Peirce’s Cosmology Made Clear, then Extended
(Deriving Something from Nothing)
By
Philip Rose
Abstract: Much of the confusion regarding Peirce’s cosmology relates to the question of how
something could be said to have come from an original, chaotic state of nothing. Such confusion
can be allayed by contextualizing Peirce’s “Guess” in the broader light of his other cosmological
works, including his work on the Categories. When so framed, Peirce’s cosmological attempt to
derive something from nothing turns out to be reasonable enough to be further extended to the
question of how the Categories themselves may have come about.
Keywords: Categories, chance, cosmology, habit-taking, law, nothing, Peirce, reasonable.
Word Count: 2,892 (excluding Abstract, Keywords, Word Count, Citations, and References)
1. Introduction
The main focus of this paper will be to provide a clear outline of Peirce’s cosmogonic hypothesis
as outlined within “A Guess at the Riddle.” By interpreting the “Guess” within the context of
Peirce’s other cosmological works, I will show that Peirce’s attempt to explain the origins of the
laws of nature from an original chaotic state is quite reasonable.1 I will end by extending Peirce’s
cosmogonic hypothesis to the question of how the Categories themselves could have come about.
If I am right, then this will address many if not all of the objections raised in T.L. Short’s paper, “Did Peirce Have
a Cosmology?” I hope to provide a more detailed outline of this in a future work.
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2. Peirce’s Guess at the Riddle Contextualized
The principal aim of “A Guess at the Riddle” is to illustrate the applicability and “continual
exemplification” of Peirce’s Categories across a wide range of subject matters from psychology
and biology, to physics, metaphysics, and theology. (EP 1, pp. 245-246; pp. 252-253)
Cosmologically, the principal test of the Categories is their ability to explain how the levels of
regularity, uniformity, and conformity with law associated with “the laws of nature came about.”
(EP 1, pp. 276-277) To pass this test, Peirce must show that the laws of nature can be accounted
for solely by appeal to his Categories, as sufficient conditions for the emergence of such laws.
Peirce claims that “every fact of a general or orderly nature calls for an explanation.”
Since the “conformity with law” expressed by the laws of nature are facts of a general or orderly
nature, then we should try to explain how such laws could have come about. (EP 1, pp. 276-277)
But what exactly is it about facts “of a general or orderly nature” that calls for an explanation?
For Peirce, the call to explain arises from experiences that are unanticipated, unexpected,
or improbable (given some set of background conditions) (EP 2, pp. 89-95). Such experiences
arouse our attention, prompting reflection and thought. (EP 1, 46-47) Since facts of a general or
orderly nature call for explanation, there must be something about such phenomena that are
improbable or unexpected in some sense. Peirce says as much, noting that the kind of uniformity
of conformity with law associated with the laws of nature “is seen to be really a highly
exceptional phenomenon” that marks it as “more important” than other, more expected
phenomena. (EP 1, p. 276) So what are these other, more expected phenomena? They are
phenomena devoid of any intrinsic generality or regularity, that is, events or relations that happen
by chance, for according to Peirce a world of purely chance relations or events would have “no
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interest for us.” (EP 1, p. 276) The general conformity with law associated with the laws of
nature call for an explanation because they appear as a new, separate order of being that departs
from the originary state of chance events. Put simply, a world of chance events is one where all
events would have an equal chance of occurring. On Peirce’s account this should be taken as the
originary or first state of nature, its default condition, if you will. It follows that any events that
display a uniform conformity with law merit attention and call for an explanation precisely
because they involve a regularity of occurrence that departs from this first, chance state. (EP 1,
pp. 172-176) Given the chance character of the original, default state we are then called to
explain how such general, law-like conditions could have come about.
It is to address this very issue that Peirce invokes his Categories, positing three
physicalist (i.e. scientific) expressions or modes of the Categories, “first, chance; second, law;
and third, habit taking,” as starting points for his cosmological “Guess” as to how the laws of
nature could have come about. (EP 1, p. 277) Two important points follow: 1) Peirce’s “Guess”
is not an account of the origins of being as such, but a hypothesis regarding the origins of facts
“of a general or orderly nature,” and 2) Peirce’s “Guess” is not an explanation of the origins or
grounds of 3rdness per se (as a fundamental Category or element of being), but is instead the
hypothetical positing of a special, physicalist sense of 3rdness, i.e. habit-taking, as a ground for
explaining how the laws of nature could have come about. Regarding the first point, Peirce
himself explicitly notes that his “Guess” is not aimed at explaining all aspects of phenomena, for
it accepts as givens both the indeterminacy of “pure firstness” (i.e. chance) and the haecceity of
“pure secondness” as “facts not calling for and not capable of explanation.” (EP 1, pp. 275-276)
Regarding the second point, “habit-taking” is not 3rdness per se, but a third, that is, one of
a number of possible thirds operant within any number of possible “systems” or ‘worlds.’ We
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see this in “Design and Chance” where Peirce asks his reader to envisage “a large number of
systems in some of which there is a decided tendency toward doing again what has once been
done, in others a tendency against doing what has once been done, in others elements having one
tendency and elements having the other.” Peirce notes how each of these possible tendencies
would play out in a world of chance events or relations.
To fix our ideas suppose players playing with dice, some of their dice are worn down in
such a way that the act of losing tends to make them lose again, others in such a way that
the act of losing tends to make them win. The latter will win or lose much more slowly,
yet after sufficient length of time they will eventually be ruined or destroyed. Those
whose dice are so worn as to reproduce the same effects will be divided into two parts,
one of which will quickly be destroyed, the other made stronger and stronger. For every
kind of organism, system, form, or compound, there is an absolute limit to a weakening
process. It ends in destruction; there is no limit to strength. The result is that chance in its
action tends to destroy the weak & increase the average strength of the objects remaining.
Systems and compounds which have bad habits follow the same course; only those that
have good habits tend to survive. (EP 1, p. 223)
The lesson is simple, habit-taking is but one of a multiplicity of possible tendencies or thirds, and
a competition between such tendencies (e.g. systems with a habit-breaking tendency, or systems
with some combination of both tendencies) in a world of chance events would see the habittaking tendency emerge as an enduring active principle within that world. As the logical outcome
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of such an ‘evolutionary’ process, habit-taking thus emerges as the most plausible candidate for a
third element that is “active in the world.” (EP 1, p. 277)
3. Chance, Law, and Habit-Taking Made Clear
The term chance has many associations in Peirce’s work, including everything from
indeterminacy, spontaneity, and freedom, to the kinds of accidental variations associated with
sporting and games of chance. Generally speaking, chance refers to occurrences, events, or
relations that seem to be devoid of any reason or cause as a determining condition of those
events. (EP 1, p. 219, 222; p. 243; p. 289) While chance or random events are predictable on
some level (EP 1, pp. 172-176; p. 222, 310), their predictability does not result from any
“definite tendency” in the sense of a positive force, cause, reason, or other governing condition
involved in those events. (EP 1, p. 219) Chance is first cosmologically because it has no
determinate or determining relation to anything before, behind, or beyond itself.
While chance is first, Law in the sense intended in Peirce’s “Guess” is second because it
refers to relations that are determinate in some absolute, complete, or mechanical sense. (EP 1,
pp. 243-244; p. 277; p. 292, p. 300) As second, Law in the physicalist, mechanical sense outlined
here is “absolute last” which, in a cosmological context of Peirce’s “Guess” represents a state of
complete determination as the limit or end point of the evolutionary process of cosmological
development. (EP 1, p. 248) As the end point, limit or “absolute last” state towards which
cosmological development is inevitably oriented, the state of absolute Law is one of dyadic
materialistic, mechanistic, or necessitarian relations now generalized or universalized as a state
of absolute conformity with law. This is a state where everything is knowable and predictable in
an absolutely precise and exact manner. (EP 1, pp. 299-300) Thus where chance is absolute
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indeterminacy, mechanical Law is absolute determinacy, an end state that is what it is by way of
its contrast with chance as its polar opposite and radical other.
Habit-taking serves the intermediary function of bringing the otherwise radically opposed
elements of chance and Law together as a continuous, reasonable whole. (EP 1, p. 347) Where
chance and Law are absolutes, habit-taking is relative as something in-between. In its relative,
mediating essence, habit-taking will thereby have a dual orientation “back toward a point in the
infinitely distant past when there was no law but mere indeterminacy,” and “forward to a point in
the infinitely distant future when there will be no indeterminacy or chance but a complete reign
of law.” (EP 1, 277) Since habit-taking tends to increase the average strength of its outcomes,
then it will be selected for from among all the other possible tendencies in a process of
cosmological selection, giving rise to a “self-generative” process of evolutionary, cosmological
growth. (EP 1, p. 223; pp. 277-278) Such cosmological growth will take the form of an increase
or spreading of relative or approximate uniform conformity with law in accordance with the law
of mind. (EP 1, p. 349) The increasing tendency towards uniform conformity with law will
continue “until it supersedes itself by strengthening habits into absolute laws regulating the
action of all things in every respect in the indefinite future.” (EP 1, 277)
4. Peirce’s Cosmology Made Clear
On Peirce’s analysis, if the world were indeed comprised of the three physicalist elements of
chance, Law, and habit-taking, then we would expect or predict that world to have the form of an
evolutionary, developmental process whose originary state is one of chaos or chance and whose
developmental state is an accelerating growth towards an increasingly uniform state of absolute,
generalized conformity with law. This is what Peirce’s model predicts and this, Peirce suggests,
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is what the evidence of experience should confirm over time. Thus framed, Peirce’s
cosmological “Guess” runs something like this:
1) The Categories are introduced as hypothetical conditions for the possibility of
phenomena in all their diverse senses (EP 1, pp. 247-256)
2) Since chance is first, as default physicalist condition, then uniform conformity with law
calls for explanation. (EP 1, p. 276)
3) The best way of explaining how the laws of nature could have come about is to propose
that “three elements are active in the world, first, chance; second, law; and third, habittaking.” The elements are posited as plausible, physicalist expressions of the Categories.
(EP 1, p. 277)
4) The three elements are now posited hypothetically as part of some pre-determinate state
where “nothing existed or really happened.” This chaotic state should be thought of as
something akin to a state of pre-physicalist possibility conditions where nothing has yet
been made determinate or factual in any physicalist sense. (EP 1, p. 278) Here the
elements are like functions that are sitting idling as it were, where the habit-taking
element, for example, is awaiting some input that is given to it as something upon which
it can work (in the same sense in which Kant’s Categories of the Understanding might be
thought to sit idling until set in motion by the given input of sensible experience). This
original, chaotic state stands as one of the first ‘tests’ of Peirce’s Categories, for if the
Categories are to be truly comprehensive and adequate in the sense proposed, then it must
be possible to set the entire universe in motion from these three elements alone without
appeal to anything else that might be presumed as given in some prior or external sense
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that is not derived in some way from those three elements (where the given condition
might thus appear as an ad hoc deus ex machine).
5) It is here that Peirce introduces his famous “flash,” which appears spontaneously or by
chance, an event whose spontaneity is justified “by the principle of firstness.” (EP 1, p.
278) As a spontaneous, chance event, the “flash” has no cause or determining condition
outside of itself, but occurs for no other reason than the fact that it can (for there is
nothing prohibiting it from occurring). While the flash, as spontaneous, is uncaused, it is
also perfectly reasonable as an expression of chance, for it is quite simply a chance event.
6) While the first or original flash occurs spontaneously “by the principle of firstness,” the
actual occurrence of the flash, as an existing event, is an expression of 2ndness, for the
flash must now be taken as second to the state of chaotic indeterminacy that can be said
to have preceded it (a condition that is itself justified by the principle of 2ndness).
7) Once we have the first flash, as a real occurrence, we now have sufficient input to set the
third, habit-taking element in motion, as something given to it from the conditions of
1stness and 2ndness). From the nature of the habit-taking element there thus follows “a
second flash,” then a third, then a growing multiplicity of flashes and series of flashes
that becomes increasingly “continuous and uniform in its flow” until it results in the birth
of time. (EP 1, p. 278)
8) Then, by the principle of 1stness, 2ndness, and 3rdness we see the emergence of pairs of
simultaneous events with this again being repeated by the habit-taking tendency, thereby
marking the birth of space. (EP 1, pp. 278-279)
9) And so on, and so on…
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3. Extending Peirce’s Riddle: Deriving the Categories from Nothing
I will finish by proposing what Short recently claimed cannot be done. (Short, p. 535) Put simply
I will suggest that 2ndness and 3rdness might be derived from 1stness, not in the physicalist,
cosmological sense that Peirce proposes in his “Guess,” but in a much more radical sense as an
account of the origins of the Categories per se. Drawing upon principles put forward by Peirce
himself, I will argue that such a derivation is perfectly reasonable given the nature of the
Categories and the ecstatic character of inferential processes.
I should begin by first noting that I agree with Short and others that neither of the
Categories can be reduced to another, for each brings something to the table that the others,
including any combination of the others, cannot. I accept this point. But while neither Category
can be reduced to another, it does not follow, as Short claims, that neither Category can be
derived from another. Of course much rests upon what we take a derivation to be, but the
derivation proposed here runs as follows:
1) In the beginning was 1stness. Expressed modally, this would be a state of indeterminate
possibility with no determinate or determining condition of any sort, a state of absolute
possibility. Understood in this radically indeterminate sense, 1stness is akin to Nothing, or
at least as close to Nothing as thought allows, for there is no-thing, no activity, no power
of any sort, only absolute possibility. Since 1stness involves no determination or power of
determination in any positive sense, then it must be maximally determinable, for to deny
this implies a limit or prohibition of some sort and this runs contrary to the essence of
1stness so characterized. As a state of maximal determinability, 1stness thus stands as a
condition of absolute permissibility where anything is possible, including the impossible
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as such. As first, 1stness can have no cause or ground outside of itself, but is what it is
purely and solely in-itself.
2) From the absolute permissibility of 1stness there emerges 2ndness, not as something
determined by 1stness, but as something that is permitted or made possible (i.e. not
prohibited) by 1stness. While 1stness will be ingredient within 2ndness (as the condition of
its possibility), 2ndness itself stands as the negation of 1stness, its difference, other, and
limit. Thus while 2ndnesss emerges from 1stness as a spontaneous event made possible by
1stness, 2ndness is not reducible to 1stness for such a reduction would be a denial of the
determinate, dyadic otherness of 2ndness as such.
3) From 1stnesss and 2ndness there again emerges 3rdness, not as something determined by
1stness or 2ndness, but as something that is not prohibited by either. 3rdness stands as a
mediating condition that brings together or unifies the otherwise disparate elements of
1stness and 2ndness into a coherent, continuous whole. While 2ndness and 1stness are
ingredient within 3rdness, 3rdness itself stands as a relative, unifying element that, in its
essence as a mediating condition, cannot be reduced to 1stness and 2ndness, but can be
said to have emerged from them.
Whether this cosmogonic sketch is a clarification of Peirce’s work or an extension of it is a
matter of discussion. On my reading it is an extension, venturing beyond what Peirce was willing
to risk, but building nonetheless upon his central insights. It is an emergent order2 in its most
It is here that Peirce’s position differs importantly from someone like Hegel, for Hegel’s account of the
development of being (and becoming) from nothing takes the relation between being and nothing to be one of
identity (which thereby privileges the relation of identity as primary or basic logically), whereas in Peirce the
relation between 1stness (or Nothing) and the emergent categories of 2 nd ness and 3rdness is illative in character (with
identity being a special case of illation), a relation that I have elsewhere characterized as fundamentally ecstatic.
Thus Peirce’s account allows for a real, emergent difference between the Categories that does not seem to be present
in an account such as Hegel’s.
2
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radical sense, but one that is nevertheless consistent with Peirce’s claim: 1) That “everything that
can happen by chance, sometime or other will happen by chance” (EP 1, p. 220), and 2) That
“the tendency to growth can be supposed itself to have grown from an infinitesimal germ
accidentally started.” (EP 1, p. 289) As such it seems perfectly consistent with Peirce’s broader
“Cosmogonic Philosophy” (EP 1, p. 297), including his later claim that at least two of the three
Universes “have a creator independent of them.” (EP 2, p. 449) On this account, 2ndness and
3rdness are not determined by 1stness, but follow from it nonetheless and in a perfectly reasonable
sense. Put simply, 2ndness, and 3rdness emerge from 1stness, not as determined by it, but as
inevitable outcomes of the radical possibility and absolute permissibility of 1stness as such. Thus
2ndness and 3rdness can be said to follow from Firstness as something destined, but not
determined.
Philip Rose
REFEREENCES
Peirce, Charles S. 1931–35, 1958. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols.1–6,
Hartshorne and Weiss, eds., Vols.7–8, Burks, ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
———. 1982–2010. Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Vols. 1–6, 8,
various eds., Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
———. 1992. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 1, Houser and
Kloesel, eds., Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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———. 1998. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 2, Peirce Edition
Project, ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Author. _____.
Short, T.L. “Did Peirce Have a Cosmology?” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol.
46, No 4, Fall 2010, pp. 521-543.
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