Episode 81: Cathy Legg discusses what Peirce's categories can do for you
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Who was Charles Sanders Peirce and why is he important for philosophy?
Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today, I just thought I'd ask if you're a fan of the show, to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and a review, and that way more people can discover it. Alright, thanks.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast ordinarily recorded at the University of Chicago. But which today is being brought to you from New York. With me is Kathy Legg. Senior Lecture in Philosophy at the University of Waikato. And she is here to discuss what Purs's philosophical categories can do for you.
Hey Matt. Thanks for inviting me.
Pleasure to have you. So today we're talking about Charles Sanders Peirce, the nineteenth century philosopher in polymath. Could you tell us a little bit about who he was and what his philosophical contributions were?
Okay, well it's hard to know where to start with Peirce. Um he was active in so many areas. But he was the son of Benjamin Peirce, who was one of the top mathematicians in the United States in the nineteenth century and also served as a kind of general scientific advisor to the US government. So Perth grew up in a home where all of the top scientists of the country were visiting and having dinner and so forth. And so he picked up a lot of knowledge of a lot of different areas of science. But the one that he was really passionate about from a young age was logic. Yeah. And he had a broader conception of logic than is the norm now in our universities. So a lot of what we call epistemology and philosophy of science now came under the heading of logic for Peirce.
So he was really interested in an overall understanding of how the many different disciplines work towards a conception of truth and how to make that process better. As a pragmatist he was always thinking about uh the ways that scientists were going about what they did and trying to distill out the essence of progress and to understand that within a broader formal framework.
So Peirce is one of those traditional philosophers who wrote about It seems almost everything, if you're looking through his works, But a topic that comes up again and again in his writings is uh the idea of like basic philosophical categories. What is a category in this special, sort of fundamental philosophical sense, as opposed to like, well, there's the category of a table and the category of a chair? When philosophers talk about the categories, what are they talking about?
Okay, so that's a really large question and that's yeah the topic of our interview today. And I think it's a really important question for contemporary philosophy because it connects to a whole way of doing philosophy which was quite sidelined, I think, in the twentieth century, and yet I think we lost certain important things with certain Moves that were made, particularly by Quine. So let me first explain the concept of a category itself in philosophy and what makes it distinctive. And I want to say that the concept of a category is different than the concept of a property. So a popular approach to contemporary metaphysics today would be to think that. reality consists of things and things have properties.
So we have things like tables and chairs and electrons and so forth. And then these things have properties like colours and shapes and electric charge or whatever. And if you can give a complete list of all of the things and all of the properties that those things have, then you have exhausted reality. So I want to say that investigating philosophical categories is somehow distinct and deeper inquiry than looking for all of the properties that exist. An old fashioned term for categories, which I think is found in purse, is modes of being. And one way to get at the idea that modes of being is distinct from investigating properties is the concept which does still survive in philosophy of the category error.
So if I say to you, what colour is the number eight? Or if I say to you the number eight is a very yellow colour, isn't it? Then You kind of want to say that what I just said is false.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who was Charles Sanders Peirce and why is he important for philosophy?
0:00–5:01
2
What are Peirce’s three fundamental categories of being?
5:01–9:53
3
How does Peirce distinguish philosophical categories from ordinary properties?
9:53–14:07
4
Why does Peirce reject Quine’s single mode of being?
14:07–18:32
5
What are concrete examples of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness?
18:32–22:08
6
How do the categories shape Peirce’s hierarchy of the sciences?
22:08–25:07
7
What is Peirce’s view of naturalism and its relation to scientific method?
25:07–30:18
8
How can Peirce’s categories improve philosophical inquiry today?
30:18–37:44
Speakers
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