I Am An American Philosopher: Aaron Wilson
-An Interview Series with John Capps-
“I believe that Peirce had always given us reason to hold that the final opinion is inevitable given enough opportunity—which, admittedly, we may not have. But it is not just that if we were inquiring in “the right ways” we would come to a final opinion, and it is not just about the social aspect of inquiry: it is not just about “consensus.” It is a model for how doxastic cognition fundamentally works. It is also a model of rationality. A rational creature is one that would be responsive to evidence over the long run. There might be many humans who are fundamentally irrational; but I think, and I think Peirce thought, that humans overall are fundamentally rational. We really do tend toward a final opinion.”
Aaron B. Wilson is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at South Texas College and Executive Director of the Charles S. Peirce Society. He is the author of Peirce’s Empiricism: Its Roots and Its Originality (2016), has written widely on Peirce and early modern philosophy, and serves on the editorial board of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy. He is a past recipient of the Charles S. Peirce Society Essay Prize and South Texas College’s NISOD Teaching Excellence Award.
What does American philosophy mean to you?
My understanding of what counts as American philosophy and what does not is genuinely informed by meetings of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. It is not simply pragmatism, a category also fraught with difficulties. It is not limited to philosophy that is done only in the Americas, nor is it any philosophy done in the Americas. It is not philosophy done only by Americans, north or south. It is an evolving category, at least for me, and I think that SAAP has taken a leading role in that evolution. To give a Peircean answer, it is whatever stable agreement on “what American philosophy is” our community would arrive at after sufficient annual meetings!
How did you become an American philosopher?
When I was a senior undergraduate at Boston University, I was dissatisfied with the philosophers and traditions that I had studied by that time. BU had a pluralistic department and by my senior year I was already fairly acquainted with the ancients, the early moderns, Kant, Hegel, the early analytics, Wittgenstein and the continental phenomenological philosophers. Then I discovered Browning’s and Myers’s Philosophers of Process which, of course, introduced me to philosophers like Whitehead and Bergson, but also Peirce, James and Dewey. I fell in love, particularly with Peirce and Dewey. I took a directed study with Victor Kestenbaum on Dewey’s Experience & Nature, and I wrote a paper on Peirce’s concept of habit for my senior-level epistemology class with the late Jaakko Hintikka, with which he seemed quite impressed. He advised me to study with Susan Haack and Risto Hilpinen at the University of Miami. When I arrived at Miami and worked with Susan, as well as Risto, I was still oriented toward pragmatism in general, but I realized that I would not say anything of real substance unless I hyper-specialized, and I decided I would hyper-specialize in Peirce. Not the best idea job-market-wise, but I’m fairly comfortable at South Texas College and I do not regret my decision.
How would you describe your current research?
I should say that currently I’m invested in raising my two young children and overloading on teaching to give them the best life I can which, along with various other obligations, doesn’t leave much time for writing and research. That said, I have two connected projects moving ahead. One builds on my work with Peirce’s views on perception, how they fit into his wider philosophical work, and connects it to other philosophical and scientific work on perception. I defend what I think is a distinct idea: that we always directly perceive reality, but we can only inquire into what that reality is, in that perception always indexes a certain reality of which our minds struggle toward a stable conceptualization. We are justified in saying that we perceive that indexed reality, that it is the “perceived object,” because it is the reality inquiry into which would tend toward a permanently stable conceptualization. I’m using terms that are Peircean but not precisely Peirce’s because I am not simply reconstructing Peirce’s philosophy of perception; I’m developing a distinctly Peircean philosophy of perception.
The second related project concerns the claim that we would tend toward a permanently stable conceptualization of reality—the famous, or infamous, claim that inquiry inevitably tends toward a “final opinion” or that semiosis tends toward a “final interpretant.” I want to defend this idea more than anyone has yet done. I believe that Peirce had always given us reason to hold that the final opinion is inevitable given enough opportunity—which, admittedly, we may not have. But it is not just that if we were inquiring in “the right ways” we would come to a final opinion, and it is not just about the social aspect of inquiry: it is not just about “consensus.” It is a model for how doxastic cognition fundamentally works. It is also a model of rationality. A rational creature is one that would be responsive to evidence over the long run. There might be many humans who are fundamentally irrational; but I think, and I think Peirce thought, that humans overall are fundamentally rational. We really do tend toward a final opinion. I suspect even most Peirceans are skeptical of this idea. However, the more I review literature in fields like cognitive psychology, the more I find reason to think that perceptual pressures on belief tend to win out over biases or identity-protective pressures over time; and, over time, social pressures tend to align with the perceptual pressures. Then, of course, there is the issue with light cones and buried secrets: realities that seem closed off from the self-corrective cognitive process; but any truly closed off reality would not affect the process anyhow and the question is just whether we still want to say that there are truths about such realities. A lot more needs to be said, but that’s my current project.
What do you do when you’re not doing American philosophy?
Overall, I am just being a dad, a teacher, getting in exercise three times a week, and enjoying a beer at the end of the day. I enjoy traveling and hiking, although I don’t get to do them enough. I’m at 40 U.S. states but only 4 countries (not including the U.S.). I like to write fan fiction, but I will not disclose any details there (haha). I’m not the most boring person in the world, just nothing of the “oh wow” sort. Well, my Halloween displays get some wows—we have the best one in our neighborhood, perhaps our side of our city.
What’s your favorite work in American philosophy? What should we all be reading?
Dewey’s Experience & Nature. You’d think it would be something that Peirce wrote. The JSP series, the Illustrations series, and the 1903 Harvard lectures are all important and valuable, but no single work by Peirce provoked my philosophical imagination as much as E&N did. There, Dewey is really trying to put it all together. That’s what I love. Putting it all together, zooming out, and appreciating how the whole of it all really makes sense–or not.