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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
thought provoking,
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This review is from: Charles Peirce's Pragmatic Pluralism (SUNY Series (Suny Series in Philosophy) (Paperback)
The stated purpose of "Pragmatic Pluralism" is to elicit the pluralism that is embedded in Peirce's thought and thereby provide an understanding of Peirce's convergence definition of truth. Rosenthal uses Peirce to build a philosophical justification for Thomas Kuhn's theories of scientific advance, and provides novel pluralistic interpretations of Peirce's theories of meaning, truth and reality. Your liking for this book will depend on your affinity for the pluralistic position, as well as your prior knowledge of Peirce. Given these, you will find this book to be very useful and stimulating. Rosenthal has a (usually) pleasing literary style but does assume quite a lot from the reader -- especially a prior familiarity with Peirce. The chapters are uneven in their difficulty. Much of the second chapter "Meaning as Habit" would be incomprehensible to anyone without some prior study of Peirce's semiotics, and its section on perception (51-61) would be clearer if you had previously read a digestible treatment, such as Susan Haack's "How the Critical Common-sensist Sees Things".Even though the entire book is making a case for pluralism, the concept itself is never explicitly defined, and only gradually becomes revealed. The following short definition of pluralism (adapted from Longino 2003) seems close to the sense used in the book: Pluralism holds that multiple, incompatible scientific theories can offer correct accounts of known phenomena, and their correctness is judged from the perspective of different background assumptions and cognitive goals. Such theories are inherently partial or incomplete, unable to encompass all the aspects of a complex phenomenon throughout their entire range. Rosenthal admits (x, 51, 62) to choosing less known selections from Peirce, and extrapolating from them to make her case for pluralism. So the reader will have to carefully judge for themself how well she represents Peirce, and how consistent her conclusions are with the (evolving) Peircean position. I sympathize with her desire to qualify Peirce's concept of convergence to truth, as that unadulterated concept is a big pill to swallow. Still, it did seem to be important to Peirce. He wrote late in his life (1909/10/11) that many powerful minds "have all alike missed that point of view which would have reconciled them all in one truth". The following excerpt from page 119 is my favorite quote: "[Peirce] has gone the path of those truly great philosophers who do not just take different alternatives among old choices but provide frameworks that reject the logic of the original questioning in terms of which both the problem and all its possible alternatives arise." I rate the book 5 stars for what it has given me to enjoy and to think about, and its many documented Peirce references, but I would penalize it 1 star for needed improvements in organization and required reader preparation.
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