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Charles Sanders Peirce

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Santiago Peirce (pronounced purse), September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914, was an American polymath. Trained as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years, he is usually deemed a philosopher. Largely ignored within his lifetime, he is now seen as an innovator in many fields, especially mathematics, logic, the methodology of research, the philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaphysics. He considered himself a logician first and foremost, and indeed made major contributions to formal logic, which for him encompassed much of the philosophy of science and of epistemology. In turn, he saw logic as a branch of semiotics which he helped found.

Peirce's writings repeatedly refer to a system of three categories, named Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, devised early in his career under Kantian inspiration. Later he initiated the philosophical tendency known as pragmatism, which remained largely unknown until his life-long friend William James made it popular. Peirce believed that any truth is provisional, and that the truth of any proposition cannot be certain but only probable. The name he gave to this state of affairs was "fallibilism". This fallibilism and pragmatism may be seen as playing roles in his work similar to those of skepticism and positivism, respectively, in the work of others.

Life

Charles Sanders Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of Sarah and Benjamin Peirce. His father was a professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University, and arguably the first serious research mathematician in America. Peirce obtained one of the first M.Sc. degrees awarded in America, in chemistry. He was employed as a scientist by the United States Coast Survey (1859–1891), working mainly in geodesy and in gravimetry, refining the use of pendulums to determine small local variations in the strength of the earth's gravity. During the 1870s, he worked in Harvard's astronomical observatory.

Peirce never obtained a tenured academic position. His academic ambitions may have been frustrated by his reportedly difficult personality; Brent (1998) conjectures that Peirce may have been manic-depressive. Peirce's first wife, Harriet Melusina Fay, left him in 1876. He soon took up with a woman whose maiden name and nationality remain uncertain to this day; the best guess is that she was French and named Juliette Froissy; he did not marry her until Fay divorced him in 1884. The resulting scandal led to his dismissal from the only academic position he ever obtained, Lecturer in Logic at Johns Hopkins University.

In 1887, Peirce used his inheritance from his parents to purchase a farm near Milford, Pennsylvania, where he spent the rest of his life writing prolifically and struggling with grave financial difficulties. He had no children. Each year until his death in 1910, William James would write to his friends in the Boston intelligentsia, asking that they make a financial contribution to help support Peirce. Peirce showed his gratitude for this remarkable gesture of friendship by adding "Santiago," "Saint James" in Spanish, to his full name (Skagestad 1981).

Works

Peirce's reputation is mostly based on a number of academic papers published in fairly obscure American scholarly journals. These papers form most of the content of the eight volumes of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, published between 1931 and 1958. ("CP x.y" refers to paragraph y in volume x of this edition.) In Peirce's day, one made a name in philosophy by publishing monographs on the subject, which he never did. Nor did he ever lay out systematically his thoughts on mathematics and logic. His only book was a short technical monograph on astronomy, the Photometric Researches of 1878, little noted. While at Johns Hopkins, he edited a book containing chapters by himself and his graduate students, called Studies in Logic (1883). He was also a frequent book reviewer and contributor to the Nation; this journalism is reprinted in Peirce (1975-), edited by Ketner and Cook.

Harvard University acquired the papers found in Peirce's study soon after his death, but did not microfilm them until 1964. Richard Robin's catalog [1] of these manujscripts was published only in 1967. Only then did it become clear that Peirce had left approximately 1650 unpublished manuscripts, totalling 80,000 pages and still largely unpublished. Because the Collected Papers are seriously incomplete (as well as flawed in other ways), a critical Peirce edition, organized chronologically, was begun in the 1970s. To date, six of a planned 31 volumes have appeared [2]. ("Wx:y" refers to page y of volume x of this edition.)

Peirce's philosophy

Peirce was a working scientist rather than a professional philosopher. 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. William James, among others, deemed two of Peirce's papers "The Fixation of Belief" (1877) and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878) as being the origin of pragmatism. Unlike James and some later pragmatists, e.g., 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.

Peirce's writings bear on an wide array of disciplines, including astronomy, metrology, geodesy, mathematics, logic, philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, linguistics, economics, and psychology. His work on these subjects has become the subject of renewed interest and approval. This revival is inspired not only by Peirce's anticipations of recent scientific developments but also by his demonstration of how philosophy can be applied effectively 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 his Principia Mathematica fails to mention Peirce.) Karl Popper viewed him as "one of the greatest philosophers of all times."

Peirce's accomplishments were slow to be recognized. His contemporaries William James and Josiah Royce were admirers, but to little effect. Once they died, Cassius Keyser at Columbia and Morris Raphael 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 studies. 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, 1969) and Thomas Goudge (1950), the 1952 edited volume by Wiener and Young, and the manifold work of Max Fisch, reprinted in Fisch (1986). The Charles Sanders Peirce Society was founded in 1946; its Transactions, an academic journal specializing in Peirciana, has appeared since 1965.

Pragmatism

Peirce's pragmatism may be understood as a method of sorting out conceptual confusions by linking the meaning of concepts to their operational / practical consequences. This pragmatism bears no resemblance to "vulgar" pragmatism, which misleadingly connotes a ruthless and Machiavellian search for mercenary or political advantage. Rather, Peirce sought an objectively verifiable method to test the truth of knowledge, one going beyond the foundational alternatives of: 1) deduction from absolute truths/rationalism or 2) induction from observable phenomena/empiricism. His approach is often confused with the latter form of foundationalism, but is distinct from it by virtue of the:

  • 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.

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.

Abductive Reasoning (abduction)

Much of Peirce's work deals with the scientific and logical questions of truth, and knowledge, questions grounded in his experience as a working logician and experimental scientist, one who was a member of the international community of scientists and thinkers of his day. He made important contributions to deductive logic (see below), but was primarily interested in the logic of science and specifically in what he called abduction or "hypothesis," 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.

In his "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" (W3: 325-26), Peirce gave the following classic example of how abduction nests with classical deductive and inductive reasoning. We posit the following three statements:

Rule = "All the beans from this bag are white."

Case = "These beans are from this bag."

Result = "These beans are white."

Let any two of these statements be Givens (their order not mattering); the remaining statement is the Conclusion. The result is an argument, of which three kinds are possible:

Deduction Induction Abduction
Given Rule Case Rule
Given Case Result Result
Conclusion Result Rule Case

Deduction encompasses, of course, the classical syllogism.

The Scholastic Realist

Peirce’s confession to being a “scholastic realist of a somewhat extreme stripe” (CP 5.470) is well known and baffles many. He is generally seen as an idealist (“reality” = “the object of the final opinion of the scientific community”), and so to the casual reader this confession makes little sense. This confusion can be quickly cleared up by noting that scholastic realism is one side of the realist / nominalist debate over universals, and not a position in the realist / idealist debate over a mind-independent reality (to which Peirce sided with the idealists). Peirce’s scholastic realism in fact supplies essential support for his better-known idealism regarding mind-independent reality.

In his first remarks on the realist / nominalist debate, Peirce sided with nominalism:

Qualities are fictions; for though it is true that roses are red, yet redness is nothing, but a fiction framed for the purpose of philosophizing; yet harmless so long as we remember that the scholastic realism it implies is false. (W1:307, May-Fall 1865)

Here Peirce—-in no uncertain terms—-disowns scholastic realism. So how does this square with his later confession to be a scholastic realist? The temptation is to explain this discontinuity by the dates of the statements in question: since Peirce asserted nominalism in 1865, but was clearly a scholastic realist in 1867, Peirce must have shifted from denying realism to asserting it. This standard explanation is that of Max Fisch, in his essay titled “Peirce’s Progress from Nominalism toward Realism,” and again in his Introduction to Vol. 2 of the Indiana edition. In both cases, Fisch portrays Peirce as having begun (at age 15!) as a nominalist, but then coming to adopt stronger and stronger versions of realism as his philosophy developed. Eventually, Fisch tells us, Peirce became the “extreme” scholastic realist of his famed 1905 confession.

Robert Lane (2004) has recently challenged this received understanding of the evolution of Peirce's views, pointing to two instances where Peirce’s self assessment of his own intellectual development contradicts the orthodox understanding due to Fisch. The clearest contradiction is an 1893 remark where Peirce wrote that “never, during the thirty years in which I have been writing on philosophical questions, have I failed in my allegiance to realistic opinions and to certain Scotistic ideas.” (CP 6.605) This remark leads Lane to re-evaluate Peirce’s 1865 statements and find that a better way to explain Peirce’s change from outspoken nominalist to outspoken realist is not by reading into Peirce a change in his philosophical position, but instead to see that between 1865 and 1867, Peirce changed what he understood by “Scholastic realism”. Before 1867, Peirce took a universal as existing out in the world; as an object that could be set next to a clock and a desk and counted. This is the position Peirce would later re-title “platonic nominalism”. Here is Peirce explaining scholastic realism in 1865:

It has been said that these “abstract names” [blueness, hardness, and loudness] denote qualities and connote nothing. But it seems to me the phrase “denoted object” is nothing but a roundabout expression for a thing…. To say that a quality is denoted is to say it is a thing…. [Such terms] were framed at a time when all men were realists in the scholastic sense and consequently things were meant by them, entities which had no quality but that expressed by the word. They, therefore, must denote these things and connote the qualities they relate to. (W1:311-312)

When Peirce goes on to call universals “fictions,” he is not condemning their truth; he is simply asserting that they do not exist as particulars. This becomes clearer when in the same paper Peirce argues against psychologism in logic by establishing the same “fictional” status for logic and mathematics as he is claiming for universals. Now by proving logic “fictional,” Peirce thinks he is doing logic a favor; saving it from the hands of the psychologists. This suggests that Peirce meant something very peculiar by “fictional”.

Many things Peirce’s pre-1867 use of the word “fictional” covered (including universals), became covered in his post-1867 use of the word “real”. Peirce had been using “fictional” as a contrasting status held by something that does not exist as a physical object, but did not intend it to imply that something did not possess the ability of being correctly or incorrectly believed. At least by 1867 Peirce had changed his mind on "reality", and instead held that "fictional" contrasted with independent on what we think about it (real). Existence as a physical object was no longer a prerequisite for being real, so that universals' lacking physical existence no longer drove Peirce to call them fictional.

The Semeiotic

Peirce was one of two founders of semiotics (the other being Ferdinand de Saussure). Semiotics is the science of signs, for which Peirce's preferred term was "semeiotic." He 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).

Peirce's semeiotic can be summarized by the following 3x3 table.

Representamen Object Interpretant
Firstness Qualisign Icon Term/word
Secondness Sinsign Index Proposition/sentence
Thirdness Legisign Symbol Argument/text

Peirce's began writing on the semeiotic in the 1860s, proposing the triadic relation described in the first paragraph of this section. He revisited his semeiotic intermittently over his entire life, renaming key concepts several times and altering the definitions of key terms. His final system consisted of 59,049 possible elements and relations. One reason for such a high number is that he allowed each interpretant to act as a sign, thereby creating a new signifying relation. He never wrote a definitive treatment of his semeiotic. His correspondence (Hardwick 2001) with Victoria Welby, 1903-1912, contains much bearing on his mature views. Also see his unpublished 1894 essay "What Is a Sign?". Liszka (1996) is an earnest attempt at a coherent exposition of the semeiotic. Also see Deledalle (2000).

Logic

Peirce made major discoveries in formal logic:

A philosophy of logic, grounded in his categories and semeiotic, can be extracted from Peirce's writings. This philosophy, as well as Peirce's logical work more generally, is ably exposited and defended in the Introduction to Houser et al (1997), Hilary Putnam (1982), and [3]

Peirce admired Georg Cantor, was admired by Ernst Schröder (the sentiment was not reciprocated) and William Kingdon Clifford, wrote a dismissive review of Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics, and was apparently ignorant of Frege's work, despite their rival achievements in logic, philosophy of language and the foundations of mathematics.

Parallels with Leibniz

Given the range and depth of his achievements, it would be tempting to conclude that Peirce's polymathy is unique in the history of ideas, but such is not the case: there are striking parallels between Peirce and the 17th century German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, of which Peirce had some awareness (the scope of Leibniz's achievement was not as well appreciated in Peirce's day as in ours). Both men were mathematicians, logicians, natural scientists, historians, philosophers of language and mind, and metaphysicians. Both were fascinated by semiotics and mathematical notation, and the interplay between philosophy and mathematics. Both were realists in their metaphysics, and surprisingly friendly to at least parts of scholastic thought (e.g., Peirce admired Duns Scotus). The ideas of both men underwent oversimplification in the hands of others, and were little appreciated for some time after their deaths. Leibniz differed from Peirce mainly in his freedom from financial difficulties, and his passionate Christianity.

Both published few books but many articles, and left voluminous writings. much of which remain unpublished as the critical editions of the works of both men are far from complete (although Leibniz's is further along). The secondary literature on both men mostly dates from the end of WWII. Leibniz's correspondence, consisting of about 15,000 items, has no parallel in Peirce.

References

  • Primary
    • C. S. Peirce, 1885, "On the algebra of logic", American Journal of Mathematics 7: 202. Reprinted in vol. 4 of Writings and in Ewald, W. ed., (1996) A Source Book in the History of Mathematics, 2 vols. Oxford Uni. Press.
    • C. S. Peirce, 1931-35, 1958. The Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce. Harvard Uni. Press. Vols. 1-6 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; Arthur Burks edited Vols. 7,8. Vol. 1 available on-line at [4]. All 8 vols. can be purchased on CD-ROM at [5].
    • Eisele, Carolyn, ed., 1976. The New Elements of Mathematics, 4 Vols. The Hague: Mouton.
    • C. S. Peirce, 1982-. Writings of C. S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. Various editors. Indiana University Press. This edition in progress meets the standards of the Modern Language Association for critical editions.
    • C. S. Peirce, 1975-. C. S. Peirce: Contributions to the Nation in 4 vols. Compiled and annotated by K L Ketner and J E Cook. Texas Tech Press.
    • Ketner, K. L., and Putnam, H., eds., 1992. Reason and the Logic of Things. Harvard Uni. Press. Being the text of an 1898 series of lectures Peirce gave in Cambridge MA, at the invitation of William James.
    • Houser, N. et al eds., 1992, 1998. The Essential Peirce, 2 vols. Indiana Uni. Press.
    • Hardwick, C. S. ed., 2001. Semiotic and Significs: the Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, 2nd ed. Texas Tech Uni. Press. 1st ed., 1977, Indiana Uni. Press.
    • Peirce writings available on-line.
  • Secondary
    • Brent, Joseph, 1998. Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life. Revised and enlarged edition. Indiana Uni. Press. The only extant biography.
    • Chiasson, Phyllis, 2001. Peirce's Pragmatism. The Design for Thinking. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
    • Debrock, Guy, 1992. "Peirce, a Philosopher for the 21st Century. Introduction." Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society 28: 1-18.
    • Deledalle, Gerard, 2000. C. S. Peirce's Philosophy of Signs. Indiana Uni. Press.
    • Fisch, Max, 1986. Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism. Indiana Uni. Press.
    • Houser, Nathan, Roberts, D. D., and Van Evra, J., eds., 1997. Studies in the Logic of C. S. Peirce. Indiana University Press.
    • Hookway, Christopher, 1985. Peirce. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
    • Kirkham, Richard, 1995. Theories of Truth. MIT Press.
    • Lane, Robert, 2004. "On Peirce's Early Realism," Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society 40: 575-605.
    • Liszka, J. J., 1996. A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of C.S. Peirce. Indiana University Press.
    • Menand, Louis, 2001. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0374199639, (paperback ISBN 0374528497). Biography of Pierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, and John Dewey.
    • Murphey, Murray, 1961. The Development of Peirce's Thought. Harvard University Press.
    • Parker, Kelly, A., 1998. The Continuity of Peirce's Thought. Vanderbilt University Press.
    • Walker Percy, 2000. Signposts in a Strange Land'.' Samway, P, ed. Saint Matin's Press: 271-91.
    • Hilary Putnam, 1982. 'Peirce the Logician'. Historia Mathematica 9: 290-301. Reprinted in Putnam, H., 1990. Realism with a Human Face. Harvard University Press: 252-60.
    • Robin, Richard, 1967. Annotated Catalog of the Papers of C. S. Peirce. University of Massachussetts Press. [6]
    • Skagestad, Peter, 1981. The Road of Inquiry, Charles Peirce's Pragmatic Realism. Columbia University Press.
    • Wennerberg, Hjalmar, 1962. The Pragmatism of C.S. Peirce: An Analytical Study. Lund, Sweden: Gleerup.
    • Wiener, Philip, and Young, Frederick, eds., 1952. Studies in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce. Harvard Uni. Press.
    • Writings about Peirce available on-line.

See also

External links

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