Charles Sanders Peirce is not the first to provide definitions for the virtual and the actual. In fact, he (763-764) credits John Duns Scotus, A Franciscan philosopher and theologian, as having defined virtual knowledge and virtual difference in ‘Ordinatio’ or ‘Opus oxoniense’.
Duns Scotus does indeed provide definitions for the virtual and the actual, in reference to knowledge. He (26) also provides a definition for what he refers to as the habitual:
“I call knowledge ‘habitual’ when the object is thus present to the intellect in idea of intelligible in act, so that the intellect can immediately have an elicited act about it.”
Therefore, anything habitual is simply what the intellect calls forth, effortlessly, recognized as being there. This is not the case with something that is virtual, as specified by him (26):
“I call knowledge ‘virtual’ when something is understood in something as part of the thing understood first, but not as the thing first understood[.]”
Anything virtual is therefore akin to something else, but not that something else, which is also how Peirce (763) explains it. This something else is then what Duns Scotus (27) refers to as actual:
“This is properly enough called ‘the thing virtually understood’ because it is close enough to the thing actually understood; for it could not be more actually understood unless it were understood in an intellection proper to it[.]”
In other words, if the virtual thing were not simply akin to something else, the actual thing, then it would be that actual thing. To get the point across, he (27) mentions that something virtual is something that is “close enough” to, “as it were”, “like” and “as if”, something else, but without ever actually being that something else.
To be clear, this is not a comparison of two or more actual things. He (26) exemplifies with humans and animals. It is fair to say that humans are animals. However, these two are not actually the same, only virtually the same, and only in part, by which I believe he means only in this and/or that regard.
If I have understood Duns Scotus correctly, using the virtual and the actual is important for him, because it allows him to explain how there can be all these finite beings, all those things, but without lapsing into thinking that is all there ever is. Therefore, reality is, in itself, infinite, but it only ever appears to us humans in finite form. In other words, reality is both virtual and actual at the same time.
This is important because it allows us to think not only in terms of pre-existing things, those Xs mentioned by Peirce (763), but also in terms of things that can displace them, functioning in certain ways, as equivalent to those Xs, as if they were those Xs, but without being them and without even having to identify them, like calling the Zs or Ys. What matters is that something virtual has that capacity, efficiency or power of something actual, as explained by Peirce (763).
To exemplify that, think of the different ways we can create sound recordings, such as music. To name a few:
- Records: invented in the late 1800s
- Wire recordings: invented in the late 1800s
- Magnetic tape recordings: invented in the early 1900s
- Compact Discs (CDs): invented in the late 1900s
- MiniDiscs (MDs): invented in the late 1900s
The list could be extended, but that is beside the point. They are clearly not actually the same. They do resemble one another, to this or that extent, but you cannot confuse one them with each other. However, what matters is that they are virtually the same, in the sense that they all be used to record and play sounds. While we may compare them and argue over their advantages and disadvantages, they can all get the job done.
From our perspective, those are all actual examples of different kinds of sound recordings or, rather, media that can be used to record and play sounds. However, if we assess the situation from the perspective of people living in the late 1800s, most of those are only virtual examples of media that can be used to record and play sounds. They had no idea that it would be possible to record or play sounds in the ways that were invented in the 1900s. It would have been impossible for them to name them, for the simple reason that the necessary technologies did not actually exist. These were not even possible or potential technologies, because that would amount to insisting that the technologies or, rather, the ideas that they are based on existed prior to their invention.
The ingenuity of this way of thinking, put forth by Duns Scotus and clarified by Peirce, is that it makes room for creativity and invention. Ideas are no longer pre-existing, simply waiting for us to discover them, but rather something that we come up with.
References
- Duns Scotus, J. ([1639] 2022). The Ordination of Blessed John Duns Scotus: Book One, Third Distinction (P. L. P. Simpson, Trans.). https://aristotelophile.com/Books/Translations/Scotus%20Ordinatio%20I%20d.3.pdf
- Peirce, C. S. (1902). Virtual. In J. M. Baldwin (Ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, Vol. II (pp. 763–764). New York, NY: The Macmillan Company.