Charles Peirce

Charles Sanders/Santiago Peirce

Peirce's philosophy

Peirce was emphatically not a professional philosopher. In his day, one made a mark on philosophy by publishing monographs on the subject; Peirce never did so. While a Harvard undergraduate, Peirce taught himself philosophy by reading a few pages of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason every day, in the original German. Two papers he published in the late 1870s are deemed (by William James, among others) to be the source of the philosophical tendency known as pragmatism. Unlike some later pragmatists such as James and John Dewey, Peirce conceived of pragmatism primarily as a method for the clarification of the meaning of ideas, by applying the scientific method to philosophical issues. Pragmatism is regarded as a distinctively American philosophy.

Related Topics:
Kant - Critique of Pure Reason - William James - Pragmatism - John Dewey - Idea - Scientific method - Philosophical

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Peirce is also deemed one of the founders semiotics, the science of signs (the other founder was Ferdinand de Saussure). Peirce defined semiosis as "...action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs." ("Pragmatism", Essential Peirce 2: 411; written 1907). He revised his view of semiosis throughout his career, beginning with this triadic relation and ending with a system consisting of 59,049 possible elements and relations. One reason for this high number is that he allowed each interpretant to act as a sign, thereby creating a new signifying relation

Related Topics:
Semiotics - Signs - Ferdinand de Saussure

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Peirce's writings bear on an astonishing diversity of disciplines, such as astronomy, metrology, geodesy, mathematics, logic, philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, linguistics, economics, and psychology. His work on these subjects have become the subject of renewed interest and lavish praise. This revival is inspired not only by Peirce's intelligent anticipations of recent scientific developments but also, and especially, by his showing how philosophy can be applied responsibly to human problems. Bertrand Russell opined, "Beyond doubt...he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever." (Yet he did not cite Peirce in his Principia Mathematica.) Karl Popper viewed him as "one of the greatest philosophers of all times."

Related Topics:
Metrology - History and philosophy of science - Linguistics - Economics - Psychology - Bertrand Russell - Nineteenth century - Karl Popper

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Peirce's manifold accomplishments were slow to obtain their just due. He held a university appointment for only five years, in logic. His only book was a short technical monograph on astronomy, the Photometric Researches of 1878, little noted. His contemporaries William James and Josiah Royce were admirers, to little effect. Once these worthies dead, Cassius Keyser at Columbia and Morris Cohen at CCNY were perhaps Peirce's only admirers of consequence. The publication of the first six volumes of the Collected Papers, 1931-35, did not lead to an immediate outpouring of secondary literature. The editors of those volumes, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, did not become Peirce specialists. Peirce scholarship arguably began with the monographs by James Feibleman (1946) and Thomas Goudge (1950), the 1952 volume edited by Philip Wiener and Frederick Young, and the work of Max Fisch. The Charles Sanders Peirce Society was founded in 1946; its Transactions, an academic journal specializing in Peirciana, has appeared since 1965.

Related Topics:
William James - Josiah Royce - Cassius Keyser - Morris Cohen - Charles Hartshorne - Paul Weiss - Max Fisch

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Abductive reasoning (abduction)

Although Peirce left no treatise laying out a system, in some respects he can be seen as a systematic philosopher in the traditional sense. But his work also deals with the scientific and logical questions of truth, and knowledge, questions grounded in his personal experience as a logician and working experimental scientist, one who was a member of the international community of scientists and thinkers of his day. Peirce made important contributions to deductive logic (see below), but he was primarily interested in the logic of science and specifically in what he called abduction (as opposed to deduction and induction). Abduction is the process whereby a hypothesis is generated, so that surprising facts may be explained. "There is a more familiar name for it than abduction," Peirce wrote, "for it is neither more nor less than guessing." Indeed, Peirce considered abduction to be at the heart not only of scientific research but of all ordinary human activities as well. His pragmatism may be understood as a method of sorting out conceptual confusions by linking relating the meaning of concepts to their operational / practical consequences.

Related Topics:
Systematic philosopher - Truth - Knowledge - Deductive logic - Abduction - Deduction - Induction

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Peirce's pragmatism emphatically bears no resemblance to "vulgar" pragmatism, which misleadingly connotes such things as the ruthless search for profit or political convenience. It appears that his focus was to find an objectively verifiable technique to test the "truth" of our "knowledge". This was a reaction to the foundational alternatives of:

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1) deduction from absolute truths/rationalism or

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2) induction from observable phenomena/empiricism.

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His approach is often confused with the latter form of foundationalism, but is distinct from it by virtue of the:

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• Active process of postulation/theorizing;
• Subsequent application of the theory;
• Verification of the theory's ability to predict and control the environment,

rather than by inductive generalization, the mere relabeling of phenomenological patterns. Peirce's pragmatism was the first time the scientific method was proposed as an epistemology for philosophical questions.

Related Topics:
Scientific method - Epistemology

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A theory that proves itself more successful in predicting and controlling our world than its rivals is said to be nearer the "truth." This is an operational notion of truth employed by scientists. Unlike the other pragmatists, Peirce never explicitly advanced a theory of truth. But his scattered comments about truth have proved influential to several epistemic truth theorists, and as a useful foil for deflationary and correspondence theories of truth.

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The Logician

Peirce made major discoveries in formal logic:

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• Effectively discovered (along with his Ph.D. student O. H. Mitchell) quantification as we know it. For an eloquent statement by Hilary Putnam of this underappreciated fact, see . Peirce's notation, unlike Frege's, was widely used until the 1930s.
• Building on the preceding, was the first to appreciate the centrality of what is now known as first-order predicate calculus.
• Proved that what we now know as Boolean algebra could be expressed by means of a single binary operation, either logical nand or its dual, logical nor. (See also De Morgan's Laws).
• Devised the existential graphs, a non-symbolic notation for predicate calculus and the basis of the conceptual graphs of John F. Sowa.
• In an 1886 letter to another former student, was the first to see that Boolean calculations could be carried out by means of electrical switches, anticipating Claude Shannon by more than 50 years.

Peirce admired Georg Cantor, was admired by Ernst Schroder (the sentiment was less than mutual) and William Kingdon Clifford, and wrote a dismissive review of Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics. But Frege's name cannot be found in his writings. It is very curious that these near-contemporaries both mixed logic and philosophy to a similar degree, and advocated planar notations for logic, yet were utterly ignorant of each other's work.

Related Topics:
Georg Cantor - Ernst Schroder - William Kingdon Clifford - Bertrand Russell - Frege

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N.B. The best-known references on the history of logic, William and Martha Kneale's (1962) The Development of Logic, and Van Heijenoort's (1966) source book, do not do Peirce the logician justice.

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