Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is considered to be among the half dozen most important philosophers the United States has produced. The Charles S. Peirce Sesquicentennial International Congress opened at Harvard University on September 5, 1989 and concluded on the 10th - Peirce's birthday. The Congress was host to approximately 450 scholars from 26 different nations. Papers concerning Peirce's philosophy of science were given at the Congress by representatives from Italy, France, Sweden, Finland, Korea, India, (...) Denmark, Greece, Brazil, Belgium, Spain, Germany, and the United States. The present volume is a compilation of some of the papers that were presented at that Congress. (shrink)

Peirce, Ch. S. Die Festlegung einer Überzeugung.--Peirce, Ch. S. Was heisst Pragmatismus?--James, W. Der Wille zum Glauben.--James, W. Der Wahrheitsbegriff des Pragmatismus.--Schiller, F. C. S. Humanismus.--Dewey, J. Pragmatismus und Pädagogik.

Translation of C.S. Peirce, "How to Make our Ideas Clear".

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method (...) over other methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

: Once cast aside as of no value, Charles S. Peirce manuscript 1570 "The First of Six Lessons . . ." and its context, provides uniquely valuable access to Peirce's religious practice (as distinct from his theology). Chronically unemployed, Peirce seized an opportunity to put in a bid for a vacant post in elocution at the Episcopal Church's major (and only "official") theological seminary, The General Theological Seminary in New York City. Peirce had on occasion (...) appealed to nearby members of the Episcopalian hierarchy seeking patronage for his scholarly work—to no avail. In this case, however, he was encouraged and aided by the current scholarly vicar of his own parish. The incumbent had pursued advanced education abroad and was also active in the seminary's affairs. And, of course, Peirce was confident about his expertise in elocution, which "General's" Dean claimed as well. Both the contextual narrative and the substantive theological content of his "lesson" are a rich resource for insights into the much vexed (if too often muddled) question of his lifelong commitment to a faith stemming from his earlier conversion to trinitarianism. (shrink)

C.S. Peirce was a scientist and philosopher best known as the earliest proponent of pragmatism. An influential and polymathic thinker, Peirce is among the greatest of American minds. His thought was a seminal influence on William James, his life long friend, and John Dewey, his one time student. James and Dewey went on to popularize pragmatism thereby achieving what Peirce’s inability to gain lasting academic employment prevented him from doing. A life long practitioner of science, Peirce (...) applied scientific principles to philosophy but his understanding and admiration of Kant also colored his work. Peirce was analytic and scientific, devoted to logical and scientific rigor, and an architectonic philosopher in the mold of Kant or Aristotle. His best-known theories, pragmatism and the account of inquiry, are both scientific and experimental but form part of a broad architectonic scheme. Long considered an eccentric figure whose contribution to pragmatism was to provide its name and whose importance was as an influence upon James and Dewey, Peirce’s significance in his own right is now largely accepted. (shrink)

With Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotical theory two different kinds of creative metaphorical reasoning in science can be identified. The building of remainder metaphors is especially important for creating new scientific models. We show that the conveyor belt metaphor provides an excellent example for Peirce's theory. The conveyor belt metaphor has recently been invented in order to describe the oceanic transport system. The paradigm of the oceanic conveyor belt strongly influenced the geoscience community and the climate change discussion.

This review of books by Niemoczynski and Robinson considers how semiotic processes of consciousness posited by Pierce yield insights into experiences usually categorized as religious. For Niemoczynski, consciousness experiences iconic representation and then disruptions of it. Conscious responds to such disruptions by means of abduction, and this is the seed of transcendence. Niemoczynski develops these processes with attention to Schelling, Heidegger, Deleuze, Corrington, and Badiou. Turning to Robinson's book, we find a deep inquiry into trinitarian logic that considers early work (...) of Christian philosophers in relation to Peirce's new list of categories: firstness, secondness, and thirdness. While both books appear to seek new frontiers of naturalism, Robinson's work is notable for its engagement with an emerging field of biosemiotics. (shrink)

In 1898 C. S. Peirce declares that the medieval doctrine of consequences had been the starting point of his logical investigations in the 1860s. This paper shows that Peirce studied the scholastic theory of consequentiae as early as 1866–67, that he adopted the scholastics’ terminology, and that that theory constituted a source of logical doctrine that sustained Peirce for a lifetime of creative and original work.

Le philosophe américain Charles S. Peirce ne trouva, malgré ses efforts, guère d’interlocuteurs en France. On le considéra comme un mathématicien et logicien, un physicien et un psychologue fiable, mais son œuvre philosophique fut systématiquement distordue au gré des controverses franco-françaises. Nous mettons l’accent sur les lectures d’André Lalande et de Louis Couturat qui contribuèrent néanmoins à faire reconnaître en France l’originalité du père du pragmaticisme.Despite his efforts, the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce found hardly any (...) interlocutors in France. He was considered mostly as a mathematician and logician, a physicist and a reliable psychologist, but his philosophical work was systematically distorted in consequence of “Franco-French” disputes. We emphasize here the readings of André Lalande and Louis Couturat who made significant contributions towards the recognition in France of the originality of the founding father of Pragmaticism. (shrink)

C.S. Peirce, the American philosopher and a principal figure in the development of the modern study of semiotics, struggled, mostly during his later years, to work out a systematic method for classifying sciences. By doing this, he hoped to define more clearly the various tasks of these sciences by showing how their individual effects are interrelated and how these effects, considered in their interrelations, establish pragmatic meanings for each individual science. Much of his work was centered on the meaning (...) and function of logic in relation to other areas of human knowledge. By rightly defining the work of logic, Peirce argued, the work of the other sciences could be pursued with more rigorous reasoning. Beverley Kent closely examines the published and unpublished writings of Peirce and carefully attends to the chronological development of his systems of classification; she thereby shows for the first time in the scholarly literature how seeming contradictions in Peirce's evolving classification are really part of an increasingly clear position. Logic, Peirce came to understand, is actually dependent on ethics and aesthetics for its principles. Kent shows how Peirce's working out of the classification of logic in relation to other sciences is a clue to the significant differences between his early and late philosophy and, perhaps even more important, to a reading of his more general claims for a philosophy of "pragmaticism." This work will be of interest to readers of Peirce and American philosophy, to historians of logic and semiotics, and to those more generally interested in the history of systems of knowledge-classification. (shrink)

In this paper, I situate C.S. Peirce's theory of knowledge and action in comparison to Chinese philosophy. My argument is that the comparison makes it important to understand Peirce's abduction and his maxim as a much more potent force in comparative philosophy. Peirce's priority of practical effects over theory is similar to Confucian conceptions of truth and action. Jon Alan Schmidt has summarized sixty-one formulations of Peirce's maxim, from which I draw the four main expressions of (...) the maxim here. According to Peirce, understanding the meaning of concepts in terms of actual effects is the core element of the maxim. This view can be seen as an echo in Wang Yangming's theory of the unity of knowledge and action. The theory is essentially a moral humanist philosophy. It integrates morality, ethics, and politics. It is similar to Peirce's pragmatic maxim, as James Liszka has explained. Finally, reflecting on the recent studies of Peirce's semiotics in China, I discuss the significance of Peirce's pragmatism in Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

Almeder's book is a substantive contribution both to Peirce scholarship and to contemporary analytic epistemology. The great strength of The Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce is its engagement of Peirce's later thought with current issues in the foundation of knowledge and the philosophy of science. Almeder brings Peirce's ideas to bear on positions held by Quine, Sellars, Rescher, Hintikka, Scheffler, Popper, Feyerabend, and Russell and in so doing makes Peirce this group's contemporary and, in (...) most cases, its philosophical better. In addition, Almeder provides a rather sophisticated defense of epistemological realism, a defense broadly Peircean but supplemented considerably by Almeder's own friendly arguments. (shrink)

The American novelist Walker Percy (1916-90) considered himself a "thief of Peirce", because he found in the views of C.S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, an alternative approach to prevailing reductionist theories in order to understand what we human beings are and what the peculiar nature of our linguistic activity is. -/- This paper describes, quoting widely from Percy, how abduction is the spontaneous activity of our reason by which we couple meanings and experience in our linguistic expressions. (...) This coupling of personal creativity and cultural tradition makes it possible to bridge the gaps between persons and cultures. (shrink)

In this article we wish to share the work in which the Group of Peirce Studies of the University of Navarra has been involved since 2007: the study of a very interesting part of the extensive correspondence of Charles S. Peirce, specifically, his European letters. Peirce wrote some of these letters over the course of his five trips to Europe (between 1870 and 1883), and wrote others to the many European scientists and intellectuals he communicated with (...) over the course of his life. The translation of those letters has been an excellent practical example of the creative and abductive nature of translation, as well as of the cooperative character of research. Translating Peirce's letters has allowed us a deep study of some theoretical aspects, and at the same time it has permitted us to work creatively and cooperatively to enrich the common vision of this scientist and philosopher. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beastly Vagueness in Charles Sanders Peirce and Henry JamesMegan M. QuigleyIn 1878, Charles Sanders Peirce closed the first section of "How to Make our Ideas Clear"—an article that William James later declared a "birth certificate of Pragmatism"—on a strangely anecdotal note.1 Using what would become known as the pragmatic method to demolish the notion of Grand Ideas ("Our idea of anything is our idea of (...) its sensible effects"), Peirce also included a lesson from an "old German story":Many a man has cherished for years some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some morning to find it gone, cleaned vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of his life gone with it. I have myself known such a man.(WCSP, p. 261)The story of the fled Melusina (a half-woman, half-serpent who gives birth to monsters) acts ostensibly as a warning against the danger inherent in "vague" ideas. "A vague shadow of an idea" can sap the life-blood out of a young man and, therefore, Peirce asserted, we must strive to be clear. But Peirce's anecdote did more than further his argument; it was an autobiographical aside—so personal, in fact, that he ordered the passage to be deleted in all future printings of his essay.Melusina was not just an allusion to a mythological figure; it was also a reference to the middle name of his wife, Harriet Melusina Fay. Since his schooldays, Peirce's friend and, later, wife, whom he called [End Page 362] "Zina," had been his constant companion and even the scribe for his fervent aspirations. Under the title "Theories of C. S. Peirce, 1854" she had transcribed his ambitious declaration: "My life is built upon a theory: and if this theory turns out false, my life will turn out a failure" (Brent, p. 51). By the mid 1870s, Peirce's theory, "passionately loved... his companion by day and by night," was finally being elucidated in his articles; however, Melusina herself had "cleaned vanished away," after two decades of intimacy, leaving Peirce in Paris to what his friend Henry James described as "a very lonely and dreary existence." Peirce's inclusion of an anecdote about his own loneliness—"I have myself known such a man"—is poignant even as it reveals his anger. Melusina is both a monster and "beautiful," and with her disappearance, Peirce has lost, "the essence of his life." The personal allusion also highlights the anxiety in the young Peirce's writing. What if his theories came to nothing, remained merely vague, and he lost his whole life and his wife to a misguided dedication? And how ironic would that be given that the idea itself aimed to explode the fallacy of grand ideas? Such an irony was not lost on his main companion during the winter of 1875, Henry James.In the following pages I aim to demonstrate that Charles S. Peirce's anxiety acted as a germ for the beast of John Marcher in James's late story, "The Beast in the Jungle." "More than any of Henry James's tales," Paul Lindholdt writes, "'The Beast in the Jungle,' has prompted source studies and psychoanalytic discussions by critics striving to identify" John Marcher.2 Eager to diagnose the relationship between Marcher and May Bartram, critics have sought both autobiographical and literary sources for Marcher's character.3 Strangely, however, no one has noted the connection between Peirce and Marcher, an omission that is especially odd given the critical attention directed at the relationship between the story and pragmatism. Since Richard Hocks's Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought highlighted the pragmatic tendencies of James's story and called Marcher the "anti-pragmatist" hero, "an epitome of William's... (shrink)

None of Peirce's most recent interpreters fall clearly into only one of these classes. All are expositors, critics, and innovators. Yet their emphases differ, and the classification serves to highlight them. W. B. Gallie, for instance, is mainly interested in introducing the general reader to the broadest line of Peirce's thought on pragmatism. He does this appreciatively, with skillful fluency. Yet he also advances a critical thesis about the meanings Peirce gave to "pragmatism," and he tests the (...) compatibility of Peirce's metaphysical and logical writings with suggestive results. Manley Thompson's book has, on the other hand, a more formal cast throughout. It is "offered as an essential propaedeutic to the determination of Peirce's place in the history of ideas". With closest care it traces the development of Peirce's pragmatic philosophy, setting out an ordered, definitive statement of what Peirce said, driving finally to a brief evaluation of the whole philosophy in which the pragmatic maxim is a principle. Lastly, the Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce contains essays of all three emphases: there are biographical, historical, and elucidating essays; there are critical ones that quibble to distraction and critical ones that excite to construction; and finally, there are a few that go through Peirce to continue inquiry on topics in ethics, logic, and metaphysics. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life. Joseph Brent; The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. John Patrick Diggins; Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy. Carl R. Hausman; Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science: Papers from the Harvard Sesquicentennial Congress. Edward C. Moore; Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898. Charles Sanders Peirce, Kenneth Laine Ketner; Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A (...) Chronological Edition. Volume 5: 1884-1886. Charles Sanders Peirce, Christian J. W. Kloesel. (shrink)

The editor of this book has put together here a very manageable selection from the published articles of C. S. Peirce and has prefaced it with his own very fine 42-page introduction. Being published articles, these have the advantages of being those which Peirce himself thought to be complete. Moreover, they are also thus able to be arranged chronologically and topically. This Moore does by including articles which fall into four major groups: 1) On epistemology, from The Journal (...) of Speculative Philosophy, 1868; 2) On Peirce’s early pragmatism and on the nature of scientific inquiry, from Popular Science Monthly, 1873-1878; 3) On Peirce’s basic metaphysics, from The Monist, 1891-1893; and 4) On his later pragmatism, from The Monist, 1905-1906. In his introduction, the editor summarizes and interrelates some of the key questions in Peirce’s philosophy and in these writings—questions on the nature of potentiality, the validity of the process of scientific inquiry, and the problem of the definition of concepts. Much of this treatment revolves around Peirce’s grappling with the key problem of the nature of universals. In the medieval dispute between the extreme realists and the nominalists, Peirce takes a middle moderate realist position, "that the referent of a concept is to be found in the experience of a specific object". On either of the other views, scientific knowledge would be impossible. (shrink)

A naturalistic approach to expert-identification begins by asking, ‘how do novices pick out putative experts?’ Alvin Goldman and Elizabeth Anderson, representing a fairly common approach, consider agents’ psychological biases as well as social situatedness. As good as this is, culture’s role in shaping cognitive mechanisms is neglected. An explanatory framework that works well to accommodate culturally-sensitive mechanisms is Peircean semiotics. His triadic approach holds that signs signify objects to interpreters. Applying the triadic model to expert-identification: novices interpret signs of expertise (...) as pointing to particular experts. The main advantage of the framework is that it is significantly more nuanced than the Goldman-Anderson model in describing how agents identify experts. It explicitly accommodates cultural and agential differences in expert-identification. It also explicitly admits the possibility of rational disagreement in assessment of evidence for expertise. But these advantages come at a cost. Namely, it’s difficult in theory – as well as practice – to make one’s way into the semiotic system of someone from another culture to help guide them away from fraudulent experts. Even so, it’s a trade-off worth making since it organizes relevant details for expert-identification, which is a first step in sketching a better normative theory. (shrink)

C.S. Peirce considera la abducción como una de las tres inferencias, que junto con la deducción y la inducción, son necesarias para la obtención del conocimiento científico. El presente artículo tiene como fin establecer la evolución del concepto de abducción, su lógica y su psicología, así como las críticas realizadas por R.N. Hanson a este concepto y a la apagogé aristotélica.

The aim of this article is to describe in some detail the actual relationship between Charles S. Peirce and Alfred N. Whitehead, paying particular attention to the Peircean notions of science and metaphysics, with the conviction that this contrast can help to understand better the scope and depth of C. S. Peirce’s thought.

Abstract.Stuart Kauffman's proposal in Investigations to ground a “general biology” in the laws of self‐organization governing systems of autonomous agents runs up against the methodological problem of how to integrate formal mathematical with semantic and semiotic approaches to the study of evolutionary development. Gilles Deleuze's concept of the virtual and C. S. Peirce's system of existential graphs provide a theoretical framework and practical art for answering this problem of method by modeling the creative event of collective self‐organization as both (...) represented and practiced in the scientific community. (shrink)

Bon nombre des écrits les plus originaux, et les plus méconnus, de Peirce concernent un sujet à première vue plus intéressant pour le gestionnaire de la recherche ou l'économiste que pour le philosophe, fût-il pragmatiste : l'optimisation de la recherche scientifique. Comment trouver une stratégie rationnelle permettant d'arriver à des résultats scientifiques intéressants plus vite et à un moindre coût ? Défait, c'est une nouvelle discipline que fonde en 1878, dans la discrétion, l'ingénieur du Coast Survey du Massachusetts nommé (...) Charles Sanders Peirce, plus connu aujourd'hui comme l'inventeur du pragmatisme. Son continuateur contemporain le plus notable est le philosophe américain Nicolas Rescher qui, dans Le Progrès scientifique entre autres, montre bien le déploiement de ce type de recherches au XX e siècle. (shrink)

The new volumes look like the earlier ones. The paper and the binding, except for a slight difference in the red, are about the same. So is the typography--though the print line has been made a little longer. The volumes are shorter than all but one of the first six. They do not have any photographs. But otherwise, in appearance, they are uniform with the others.

Drawing on the legacy of prominent pragmatic philosophers and political economists—C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and John R. Commons—Charles W. Anderson creatively brings pragmatism and liberalism together, striving to temper the excesses of both and to fashion a broader vision of the proper domain of political reason.

This is my review of Ludwig Nagel's short, German introduction to the thought of C. S. Peirce. The book was published by Campus Verlag in 1992.