Esiste la coscienza? : le tesi inattuali di Peirce e James a confronto con la filosofia novecentesca

Peirce considered consciousness, in his early 1868’s writings, as a mere result of an inferential process, arguing that we have no power of introspection and that the Self is built throughout a process of trial and error. Peirce considered consciousness as a sign effect, more than as the generative origin of the knowledge of the world and of the other living beings. In his later correspondence with James, at the beginning of the 20th century, he affirmed that consciousness has to be considered not substantially, but phenomenologically, as “qualisense, altersense, medisense”, following the results of the phaneroscopic considerations developed in the part of his system called “High Philosophy”, or philosophy of experience. From his part, James opened his writings on radical empiricism with an essay entitled “Does consciousness exist?”, where he advanced some doubts about the constitutive and transcendental power of it, and proposed to consider consciousness just as a function, useful for some cognitive purposes. Pure experience is made of a same ‘stuff’, a same matter, that is the matter of thoughts and the matter of things, and they are just one in the simultaneity of their apparition. Consciousness is no more than an adaptive opportunity, among many others useful in our commerce with the world. Both the authors, therefore, preferred to speak of “a pure experience” based on habits of response, rather than of a pure consciousness. Consciousness in their system has no founding role, no psychological centrality, and no conceptual priority. This way, they inaugurate a stream of thought that was not prevalent in the 20th century (think of Husserl’s or Sartre’s positions, for example), but that nowadays could help us in solving many philosophical puzzles, and in building a living dialogue between pragmatism and cognitive sciences.