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 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: • Growth and increasing complexity • Variety and diversity • Regularity (laws of nature) • Mind/consciousness/feeling He then asks us to consider how these features could possibly be explained by a strictly
determined,
mechanistic theory of the way of all things. ==Evolution==