The summer of 1859

and the Metaphysical Club gets cooking [the origins of pragmatism, semiotics, pluralism, and Holmes' criticism of legal formalism.]

from "The Metaphysical Club" by Menand

When "On The Origin of Species" came out, in late 1859, Peirce was in the Louisianna wilderness, working for the Coast Survey, but he exchanged letters with [Chauncey] Wright about the book, and when he got back to Cambridge that summer and found him a convert to Darwinism, he told him that if the theory of natural selection by chance variation was correct, there was more spontaneity in the universe than Wright's mechanistic views allowed. This remark, according to Peirce, "impressed him enough to perplex him."

If scientific laws are not absolutely precise, then scientific terminology has to be understood in a new way. Words like "cause" and "effect," "certainty" and "chance," even "hard" and "soft" cannot be understood as naming fixed and discreet entities or properties; they have to be understood as naming points on a curve of posibillities, as guesses or predictions rather than conclusions. Otherwise, scientists are in danger of reifing their concepts - of imputng an unvarying essence to phenomena that are in a continual state of flux. Peirce was the first scientist to perceive all the implications of this problem, and his mature philosophy - his theory of signs and his elabotation of what he called "the logic of relations" - is obsessed with it. The problem boiils down to this question: What does it mean to say that a statement is "true" in a world always susceptible to "a certain swerving"? Peirce got a hint of how this question might be answered from another member of the Metaphysical Club, Nicholas St. John Green.

... Green wrote frequently for the "American Law Review", articles much admired by his friend and editor Wendell Holmes, and also by Charles Peirce. His favorite target was legal formalism - the belief that legal concepts refer to something immutable and determinate. His criticism of legal formalism was Wright's criticism of Spencer's evolutionary philosophy: he thought it treated what were merely tools of analysis as though they named actual entities.

[...]the chain of causation," Green argued, is only a metaphor. In reality, every event has a multiplicity of interdependedt causes.

... This was entirely compatible with Pierce'e understanding of causality in nature, and Peirce found the method of analysis thrilling. He praised, in one of his recollections of the Metaphysical Club, Green's "extraordinary power of disrobing warm and breathing truth of the draperies of long worn formulas."

Green thought that all beliefs have this purposive character - that knowledge is not a passive mirroring of the world, but an active means of making the world into the kind of world we want it to be - and this was a point he insisted on in meetings of the Metaphsical Society. [Menand, pg 224]

The next passage is also from "The Metaphysical Club" by Menand,

One of the first things that Peirce did after arriving at Hopkins in the fall of 1879 was to start a Metaphysical Club.

he said:

"Does the principle that everything can be explained have an explanation? Or, as he also put it: Does the law of causality (which is another name for the principle that everything can be explained) have a cause?" pg 275

____
[One hundred years later, a rule was drawn up to foster this attitude
at the Metaphysics Anonymous Meetings in Memphis, San Francisco,
Dallas, Atlanta, and Little Rock:

Bylaws of Metaphysics Anonymous:

We agree:

 Members have a right to hold and express their own opinions.

 Members may use and explain their own definitions.

 An attempt will be made to communicate not merely persuade.

 People who agree with (1) , (2,) and (3) above can be members.

 New rules can be made by consesus.