W45 CCC 61:1 / SEPTEMBER 2009 Matthew J. Newcomb Arguing at Play in the Fields of the Lord; or, Abducting Charles Peirce’s Rhetorical Theory in “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” This article argues that the ideas of “play” and “abduction” in Charles Peirce’s work represent an inventive theory of argument that opens up the kinds of activities that can be called “arguments” and avoids some of the struggles over imposed beliefs with which recent argument theory has grappled. A n ‘Argument’ is any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief ” (Peirce, “Neglected” 119). There is quite a bit to unpack in this short definition, and I hope to usefully labor at that process in a portion of this essay. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), by most accounts the founder of American pragmatism (although he later attempted to distance himself from William James, John Dewey, and others by calling himself a pragmaticist 1 ), discussed rhetoric a bit in his work but never fully fleshed out his theories about this area of study. However, the concept of argument was central to this theorist of signs, and the definition of argument that he offers in the sentence above is a first obvious sign for the potential historical and theoretical value of including further study of Peirce in contemporary rhetorical work. 2 As in the
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CCC 61:1 / september 2009
Matthew J. Newcomb
Arguing at Play in the Fields of the Lord; or, Abducting Charles Peirce’s Rhetorical Theory in “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”
This article argues that the ideas of “play” and “abduction” in Charles Peirce’s work represent an inventive theory of argument that opens up the kinds of activities that can be called “arguments” and avoids some of the struggles over imposed beliefs with which recent argument theory has grappled.
An ‘Argument’ is any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief ” (Peirce, “Neglected” 119). There is quite a bit to unpack in this short definition, and I hope to usefully labor at that process in a portion of this essay. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), by most accounts the founder of American pragmatism (although he later attempted to distance himself from William James, John Dewey, and others by calling himself a pragmaticist1), discussed rhetoric a bit in his work but never fully fleshed out his theories about this area of study. However, the concept of argument was central to this theorist of signs, and the definition of argument that he offers in the sentence above is a first obvious sign for the potential historical and theoretical value of including further study of Peirce in contemporary rhetorical work.2 As in the
case of Kenneth Burke’s religious analyses, Peirce’s arguments about God in his “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” and about religious language are more about rhetoric and language as a whole than they are about God. Most significantly, Peirce offers an understanding of argument that emphasizes play-ful exploration of new knowledge in a way that moves beyond recent debates (as seen in scholars focusing on classical work and often those doing feminist work) about the (potentially) negative coerciveness of most contemporary models of argument.
I am not suggesting that Peirce is fundamentally a rhetorician. His interests in logic, philosophy, and science can, of course, border on rhetoric in many ways, but one might still use those first three terms in labeling his work. Neverthe-less, Peirce’s understanding of argument is quite expansive while remaining meaningful. His is another valuable voice to put into discussion with Aristotle, Burke, and feminist writers who critique the notion of argument itself. Here I analyze what I consider to be three of his main rhetorical principles as found in his “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (1908) (which Peirce often shortens to “NA”), a piece from fairly late in his life and philosophical develop-ment. It is, as the title indicates, an argument: an attempt to impact the ideas and attitudes of readers, particularly in how they think of reality, belief, and God. I choose the “Neglected Argument” partially because it is a later work of his, after some of his ideas had developed through a few phases, partially because it is not as obsessed with traditional logic as some of his work is, and partially because the NA itself is an argument and is about arguments.
In this essay, I develop Peirce’s definition and approach to argument and argumentation, his notion of the “play” of “musement,” and his constant em-phasis on the creative activity of retroduction (also called abduction)—as an aspect of persuasion. I opened with a brief definition of argument from Peirce, a term that he contrasts with more methodical “argumentation” (as in the case of Toulmin and other more formalized methods), which is “an Argument proceeding upon definitely formulated premisses [sic]” (119). “Play,” for Peirce, is a purposeless wandering of the mind, done “perhaps during a stroll,” which “has no rules, except this very law of liberty” (120). In this sense, play is based in freedom and is therefore quite different than the typical scientific mode of inquiry and argument, since it is specifically without direction or controls. As for abduction or retroduction (those two terms are used interchangeably by Peirce), this is the moment of putting together disparate observations and experiences into a hypothesis that then can be examined further. Peirce says that this hypothesis-making activity, as well as experiences leading to it, is a
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form of argument. Peirce gives rhetoricians and teachers an understanding of argument that makes play, experience, and hypothesis making central to argu-ment, making argument something prior to convincing others of something you already think.
Background on PeirceThe three aspects of Peirce’s rhetoric in his “Neglected Argument for the Real-ity of God” require some background on Peirce’s philosophy and on his rather non-intuitive terminology. Peirce’s primary claim to fame is his status as the reputed founder of pragmatism. Peirce’s friend William James, in his first lecture in his Pragmatism series entitled “The Present Dilemma in Philosophy,” cites Peirce indirectly as the “founder of pragmatism” whose lectures were “flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness!” (7). Later, Cornel West puts Peirce squarely in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and those who evade the problems of certainty-centered European Enlightenment epistemol-ogy (42). This development of a rather unique view of knowledge developed, of course, in a community. In Peirce’s case it was a community of academics and debate in a time when questions of scientific method were central, when the theory of evolution had a powerful impact on philosophy, and when statistical knowledge was growing in importance. Louis Menand, who includes Peirce as a key figure but not a focal point of his social history of pragmatism, describes Charles Peirce as an intriguing, intelligent, and arrogant figure (151).3 The son of Harvard professor Benjamin Peirce, Charles Peirce struggled financially and personally for much of his life. Although he was a professor in the early years of Johns Hopkins University (he also spent a fair amount of time in the first part of his life working for the U.S. Coast Survey), often as a result of character shortcomings he never kept a faculty position for long. Menand asserts that Peirce, “had a better nature; but he knew, even at twenty, that his personality was his enemy, and his entire adult life was a continual cycle of self-indulgence and self-rebuke” (159; emphasis in original). Peirce’s social difficulties did not prevent him from being a vital part of a small intellectual community—em-phasizing the social character he imputes to knowledge.
Peirce is less social in his very particular way of using terms. For example, “belief ” is an important term in a context where the goal of many arguments is to lead to a change in belief or to a new belief. By “belief ” Peirce usually means a fairly standard pragmatic notion of the term: any idea that is strong enough that you act on it is a belief. As Peirce says in the “Neglected Argument,” “Now to be deliberately and thoroughly prepared to shape one’s conduct into
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conformity with a proposition is neither more nor less than the state of mind called Believing that proposition, however long the conscious classification of it under that head be postponed” (“NA” 124–25). Consequently, labeling something a belief or not is less important than being willing to act on that notion or proposition. Douglas Anderson’s detailed analysis of the “Neglected Argument” provides some additional nuance to Peircian belief:
For Peirce full and living belief is neither the Bainian belief of practice nor the purely provisional belief of science; rather, it is a transactional process in which we are committed to acting on a belief as if it were indubitable while at the same time leaving it open to criticism. In this way, the practical dimension of belief underwrites the possibility of practicing science, and the theoretical dimension underwrites the possibilities of tempering and altering our modes of practice. (182)
In short, belief requires the difficult combination of enough intellectual, emo-tional, and behavioral investment in an idea that it is treated as True, even while the behavior maintains a sense of epistemological fallibility that could let a belief be criticized and even changed. Peirce’s notion of belief here asserts a value for strong conviction (suggesting that there is an emotional, not just intellectual, aspect to belief), yet it needs the same kind of openness to alteration that is a necessary precursor to most effective rhetorical acts.
Peirce’s use of the word “Reality” in his title is also important. Central to much of his work is a tri-partite system of reality. “Real” things could be Firsts, Seconds, or Thirds. (He was somewhat obsessed with threes.) Much of his sys-tem was a response to what he saw as the emptiness and ultimate ineffectiveness of a nominalism that did not allow for the reality of concepts or generalizations. Peirce thought that this sort of nominalism ultimately removed all connections between things, making science and language rather pointless. In Peirce’s work, therefore, he supplied those connections. Firstness is connected to freedom and the possible. It is “what is merely possible, what is a suchness, and what is associated primarily with feeling” (Anderson 39). Secondness, on the other hand, is more readily identifiable by the senses. It is the realm of science and includes individual objects that Peirce speaks of as “existing.” Thirdness, then, is the category that creates connections and relations between things in the first two categories. Thirdness is the realm of concepts, laws, and, notably for our purposes, signs.4 Peirce discusses Thirdness, his main area of focus of the three realms, in the “Neglected Argument:”
The third Universe comprises everything whose being consists in active power to establish connections between different objects, especially between objects in
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different Universes. Such is everything which is essentially a Sign—not the mere body of the Sign, which is not essentially such, but, so to speak, the Sign’s Soul, which has its Being in its power of serving as intermediary between its Object and a Mind. (“NA” 119)
Some aspect of a sign, a thing that mediates between minds and objects, has reality for Peirce. In his system only the second Universe has existence, but all three realms are equivalent in their reality. By calling something real, then, Peirce defines things in all three realms as having characteristics independent of what is thought about them (Anderson 141). An example from Peirce is that
the substance of a dream is not Real, since it was such as it was, merely in that a dreamer so dreamed it; but the fact of the dream is Real, if it was dreamed; since if so, its date, the name of the dreamer, etc., make up a set of circumstances sufficient to distinguish it from all other events; and these belong to it, i.e. would be true if predicated of it, whether A, B, or C Actually ascertains them or not. (“NA” 118)
The reality of God in Peirce’s argument is in the third Universe: it is not the same thing as saying that God “exists” like my desk does, or that God necessarily interacts with other objects in a particular existent location.5
So what does the “Neglected Argument” actually argue? It has some con-nections to arguments for the existence of God based on design. To oversimplify for a moment: people are made in such a way that when their minds are given free play and turn to spiritual things, they will inevitably believe (using Peirce’s definition of belief) in the reality (not necessarily the existence) of God. Later forms of testing and induction can then be used to alter or confirm this belief. It is also a hypothesis that runs into the problem that many people have given a form of freedom to their musings and have not come to believe in the reality of God. Peirce’s full essay is really more of a nesting of three arguments. Sandra Rosenthal provides a useful summary of the “Neglected Argument”6:
The first argument, which is an immediate and direct experience for the muser, is “entirely honest, sincere and unaffected [. . .] meditation upon the Idea of God, into which the Play of Musement will inevitably sooner or later lead, and which will produce a truly religious” belief in the reality of God. The second concerns the universality and naturalness of the experience involved in the first. It is “a vindicatory description—of the mental operations which the Humble Argument actually and actively lives out.” The third argument identifies the humble argument as exemplifying induction, which is the first step of scientific method. In this way the living belief in God is a first step for scientific inquiry. (239)
Peirce calls his argument “humble” because any person (supposedly) could
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have access to it. In fact, he claims, some form of this argument is how most people do actually come to believe in God. Some form of musement, perhaps while out on a walk in the woods, leads a person to consider and without strong reason feel the reality of God. Peirce claims that this is a fairly universal experience—indicating something about the design of humans, although one could also argue that humans have this experience of belief that they can act on because of common social factors or because of the value of belief in God for evolutionary survival. Peirce then completes his case by asserting that his argument for God’s reality is a key example of how inquiry works. Argument is a happening; it occurs in the free wandering of a mind as that mind (or group of minds—because knowledge is quite social for Peirce) hypothesizes patterns and explanations for a diversity of seemingly unconnected data.
Peirce on Argument As I noted earlier, according to Peirce’s definition, “An ‘Argument’ is any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief. An ‘Argumentation’ is an Argument proceeding upon definitely formulated premises” (“NA” 119). An argument, then, does not have to be one or more speakers influencing oth-ers. Lyne helpfully notes that “discourse” for Peirce “is an engagement of two or more minds, or ‘quasi-minds,’ in a semiotic process. The ‘quasi-mind’ designa-tion is useful when there is an interchange between entities not regarded as persons—the ‘parts’ of consciousness for instance” (158). For Peirce, you can be your own audience, and argument is broad enough to include anything that you might be interacting with through signs—perhaps even your environment (to broaden the point beyond where Lyne and maybe Peirce as well would take it). So argument can be any “process of thought” that has the right “tendency” and a level of reasonableness. Peirce disallows gibberish or total irrationality with his focus on reason, but keeps argument open to feeling, instinct, intu-ition, and impulse. Much of what rhetorical scholars have studied is closer to “argumentation” (Toulmin on argument, for example). It involves working from logical premises, going by deduction or induction, and articulating tactics used in an argumentative method. This is useful, and Peirce does not suggest it is a negative thing either. But he does want to distinguish it from the more experiential process of living and of argument. An argument in this definition (also in keeping with his valuation of play) is often what happens to someone, not what one sets out to do.
Peirce again is open with his definition of argument. Belief does not have to be firm for an argument to exist; all that is needed is a process that tends
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to produce a specific belief. Belief is something that a person can and is will-ing to act on, even though it is held open to later change. In this sense, Peirce keeps argument as a continuous activity. Future experiences, bits of data to include in a hypothesis, or alternative arguments: all are not only possible factors in changing belief, but are also expected. Belief ’s connection to action potentially makes argument, in Peirce’s formulation, the basis behind virtu-ally all actions. An argument is a causal force or set of causal factors. How far can we take this point? Is a virus an argument for the symptoms it produces? This speculation moves beyond Peirce’s limitation of a “process of thought” (at least as “thought” is usually defined), but one could open up his rhetoric in this direction. If I observe an increase in gasoline prices, that increase, along with my thoughts about it, are both aspects of an argument that results in my riding my bicycle more often.
Peirce himself showed some interest in having a broad notion of argument and rhetoric. In an unpublished manuscript from 1904 he concluded, “Evidently our conception of rhetoric has got to be generalized; and while we are about it, why not remove the restriction of rhetoric to speech? [. . .] Let us cut short such objections [that something is “too rhetorical”] by acknowledging at once, as an ens in posse, a universal art of rhetoric, which shall be the general secret of rendering signs effective” (470, MS 774: 3–5). While Peirce specifically referred to artwork that had been critiqued for being “too rhetorical,” his point applies to other phenomena. Rhetoric is not restricted to speech, or even to words, at this point, but Peirce pushes this openness to the side of the observer, reader, or listener. He is interested in the “effectiveness” of signs, which is indicated by action from belief. Peirce’s rhetorical theory would seemingly include a large space for responses, not just in thought or words, but in actions. A Peircian rhetorical study could start with behaviors or actions by specific people and then work an analysis back to the often wide set of experiences, observations, words, and thoughts that led through retroduction to belief that brings action.
Peirce’s mix of elements in argumentation suggests his belief that reason and emotion are mixed in lived experience. Rosenthal elaborates on this point, noting the surprising fact that Peirce considers the “Neglected Argument” to be an argument at all.
That the humble argument is seen as an argument at all shows the inseparable intermingling of reason and feeling at the primal level. The “argument” is not rationally developed but felt in the immediacy of experience; what is emphasized is the emotive, spiritual nature of religious belief, the source of its vitality. [. . .] Religious belief must have verifiable consequences not in offering its own kind
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of abstract, formalized “explanation” of the world but in the kind of effects it has on the vitality of concrete human existence.” (239)
Argument can be quite instantaneous in this description—and it can at least feel experiential and instantaneous to someone who changes a belief. Rosenthal does not spend more time on the surprising fact that the “humble argument is seen as an argument at all,” but it supports the work on Peircian argument that I have done above in that the humble argument is an experienced process, does not have to involve others, may include a wide variety of forces and observa-tions, and is instinctive or intuitive. Argument is experienced as much as it is made, spoken, or outlined.
Persuasion versus/with UnderstandingSo what does Peirce’s idea of argument have to say to current debates about argument as a concept? Peirce provides a valuable perspective on the connec-tions between argument and the creation of new knowledge.7 His “Neglected Argument” shifts recent debates about argument toward an emphasis on playful inventive work that happens earlier in a rhetorical process than current argument theories. Much recent work on argument has provided a dichotomy between argument as persuasion (through reason, emotion, or both) and argu-ment as understanding and invitation (particularly through feminist critiques of the dominating aspects of persuasion). In a 2006 College Composition and Communication article, for instance, Suzanne Bordelon addresses debates about argumentation through George Pierce Baker’s work. She identifies Baker as someone who is “typically associated with a logic-based approach to argumentation by scholars such as Albert R. Kitzhaber, Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran, and, particularly, Robert J. Connors” (“Reassessment” 764). One standard understanding of argument is through logic and tied to persua-sion. Bordelon argues that Baker used a practical logic (rather than a strictly formal logic) for argument and was concerned with the relationships between rhetors. Bordelon mentions Baker’s definition of argumentation that involves creating particular thoughts or attitudes in the mind of another, claiming that “Baker describes argument in psychological terms, rather than emphasizing it as a process of merely proving or disproving propositions” (768). Peirce follows Baker about thirteen years later in focusing on the practical aspects of argument and the more psychological and relational possibilities for argument; however, Peirce’s NA takes a further step away from particular structures and strategies to promote even surprising observations as unintended aspects of argument.
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Bordelon’s use of Baker places a “cooperative approach to argument” against what Bordelon calls the “traditional agonistic, persuasion-oriented view” (776).8 Much of the tension between these ideas of argument as agonistic persuasion and argument as cooperative understanding can be traced to the development of invitational rhetoric.
Sonya Foss and Cindy Griffin ask for a profound change in rhetorical practices away from coercive persuasion models. They theorize “invitational rhetoric,” which is “grounded in the feminist principles of equality, immanent value, and self-determination. Its purpose is to offer an invitation to under-standing” (2). This rhetoric does not have persuasion as a goal,9 but rather asks the participants in conversations to understand how people construct the worlds in which they live (Foss, Foss, and Griffin 7). Kathleen Ryan and Eliza-beth Natalle have worked with invitational rhetoric to try to address critiques made of invitational rhetoric for its isolated and essentialized subjects, for its difficulty in explaining change, and for the lack of public uses for invitational rhetoric (71–73). Nevertheless, the main split in issues of argumentation re-mains between supposedly persuasive and cooperative models—both of which assume the centrality of changing (persuading) or maintaining (understanding) another person, but which differ over the primacy of influence and understand-ing. These notions of argument assume that a person already has knowledge or a viewpoint and must persuade another to that viewpoint or convey it in a mutually understandable way. While arguing with another may create changes in opinion, it does not emphasize the creation of knowledge not yet held by any party involved. This focus on creating new knowledge is one of the main things Peirce can add to rhetoricians’ understanding of argument. Peirce does not finish or solve debates about persuasion and understanding but rather shifts the debate to an earlier stage—where perspectives are not yet established.
Let me provide an example that is applicable to Peirce’s understanding of argument. Recently my foot was hurting, and I went to the doctor. I already had a belief of what the problem was—a certain kind of tendonitis in the bot-tom of the foot. According to the persuasion notion of argument that involves an attempt to change another person (where an individual has a belief and attempts to lead another to agree with that belief), I made an argument to the doctor about what I thought the problem was. I argued that plantar fasciitis was likely my problem and gave information about the location, type, and times of pain as evidence. I even made note of the research I had done. After X-rays, the doctor agreed with me, but she in turn made an argument, using evidence from
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the X-rays, to persuade me that there might be another bone-related issue. My opinion was changed by the authority and evidence presented by the doctor.
This example is nothing new and may even seem obvious—and that is precisely because persuading someone to change his or her mind through con-vincing language is still the main way rhetoricians think of argument. In the same medical situation, if one considers it through the influence of invitational rhetoric and its understanding of argument, there were other—perhaps more important—moments of argument in my visit to the doctor. Yes, the above examples are argument as well, but of the dominating kind (a kind that most theorists regard as still useful at times). When the doctor and I chatted about what I liked to do (particularly in reference to activities that would require me to use my foot), about her husband’s interest in similar activities, and about how the medical process in that visit might work, we were presenting aspects of our-selves to be understood and to develop cooperation. This is a less agonistic form of argument. I believe it has advantages in its focus on relationship-building and avoiding dominating relationships, but it can make attempts to influence others (still an important activity) difficult—or can simply hide that influence.
Musement and PlayRemember that Peirce began his meditations on argument by referring to the notions of play and musement. “Pure Play” for Peirce is a “certain agreeable occupation of mind” that “involves no purpose save that of casting aside all serious purpose:” (“NA” 120).
Pure Play has no rules, except this very law of liberty. It bloweth where it listeth. It has no purpose, unless recreation. [. . . Pure Play] may take the form of esthetic contemplation, or that of distant castle building (whether in Spain or within one’s own moral training, or that of considering some wonder in one of the Universes, or some connection between two of the three, with speculation concerning its cause. (“NA” 120)
Pure Play for Peirce is fundamentally an act of freedom by the mind. Given that there is no total freedom from influences, and given the fact that Peirce seems to allow for the influence of what one observes on this play, what is the freedom from? The freedom of mind is from the structures and strictures of focused thought or research. There is no conscious end goal for this play of the mind (which is often connected to the body as well for Peirce—given his comments about how observing nature and Playing often happen during walks). Play can be the starting point for argument as it makes observations about the world.
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In this case, an argument is not a planned thing, it is not a prepared sequence of statements; nor is it necessarily goal oriented. Argument can begin with the relaxed freedom from purpose that Pure Play allows (as difficult as it might be to escape all purpose in thought in any “pure” way). This notion of play as the beginning of argument potentially frees argument from some of its con-nections to exerting power over others through intentionally trying to change them. This form of argument is often a solitary thing, as a person muses alone. At the same time, free time, free space, and freedom from pressures as needed to enter a state of Pure Play are necessary, and for many people this freedom is not consistently possible.
After Pure Play comes “Musement.” Musement involves the aspect of play where one considers a wonder in one of the (three) Universes and then moves on to think about connections and causes—but still in a free and meandering manner. Peirce states, Musement “begins passively enough with drinking in the impression of some nook in one of the three Universes. But impression soon passes into attentive observation, observation into musing, musing into a lively give-and-take of communion between self and self ” (“NA” 120). Peirce insists that this musing must not become too focused, or it turns into the useful but restricted thing called “scientific study” (120). Peirce’s words continue to suggest that Musement is done alone or with aspects of one’s self. However, the “com-munion between self and self ” could also apply to the musing conversation of good friends walking together—which again is not a typical understanding of argument proper for many rhetoricians. Walking through a physical or mental environment that allows the mind to put together new pieces of information is an argument. When I attended the last Rhetoric Society of America conference, the sessions that allowed my mind to wander among the paper being given, the ducks in the hotel, a conversation on the drive in, and various other moments, all in order to develop new ideas, were arguments (according to Peirce) as much or more than the “actual” arguments made in the papers I heard. (Which is not to devalue those papers at all—and they may have formed in similar circum-stances of Peircian argument.)
Not having a goal already in mind is one of the distinguishing factors of Musement as a rhetorical principle or form of argument. Anderson notes about Musement that “it is the only method that does not begin inquiry with its goal already presupposed. Musement is an activity in which we may choose in a self-controlled fashion to engage, but it leaves room for tychistic development, for ideas ‘to grow up spontaneously out of Pure Play without any breach of continu-ity’” (146). Musement as argument leaves room for chance and acknowledges
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the serendipitous nature of many changes in belief. In a sense, Peirce is making an argument for the value of digression and for the importance of considering a wide variety of seemingly unrelated objects for the ideas and influences they may work together to create. (My next section, on retroduction, focuses more on how those different observations and objects create new ideas and beliefs in Peirce’s system.) The fact that Musement does not start with a presupposed goal may be the simplest, but also most striking, difference between Peircian argument and argument as it is explained in the textbooks I described earlier.
Peirce claims that the “Neglected Argument” most readily comes to mind, or really simply happens, when one moves to the stage of Musement about spiri-tual matters. The idea of God’s reality works because it is “attractive fancy” in Musement. “The more he ponders it, the more it will find response in every part of his mind, for its beauty, for its supplying an ideal of life, and for its thoroughly satisfactory explanation of his whole threefold environment” (“NA” 124). The potential rhetorical principle here is that an idea is accepted and looked into more when it is beautiful, when it gives a notion of how to live or function in some way, and when it explains some aspect of the world. Beauty or pleasure, options for life, and making sense of the wide data in a person’s experience of the world: these are the things that make the initial stages of an argument convincing. Logic or emotional connections to an object may be important, but they may also be subsumed under logically pleasing explanation, feelings of pleasure, or the emotional value in finding good options for living in the world.
Peirce’s Musement does not require special rhetorical training or educa-tion, although it seems to help to be a good observer and to have an ability to make connections. Anderson notes that perception is the starting point of thinking and is vital to Musement (168), and Peirce explains that “instinct” is valuable for ideas and connections between objects (“NA” 129–30). For Peirce, people’s intuitions or instincts about connections and hypotheses are right a surprising amount of the time. He suggests that this is because we have evolved this ability for survival; what often happens is that people make reasonable connections below the conscious level. Musement as a principle for argument makes room for an intuitive sense of what conclusions to draw from the ar-gument, but it must never be forgotten that Peirce always sees later stages of refining ideas with more controlled experimentation as important as well. As Anderson argues, for Peirce, reasoning is “internal experimentation” (148); you can only get people to Musement indirectly by using examples, and then you must let them figure it out on their own. Again, Peirce leaves the individual free
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to go through this rhetorical process with a limited amount of direct outside influence or direct attempts to change someone.
Play is something missing at times in the composition classroom. Despite the debates about argument in rhetorical theory, most composition textbooks still stick with the idea of argument as persuasion. I completed a semi-formal survey of composition textbooks in my university’s composition library from the past five years that emphasize argument in some way. They all emphasize argument as persuasive, although some move toward the idea of negotiation and community-building as aspects of argument. Andrea Lunsford, John Ruszkiewicz, and Keith Walters’s Everything’s an Argument claims in the pref-ace to the second edition that “all language—including the language of visual images or of symbol systems other than writing—is persuasive, pointing in a direction and asking for response. [. . .] [W]e walk, talk, and breathe persua-sion very much as we breathe the air: everything is an argument.” (v; emphasis in original). In this version of argument, everything is persuasion. The fourth edition of the same text states, “People walk, talk, and breathe persuasion very much as they breathe the air: everything is a potential argument” (vii; emphasis in original). Argument and persuasion are nearly synonymous. The authors do later distinguish between the two terms, centering argument in a speaker—in what someone expresses or claims—and centering persuasion more in an audience, that is, in an attempt to alter viewpoints (4th ed., 1085). Both terms still imply starting with an individual who has a set position or belief with which he or she wants to impact others. Lester Faigley and Jack Selzer’s Good Reasons with Contemporary Arguments similarly claims that “[e]ffective arguments do not make the assumption that everyone should think the same way or hold the same beliefs. They attempt to change people’s minds by convincing them of the validity of new ideas or that a particular course of action is the best one to take” (2). Here the power involved in persuasion is quite apparent, although it does encourage students to think of argument more in terms of cooperation and respect, rather than as something to win. Gary Layne Hatch’s Arguing in Communities focuses on contextualizing arguments, making arguments positive, and moving the notion of argument more toward community building. In his preface, Hatch declares, “My central premise in the text is that arguing productively is an important part of living healthfully in any community and among other communities” (v). Argument for Hatch is about “negotiating difference” (v), which is not quite what invitational rhetoric calls for, but which is closer to an emphasis on mutual understanding and coopera-
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tion as a key component of argument.10 John Gage’s 1987 The Shape of Reason takes a slightly different perspective on “[a]rgumentative writing—writing that reasons its way to a conclusion” (v). Argument here is a process of finding out and reasoning. This inquiry-based approach is perhaps closest to Peirce, but is much more conscious and directed in its purposes. Gage “trie[s] to underplay persuasion, as the writer’s aim, in favor of inquiry” (vii; emphasis in original), but also maintains the importance of “develop[ing] the best case for believing a conclusion” (181). Gage and Peirce are similar in valuing inquiry, but Peirce makes it a Playful and undirected process.
My purpose here is not to try to arbitrate between cooperative and persuasion-focused definitions of argument. While both are useful, they tend to miss out on the exploratory, creative, and playful aspects of argument. They also implicitly limit argument to interpersonal interactions and miss the variety of events and data that can sometimes form an argument. Peirce focuses on the ways that life experience and even letting the mind wander can be part of argument, and he makes a case for an early stage of argument as the only time when new knowledge is created. Peirce makes not just rhetoric, but also argument, central to epistemology and inquiry, and he provides a way to move current debates about argument beyond the (still important) questions of persuasion, power, and understanding.
In my own classroom, Peirce helps serve as a justification for digression. The meandering conversation that can juxtapose unexpected areas to each other leads my students to many ideas. Much of my application of Peirce is to the invention stage. I even have students do written ramblings from which they later work to draw connections, conclusions, or hypotheses. Peirce also helps when it comes to analyzing arguments in the classroom. Instead of thinking of context and text, Peirce lets all sorts of elements work on the same playing field—all as observations that lead to a hypothesis. Peirce’s willingness to look to unique juxtapositions for new knowledge also lets me encourage my students to draw on the variety of discourse communities in which they participate to create interesting hypotheses from the conjunctions of those communities. My students can add new knowledge to the classroom by meandering through their various discourse groups. Musement and Pure Play may be interesting processes, but they do not fully lead to the kind of change or new idea that is often implied by the notion of argument until we consider the importance of retroduction in Peirce’s thought. It is to that term that I now turn.
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Abduction/RetroductionPeirce uses “abduction” and “retroduction” more or less as synonyms for the moment of making a hypothesis from an eclectic, fairly unstudied collection of observations. He uses “retroduction” in the “Neglected Argument,” so I will generally use that term here. According to Peirce, “retroduction” is the process of thinking about different phenomena until one reaches a conjecture that puts them together and explains the different phenomena. It is the first stage of inquiry for Peirce and is the only moment where new concepts and new knowledge are developed (“NA” 125–26). In fact, Peirce goes so far as to claim that in terms of inquiry toward knowledge, “every plank of its advance is first laid by Retroduction alone, that is to say, by the spontaneous conjecture of instinctive reason; and neither Deduction nor Induction contributes a single new concept to the structure. Nor is this less true or less important for those inquiries that self-interest prompts” (128). For Peirce, the main point of many an argument is whatever hypothesis comes forth in retroduction. This is the argument that is usually presented to one part of the self, or that could be mentioned to another person as a possibility. This idea of argument makes it seemingly spontaneous and keeps the elements involved in bringing forth a new argument appropriately broad.
The detective Sherlock Holmes, who is usually associated with deduction, has been used as a major example of retroduction or abduction (even though Arthur Conan Doyle generally calls Holmes’s work “deduction”). Umberto Eco uses the example of Sherlock Holmes as a case of “creative induction”—Eco’s equivalent to retroduction—as Holmes puts lots of facts together and then expresses a surprising or seemingly impossible relation between them; before testing and then explaining them after the fact (215).11 The rhetoric of Sher-lock Holmes can be a useful teaching tool for argument in the composition classroom—not in terms of the verbal arguments he makes or the language he uses, but for his process of inquiry. The storied detective observes, reflects, lets his mind wander, and waits for connections to come—before sharing his conclusions orally. It is this notion of inquiry as a lived form of argument (and vice versa) that helps make Peirce stand out from other rhetorical theorists.12
Just as with Sherlock Holmes’s ability to use small pieces of data to describe someone, the kind of mud on your shoe, the bread I had for lunch, the weather outside, an article from yesterday’s newspaper, and a side comment made by an acquaintance may all be part of an argument or the analysis of an argument. That is, they may all be the factors leading to a new hypothesis (whether about
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a criminal or not) that creates belief. Holmes may be well studied on the history of tobacco or the physics of footprints, but especially in cases where he simply makes observations and hypotheses about a person as a playful and curious activity, his work is quite similar to retroduction. Holmes’s thinking becomes a bit more focused when he tries to solve a case, but he still uses similar com-pilations of disparate data, even if the applicability of the information is not directly obvious. And it is the meandering, musing mind that can have the best access to this variety of factors, whether or not one is led to think about the reality of God.
Again, I want to emphasize that this is not the end of inquiry for Peirce. Retroduction is not far enough along on the road to knowledge to actually explain how a reasoned process works; and “[r]etroduction does not afford security. The hypothesis must be tested” (Peirce, “NA” 126). However, because it is a “plausible” conjecture that leads to new action, and because it comes through lived phenomena rather than specific testing, retroduction for Peirce “is a form of Argument rather than of Argumentation” (120). I believe that in this way Peirce gives us a compelling way to move toward a focus on argument and away from emphasizing argumentation methods in rhetorical studies.
The humble argument Peirce gives is an example of retroduction. Ander-son explains: “The humble argument, when viewed from the side of logic or science, serves as a possible instance of retroduction or abduction. God’s reality is a hypothesis capable of explaining the reality of the three universes of experi-ence. Moreover, as we have seen, in a circular fashion it serves as a hypothesis explaining how abduction and the whole of inquiry are effective” (180). Peirce suggests that “instinctive reason” will lead anyone to hypothesize God as an explanation of the reality and connections between the three universes. The spontaneity of the whole process is important to retroduction. This spontaneity can come through instinct and listening, especially in Peirce’s example of the humble argument. “Instinctive hypotheses display plausibility; those that are strongly instinctive, we might say, display strong plausibility” (Anderson 166). These instinctive hypotheses may have good conscious reasons given for them after further examination, but they are experienced as spontaneous ideas in the moment of their arising. In fact, Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok claim that ac-cording to Peirce we often guess right in retroduction because of unconscious observations that come to light later (18). An important aspect of argument here may be the later explanation of ideas that seemed instinctive. Again, the action or hypothesis is the starting point, and then the rhetorician can work
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back to the phenomena that serve as part of the argument or work back to the reasons that explain why the hypothesis was possible in the first place.
According to the theory of argument I have started to describe here, I cannot pick a point that I want you to believe and try to convince you of it. However, I might quite effectively explain how a conjunction of reading dif-ferent pragmatists and rhetoricians, having a friend writing a dissertation on Peirce and Plato, and acknowledging a number of other factors all served as a spontaneous argument to me that Peirce could be important for rhetorical theory—and that his definition of argument, his idea of play/musement, and his theory of retroduction could all be vital aspects of that rhetoric.
ConclusionI now return to my example of the doctor visit. In terms of Peirce’s idea of ar-gument, the argument started when I first put together the fact that my foot hurt worse after exercising and after waking up in the morning. These bits of data led me to an initial hypothesis, which turned into further research in an inquiry process. Again, as I told the doctor bits of information—like the level of pain I felt, my exercise practices, my injury history, and the location of the pain—she made an initial diagnosis. The argument according to Peirce is not simply in the doctor’s attempt to convince me that the diagnosis is correct; it is also in meandering through the bits of information to come up with a hypothesis. I did make an argument when I attempted to convince the doc-tor of my injuries, and I made one for “invitational rhetoric” in building some understanding with the doctor. However, for Peirce, the initial site of argument was when I noticed foot pain while running and observed that I had to stretch more in the morning. The argument happened in the daily wandering through life—and in the literal playing of sports in this case—as those experiences led to a moment of abduction.
The “Neglected Argument” is only the first stage of a full process of inquiry for Peirce (“NA” 131). A person should move on to further observations and changes based on life or scientific experiments. There never really is a final stage in Peircian inquiry. Eventually everyone could reasonably agree on something as the truth, but this is an ideal toward which to move, not something Peirce thought was going to be attained very often. Even though the “Neglected Argu-ment” is the first stage, it is perhaps the most important and creative stage of an argument. It is where new ideas are formed and where the mind has freedom to play with observations from the three Universes of reality. The exploratory
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research that leads to accidental medical discoveries, for example, is a playful experience and a form of argument that Peirce would affirm.
Peirce allows visuals, objects, and places to be forms of argument—all they have to do is nudge someone toward the kind of action that indicates belief. Peirce’s pragmatic rhetoric means that we should consider a room to be a potential argument, or a user interface on a computer to be an argument. The meandering musement of life is where arguments are first found, not in the logical giving of reasons and evidence (which Peirce certainly considers to be valuable at later stages). The inventive stage of an argument, you could say, comes in the hypotheses and ideas of a meandering body and mind. If nothing else, Peirce’s rhetoric is an affirmation of exploratory research processes in fields like rhetoric, even if the researcher does not initially seek any direct application. Peirce’s rhetoric is intuitive, or as he often calls it, “instinctive.” The intuitions for different creative leaps that put disparate pieces of information together into a new idea or hypothesis are kinds of arguments; both the hypotheses and the impact of experience and thought through musement that lead to these ideas are arguments. Rhetoric is a playful, creative endeavor for this seemingly quite serious writer and philosopher—or so I believe enough to act with con-viction by writing this document, which is, of course, fallible and open to both critique and new pieces of information that call for new hypotheses about the rhetoric of Charles Peirce.
More importantly, however, Peirce helps revise our understanding of argument. For Peirce, argument includes the creation of new knowledge; rhetoric is a knowledge-making (and perhaps reality-making) field, not just an area of critique, debate, or persuasion. According to Lyne, Peirce proposes that “rationality is an engagement in the production of new knowledge, not just the disabuse of error. Speculative Rhetoric would function toward that end. [. . .] It would thus be appropriate to characterize Speculative Rhetoric as a tool of ‘constructive rationality’” (168). While I do not want to limit Peirce’s contributions to rhetorical theory strictly to what he says under the category of “speculative rhetoric” (and its pseudonyms), Peirce’s definition of argument, his notion of Play, and his focus on retroduction all emphasize the creation of new knowledge and new relations between objects as the goal of argument and of rhetoric.
Notes
1. See “’Pragmatism Defined,” “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism,” and “The Basis of Pragmaticism” (Peirce on Signs) for details on Peirce’s distinction of
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pragmaticism from pragmatism. One of his main concerns is to avoid the untenable lack of reality given to generalities and concepts for some pragmatists.
2. A small amount of work has already been done on Peirce’s rhetoric. Cornel West emphasizes the communal aspect of knowing and of scientific method in Peirce’s theories, suggesting that scientific method is a very rhetorical and negotiated experience for Peirce (43–44). Two articles appeared together in the Winter 1981 issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric about Peirce’s “speculative” rhetoric. In the first of these articles, John Braun argues that Peirce’s rhetoric is about logic, not persuasion, choice, or public issues (2–3), while John Krois’s contribution understands Peirce’s “speculative rhetoric” (Peirce’s main term for talking about rhetoric) as focused on making the conditions necessary for “attainment of consensus” or “proclamation of law” (27). This work again focuses mostly on persuasion, and a bit on cooperative understanding, when thinking of rhetoric and argument. In a more recent article, James Liszka continues the focus on the logic of Peirce’s rhetoric, arguing that “Peirce’s rhetoric concerns the practice of inquiry, and calls for an integration of rhetoric and logic on that basis” (439; emphasis in original). Finally, John Lyne’s 1980 QJS article identifies Charles Peirce as one of the few thinkers who have “provided what might properly be called a philosophy of rhetoric” (155). Lyne works more than the others to provide a full rhetorical system from Peirce, but he too comes more from the direction of semiotics than from rhetoric, subsuming Peirce’s philosophy of rhetoric under “the philosophy of signs of which it is a part” (157). While all of these articles add useful analysis of Peirce’s rhetorical logic, they all emphasize what Peirce would call “argumentation” rather than “argument.” That is, they describe strict rules and connections for methodological movements.
3. Menand’s chapter entitled “The Law of Errors” (177–200) focuses on the impor-tance of statistics to both Benjamin and Charles Peirce through the story of their statistical analysis of handwriting samples given as testimony in the case of Hetty Green’s estate. Green was perhaps the richest woman in the United States at the time of her death, and the validity of aspects of her will was in question (Menand 176).
4. Lyne’s article also includes a useful rhetorician’s summary of Firstness, Second-ness, and Thirdness that is more detailed than my own (159–63).
5. Ann Berthoff has done valuable work on Peirce and the idea of the Third or Thirdness. Her focus is on Peirce’s triadic semiotics that includes not just a sign and referent but also an “Interpretant” (59). All knowledge is limited and partial for Peirce, but this does not suggest “that we cannot know or that we cannot represent our partial knowledge” (60).
6. Also see Anderson’s commentary on the “Neglected Argument” for a detailed analysis of the essay itself. Anderson focuses more than I do on the religious aspects of the argument and how it fits into Peirce’s career as a whole.
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7. One reason for Peirce’s neglect may be the influence of Richard Rorty. Rorty has minimized Peirce’s role in pragmatism, declaring about Peirce that “[h]is contribu-tion [to] pragmatism was merely to have given it a name” along with sending a few other thinkers on to their own more important ideas (161).
8. Bordelon has made similar points, opposing feminist, cooperative forms of argu-ment to persuasion-oriented types of argument in “Contradicting and Complicating Feminization of Rhetoric Narratives” as well.
9. Persuasion is considered to be a problem because “[e]mbedded in efforts to change others is a desire for control and domination, for the act of changing another establishes the power of the change agent over that other” (Foss and Griffin 3).
10. Other examples include Everyday Arguments by Katherine J. Mayberry and Timothy Crusius and Carolyn Channell’s The Aims of Argument.
11. Eco and Sebeok’s use of Sherlock Holmes and the discussions of Holmes and Dupin throughout Eco and Sebeok’s edited volume is an excellent example of ap-plying Peirce’s theory of inquiry.
12. One rhetorician to whom I might draw a connection for Peirce is Gregory Ulmer. His ideas about conductivity and conduction in rhetoric, where one text or idea leads to a new one, are similar to Peirce in their focus on rhetorical arguments as creating new ideas and hypotheses (texts) from a variety of lived experiences.
Works Cited
Anderson, Douglas R. Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Peirce. Purdue UP Series in the History of Philosophy. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1995.
Berthoff, Ann E. The Mysterious Barricades: Language and Its Limits. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999.
Bordelon, Suzanne. “Contradicting and Complicating Feminization of Rhetoric Narratives: Mary Yost and Argument from a Sociological Perspective.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.3 (Summer 2005): 101–24.
. “A Reassessment of George Pierce Baker’s The Principles of Argumentation: Minimizing the Use of Formal Logic in Favor of Practical Approaches” College Composition and Communication 57.4 (June 2006): 763–88.
Braun, John. “The ‘Speculative Rhetoric’ of Charles Sanders Peirce.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 14.1 (Winter 1981): 1–15.
Crusius, Timothy W., and Carolyn E. Chan-nell. The Aims of Argument. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.
Eco, Umberto. “Horns, Hooves, Insteps.” The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Eds. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983. 198–220.
Faigley, Lester, and Jack Selzer. Good Rea-sons with Contemporary Arguments. 3rd ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006.
Krois, John Michael. “Peirce’s Speculative Rhetoric and the Problem of Natural Law.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 14:1 (Winter 1981): 16–30.
Liszka, James Jakób. “Peirce’s New Rheto-ric.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 36.4 (Fall 2000): 439–76.
Lunsford, Andrea, John Ruszkiewicz, and Keith Walters. Everything’s an Argument. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001.
. Everything’s an Argument 4th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007.
Lyne, John R. “Rhetoric and Semiotic in C. S. Peirce.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 155–68.
Mayberry, Katherine J. Everyday Arguments: A Guide to Writing and Reading Effective Arguments. New York: Longman, 2002.
Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.
Peirce, Charles. “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.” Anderson 118–34.
. Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce. Ed. James Hoopes. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991.
. Unpublished Manuscript. (1904) Numbered MS 774. Located at the Insti-tute for Studies in Pragmaticism, Texas Tech University, Lubbock.
Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester P, 1982.
Rosenthal, Sandra B. “Spirituality and American Pragmatism.” Pragmatism and Religion. Ed. Stuart Rosenbaum. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003. 229–42.
Ryan, Kathleen J., and Elizabeth J. Natalle. “Fusing Horizons: Standpoint Herme-neutics and Invitational Rhetoric. Rheto-ric Society Quarterly 31 (2001): 69–90.
Sebeok, Thomas A., and Jean Umiker-Sebeok. “You Know My Method: A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes.” The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Eds. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983. 11–44.
Ulmer, Gregory. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.
West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989.
Matthew J. NewcombMatthew Newcomb is assistant professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, where he teaches composition, American literature, rhetorical theory, and writing theory. His work has also appeared in JAC and Politics and Culture. His current research interests include argument theory, composition and sustainability, and composi-tion studies policies.
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