Abstract The success of the pragmatic account of truth is often thought to founder on the principle of bivalence?the principle which holds that every genuine statement in the indicative mood is either true or false. For pragmatists must, it seems, claim that the principle does not hold for theoretical statements and observation statements about the past. That is, it seems that pragmatists must deny objective truth?values to these perfectly respectable sorts of hypotheses. In this paper, after examining three pragmatist attitudes (...) towards bivalence, I shall suggest that the pragmatist's proper stance is to treat bivalence as a regulative assumption of inquiry. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce is best known as the founder of pragmatism, but the name that he preferred for his overall system of thought was ‘‘synechism’’ because the principle of continuity was its central thesis. He considered time to be the paradigmatic example and often wrote about its various aspects while discussing other topics. This essay draws from many of those widely scattered texts to formulate a distinctively Peircean philosophy of time, incorporating extensive quotations into a comprehensive and coherent synthesis. Time (...) is not an existential subject with past, present, and future as its incompatible predicates, but rather a real law enabling things to possess contrary qualities at its different determinations, and Peirce identifies four classes of such states based on when and how they are realized. Because time is continuous, it is not composed of instants, and even the present is an indefinite lapse during which we are directly aware of constant change. The accomplished past is perpetually growing as the possibilities and conditional necessities of the future are actualized at the present, and the entire universe evolves from being utterly indeterminate toward being absolutely determinate. Nevertheless, time must return into itself even if events are limited to only a portion of it, a paradox that is resolved with the aid of projective geometry. Temporal synechism thus touches on a broad spectrum of philosophical issues including mathematics, phenomenology, logic, and metaphysics. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Peirce's account of association and his view that it is the only force which exists within the intellect. I look to the British Associationists, especially Hume, for the background. From there, Peirce's theory of attention becomes important for explaining the formation of associations. Finally, I argue that resemblance and contiguity are reduced to association by utility motivated by the individual's interests. Placing association in a general theory of the individual's interests is important for understanding the (...) habits and critical self-control that are essential for the ultimate aim of the growth of concrete reasonableness. (shrink)