Peirce's Theory of Scientific Discovery: A System of Logic Conceived as Semiotic (review)

Tursman has provided a work that is a significant guide to understanding a difficult and complex area of Peirce's philosophical thought, and a guide both to locating the position of Peirce's thought with respect to the intellectual currents of his own time, and to marking out for us today a distinctively pragmatistic philosophy of science. Tursman's general project can be seen as attempting to address several of the eight "unfinished tasks o f Peircean semeiotic scholarship" indicated by Max Fisch? Among those tasks important for understanding Tursman's direction are that of showing how, for Peirce, the analysis of the logic of science was to be situated in a semiotic framework, and revealing what we might have seen if Peirce had finished his own A System of Logic, Considered as Semiotic. Tursman's subtitle should suggest that the last o f these suggested tasks is a central concern, and he employs the very organizing principle suggested by Fisch for Peirce's own work. 2 This principle is the division of Peirce's theory of signs into Speculative Grammar, Critic, and Speculative Rhetoric. What Tursman's analysis shows is how Peirce constructed a system of logic within semiotic, and how the semiotic was constructed within a larger framework of the analysis of the most general features o f experience. This, as Fisch suggests, is what would have been the outcome of Peirce's own unfinished System of Logic. ~ The explication of Peirce's method of inquiry (the interrelated functions of abductive, deductive, and inductive inference, governed by the Pragmatic Maxim) is one of the most thorough available. One of the most important contributions Tursman's examination makes is the treatment o f the illative relation (transitivity) and its function in Peirce's system (72-8o). Within the Peircean account of the method of science and its shift in focus from existentially particular cognitive antecedents for knowledge toward a focus on the results of inquiry, the importance of the illafive relation emerges. The illative relation is, for Peirce, the primary semiotic relation because it is the/aw of inference that grounds the leading principles which inform abduction, deduction, and induction, and thereby governs the relations o f signs with other signs.