HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

Volume 22, Number 4, October 2005

CULTIVATING HABITS OF REASON:

PEIRCE AND THE LOGICA UTENS
VERSUS LOGICA DOCENS DISTINCTION
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen

C harles S. Peirce is well acknowledged for arguing for and propagat-

ing further the significant and far-reaching distinction between two
logical faculties, the form of reasoning that resorts to the faculty of logica
utens (logic in ‘use’ or in ‘action’) and reasoning that resorts to the fac-
ulty of logica docens (‘theoretical,’ ‘scientific,’ or ‘educational’ logic).1 The
main difference is that the docens is the educable, improving, nurtured,
and schooled facility for reasoning for its own sake while the utens is
not.2 The latter is a native, stable, acquired, invariable, constitutional,
secure, enduring, and instinctive form of reasoning—like mathematics,
as Peirce states, which “performs its reasonings by a logica utens which
it develops for itself, and has no need of any appeal to a logica docens;
for no disputes about reasoning arise in mathematics which need to be
submitted to the principles of the philosophy of thought for decision.”3
The utens appeals to imagination, experimentation, and iconic represen-
tation of objects of thought. It is the mind’s eye of suggesting generalizing
constructions and introducing new elements to the chains of reasoning,
while the docens reflects on and explicates how such mental processes
ought to work for the purposes of positive discovery and inquiry.
In relation to the logical reasoning that is most germane to math-
ematical activities, this distinction has been much less scrutinized in the
subsequent literature. As it happens, however, in Peirce’s philosophy
logical and mathematical aspects are inherently intertwined with some
of the most central aspects of his semiotics, the general theory of signs.
Signs themselves are mediated in, and interpreted via, interpersonal
processes that aim at fundamental changes in habitual practices deeply
rooted in our everyday practical affairs. Habits are, in this perspec-

357
358 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

tive, shaped and supported by the continuous connection that obtains

between the logica utens and the fundamental activities of the agent
who performs formal reasoning.
Peirce is customarily taken to have adopted the terms logica utens
and logica docens from the scholastics. Indeed, the terms appear in John
Buridan’s (1295/1305–1358/1361) works dating from the mid-fourteenth
century. Later, according to Sten Ebbesen, the Albertists of the late
fifteenth century (followers of the logician Albert of Saxony, c. 1316–c.
1390), in their search for reliable knowledge involved in argumentation
and disputation, rendered the distinction as one between the princi-
pally theoretical and pedagogical (docens) and the practically-oriented
(utens).4 These terms did not appear explicitly in Albert’s own writ-
ings, but his observations on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics in Perutilis
Logica (‘Very Useful Logic,’ Venice 1522) follow closely the footpath of
Buridan’s commentaries, thus endorsing the view that logic is, in es-
sence, practical knowledge. The most probable scenario nevertheless
is that Peirce learned about the distinction from John Duns Scotus,
probably his ““parva logicalia” (1295). It was among the key medieval
logical treatises alongside his student William of Ockham’s (c. 1287–c.
1347) Tractatus logicæ and Summa Logices to which Peirce frequently
alluded. To Buridan’s Summulae de dialectica or his other works Peirce’s
own references were few and far between.5
Even earlier, the utens / docens distinction was evoked in the writings
of the Arabians in their cultivation and reinstatement of Aristotelian
logic. If, moreover, the distinction is taken to resemble the general dis-
tinction between praxis and theoriam, the practical and the theoretical
faces of reasoning, its origins are even older than this. In antiquity, it
was reflected in art (wisdom) vs. technê. The difference ultimately ven-
tures beyond the boundaries of logic and the sciences—take instinctive
musicality vs. educable musicality, for example.
One might also wish to make a comparable distinction between
pure and applied logic, as did the Aristotelian commentator āl-Fārābī
(c.870–c.950), perhaps the first to highlight the Aristotelian distinction
between the theoretical and the practical in relation to the rational fac-
ulty of human reasoning.6 In our day and age, however, at least if looked
from the historically-conscious perspective that Peirce certainly adopted,
masking the docens / utens distinction on the pure / applied distinction
may no longer be particularly desirable, because what is being applied
in ‘applied logic’ is frequently based on theories or systems originating
from and developed within the purview of logica docens.
Nevertheless, Peirce maintained that a proper theory of logic cannot
exist without a reasoner having some general idea of what the preferred
 CULTIVATING HABITS OF REASON 359

logical reasoning is.7 He explained the logica utens as that which is

found in the reasoner’s instinctive and ingrained, inner life. By draw-
ing attention to it, they become aware of one of their most fundamental
native capacities, which thereby constitute the basis of well-mannered
theories of logical reasoning, argumentation, and the representation
of concepts. In this sense, the logica utens is, as surprising as it may
seem, at the same time both a reasoning instinct and some elementary
acquaintance or awareness of a theory of what the ingrained reasoning
of a human species is.8

II
The generally held view is that the logical faculty of utens has little or no
bearing in the formal activities of the agent, such as in reasoning, since
these activities are based on some normative theory of how one should
reason. Even if the logica utens would, by virtue of not being as much
under self-control as the docens, be beyond much of our regular norma-
tive concerns, and even though Peirce himself regarded unconscious
reasoning hardly reasoning at all,9 it nevertheless forms the bedrock
of fundamental mathematical statements and the rules on which the
truths of mathematical propositions hang. The validities of statements
and assertions that this facility produces, however mathematical, formal
or informal, appear to be beyond any doubt.
This would not be the end of the story. Despite providing such robust,
rigorous, and logically incontestable foundations, the utens is not deduc-
tive activity, even though it may well be related to logical processes that
are applied to tasks involving deductive reasoning, such as theorematic
reasoning.10
First and foremost, it is worth noting that, in his attempt to explain
what a logical doctrine based on the utens could be, Peirce arrived at his
well-known and vigorous criticism of the Cartesian view of philosophy
and its prominence in the history of Western thought.
Nothing is more irrational than false pretence. Yet the Cartesian
philosophy, which ruled Europe for so long, is founded upon it. It
pretended to doubt what it did not doubt. Let us not fall into that vice.
You think that your logica utens is more or less unsatisfactory. But
you do not doubt that there is some truth in it. Nor do I; nor does any
man. Why cannot men see that what we do not doubt, we do not doubt;
so that it is false pretence to pretend to call it in question? There are
certain parts of your logica utens which nobody really doubts. Hegel
and his [sic] have loyally endeavored to cast a doubt upon it. The
effort has been praiseworthy; but it has not succeeded. The truth of
it is too evident. Mathematical reasoning holds. Why should it not?
360 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

It relates only to the creations of the mind, concerning which there

is no obstacle to our learning whatever is true of them. . . . It is fal-
lible, as everything human is fallible. Twice two may perhaps not be
four. But there is no more satisfactory way of assuring ourselves of
anything than the mathematical way of assuring ourselves of math-
ematical theorems. No aid from the science of logic is called for in
that field. As a fact, I have not the slightest doubt that twice two is
four; nor have you. Then let us not pretend to doubt mathematical
demonstrations of mathematical propositions so long as they are not
open to mathematical criticism and have been submitted to sufficient
examination and revision. The only concern that logic has with this
sort of reasoning is to describe it.11
The notion of mathematics that Peirce outlines in this passage refers
to the creations of the mind. This reminds us of his phenomenology
(
(phaneroscopy ). More to the point here is that this passage is crucial in
another, hitherto not very well acknowledged sense, namely that Peirce
is seen to take a step, though a gentle one, towards constructivist ten-
dencies in the foundations of mathematics. These tendencies surface,
among others, in his logic of vagueness for general statements rejecting
the law of excluded middle, as well as in his definition of existence as a
dynamic process of dialogic reaction with the rest of the universe and
of what can be found in it. They were also central in his capacity as an
actual mathematician indisposed in finitistic doctrines.12
Because the logica utens is, according to Peirce, uncontrollable, it
is not “subject to any normative laws.” It is “neither good nor bad; it
neither subserves an end nor fails to do so.”13 This view implies that all
reasoning refers to its general means of classifying arguments, shaping
the foundations for any systematic study of the subject. Its contrasting
part is the way in which educated logical reasoning is performed in
scientific reasoning, the logica docens, the system in which reasoning
is subservient to the ongoing process of theory development. It is the
propensity for anyone who practices reasoning. Logical laws such as the
law of excluded middle, the law of non-contradiction, and the fact that
at least some indubitable, sure-fire propositions are true, belong here
and not to the realm of logica utens.
Peirce’s views on the philosophy of mathematics have not been
studied as much as his logic and semiotics.14 This has deteriorated the
effectiveness of the distinction and its relevance to contemporary discus-
sion, and brought it on the verge of extinction in current-day opinions
shared by philosophers of logic. The division between these two faculties
may be interpreted so that constructivist tendencies we might entertain
concerning the origins and status of mathematical reasoning represent
properties that are not based on the validity of strictly logical laws such
 CULTIVATING HABITS OF REASON 361

as the law of excluded middle, but would derive, at least partly, from
the specifics of our logica utens. This interpretation would be in accor-
dance with Peirce’s stout belief that mathematics has an autonomous
status in the classificatory hierarchy of the sciences, and is primary to
logic.15 It is also in agreement with the view expressed by the Dutch
mathematician and philosopher L. E. J. Brouwer (1881–1966) a couple
of decades later, namely that mathematics is a non-linguistic activ-
ity, drawing its insights from extra-linguistic ‘primordial ur-intuition’
concerning the content of the mind.16 It follows from both Peirce’s and
Brouwer’s views that foundations of mathematical systems change not
because of changes in logic, but because of changes in what we take
there to be in the general and common properties of the human mind
that practices mathematics.
This is not to say that the logica utens is in some sense utterly pre-
theoretical, or not subject to its own laws and intrinsic structure of how it
comes to be constituted. Neither is utens based on any institutionalized,
conventional or impersonal theory concerning the admissible rules of
some logical system. Peirce’s own turn of the phrase is “instinctive logic.”17
Remarkably, the camouflage of utens as a form of instinct is not only con-
sistent with, but also paramount to, Peirce’s desire to implant instinctive
aspects of reasoning in the conception of reasoning guided by habits.
Peirce tells us that reasoning does not have its beginning in that fo-
cal point at which judgements are to be found, but precedes them in its
determination of judgement according to the general habits of thought.
It is that “which a reasoner may not be able precisely to formulate, but
which he approves as conducive to true knowledge.”18 This is a vitally
important remark. We may interpret this by noting that true knowledge,
stemming from reliable sources of information, is the locus in which
belief that is beyond any doubt ultimately rests. To have a belief that
cannot be doubted is constituted by a process of logical approval, but
such a process lacks the essence of reasoning.
Accordingly, logica utens refers to a principle that everyone has
to accept. Unconscious in essence, it is not controllable by the active,
reflective and self-aware mind. It is therefore not subject to criticism
and does not form the subject matter of the second class of his triadic
concept of semiotics, logic proper or critic, which accomplishes quite
the opposite in classifying arguments according to their value.19 For
that which precedes the control of conscious processes is not subject to
considerations of logical goodness or badness and hence the truth, but
is by its very nature logical reasoning that can be nothing other than
good. Peirce’s note was that, if no fault is found in such an antedating
object of cognition, “it must be taken at its own valuation.”20
362 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

Pre-theoretical or unexcogitated notions of reasoning also constitute

the subject of Peirce’s fascinating unpublished manuscript 596, Reason’s
Rules [c.1902–03].21 It is here that the power of the logica utens finds
its home among nine other beliefs that Peirce takes to be the presumed
initial beliefs of reasoners concerning innermost reckoning and thought.
The utens is described as a principle that enables reasoners, no matter
how thoroughly they have been brainwashed by systems and studies
of logic, to distinguish between such forms of reasoning that will be
approved as ones leading to the truth and ones that will be considered
dangerous. The nine other beliefs concerning the presumed initial be-
liefs of the reasoning are mutually understood to hold between active,
deliberating agents, and thus forming a part of the common ground of
the interlocutors.22
To wit, these commonly and reciprocally recognized principles are
the following. (i) The reasoner is in the state of doubt concerning some
question and in the state of belief concerning others. (ii) The aim of in-
quiry is to produce a mental representation which shall be true, in other
words accord with the real state of things. (iii) One considers some of
his beliefs to be false. (iv) Certain “firm” beliefs beyond reasoner’s doubt
exist that are unanswerable if questioned by merely “yes” or “no.” (v)
There are also such firm beliefs that arise directly upon perception. (vi)
On reflecting perceptual beliefs they appear infallible, in other words the
seeming and the belief that something seems are in reasoner’s opinion
one and the same. (vii) To certain firm beliefs, both “yes” and “no” may
be justifiable answers, provided that the question asked is not definite.
(viii) If all acquired notions of logic could be cast aside, each reason would
be judged by the agent’s own sense of reasonableness. (ix) The agent’s
own logical judgements are in some degree erroneous and imperfect.23
If the faculty that gets us to perform reliable reasoning is so central
and so agglutinated unto our everyday life, what is it, then, that imple-
ments and triggers that faculty?

III
Peirce’s notion of a habit is mentioned at a number of key junctures
of his philosophical architectonics related to, among others, thought,
cognition, interpretation, and belief. It is one of the most vital cross-cat-
egorial concepts in his system. While its status has been acknowledged
in phenomenological and metaphysical segments of Peirce’s writings, its
bearings on logical tasks have not been brought to the limelight before.
Even so, it is the last resort in his notion of the logica utens, as well as
the key notion in the formation of the interpretants that are final and
stable in the sense detailed in his sign theory. Such final interpretants
 CULTIVATING HABITS OF REASON 363

may be thought as equilibrium or saddle points in the general sense of

equilibrium systems in systems theory, or as local optima in optimization
tasks, stable sets in game theory, and so on. The return of the habit to
our intellectual scenery that is underway after its long overdue siesta
will not only revive the utens / docens distinction but also contribute
to the post-symbolic era of logical studies that is imminent given the
emerging variety of heterogeneous and iconic systems of reasoning and
representation.24
Despite the existence of a whole range of dimensions that habits may
take, the relevant ones that Peirce thought individual agents to pos-
sess pertain to reasoning. Habits do not so much concern the deductive
tasks than the inductive testing of hypotheses generated by abductive
inferences. In contrast to induction, the deductive and abductive tasks
are related to sensory presentations and volitional reasoning, not to
the learned, grown, and cultivated processes that individuals have
acquired during their existence and interaction with the environment.
In this sense, habits are more intimately linked with evolutionary
aspects of Peirce’s metaphysics and cosmology such as continuity and
law-formation than with the process of producing hypotheses or deriving
conclusions in argumentative structures.25
Induction and the very substance of the logica utens are intimately
entangled. Their cultivation happens not only through presentation and
perceptual input, but also through intensive cycles of communication. As
Peirce’s sign theory teaches us, to understand communication is to not
confine it to the intersubjective notion that for instance Jürgen Haber-
mas has advocated. Habermas attempted to make assertions public and
linguistic, cognitively testable activities devoid of strategic concerns.26 In
contrast, Peirce refers to processes that the utterer and the interpreter,
conceived through aspects or phases of the mind, or encounters between
the Ego and the Non-Ego, are constantly undertaking; those theoretical
entities that possess “definite general tendencies of a tolerably stable
nature.”27 The tendencies leading to stable outcomes remind us of the
ways in which final interpretants of agents are achieved in sign theory,
how various notions of equilibrium points arise in current theories of
actions, decisions or general systems, or what the propensities are that
pilot consistent inquirers to new scientific truths.28
What Peirce is on the whole implying is that a sufficiently wide no-
tion of strategic communication and action is what is needed to expose
common aspects of reality, in other words to generalize, invent, and
improve on the basis of information and reasoning, through habituated
and pre-programmed responses to what is presented to the mind, its
‘run-off.’29
364 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

Recall that the concept of a habit was by no means Peirce’s own in-
vention (though he tended to use the indefinite article). The term was
frequently used for explanatory purposes in many branches of science
in the nineteenth century and earlier. It was thought to be the key to
many doors of philosophy, not only in relation to philosophers from
David Hume and Immanuel Kant to nineteenth-century pragmatists
including John Dewey, Peirce, and William James, but also, and more
commonly, for a number of political and social scientists, psychologists,
institutional economists, and biologists throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury and the early twentieth century.30 It should not be surprising that
most of these thinkers were generalists striving to distance themselves
from all shreds of nominalism.
Charles Camic has traced some of the sociological history of this
fascinating concept from the past, with a fleeting look back at its philo-
sophical significance.31 He makes no mention of Peirce, but notes that
John Dewey had considered habits to play a considerable role in the
dynamic and projective systematization of human action.32 We know
that William James gave it a psychological twist, which perhaps comes
closest to what we nowadays understand by it.33 It is remarkable that
the notion infiltrated even the then-quite-antipragmatic atmosphere
of logical empiricists, especially through the philosopher Otto Neurath
and his intrepid rendering of habit as custom. At that time, regrettably,
the notion was already in the process of acquiring some unfortunate
behavioristic overtones.
Nevertheless, the notion of habit played one of the most far-reaching
roles in Peirce’s systematization of his pragmatism, and had significant
repercussions on the improvements upon logic and reasoning. As it hap-
pened, Peirce’s pragmatic philosophy embarked to focus on the side of
the docens of logical theories, notably on his diagrammatic methods of
representation and reasoning, and so the vast methodological and logical
artillery that he introduced was not used to tackle the utens.
On the more general level of the history of ideas, it remains to be seen
precisely how the concept of habit that was widely used in the nineteenth
century came to be replaced by the institutionalized concept of a strategy
during the early decades of the twentieth century, and precisely why it
disappeared from mainstream philosophy.34

IV
What is the status of the logica utens vs. docens distinction in the light
of twenty-first-century logic, now that a profusion of systems designed
for issues of reasoning, representation, information, and communication
of thought is taking place?
 CULTIVATING HABITS OF REASON 365

(i) Logics that address practical aspects of these issues have abounded
of late.35 While there is little agreement on the perennial nature of
practicality, many reasoning methods implemented by computers and
programming languages no longer exhibit strictly necessary, humanly
inaccessible reasoning. On the contrary, many of them are enthyme-
mic, in the sense of containing incomplete sets of premises. They are
non-monotonic and fallible.36 And so the tide is turning. The recent
advancements attempt to tease out the utens of logic increasingly more,
while not sacrificing its docens, the institutionalized protectorate of the
communities of scholars and their ever-expansive specter of academic
forums.
(ii) Another reflection of the distinction is found in the discussion
revolving around rational decisions. Ideal rationality has been replaced
by non-ideal varieties, especially in decision- and game-theoretic argu-
ments. Explicit rules, protocols, and entire strategy profiles have been
substituted by rules of thumb, imperfect knowledge, information, and
recall, with many other alleviations of hyper-rational agenthood.37 There
is a tangible overlap between this turn and the tendency to revitalize
and revisit the notion of a habit that is ever more felt in related corners
of inquiry, including institutionalized and evolutionary economics,
evolutionary game theory, and in the arguments for the evolutionary
emergence of language, let alone the many attempts to cross over the
aperture between science and humanities.38
Much more could be said of the affinity between bounded rationality
and the logica utens. To appeal to a habit that is learned by experimen-
tation and experience that utens alludes to is, according to Peirce, “very
different from appealing to any immediate instinct of rationality.”39
Optimal decisions break down given limited time, information, and cog-
nitive powers, and only probable courses of events may be anticipated,
predicted, and intellectually guessed. Likewise in novel situations in
which only a little experience is at hand for habits to appeal to, or in
abductive reasoning that conceives invention; yet surprising similarities,
or focal points, come to pass and become shared between coordinating
agents that have mutual goals, or between cohesive groups of scientists
formulating challenging hypotheses.
(iii) The third relation is found in the strategies of reasoning already
scrutinized: for instance, the tradition of informal logic may be seen to
endorse the utens.40 What it brings out is congenial also to what the
schools of critical thinking have been after. It represents a faculty not
bound to any particular theory or specialty of reasoning and argumen-
tation other than what is provided by some native, organically grown
forms in the reasoner’s inner life. This is not unlike mathematics,
366 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

which, according to Peirce, performs its reasonings by such utens, hav-

ing no need of appeal to its educable counter-faculty associated with
all-evolving theories of logic. It is the docens that has burgeoned until
today, while the utens has been lolling somewhat in the background.
The various moves towards practical logics of cognitive agenthood thus
mark a significant step in an encouraging direction.
Unlike theories of logic and argumentation, an innate logic, or criti-
cal attitude of utens to human thought, is not itself to be evaluated as
good or bad, but is altogether beyond such normative concerns. It is not
to be subsumed under reflected criticism. Hence it is an appealing and
historically venerable candidate for the locus in which the verification
of elementary sentences and the formation of the principles of so-called
ortho-language may take place. To bring out one historical tradition,
questions concerning the emergence of ortho-language is what the
Erlanger Schule, most notably in terms of the constructivism of Paul
Lorenzen (1915–1994) and the development of dialogue games, were
after—a kind of interpersonal redepraxis or ‘proto-logic’ to work for other
logical theories, and so an heir to medieval obligationes of performing
well in argumentations.41 Such a program thus constitutes a unifying
reference point for approaches to the informal component of logic.42
Therefore, as regards to this third encounter, substituting strategic
rules of such games for habits, we are able to throw light on Peirce’s
riveting rhetoric: “Why may not all our natural judgments as to what
is good reasoning be founded on habits formed in some [experimental,
learned] ways?”43
(iv) The last connection to be mentioned here relates to recent find-
ings in cognitive neuroscience. Some philosophers hold that logica utens
is unconscious reasoning. Such processing may take many forms, and
good deal of light has recently been thrown on them by neuroscientific
experiments.44 The central distinction is that of implicit vs. explicit in-
formation processing or implicit vs. explicit cognition. Implicit processes
do not reach conscious interpretation. In Peirce’s terms, they would be
presentations rather than representations, inarticulable mental irrita-
tion, or “a sort of picture or something less distinct than a picture.”45
Most of out innate threads of reason appear to be of that kind, and so
pertain to the faculty of utens. It is, therefore, significant to study what
neuropsychological experiments reveal about implicit aspects of reason-
ing, logic, and action, in addition to what they have revealed in relation
to other cognitive tasks, such as perception, knowledge, memory, and
learning. Eventually, these aspects of reasoning need to be extended
to also accommodate bodily reasoning, a logic of our proprioceptive
modalities.
 CULTIVATING HABITS OF REASON 367

The pragmatic derivation of the distinction is needed in the light of

recent logical studies. The urgency of revoking the distinction and plac-
ing it under the right light of pragmatist logic goes hand-in-hand with
the re-emergence of the notion of the habit on the cross-disciplinary
levels of organizational, communal, and individual reasoning. To call
the utens something like a ‘deductive organ’ of humans contains a grave
mistake. Like habits, it codifies the largely non-normative practices
of what humans do, what they have always done, and what they will
continue doing.46 To anachronistically apply the later Wittgensteinian
allegory, that faculty refers to the kinds of language games characteristic
of the human species as a whole.47

University of Helsinki

NOTES

1. Among the previous literature on this distinction and its implications,

one should mention Douglas R. Anderson, Strands of System: The Philosophy of
Charles Peirce (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1995); Vincent
Colapietro, “Peirce’s Guess at the Riddle of Rationality,” in Classical American
Philosophy, ed. Rosenthal, Hausman, and Anderson (Illinois, 1999); Kathleen
Hull, “Why Hanker After Logic? Mathematical Imagination, Creativity, and
Perception in Peirce’s Systematic Philosophy,” Transactions of the Charles S.
Peirce Society, vol. 30 (1994), pp. 271–295; and Catherine Legg, “This is Simply
What I Do,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 66 (2003), pp.
58–80.
2. Contemporary research in the psychology of reasoning appears to invali-
date the claim that logica utens or instinctive reasoning is not educable. For
example, it has been asserted that consideration of our learning to avoid basic
mistakes in logical reasoning, such as avoiding various fallacies, suggests that
such basic reasoning is indeed educable. However, to become a better reasoner
does not imply that more fallacies could be avoided, because what is counted as
a fallacy depends on the theory of reasoning in question. Therefore, the logica
utens, in the strict sense of instinctivity, is not educable in the same sense and
degree in which the docens is. Notable here is Peirce’s statement that certain
fallacies may have “their origin in loose logica utens or faulty logica docens” (MS
L 75: 178–179, 1902, “Carnegie Institution Correspondence”). The reference is by
manuscript and letter number, followed by page numbers or alternative identi-
fier, year, and title, to Charles S. Peirce, “Manuscripts in the Houghton Library
of Harvard University,” identified by Richard Robin, Annotated Catalogue of
the Papers of Charles S. Peirce (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1967), and “The Peirce Papers: A Supplementary Catalogue,” Transactions of
the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. 7 (1971), pp. 37–57.
368 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

3. CP 1.417, c.1896, “The Logic of Mathematics; An Attempt to Develop My

Categories from Within. The Three Categories.” The reference is by volume and
paragraph number, followed by year and title, to Charles S. Peirce, Collected
Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, eight volumes., ed. Charles Hartshorne and
Paul Weiss, vols. 1–6, 1931–1935, and Arthur W. Burks, vols. 7–8 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958).
4. Sten Ebbesen, “Is Logic Theoretical or Practical Knowledge?” Itinéraires
d’Albert de Saxe Paris–Vienne au XIVe Siècle, ed. Joël Biard (Paris: Librairie
Philosophique J. Vrin, 1991), pp. 267–276.
5. Peirce characterized parva logicalia as “a series of medieval treatises
explaining how the forms of everyday thought are to be made amenable to
strict logical rules” (CN 2.74, 1894, “Four Histories of Philosophy”). The refer-
ence is, by volume and paragraph number followed by year and title, to Peirce,
Contributions to The Nation, four volumes, ed. Kenneth Ketner and James Cook
(Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1975–87). According to Peirce, “Duns
Scotus and William Ockham are decidedly the greatest speculative minds of
the middle ages, as well as two of the profoundest metaphysicians that ever
lived” (CP 1.29, 1869). See also John Boler: Charles Peirce and Scholastic Real-
ism: A Study of Peirce’s Relation to John Duns Scotus” (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1963). It is to be recalled that Peirce owned a collection of
medieval philosophers’ works that was at the time considered one of the greatest
in the US, and was “particularly rich in specimens of the leading metaphysical,
logical, and theological works of the great Scholastic Doctors” (Librarian Dr.
William Hand Browne’s report, June 1881, quoted in Max Fisch, “Peirce at the
Johns Hopkins University,” in Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 52.
6. “The rational faculty . . . is partly practical and partly theoretical. The
practical is partly a matter of skill and partly reflective. The theoretical is that
by which man knows the existents which are not such that we can make them
and alter them from one condition to another, e.g., three is an odd and four an
even number. . . . The practical is that by which are distinguished the things
which are such that we can make them and alter them from one condition to
another,” in āl-Fārābī, The Fusūl al-Madanī of āl-Fārābī ((Aphorisms
Aphorisms of the
Statesman), ed. with an English translation, introduction, and notes by D. M.
Dunlop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 30–31.
“Practical” may be interpreted also as pertaining to “calculative,” “specula-
tive,” or, as suggested in the present essay, “strategic” rules of reasoning.
7. CP 2.186, c.1902, “General and Historical Survey of Logic. Why Study
Logic? Logica Utens.”
8. And so the view held by K. T. Fann, namely that Peirce held only the
logica utens to be about a theory of what constitutes a good reasoning, is not
correct. See K. T. Fann, Peirce’s Theory of Abduction (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1970). Phyllis Chiasson seems to hold—admittedly in a nebulous dia-
logical prose that is hard to pin down—the narrow view that attempts to equate
docens with formal logic, which according to Peirce’s classification of sciences
would pertain to mathematics. See Phyllis Chiasson, Peirce’s Pragmatism: The
 CULTIVATING HABITS OF REASON 369

Design for Thinking (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001). But not all theories of logic
need to be formal in the least.
9. CP 2.182, c.1902, “General and Historical Survey of Logic. Why Study
Logic? Reasoning and Consciousness.”
10. On Peirce’s account of theorematic as opposed to corollarial reasoning,
See, e.g., Risto Hilpinen, “Peirce on Language and Reference,” Peirce and Con-
temporary Thought, ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner (New York: Fordham University
Press, 1995), pp. 272–303. To quote Peirce: “There are two kinds of Deduction;
and it is truly significant that it should have been left for me to discover this.
I first found, and subsequently proved, that every Deduction involves the
observation of a Diagram (whether Optical, Tactical, or Acoustic) and having
drawn the diagram (for I myself always work with Optical Diagrams) one finds
the conclusion to be represented by it. Of course, a diagram is required to com-
prehend any assertion. My two genera of Deductions are first those in which
any Diagram of a state of things in which the premises are true represents the
conclusion to be true and such reasoning I call Corollarial because all the corol-
laries that different editors have added to Euclid’s Elements are of this nature.
Second kind. To the Diagram of the truth of the Premises something else has
to be added, which is usually a mere May-be, and then the conclusion appears.
I call this Theorematic reasoning because all the most important theorems are
of this nature” (EP 502, 1909, “Letter to William James”). The reference is to
Charles S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2
(1893–1913), ed. by the Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1998), followed by page number, year, and title.
11. CP 2.192, c.1902, “General and Historical Survey of Logic. Why Study
Logic? The Improvement of Reasoning.”
12. In other words, he did not think that the mind was not powerful enough
to capture and characterize infinite constructions. For example, his writings
on mathematical theories of collections abound with infinitary concepts.
13. CP 2.204, c.1901–02, “General and Historical Survey of Logic. Why
Study Logic? Logic.” One should not think of the arguments regarding the
controllability vs. act or omission of an agent to apply to the same instances in
the normative realm of logical reasoning as they do in the normative realm of
ethical theories.
14. With a few exceptions, including Nathan Houser et al., eds. Studies in
the Logic of Charles Sanders Peirce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997). Among the subjects addressed in that book are Peirce’s writings on col-
lections, the relation between logic and mathematics, and the influence of his
algebraist predecessors. The relationship between mathematics and logic was
for Peirce a matter of fallibilism and anti-foundationalism, not far removed
from phenomenological quasi-empiricism, steering a middle course between
Hilbert’s project and moderate intuitionism.
15. On Peirce’s classification of the sciences, see, e.g., Beverley Kent, Charles
S. Peirce: Logic and the Classification of the Sciences (Kingston: McGill-Queen,
1987); Anderson, Strands of System.
370 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

16. See Luizen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, “Mathematik, Wissenschaft und

Sprache,” Monatshefte Der Mathematik und Physik, vol. 36 (1929), pp. 153–164.
(Reprinted in L. E. J. Brouwer, L. E. J. Brouwer, Collected Works 1: Philoso-
phy and Foundations of Mathematics (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1975), pp.
417–428. English translation, “Mathematics, Science, and Language,” in From
Brouwer to Hilbert. The Debate on the Foundations of Mathematics in the 1920s,
ed. Paolo Mancosu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.) Brouwer was a
student of the Dutch mathematician Gerrit Mannoury (1867–1956), who, with
Peirce, was among the first to express reservations concerning the unrestricted
applications of the law of the excluded middle in logic. Mannoury was the driving
force behind the ‘Significs Movement’ in the Netherlands that was inspired by
the writings of Victoria Lady Welby (1837–1912), Peirce’s active correspondent
in England.
17. MS L 75, 1902, “Carnegie Institute Correspondence.”
18. CP 2.773, c.1901–02, “Critical Logic. Notes on Ampliative Reasoning.
Reasoning.”
19. According to Peirce, the third part of logic is methodeutic (speculative
rhetoric), the study of how to conduct an inquiry. The scholastic predecessors
are salient here, too.
20. CP 5.114, 1903, “Lectures on Pragmatism. The Reality of Thirdness.
Normative Judgments.” Taking something “at its own valuation” does not
make utens normative, since there is no decision that is made between good
and bad.
21. See www.helsinki.fi/~pietarin// for educational material on Peirce’s logic
and philosophy, including a transcription of MS 596.
22. The common ground and the factual and conceptual collaterality were
central for Peirce, and they recur in numerous contexts from the pragmatics of
communication to the evolutionary emergence of symbolic systems. See Ahti-
Veikko Pietarinen, “Grice in the Wake of Peirce,” Pragmatics & Cognition, vol.
12 (2004), pp. 395–415.
23. A little later on, Peirce continues by commenting on these nine opinions.
Only this commentary part of the manuscript was published in CP 5.538, c.1902,
“Belief and Judgment. Practical and Theoretical Beliefs.”
24. Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Evolution and Institutions: On Evolutionary
Economics and the Evolution of Economics (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1999);
Erkki Kilpinen, The Enormous Fly-Wheel of Society: Pragmatism’s Habitual
Conception of Action and Social Theory (dissertation, University of Helsinki,
2000); Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, Signs of Logic: Peircean Themes in the Philosophy
of Language, Games and Communication (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005).
25. Carl R. Hausman, Charles S. Peirce’s Evolutionary Philosophy (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
26. Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary
Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action, translated by Barbara Fultner
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).
 CULTIVATING HABITS OF REASON 371

27. MS 280: 30, c.1905, “The Basis of Pragmaticism.”

28. Some of the congenialities between Peirce’s views and the current-day
systems on multi-agent communication and reasoning have been elaborated in
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, “Multi-Agent Systems and Game Theory: A Peircean
Manifesto,” International Journal of General Systems, vol. 33 (2004), pp.
294–314.
29. See Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, “Peirce, Habermas, and Strategic Dialogues:
Form Pragmatism to the Pragmatics of Communication,” LODZ Papers in
Pragmatics, vol. 1, in press.
30. On a much earlier note, let us quote Buridan: “The category of habit
. . . contains properly the terms by which a body is said to wear some habit on
account of the adjacency of some extrinsic body” (p. 204), and that “habit is
generated out of act” (p. 720), John Buridan, Summulae de Dialectica, an an-
notated translation, with a philosophical introduction by Gyula Klima (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
31. Charles Camic, “The Matter of Habit,” American Journal of Sociology,
vol. 91 (1986), pp. 1039–1087.
32. Camic, “The Matter of Habit,” p. 1046. Let us quote the actual context
from Dewey: “The function of knowledge is to make one experience freely
available in other experiences. The word ‘freely’ marks the difference between
the principle of knowledge and that of habit. Habit means that an individual
undergoes a modification through an experience, which modification forms
a predisposition to easier and more effective action in a like direction in the
future. Thus it also has the function of making one experience available in
subsequent experiences.” John Dewey, “Theories of Knowledge,” Pragmatism:
A Reader, ed. Louis Menand (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), pp. 205–218, p.
212. Originally appeared in Democracy and Education, 1916.
33. “When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one
of the things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits. In wild animals,
the usual round of daily behavior seems a necessity implanted at birth; in ani-
mals domesticated, and especially in man, it seems, to a great extent, to be the
result of education. The habits to which there is an innate tendency are called
instincts; some of those due to education would by most persons be called acts
of reason. It thus appears that habit covers a very large part of life, and that
one engaged in studying the objective manifestations of mind is bound at the
very outset to define clearly what its limits are.” William James, “Habit,” ibid.,
pp. 60–68, p. 60. Originally appeared in The Principles of Psychology, 1890.
34. Concerning the strategic nature of Peirce’s logic, see Hilpinen, “Peirce
on Language and Reference”; Jaakko Hintikka, “What is Abduction? The
Fundamental Problem of Contemporary Epistemology,” Transactions of the
Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. 34 (1998), pp. 503–533; Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen,
“Peirce’s Game-Theoretic Ideas in Logic,” Semiotica, vol. 144 (2003), pp. 33–47;
Pietarinen, “Peirce’s Magic Lantern: Moving Pictures of Thought,” Transactions
of the Charles S. Peirce Society, forthcoming.
372 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

35. See, e.g., Dov Gabbay and John Woods, “The New Logic,” Logic Journal of the
IGPL, vol. 9 (2001), pp. 141–174; Dov Gabbay et al., eds., Handbook of the Logic of Ar-
gument and Inference: The Turn Towards the Practical (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003).
36. Typical epithets to such systems of logic are ‘defeasible,’ ‘default,’
‘autoepistemic,’ and ‘circumscription.’
37. See Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten, Bounded Rationality: The
Adaptive Toolbox (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
38. Connections between evolutionary game theory and habits is explicated
in Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, “Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Semantics and Its
Foundational Status,” in Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture:
A Nonadaptationist Systems-Theoretical Approach, ed. Nathalie Gontier et al.
(Dordrecht: Springer), pp. 429–452.
39. CP 2.170, c.1902, “Elements of Logic. General and Historical Survey
of Logic. Why Study Logic? The Fallibility of Reasoning and the Feeling of
Rationality.”
40. See “Dialogue Foundations and Informal Logic,” in Pietarinen, Signs of
Logic.
41. Kuno Lorenz, “Basic Objectives of Dialogue Logic in Historical Perspec-
tive,” Synthese, vol. 127 (2001), pp. 255–263.
42. See Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, “Towards the Intellectual History of Logic
and Games,” in Logic and Games: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Ahti-Veikko
Pietarinen et al., forthcoming.
43. CP 2.170, c.1902.
44. See Geoffrey Underwood, Implicit Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996). See also Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, “Towards Cognitive Informat-
ics: Awareness in the Brain, Logic, and Cognitive Neuroscience,” in Cognitive
Informatics: Exploring the Natural Intelligence, ed. Y. Wang (Singapore: World
Scientific, in press).
45. MS 829, late, [Absolute Certainty].
46. The list of notions relevant to the logica utens would furthermore in-
clude Michael Polanyi’s tacit knowledge in shaping human experience, Stephen
Toulmin’s reasonableness, personal experience, and practice as prerequisites for
the creation and emergence of minds that reason rationally, Nelson Goodman’s
entrenchment, or the diachronicity of predicates, and Wittgenstein’s primary,
non-epistemic language games as the vehicles for constituting the meaning of
our everyday concepts. Peirce’s own elaborations draw in issues such as Galileo
Galileo’s Il lume naturale and Friedrich C. S. Schiller’s World-Spirit’s Spiel-
trieb, alongside Peirce’s rendering of these as the ‘Play of Musement,’ in which
“logical analysis can be put to its full efficiency” (CP 6.461, 1908, “A Neglected
Argument for the Reality of God”). See Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
47. Supported by the Academy of Finland (Grant No. 1103130). My thanks
go to the anonymous referee for valuable comments.