating
William James, will be attempted on another occasion.
For a start, let us look at the definition given by the
Soviet authorities. The 1967 edition of A Dictionary of
Philosophy, edited by M. Rosenthal and P. Yudin, sets a
standard for delimiting pragmatism as subjective idealism
or obscurantism. Peirce is charged for being responsible
for the principle of determining the value of truth by “its
practical utility.” To William James is ascribed the practice
of solving philosophical disputes “by means of comparing
‘practical consequences; truth, for pragmatists, is
‘what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every
part of life best and combines with the collectivity of
experience’s demands” (1967, 357). The tendentious
manner of quoting is revealing. The Soviet authors further
ascribe a subjectivist understanding of practice and
truth to pragmatists, making a concept an instrument of
action (Dewey) and “cognition as the sum total of subjective
truths,” as in the humanism of British philosopher
F.C.S. Schiller. The Dictionary posits the belief that pragmatists
uphold the “subjective interests of the individual,”
which are equated with “practical utility.” The
pragmatists are labelled “radical empiricists,” identifying
objective reality with experience in which subject and
object are permanently disjoined and polarized.
The Soviet text thus indicts pragmatism as subjectivist
because it limits truth to practical utility viewed
101

from an individualist optic, from crass expediency. James
is dismissed as an open irrationalist, Dewey a covert
one who regards the laws and forms of logic as useful
fictions. The brunt of the charge is uncompromising:
“Pragmatism subscribes to meliorism in ethics, while in
sociology it varies from the cult of “outstanding individuals”
(James) and apology for bourgeois democracy
(Dewey) to an outright defence of racism and fascism
(F.C.S. Schiller)” (1967, 358). Sidney Hook is then
charged for anti-communism, for his “experimental naturalism.”
Other manifestations are condemned: C.W.
Morris’ semantic idealism, P. W. Bridgman’s operationism
(sic) , and the equally reprehensible logical formalism
of C.I. Lewis, R. Carnap and W. Quine. Finally
the Soviet experts conclude that pragmatism has given
way to neo-positivism and religion as the dominant influence
on the spiritual life of the United States.
A clue to the stubborn fixation on characterizing
pragmatism as subjectivism may be found in the entry on
Peirce in the Dictionary. Peirce allegedly decreed the law
that “the value of an idea lies in its practical results”
(1967, 335). And because results are identified with sensations,
Peirce becomes a follower of Berkeley. This subjective-idealist
theory of knowledge is then tied to the
three methods of pragmatism: the methods of persistence,
of authority, and the scientific method. The last
statement was a blatant error, so it was omitted in the
1984 reprint. Finally, the authors acknowledge that
Peirce also worked out an objective-idealist theory of
development based on the principle of “chance” and
“love” as guiding forces. Nonetheless Peirce is credited
with having made significant contributions to semiotics,
the theory of probability and the logic of relations.
Genealogy of Distortions
How the Soviet experts can completely mis-read
Peirce’s texts, may be clarified by examining the possible
source of this muddle. In his polemic Pragmatism:
Philosophy of Imperialism, Harry K. Wells identified the
three methods of fixing belief that Peirce outlined as
those of pragmatism. Clearly Peirce rejected the first two
traditional methods, tenacity and authority, and proposed
the third, the method of science. But Wells dismissed this
as demagogy and solipsism, charging Peirce with positivism.
This tack is often repeated in numerous “Marxist”
judgments of pragmatism implicating Peirce’s early essays
of 1877-78, “The Fixation of Belief” and “How To Make
Our Ideas Clear” (1998), without reference to the more
substantial expositions of pragmaticism in the last
decades of his life.
Peirce's pragmaticism needs to be historically specified
to distinguish the early nominalist leanings and the
later realist conviction. His early formulations (expressed
originally in those two foundational essays but modified
later in 1903 Harvard Lectures on pragmatism) seem to
be so enigmatic that they generate the opposite of what
they purport to convey. When Peirce argues that scientific
beliefs depend on “some external permanency” not
dependent on any single individual consciousness, Wells
interprets this as a denial of the objective material world.
When Peirce asserts that “Reality, like every other quality,
consists in the peculiar sensible effects which things
partaking of it produce…” and that in turn “cause belief”
when reworked in consciousness, Wells accuses Peirce of
reducing reality to a belief or a habit of action in which
“we act as though a thing were real” (1954, 37). While
Peirce was striving to emphasize that reality does not
depend on individual interest, Wells adamantly insists
that Peirce was proposing a “doctrine of sheer expediency
in means and ends, the doctrine that the end justifies
the use of any means” (39). Such distortions are typical,
replicated and inflected in various ways.
One would think that after a decade or more,
Peirce’s ideas would finally receive a more intelligent
reading. The highly acclaimed Marxist thinker Leszek
Kolakowski follows the trend of labeling Peirce a positivist
and, more flagrantly, a nominalist. He focuses on
Peirce’s pragmatic test of meaning. The meaning of any
statement lies in “what practical consequences it involves.
Peirce explicitly goes so far as to say that the meaning of
a judgment is entirely exhausted in its practical consequences”
(1968, 151). But practical testability did not
constitute truth, Kolakowski explains, since for Peirce,
truth was “a relation of correspondence between judgments
and actual states of affairs” which empirical criteria
help humans to discover. While correctly estimating
Peirce as chiefly concerned with “perfecting knowledge,
not with its possible immediate benefits,” Kolakowski
insists that Peirce’s denial of essences or any authentic
reality behind phenomena distinguish him as a positivist,
a “champion of scientism,” who holds that all questions
that cannot be settled by the natural and deductive sciences
be ignored or relegated to the realm of nonsense.
This is directly contradicted by Peirce's belief that "our
logically controlled thoughts compose a small part of the
mind (1998, 241). The fact is that Peirce posited in
Firstness the source of inexhaustible qualities, not a
Kantian incognizable essence but a real generality retroducted
or abducted by intersubjective communication
(Habermas 1971, 135-37). This is the cognizable reality
behind primitive sense-data which by inference become
perceptual judgments, the outcome of intellectual operations.
Moreover, Peirce emphasized that the act of conceiving
effects translatable into habits of action allows
"any flight of imagination, provided this imagination
ultimately alights upon a possible practical effect" (1998,
235), with the imagination operative in the "general purposiveness"
of action immanent in the category of
Thirdness.
Why was Peirce engaged in examining the formation
of beliefs (rules of action), habits of action, the interface
between rationality and conduct? Kolakowski cannot reconcile
the larger ethical and political implications of
Peirce’s inquiry, a task fully explored by the German
102

philosophers Apel (1967; 1995) and Jurgen Habermas
(1971). Nonetheless, Kolakowski concludes that in his
theory of meaningfulness, Peirce belongs to the school
of the Vienna logical positivists, associating him with
Bertrand Russell, Alfred Ayer, and the early Ludwig
Wittgenstein. Ayer, however, astutely separates James's
notion of the “cash value” of words evoking sense-experiences
from Peirce's scientific standards of fixing the
meaning of words based on publicly repeatable procedures
and evolving changes in our apprehension of the
laws of nature (1982). However, this is not merely
abstract formal verification as performed by the Vienna
School and their followers; it involves prediction of outcomes
of possible action, with social values and purposes
invested in the logical clarification of meanings. As
Kaplan puts it, pragmatist knowledge is not just a record
of the past but “a reconstruction of the present directed
toward fulfillments in the emerging future” (1961, 27).
Specifying Peirce’s Pragmaticism
Before proceeding further in correcting wrong
construals and one-sided glosses, let us review the fundamental
theorems behind Pierce’s pragmaticist intervention.
The distinctive feature of Peirce’s theoretical stance
is his affirmation of the reality of generals, of concepts
that enable thought and the production of knowledge.
This conviction regarding real general forces and objects
constitutes Peirce’s realism (of the moderate kind aligned
with the scholastic realism of Duns Scotus). He describes
his position thus: “No collection of facts can constitute a
law, for the law goes beyond any accomplished facts and
determines how facts that may be, but all of which never
can have happened, shall be characterized. There is no
objection to saying that a law is a general fact, provided
that it be understood that the general has an admixture of
potentiality, so that no congeries of actions here and now
can ever make a general fact” (1.420). For Peirce, “What
anything really is, is what it may finally come to be
known to be in the ideal state of complete information,
so that reality depends on the ultimate decision of the
community” of inquirers (5.316). In the key notion of
“potentiality,” which functions in Peirce’s analysis of the
shifting roles of chance and determination, one may discern
the motive-force of change, novelty, and sociohistorical
transformations in people’s lives. Not only is the
new always in the process of emerging; movements in
reality are prefigured and anticipated in the deployment
and articulation of signs.
This realism is diametrically opposed to nominalism
which characterizes the foundational platform of positivists,
idealists, neopragmatists. The nominalists are
concerned only with particulars, dismissing generals or
universal concepts as mere names, arbitrary fictions useful
for language-games. Thus for nominalists there is no
such thing as beauty or virtue, only particulars with properties
that can be designated beautiful or virtuous. Facts,
events, objects are entirely disconnected, for the nominalists;
only the mind unites them. This also explains the
voguish rejection by deconstructionists and transnationlizing
scholars of all generalities stigmatized as essentialism
or universalism, or any claim to discovering
knowledge applicable to societies across a range of cultures,
times and places. An agnostic relativism ensues,
with its attendant politics of nihilism or opportunism, at
best of charitable pluralism and its latter incarnation,
humanitarian imperialism (the refurbished version of the
old “civilizing mission” of European empires).
But how do we define a concept? Peirce holds that
if we act in a certain manner, then we will have certain
experiences providing ideas—the practical result; these
ideas constitute the meaning of the concept or general
being defined. According to Peirce: “In order to ascertain
the meaning of an intellectual conception one should
consider what practical consequences might conceivably
result by necessity from the truth of that conception, and
the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire
meaning of the conception” (5.9). Note that “consequences”
here simply means the process of connecting
antecedents and consequents; the sum-total of those connections,
sense-experiences eventually arranged into
beliefs and habits of action, will enable the discovery of
the relation between general ideas and reality (outside of
any one’s mind), which Peirce’s realism privileges as the
goal of experimental inquiry.
Peirce’s realism underlies his theory of the scientific
method. In this way belief is fixed by the pressure of reality,
not our consciousness, by means of publicly observable
modes of investigation leading to some agreement, a
social consensus. This socialized cooperative endeavor
ultimately leads to the achievement of “concrete reasonableness.”
It advances knowledge and the human control
of the social and natural environments. To be sure, the
charge of subjectivism immediately dissolves when we
bear in mind Peirce’s stricture: “The real is that which is
not whatever we happen to think, but is unaffected by
what we may think of it” (8.12). This coincides with the
Marxist principle of epistemic realism, with theory as
"empirically controlled retroduction of an adequate
account of the structures producing the manifest phenomena
of socioeconomic life" (Bhaskar 1983, 434).
Knowing what is true is then not a result of copying of
appearances (the reflectionist or correspondence view of
truth) but a product of a process of systematic inquiry.
Theory, the field of generals for Peirce, involves the
making of hypothesis, more precisely abduction (the
pragmatic maxim, in short) as the positing of universal
propositions about structures (generals) inferred from
perceptual judgments in experience (more on abduction
later).
Always Historicize
Realism (inflected as naturalism and materialism)
embraces both epistemology and a research program,
103

Peirce's "logic of inquiry." Antithetical to Alex Callinicos'
(1985) claim that Marx's realism holds that reality is
independent of all interpretive activity, the second thesis
on Feuerbach proclaims that "the question whether
objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is
not a question of theory but a practical question" (Marx-
Engels 1978, 144). Marx concurs with Peirce provided
"practice" is broadened to include the whole repertoire
of logical-semiotic experimentation, with its ethical and
aesthetic resonance. Both Marx and Peirce recognized an
objective reality independent of consciousness, but they
also subscribed to the historicity of knowledge.
Analogous to Marx and Engel's reliance on organic
intellectuals of the proletariat, Peirce also emphasized the
community of knowledge-seekers, not solitary geniuses,
committed to the pursuit of knowledge. It is a collective
project sustained by publicly shared results and the fallible
process of verification: “The opinion which is fated
to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what
we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this
opinion is the real” (5.407). Truth then is the outcome of
social agreement, subject to the test of falsifiability, and
open to correction; a truth-claim refers to the real, to
objective reality. Peirce’s theory of reality emerges from
communal agreement adjusted to the needs of society.
Accordingly, reality is defined in terms of correlated
human experiences, common deliberations, and comparative
testing of results governed by rationally agreed rules
of action. The process of knowing thus is a practical
activity, though this does not reduce science to merely an
epiphenomenal expression of the historical Zeitgeist and
consequent ethical relativism. Nature and social forms
are transitory and emergent, but their appearances cannot
be fully cognized or comprehended without positing
structures/theoretical ensembles via abduction, hypothetical
inferences, and evaluating them via deduction, induction,
and even intuitive guesses. Marx and Peirce are
agreed on this methodical principle. When Marx's historic
rationalism (its progressive impetus informs Peirce's
"concrete reasonableness") is combined with Peirce's
epistemic realism, we obtain the most creative transaction
between Peirce's pragmaticism and Marx-Engel's
practical materialism and its singular mode of dialectical
reasoning based on what John Bellamy Foster calls "the
logic of emergence" (2000, 233; for an early review of the
conflicted relation between scientism and Marxism, see
Aronowitz 1988).
For Peirce the critical realist, the actual regularity of
the universe can be explained by the action of forces acting
in accordance with laws, but also accounting for deviations.
In Marx's view, the phenomenal appearances in
the universe can be understood only from hypothetical
structures (for example, value) which are irreducible to
phenomena or sense-data. The concrete real can be
grasped in thought by a critical transformation of preexisting
theories and conceptions constitutive of the
phenomena being analyzed. Marx, however, required
the testing of hypothesis through praxis. Likewise, Peirce
subjected hypotheses to tests and practical results converging
in common agreement. Perhaps this impelled
Peirce to posit mind (later, a non-psychic Interpretant) as
basic when it is linked to habits that assume natural lawlike
behavior; however, such habits are never precise nor
rigid, hence the intervention of absolute chance in the
universe. This is the dimension of historicism that
"Western Marxists" (such as Adorno, Marcuse, etc.)
adopted in reaction to a deterministic, positivist science
that dominated the triumphalist technocrats of the
Stalinist epoch.
One needs to stress here that Peirce's science is definitely
not mechanistic, without feedback checks, teleological,
nor hermeneutically opaque to humanistic
traditions and social exigencies. Nor is it premised on
Enlightenment meliorism tied to Auguste Comte and
Herbert Spencer. One can speculate that Peirce's doctrine
of tychism (enabled by the categories of Firstness
and Secondness) emerged in diametric opposition to various
forms of scientistic determinism. Because habits
congregate and form larger networks, totalities, wholes
(his theory of synechism), Peirce holds that the universe
is moving from domination by chance at the start toward
complete order through habit-formation and its purposedirected
mutations. This process of evolution impelled
by an inner principle of creative love, leading to a stage
in which everything is infused with “Reasonableness,”
the universe becoming “a vast representamen, a great
symbol of God’s purpose, working out its conclusions in
living realities” (5.119). So much for Pierce’s metaphysical
speculations that resemble those of Alfred North
Whitehead and other scientific thinkers engaged in cosmological
extrapolations.
The Three Modalities of Being
Generality and potentiality are linked together in
Peirce’s theorizing of knowledge and the horizon of
inquiry. This parallels Marx’s interface of mode of production
and social relations in the analysis of historical
development. The moot point is how change or motion
proceeds and is grasped on various levels of abstraction.
How to describe and interpret the import of matter in
motion, history, this logic of emergence of social life in
nature, not only the past and present but also the future,
both potentiality and actuality—all these can be illuminated
and charted by Peirce’s semiotics along the path
that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao and others have traced,
provided we take into account the historic origin and
limits of Peirce's metaphysics within the epoch of the
United States' transition from industrial capitalism to
imperialism, from the end of the Civil War, the Spanish-
American War, the annexation of Cuba and the
Philippines, and World War I.
Before we pursue this theme further, it is necessary
to expound Peirce’s epistemology, closely tied to his
semiotics or triadic theory of signs. Next to the nominal-
104

ist-realist demarcation which clears up the muddle
caused by tagging Peirce as a positivist, Peirce’s categorial
scheme might be the best key to unfolding what may
be his immanent dialectics, one much more infinitely
complicated than Engels in its articulation of the interweaving
of complex varieties of signs or signifying
processes that comprise patterns of experience, including
variations or changes in cultural styles, tastes, norms—in
short, the stratified and differentiated reality that Marx
treated in Capital. In both the Grundrisse and Marx's
Notes on Adolph Wagner (Carver 1975), we encounter
Marx's methodological principle that while transhistorical
structures or concepts are necessary, the experience
and institutions of specific societies at different periods,
as well as the complex of historical determinations that
comprise its concrete reality, need to be carefully investigated
and meticulously analyzed. That lesson was drawn
from criticizing the reductionist fallacies vitiating the
political economy of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John
Stuart Mill, etc.
While analytically distinct, Peirce’s ontological categories
of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness are articulations
of modes of being, not transcendental dogmatic
absolutes. They operate differently in logic, metaphysics,
epistemology, language analysis, etc. These three modes
of being may resemble the casuistry of scholastic metaphysics,
but their application in semiotics and social critique
differs from Christian apologetics. They provide
the rationale for the pragmatic method of ascertaining
the real meaning of any concept, doctrine, proposition,
word or other signs. Their connections and transitions
spell out the actual configuration of change in observable
phenomena, calibrating the play of contingency and
determination in the passage and vicissitudes of events,
peoples, and their interaction with the biosphere.
The three categories are not hierarchical but interpenetrative
or interactive. In summary, Firstness refers to
the potentiality of an actual idea, a possibility. It is not
the domain of Plato’s hypostatized Forms nor scholastic
essences, but a transitional moment between nothing and
an existent thought or object; not a nothing but less than
an actual thought, only its possibility. Firstness may be a
color sensation, not yet red or blue, but only its possibility.
The sense experiences are possibilities that may
become actualized in the next step of understanding.
In terms of the triadic sign-system, Firstness refers to a
mere quality, a presence, a sin-sign or icon in relation to
its object, the site of novelty and emergences. Firstness is
the prelogical, intuitive feature of immediate appearances
that defy description.
Secondness designates an actually existing object or
event analyzable into qualities and properties of matter.
It involves reaction or brute actuality, “the blind force
[that] is an element of experience distinct from rationality
or logical force” (1.220). This is the realm of conflict,
antagonism, resistance. In terms of signs, Secondness is
a token or sin-sign, an object or event, with indices as
signs with dynamic or causal relations to their objects.
Qualities of bodies belong to Firstness, but they are actualized
when only they are experienced, thereby generating
a percept in the mind. In turn this sense-percept or
sense-data, the result of a psychological process, appears
in consciousness as a feeling or image, already an intellectual
judgment. While Peirce asserted that “the percept
is the reality” (5.568), to make full sense, immediate perception
undergoes modification when the mind confronts
linkages and crossings of percepts and begins to abstract
concepts expressed in symbols, the realm of Thirdness, of
conventions, transhistorical paradigms and structures.
We then move to Thirdness, a meaning or general
concept, derived from percepts through the power of
abstraction (exemplified in the mind’s capacity to infer by
induction, deduction, and abduction). This is the sphere
of generals that constitute meaning; they are real because
they have verifiable, external counterparts in the percepts.
In the percept one encounters Firstness in the
perceived object become actualized. To be meaningful,
every abstract concept or idea must refer to a percept
(Secondness). All men are mortal, but mortality is not the
same for all men; the mortality that belongs to each man
is similar to the mortality that belongs to each of his fellow
men. It is the same with Marx's concept of value, the
two-fold character of labor concretized historically into
use-value and exchange value (Marx-Engels 1978, 308-
328).
We confuse similarity with identity when we handle
concepts as pure abstractions, or pure Firstness, without
reference to their actualization. Peirce made the same
point when he noted that for nominalists, “man” is applicable
to something real, “but he believes that there is
beneath this a thing in itself, an incognizable reality. His
is the metaphysical figment… The great argument for
nominalism is that there is no man unless there is some
particular man” (5.312). Early on Peirce rejected Kant's
unknowable thing-in-itself (in the 1868 essays on
"Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for
Man" [1998b, 64-118]). Peirce remarks that the species
“man” is real because it may be found in any man by
abstracting it from his accidental or particularizing characteristics.
We make a distinction between the species in
any man and his other accidental characteristics, by the
process of abstraction (logical inferences). The nominalists
are the positivists who dare not proceed further than
the realm of sense-data, fictional names, atomistic facts.
We can see clearly here a parallel with Marx’s discrimination
of value into use-value and exchange-value, value
itself being a real general comprehensible apart from its
varied historical incarnations and without which the variable
phenomena—for example, the fetishistic commodity-form—cannot
be made intelligible for any purposive
research program.
What are some consequences of this mode of cognizing
reality when compared with Marxist historicizing
epistemology? Is Peirce’s formulation idealistic or materi-
105

alist, grounded in Hegelian ideas or empirical observations
and rational hypothesis? Is Peirce’s pragmaticist
theory of meaning inconsistent with the dialectical
schema of investigation as delineated by Bertell Ollman,
for example? I have already suggested parallels or analogues
between Peircean pragmaticism and Marx's structuralist-historical
dialectics earlier, but a few more
affinities may be mentioned here for future elaboration.
Envisioning Comparative Dialectics
By consensus, Marx’s method in analyzing capitalism
as a historical system is materialist dialectics with a lineage
dating back to Heraclitus and Epicurus up to Diderot
and Hegel. Marx criticized the idealist basis of Hegel’s
dialectics in various works: Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
the State, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, The Holy
Family, The German Ideology, and The Poverty of Philosophy.
In demystifying Hegel’s method and rescuing its rational
kernel, Marx emphasized the autonomy of nature and the
historicity of social forms. In Roy Bhaskar’s formulation,
Marx counterposed to Hegel’s idealist inversion “a conception
of universals as properties of particular things,
knowledge as irreducibly empirical, and civil society (later
modes of production) as the foundation of the state.”
Marx replaced Hegel’s “immanent spiritual teleology of
infinite, petrified and finite mind” with “a methodological
commitment to the empirically-controlled investigation
of the causal relations within and between
historically emergent, developing humanity and irreducibly
real, but modifiable nature” (1983, 123). In
effect, Firstness (potentialities) and Secondness (actualities)
were privileged in grasping the concrete determinations
of Thirdness, the lawful regularities inferrable by
hypothesis or abduction from perceptual judgments.
Overturning the topsy-turvy world of Hegel's Geist,
Marx rejected Hegel’s absolute Spirit and its tacit link
with atomistic empiricism, conceiving matter and motion
as irreducible to thought. Marx valued differentiation and
complexity (as in the notion of uneven and combined
development), causal and not conceptual necessity, and
empirically verified totalities. This was demonstrated
particularly in his discovery of the two-fold character of
labor and the existence of surplus labor (a generality)
apart from its particular sociohistoric embodiments. He
initiated a science of history thickened with nuanced
ontological stratification, analysis of rational purposes in
social praxis, and a flexible apparatus for charting the
vicissitudes of sociohistorical becoming or change (Farr
1991). This way of “doing science differently,” as Daniel
Bensaid observed, shown in Marx's critique of classical
political economy “aspires to a different rationality...
Constrained by its object (the social relations and economic
rhythms of capital), by the non-linear logic of its
temporalities, by disconcerting ‘laws’ that contradict
themselves,” Marx's science deploys “a strategic thought”
attentive to what is hidden, obscure, irrational—in short,
to chance, as Peirce located it in an open-ended, evolving
universe: “The premisses of Nature's own process are all
the independent uncaused elements of fact that go to
make up the variety of nature, which the necessitarian
supposes to have been all in existence from the foundation
of the world, but which the Tychist [partisan of
chance] supposes are continually receiving new accretions”
(1998a, 194).
Masks of Dialectics
The core of Marxian dialectics has been the subject
of numerous expositions. For this occasion, we can attach
it to the way Marx defined the contradictions of capitalism
as deriving from the structural contradictions
between the use-value and the value of the commodity,
between concrete, useful and abstract social aspects of
labor, and their expressions in class antagonisms.
Reciprocal interaction, subsumptions, and playful alternations
characterize opposites. The fundamental structural
contradictions of any social formation (between
forces and relations of production, between production
and valorization process, etc.) are inclusive oppositions,
interpenetrating with each other, all sprung from the historical
legacy of the separation of the immediate producers
from the means and materials of production and from
the nexus of social relations with nature.
Contending that dialectics is universally applicable,
Fredrick Engels proposed that it is “the science of the
general laws of motion and development of nature,
human society and thought” (1931, 39). In his Dialectics of
Nature, Engels summed up the three main laws of materialist
dialectics, often converted into scriptural dogmas
by party fanatics: 1) the transformation of quantity into
quality and vice-versa; 2) the interpenetration of opposites,
and 3) the negation of the negation (1940, 26). In
my undergraduate days (to add a personal note), these
three laws were condensed in Mao’s aphorism, easily carried
out by subaltern vulgarizers: To know what a pear is,
just eat it, QED! Pears in the Philippines were imported
from the neocolonial power, the masters of U.S. corporate
agribusiness. Needless to say, such "laws" or tendencies
also need to be made concrete in thought by spelling
out manifold determinations involving the three modalities
that Peirce outlined in order for their meaning to be
socially proved via hypothetical inferences, validated by
logical rules of deduction, induction, etc.
Since I am mainly doing an exploratory survey in
finding out how Peirce’s thinking can help strengthen
and sharpen the way Marxists have analyzed social
change, I will limit myself to the theme of contradiction.
Bertell Ollman has aptly stressed the critical and revolutionary
nature of the Marxist dialectic, critical because it
helps us learn and understand our situation as victims and
actors with power (if mobilized and organized) to change
things, and revolutionary because it grasps the present as
a moment of transformation. Science becomes a causal
agent when translated by a community with an activist
program: scientific understanding of the laws of motion
106

of bourgeois society forces us to comprehend where
present capitalist society came from and where it is heading,
and our role in this transformation. Marx’s dialectical
critique of reality (alienated in capitalism) concentrates
on four kinds of relations (identity/difference; interpenetration
of opposites; quantity/quality, and contradiction).
Elucidation of these relations enabled Marx “to attain his
double aim of discovering how something works or happened
while simultaneously developing his understanding
of the system in which such things could work or happen
in just this way” (Ollman 1993, 13).
Notwithstanding its ambiguous nuances, I submit
that Peirce’s Thirdness is the sphere where contradiction,
which is most vivid in Secondness, finds appropriate
mediation. Thirdness is mediation or intelligibility, for
Peirce, instanced in the legi-sign, and the symbol which
functions as a sign of an object by virtue of a rule or habit
of interpretation. While Firstness (presence) is unthinkable,
and Secondness (brute actuality) is unintelligible—
an element of experience distinct from rationality or
logical force, the experience of Thirdness is the experience
of the intelligible, of “concrete reasonableness.”
Once Marx has explained the ineluctable contradictions
in the motion of socialized capital, its necessary dissolution
in crisis and the emergence of class consciousness in
its victims, we reach the moment of Thirdness. The discovery
of general laws of motion—by Lenin in the rise of
capitalism in Russia, by Mao in the possibilities of peasant
uprising contributing to proletarian mobilization—
ushers us to a feasible point of grasping the import of
phenomena synthesized by general laws. Thirdness, to
the Marxist sensibility, designates the hazardous unpredictable
course of revolution, with its contingencies,
necessities, and ineluctable vicissitudes.
Totality and Process
Using a Peircean method of abduction--hypothetical
inferences tested by historical testimony and evidence,
Marx discovered the general laws of motion in capitalist
society. In accord with ongoing political struggles and
theoretical praxis, he drew out their implications and
entailments in the political-ideological crisis of bourgeois
hegemony. The interpretation of these laws were in turn
refined, enriched and developed by Lenin in the imperialist
stage, and by Gramsci, Mao, W.E. Du Bois, C.L.R.
James, Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral
in the dependent, peripheral outposts of Empire. The
interpretants (linking the present and future, the actual
and potential) included the organic intellectuals and the
popular struggles in each social formation.
One of the first scholars to link Peirce's method of
abduction to Marx's critical-dialectical method is Derek
Sayer. In abstracting the essential relations from the phenomenal
forms of the commodity, as well as the historical
instantiations of surplus value, Marx applied not deductive
apriorist thinking nor a posteriori inductive reasoning.
Instead, as Sayer demonstrates, he mobilized a realist
mode of explaining the empirical correlations, “the
mechanisms through which they are brought about, and
behind them their conditions” (Sayer 1983, 114). This is
the logic of hypothesis formation (N.R. Hanson's retroductive
scheme, for Sayer), positing mechanisms and
conditions that would explain how and why the phenomena
observed come to assume the forms they do.
Following this abductive or retroductive analytic,
Marx attempts a dialectic mode of presentation which
Sayer calls Kantian but which is more properly described
as comic, cathartic, demystifying narrative. It historicizes
the allegedly transcendental forms fetishized by bourgeois,
classical political economy. In his commentary on
the 1857 introduction to the Grundrisse and 1879-80
Notes on Adolph Wegner, Terrell Carver (1975) also highlighted
Marx's dialectical synthesis of phenomena and
structures to generate the concrete universal concerning
value, social relations of production, surplus value, and,
in particular, the historic singularity of capitalist society.
Rejecting eternal verities and the Robinson-Crusoe
archetype of bourgeois economists, Marx began with the
hypothetical premise that “the socially determined production
carried on by individuals,” when thoroughly analyzed,
can elucidate the changes and development in
various aspects (both universal and specific) of social life.
His task involved both a critique of previous theories and
an empirical investigation of sensory and intellectual
experience of whole societies in the process of transition.
Historical materialism seems to confirm Peirce’s thesis
that these laws were not just mere conjunctions of
actual individual instances, as empiricists would posit.
The totality of relations—both social and international—
that Lukacs privileged and that Engels crystallized in
the interpenetration of opposites (unity, not identity, of
opposites) functions within the category of Thirdness.
Peirce’s view was part of his synechism or doctrine that
the universe contains genuinely continuous phenomena.
Continuity does not imply linear causal determinism, or
a closed universe of necessity; it allows the role of chance
(Peirce’s tychism), spontaneity, and an evolutionary cosmology
premised on regularities of nature and mind as
products of growth. Chance evinced in the Darwinian
play of heredity and adaptation is accepted by both
Peirce and Marx (for Christopher Caudwell's contribution,
see Foster 2000).
Synechism, Peirce's doctrine of continuity, holds that
“ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain
others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of
affectability. In this spreading they lose intensity, and
especially the power of affecting others, but gain generality
and become welded with other ideas” (6.104). Peirce
explains further that synechism is “founded on the notion
that coalescence, the becoming continuous, the becoming
governed by laws… are but phases of one and the
same process of the growth of reasonableness” (5.4). The
107

interanimation of ideas epitomized by synechism led
Sidney Hook (1962) to associate it with Hegel's dialectical
synthesis of thesis and antithesis, the temporal unity
of opposites via sublation (Aufhebung). Peirce, however,
grounds his dialectical ontology of internal relations in
sociohistorical praxis (Sayer 1987), not in the transcendental
domain of Absolute Spirit. The ideological refusal
to appreciate these laws (tendencies, if you like) of
motion and their outcome leads to the irrationalism and
self-destructive impulses in bourgeois rule and its toxic
ideology disseminated by sophisticated media and State
apparatuses, e.g. spreading freedom and democracy in
Afghanistan by drones, torture, subjugation of the populace
the U.S. is claiming to save and enlighten. Illusions
bred by reality reinforce the ideological persistence of
deceptive facts taken to be common sense, normal, business-as-usual
routine.
There is an exciting reservoir of dialectical insights
hidden in Peirce’s tychism that allows novelty, irregularity,
complexity and change in the universe (Brent 1998,
208). Because chance operates in the universe, the basic
laws of nature and history are not apodictic but inexact,
probabilistic, fallible. Peirce’s world-view allows the kind
of revolutionary ruptures that utopian Marxists like Ernst
Bloch and Walter Benjamin would prophesy in moments
of apparent harmony in bourgeois systems. It encourages
prediction of what is unexpected, unlikely, implausible; it
entertains the unpredictable momentum of hidden forces
behind the fetishized appearances of quotidian, commodity-oriented
life.
The Real as Actual
Realism becomes the germinal anchor of hope.
Believing that reality cannot be identified with actuality,
Peirce asserts that there are real, objective possibilities
‘based on his realization that many conditional statements,
for instance, the ‘practical’ conditionals expressing
the empirical import of a proposition… cannot be construed
as material or truth-functional conditionals, but
must be regarded as modal (subjunctive) conditionals”
(Hilpinen 1995, 568). In this framework, hope is deemed
as real as any weapon in the class struggle. Such objective
possibilities pervade Marx and Engels’ speculations on a
future communist society (first prophesied in The
Communist Manifesto), Rosa Luxemburg’s foresights on
women’s liberation, and C.L.R. James’s anticipatory politics
of an evolving socialist era.
Aside from the semiotic triad of sign-production and
the logic of abduction, I think Peirce’s notion of potentiality
is the closest to the idea of dialectical sublation
or Aufhebung in Hegelian idealism. While possibility
belongs to Firstness, potentiality belongs to Thirdness,
the realm in which "an actualized sign's potentiality for
becoming what it is within its nature to come into interrelation
and interaction with all other signs. Potentiality
is future-oriented, while possibility is present oriented"
(Merrell 2000, 130). This notion of potentiality can
prove to be the most creative, versatile tool for a Marxist
activist intellectual desiring to appropriate what is useful
in Peirce’s pragmaticism for transformative praxis. We
have seen that the pragmaticist maxim valorizes the totality
of modes of rational conduct triggered by a practicable
concept, taking into account also “the possible
different circumstances and desires” of the participants
involved in interpretation. Meaning is not indefinitely
deferred; rather, as Leroy Searle observes, it “accepts
meaning (as it does thought and reality itself) as a continuous
process, which we determine, with arbitrary precision
(depending on ‘different circumstances and desires’)
in communities of inquiry” (1994, 562). We can envisage
a united front, a counter-hegemonic bloc of classes, genders,
sexualities, peoples, etc., their diverse interests and
motivations articulated under the aegis of interminable
Peircean inquiry.
One may venture that the final logical interpretant
(the mediating catalyst between object and signifier or
representamen) in Peirce’s semiotics may be figured as
the leading or decisive force in the community of
researchers. It may be the revolutionary agent, bearer
of intelligibility, aware of qualities (Firstness), immersed
in existential agony (Secondness), but specifically
removed in comprehending the totality of the situation
(Thirdness) (Liszka 1996) and in synthesizing the measures
needed to change the situation. This allegorical
translation speaks volumes if translated into the function
of intellectuals/leaders in popular mass organizations
seeking thoroughgoing, radical change.
In Marxist dialectics, the resolution of a contradiction
proceeds through spirals and swerves that defy precise
calculation and final judgments. The potential order
of evolving society is immanent in the conjuncture of
events and their sequences. Given Peirce’s realism, the
idea of general potentiality is as real as individual particularity.
Continua or the continuum of events bear unactualized
possibilities (Murphey1993, 394). Richard Robin
paraphrases Peirce by saying that potentiality is part of
reality and cannot be defined simply as future actuality, in
the sense that revolutionary rupture is a potential quality
in U.S. society but it can be actualized only in the future
by way of fortuitous actions and organized interventions.
If pursued correctly, Peirce's critical realism becomes
a pedagogical heuristic for a kind of prophetic politics. If
Marxists as revolutionaries seek to prefigure, anticipate
and invent the future, just as scientists aspire to predict
what’s to come, then their task is to assert meaningful
propositions about events not yet actualized. In doing so
they seek to prepare for the coming of these events. We
therefore take the position that the realia are not just particular
undecidable individuals, as nominalists and positivists
hold, but also real indeterminate potentialities (on
its application to communicative problems (see Apel
1995). Communism is already an extant if not nascent
potential, so to speak, not just the seeds whose death
spells the birth of new life and order. In short, it is
108

already an emergent actuality in people's everyday lives.
Peirce’s idea of potentiality may already be present in
the Marxist concept of praxis enunciated in “Theses on
Feuerbach.” It may also be embedded in Gramsci’s
organic intellectual as the fusion of interpretation and
action, or Lenin’s idea of a revolutionary party, educator
and mobilizer of masses of people. Knowledge entails
actionable or practicable assumptions. Richard Robin
suggests that if “the function of knowledge is to enable us
to control the future, then we must take potentialities
seriously, for the future as known in the present consists
entirely of potentialities, some of which will be actualized
and some of which will not… An epistemology that takes
into account the facts of human behavior and the working
practices of science must recognize that potentialities,
while they cannot be identified with any class of individuals,
are nevertheless real. And the reason they are real is
because, as Peirce first showed us, the world is general”
(1998, 42).
The Crucible of Experience: Assaying Politics,
Ethics, Morality
As partisans of radical inquiry, Marx and Engels
worked all their lives to educate and inspire a community
of inquirers (analogous to that envisaged by Peirce) that
would join theory and practice, knowledge and action, to
produce significant changes in society for the better: to
liberate human potential, to enhance the domain of free
activities, to promote beauty and self-fulfillment for all
(see “Critique of the Gotha Program”). These changes
precede and follow the pragmaticist call for habits or dispositions
founded on rational activities. For Peirce, as
James Hoopes notes, “thinking is behavior,” an action
just as real and historical as operating a machine or fighting
a war (1991, 9). Peirce’s final reflection on the interface
of ethics, politics and his brand of pragmaticist
epistemology conveys a trenchant emancipatory message:
Just as conduct controlled by ethical reason tends toward
fixing certain habits of conduct, the nature of which... does
not depend upon any accidental circumstances, and in that
sense may be said to be destined, so, thought, controlled by
a rational experimental logic, tends to the fixation of certain
opinions, equally destined, the nature of which will be the
same in the end, however the perversity of thought of whole
generations may cause the postponement of the ultimate
fixation (CP 5.430, 1905)
For “perversity of thought,” one can substitute irrational
social practices and institutions, and for the “ultimate
fixation,” “concrete reasonableness” arrived at in
the fated convergence of inquiry fulfilling the paramount
ends of truth, rightness and beauty via logic, ethics and
aesthetics. The last three normative sciences Peirce
regarded as the foundation of pragmaticism (1998 a, 371-
397). In 1898, James gave a lecture entitled “Philosophy
and the Conduct of Life” (1998a). This was also the period
in which he sympathized with the goals of the Anti-
Imperialist League of William James, Mark Twain, and
others denouncing U.S. imperialist aggression in Cuba
and particularly the Philippines. On various occasions
Peirce alluded to the barbaric effects of U.S. colonial
invasion of the Philippines (see Brent 1993). In his lecture,
he contended that for advancing scientific knowledge,
reason is key but for the vital concerns of morality
and ethics, sentiment and instinct suffice. This has led
many to consider Peirce an ambivalent if not inconsistent
thinker.
But all the evidence points to the contrary. Eugene
Rochberg-Halton connected Peirce's notion of “instinctive
mind” of the inquirer with purpose as a transaction
in a complex environment susceptible to growth and correction:
“Instincts are accordingly, in their proper environment,
true ideas” (1986, 10). As Cheryl Misak (2004)
has cogently shown, Peirce adhered to a cognitivist, fallibilist
standard which subjects any belief to the test of
experience and rational argument. Consequently, moral
and ethical deliberations are responsive to the broad
range of experience, including “the spontaneous conjectures
of instinctive reason” underlying abduction. Mizak
reminds us that Peirce conceived of logic as normative,
ethical, thought under self-control: “Thinking is a kind
of action, and reasoning is a kind of deliberate action,
and to call an argument illogical, or a proposition false,
is a special kind of moral judgment” (Peirce quoted in
Mizak 2004, 170). Writing at the beginning of the Cold
War, Donald S. Mackay summed up the original intent of
pragmatism: “Instead of elaborating theories about ‘passive’
states of knowledge in a knowing mind, or ‘contents’
of knowledge within its own fixed and immutable forms,
pragmatism offered a working hypothesis concerning the
practice of knowledge in ‘the real business of living’”
(1950, 398).
Finally, one can venture the “musement” (Peirce's
term for imagination) that Peirce's socialism inheres in
his trust in the moral universalism of the scientific community.
Cornel West noted Peirce’s “agapastic theory of
evolution” as a critique of Darwinian mechanical necessitarianism
and its implied individualism (1989, 52-53; see
also Smith 1963, 32-37). If thinking is already practice,
then all humans—as Gramsci reminded us—are already
intellectuals in one degree or another, functioning
according to their capacities and social situations. In
effect, all citizens are protagonists in the shaping of their
everyday lives and, as collectives, in the reconstruction of
their societies. Peirce would concur with this notion of a
communal enterprise striving toward “concrete reasonableness”
in the reconstruction of the old decadent,
oppressive, iniquitous society. This hypothesis captures
the essential relevance of Peirce’s pragmaticist realism for
Marxist intellectuals whose program of research and its
implementation coincides with the problematic of their
effective and feasible intervention in the revolutionary
process of their time.
109

References
Apel, Karl-Otto. 1995. Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism
to Pragmaticism. New Jersey:Humanities Press.
Aronowitz, Stanley. 1988. “The Production of Scientific
Knowledge: Science, Ideology and Marxism.” In Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and
Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press.
Ayer, Alfred. 1982. Philosophy in the Twentieth Century.
New York: Random House.
Bensaid, Daniel. 2002. Marx for Our Times. New York:
Verso.
Bhaskar, Roy. 1983. “Dialectics.” In A Dictionary of
Marxist Thought. Ed. Tom Bottomore. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press.
Brent, Joseph. 1998. Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life.
Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press.
Callinicos, Alex. 1985. Marxism and Philosophy.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Carver, Terrell. 1975. Karl Marx: Texts on Method.
New York: Basil Blackwell.
Denning, Michael. 1998. “The Dance of Pragmatism and
Marxism.” Against the Current #75 (July-August), post in
Solidarity Website:
Engels, Frederick. 1939. Anti-Duhring. Tr. Emile Burns.
New York: International Publishers.
—-.1940. Dialectics of Nature. Tr. Clemens Dutt.
New York: International Publishers.
Farr, James. 1991. “Science: Realism, Criticism, History.”
In The Cambridge Companion to Marx. Ed. Terrell
Carver. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx's Ecology. New York:
Monthly Review Press.
Habermas, Jurgen. 1971. Knowledge and Human Interests.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Hilpinen, Risto. 1995. “Peirce, Charles Sanders.” In The
Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Ed. Robert Audi.
Hoffman, John. 1975. Marxism and the Theory of Praxis.
New York: International Publishers.
Hook, Sidney. 1962. From Hegel to Marx. Ann Arbor, MI:
The University of Michigan Press.
Hoopes, James, ed. 1991. Peirce on Signs. Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina Press.
James, William. 1955. Pragmatism. New York: Meridian
Books.
Kaplan, Abraham. 1961. The New World of Philosophy.
New York: Vintage Books.
Kolakowski, Leszek. 1968. The Alienation of Reason:
A History of Positivist Thought. New York:
Doubleday Anchor.
Korsch, Karl. 1971. Three Essays on Marxism. New York:
Monthly Review Press.
Liszka, James Jakob. 1996. A General Introduction to the
Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce. Bloomington, Ind.:
Indiana University Press.
Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness.
London: Merlin Press.
Mackay, Donald S. 1950. “Pragmatism.” In A History of
Philosophical Systems. Ed. Vegilius Ferm. New York: The
Philosophical Library.
Marx, Karl and Fredrick Engels. 1978. The Marx-Engels
Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton,
1978.
Merrell, Floyd. 2000. Change through Signs of Body, Mind
and Language. Prospect Heights, Ill: Waveland Press.
Misak, Cheryl. 2004. “C.S. Peirce on Vital Matters.”
In The Cambridge Companion to Peirce. Ed. C. Misak. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Murphey, Murray G. 1993. The Development of Peirce’s
Philosophy. Indianapolis, Ind: Hackett Publishing Co.
Novack, George. 1974. “Dialecticl Materialism vs.
Pragmatism: The Logic of John Dewey.” International
Socialist Review (July-August): 12-17
Ollmann, Bertell. 1993. Dialectical Investigations.
New York: Routledge.
Peirce, Charles S. 1931-58. The Collected Papers on Charles
Sanders Peirce. Vols. 1-8. Eds. Charles Hartshorne,
Paul Weiss, and A. Burk. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press.
—-.1992. The Essential Peirce. Volume 1.Ed. Nathan
Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington, Ind:
Indiana University Press.
—-. 1998a. The Essential Peirce. Volume 2. Ed. Peirce
Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
—-.1998b. The Essential Writings. Ed. Edward C. Moore.
Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Robin, Richard. 1998. “Preface.” The Essential Writings of
Charles S. Peirce. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Rochberg-Halton, Eugene. 1986. Meaning and Modernity:
Social Theory in the Pragmatic Attitude. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Rosenthal, M. and P. Yudin, eds. 1967. A Dictionary of
Philosophy. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Sayer, Derek. 1983. Marx's Method. New Jersey:
Humanities Press.
—-. 1987. The Violence of Abstraction. Oxford, UK:
Basil Blackwell.
Searle, Leroy. 1994. “Peirce, Charles Sanders.” In The
Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism. Eds.
Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth. Baltimore, MD:
The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Smith, John R. 1966. The Spirit of American Philosophy.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Wells, Harry K. 1954. Pragmatism: Philosophy of
Imperialism. New York: International Publishers.
West, Cornel. 1989. The American Evasion of Philosophy.
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
—-.1993. Keeping Faith. New York: Routledge.
110