Peirce’s pragmatist portrait of deliberative rationality

Abstract

My overarching purpose is to offer a pragmatist sketch of deliberative rationality derived from collated texts in C. S. Peirce’s voluminous corpus. Though in some instances, the formulations are mine, not Peirce’s. But this does not make my effort an instance of ventriloquism (a case of putting my words into his mouth): the position regarding rationality is his, not (in the first instance) mine. My thesis is that, for Peirce, reason is at bottom a more or less integrated set of habits enabling agents to be deliberative. That is, deliberation is for him the heart of rationality. This is fundamentally an agential capacity: it pertains first and foremost to agents, theoretical knowers being a distinctive role played by deliberative agents. What I hope to show in this paper is why this portrait of reason is distinctively pragmatic and truly Peircean. What I also hope to show is how Peirce’s position entails what in contemporary philosophy is identified by Christine Korsgaard as self-constitution, Sabrina Lovibond as self-formation, and other theorists by other designations. Deliberative agents are, in Peirce’s account, radically responsible agents. They are responsible for the very criteria by which reasonableness and responsibility are defined and developed. The question of maturity and the relationship between being moral and being mature are central to Peirce’s account of rationality. His pragmatist portrait of deliberative rationality is, in my judgment, not only a tenable but also a compelling one. Above all, this is what I hope to show in this essay.