Abstract
Walker Percy’s unusual aspirations set his novels apart from most literary attempts to understand profound human problems. He gave meaning to the category of art as inquiry. In the novels, his characters’ eccentric quests treat everyday things as evidence for abstract and ultimately theological hypotheses. Outside the novels Percy shared their conviction, inspired by philosophical traditions that include Leibniz, Descartes, the British phenomena lists, C.S. Peirce, and Noam Chomsky. This article shows how well in tune he was with these traditions, and especially with Chomsky’s and Peirce’s variants on the thesis that built-in biases picked up from our environment are relevant to everyday and scientific learning. In this respect, Percy too anticipated the significance of more recent developments in cognitive science and robotic learning. Like Peirce, he also believed that these empirical learning patterns have theological resonance.
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- 1.
I mean primarily Chapters 7–15 of Percy 1975. The earlier essays are equally serious but only the last eight have a common set of common themes.
- 2.
The castaway is certainly the counterpart of the Martian, an identity Percy feigned in the first few pages of A Theory of Language (MB, pp. 298–307, esp. pp. 298–301).
- 3.
See, in particular, “The Message in the Bottle”, “The Mystery of Language”, and “The Triadic Theory of Meaning” (MB, Chapters 6–8).
- 4.
- 5.
In fact, he argues for the importance and similar significance of meaning to both science and art in Culture (MB, Chapter 10).
- 6.
Percy mentions Kant , Husserl , and Heidegger as background figures for his own emphasis on the context of symbols in which symbols are used, and suggests that they were on the same path as Cassirer (MB, pp. 202–4).
- 7.
Percy sometimes seems to describe Chomsky as failing to grasp the problem that a triadic theory of meaning solves but at others assigns importance to Chomsky’s understanding of others’ failure in this regard (Chomsky 1965; MB, p. 165).
- 8.
“In what follows, the Martian will revive another idea. … Charles Peirce’s theory of abduction, which is an analysis of scientific hypothesis formation, peculiarly apposite, as the Martian sees it, to linguistic theorizing” (MB, pp. 300–1).
- 9.
The references are of course to the Russian psychologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s theory that learning in infants and animals is the result of “conditioning” or repetitive exposure to the juxtaposition of signs and the things they signify. John B. Watson of Columbia University, also an academic psychologist, gave this approach the name “behaviorism.” The novel component of the theory they both stood for was that language learning is no more complex that the learning of connections between other nonlinguistic phenomena, as in animal and human learning of simple causal relations (causal “recipes”) in the world around us.
- 10.
Percy compares these, as Chomsky implicitly also did, with Bloomfield’s, Harris’s, and Fodor and Katz’s non-behaviorist views of language acquisition.
- 11.
- 12.
Scotus wrote on haecceitas (this-ness) in his Ordinatio 2, d. 3, pars 1, qq. 1–6 (Scotus 1302).
- 13.
Nevertheless, relevant parts of the environment in which the hypothesis “crops up” seem to favor it. In statistical trials of low-level hypotheses, this reflection of the environment is found in the investigator’s assumption that certain variables are logically independent of each other. If variables are not logically independent, their repeated cooccurrence cannot raise the probability that their cooccurrence is statistically significant.
- 14.
Percy remarks with apparent approval on Foote’s inclusion of Lucretius in a list of great scientists . (Tolson 1997, p. 280).
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Utz, S. (2018). Percy, Peirce, and Parsifal: Intuition’s Farther Shore. In: Marsh, L. (eds) Walker Percy, Philosopher. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77968-3_2
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