Research

My research centers on the work of the American polymath Charles Sanders Peirce, pragmatism (of which Peirce is generally considered the founder), and 20^th-century philosophy. My main focus is on the logic of scientific inquiry, where science is conceived broadly and logic is understood as a normative enterprise. On this view, logic seeks to determine how one should reason if one wants to correctly represent something in thought, or, as the parlance goes, if one wants to say something that is true. 

In many ways, the Enlightenment, which reached its heyday during the 18^th-century, can be seen as a time of great optimism about our ability to reason, not only for understanding the world, but also for improving it. As it turned out, however, it wasn’t that simple. True, the scientific worldview it engendered yielded extraordinary advances, but it also led to industrial warfare, science-based genocide, and large-scale destruction of the natural world. While all of this was happening, science also lost its footing, resulting in a crisis of foundations severe enough to undermine the very worldview it developed and that it had come to take for granted.

Much of 20^th-century philosophy, especially within Continental Europe, sought to grapple with all of this, realizing that old philosophical staples such as truth, goodness, freedom, sense experience, and reason, can no longer be taken for granted, but need radically rethought.

The pragmatist approach to philosophy that Peirce developed may be of help here. At least, that’s the one I’m trying. And I’m by no means the only one, or even the first one, to see in pragmatism the philosophy of the future.

At face value, appealing to pragmatism seems counterintuitive. Pragmatism is often seen as a soulless philosophy that reduces all rational thought to a calculating understanding devoid of any interest in broader questions of what it means to be alive or to be human. Critics of pragmatism, however, tend to have a hard time showing what other kinds of rational thought there could be.

In his attempts at developing a philosophy of science, Peirce presents us with a general account for what any attempt at explaining positive facts should look like, whether the attempt can be called “scientific” or no. By positive fact is meant any qualitative content that is simply forced upon us without any reason or pretension to reason, but that lends itself to being reasoned about (even if doing so doesn’t get us anywhere). It can be a sharp stabbing pain in the abdomen, perceived shifts in the weather pattern, the sudden realization that your dog is gone, or the vague feeling that an angel is watching over you.

The view Peirce developed, hinges on the idea that we can separate good from bad reasoning (or right from wrong reasoning). By interpreting reasoning as something we do, Peirce came to see logic as a branch of ethics, which concerns the more general question of how to act (we clearly do more than just reason). Ethics, in turn, presupposes that we already know what is worth doing, which brings us, in Peirce’s view, to the domain of aesthetics: the discipline that studies what is worth striving for. Aesthetics, finally, is a product of mathematics and phenomenology.

Interpreted this way, aesthetics informs ethics, ethics informs logic, and logic informs science. We could object, however, that the reduction to science (even when we take a very broad view of it) is too limiting. Instead, we should broaden it so that the conception of rational understanding that comes out of it includes ways of thinking that are not restricted to this soulless calculating understanding that the continental philosophers were so worried about—a type of understanding that, though helpful when we want to control our environment, is not able to address higher questions of purpose (Why are we here? What is expected from us? What do we want from life? etc.) questions that are historically addressed by religion.

It is to this that I’m currently directing my attention.