Pragmatism and Design (I): Charles Sanders Pierce
From all schools of thought, pragmatism is the only philosophical tradition that was born in the United States, explicitly reflecting the founding ideals of this country, and more particularly, the political, institutional and scientific context of the early nineteenth century. Pragmatism ideas had a profound impact on how American society was formed, changing the way of thinking of its citizens and defining its institutions.
From a perspective of how we understand design today, and more specifically from Europe, I think it is worth knowing this influence and being aware of its origin. Ideas take a long time to come together in a society, sometimes it is necessary to go back centuries to understand how we act. I have always had the feeling that we live the practice of design with great dissonance with our counterparts from other latitudes, in constant conflict with the basic education we received.
Pragmatism is a current of thought that speaks directly to the people interested in social change. At the end of the 19th century, there was a lot of optimism and confidence in the intellectuals as the engine of progress. This does not mean that we are not able to read critically and with a perspective all the influence of the pragmatic movement, a movement which was conceived by privileged intellectuals of the economic elites, in a completely different historical context.
The Metaphysical Club
Around 1870, a group of young students meet at a Harvard club to discuss their ideas. From “The Metaphysical Club”, an ironic name, since their ideas went in a completely opposite line, arose the main exponents pragmatic thought, a philosophical movement that defends that theories must be linked to experience.
The most active members of the group were Charles Sanders Peirce, author of the pragmatic principle, and William James popularizer of the movement. We also find names like George Herbert Mead and John Dewey, who stood out as the most influential philosopher who put into practice the principles of pragmatism in the society.
All of them were strongly influenced by the publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and the evolutionary perspective of life, ideas that from a pragmatic perspective, emphasize the interactions and adaptation between the organism and the environment. .
Pragmatism emphasizes putting into practice all knowledge, rejecting the Cartesian radical doubt and the dualistic views of the world in force up to that time: mind and matter, reason and emotion, theory and practice, etc. They put the focus on the experience as the place of all meaning. Continuity, flow and change become the main axes of its discourse, which triggers an epistemological theory that emphasizes process and experimentation.
Since I think the ideas are better understood having a little context about the lives of their authors, let’s make a short introduction about each one of the group members and their contributions.
Peirce, clarifying ideas
“Why your eye is like a thief dodging whiplashes? Because it is under the eyelashes”.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), was a precocious and privileged boy with a great deal of intellectual stimulation. His father was an eminence of mathematics at Harvard and his interest in logic began at a young age. After graduation, he worked for the US government conducting geodetic investigations. For over thirty years, Peirce was involved in practical and theoretical problems associated with taking scientific measurements. This experience was undoubtedly vital to his views on philosophy and logic.
Although he wrote extensively on many philosophical subjects, he never compiled his thoughts into one book. His writing style, like his character, was not easy, lacking the clarity that could have made his views more accessible. He was a guy with a complicated character, so he didn’t forge many friends and throughout his career he didn’t have much support or recognition.
In his article “How to make our ideas clear”, Peirce looks for a reason to think, a sense of reality to get away from the previous philosophical tradition. A clear logic path, rule, or method about the purpose of concepts and hypotheses:
We clarify a hypothesis by identifying its practical consequences. If a philosophical question has no practical consequences, it has no interest.
For him, philosophy and logic were sciences in themselves, moreover, he understood that philosophy was the philosophy of science, and logic was the logic of science. Pragmatism is a method that formulates how to clarify our ideas. To determine the meaning of an idea, we will follow the scientific method: one must “test” that idea in the “objective world” and the results of this experiment will constitute the meaning of it. If there are no results, or if the results do not have sense, the idea is most likely not significant
Abducted by surprise
Before Peirce, logic divided arguments into two subclasses: deductive arguments (necessary inferences) and inductive arguments (probable inferences). Peirce introduced a third: abductive inferences, which was also referred to them as introductory hypotheses.
The scientific method would start with abduction, an explanatory hypothesis based on an “astonishing” observation that draws our attention. Subsequently, by deduction, conclusions would be drawn about what phenomena should be expected, if the hypothesis were correct. The method would be closed with induction, when the experiments to determine whether the deduced results are obtained or not.
Unlike deduction or induction, abductive logic allows the creation of new knowledge and ideas: B is presented as a better guess as to why A is occurring, but B is not part of the original set of premises. And unlike deduction, but equally true to induction, the conclusions of an abductive argument can be false, even if the premises are true (Kolko 2010).
“The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of understanding, although an extremely fragile understanding. It is true that the different elements of the hypothesis were in our minds before; but it is the idea of assembling what we have never dreamed of assembling before, which shows the new suggestion before our contemplation.”
Design synthesis is fundamentally a way of applying abductive logic. The activity of defining and creating connections actively produces new insights. The process of making sense by manipulating, organizing, and filtering data is based on specific design skills and techniques. For example, rethinking a situation from a particular user perspective, graphically mapping concepts, or experimenting with design patterns.
Icons, indices and symbols
Strongly connected with the ways the scientific method argues, there would be the theory of signs or semiotics, or how we interpret and represent signs.
A sign is something that represents someone or something in some aspect or capacity. It creates an equivalent representation in someone’s mind, not in all facets, but in reference to some kind of “idea” or basis. The relationship between an object, a sign and an interpreter is genuine, no one interprets a sign in the same way.
Signs are in turn divided into three types:
- Icons are signs that show their objects through similarities or similarities. An ✏ is an icon of the object it represents. However, its meaning resides in its connotation.
- Indexes are signs indicating their objects causally. The smoke is an index of fire and a symptom is an index of a disease. The meaning of an index lies in its denotation, since the main quality of an index is to draw attention to its object by causing the interpreter to focus on the object.
- Symbols are words, hypothesis or arguments that depend on a conventional or usual rule. They have a pragmatic meaning, that is, they are intended for people to use them by knowing how they will be interpreted.
According to Peirce’s theory of signs, the meaning of a symbol, such as a word, is based on social conventions and therefore its pragmatic meaning is dynamic, as it continues to evolve over time. When a sign causes a subsequent sign (an interpretation) in someone’s mind, an infinite chain of interpretation, development, or ideas begins.
Pierce used visual diagrams from his youth to project his ideas.
“I don’t think I ever reflect my ideas in words: I use visual diagrams, firstly, because this way of thinking is my natural language of self-communication, and secondly, because I am convinced that it is the best system for that purpose”.
Peirce was aware of this visual facet as a characteristic of his own mind, he developed his own method to graphically represent his thoughts and arguments, projecting their relationships between them through diagrams. He described this language as “ideoscopy”, making explicit the link between ideas and the visual representation he was looking for.
His worksheets were often illustrated with diagrams used to develop reasoning processes and mathematical concepts. His interest in puzzles of all kinds is evident in his documents; he playfully enjoyed them while logically analysing them.
Signs are the raw material of design, in any of their meanings, which may be misinterpreted tomorrow in a very different context, or give them another meaning.
Since I am sure that at this point in the text you will begin to show signs of weariness, and that our reality is dictated by very brief moments of attention, we will continue talking about American pragmatists later. Not without first leaving us a small index of our next protagonist: ♥
Keep reading
This post is the first in a series of four on Pragmatism and Design:
- Charles Sanders Pierce (I)
Practical consequences, abduction and semiotics. - William James (II)
Mediation, body and emotions. - John Dewey (III)
Learning, experience and closure. - George Herbert Mead (IV)
Identity, social relations and objects.
Bibliography
Brag M. Pragmatism. In Our Time. BBC Radio 4.
Dalsgaard, P. (2014). Pragmatism and design thinking. International Journal of Design, 8 (1), 143–155.
Kolko, J. (2010), “Abductive Thinking and Sensemaking: The Drivers of Design Synthesis”. In MIT’s Design Issues: Volume 26, Number 1 Winter 2010.
Leja, M. “Peirce, Visuality, and Art.” Representations, no. 72 (2000): 97–122. Accessed July 9, 2020. doi: 10.2307 / 2902910.
Peirce. CS “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”. Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878), 286–302.
This piece was originally written in Spanish at Guindo’s blog:
“Pragmatismo y diseño (I): Charles Sanders Pierce”
