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Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-12-09T01:29:02Z

ForNow: /* Further reading */ found typo

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914)<ref> pronounced "purse"</ref> was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and [[polymath]]<ref> He wrote important essays on logic, pragmatism, metaphysics, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, and chemistry. He also wrote on psychology, early English and classical Greek pronunciation, psychical research, criminology, the history of science, ancient history, Egyptology, and Napoleon, prepared a thesaurus and an editor's manual, and did translations from Latin and German.</ref> [[William James]] and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder.<ref> Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.</ref> From 1879 to 1884 he was a lecturer at the new graduate university, Johns Hopkins. There he taught logic to Christine Ladd-Franklin and to [[John Dewey]], who became a leader of the liberal wing of pragmatism. Peirce himself was quite conservative when it came to social and economic issues.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Career==
Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor and the nation's leading mathematician. Benjamin especially taught Charles how to solve increasingly complex math and logic problems. He graduated from Harvard College in 1859 with mediocre grades; he later earned degrees in chemistry and biology with distinction. He became a research scientist with the United States Coast Survey, 1861-1891, doing research on gravity. At the same time he taught and did research at Harvard in logic and astronomy.

He suffered from an early age from trigeminal or "facial" neuralgia, an extremely painful condition. Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, ill-tempered, and lazy. Lazy he was not, but the other personality traits only worsened and prevented him from securing a permanent faculty appointment anywhere, a cause defeated by his opponents' reporting to potential academic employers the fact of his having lived with his future second wife Juliette while still married to his first. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and second wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania, an area which attracted him because it was a watering hole for captains of industry<ref>See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in ''First Things'', 1993, [http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5203 online edition].</ref>. There he built a house which he called Arisbe, where he hoped to have intellectual guests regularly from New York City, and which he and Juliette continued to expand even during the poverty from which they never finally escaped. He wrote many articles for periodicals, over 300 during his lifetime for ''The Nation'', and for dictionaries<ref>Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the ''Century Dictionary'' ([http://www.global-language.com/century/ online edition]) and Baldwin's ''Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology'' (online editions [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/ here] and [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/concepts/browse?source=Baldwin here])</ref> and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.

==Logic==
In logic Peirce was the first American to take up [[George Boole]]'s program to find the mathematical laws of logic--a program that began modern logic. Peirce made numerous major contributions from 1866 to 1914. His technical papers of 1867 to 1885 established him as the greatest formal logician in the world, and the most influential in the period from Boole to Ernst Schroeder. Peirce's papers were extremely difficult, but Schroeder explicated them and they became well known in the field.

Peirce radically modified, extended, and transformed Boolean algebra, making it applicable to propositions, relations, probability, and arithmetic. Following De Morgan, Peirce laid the foundations of the logic of relations, the key technique for the logical analysis of mathematics. He invented the copula symbol of inclusion, the most important symbol in the logic of classes. Peirce invented two new logical algebras, two new systems of logical graphs, discovered the link between the logic of classes and the logic of propositions, was the first to give the fundamental principle for the logical development of mathematics, and made fundamental contributions to probability theory, induction, statistics, and the logic of scientific methodology. Peirce wrote an elaborate book on advanced logic but could not get it published.

==Pragmatism==
Peirce was the creator if "Pragmatism;" it emerged from his many discussions in Cambridge at a "metaphysical club" founded in the 1870s. Most influential on peirce were [[Chauncey Wright]], a philosopher; [[William James]], Peirce's lifelong friend and benefactor; and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer and follower of utilitarian philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]] who interpreted doctrines in terms of their effect upon social life. Peirce began reading philosophy and by 1871 he was converted to the version of realism originally propounded by medieval philosopher [[Duns Scotus]]. Peirce remained a realist in philosophy all his life, eventually embracing realism not only about generals or universals but also about modalities such as possibility and necessity. His first major statement of Pragmatism appeared in ''Popular Science Monthly'' in January 1878, under the title "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."<ref> see [http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; ''Popular Science Monthly'' 12 (January 1878), 286-302]</ref>

In 1898 William James first publicly used the term "pragmatism" and acknowledged Peirce's priority. Peirce's pragmatism, however, is not the same as James's; it has more in common with the somewhat independently developed idealism of [[Josiah Royce]] and the later views of John Dewey. Peirce shared many of the views characteristic of the pragmatic school, developing them in his own fashion. He believed in the dependence of logic on ethics, argued as early as 1868 against individualism and egoism, and developed social theories of reality and logic. At the same time he believed that the development of business methods should be left to business without law's interference.<ref>See the 1910 quote from Peirce in the third section of "Pragmatism and American Democracy: An Elective Affinity Analysis" by Norbert Wiley, presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, 2003, [http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/pragmatism/wiley_pragma_demo.html online edition].</ref> He believed and argued that logic precedes metaphysics, and that metaphysicians failing to appreciate that precedence have always barred the way to inquiry.<ref>See for example "F.R.L." (First Rule of Logic), 1899 manuscript, not to be confused with another piece given that title. Published in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 1, paragraphs 135-140, [http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/frl_99.htm online edition].</ref>

Peirce held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>.

Pragmatism allows ideas to have any origin; what matters is not where we got an idea from but where we can go with it. In the case of science the usefulness of an idea includes reliability and fruitfulness. "Fruitfulness" does not mean practical utility but, rather, the opening up of original lines of successful research, what mathematicians nowadays call fecundity. As reliability is to truth, so fruitfulness is to depth and breadth of understanding. The test of truth and fruitfulness lies in the future. Truth, for the pragmatist, depends on our developing the implications of ideas so that we can find ways of applying them experimentally.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Semiotics==
Peirce's work in logic established the foundation for yet another branch of study, semiotics, which would not flourish until 40 years after his death. The discipline of semiotics studies how information, in the form of language or any other type of communication (music, painting, etc.), is transmitted and received. In Peirce's formulation, signs are presented not only by culture but also by nature (reactions, natural semblances, etc.) and logic (abstract ideas are signs), and there is a triangular relationship between sign, object, and interpretant. A sign represents a particular thing or idea which is being communicated (the object). A sign's object is either immediate to the sign, that is, the object as represented by the sign, or is a dynamic object, the object as it really is, even if fictional such as Rip Van Winkle. An interpretant is a sign's effect that amounts to a further sign, for instance a quality of impression (an immediate interpretant, immediate to the sign) which the sign is suited to produce, or an actually resulting interpretation (a dynamic interpretant) such as a translation, state of agitation, or forming of an idea in an interpreter's mind; or a kind of ideal or norm (a final or normal interpretant), the conduct that would be produced if the sign were to be sufficiently interpreted.

The sign itself can take on three forms, an icon, an index, or a symbol. An icon directly resembles the object, regardless of factual connection to it (the object need not even exist) and regardless of interpretation (the resemblance is objective though relative to sight, intellect, etc.). An index represents through factual connection to the object; for example an ongoing effect such as smoke is an index of fire; the smoke need not resemble the fire, nor is its connection with fire a matter of interpretation. A symbol does depend on interpretation, and so it requires a dependable rule or habit of interpretation; that rule is essentially the symbol. A symbol represents the object by an interpretive norm or rule that may be logical, cultural, or even inborn but in any case without depending on resemblance or factual connection to the object. Written and spoken language therefore rely heavily on symbolic signs, in that a word's meaning must be understood by both the speaker and the listener in order for communication to take place. Designations such as proper names and words such as "this" Peirce usually considered to be indices. Peirce considered language as involving a mind's ability to supply mental indices and icons to accompany it. Peirce regarded diagrams as icons, and "All___is___" as a linguistic diagram, subject to logical transformations.

Peirce's ideas were highly influential on later linguistic scholars such as [[Noam Chomsky]], as well as on [[deconstruction|deconstructionists]] Jacques Derrida and Paul le Man. His ideas have also entered [[music theory]], in a separate branch known as musical semiotics. Leading exponents of this field include Wilson Coker, Robert Hatten, David Lidov, and V. Kofi Agawu.

==Further reading==
* Auspitz, Josiah Lee. "The Greatest Living American Philosopher." ''Commentary'' 1983 76(6): 51-64. 0010-2601 Calls Peirce a living philosopher because his ideas remain relevant [http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-greatest-living-american-philosopher-6781 online edition]
* Brent, Joseph. ''Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life'' (1998), 404pp; the standard biography [http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Sanders-Peirce-Joseph-Brent/dp/0253211611/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (2006), advanced [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ online]
* Haack, Susan. "Vulgar Rortyism" in ''The New Citerion'' (1997). Review of Louis Menand's ''Pragmatism: A Reader''. Opposed to Menand's and Rorty's views of Peirce. [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/rortyism-haack-3261 Online edition].
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.
* Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" ''Dictionary of American Biography'' (1935), [http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/weissbio.htm online edition].
===Specialized studies===
* Braude, Stephen E. "Peirce on the Paranormal". ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 1998 34(1): 203-224. 0009-1774 Looks at P's ideas 1887-1906 regarding telepathy, spiritualism, psychokinesis, postmortem survival, and miracles. [http://userpages.umbc.edu/~braude/pdfs_pubd/braude--Peirce%20on%20the%20Paranormal.pdf Online edition].
* Delaney, Cornelius. ''Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce'' (1993)
* Fisch, Max H. ''Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism.'' ed. by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel, Indiana U. Press, 1986. 464 pp.
* Hartman, Matthew. "Utopian Evolution: The Sentimental Critique of Social Darwinism in Bellamy and Peirce." ''Utopian Studies'' 1999 10(1): 26-41. 1045-991X Compares Peirce's essay "Evolutionary Love" (1893) with Edward Bellamy's utopian novel ''Looking Backward'' (1888), exploring the elevation of creative love over greed as agents of change. Both works were written in the utopian vein in response to the growing prominence of capitalist economic theory and [[Social Darwinism]] during the [[Gilded Age]]. [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7051/is_1_10/ai_n28758437/ Online edition]
* Hausman, Carl R. ''Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy'' (1993)
* Hoopes, James. ''Community Denied: The Wrong Turn of Pragmatic Liberalism'' (1998), argues for Peirce's view of pragmatism, which perceived an individual in terms of his relations with others, over James's and Dewey's "weak liberalism."
* Ketner, Kenneth Laine. ''His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce.'' Vanderbilt U. Pr., 1998. 420 pp.; this is a novel in which Ketner combines some actual documents with an imaginary reconstruction of P's life. [http://www.wyttynys.net/ Excerpt online]
* Leja, Michael. "Peirce, Visuality, and Art." ''Representations'' 2000 (72): 97-122. 0734-6018 Examines the visuality of his semiotics and the use of images and reflected meaning; based on drawings in Peirce's unpublished notes
* Locke, Gordon. "Peirce's Metaphysics: Evolution, Synechism, and the Mathematical Conception of the Continuum." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2000 36(1): 133-147. Explores his use of the mathematical concept of the continuum, an image he used to express the tightly packed connectedness of related concepts. His metaphysics of evolution depends completely on a continuum completely lacking inherent divisions, one that is "nothing but pure potential for demarcation."
* Midtgarden, Torjus. "Peirce's Speculative Grammar from 1895-1896: Its Exegetical Background and Significance." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2001 37(1): 81-96. Examines the changes in Peirce's epistemological thinking that were determined by his innovations in predicate logic during the 1880s, focused on "On the Algebra of Logic" (1885) and "Grand Logic" (1893).
* Moore, Edward C., ed. ''Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science: Papers from the Harvard Sesquicentennial Congress.'' U. of Alabama Press, 1993. 424 pp.

===Primary sources===
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893)'' (1992) ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, and ''Volume Two (1893-1913)'' (1998) ed. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep.htm online edition].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics'' (1991) ed. James Hoopes, University of North Carolina Press [http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Signs-Writings-Semiotic-Charles/dp/0807843423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' (vols 1-6 1931-35) ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss and (vols. 7-8 1958) ed. Arthur W. Burks, Harvard & [http://www.nlx.com/collections/95 online subscription].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce'', ed. Carolyn Eisele (4 vol. in 5, 1976), Mouton and Humanities Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Contributions to 'The Nation''' ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (4 vol 1975-1987) Texas Tech University and [http://www.nlx.com/collections/96 online subscription].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Historical Perspectives on Peirce's Logic of Science: A History of Science.'' ed. by Carolyn Eisele, 2 vol. New York: Mouton, 1985. 1130 pp.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders and Lady Welby, Victoria. ''Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby'' (1977) ed. Charles S. Hardwick with James Cook, Indiana University Press. 2nd ed. 2001, Press of Arisbe Associates.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition'' (vols. 1-6 & 8 of projected 30, 1981-present) eds. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/crit.htm electronic version], Indiana University Press and (vols. 1-6) [http://www.nlx.com/collections/97 online subscription].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Reasoning and the Logic of Things, The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898'' (1992) ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner, intro. and commentary Hilary Putnam, Harvard.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism"'' (1997) ed. Patricia Ann Turisi, SUNY Press.

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]
[[Category:Progressive Era]]
[[Category:Gilded Age]]
[[Category:People who were Educated at Home]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Peirce, Charles Sanders}}

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-12-09T01:20:13Z

ForNow: /* Semiotics */ Expanding the discussion somewhat.

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914)<ref> pronounced "purse"</ref> was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and [[polymath]]<ref> He wrote important essays on logic, pragmatism, metaphysics, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, and chemistry. He also wrote on psychology, early English and classical Greek pronunciation, psychical research, criminology, the history of science, ancient history, Egyptology, and Napoleon, prepared a thesaurus and an editor's manual, and did translations from Latin and German.</ref> [[William James]] and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder.<ref> Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.</ref> From 1879 to 1884 he was a lecturer at the new graduate university, Johns Hopkins. There he taught logic to Christine Ladd-Franklin and to [[John Dewey]], who became a leader of the liberal wing of pragmatism. Peirce himself was quite conservative when it came to social and economic issues.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Career==
Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor and the nation's leading mathematician. Benjamin especially taught Charles how to solve increasingly complex math and logic problems. He graduated from Harvard College in 1859 with mediocre grades; he later earned degrees in chemistry and biology with distinction. He became a research scientist with the United States Coast Survey, 1861-1891, doing research on gravity. At the same time he taught and did research at Harvard in logic and astronomy.

He suffered from an early age from trigeminal or "facial" neuralgia, an extremely painful condition. Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, ill-tempered, and lazy. Lazy he was not, but the other personality traits only worsened and prevented him from securing a permanent faculty appointment anywhere, a cause defeated by his opponents' reporting to potential academic employers the fact of his having lived with his future second wife Juliette while still married to his first. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and second wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania, an area which attracted him because it was a watering hole for captains of industry<ref>See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in ''First Things'', 1993, [http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5203 online edition].</ref>. There he built a house which he called Arisbe, where he hoped to have intellectual guests regularly from New York City, and which he and Juliette continued to expand even during the poverty from which they never finally escaped. He wrote many articles for periodicals, over 300 during his lifetime for ''The Nation'', and for dictionaries<ref>Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the ''Century Dictionary'' ([http://www.global-language.com/century/ online edition]) and Baldwin's ''Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology'' (online editions [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/ here] and [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/concepts/browse?source=Baldwin here])</ref> and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.

==Logic==
In logic Peirce was the first American to take up [[George Boole]]'s program to find the mathematical laws of logic--a program that began modern logic. Peirce made numerous major contributions from 1866 to 1914. His technical papers of 1867 to 1885 established him as the greatest formal logician in the world, and the most influential in the period from Boole to Ernst Schroeder. Peirce's papers were extremely difficult, but Schroeder explicated them and they became well known in the field.

Peirce radically modified, extended, and transformed Boolean algebra, making it applicable to propositions, relations, probability, and arithmetic. Following De Morgan, Peirce laid the foundations of the logic of relations, the key technique for the logical analysis of mathematics. He invented the copula symbol of inclusion, the most important symbol in the logic of classes. Peirce invented two new logical algebras, two new systems of logical graphs, discovered the link between the logic of classes and the logic of propositions, was the first to give the fundamental principle for the logical development of mathematics, and made fundamental contributions to probability theory, induction, statistics, and the logic of scientific methodology. Peirce wrote an elaborate book on advanced logic but could not get it published.

==Pragmatism==
Peirce was the creator if "Pragmatism;" it emerged from his many discussions in Cambridge at a "metaphysical club" founded in the 1870s. Most influential on peirce were [[Chauncey Wright]], a philosopher; [[William James]], Peirce's lifelong friend and benefactor; and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer and follower of utilitarian philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]] who interpreted doctrines in terms of their effect upon social life. Peirce began reading philosophy and by 1871 he was converted to the version of realism originally propounded by medieval philosopher [[Duns Scotus]]. Peirce remained a realist in philosophy all his life, eventually embracing realism not only about generals or universals but also about modalities such as possibility and necessity. His first major statement of Pragmatism appeared in ''Popular Science Monthly'' in January 1878, under the title "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."<ref> see [http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; ''Popular Science Monthly'' 12 (January 1878), 286-302]</ref>

In 1898 William James first publicly used the term "pragmatism" and acknowledged Peirce's priority. Peirce's pragmatism, however, is not the same as James's; it has more in common with the somewhat independently developed idealism of [[Josiah Royce]] and the later views of John Dewey. Peirce shared many of the views characteristic of the pragmatic school, developing them in his own fashion. He believed in the dependence of logic on ethics, argued as early as 1868 against individualism and egoism, and developed social theories of reality and logic. At the same time he believed that the development of business methods should be left to business without law's interference.<ref>See the 1910 quote from Peirce in the third section of "Pragmatism and American Democracy: An Elective Affinity Analysis" by Norbert Wiley, presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, 2003, [http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/pragmatism/wiley_pragma_demo.html online edition].</ref> He believed and argued that logic precedes metaphysics, and that metaphysicians failing to appreciate that precedence have always barred the way to inquiry.<ref>See for example "F.R.L." (First Rule of Logic), 1899 manuscript, not to be confused with another piece given that title. Published in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 1, paragraphs 135-140, [http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/frl_99.htm online edition].</ref>

Peirce held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>.

Pragmatism allows ideas to have any origin; what matters is not where we got an idea from but where we can go with it. In the case of science the usefulness of an idea includes reliability and fruitfulness. "Fruitfulness" does not mean practical utility but, rather, the opening up of original lines of successful research, what mathematicians nowadays call fecundity. As reliability is to truth, so fruitfulness is to depth and breadth of understanding. The test of truth and fruitfulness lies in the future. Truth, for the pragmatist, depends on our developing the implications of ideas so that we can find ways of applying them experimentally.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Semiotics==
Peirce's work in logic established the foundation for yet another branch of study, semiotics, which would not flourish until 40 years after his death. The discipline of semiotics studies how information, in the form of language or any other type of communication (music, painting, etc.), is transmitted and received. In Peirce's formulation, signs are presented not only by culture but also by nature (reactions, natural semblances, etc.) and logic (abstract ideas are signs), and there is a triangular relationship between sign, object, and interpretant. A sign represents a particular thing or idea which is being communicated (the object). A sign's object is either immediate to the sign, that is, the object as represented by the sign, or is a dynamic object, the object as it really is, even if fictional such as Rip Van Winkle. An interpretant is a sign's effect that amounts to a further sign, for instance a quality of impression (an immediate interpretant, immediate to the sign) which the sign is suited to produce, or an actually resulting interpretation (a dynamic interpretant) such as a translation, state of agitation, or forming of an idea in an interpreter's mind; or a kind of ideal or norm (a final or normal interpretant), the conduct that would be produced if the sign were to be sufficiently interpreted.

The sign itself can take on three forms, an icon, an index, or a symbol. An icon directly resembles the object, regardless of factual connection to it (the object need not even exist) and regardless of interpretation (the resemblance is objective though relative to sight, intellect, etc.). An index represents through factual connection to the object; for example an ongoing effect such as smoke is an index of fire; the smoke need not resemble the fire, nor is its connection with fire a matter of interpretation. A symbol does depend on interpretation, and so it requires a dependable rule or habit of interpretation; that rule is essentially the symbol. A symbol represents the object by an interpretive norm or rule that may be logical, cultural, or even inborn but in any case without depending on resemblance or factual connection to the object. Written and spoken language therefore rely heavily on symbolic signs, in that a word's meaning must be understood by both the speaker and the listener in order for communication to take place. Designations such as proper names and words such as "this" Peirce usually considered to be indices. Peirce considered language as involving a mind's ability to supply mental indices and icons to accompany it. Peirce regarded diagrams as icons, and "All___is___" as a linguistic diagram, subject to logical transformations.

Peirce's ideas were highly influential on later linguistic scholars such as [[Noam Chomsky]], as well as on [[deconstruction|deconstructionists]] Jacques Derrida and Paul le Man. His ideas have also entered [[music theory]], in a separate branch known as musical semiotics. Leading exponents of this field include Wilson Coker, Robert Hatten, David Lidov, and V. Kofi Agawu.

==Further reading==
* Auspitz, Josiah Lee. "The Greatest Living American Philosopher." ''Commentary'' 1983 76(6): 51-64. 0010-2601 Calls Peirce a living philosopher because his ideas remain relevant [http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-greatest-living-american-philosopher-6781 online edition]
* Brent, Joseph. ''Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life'' (1998), 404pp; the standard biography [http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Sanders-Peirce-Joseph-Brent/dp/0253211611/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), advanced [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ online]
* Haack, Susan. "Vulgar Rortyism" in ''The New Citerion'' (1997). Review of Louis Menand's ''Pragmatism: A Reader''. Opposed to Menand's and Rorty's views of Peirce. [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/rortyism-haack-3261 Online edition].
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.
* Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" ''Dictionary of American Biography'' (1935), [http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/weissbio.htm online edition].
===Specialized studies===
* Braude, Stephen E. "Peirce on the Paranormal". ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 1998 34(1): 203-224. 0009-1774 Looks at P's ideas 1887-1906 regarding telepathy, spiritualism, psychokinesis, postmortem survival, and miracles. [http://userpages.umbc.edu/~braude/pdfs_pubd/braude--Peirce%20on%20the%20Paranormal.pdf Online edition].
* Delaney, Cornelius. ''Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce'' (1993)
* Fisch, Max H. ''Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism.'' ed. by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel, Indiana U. Press, 1986. 464 pp.
* Hartman, Matthew. "Utopian Evolution: The Sentimental Critique of Social Darwinism in Bellamy and Peirce." ''Utopian Studies'' 1999 10(1): 26-41. 1045-991X Compares Peirce's essay "Evolutionary Love" (1893) with Edward Bellamy's utopian novel ''Looking Backward'' (1888), exploring the elevation of creative love over greed as agents of change. Both works were written in the utopian vein in response to the growing prominence of capitalist economic theory and [[Social Darwinism]] during the [[Gilded Age]]. [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7051/is_1_10/ai_n28758437/ Online edition]
* Hausman, Carl R. ''Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy'' (1993)
* Hoopes, James. ''Community Denied: The Wrong Turn of Pragmatic Liberalism'' (1998), argues for Peirce's view of pragmatism, which perceived an individual in terms of his relations with others, over James's and Dewey's "weak liberalism."
* Ketner, Kenneth Laine. ''His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce.'' Vanderbilt U. Pr., 1998. 420 pp.; this is a novel in which Ketner combines some actual documents with an imaginary reconstruction of P's life. [http://www.wyttynys.net/ Excerpt online]
* Leja, Michael. "Peirce, Visuality, and Art." ''Representations'' 2000 (72): 97-122. 0734-6018 Examines the visuality of his semiotics and the use of images and reflected meaning; based on drawings in Peirce's unpublished notes
* Locke, Gordon. "Peirce's Metaphysics: Evolution, Synechism, and the Mathematical Conception of the Continuum." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2000 36(1): 133-147. Explores his use of the mathematical concept of the continuum, an image he used to express the tightly packed connectedness of related concepts. His metaphysics of evolution depends completely on a continuum completely lacking inherent divisions, one that is "nothing but pure potential for demarcation."
* Midtgarden, Torjus. "Peirce's Speculative Grammar from 1895-1896: Its Exegetical Background and Significance." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2001 37(1): 81-96. Examines the changes in Peirce's epistemological thinking that were determined by his innovations in predicate logic during the 1880s, focused on "On the Algebra of Logic" (1885) and "Grand Logic" (1893).
* Moore, Edward C., ed. ''Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science: Papers from the Harvard Sesquicentennial Congress.'' U. of Alabama Press, 1993. 424 pp.

===Primary sources===
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893)'' (1992) ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, and ''Volume Two (1893-1913)'' (1998) ed. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep.htm online edition].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics'' (1991) ed. James Hoopes, University of North Carolina Press [http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Signs-Writings-Semiotic-Charles/dp/0807843423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' (vols 1-6 1931-35) ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss and (vols. 7-8 1958) ed. Arthur W. Burks, Harvard & [http://www.nlx.com/collections/95 online subscription].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce'', ed. Carolyn Eisele (4 vol. in 5, 1976), Mouton and Humanities Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Contributions to 'The Nation''' ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (4 vol 1975-1987) Texas Tech University and [http://www.nlx.com/collections/96 online subscription].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Historical Perspectives on Peirce's Logic of Science: A History of Science.'' ed. by Carolyn Eisele, 2 vol. New York: Mouton, 1985. 1130 pp.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders and Lady Welby, Victoria. ''Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby'' (1977) ed. Charles S. Hardwick with James Cook, Indiana University Press. 2nd ed. 2001, Press of Arisbe Associates.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition'' (vols. 1-6 & 8 of projected 30, 1981-present) eds. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/crit.htm electronic version], Indiana University Press and (vols. 1-6) [http://www.nlx.com/collections/97 online subscription].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Reasoning and the Logic of Things, The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898'' (1992) ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner, intro. and commentary Hilary Putnam, Harvard.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism"'' (1997) ed. Patricia Ann Turisi, SUNY Press.

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]
[[Category:Progressive Era]]
[[Category:Gilded Age]]
[[Category:People who were Educated at Home]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Peirce, Charles Sanders}}

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-12-09T00:06:44Z

ForNow: /* Primary sources */ Updated Writings to include vol. 8 (vol. 7 is yet unpublished). Updated CD-ROM to online subscription (CD-ROMs discontinued).

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914)<ref> pronounced "purse"</ref> was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and [[polymath]]<ref> He wrote important essays on logic, pragmatism, metaphysics, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, and chemistry. He also wrote on psychology, early English and classical Greek pronunciation, psychical research, criminology, the history of science, ancient history, Egyptology, and Napoleon, prepared a thesaurus and an editor's manual, and did translations from Latin and German.</ref> [[William James]] and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder.<ref> Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.</ref> From 1879 to 1884 he was a lecturer at the new graduate university, Johns Hopkins. There he taught logic to Christine Ladd-Franklin and to [[John Dewey]], who became a leader of the liberal wing of pragmatism. Peirce himself was quite conservative when it came to social and economic issues.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Career==
Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor and the nation's leading mathematician. Benjamin especially taught Charles how to solve increasingly complex math and logic problems. He graduated from Harvard College in 1859 with mediocre grades; he later earned degrees in chemistry and biology with distinction. He became a research scientist with the United States Coast Survey, 1861-1891, doing research on gravity. At the same time he taught and did research at Harvard in logic and astronomy.

He suffered from an early age from trigeminal or "facial" neuralgia, an extremely painful condition. Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, ill-tempered, and lazy. Lazy he was not, but the other personality traits only worsened and prevented him from securing a permanent faculty appointment anywhere, a cause defeated by his opponents' reporting to potential academic employers the fact of his having lived with his future second wife Juliette while still married to his first. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and second wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania, an area which attracted him because it was a watering hole for captains of industry<ref>See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in ''First Things'', 1993, [http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5203 online edition].</ref>. There he built a house which he called Arisbe, where he hoped to have intellectual guests regularly from New York City, and which he and Juliette continued to expand even during the poverty from which they never finally escaped. He wrote many articles for periodicals, over 300 during his lifetime for ''The Nation'', and for dictionaries<ref>Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the ''Century Dictionary'' ([http://www.global-language.com/century/ online edition]) and Baldwin's ''Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology'' (online editions [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/ here] and [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/concepts/browse?source=Baldwin here])</ref> and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.

==Logic==
In logic Peirce was the first American to take up [[George Boole]]'s program to find the mathematical laws of logic--a program that began modern logic. Peirce made numerous major contributions from 1866 to 1914. His technical papers of 1867 to 1885 established him as the greatest formal logician in the world, and the most influential in the period from Boole to Ernst Schroeder. Peirce's papers were extremely difficult, but Schroeder explicated them and they became well known in the field.

Peirce radically modified, extended, and transformed Boolean algebra, making it applicable to propositions, relations, probability, and arithmetic. Following De Morgan, Peirce laid the foundations of the logic of relations, the key technique for the logical analysis of mathematics. He invented the copula symbol of inclusion, the most important symbol in the logic of classes. Peirce invented two new logical algebras, two new systems of logical graphs, discovered the link between the logic of classes and the logic of propositions, was the first to give the fundamental principle for the logical development of mathematics, and made fundamental contributions to probability theory, induction, statistics, and the logic of scientific methodology. Peirce wrote an elaborate book on advanced logic but could not get it published.

==Pragmatism==
Peirce was the creator if "Pragmatism;" it emerged from his many discussions in Cambridge at a "metaphysical club" founded in the 1870s. Most influential on peirce were [[Chauncey Wright]], a philosopher; [[William James]], Peirce's lifelong friend and benefactor; and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer and follower of utilitarian philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]] who interpreted doctrines in terms of their effect upon social life. Peirce began reading philosophy and by 1871 he was converted to the version of realism originally propounded by medieval philosopher [[Duns Scotus]]. Peirce remained a realist in philosophy all his life, eventually embracing realism not only about generals or universals but also about modalities such as possibility and necessity. His first major statement of Pragmatism appeared in ''Popular Science Monthly'' in January 1878, under the title "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."<ref> see [http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; ''Popular Science Monthly'' 12 (January 1878), 286-302]</ref>

In 1898 William James first publicly used the term "pragmatism" and acknowledged Peirce's priority. Peirce's pragmatism, however, is not the same as James's; it has more in common with the somewhat independently developed idealism of [[Josiah Royce]] and the later views of John Dewey. Peirce shared many of the views characteristic of the pragmatic school, developing them in his own fashion. He believed in the dependence of logic on ethics, argued as early as 1868 against individualism and egoism, and developed social theories of reality and logic. At the same time he believed that the development of business methods should be left to business without law's interference.<ref>See the 1910 quote from Peirce in the third section of "Pragmatism and American Democracy: An Elective Affinity Analysis" by Norbert Wiley, presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, 2003, [http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/pragmatism/wiley_pragma_demo.html online edition].</ref> He believed and argued that logic precedes metaphysics, and that metaphysicians failing to appreciate that precedence have always barred the way to inquiry.<ref>See for example "F.R.L." (First Rule of Logic), 1899 manuscript, not to be confused with another piece given that title. Published in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 1, paragraphs 135-140, [http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/frl_99.htm online edition].</ref>

Peirce held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>.

Pragmatism allows ideas to have any origin; what matters is not where we got an idea from but where we can go with it. In the case of science the usefulness of an idea includes reliability and fruitfulness. "Fruitfulness" does not mean practical utility but, rather, the opening up of original lines of successful research, what mathematicians nowadays call fecundity. As reliability is to truth, so fruitfulness is to depth and breadth of understanding. The test of truth and fruitfulness lies in the future. Truth, for the pragmatist, depends on our developing the implications of ideas so that we can find ways of applying them experimentally.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Semiotics==
Peirce's work in logic established the foundation for yet another branch of study, semiotics, which would not flourish until 40 years after his death. The discipline of semiotics studies how information, in the form of language or any other type of communication (music, painting, etc.), is transmitted and received. In Peirce's formulation, there is a triangular relationship between sign, object, and interpretant. The sign represents a particular thing or idea which is being communicated (the object); the interpretant can be either the person who interprets the sign, or another sign which acts on, and re-interprets the first sign.

The sign itself can take on three forms, an icon, an index, or a symbol. An icon directly resembles the object, an index shows the effect of the object, and a symbol represents the object by a pre-established rule which is established by cultural context. Written and spoken language therefore rely almost entirely on symbolic signs, in that a word's meaning must be understood by both the speaker and the listener in order for communication to take place.

Peirce's ideas were highly influential on later linguistic scholars such as [[Noam Chomsky]], as well as on [[deconstruction|deconstructionists]] Jacques Derrida and Paul le Man. His ideas have also entered [[music theory]], in a separate branch known as musical semiotics. Leading exponents of this field include Wilson Coker, Robert Hatten, David Lidov, and V. Kofi Agawu.

==Further reading==
* Auspitz, Josiah Lee. "The Greatest Living American Philosopher." ''Commentary'' 1983 76(6): 51-64. 0010-2601 Calls Peirce a living philosopher because his ideas remain relevant [http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-greatest-living-american-philosopher-6781 online edition]
* Brent, Joseph. ''Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life'' (1998), 404pp; the standard biography [http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Sanders-Peirce-Joseph-Brent/dp/0253211611/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), advanced [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ online]
* Haack, Susan. "Vulgar Rortyism" in ''The New Citerion'' (1997). Review of Louis Menand's ''Pragmatism: A Reader''. Opposed to Menand's and Rorty's views of Peirce. [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/rortyism-haack-3261 Online edition].
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.
* Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" ''Dictionary of American Biography'' (1935), [http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/weissbio.htm online edition].
===Specialized studies===
* Braude, Stephen E. "Peirce on the Paranormal". ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 1998 34(1): 203-224. 0009-1774 Looks at P's ideas 1887-1906 regarding telepathy, spiritualism, psychokinesis, postmortem survival, and miracles. [http://userpages.umbc.edu/~braude/pdfs_pubd/braude--Peirce%20on%20the%20Paranormal.pdf Online edition].
* Delaney, Cornelius. ''Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce'' (1993)
* Fisch, Max H. ''Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism.'' ed. by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel, Indiana U. Press, 1986. 464 pp.
* Hartman, Matthew. "Utopian Evolution: The Sentimental Critique of Social Darwinism in Bellamy and Peirce." ''Utopian Studies'' 1999 10(1): 26-41. 1045-991X Compares Peirce's essay "Evolutionary Love" (1893) with Edward Bellamy's utopian novel ''Looking Backward'' (1888), exploring the elevation of creative love over greed as agents of change. Both works were written in the utopian vein in response to the growing prominence of capitalist economic theory and [[Social Darwinism]] during the [[Gilded Age]]. [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7051/is_1_10/ai_n28758437/ Online edition]
* Hausman, Carl R. ''Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy'' (1993)
* Hoopes, James. ''Community Denied: The Wrong Turn of Pragmatic Liberalism'' (1998), argues for Peirce's view of pragmatism, which perceived an individual in terms of his relations with others, over James's and Dewey's "weak liberalism."
* Ketner, Kenneth Laine. ''His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce.'' Vanderbilt U. Pr., 1998. 420 pp.; this is a novel in which Ketner combines some actual documents with an imaginary reconstruction of P's life. [http://www.wyttynys.net/ Excerpt online]
* Leja, Michael. "Peirce, Visuality, and Art." ''Representations'' 2000 (72): 97-122. 0734-6018 Examines the visuality of his semiotics and the use of images and reflected meaning; based on drawings in Peirce's unpublished notes
* Locke, Gordon. "Peirce's Metaphysics: Evolution, Synechism, and the Mathematical Conception of the Continuum." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2000 36(1): 133-147. Explores his use of the mathematical concept of the continuum, an image he used to express the tightly packed connectedness of related concepts. His metaphysics of evolution depends completely on a continuum completely lacking inherent divisions, one that is "nothing but pure potential for demarcation."
* Midtgarden, Torjus. "Peirce's Speculative Grammar from 1895-1896: Its Exegetical Background and Significance." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2001 37(1): 81-96. Examines the changes in Peirce's epistemological thinking that were determined by his innovations in predicate logic during the 1880s, focused on "On the Algebra of Logic" (1885) and "Grand Logic" (1893).
* Moore, Edward C., ed. ''Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science: Papers from the Harvard Sesquicentennial Congress.'' U. of Alabama Press, 1993. 424 pp.

===Primary sources===
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893)'' (1992) ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, and ''Volume Two (1893-1913)'' (1998) ed. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep.htm online edition].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics'' (1991) ed. James Hoopes, University of North Carolina Press [http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Signs-Writings-Semiotic-Charles/dp/0807843423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' (vols 1-6 1931-35) ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss and (vols. 7-8 1958) ed. Arthur W. Burks, Harvard & [http://www.nlx.com/collections/95 online subscription].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce'', ed. Carolyn Eisele (4 vol. in 5, 1976), Mouton and Humanities Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Contributions to 'The Nation''' ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (4 vol 1975-1987) Texas Tech University and [http://www.nlx.com/collections/96 online subscription].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Historical Perspectives on Peirce's Logic of Science: A History of Science.'' ed. by Carolyn Eisele, 2 vol. New York: Mouton, 1985. 1130 pp.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders and Lady Welby, Victoria. ''Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby'' (1977) ed. Charles S. Hardwick with James Cook, Indiana University Press. 2nd ed. 2001, Press of Arisbe Associates.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition'' (vols. 1-6 & 8 of projected 30, 1981-present) eds. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/crit.htm electronic version], Indiana University Press and (vols. 1-6) [http://www.nlx.com/collections/97 online subscription].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Reasoning and the Logic of Things, The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898'' (1992) ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner, intro. and commentary Hilary Putnam, Harvard.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism"'' (1997) ed. Patricia Ann Turisi, SUNY Press.

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]
[[Category:Progressive Era]]
[[Category:Gilded Age]]
[[Category:People who were Educated at Home]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Peirce, Charles Sanders}}

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-05-31T00:04:42Z

ForNow: /* Logic */ Corrected seeming typo from "the influential" to "the most influential." Added statistics to the fields to which he made fundamental contributions

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914)<ref> pronounced "purse"</ref> was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and [[polymath]]<ref> He wrote important essays on logic, pragmatism, metaphysics, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, and chemistry. He also wrote on psychology, early English and classical Greek pronunciation, psychical research, criminology, the history of science, ancient history, Egyptology, and Napoleon, prepared a thesaurus and an editor's manual, and did translations from Latin and German.</ref> [[William James]] and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder.<ref> Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.</ref> From 1879 to 1884 he was a lecturer at the new graduate university, Johns Hopkins. There he taught logic to Christine Ladd-Franklin and to [[John Dewey]], who became a leader of the liberal wing of pragmatism. Peirce himself was quite conservative when it came to social and economic issues.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Career==
Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor and the nation's leading mathematician. Benjamin especially taught Charles how to solve increasingly complex math and logic problems. He graduated from Harvard College in 1859 with mediocre grades; he later earned degrees in chemistry and biology with distinction. He became a research scientist with the United States Coast Survey, 1861-1891, doing research on gravity. At the same time he taught and did research at Harvard in logic and astronomy.

He suffered from an early age from trigeminal or "facial" neuralgia, an extremely painful condition. Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, ill-tempered, and lazy. Lazy he was not, but the other personality traits only worsened and prevented him from securing a permanent faculty appointment anywhere, a cause defeated by his opponents' reporting to potential academic employers the fact of his having lived with his future second wife Juliette while still married to his first. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and second wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania, an area which attracted him because it was a watering hole for captains of industry<ref>See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in ''First Things'', 1993, [http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5203 online edition].</ref>. There he built a house which he called Arisbe, where he hoped to have intellectual guests regularly from New York City, and which he and Juliette continued to expand even during the poverty from which they never finally escaped. He wrote many articles for periodicals, over 300 during his lifetime for ''The Nation'', and for dictionaries<ref>Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the ''Century Dictionary'' ([http://www.global-language.com/century/ online edition]) and Baldwin's ''Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology'' (online editions [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/ here] and [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/concepts/browse?source=Baldwin here])</ref> and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.

==Logic==
In logic Peirce was the first American to take up [[George Boole]]'s program to find the mathematical laws of logic--a program that began modern logic. Peirce made numerous major contributions from 1866 to 1914. His technical papers of 1867 to 1885 established him as the greatest formal logician in the world, and the most influential in the period from Boole to Ernst Schroeder. Peirce's papers were extremely difficult, but Schroeder explicated them and they became well known in the field.

Peirce radically modified, extended, and transformed Boolean algebra, making it applicable to propositions, relations, probability, and arithmetic. Following De Morgan, Peirce laid the foundations of the logic of relations, the key technique for the logical analysis of mathematics. He invented the copula symbol of inclusion, the most important symbol in the logic of classes. Peirce invented two new logical algebras, two new systems of logical graphs, discovered the link between the logic of classes and the logic of propositions, was the first to give the fundamental principle for the logical development of mathematics, and made fundamental contributions to probability theory, induction, statistics, and the logic of scientific methodology. Peirce wrote an elaborate book on advanced logic but could not get it published.

==Pragmatism==
Peirce was the creator if "Pragmatism;" it emerged from his many discussions in Cambridge at a "metaphysical club" founded in the 1870s. Most influential on peirce were [[Chauncey Wright]], a philosopher; [[William James]], Peirce's lifelong friend and benefactor; and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer and follower of utilitarian philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]] who interpreted doctrines in terms of their effect upon social life. Peirce began reading philosophy and by 1871 he was converted to the version of realism originally propounded by medieval philosopher [[Duns Scotus]]. Peirce remained a realist in philosophy all his life, eventually embracing realism not only about generals or universals but also about modalities such as possibility and necessity. His first major statement of Pragmatism appeared in ''Popular Science Monthly'' in January 1878, under the title "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."<ref> see [http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; ''Popular Science Monthly'' 12 (January 1878), 286-302]</ref>

In 1898 William James first publicly used the term "pragmatism" and acknowledged Peirce's priority. Peirce's pragmatism, however, is not the same as James's; it has more in common with the somewhat independently developed idealism of [[Josiah Royce]] and the later views of John Dewey. Peirce shared many of the views characteristic of the pragmatic school, developing them in his own fashion. He believed in the dependence of logic on ethics, argued as early as 1868 against individualism and egoism, and developed social theories of reality and logic. At the same time he believed that the development of business methods should be left to business without law's interference.<ref>See the 1910 quote from Peirce in the third section of "Pragmatism and American Democracy: An Elective Affinity Analysis" by Norbert Wiley, presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, 2003, [http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/pragmatism/wiley_pragma_demo.html online edition].</ref> He believed and argued that logic precedes metaphysics, and that metaphysicians failing to appreciate that precedence have always barred the way to inquiry.<ref>See for example "F.R.L." (First Rule of Logic), 1899 manuscript, not to be confused with another piece given that title. Published in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 1, paragraphs 135-140, [http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/frl_99.htm online edition].</ref>

Peirce held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>.

Pragmatism allows ideas to have any origin; what matters is not where we got an idea from but where we can go with it. In the case of science the usefulness of an idea includes reliability and fruitfulness. "Fruitfulness" does not mean practical utility but, rather, the opening up of original lines of successful research, what mathematicians nowadays call fecundity. As reliability is to truth, so fruitfulness is to depth and breadth of understanding. The test of truth and fruitfulness lies in the future. Truth, for the pragmatist, depends on our developing the implications of ideas so that we can find ways of applying them experimentally.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Further reading==
* Auspitz, Josiah Lee. "The Greatest Living American Philosopher." ''Commentary'' 1983 76(6): 51-64. 0010-2601 Calls Peirce a living philosopher because his ideas remain relevant [http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-greatest-living-american-philosopher-6781 online edition]
* Brent, Joseph. ''Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life'' (1998), 404pp; the standard biography [http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Sanders-Peirce-Joseph-Brent/dp/0253211611/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), advanced [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ online]
* Haack, Susan. "Vulgar Rortyism" in ''The New Citerion'' (1997). Review of Louis Menand's ''Pragmatism: A Reader''. Opposed to Menand's and Rorty's views of Peirce. [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/rortyism-haack-3261 Online edition].
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.
* Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" ''Dictionary of American Biography'' (1935), [http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/weissbio.htm online edition].
===Specialized studies===
* Braude, Stephen E. "Peirce on the Paranormal". ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 1998 34(1): 203-224. 0009-1774 Looks at P's ideas 1887-1906 regarding telepathy, spiritualism, psychokinesis, postmortem survival, and miracles. [http://userpages.umbc.edu/~braude/pdfs_pubd/braude--Peirce%20on%20the%20Paranormal.pdf Online edition].
* Delaney, Cornelius. ''Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce'' (1993)
* Fisch, Max H. ''Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism.'' ed. by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel, Indiana U. Press, 1986. 464 pp.
* Hartman, Matthew. "Utopian Evolution: The Sentimental Critique of Social Darwinism in Bellamy and Peirce." ''Utopian Studies'' 1999 10(1): 26-41. 1045-991X Compares Peirce's essay "Evolutionary Love" (1893) with Edward Bellamy's utopian novel ''Looking Backward'' (1888), exploring the elevation of creative love over greed as agents of change. Both works were written in the utopian vein in response to the growing prominence of capitalist economic theory and [[Social Darwinism]] during the [[Gilded Age]]. [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7051/is_1_10/ai_n28758437/ Online edition]
* Hausman, Carl R. ''Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy'' (1993)
* Hoopes, James. ''Community Denied: The Wrong Turn of Pragmatic Liberalism'' (1998), argues for Peirce's view of pragmatism, which perceived an individual in terms of his relations with others, over James's and Dewey's "weak liberalism."
* Ketner, Kenneth Laine. ''His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce.'' Vanderbilt U. Pr., 1998. 420 pp.; this is a novel in which Ketner combines some actual documents with an imaginary reconstruction of P's life. [http://www.wyttynys.net/ Excerpt online]
* Leja, Michael. "Peirce, Visuality, and Art." ''Representations'' 2000 (72): 97-122. 0734-6018 Examines the visuality of his semiotics and the use of images and reflected meaning; based on drawings in Peirce's unpublished notes
* Locke, Gordon. "Peirce's Metaphysics: Evolution, Synechism, and the Mathematical Conception of the Continuum." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2000 36(1): 133-147. Explores his use of the mathematical concept of the continuum, an image he used to express the tightly packed connectedness of related concepts. His metaphysics of evolution depends completely on a continuum completely lacking inherent divisions, one that is "nothing but pure potential for demarcation."
* Midtgarden, Torjus. "Peirce's Speculative Grammar from 1895-1896: Its Exegetical Background and Significance." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2001 37(1): 81-96. Examines the changes in Peirce's epistemological thinking that were determined by his innovations in predicate logic during the 1880s, focused on "On the Algebra of Logic" (1885) and "Grand Logic" (1893).
* Moore, Edward C., ed. ''Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science: Papers from the Harvard Sesquicentennial Congress.'' U. of Alabama Press, 1993. 424 pp.

===Primary sources===
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893)'' (1992) ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, and ''Volume Two (1893-1913)'' (1998) ed. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep.htm online edition].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics'' (1991) ed. James Hoopes, University of North Carolina Press [http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Signs-Writings-Semiotic-Charles/dp/0807843423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' (vols 1-6 1931-35) ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss and (vols. 7-8 1958) ed. Arthur W. Burks, Harvard & [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlpeir.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce'', ed. Carolyn Eisele (4 vol. in 5, 1976), Mouton and Humanities Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Contributions to 'The Nation''' ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (4 vol 1975-1987) Texas Tech University and [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlppw1.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Historical Perspectives on Peirce's Logic of Science: A History of Science.'' ed. by Carolyn Eisele, 2 vol. New York: Mouton, 1985. 1130 pp.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders and Lady Welby, Victoria. ''Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby'' (1977) ed. Charles S. Hardwick with James Cook, Indiana University Press. 2nd ed. 2001, Press of Arisbe Associates.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition'' (6 vols. of projected 30, 1981-present) eds. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/crit.htm electronic version], Indiana University Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Reasoning and the Logic of Things, The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898'' (1992) ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner, intro. and commentary Hilary Putnam, Harvard.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism"'' (1997) ed. Patricia Ann Turisi, SUNY Press.

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]
[[Category:Progressive Era]]
[[Category:Gilded Age]]
[[Category:People who were Educated at Home]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Peirce, Charles Sanders}}

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-05-30T23:54:14Z

ForNow: /* Career */ Peirce wrote over 300 pieces, not over 400 pieces, for The Nation.

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914)<ref> pronounced "purse"</ref> was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and [[polymath]]<ref> He wrote important essays on logic, pragmatism, metaphysics, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, and chemistry. He also wrote on psychology, early English and classical Greek pronunciation, psychical research, criminology, the history of science, ancient history, Egyptology, and Napoleon, prepared a thesaurus and an editor's manual, and did translations from Latin and German.</ref> [[William James]] and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder.<ref> Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.</ref> From 1879 to 1884 he was a lecturer at the new graduate university, Johns Hopkins. There he taught logic to Christine Ladd-Franklin and to [[John Dewey]], who became a leader of the liberal wing of pragmatism. Peirce himself was quite conservative when it came to social and economic issues.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Career==
Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor and the nation's leading mathematician. Benjamin especially taught Charles how to solve increasingly complex math and logic problems. He graduated from Harvard College in 1859 with mediocre grades; he later earned degrees in chemistry and biology with distinction. He became a research scientist with the United States Coast Survey, 1861-1891, doing research on gravity. At the same time he taught and did research at Harvard in logic and astronomy.

He suffered from an early age from trigeminal or "facial" neuralgia, an extremely painful condition. Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, ill-tempered, and lazy. Lazy he was not, but the other personality traits only worsened and prevented him from securing a permanent faculty appointment anywhere, a cause defeated by his opponents' reporting to potential academic employers the fact of his having lived with his future second wife Juliette while still married to his first. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and second wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania, an area which attracted him because it was a watering hole for captains of industry<ref>See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in ''First Things'', 1993, [http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5203 online edition].</ref>. There he built a house which he called Arisbe, where he hoped to have intellectual guests regularly from New York City, and which he and Juliette continued to expand even during the poverty from which they never finally escaped. He wrote many articles for periodicals, over 300 during his lifetime for ''The Nation'', and for dictionaries<ref>Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the ''Century Dictionary'' ([http://www.global-language.com/century/ online edition]) and Baldwin's ''Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology'' (online editions [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/ here] and [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/concepts/browse?source=Baldwin here])</ref> and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.

==Logic==
In logic Peirce was the first American to take up [[George Boole]]'s program to find the mathematical laws of logic--a program that began modern logic. Peirce made numerous major contributions from 1866 to 1914. His technical papers of 1867 to 1885 established him as the greatest formal logician in the world, and the influential in the period from Boole to Ernst Schroeder. Peirce's papers were extremely difficult, but Schroeder explicated them and they became well known in the field.

Peirce radically modified, extended, and transformed Boolean algebra, making it applicable to propositions, relations, probability, and arithmetic. Following De Morgan, Peirce laid the foundations of the logic of relations, the key technique for the logical analysis of mathematics. He invented the copula symbol of inclusion, the most important symbol in the logic of classes. Peirce invented two new logical algebras, two new systems of logical graphs, discovered the link between the logic of classes and the logic of propositions, was the first to give the fundamental principle for the logical development of mathematics, and made fundamental contributions to probability theory, induction, and the logic of scientific methodology. Peirce wrote an elaborate book on advanced logic but could not get it published.

==Pragmatism==
Peirce was the creator if "Pragmatism;" it emerged from his many discussions in Cambridge at a "metaphysical club" founded in the 1870s. Most influential on peirce were [[Chauncey Wright]], a philosopher; [[William James]], Peirce's lifelong friend and benefactor; and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer and follower of utilitarian philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]] who interpreted doctrines in terms of their effect upon social life. Peirce began reading philosophy and by 1871 he was converted to the version of realism originally propounded by medieval philosopher [[Duns Scotus]]. Peirce remained a realist in philosophy all his life, eventually embracing realism not only about generals or universals but also about modalities such as possibility and necessity. His first major statement of Pragmatism appeared in ''Popular Science Monthly'' in January 1878, under the title "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."<ref> see [http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; ''Popular Science Monthly'' 12 (January 1878), 286-302]</ref>

In 1898 William James first publicly used the term "pragmatism" and acknowledged Peirce's priority. Peirce's pragmatism, however, is not the same as James's; it has more in common with the somewhat independently developed idealism of [[Josiah Royce]] and the later views of John Dewey. Peirce shared many of the views characteristic of the pragmatic school, developing them in his own fashion. He believed in the dependence of logic on ethics, argued as early as 1868 against individualism and egoism, and developed social theories of reality and logic. At the same time he believed that the development of business methods should be left to business without law's interference.<ref>See the 1910 quote from Peirce in the third section of "Pragmatism and American Democracy: An Elective Affinity Analysis" by Norbert Wiley, presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, 2003, [http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/pragmatism/wiley_pragma_demo.html online edition].</ref> He believed and argued that logic precedes metaphysics, and that metaphysicians failing to appreciate that precedence have always barred the way to inquiry.<ref>See for example "F.R.L." (First Rule of Logic), 1899 manuscript, not to be confused with another piece given that title. Published in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 1, paragraphs 135-140, [http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/frl_99.htm online edition].</ref>

Peirce held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>.

Pragmatism allows ideas to have any origin; what matters is not where we got an idea from but where we can go with it. In the case of science the usefulness of an idea includes reliability and fruitfulness. "Fruitfulness" does not mean practical utility but, rather, the opening up of original lines of successful research, what mathematicians nowadays call fecundity. As reliability is to truth, so fruitfulness is to depth and breadth of understanding. The test of truth and fruitfulness lies in the future. Truth, for the pragmatist, depends on our developing the implications of ideas so that we can find ways of applying them experimentally.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Further reading==
* Auspitz, Josiah Lee. "The Greatest Living American Philosopher." ''Commentary'' 1983 76(6): 51-64. 0010-2601 Calls Peirce a living philosopher because his ideas remain relevant [http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-greatest-living-american-philosopher-6781 online edition]
* Brent, Joseph. ''Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life'' (1998), 404pp; the standard biography [http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Sanders-Peirce-Joseph-Brent/dp/0253211611/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), advanced [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ online]
* Haack, Susan. "Vulgar Rortyism" in ''The New Citerion'' (1997). Review of Louis Menand's ''Pragmatism: A Reader''. Opposed to Menand's and Rorty's views of Peirce. [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/rortyism-haack-3261 Online edition].
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.
* Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" ''Dictionary of American Biography'' (1935), [http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/weissbio.htm online edition].
===Specialized studies===
* Braude, Stephen E. "Peirce on the Paranormal". ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 1998 34(1): 203-224. 0009-1774 Looks at P's ideas 1887-1906 regarding telepathy, spiritualism, psychokinesis, postmortem survival, and miracles. [http://userpages.umbc.edu/~braude/pdfs_pubd/braude--Peirce%20on%20the%20Paranormal.pdf Online edition].
* Delaney, Cornelius. ''Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce'' (1993)
* Fisch, Max H. ''Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism.'' ed. by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel, Indiana U. Press, 1986. 464 pp.
* Hartman, Matthew. "Utopian Evolution: The Sentimental Critique of Social Darwinism in Bellamy and Peirce." ''Utopian Studies'' 1999 10(1): 26-41. 1045-991X Compares Peirce's essay "Evolutionary Love" (1893) with Edward Bellamy's utopian novel ''Looking Backward'' (1888), exploring the elevation of creative love over greed as agents of change. Both works were written in the utopian vein in response to the growing prominence of capitalist economic theory and [[Social Darwinism]] during the [[Gilded Age]]. [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7051/is_1_10/ai_n28758437/ Online edition]
* Hausman, Carl R. ''Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy'' (1993)
* Hoopes, James. ''Community Denied: The Wrong Turn of Pragmatic Liberalism'' (1998), argues for Peirce's view of pragmatism, which perceived an individual in terms of his relations with others, over James's and Dewey's "weak liberalism."
* Ketner, Kenneth Laine. ''His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce.'' Vanderbilt U. Pr., 1998. 420 pp.; this is a novel in which Ketner combines some actual documents with an imaginary reconstruction of P's life. [http://www.wyttynys.net/ Excerpt online]
* Leja, Michael. "Peirce, Visuality, and Art." ''Representations'' 2000 (72): 97-122. 0734-6018 Examines the visuality of his semiotics and the use of images and reflected meaning; based on drawings in Peirce's unpublished notes
* Locke, Gordon. "Peirce's Metaphysics: Evolution, Synechism, and the Mathematical Conception of the Continuum." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2000 36(1): 133-147. Explores his use of the mathematical concept of the continuum, an image he used to express the tightly packed connectedness of related concepts. His metaphysics of evolution depends completely on a continuum completely lacking inherent divisions, one that is "nothing but pure potential for demarcation."
* Midtgarden, Torjus. "Peirce's Speculative Grammar from 1895-1896: Its Exegetical Background and Significance." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2001 37(1): 81-96. Examines the changes in Peirce's epistemological thinking that were determined by his innovations in predicate logic during the 1880s, focused on "On the Algebra of Logic" (1885) and "Grand Logic" (1893).
* Moore, Edward C., ed. ''Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science: Papers from the Harvard Sesquicentennial Congress.'' U. of Alabama Press, 1993. 424 pp.

===Primary sources===
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893)'' (1992) ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, and ''Volume Two (1893-1913)'' (1998) ed. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep.htm online edition].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics'' (1991) ed. James Hoopes, University of North Carolina Press [http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Signs-Writings-Semiotic-Charles/dp/0807843423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' (vols 1-6 1931-35) ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss and (vols. 7-8 1958) ed. Arthur W. Burks, Harvard & [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlpeir.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce'', ed. Carolyn Eisele (4 vol. in 5, 1976), Mouton and Humanities Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Contributions to 'The Nation''' ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (4 vol 1975-1987) Texas Tech University and [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlppw1.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Historical Perspectives on Peirce's Logic of Science: A History of Science.'' ed. by Carolyn Eisele, 2 vol. New York: Mouton, 1985. 1130 pp.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders and Lady Welby, Victoria. ''Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby'' (1977) ed. Charles S. Hardwick with James Cook, Indiana University Press. 2nd ed. 2001, Press of Arisbe Associates.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition'' (6 vols. of projected 30, 1981-present) eds. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/crit.htm electronic version], Indiana University Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Reasoning and the Logic of Things, The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898'' (1992) ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner, intro. and commentary Hilary Putnam, Harvard.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism"'' (1997) ed. Patricia Ann Turisi, SUNY Press.

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]
[[Category:Progressive Era]]
[[Category:Gilded Age]]
[[Category:People who were Educated at Home]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Peirce, Charles Sanders}}

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-05-11T21:23:24Z

ForNow: /* Specialized studies */ Link to Braude's paper online. Plus caught typo.

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914)<ref> pronounced "purse"</ref> was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and [[polymath]]<ref> He wrote important essays on logic, pragmatism, metaphysics, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, and chemistry. He also wrote on psychology, early English and classical Greek pronunciation, psychical research, criminology, the history of science, ancient history, Egyptology, and Napoleon, prepared a thesaurus and an editor's manual, and did translations from Latin and German.</ref> [[William James]] and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder.<ref> Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.</ref> From 1879 to 1884 he was a lecturer at the new graduate university, Johns Hopkins. There he taught logic to Christine Ladd-Franklin and to [[John Dewey]], who became a leader of the liberal wing of pragmatism. Peirce himself was quite conservative when it came to social and economic issues.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Career==
Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor and the nation's leading mathematician. Benjamin especially taught Charles how to solve increasingly complex math and logic problems. He graduated from Harvard College in 1859 with mediocre grades; he later earned degrees in chemistry and biology with distinction. He became a research scientist with the United States Coast Survey, 1861-1891, doing research on gravity. At the same time he taught and did research at Harvard in logic and astronomy.

He suffered from an early age from trigeminal or "facial" neuralgia, an extremely painful condition. Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, ill-tempered, and lazy. Lazy he was not, but the other personality traits only worsened and prevented him from securing a permanent faculty appointment anywhere, a cause defeated by his opponents' reporting to potential academic employers the fact of his having lived with his future second wife Juliette while still married to his first. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and second wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania, an area which attracted him because it was a watering hole for captains of industry<ref>See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in ''First Things'', 1993, [http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5203 online edition].</ref>. There he built a house which he called Arisbe, where he hoped to have intellectual guests regularly from New York City, and which he and Juliette continued to expand even during the poverty from which they never finally escaped. He wrote many articles for periodicals, over 400 during his lifetime for ''The Nation'', and for dictionaries<ref>Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the ''Century Dictionary'' ([http://www.global-language.com/century/ online edition]) and Baldwin's ''Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology'' (online editions [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/ here] and [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/concepts/browse?source=Baldwin here])</ref> and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.

==Logic==
In logic Peirce was the first American to take up [[George Boole]]'s program to find the mathematical laws of logic--a program that began modern logic. Peirce made numerous major contributions from 1866 to 1914. His technical papers of 1867 to 1885 established him as the greatest formal logician in the world, and the influential in the period from Boole to Ernst Schroeder. Peirce's papers were extremely difficult, but Schroeder explicated them and they became well known in the field.

Peirce radically modified, extended, and transformed Boolean algebra, making it applicable to propositions, relations, probability, and arithmetic. Following De Morgan, Peirce laid the foundations of the logic of relations, the key technique for the logical analysis of mathematics. He invented the copula symbol of inclusion, the most important symbol in the logic of classes. Peirce invented two new logical algebras, two new systems of logical graphs, discovered the link between the logic of classes and the logic of propositions, was the first to give the fundamental principle for the logical development of mathematics, and made fundamental contributions to probability theory, induction, and the logic of scientific methodology. Peirce wrote an elaborate book on advanced logic but could not get it published.

==Pragmatism==
Peirce was the creator if "Pragmatism;" it emerged from his many discussions in Cambridge at a "metaphysical club" founded in the 1870s. Most influential on peirce were [[Chauncey Wright]], a philosopher; [[William James]], Peirce's lifelong friend and benefactor; and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer and follower of utilitarian philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]] who interpreted doctrines in terms of their effect upon social life. Peirce began reading philosophy and by 1871 he was converted to the version of realism originally propounded by medieval philosopher [[Duns Scotus]]. Peirce remained a realist in philosophy all his life, eventually embracing realism not only about generals or universals but also about modalities such as possibility and necessity. His first major statement of Pragmatism appeared in ''Popular Science Monthly'' in January 1878, under the title "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."<ref> see [http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; ''Popular Science Monthly'' 12 (January 1878), 286-302]</ref>

In 1898 William James first publicly used the term "pragmatism" and acknowledged Peirce's priority. Peirce's pragmatism, however, is not the same as James's; it has more in common with the somewhat independently developed idealism of [[Josiah Royce]] and the later views of John Dewey. Peirce shared many of the views characteristic of the pragmatic school, developing them in his own fashion. He believed in the dependence of logic on ethics, argued as early as 1868 against individualism and egoism, and developed social theories of reality and logic. At the same time he believed that the development of business methods should be left to business without law's interference.<ref>See the 1910 quote from Peirce in the third section of "Pragmatism and American Democracy: An Elective Affinity Analysis" by Norbert Wiley, presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, 2003, [http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/pragmatism/wiley_pragma_demo.html online edition].</ref> He believed and argued that logic precedes metaphysics, and that metaphysicians failing to appreciate that precedence have always barred the way to inquiry.<ref>See for example "F.R.L." (First Rule of Logic), 1899 manuscript, not to be confused with another piece given that title. Published in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 1, paragraphs 135-140, [http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/frl_99.htm online edition].</ref>

Peirce held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>.

Pragmatism allows ideas to have any origin; what matters is not where we got an idea from but where we can go with it. In the case of science the usefulness of an idea includes reliability and fruitfulness. "Fruitfulness" does not mean practical utility but, rather, the opening up of original lines of successful research, what mathematicians nowadays call fecundity. As reliability is to truth, so fruitfulness is to depth and breadth of understanding. The test of truth and fruitfulness lies in the future. Truth, for the pragmatist, depends on our developing the implications of ideas so that we can find ways of applying them experimentally.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Further reading==
* Auspitz, Josiah Lee. "The Greatest Living American Philosopher." ''Commentary'' 1983 76(6): 51-64. 0010-2601 Calls Peirce a living philosopher because his ideas remain relevant [http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-greatest-living-american-philosopher-6781 online edition]
* Brent, Joseph. ''Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life'' (1998), 404pp; the standard biography [http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Sanders-Peirce-Joseph-Brent/dp/0253211611/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), advanced [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ online]
* Haack, Susan. "Vulgar Rortyism" in ''The New Citerion'' (1997). Review of Louis Menand's ''Pragmatism: A Reader''. Opposed to Menand's and Rorty's views of Peirce. [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/rortyism-haack-3261 Online edition].
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.
* Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" ''Dictionary of American Biography'' (1935), [http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/weissbio.htm online edition].
===Specialized studies===
* Braude, Stephen E. "Peirce on the Paranormal". ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 1998 34(1): 203-224. 0009-1774 Looks at P's ideas 1887-1906 regarding telepathy, spiritualism, psychokinesis, postmortem survival, and miracles. [http://userpages.umbc.edu/~braude/pdfs_pubd/braude--Peirce%20on%20the%20Paranormal.pdf Online edition].
* Delaney, Cornelius. ''Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce'' (1993)
* Fisch, Max H. ''Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism.'' ed. by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel, Indiana U. Press, 1986. 464 pp.
* Hartman, Matthew. "Utopian Evolution: The Sentimental Critique of Social Darwinism in Bellamy and Peirce." ''Utopian Studies'' 1999 10(1): 26-41. 1045-991X Compares Peirce's essay "Evolutionary Love" (1893) with Edward Bellamy's utopian novel ''Looking Backward'' (1888), exploring the elevation of creative love over greed as agents of change. Both works were written in the utopian vein in response to the growing prominence of capitalist economic theory and [[Social Darwinism]] during the [[Gilded Age]]. [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7051/is_1_10/ai_n28758437/ Online edition]
* Hausman, Carl R. ''Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy'' (1993)
* Hoopes, James. ''Community Denied: The Wrong Turn of Pragmatic Liberalism'' (1998), argues for Peirce's view of pragmatism, which perceived an individual in terms of his relations with others, over James's and Dewey's "weak liberalism."
* Ketner, Kenneth Laine. ''His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce.'' Vanderbilt U. Pr., 1998. 420 pp.; this is a novel in which Ketner combines some actual documents with an imaginary reconstruction of P's life. [http://www.wyttynys.net/ Excerpt online]
* Leja, Michael. "Peirce, Visuality, and Art." ''Representations'' 2000 (72): 97-122. 0734-6018 Examines the visuality of his semiotics and the use of images and reflected meaning; based on drawings in Peirce's unpublished notes
* Locke, Gordon. "Peirce's Metaphysics: Evolution, Synechism, and the Mathematical Conception of the Continuum." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2000 36(1): 133-147. Explores his use of the mathematical concept of the continuum, an image he used to express the tightly packed connectedness of related concepts. His metaphysics of evolution depends completely on a continuum completely lacking inherent divisions, one that is "nothing but pure potential for demarcation."
* Midtgarden, Torjus. "Peirce's Speculative Grammar from 1895-1896: Its Exegetical Background and Significance." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2001 37(1): 81-96. Examines the changes in Peirce's epistemological thinking that were determined by his innovations in predicate logic during the 1880s, focused on "On the Algebra of Logic" (1885) and "Grand Logic" (1893).
* Moore, Edward C., ed. ''Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science: Papers from the Harvard Sesquicentennial Congress.'' U. of Alabama Press, 1993. 424 pp.

===Primary sources===
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893)'' (1992) ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, and ''Volume Two (1893-1913)'' (1998) ed. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep.htm online edition].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics'' (1991) ed. James Hoopes, University of North Carolina Press [http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Signs-Writings-Semiotic-Charles/dp/0807843423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' (vols 1-6 1931-35) ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss and (vols. 7-8 1958) ed. Arthur W. Burks, Harvard & [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlpeir.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce'', ed. Carolyn Eisele (4 vol. in 5, 1976), Mouton and Humanities Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Contributions to 'The Nation''' ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (4 vol 1975-1987) Texas Tech University and [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlppw1.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Historical Perspectives on Peirce's Logic of Science: A History of Science.'' ed. by Carolyn Eisele, 2 vol. New York: Mouton, 1985. 1130 pp.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders and Lady Welby, Victoria. ''Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby'' (1977) ed. Charles S. Hardwick with James Cook, Indiana University Press. 2nd ed. 2001, Press of Arisbe Associates.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition'' (6 vols. of projected 30, 1981-present) eds. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/crit.htm electronic version], Indiana University Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Reasoning and the Logic of Things, The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898'' (1992) ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner, intro. and commentary Hilary Putnam, Harvard.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism"'' (1997) ed. Patricia Ann Turisi, SUNY Press.

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]
[[Category:Progressive Era]]
[[Category:Gilded Age]]
[[Category:People who were Educated at Home]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Peirce, Charles Sanders}}

User:ForNow

2009-04-21T00:58:37Z

ForNow: Blanked the page

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-18T18:10:49Z

ForNow: /* Specialized studies */ Some links. Correction of Delaney book's title (begins with "Science..." not "In Science...")

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914)<ref> pronounced "purse"</ref> was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and [[polymath]]<ref> He wrote important essays on logic, pragmatism, metaphysics, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, and chemistry. He also wrote on psychology, early English and classical Greek pronunciation, psychical research, criminology, the history of science, ancient history, Egyptology, and Napoleon, prepared a thesaurus and an editor's manual, and did translations from Latin and German.</ref> [[William James]] and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder.<ref> Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.</ref> From 1879 to 1884 he was a lecturer at the new graduate university, Johns Hopkins. There he taught logic to Christine Ladd-Franklin and to [[John Dewey]], who became a leader of the liberal wing of pragmatism. Peirce himself was quite conservative when it came to social and economic issues.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Career==
Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor and the nation's leading mathematician. Benjamin especially taught Charles how to solve increasingly complex math and logic problems. He graduated from Harvard College in 1859 with mediocre grades; he later earned degrees in chemistry and biology with distinction. He became a research scientist with the United States Coast Survey, 1861-1891, doing research on gravity. At the same time he taught and did research at Harvard in logic and astronomy.

He suffered from an early age from trigeminal or "facial" neuralgia, an extremely painful condition. Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, ill-tempered, and lazy. Lazy he was not, but the other personality traits only worsened and prevented him from securing a permanent faculty appointment anywhere, a cause defeated by his opponents' reporting to potential academic employers the fact of his having lived with his future second wife Juliette while still married to his first. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and second wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania, an area which attracted him because it was a watering hole for captains of industry<ref>See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in ''First Things'', 1993, [http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5203 online edition].</ref>. There he built a house which he called Arisbe, where he hoped to have intellectual guests regularly from New York City, and which he and Juliette continued to expand even during the poverty from which they never finally escaped. He wrote many articles for periodicals, over 400 during his lifetime for ''The Nation'', and for dictionaries<ref>Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the ''Century Dictionary'' ([http://www.global-language.com/century/ online edition]) and Baldwin's ''Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology'' (online editions [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/ here] and [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/concepts/browse?source=Baldwin here])</ref> and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.

==Logic==
In logic Peirce was the first American to take up [[George Boole]]'s program to find the mathematical laws of logic--a program that began modern logic. Peirce made numerous major contributions from 1866 to 1914. His technical papers of 1867 to 1885 established him as the greatest formal logician in the world, and the influential in the period from Boole to Ernst Schroeder. Peirce's papers were extremely difficult, but Schroeder explicated them and they became well known in the field.

Peirce radically modified, extended, and transformed Boolean algebra, making it applicable to propositions, relations, probability, and arithmetic. Following De Morgan, Peirce laid the foundations of the logic of relations, the key technique for the logical analysis of mathematics. He invented the copula symbol of inclusion, the most important symbol in the logic of classes. Peirce invented two new logical algebras, two new systems of logical graphs, discovered the link between the logic of classes and the logic of propositions, was the first to give the fundamental principle for the logical development of mathematics, and made fundamental contributions to probability theory, induction, and the logic of scientific methodology. Peirce wrote an elaborate book on advanced logic but could not get it published.

==Pragmatism==
Peirce was the creator if "Pragmatism;" it emerged from his many discussions in Cambridge at a "metaphysical club" founded in the 1870s. Most influential on peirce were [[Chauncey Wright]], a philosopher; [[William James]], Peirce's lifelong friend and benefactor; and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer and follower of utilitarian philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]] who interpreted doctrines in terms of their effect upon social life. Peirce began reading philosophy and by 1871 he was converted to the version of realism originally propounded by medieval philosopher [[Duns Scotus]]. Peirce remained a realist in philosophy all his life, eventually embracing realism not only about generals or universals but also about modalities such as possibility and necessity. His first major statement of Pragmatism appeared in ''Popular Science Monthly'' in January 1878, under the title "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."<ref> see [http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; ''Popular Science Monthly'' 12 (January 1878), 286-302]</ref>

In 1898 William James first publicly used the term "pragmatism" and acknowledged Peirce's priority. Peirce's pragmatism, however, is not the same as James's; it has more in common with the somewhat independently developed idealism of [[Josiah Royce]] and the later views of John Dewey. Peirce shared many of the views characteristic of the pragmatic school, developing them in his own fashion. He believed in the dependence of logic on ethics, argued as early as 1868 against individualism and egoism, and developed social theories of reality and logic. At the same time he believed that the development of business methods should be left to business without law's interference.<ref>See the 1910 quote from Peirce in the third section of "Pragmatism and American Democracy: An Elective Affinity Analysis" by Norbert Wiley, presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, 2003, [http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/pragmatism/wiley_pragma_demo.html online edition].</ref> He believed and argued that logic precedes metaphysics, and that metaphysicians failing to appreciate that precedence have always barred the way to inquiry.<ref>See for example "F.R.L." (First Rule of Logic), 1899 manuscript, not to be confused with another piece given that title. Published in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 1, paragraphs 135-140, [http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/frl_99.htm online edition].</ref>

Peirce held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>.

Pragmatism allows ideas to have any origin; what matters is not where we got an idea from but where we can go with it. In the case of science the usefulness of an idea includes reliability and fruitfulness. "Fruitfulness" does not mean practical utility but, rather, the opening up of original lines of successful research, what mathematicians nowadays call fecundity. As reliability is to truth, so fruitfulness is to depth and breadth of understanding. The test of truth and fruitfulness lies in the future. Truth, for the pragmatist, depends on our developing the implications of ideas so that we can find ways of applying them experimentally.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Further reading==
* Auspitz, Josiah Lee. "The Greatest Living American Philosopher." ''Commentary'' 1983 76(6): 51-64. 0010-2601 Calls Peirce a living philosopher because his ideas remain relevant [http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-greatest-living-american-philosopher-6781 online edition]
* Brent, Joseph. ''Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life'' (1998), 404pp; the standard biography [http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Sanders-Peirce-Joseph-Brent/dp/0253211611/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), advanced [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ online]
* Haack, Susan. "Vulgar Rortyism" in ''The New Citerion'' (1997). Review of Louis Menand's ''Pragmatism: A Reader''. Opposed to Menand's and Rorty's views of Peirce. [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/rortyism-haack-3261 Online edition].
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.
* Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" ''Dictionary of American Biography'' (1935), [http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/weissbio.htm online edition].
===Specialized studies===
* Braude, Stephen E. "Peirce on the Paranormal". ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 1998 34(1): 203-224. 0009-1774 Looks at P's ideas 1887-1906 regarding telepathy, spiritualism, psychokinesis, postmortem survival, and miracles.
* Delaney, Cornelius. ''Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce'' (1993)
* Fisch, Max H. ''Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism.'' ed. by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel, Indiana U. Press, 1986. 464 pp.
* Hartman, Matthew. "Utopian Evolution: The Sentimental Critique of Social Darwinism in Bellamy and Peirce." ''Utopian Studies'' 1999 10(1): 26-41. 1045-991X Compares Peirce's essay "Evolutionary Love" (1893) with Edward Bellamy's utopian novel ''Looking Backward'' (1888), exploring the elevation of creative love over greed as agents of change. Both works were written in the utopian vein in response to the growing prominence of capitalist economic theory and [[Social Darwinism]] during the [[Gilded Age]]. [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7051/is_1_10/ai_n28758437/ Online edition]
* Hausman, Carl R. ''Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy'' (1993)
* Hoopes, James. ''Community Denied: The Wrong Turn of Pragmatic Liberalism'' (1998), argues for Peirce's view of pragmatism, which perceived an individual in terms of his relations with others, over James's and Dewey's "weak liberalism."
* Ketner, Kenneth Laine. ''His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce.'' Vanderbilt U. Pr., 1998. 420 pp.; this is a novel in which Ketner combines some actual documents with an imaginary reconstruction of P's life. [http://www.wyttynys.net/ Excerpt online]
* Leja, Michael. "Peirce, Visuality, and Art." ''Representations'' 2000 (72): 97-122. 0734-6018 Examines the visuality of his semiotics and the use of images and reflected meaning; based on drawings in Peirce's unpublished notes
* Locke, Gordon. "Peirce's Metaphysics: Evolution, Synechism, and the Mathematical Conception of the Continuum." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2000 36(1): 133-147. Explores his use of the mathematical concept of the continuum, an image he used to express the tightly packed connectedness of related concepts. His metaphysics of evolution depends completely on a continuum completely lacking inherent divisions, one that is "nothing but pure potential for demarcation."
* Midtgarden, Torjus. "Peirce's Speculative Grammmar from 1895-1896: Its Exegetical Background and Significance." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2001 37(1): 81-96. Examines the changes in Peirce's epistemological thinking that were determined by his innovations in predicate logic during the 1880s, focused on "On the Algebra of Logic" (1885) and "Grand Logic" (1893).
* Moore, Edward C., ed. ''Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science: Papers from the Harvard Sesquicentennial Congress.'' U. of Alabama Press, 1993. 424 pp.

===Primary sources===
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893)'' (1992) ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, and ''Volume Two (1893-1913)'' (1998) ed. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep.htm online edition].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics'' (1991) ed. James Hoopes, University of North Carolina Press [http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Signs-Writings-Semiotic-Charles/dp/0807843423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' (vols 1-6 1931-35) ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss and (vols. 7-8 1958) ed. Arthur W. Burks, Harvard & [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlpeir.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce'', ed. Carolyn Eisele (4 vol. in 5, 1976), Mouton and Humanities Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Contributions to 'The Nation''' ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (4 vol 1975-1987) Texas Tech University and [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlppw1.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Historical Perspectives on Peirce's Logic of Science: A History of Science.'' ed. by Carolyn Eisele, 2 vol. New York: Mouton, 1985. 1130 pp.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders and Lady Welby, Victoria. ''Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby'' (1977) ed. Charles S. Hardwick with James Cook, Indiana University Press. 2nd ed. 2001, Press of Arisbe Associates.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition'' (6 vols. of projected 30, 1981-present) eds. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/crit.htm electronic version], Indiana University Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Reasoning and the Logic of Things, The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898'' (1992) ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner, intro. and commentary Hilary Putnam, Harvard.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism"'' (1997) ed. Patricia Ann Turisi, SUNY Press.

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]
[[Category:Progressive Era]]
[[Category:Gilded Age]]
[[Category:People who were Educated at Home]]

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-17T15:18:00Z

ForNow: /* Further reading */ Added "Vulgar Rortyism"

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914)<ref> pronounced "purse"</ref> was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and [[polymath]]<ref> He wrote important essays on logic, pragmatism, metaphysics, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, and chemistry. He also wrote on psychology, early English and classical Greek pronunciation, psychical research, criminology, the history of science, ancient history, Egyptology, and Napoleon, prepared a thesaurus and an editor's manual, and did translations from Latin and German.</ref> [[William James]] and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder.<ref> Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.</ref> From 1879 to 1884 he was a lecturer at the new graduate university, Johns Hopkins. There he taught logic to Christine Ladd-Franklin and to [[John Dewey]], who became a leader of the liberal wing of pragmatism. Peirce himself was quite conservative when it came to social and economic issues.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Career==
Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor and the nation's leading mathematician. Benjamin especially taught Charles how to solve increasingly complex math and logic problems. He graduated from Harvard College in 1859 with mediocre grades; he later earned degrees in chemistry and biology with distinction. He became a research scientist with the United States Coast Survey, 1861-1891, doing research on gravity. At the same time he taught and did research at Harvard in logic and astronomy.

He suffered from an early age from trigeminal or "facial" neuralgia, an extremely painful condition. Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, ill-tempered, and lazy. Lazy he was not, but the other personality traits only worsened and prevented him from securing a permanent faculty appointment anywhere, a cause defeated by his opponents' reporting to potential academic employers the fact of his having lived with his future second wife Juliette while still married to his first. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and second wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania, an area which attracted him because it was a watering hole for captains of industry<ref>See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in ''First Things'', 1993, [http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5203 online edition].</ref>. There he built a house which he called Arisbe, where he hoped to have intellectual guests regularly from New York City, and which he and Juliette continued to expand even during the poverty from which they never finally escaped. He wrote many articles for periodicals, over 400 during his lifetime for ''The Nation'', and for dictionaries<ref>Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the ''Century Dictionary'' ([http://www.global-language.com/century/ online edition]) and Baldwin's ''Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology'' (online editions [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/ here] and [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/concepts/browse?source=Baldwin here])</ref> and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.

==Logic==
In logic Peirce was the first American to take up [[George Boole]]'s program to find the mathematical laws of logic--a program that began modern logic. Peirce made numerous major contributions from 1866 to 1914. His technical papers of 1867 to 1885 established him as the greatest formal logician in the world, and the influential in the period from Boole to Ernst Schroeder. Peirce's papers were extremely difficult, but Schroeder explicated them and they became well known in the field.

Peirce radically modified, extended, and transformed Boolean algebra, making it applicable to propositions, relations, probability, and arithmetic. Following De Morgan, Peirce laid the foundations of the logic of relations, the key technique for the logical analysis of mathematics. He invented the copula symbol of inclusion, the most important symbol in the logic of classes. Peirce invented two new logical algebras, two new systems of logical graphs, discovered the link between the logic of classes and the logic of propositions, was the first to give the fundamental principle for the logical development of mathematics, and made fundamental contributions to probability theory, induction, and the logic of scientific methodology. Peirce wrote an elaborate book on advanced logic but could not get it published.

==Pragmatism==
Peirce was the creator if "Pragmatism;" it emerged from his many discussions in Cambridge at a "metaphysical club" founded in the 1870s. Most influential on peirce were [[Chauncey Wright]], a philosopher; [[William James]], Peirce's lifelong friend and benefactor; and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer and follower of utilitarian philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]] who interpreted doctrines in terms of their effect upon social life. Peirce began reading philosophy and by 1871 he was converted to the version of realism originally propounded by medieval philosopher [[Duns Scotus]]. Peirce remained a realist in philosophy all his life, eventually embracing realism not only about generals or universals but also about modalities such as possibility and necessity. His first major statement of Pragmatism appeared in ''Popular Science Monthly'' in January 1878, under the title "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."<ref> see [http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; ''Popular Science Monthly'' 12 (January 1878), 286-302]</ref>

In 1898 William James first publicly used the term "pragmatism" and acknowledged Peirce's priority. Peirce's pragmatism, however, is not the same as James's; it has more in common with the somewhat independently developed idealism of [[Josiah Royce]] and the later views of John Dewey. Peirce shared many of the views characteristic of the pragmatic school, developing them in his own fashion. He believed in the dependence of logic on ethics, argued as early as 1868 against individualism and egoism, and developed social theories of reality and logic. At the same time he believed that the development of business methods should be left to business without law's interference.<ref>See the 1910 quote from Peirce in the third section of "Pragmatism and American Democracy: An Elective Affinity Analysis" by Norbert Wiley, presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, 2003, [http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/pragmatism/wiley_pragma_demo.html online edition].</ref> He believed and argued that logic precedes metaphysics, and that metaphysicians failing to appreciate that precedence have always barred the way to inquiry.<ref>See for example "F.R.L." (First Rule of Logic), 1899 manuscript, not to be confused with another piece given that title. Published in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 1, paragraphs 135-140, [http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/frl_99.htm online edition].</ref>

Peirce held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>.

Pragmatism allows ideas to have any origin; what matters is not where we got an idea from but where we can go with it. In the case of science the usefulness of an idea includes reliability and fruitfulness. "Fruitfulness" does not mean practical utility but, rather, the opening up of original lines of successful research, what mathematicians nowadays call fecundity. As reliability is to truth, so fruitfulness is to depth and breadth of understanding. The test of truth and fruitfulness lies in the future. Truth, for the pragmatist, depends on our developing the implications of ideas so that we can find ways of applying them experimentally.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Further reading==
* Auspitz, Josiah Lee. "The Greatest Living American Philosopher." ''Commentary'' 1983 76(6): 51-64. 0010-2601 Calls Peirce a living philosopher because his ideas remain relevant [http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-greatest-living-american-philosopher-6781 online edition]
* Brent, Joseph. ''Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life'' (1998), 404pp; the standard biography [http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Sanders-Peirce-Joseph-Brent/dp/0253211611/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), advanced [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ online]
* Haack, Susan. "Vulgar Rortyism" in ''The New Citerion'' (1997). Review of Louis Menand's ''Pragmatism: A Reader''. Opposed to Menand's and Rorty's views of Peirce. [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/rortyism-haack-3261 Online edition].
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.
* Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" ''Dictionary of American Biography'' (1935), [http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/weissbio.htm online edition].
===Specialized studies===
* Braude, Stephen E. "Peirce on the Paranormal". ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 1998 34(1): 203-224. 0009-1774 Looks at P's ideas 1887-1906 regarding telepathy, spiritualism, psychokinesis, postmortem survival, and miracles.
* Delaney, Cornelius. ''In Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce'' (1993)
* Fisch, Max H. ''Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism.'' ed. by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel, Indiana U. Press, 1986. 464 pp.
* Hartman, Matthew. "Utopian Evolution: The Sentimental Critique of Social Darwinism in Bellamy and Peirce." ''Utopian Studies'' 1999 10(1): 26-41. 1045-991X Compares Peirce's essay "Evolutionary Love" (1893) with Edward Bellamy's utopian novel ''Looking Backward'' (1888), exploring the elevation of creative love over greed as agents of change. Both works were written in the utopian vein in response to the growing prominence of capitalist economic theory and [[Social Darwinism]] during the [[Gilded Age]]
* Hausman, Carl R. ''Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy (1993)
* Hoopes, James. ''Community Denied: The Wrong Turn of Pragmatic Liberalism'' (1998), argues for Peirce's view of pragmatism, which perceived an individual in terms of his relations with others, over James's and Dewey's "weak liberalism."
* Ketner, Kenneth Laine. ''His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce.'' Vanderbilt U. Pr., 1998. 420 pp.; this is a novel in which Ketner combines some actual documents with an imaginary reconstruction of P's life
* Leja, Michael. "Peirce, Visuality, and Art." ''Representations'' 2000 (72): 97-122. 0734-6018 Examines the visuality of his semiotics and the use of images and reflected meaning; based on drawings in Peirce's unpublished notes
* Locke, Gordon. "Peirce's Metaphysics: Evolution, Synechism, and the Mathematical Conception of the Continuum." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2000 36(1): 133-147. Explores his use of the mathematical concept of the continuum, an image he used to express the tightly packed connectedness of related concepts. His metaphysics of evolution depends completely on a continuum completely lacking inherent divisions, one that is "nothing but pure potential for demarcation."
* Midtgarden, Torjus. "Peirce's Speculative Grammmar from 1895-1896: Its Exegetical Background and Significance." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2001 37(1): 81-96. Examines the changes in Peirce's epistemological thinking that were determined by his innovations in predicate logic during the 1880s, focused on "On the Algebra of Logic" (1885) and "Grand Logic" (1893).
* Moore, Edward C., ed. ''Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science: Papers from the Harvard Sesquicentennial Congress.'' U. of Alabama Press, 1993. 424 pp.

===Primary sources===
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893)'' (1992) ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, and ''Volume Two (1893-1913)'' (1998) ed. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep.htm online edition].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics'' (1991) ed. James Hoopes, University of North Carolina Press [http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Signs-Writings-Semiotic-Charles/dp/0807843423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' (vols 1-6 1931-35) ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss and (vols. 7-8 1958) ed. Arthur W. Burks, Harvard & [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlpeir.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce'', ed. Carolyn Eisele (4 vol. in 5, 1976), Mouton and Humanities Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Contributions to 'The Nation''' ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (4 vol 1975-1987) Texas Tech University and [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlppw1.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Historical Perspectives on Peirce's Logic of Science: A History of Science.'' ed. by Carolyn Eisele, 2 vol. New York: Mouton, 1985. 1130 pp.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders and Lady Welby, Victoria. ''Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby'' (1977) ed. Charles S. Hardwick with James Cook, Indiana University Press. 2nd ed. 2001, Press of Arisbe Associates.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition'' (6 vols. of projected 30, 1981-present) eds. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/crit.htm electronic version], Indiana University Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Reasoning and the Logic of Things, The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898'' (1992) ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner, intro. and commentary Hilary Putnam, Harvard.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism"'' (1997) ed. Patricia Ann Turisi, SUNY Press.

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]
[[Category:Progressive Era]]
[[Category:Gilded Age]]
[[Category:People who were Educated at Home]]

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-17T14:56:13Z

ForNow: /* Specialized studies */ Repairing italics and a typo

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914)<ref> pronounced "purse"</ref> was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and [[polymath]]<ref> He wrote important essays on logic, pragmatism, metaphysics, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, and chemistry. He also wrote on psychology, early English and classical Greek pronunciation, psychical research, criminology, the history of science, ancient history, Egyptology, and Napoleon, prepared a thesaurus and an editor's manual, and did translations from Latin and German.</ref> [[William James]] and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder.<ref> Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.</ref> From 1879 to 1884 he was a lecturer at the new graduate university, Johns Hopkins. There he taught logic to Christine Ladd-Franklin and to [[John Dewey]], who became a leader of the liberal wing of pragmatism. Peirce himself was quite conservative when it came to social and economic issues.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Career==
Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor and the nation's leading mathematician. Benjamin especially taught Charles how to solve increasingly complex math and logic problems. He graduated from Harvard College in 1859 with mediocre grades; he later earned degrees in chemistry and biology with distinction. He became a research scientist with the United States Coast Survey, 1861-1891, doing research on gravity. At the same time he taught and did research at Harvard in logic and astronomy.

He suffered from an early age from trigeminal or "facial" neuralgia, an extremely painful condition. Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, ill-tempered, and lazy. Lazy he was not, but the other personality traits only worsened and prevented him from securing a permanent faculty appointment anywhere, a cause defeated by his opponents' reporting to potential academic employers the fact of his having lived with his future second wife Juliette while still married to his first. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and second wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania, an area which attracted him because it was a watering hole for captains of industry<ref>See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in ''First Things'', 1993, [http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5203 online edition].</ref>. There he built a house which he called Arisbe, where he hoped to have intellectual guests regularly from New York City, and which he and Juliette continued to expand even during the poverty from which they never finally escaped. He wrote many articles for periodicals, over 400 during his lifetime for ''The Nation'', and for dictionaries<ref>Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the ''Century Dictionary'' ([http://www.global-language.com/century/ online edition]) and Baldwin's ''Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology'' (online editions [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/ here] and [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/concepts/browse?source=Baldwin here])</ref> and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.

==Logic==
In logic Peirce was the first American to take up [[George Boole]]'s program to find the mathematical laws of logic--a program that began modern logic. Peirce made numerous major contributions from 1866 to 1914. His technical papers of 1867 to 1885 established him as the greatest formal logician in the world, and the influential in the period from Boole to Ernst Schroeder. Peirce's papers were extremely difficult, but Schroeder explicated them and they became well known in the field.

Peirce radically modified, extended, and transformed Boolean algebra, making it applicable to propositions, relations, probability, and arithmetic. Following De Morgan, Peirce laid the foundations of the logic of relations, the key technique for the logical analysis of mathematics. He invented the copula symbol of inclusion, the most important symbol in the logic of classes. Peirce invented two new logical algebras, two new systems of logical graphs, discovered the link between the logic of classes and the logic of propositions, was the first to give the fundamental principle for the logical development of mathematics, and made fundamental contributions to probability theory, induction, and the logic of scientific methodology. Peirce wrote an elaborate book on advanced logic but could not get it published.

==Pragmatism==
Peirce was the creator if "Pragmatism;" it emerged from his many discussions in Cambridge at a "metaphysical club" founded in the 1870s. Most influential on peirce were [[Chauncey Wright]], a philosopher; [[William James]], Peirce's lifelong friend and benefactor; and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer and follower of utilitarian philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]] who interpreted doctrines in terms of their effect upon social life. Peirce began reading philosophy and by 1871 he was converted to the version of realism originally propounded by medieval philosopher [[Duns Scotus]]. Peirce remained a realist in philosophy all his life, eventually embracing realism not only about generals or universals but also about modalities such as possibility and necessity. His first major statement of Pragmatism appeared in ''Popular Science Monthly'' in January 1878, under the title "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."<ref> see [http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; ''Popular Science Monthly'' 12 (January 1878), 286-302]</ref>

In 1898 William James first publicly used the term "pragmatism" and acknowledged Peirce's priority. Peirce's pragmatism, however, is not the same as James's; it has more in common with the somewhat independently developed idealism of [[Josiah Royce]] and the later views of John Dewey. Peirce shared many of the views characteristic of the pragmatic school, developing them in his own fashion. He believed in the dependence of logic on ethics, argued as early as 1868 against individualism and egoism, and developed social theories of reality and logic. At the same time he believed that the development of business methods should be left to business without law's interference.<ref>See the 1910 quote from Peirce in the third section of "Pragmatism and American Democracy: An Elective Affinity Analysis" by Norbert Wiley, presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, 2003, [http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/pragmatism/wiley_pragma_demo.html online edition].</ref> He believed and argued that logic precedes metaphysics, and that metaphysicians failing to appreciate that precedence have always barred the way to inquiry.<ref>See for example "F.R.L." (First Rule of Logic), 1899 manuscript, not to be confused with another piece given that title. Published in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 1, paragraphs 135-140, [http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/frl_99.htm online edition].</ref>

Peirce held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>.

Pragmatism allows ideas to have any origin; what matters is not where we got an idea from but where we can go with it. In the case of science the usefulness of an idea includes reliability and fruitfulness. "Fruitfulness" does not mean practical utility but, rather, the opening up of original lines of successful research, what mathematicians nowadays call fecundity. As reliability is to truth, so fruitfulness is to depth and breadth of understanding. The test of truth and fruitfulness lies in the future. Truth, for the pragmatist, depends on our developing the implications of ideas so that we can find ways of applying them experimentally.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Further reading==
* Auspitz, Josiah Lee. "The Greatest Living American Philosopher." ''Commentary'' 1983 76(6): 51-64. 0010-2601 Calls Peirce a living philosopher because his ideas remain relevant [http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-greatest-living-american-philosopher-6781 online edition]
* Brent, Joseph. ''Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life'' (1998), 404pp; the standard biography [http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Sanders-Peirce-Joseph-Brent/dp/0253211611/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), advanced [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ online]
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.
* Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" ''Dictionary of American Biography'' (1935), [http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/weissbio.htm online edition].
===Specialized studies===
* Braude, Stephen E. "Peirce on the Paranormal". ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 1998 34(1): 203-224. 0009-1774 Looks at P's ideas 1887-1906 regarding telepathy, spiritualism, psychokinesis, postmortem survival, and miracles.
* Delaney, Cornelius. ''In Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce'' (1993)
* Fisch, Max H. ''Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism.'' ed. by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel, Indiana U. Press, 1986. 464 pp.
* Hartman, Matthew. "Utopian Evolution: The Sentimental Critique of Social Darwinism in Bellamy and Peirce." ''Utopian Studies'' 1999 10(1): 26-41. 1045-991X Compares Peirce's essay "Evolutionary Love" (1893) with Edward Bellamy's utopian novel ''Looking Backward'' (1888), exploring the elevation of creative love over greed as agents of change. Both works were written in the utopian vein in response to the growing prominence of capitalist economic theory and [[Social Darwinism]] during the [[Gilded Age]]
* Hausman, Carl R. ''Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy (1993)
* Hoopes, James. ''Community Denied: The Wrong Turn of Pragmatic Liberalism'' (1998), argues for Peirce's view of pragmatism, which perceived an individual in terms of his relations with others, over James's and Dewey's "weak liberalism."
* Ketner, Kenneth Laine. ''His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce.'' Vanderbilt U. Pr., 1998. 420 pp.; this is a novel in which Ketner combines some actual documents with an imaginary reconstruction of P's life
* Leja, Michael. "Peirce, Visuality, and Art." ''Representations'' 2000 (72): 97-122. 0734-6018 Examines the visuality of his semiotics and the use of images and reflected meaning; based on drawings in Peirce's unpublished notes
* Locke, Gordon. "Peirce's Metaphysics: Evolution, Synechism, and the Mathematical Conception of the Continuum." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2000 36(1): 133-147. Explores his use of the mathematical concept of the continuum, an image he used to express the tightly packed connectedness of related concepts. His metaphysics of evolution depends completely on a continuum completely lacking inherent divisions, one that is "nothing but pure potential for demarcation."
* Midtgarden, Torjus. "Peirce's Speculative Grammmar from 1895-1896: Its Exegetical Background and Significance." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 2001 37(1): 81-96. Examines the changes in Peirce's epistemological thinking that were determined by his innovations in predicate logic during the 1880s, focused on "On the Algebra of Logic" (1885) and "Grand Logic" (1893).
* Moore, Edward C., ed. ''Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science: Papers from the Harvard Sesquicentennial Congress.'' U. of Alabama Press, 1993. 424 pp.

===Primary sources===
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893)'' (1992) ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, and ''Volume Two (1893-1913)'' (1998) ed. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep.htm online edition].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics'' (1991) ed. James Hoopes, University of North Carolina Press [http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Signs-Writings-Semiotic-Charles/dp/0807843423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' (vols 1-6 1931-35) ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss and (vols. 7-8 1958) ed. Arthur W. Burks, Harvard & [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlpeir.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce'', ed. Carolyn Eisele (4 vol. in 5, 1976), Mouton and Humanities Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Contributions to 'The Nation''' ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (4 vol 1975-1987) Texas Tech University and [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlppw1.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Historical Perspectives on Peirce's Logic of Science: A History of Science.'' ed. by Carolyn Eisele, 2 vol. New York: Mouton, 1985. 1130 pp.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders and Lady Welby, Victoria. ''Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby'' (1977) ed. Charles S. Hardwick with James Cook, Indiana University Press. 2nd ed. 2001, Press of Arisbe Associates.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition'' (6 vols. of projected 30, 1981-present) eds. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/crit.htm electronic version], Indiana University Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Reasoning and the Logic of Things, The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898'' (1992) ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner, intro. and commentary Hilary Putnam, Harvard.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism"'' (1997) ed. Patricia Ann Turisi, SUNY Press.

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]
[[Category:Progressive Era]]
[[Category:Gilded Age]]
[[Category:People who were Educated at Home]]

Talk:Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-17T03:17:42Z

ForNow:

this article is shaping up very well indeed! maybe the title should be changed to "Charles S. Peirce" or "Charles Sanders Peirce" (nobody callshim Charles Peirce). ???? [[User:RJJensen|RJJensen]] 08:36, 16 April 2009 (EDT)

:Yes, the article has definitely come a long way in a few days. I'm okay with "Charles Peirce," but I like "Charles S. Peirce" better and "Charles Sanders Peirce" best of all, I'm not sure why, maybe because having the full middle name is the surest way in the long run to avoid having a disambiguation thing at the page's top. [[User:ForNow|ForNow]] 23:01, 16 April 2009 (EDT)
::agreed. nice work! I got interested in Peirce some years ago (1961 to be exact). [[User:RJJensen|RJJensen]] 23:09, 16 April 2009 (EDT)
:::P.S. "Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce" - wish I had thought of putting it that way! [[User:ForNow|ForNow]] 23:13, 16 April 2009 (EDT) Your comment wasn't there yet when I did the edit, sorry mine ran into yours. [[User:ForNow|ForNow]] 23:17, 16 April 2009 (EDT)

Talk:Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-17T03:13:28Z

ForNow:

this article is shaping up very well indeed! maybe the title should be changed to "Charles S. Peirce" or "Charles Sanders Peirce" (nobody callshim Charles Peirce). ???? [[User:RJJensen|RJJensen]] 08:36, 16 April 2009 (EDT)

:Yes, the article has definitely come a long way in a few days. I'm okay with "Charles Peirce," but I like "Charles S. Peirce" better and "Charles Sanders Peirce" best of all, I'm not sure why, maybe because having the full middle name is the surest way in the long run to avoid having a disambiguation thing at the page's top. [[User:ForNow|ForNow]] 23:01, 16 April 2009 (EDT)
::agreed. nice work! I got interested in Peirce some years ago (1961 to be exact). [[User:RJJensen|RJJensen]] 23:09, 16 April 2009 (EDT) P.S. "Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce" - wish I had thought of putting it that way! [[User:ForNow|ForNow]] 23:13, 16 April 2009 (EDT)

User:ForNow

2009-04-17T03:03:52Z

ForNow: Created page with '[http://4now.blogspot.com/ http://4now.blogspot.com/] I haven't updated it in a while but there are still some useful links in there. It consists mostly of article links, in cate...'

[http://4now.blogspot.com/ http://4now.blogspot.com/] I haven't updated it in a while but there are still some useful links in there. It consists mostly of article links, in categories. [[User:ForNow|ForNow]]

Talk:Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-17T03:01:43Z

ForNow:

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-17T02:43:03Z

ForNow: /* Primary sources */ Added year 1958 for vols 7 & 8 of _Collected Papers_

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914)<ref> pronounced "purse"</ref> was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and [[Polymath]]<ref> He wrote important essays on logic, pragmatism, metaphysics, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, and chemistry. He also wrote on psychology, early English and classical Greek pronunciation, psychical research, criminology, the history of science, ancient history, Egyptology, and Napoleon, prepared a thesaurus and an editor's manual, and did translations from Latin and German.</ref> [[William James]] and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder.<ref> Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.</ref> From 1879 to 1884 he was a lecturer at the new graduate university, Johns Hopkins. There he taught logic to Christine Ladd-Franklin and to [[John Dewey]], who became a leader of the liberal wing of pragmatism. Peirce himself was quite conservative when it came to social and economic issues.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Career==
Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor and the nation's leading mathematician. Benjamin especially taught Charles how to solve increasingly complex math and logic problems. He graduated from Harvard College in 1859 with mediocre grades; he later earned degrees in chemistry and biology with distinction. He became a research scientist with the United States Coast Survey, 1861-1891, doing research on gravity. At the same time he taught and did research at Harvard in logic and astronomy.

Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, lazy, and ill-tempered. He suffered from an early age from trigeminal or "facial" neuralgia, an extremely painful condition. Lazy he was not, but the other personality traits did not help his cause in seeking a permanent faculty appointment anywhere, a cause defeated by his opponents' reporting to potential academic employers the fact of his having lived with his future second wife Juliette while still married to his first. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania, an area which attracted him because it was a watering hole for captains of industry<ref>See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in ''First Things'', 1993, [http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5203 online edition].</ref>. There he built a house which he called Arisbe, where he hoped to have intellectual guests regularly from New York City, and which he and Juliette continued to expand even during the poverty from which they never finally escaped. He wrote many articles for periodicals, over 400 during his lifetime for ''The Nation'', and for dictionaries<ref>Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the ''Century Dictionary'' ([http://www.global-language.com/century/ online edition]) and Baldwin's ''Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology'' (online editions [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/ here] and [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/concepts/browse?source=Baldwin here])</ref> and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.

==Logic==
In logic Peirce was the first American to take up [[George Boole]]'s program to find the mathematical laws of logic--a program that began modern logic. Peirce made numerous major contributions from 1866 to 1914. His technical papers of 1867 to 1885 established him as the greatest formal logician in the world, and the influential in the period from Boole to Ernst Schroeder. Peirce's papers were extremely difficult, but Schroeder explicated them and they became well known in the field.

Peirce radically modified, extended, and transformed Boolean algebra, making it applicable to propositions, relations, probability, and arithmetic. Following De Morgan, Peirce laid the foundations of the logic of relations, the key technique for the logical analysis of mathematics. He invented the copula symbol of inclusion, the most important symbol in the logic of classes. Peirce invented two new logical algebras, two new systems of logical graphs, discovered the link between the logic of classes and the logic of propositions, was the first to give the fundamental principle for the logical development of mathematics, and made fundamental contributions to probability theory, induction, and the logic of scientific methodology. Peirce wrote an elaborate book on advanced logic but could not get it published.

==Pragmatism==
Peirce was the creator if "Pragmatism;" it emerged from his many discussions in Cambridge at a "metaphysical club" founded in the 1870s. Most influential on peirce were [[Chauncey Wright]], a philosopher; [[William James]], Peirce's lifelong friend and benefactor; and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer and follower of utilitarian philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]] who interpreted doctrines in terms of their effect upon social life. Peirce began reading philosophy and by 1871 he was converted to the version of realism originally propounded by medieval philosopher [[Duns Scotus]]. Peirce remained a realist in philosophy all his life, eventually embracing realism not only about generals or universals but also about modalities such as possibility and necessity. His first major statement of Pragmatism appeared in ''Popular Science Monthly'' in January 1878, under the title "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."<ref> see [http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; ''Popular Science Monthly'' 12 (January 1878), 286-302]</ref>

In 1898 William James first publicly used the term "pragmatism" and acknowledged Peirce's priority. Peirce's pragmatism, however, is not the same as James's; it has more in common with the somewhat independently developed idealism of [[Josiah Royce]] and the later views of John Dewey. Peirce shared many of the views characteristic of the pragmatic school, developing them in his own fashion. He believed in the dependence of logic on ethics, argued as early as 1868 against individualism and egoism, and developed social theories of reality and logic. At the same time he believed that the development of business methods should be left to business without law's interference.<ref>See the 1910 quote from Peirce in the third section of "Pragmatism and American Democracy: An Elective Affinity Analysis" by Norbert Wiley, presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, 2003, [http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/pragmatism/wiley_pragma_demo.html online edition].</ref> He believed and argued that logic precedes metaphysics, and that metaphysicians failing to appreciate that precedence have always barred the way to inquiry.<ref>See for example "F.R.L." (First Rule of Logic), 1899 manuscript, not to be confused with another piece given that title. Published in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 1, paragraphs 135-140, [http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/frl_99.htm online edition].</ref>

Peirce held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>.

Pragmatism allows ideas to have any origin; what matters is not where we got an idea from but where we can go with it. In the case of science the usefulness of an idea includes reliability and fruitfulness. "Fruitfulness" does not mean practical utility but, rather, the opening up of original lines of successful research, what mathematicians nowadays call fecundity. As reliability is to truth, so fruitfulness is to depth and breadth of understanding. The test of truth and fruitfulness lies in the future. Truth, for the pragmatist, depends on our developing the implications of ideas so that we can find ways of applying them experimentally.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Further reading==
* Brent, Joseph. ''Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life'' (1998) [http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Sanders-Peirce-Joseph-Brent/dp/0253211611/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), advanced [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ online]
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.
* Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" ''Dictionary of American Biography'' (1935), [http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/weissbio.htm online edition].

===Primary sources===

* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893)'' (1992) ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, and ''Volume Two (1893-1913)'' (1998) ed. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep.htm online edition].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics'' (1991) ed. James Hoopes, University of North Carolina Press [http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Signs-Writings-Semiotic-Charles/dp/0807843423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' (vols 1-6 1931-35) ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss and (vols. 7-8 1958) ed. Arthur W. Burks, Harvard & [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlpeir.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce'', ed. Carolyn Eisele (4 vol. in 5, 1976), Mouton and Humanities Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Contributions to 'The Nation''' ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (4 vol 1975-1987) Texas Tech University and [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlppw1.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders and Lady Welby, Victoria. ''Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby'' (1977) ed. Charles S. Hardwick with James Cook, Indiana University Press. 2nd ed. 2001, Press of Arisbe Associates.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition'' (6 vols. of projected 30, 1981-present) eds. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/crit.htm electronic version], Indiana University Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Reasoning and the Logic of Things, The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898'' (1992) ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner, intro. and commentary Hilary Putnam, Harvard.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism"'' (1997) ed. Patricia Ann Turisi, SUNY Press.

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]
[[Category:Progressive Era]]
[[Category:People who were Educated at Home]]

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-16T05:19:26Z

ForNow: /* Further reading */ added editors of the Collected Papers and link to Weiss's article.

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914)<ref> pronounced "purse"</ref> was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and [[Polymath]]<ref> He wrote important essays on logic, pragmatism, metaphysics, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, and chemistry. He also wrote on psychology, early English and classical Greek pronunciation, psychical research, criminology, the history of science, ancient history, Egyptology, and Napoleon, prepared a thesaurus and an editor's manual, and did translations from Latin and German.</ref> [[William James]] and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder.<ref> Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.</ref> From 1879 to 1884 he was a lecturer at the new graduate university, Johns Hopkins. There he taught logic to Christine Ladd-Franklin and to [[John Dewey]], who became a leader of the liberal wing of pragmatism. Peirce himself was quite conservative when it came to social and economic issues.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Career==
Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor and the nation's leading mathematician. Benjamin especially taught Charles how to solve increasingly complex math and logic problems. He graduated from Harvard College in 1859 with mediocre grades; he later earned degrees in chemistry and biology with distinction. He became a research scientist with the United States Coast Survey, 1861-1891, doing research on gravity. At the same time he taught and did research at Harvard in logic and astronomy.

Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, lazy, and ill-tempered. He suffered from an early age from trigeminal or "facial" neuralgia, an extremely painful condition. Lazy he was not, but the other personality traits did not help his cause in seeking a permanent faculty appointment anywhere, a cause defeated by his opponents' reporting to potential academic employers the fact of his having lived with his future second wife Juliette while still married to his first. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania, an area which attracted him because it was a watering hole for captains of industry<ref>See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in ''First Things'', 1993, [http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5203 online edition].</ref>. There he built a house which he called Arisbe, where he hoped to have intellectual guests regularly from New York City, and which he and Juliette continued to expand even during the poverty from which they never finally escaped. He wrote many articles for periodicals, over 400 during his lifetime for ''The Nation'', and for dictionaries<ref>Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the ''Century Dictionary'' ([http://www.global-language.com/century/ online edition]) and Baldwin's ''Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology'' (online editions [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/ here] and [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/concepts/browse?source=Baldwin here])</ref> and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.

==Logic==
In logic Peirce was the first American to take up [[George Boole]]'s program to find the mathematical laws of logic--a program that began modern logic. Peirce made numerous major contributions from 1866 to 1914. His technical papers of 1867 to 1885 established him as the greatest formal logician in the world, and the influential in the period from Boole to Ernst Schroeder. Peirce's papers were extremely difficult, but Schroeder explicated them and they became well known in the field.

Peirce radically modified, extended, and transformed Boolean algebra, making it applicable to propositions, relations, probability, and arithmetic. Following De Morgan, Peirce laid the foundations of the logic of relations, the key technique for the logical analysis of mathematics. He invented the copula symbol of inclusion, the most important symbol in the logic of classes. Peirce invented two new logical algebras, two new systems of logical graphs, discovered the link between the logic of classes and the logic of propositions, was the first to give the fundamental principle for the logical development of mathematics, and made fundamental contributions to probability theory, induction, and the logic of scientific methodology. Peirce wrote an elaborate book on advanced logic but could not get it published.

==Pragmatism==
Peirce was the creator if "Pragmatism;" it emerged from his many discussions in Cambridge at a "metaphysical club" founded in the 1870s. Most influential on peirce were [[Chauncey Wright]], a philosopher; [[William James]], Peirce's lifelong friend and benefactor; and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer and follower of utilitarian philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]] who interpreted doctrines in terms of their effect upon social life. Peirce began reading philosophy and by 1871 he was converted to the version of realism originally propounded by medieval philosopher [[Duns Scotus]]. Peirce remained a realist in philosophy all his life, eventually embracing realism not only about generals or universals but also about modalities such as possibility and necessity. His first major statement of Pragmatism appeared in ''Popular Science Monthly'' in January 1878, under the title "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."<ref> see [http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; ''Popular Science Monthly'' 12 (January 1878), 286-302]</ref>

In 1898 William James first publicly used the term "pragmatism" and acknowledged Peirce's priority. Peirce's pragmatism, however, is not the same as James's; it has more in common with the somewhat independently developed idealism of [[Josiah Royce]] and the later views of John Dewey. Peirce shared many of the views characteristic of the pragmatic school, developing them in his own fashion. He believed in the dependence of logic on ethics, argued as early as 1868 against individualism and egoism, and developed social theories of reality and logic. At the same time he believed that the development of business methods should be left to business without law's interference.<ref>See the 1910 quote from Peirce in the third section of "Pragmatism and American Democracy: An Elective Affinity Analysis" by Norbert Wiley, presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, 2003, [http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/pragmatism/wiley_pragma_demo.html online edition].</ref> He believed and argued that logic precedes metaphysics, and that metaphysicians failing to appreciate that precedence have always barred the way to inquiry.<ref>See for example "F.R.L." (First Rule of Logic), 1899 manuscript, not to be confused with another piece given that title. Published in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 1, paragraphs 135-140, [http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/frl_99.htm online edition].</ref>

Peirce held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>.

Pragmatism allows ideas to have any origin; what matters is not where we got an idea from but where we can go with it. In the case of science the usefulness of an idea includes reliability and fruitfulness. "Fruitfulness" does not mean practical utility but, rather, the opening up of original lines of successful research, what mathematicians nowadays call fecundity. As reliability is to truth, so fruitfulness is to depth and breadth of understanding. The test of truth and fruitfulness lies in the future. Truth, for the pragmatist, depends on our developing the implications of ideas so that we can find ways of applying them experimentally.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Further reading==
* Brent, Joseph. ''Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life'' (1998) [http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Sanders-Peirce-Joseph-Brent/dp/0253211611/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), advanced [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ online]
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.
* Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" ''Dictionary of American Biography'' (1935), [http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/weissbio.htm online edition].

===Primary sources===

* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893)'' (1992) ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, and ''Volume Two (1893-1913)'' (1998) ed. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep.htm online edition].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics'' (1991) ed. James Hoopes, University of North Carolina Press [http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Signs-Writings-Semiotic-Charles/dp/0807843423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' (vols 1-6 1931-35) ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss and (vols. 7-8) ed. Arthur W. Burks, Harvard & [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlpeir.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce'', ed. Carolyn Eisele (4 vol. in 5, 1976), Mouton and Humanities Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Contributions to 'The Nation''' ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (4 vol 1975-1987) Texas Tech University and [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlppw1.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders and Lady Welby, Victoria. ''Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby'' (1977) ed. Charles S. Hardwick with James Cook, Indiana University Press. 2nd ed. 2001, Press of Arisbe Associates.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition'' (6 vols. of projected 30, 1981-present) eds. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/crit.htm electronic version], Indiana University Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Reasoning and the Logic of Things, The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898'' (1992) ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner, intro. and commentary Hilary Putnam, Harvard.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism"'' (1997) ed. Patricia Ann Turisi, SUNY Press.

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]
[[Category:Progressive Era]]
[[Category:People who were Educated at Home]]

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-16T05:08:17Z

ForNow: /* Primary sources */ Got all the major editions in

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914)<ref> pronounced "purse"</ref> was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and [[Polymath]]<ref> He wrote important essays on logic, pragmatism, metaphysics, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, and chemistry. He also wrote on psychology, early English and classical Greek pronunciation, psychical research, criminology, the history of science, ancient history, Egyptology, and Napoleon, prepared a thesaurus and an editor's manual, and did translations from Latin and German.</ref> [[William James]] and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder.<ref> Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.</ref> From 1879 to 1884 he was a lecturer at the new graduate university, Johns Hopkins. There he taught logic to Christine Ladd-Franklin and to [[John Dewey]], who became a leader of the liberal wing of pragmatism. Peirce himself was quite conservative when it came to social and economic issues.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Career==
Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor and the nation's leading mathematician. Benjamin especially taught Charles how to solve increasingly complex math and logic problems. He graduated from Harvard College in 1859 with mediocre grades; he later earned degrees in chemistry and biology with distinction. He became a research scientist with the United States Coast Survey, 1861-1891, doing research on gravity. At the same time he taught and did research at Harvard in logic and astronomy.

Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, lazy, and ill-tempered. He suffered from an early age from trigeminal or "facial" neuralgia, an extremely painful condition. Lazy he was not, but the other personality traits did not help his cause in seeking a permanent faculty appointment anywhere, a cause defeated by his opponents' reporting to potential academic employers the fact of his having lived with his future second wife Juliette while still married to his first. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania, an area which attracted him because it was a watering hole for captains of industry<ref>See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in ''First Things'', 1993, [http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5203 online edition].</ref>. There he built a house which he called Arisbe, where he hoped to have intellectual guests regularly from New York City, and which he and Juliette continued to expand even during the poverty from which they never finally escaped. He wrote many articles for periodicals, over 400 during his lifetime for ''The Nation'', and for dictionaries<ref>Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the ''Century Dictionary'' ([http://www.global-language.com/century/ online edition]) and Baldwin's ''Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology'' (online editions [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/ here] and [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/concepts/browse?source=Baldwin here])</ref> and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.

==Logic==
In logic Peirce was the first American to take up [[George Boole]]'s program to find the mathematical laws of logic--a program that began modern logic. Peirce made numerous major contributions from 1866 to 1914. His technical papers of 1867 to 1885 established him as the greatest formal logician in the world, and the influential in the period from Boole to Ernst Schroeder. Peirce's papers were extremely difficult, but Schroeder explicated them and they became well known in the field.

Peirce radically modified, extended, and transformed Boolean algebra, making it applicable to propositions, relations, probability, and arithmetic. Following De Morgan, Peirce laid the foundations of the logic of relations, the key technique for the logical analysis of mathematics. He invented the copula symbol of inclusion, the most important symbol in the logic of classes. Peirce invented two new logical algebras, two new systems of logical graphs, discovered the link between the logic of classes and the logic of propositions, was the first to give the fundamental principle for the logical development of mathematics, and made fundamental contributions to probability theory, induction, and the logic of scientific methodology. Peirce wrote an elaborate book on advanced logic but could not get it published.

==Pragmatism==
Peirce was the creator if "Pragmatism;" it emerged from his many discussions in Cambridge at a "metaphysical club" founded in the 1870s. Most influential on peirce were [[Chauncey Wright]], a philosopher; [[William James]], Peirce's lifelong friend and benefactor; and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer and follower of utilitarian philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]] who interpreted doctrines in terms of their effect upon social life. Peirce began reading philosophy and by 1871 he was converted to the version of realism originally propounded by medieval philosopher [[Duns Scotus]]. Peirce remained a realist in philosophy all his life, eventually embracing realism not only about generals or universals but also about modalities such as possibility and necessity. His first major statement of Pragmatism appeared in ''Popular Science Monthly'' in January 1878, under the title "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."<ref> see [http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; ''Popular Science Monthly'' 12 (January 1878), 286-302]</ref>

In 1898 William James first publicly used the term "pragmatism" and acknowledged Peirce's priority. Peirce's pragmatism, however, is not the same as James's; it has more in common with the somewhat independently developed idealism of [[Josiah Royce]] and the later views of John Dewey. Peirce shared many of the views characteristic of the pragmatic school, developing them in his own fashion. He believed in the dependence of logic on ethics, argued as early as 1868 against individualism and egoism, and developed social theories of reality and logic. At the same time he believed that the development of business methods should be left to business without law's interference.<ref>See the 1910 quote from Peirce in the third section of "Pragmatism and American Democracy: An Elective Affinity Analysis" by Norbert Wiley, presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, 2003, [http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/pragmatism/wiley_pragma_demo.html online edition].</ref> He believed and argued that logic precedes metaphysics, and that metaphysicians failing to appreciate that precedence have always barred the way to inquiry.<ref>See for example "F.R.L." (First Rule of Logic), 1899 manuscript, not to be confused with another piece given that title. Published in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 1, paragraphs 135-140, [http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/frl_99.htm online edition].</ref>

Peirce held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>.

Pragmatism allows ideas to have any origin; what matters is not where we got an idea from but where we can go with it. In the case of science the usefulness of an idea includes reliability and fruitfulness. "Fruitfulness" does not mean practical utility but, rather, the opening up of original lines of successful research, what mathematicians nowadays call fecundity. As reliability is to truth, so fruitfulness is to depth and breadth of understanding. The test of truth and fruitfulness lies in the future. Truth, for the pragmatist, depends on our developing the implications of ideas so that we can find ways of applying them experimentally.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Further reading==
* Brent, Joseph. ''Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life'' (1998) [http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Sanders-Peirce-Joseph-Brent/dp/0253211611/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), advanced [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ online]
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.
* Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" ''Dictionary of American Biography'' (1935)

===Primary sources===

* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893)'' (1992) ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, and ''Volume Two (1893-1913)'' (1998) ed. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep.htm online edition].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics'' (1991) ed. James Hoopes, University of North Carolina Press [http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Signs-Writings-Semiotic-Charles/dp/0807843423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' (8 vol. 1931-58), Harvard & [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlpeir.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce'', ed. Carolyn Eisele (4 vol. in 5, 1976), Mouton and Humanities Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Contributions to 'The Nation''' ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (4 vol 1975-1987) Texas Tech University and [http://www.nlx.com/titles/titlppw1.htm CD-ROM].
* Peirce, Charles Sanders and Lady Welby, Victoria. ''Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby'' (1977) ed. Charles S. Hardwick with James Cook, Indiana University Press. 2nd ed. 2001, Press of Arisbe Associates.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition'' (6 vols. of projected 30, 1981-present) eds. Peirce Edition Project [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/crit.htm electronic version], Indiana University Press.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Reasoning and the Logic of Things, The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898'' (1992) ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner, intro. and commentary Hilary Putnam, Harvard.
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism"'' (1997) ed. Patricia Ann Turisi, SUNY Press.

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]
[[Category:Progressive Era]]
[[Category:People who were Educated at Home]]

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-16T04:29:14Z

ForNow: /* Pragmatism */ Adding info and footnotes with links

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914)<ref> pronounced "purse"</ref> was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and [[Polymath]]<ref> He wrote important essays on logic, pragmatism, metaphysics, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, and chemistry. He also wrote on psychology, early English and classical Greek pronunciation, psychical research, criminology, the history of science, ancient history, Egyptology, and Napoleon, prepared a thesaurus and an editor's manual, and did translations from Latin and German.</ref> [[William James]] and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder.<ref> Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.</ref> From 1879 to 1884 he was a lecturer at the new graduate university, Johns Hopkins. There he taught logic to Christine Ladd-Franklin and to [[John Dewey]], who became a leader of the liberal wing of pragmatism. Peirce himself was quite conservative when it came to social and economic issues.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Career==
Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor and the nation's leading mathematician. Benjamin especially taught Charles how to solve increasingly complex math and logic problems. He graduated from Harvard College in 1859 with mediocre grades; he later earned degrees in chemistry and biology with distinction. He became a research scientist with the United States Coast Survey, 1861-1891, doing research on gravity. At the same time he taught and did research at Harvard in logic and astronomy.

Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, lazy, and ill-tempered. He suffered from an early age from trigeminal or "facial" neuralgia, an extremely painful condition. Lazy he was not, but the other personality traits did not help his cause in seeking a permanent faculty appointment anywhere, a cause defeated by his opponents' reporting to potential academic employers the fact of his having lived with his future second wife Juliette while still married to his first. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania, an area which attracted him because it was a watering hole for captains of industry<ref>See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in ''First Things'', 1993, [http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5203 online edition].</ref>. There he built a house which he called Arisbe, where he hoped to have intellectual guests regularly from New York City, and which he and Juliette continued to expand even during the poverty from which they never finally escaped. He wrote many articles for periodicals, over 400 during his lifetime for ''The Nation'', and for dictionaries<ref>Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the ''Century Dictionary'' ([http://www.global-language.com/century/ online edition]) and Baldwin's ''Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology'' (online editions [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/ here] and [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/concepts/browse?source=Baldwin here])</ref> and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.

==Logic==
In logic Peirce was the first American to take up [[George Boole]]'s program to find the mathematical laws of logic--a program that began modern logic. Peirce made numerous major contributions from 1866 to 1914. His technical papers of 1867 to 1885 established him as the greatest formal logician in the world, and the influential in the period from Boole to Ernst Schroeder. Peirce's papers were extremely difficult, but Schroeder explicated them and they became well known in the field.

Peirce radically modified, extended, and transformed Boolean algebra, making it applicable to propositions, relations, probability, and arithmetic. Following De Morgan, Peirce laid the foundations of the logic of relations, the key technique for the logical analysis of mathematics. He invented the copula symbol of inclusion, the most important symbol in the logic of classes. Peirce invented two new logical algebras, two new systems of logical graphs, discovered the link between the logic of classes and the logic of propositions, was the first to give the fundamental principle for the logical development of mathematics, and made fundamental contributions to probability theory, induction, and the logic of scientific methodology. Peirce wrote an elaborate book on advanced logic but could not get it published.

==Pragmatism==
Peirce was the creator if "Pragmatism;" it emerged from his many discussions in Cambridge at a "metaphysical club" founded in the 1870s. Most influential on peirce were [[Chauncey Wright]], a philosopher; [[William James]], Peirce's lifelong friend and benefactor; and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer and follower of utilitarian philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]] who interpreted doctrines in terms of their effect upon social life. Peirce began reading philosophy and by 1871 he was converted to the version of realism originally propounded by medieval philosopher [[Duns Scotus]]. Peirce remained a realist in philosophy all his life, eventually embracing realism not only about generals or universals but also about modalities such as possibility and necessity. His first major statement of Pragmatism appeared in ''Popular Science Monthly'' in January 1878, under the title "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."<ref> see [http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; ''Popular Science Monthly'' 12 (January 1878), 286-302]</ref>

In 1898 William James first publicly used the term "pragmatism" and acknowledged Peirce's priority. Peirce's pragmatism, however, is not the same as James's; it has more in common with the somewhat independently developed idealism of [[Josiah Royce]] and the later views of John Dewey. Peirce shared many of the views characteristic of the pragmatic school, developing them in his own fashion. He believed in the dependence of logic on ethics, argued as early as 1868 against individualism and egoism, and developed social theories of reality and logic. At the same time he believed that the development of business methods should be left to business without law's interference.<ref>See the 1910 quote from Peirce in the third section of "Pragmatism and American Democracy: An Elective Affinity Analysis" by Norbert Wiley, presented at the American Sociological Association Meetings, 2003, [http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/pragmatism/wiley_pragma_demo.html online edition].</ref> He believed and argued that logic precedes metaphysics, and that metaphysicians failing to appreciate that precedence have always barred the way to inquiry.<ref>See for example "F.R.L." (First Rule of Logic), 1899 manuscript, not to be confused with another piece given that title. Published in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 1, paragraphs 135-140, [http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/frl_99.htm online edition].</ref>

Peirce held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>.

Pragmatism allows ideas to have any origin; what matters is not where we got an idea from but where we can go with it. In the case of science the usefulness of an idea includes reliability and fruitfulness. "Fruitfulness" does not mean practical utility but, rather, the opening up of original lines of successful research, what mathematicians nowadays call fecundity. As reliability is to truth, so fruitfulness is to depth and breadth of understanding. The test of truth and fruitfulness lies in the future. Truth, for the pragmatist, depends on our developing the implications of ideas so that we can find ways of applying them experimentally.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Further reading==
* Brent, Joseph. ''Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life'' (1998) [http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Sanders-Peirce-Joseph-Brent/dp/0253211611/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), advanced [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ online]
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.
* Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" ''Dictionary of American Biography'' (1935)

===Primary sources===
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics'' (1991) [http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Signs-Writings-Semiotic-Charles/dp/0807843423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, 1893-1913'' ed. Nathan Houser, and Jonathan R. Eller (2vol 1992-98) [http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep.htm online edition]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' (8 vol. 1931-58) [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/crit.htm electronic version]

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]
[[Category:Progressive Era]]
[[Category:People who were Educated at Home]]

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-16T04:00:54Z

ForNow: /* Career */ Some more info, Arisbe, trigeminal neuralgia, etc.

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914)<ref> pronounced "purse"</ref> was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and [[Polymath]]<ref> He wrote important essays on logic, pragmatism, metaphysics, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, and chemistry. He also wrote on psychology, early English and classical Greek pronunciation, psychical research, criminology, the history of science, ancient history, Egyptology, and Napoleon, prepared a thesaurus and an editor's manual, and did translations from Latin and German.</ref> [[William James]] and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder.<ref> Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.</ref> From 1879 to 1884 he was a lecturer at the new graduate university, Johns Hopkins. There he taught logic to Christine Ladd-Franklin and to [[John Dewey]], who became a leader of the liberal wing of pragmatism. Peirce himself was quite conservative when it came to social and economic issues.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Career==
Peirce was home-schooled by his father, Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor and the nation's leading mathematician. Benjamin especially taught Charles how to solve increasingly complex math and logic problems. He graduated from Harvard College in 1859 with mediocre grades; he later earned degrees in chemistry and biology with distinction. He became a research scientist with the United States Coast Survey, 1861-1891, doing research on gravity. At the same time he taught and did research at Harvard in logic and astronomy.

Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, lazy, and ill-tempered. He suffered from an early age from trigeminal or "facial" neuralgia, an extremely painful condition. Lazy he was not, but the other personality traits did not help his cause in seeking a permanent faculty appointment anywhere, a cause defeated by his opponents' reporting to potential academic employers the fact of his having lived with his future second wife Juliette while still married to his first. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania, an area which attracted him because it was a watering hole for captains of industry<ref>See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in ''First Things'', 1993, [http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5203 online edition].</ref>. There he built a house which he called Arisbe, where he hoped to have intellectual guests regularly from New York City, and which he and Juliette continued to expand even during the poverty from which they never finally escaped. He wrote many articles for periodicals, over 400 during his lifetime for ''The Nation'', and for dictionaries<ref>Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the ''Century Dictionary'' ([http://www.global-language.com/century/ online edition]) and Baldwin's ''Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology'' (online editions [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/ here] and [http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/concepts/browse?source=Baldwin here])</ref> and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.

==Logic==
In logic Peirce was the first American to take up [[George Boole]]'s program to find the mathematical laws of logic--a program that began modern logic. Peirce made numerous major contributions from 1866 to 1914. His technical papers of 1867 to 1885 established him as the greatest formal logician in the world, and the influential in the period from Boole to Ernst Schroeder. Peirce's papers were extremely difficult, but Schroeder explicated them and they became well known in the field.

Peirce radically modified, extended, and transformed Boolean algebra, making it applicable to propositions, relations, probability, and arithmetic. Following De Morgan, Peirce laid the foundations of the logic of relations, the key technique for the logical analysis of mathematics. He invented the copula symbol of inclusion, the most important symbol in the logic of classes. Peirce invented two new logical algebras, two new systems of logical graphs, discovered the link between the logic of classes and the logic of propositions, was the first to give the fundamental principle for the logical development of mathematics, and made fundamental contributions to probability theory, induction, and the logic of scientific methodology. Peirce wrote an elaborate book on advanced logic but could not get it published.

==Pragmatism==
Peirce was the creator if "Pragmatism;" it emerged from his many discussions in Cambridge at a "metaphysical club" founded in the 1870s. Most influential on peirce were [[Chauncey Wright]], a philosopher; [[William James]], Peirce's lifelong friend and benefactor; and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer and follower of utilitarian philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]] who interpreted doctrines in terms of their effect upon social life. Peirce began reading philosophy and by 1871 he was converted to the version of realism originally propounded by medieval philosopher [[Duns Scotus]]. Peirce remained a realist in philosophy all his life. His first major statement appeared in ''Popular Science Monthly'' in January 1878, under the title "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."<ref> see [http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; ''Popular Science Monthly'' 12 (January 1878), 286-302]</ref>

In 1898 William James first publicly used the term "pragmatism" and acknowledged Peirce's priority. Peirce's pragmatism, however, is not the same as James's; it has more in common with the somewhat independently developed idealism of [[Josiah Royce]] and the later views of John Dewey. Peirce shared many of the views characteristic of the pragmatic school, developing them in his own fashion. He belived in the dependence of logic on ethics, argued as early as 1868 against individualism and egoism, and developed social theories of reality and logic.

Peirce held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>.

Pragmatism allows ideas to have any origin; what matters is not where we got an idea from but where we can go with it. In the case of science the usefulness of an idea includes reliability and fruitfulness. "Fruitfulness" does not mean practical utility but, rather, the opening up of original lines of successful research.As reliability is to truth, so fruitfulness is to depth and breadth of understanding. The test of truth and fruitfulness lies in the future. Truth, for the pragmatist, depends on our developing the implications of ideas so that we can find ways of applying them experimentally.<ref> See Short (2001)</ref>

==Further reading==
* Brent, Joseph. ''Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life'' (1998) [http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Sanders-Peirce-Joseph-Brent/dp/0253211611/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-4 excerpt and text search]
* Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), advanced [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ online]
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.
* Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" ''Dictionary of American Biography'' (1935)

===Primary sources===
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics'' (1991) [http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Signs-Writings-Semiotic-Charles/dp/0807843423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, 1893-1913'' ed. Nathan Houser, and Jonathan R. Eller (2vol 1992-98) [http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239829331&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep.htm online edition]
* Peirce, Charles Sanders. ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' (8 vol. 1931-58) [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/crit.htm electronic version]

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]
[[Category:Progressive Era]]
[[Category:People who were Educated at Home]]

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-15T19:16:37Z

ForNow: /* Further reading */ Added link to non-PDF edition of Short's article "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce"

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914) was an American logician, mathematician, [[philosopher]], and [[scientist]]. William James and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder. Peirce eventually distinguished his own version as "Pragmaticism". He held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>. In his later years he was unable to obtain academic appointments. He and his second wife Juliette lived in Milford, Pennsylvania. He was considered a [[Polymath]] for his broad knowledge.
==Further reading==
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianopolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianopolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition pdf]. Non-pdf [http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=847&theme=cotho&loc=b online edition] at ''First Principles''.

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-15T16:00:23Z

ForNow: /* Further reading */ Added Notes section for footnote

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914) was an American logician, mathematician, [[philosopher]], and [[scientist]]. William James and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder. Peirce eventually distinguished his own version as "Pragmaticism". He held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>. In his later years he was unable to obtain academic appointments. He and his second wife Juliette lived in Milford, Pennsylvania. He was considered a [[Polymath]] for his broad knowledge.
==Further reading==
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianopolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianopolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online edition].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online edition].

==Notes==
<references />

[[Category:Philosophers]]

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-15T15:59:13Z

ForNow: /* Further reading */

Charles Sanders Peirce

2009-04-15T15:57:44Z

ForNow: Corrected and expanded

'''Charles Sanders Peirce''' (1839 – 1914) was an American logician, mathematician, [[philosopher]], and [[scientist]]. William James and other pragmatists credited Peirce as [[Pragmatism]]'s founder. Peirce eventually distinguished his own version as "Pragmaticism". He held that a conception's meaning is general and does not boil down to its actual consequences (or "cash value") but consists in the conceived object's ''conceivable'' practical consequences. He disagreed with other Pragmatists over what he called their "angry hatred of strict logic" and their views that, among other things, "truth is mutable" and "infinity is unreal".<ref>Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", ''Hibbert Journal'' vol. 7, pp. 90-112. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'' vol. 6, paragraphs 452-485 and ''The Essential Peirce'' vol. 2, pp.434-450.</ref>. In his later years he was unable to obtain academic appointments. He and his second wife Juliette lived in Milford, Pennsylvania. He was considered a [[Polymath]] for his broad knowledge.
==Further reading==
* Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianopolis [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/life/lifex.htm online edition].
* Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianopolis, [http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm online text].
* Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," ''Modern Age'' Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 [http://www.mmisi.org/ma/43_04/short.pdf online text].

[[Category:Philosophers]]