Tychism is a thesis proposed by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce that holds that absolute chance

Chance

- Philosophy, logic and theology :* Chance * Contingency * Indeterminism* Luck* Probability* Randomness- Places :* Chancé, a commune in Brittany, France* Chance, Kentucky, U.S.* Chance, Maryland, U.S.* Chance, Virginia, U.S....

, or indeterminism

Indeterminism

Indeterminism is the concept that events are not caused, or not caused deterministically by prior events. It is the opposite of determinism and related to chance...

, is a real factor operative in the universe. This doctrine forms a central part of Peirce's comprehensive evolutionary cosmology

Cosmology

Cosmology is the discipline that deals with the nature of the Universe as a whole. Cosmologists seek to understand the origin, evolution, structure, and ultimate fate of the Universe at large, as well as the natural laws that keep it in order...

. It may be considered both the direct opposite of Einstein's oft quoted dictum that: "God does not play dice with the universe" and an early philosophical anticipation of Werner Heisenberg

Werner Heisenberg

Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics and is best known for asserting the uncertainty principle of quantum theory...

's uncertainty principle

Uncertainty principle

In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known...

.

The thesis

In his theory of tychism, Peirce sought to deny the central position of the doctrine of necessity which maintains that "the state of things existing at any time, together with certain immutable laws, completely determine the state of things at every other time." One of the principal arguments of the necessitarians

Necessitarianism

Necessitarianism is a metaphysical principle that denies all mere possibility; there is exactly one way for the world to be. It is the strongest member of a family of principles, including hard determinism, each of which deny free will, reasoning that human actions are predetermined by external or...

 is that their position involves a presupposition of all science. Peirce attacks this idea asserting: "To 'postulate' a proposition is no more than to hope it is true." Thus an avenue is opened up allowing the entry of chance as a fundamental and absolute entity.

Peirce does not, of course, assert that there is no law in the universe. On the contrary, he maintains that an absolutely chance world would be a contradiction and thus impossible.
Complete lack of order is itself a sort of order. The position he advocates is rather that there are in the universe both regularities and irregularities.

To explain the presence of such a universal "law" Peirce proposes a cosmological theory of evolution in which law develops out of chance. The hypothesis that out of irregularity, regularity constantly evolves seemed to him to have decided advantages not the least being its explanation of "why laws are not precisely or always obeyed, for what is still in a process of evolution can not be supposed to be absolutely fixed."

Underpinnings

Attempting to provide an explanation of some of the more general observable traits of the universe, Peirce formulates four reasons in support of his hypothesis:

1. Growth and increasing complexity
2. Variety and diversity
3. Regularity (laws of nature)
4. Mind/consciousness/feeling

He then asks us to consider how these features could possibly be explained by a strictly determined

Determinism

Determinism is the general philosophical thesis that states that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else could happen. There are many versions of this thesis. Each of them rests upon various alleged connections, and interdependencies of things and...

, mechanistic

Mechanism (philosophy)

Mechanism is the belief that natural wholes are like machines or artifacts, composed of parts lacking any intrinsic relationship to each other, and with their order imposed from without. Thus, the source of an apparent thing's activities is not the whole itself, but its parts or an external...

 theory of the way of all things.

Evolution

Peirce very pointedly observed that all the scientifically viable theories of evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

 are based on tychistic formulations.

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....

 had argued that evolution was an inevitable upwards progress driven by the law of the conservation of energy

Conservation of energy

The nineteenth century law of conservation of energy is a law of physics. It states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. The total energy is said to be conserved over time...

. Pierce rejected this idea, pointing out that energy conservation, like other laws of classical physics, is time-symmetric. Turning to Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

 he points out that the fundamental driver of his theory is accidental variation, noting that "Darwinian evolution is evolution by the operation of chance, and the destruction of bad results." Even the catastrophism

Catastrophism

Catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been affected in the past by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. The dominant paradigm of modern geology is uniformitarianism , in which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, create the Earth's appearance...

 of Clarence King

Clarence King

Clarence R. King was an American geologist, mountaineer, and art critic. First director of the United States Geological Survey, from 1879 to 1881, King was noted for his exploration of the Sierra Nevada. He was born in Newport, Rhode Island.-Career:...

 and others, which postulates an acceleration in evolutionary change via sudden environmental dislocations, naturally falls under the rubric of tychism.

This evolutionary aspect of tychism compels Peirce to expand Darwin's view to a cosmological level, sending its operations back to the origin of the universe under the regulative principle of his synechism

Synechism

Synechism , a philosophical term proposed by C. S. Peirce to express the tendency to regard things such as space, time, and law as continuous:His synechism holds that the essential feature in philosophic speculation is continuity...

.

Critical reading

• Turley, Peter, Peirce's Cosmology, New York: Philosophical Library, 1977, ISBN 978-0802222084
• Esposito, Joseph L., Evolutionary Metaphysics: The Development of Peirce's Theory of Categories, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980, ISBN 978-0821405512
• Hausman, Carl, Charles Peirce's Evolutionary Metaphysics, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0521415590
• Sheriff, John K., Charles Peirce's Guess at the Riddle: Grounds for Human Significance, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0253352040

External links

• Commens Peirce dictionary definition of "tychism" (collection of Peirce's own definitions).