Difference between revisions of "Charles Sanders Peirce"

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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 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.
  
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Peirce described himself when a senior at college as being vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, lazy, and ill-tempered. Lazy he was not, but the other charecteristcs made him unfit for a permanent faculty appointment anywhere. He inherited some money in 1887 and took his books and his second wife Juliette to what he called "the wildest county of the Northern States", near Milford, Pennsylvania. He wrote many articles for dictionaries and encyclopedias, which paid money in those days, but not enough to escape poverty.
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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==
 
==Logic==

Revision as of 04:00, April 16, 2009

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914)[1] was an American logician, mathematician, philosopher, scientist and Polymath[2] William James and other pragmatists credited Peirce as Pragmatism's founder.[3] 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.[4]

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[5]. 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[6] 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."[7]

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".[8].

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.[9]

Further reading

  • Brent, Joseph. Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (1998) excerpt and text search
  • Burch, Robert W. "Charles Sanders Peirce" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), advanced online
  • Houser, Nathan. "Charles S. Peirce", the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis online edition.
  • Peirce Edition Project editors, "Chronology" (of Peirce's life), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, online edition.
  • Short, Thomas. "The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce," Modern Age Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001 online edition pdf. Non-pdf online edition at First Principles.
  • Weiss, Paul. "Peirce, Charles Sanders" Dictionary of American Biography (1935)

Primary sources


Notes

  1. ↑ pronounced "purse"
  2. ↑ 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.
  3. ↑ Pierce later called his ideas "pragmaticism", but the new term did not prove useful to philosophers and has been abandoned.
  4. ↑ See Short (2001)
  5. ↑ See "Discovering the American Aristotle" by Edward T. Oakes in First Things, 1993, online edition.
  6. ↑ Peirce wrote or reviewed many entries in the Century Dictionary (online edition) and Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (online editions here and here)
  7. ↑ see "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles S. Peirce; Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878), 286-302
  8. ↑ 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.
  9. ↑ See Short (2001)
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