Victorino Tejera
Has Habermas
Understood Peirce?
I
A Response to Habermas on Peirce and Communication’
The thesis of Habermas’s essay on “Peirce and Communication”
that the interpretant relation of the sign cannot be explained.
without recourse to the conditions for reaching an
intersubjective agreement, however rudimentary these con-
ditions may be.!
Because Peirce’s semeiotic is not “intersubjectively based,”
Habermas thinks that Peirce’s “pragmatic turn cannot be carried out
consistently” (PMT 92). By “pragmatic” Habermas means something
dualistic that Peirce did not. Since Peirce’s semeiotic was pragmatic
in Peirce’s sense from the first, it must be Habermas who feels the
need for such a turn. We note, as well, that Habermas thinks of
Peirce as an epistemologist (PMT 90, 93), he is talking about a prag-
matic turn within epistemology, the very discipline fated to be made
supererogatory by the success of Peirce’s semiotics in dissolving the
misformulations which cripple dualist Cartesian or neopositivist ap-
proaches to the problems of meaning and representation. For, by
“the pragmatic turn” Habermas means the pursuit of what he calls
‘pragmatics’. But “pragmatics” is not a term or notion of Peirce’s any
more than “semantics” is. Like Eco and Charles Morris, Habermas
doesn’t see that what he calls pragmatics is really sociology of knowl-
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society
Winter, 1996, Vol. XXXII, No. 1108 Victorino Tejera
edge, namely, part ofa reflection upon the use made dy the interpret:
ers of the mediating interpretant.? But to explain “the interpretant
relation of the sign” (PMT 92) by having recourse to the conditions
of and relations among interpreters, as Habermas’s ‘pragmatics’ wants
to, is precisely what Peirce’s semiotics strategically avoids. And it
avoids the pitfalls of this intersubjectivist turn (to use Habermas’s
term) without loss to a full understanding of meaning-processes.
That Habermas’s understanding of Peirce is externalist, seeking
to recast Peirce’s views into his own terms, emerges when he calls
Peirce’s purely ideal community of ongoing investigators a
“counterfactual presupposition.” Not only is Peirce’s a limiting con-
ception in the sense that it will aever—as Peirce expects us to know—
be reached. It is, secondly, a conception which wisely concedes that
every advance in knowledge also always enlarges the scope of what
remains to be known. To call “counterfactual” Peirce’s nomination
of truth and reality as that which is approximated in a notional com-
munity, is to believe that Peirce has asserted that his postulated ideal
can or will come into actual sociohistorical and material existence.
And this is patently false, although it’s an error into which many
other readers of Peirce have likewise lapsed.
Habermas misreads Peirce in a dualistic way in claiming that he
took “symbolic forms” to make up a “third world ... that mediates
between the inner and outer worlds” (W:1.168); for, Peirce here is
using ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ as qualifiers of feeling only to deny their
supposed dichotomy and to assert the mixed nature of the feeling
that comes with the representation and that feeling’s inseparability
from the representation. Revealing too is the lingwisticist way in
which Habermas slips when he misquotes Peirce: the latter does not
say that “every (sic) thought is an unuttered word (p.169).” He is
just talking about the timelessness of “the law of number;” word
here incautiously stands for term in the dialogical activity which think
ing is for Peirce—as Habermas would have to agree when he grants
elsewhere in his essay that Peirce’s semiotics is more comprehensive
than a theory of merely linguistic meaning.
Only an inveterate dualism and epistemologism could call Peirce’sHas Habermas Understood Peirce? 109
semiotics a “semantic (sic) transformation of Kantian epistemology”
(PMT 94). Yes, Peirce has certainly “giv[en] a semiotic reinterpreta-
tion to the fundamental concept of representation” with his triadic
account of semiosis. But just as certainly Peirce does not limit “sym-
bolic representation” to “a proposition representing a state of
affairs.” Nor is there anything (that Habermas means by) “seman-
tic” about Peirce’s perspective on meaning-processes that makes it
“not... clear whether th{e] universal more properly belongs in the
world or to language” (PMT 95). Habermas is assuming here that
“that for which the sentence-sign stands” has a “propositional struc-
ture.” But this is question-begging and reductive. Propositional
structure cannot be imputed to all objects of signs. Some objects of
signs are firsts, and if firsts of thirds, not all thirds are propositional.
The general, in Peirce, “properly belongs” Goth “in the world” and
“to language;” this precisely is Peirce’s anti-dualism.
Peirce’s anti-dualism is anti-semantic because he doesn’t al-
low—as Habermas does—that there can be non-semiotic objects.
All objects are significate objects for Peirce, and the world itself is a
significate object. It is not something to which we have access inde-
pendently of semiosis. Any “thing” which we access becomes, thereby,
an object, namely, the olyect of a sign. The trouble with “semantics”
is just this, that its practitioners assume that some things can be
known independently of any interpretant, in parallel with the way
neo-positivist “pragmatics” assumes that perceivers’ differing inter-
pretations of the world can be studied in relation only to the world or
to each other, without reference to the interpretants that mediate
between the world and the interpreters or those that mediate the
interpreters’ understandings of each other.
If there were a Peircean “semantics,” it would have to be the
study of the relation of signs to their significate, or semiotic, objects;
just as, ifthere were a Peircean “pragmatics,” it would have to be the
study of the relation of interpretant-signs to each other. When, for
example, two interpreters have caught what could be called the mean-
ing of a complex object, it is because they are sharing more or less
congruent imterpretants of it. If they are literary or artcritics, and