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In my response to the commentators, I agree with Rosa Mayorga that Duns Scotus should be included as an important influence on Peirce's notion of agency, as well as his sense of the highest good. I explain, however, how Peirce's triadic view of agency is an improvement that relates to current debates between moral internalism and externalism. In response to Diana Heney, I defend Peirce's notion of evolutionary love as a form of intergenerational altruism, necessary to any community of inquiry. I also argue, in response to her query, that Peirce did not subscribe to moral perfectionism. Instead, there is good reasons to think that he was a meliorist in Dewey's sense. The end is improvement, which seems to be an endless process, rather than the movement towards a static end. I agree with Aaron Wilson's claim that the pragmatic definition of truth implies the convergence theory of truth. However, I explain how the convergence theory of truth might be elaborated as to apply to ethical claims. I also discuss how the 'would be' of the convergence theory of truth is a problematic measure of moral claims. Like progress in science, it is better to measure a moral norm in terms of its improvement from previous ones. I take issue with Wilson's account of moral reality and his claim that truth can be attained by individuals in the absence of community. I end by arguing that reasonableness has to be understood as a process rather than a perfected state. Keywords: Charles S. Peirce, Ethics, Moral Realism, Moral Truth, First, my thanks to Richard Atkins for organizing an author-meets-critic panel at the 2022 Eastern APA to discuss Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences. The present commentaries [...]

In Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences, I argue that Peirce was motivated to develop a normative science of ethics because of his growing concern with the corruption of science in the Gilded Age, and the recognition that the pragmatic maxim entailed an amoral instrumentalism. Rather than taking a Kantian approach to resolve the latter issue, he adopts an Aristotelian one, engaging in a search for an ultimate end that could order all other ends. What is right is what would be conducive to that end. As such he sees the necessity of a science of esthetics which would study such an end. However, rather than eudaimonia as the highest end, Peirce sees reasonableness as the summum bonum. Although barely sketched by Peirce, I argue that its principal sense is that of an ongoing process of self-correction away from error. In regard to this end, what is most important is the design of practices and the establishment of habits of conduct and sentiment most conducive to self-correction. For this reason, a proper community of inquiry with these features ought to be established, armed with the general methodology of science to assess the norms that guide the experiments of living together. Assurance that communities of inquiries are moving away from error and toward improvement is based on a convergence theory of truth. Keywords: Charles S. Peirce, esthetics, ethics, In Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences (2021), I argue that Peirce had two primary motivations for developing a normative science of ethics and esthetics. First, he [...]

Ivo IBRI Kosmos Noetos: The Metaphysical Architecture of Charles S. Peirce Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017, 114pp. Translated from the Portuguese by Henry Mallett. Originally published in 1992 in Portuguese, the [...]

Peirce proposed the idea of a normative science. The three disciplines of logic, ethics, and esthetics would each study a kind of good: good reasoning, good conduct, and good ends. By calling them sciences, his study raises the question of what sort of science a normative science would be. For Peirce, these inquiries were both formal and positive, where the latter was understood as making factual claims about experience, based on experience. The latter characterization raises the further question of whether a normative science could be an empirical science, that is, an idioscopic science in Peirce's vocabulary. If that is the case, it would entail some version of normative naturalism, the position that normative properties can be considered natural ones. Although Peirce makes explicit claims against identifying the normative sciences as idioscopic, I argue that the framework of Peirce's formal analysis of ethical reasoning and conduct, as a variety of purposive, goal-directed behavior, nonetheless lends itself to a version of normative naturalism. Keywords: Charles Peirce, ethics, esthetics, normative naturalism, normative science, In his later years, Peirce proposed the idea of ethics as a normative science. Is such a thing possible? John Dewey asks 'whether scientific propositions about the direction of human [...]