Umandal, Larison P.

BSAeE 1-2

Charles Sanders Peirce

(September 10, 1839 April 19, 1914)

Was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist,

sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". He was educated as a
chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated
largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific
methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism.
In 1934, the philosopher Paul Weiss called Peirce "the most original and
versatile of American philosophers and America's greatest logician".
Webster's Biographical Dictionary said in 1943 that Peirce was "now regarded
as the most original thinker and greatest logician of his time."
An innovator in mathematics, statistics, philosophy, research
methodology, and various sciences, Peirce considered himself, first and
foremost, a logician. He made major contributions to logic, but logic for him
encompassed much of that which is now called epistemology and philosophy
of science. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics, of which he is a
founder. As early as 1886 he saw that logical operations could be carried out

by electrical switching circuits; the same idea was used decades later to
produce digital computers.

Life
Peirce was born at 3 Phillips Place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Peirce
was one of four sons of Sarah Mills and Benjamin Peirce, who was Perkins
professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University. After
graduating from Harvard College in 1859 and spending one year with field
parties of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, Peirce entered the Lawrence
Scientific School of Harvard University, from which, in 1863, he graduated
summa cum laude in chemistry. Meanwhile, he had reentered the Survey in
1861 as a computing aide to his father, who had undertaken the task of
determining, from observations of lunar occultations of the Pleiades, the
longitudes of American survey points with respect to European ones. Much of
his early astronomical work for the Survey was done in the Harvard
Observatory, in whose Annals (1878) there appeared his Photometric
Researches (concerning a more precise determination of the shape of the
Milky Way Galaxy).
In 1871 his father obtained an appropriation to initiate a geodetic
connection between the surveys of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. This crosscontinental triangulation lent urgency to the need for a gravimetric survey of
North America directed toward a more precise determination of the Earths
ellipticity, a project that Charles was to supervise. In pursuit of this project,
Peirce contributed to the theory and practice of pendulum swinging as a
means of measuring the force of gravity. The need to make accurate
measurements of lengths in his pendulum researches, in turn, led him to
make a pioneer determination of the length of the metre in terms of a
wavelength of light (187779). Between 1873 and 1886 Peirce conducted
pendulum experiments at about 20 stations in Europe and the United States
and (through deputies) at several other places, including Grinnell Land in the
Canadian Arctic.
Though his experimental and theoretical work on gravity
determinations had won international recognition for both him and the
Survey, he was in frequent disagreement with its administrators from 1885
onward. The amount of time he took for the careful preparation of reports
was ascribed to procrastination. His Report on Gravity at the Smithsonian,
Ann Arbor, Madison, and Cornell (written 1889) was never published,
because of differences concerning its form and content. He finally resigned
as of the end of 1891, and, from then until his death in 1914, he had no
regular employment or income. For some years he was a consulting chemical
engineer, mathematician, and inventor.
Peirce was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in 1867 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in

1877. He presented 34 papers before the latter from 1878 to 1911, nearly a
third of them in logic (others were in mathematics, physics, geodesy,
spectroscopy, and experimental psychology). He was elected a member of
the London Mathematical Society in 1880.

Difficulty of Access to Peirce's

Writings
Peirce's extensive publications are scattered among various publication
media, and have been difficult to collect. Shortly after his death in 1914, his
widow Juliette sold his unpublished manuscripts to the Department of
Philosophy at Harvard University. Initially they were under the care of Josiah
Royce, but after Royce's death in 1916, and especially after the end of the
First World War, the papers were poorly cared for. Many of them were
misplaced, lost, given away, scrambled, and the like. Carolyn Eisele, one of
several genuine heroes in the great effort to locate and assemble Peirce's
writings, discovered a lost trunk full of Peirce's papers and manuscripts only
in the mid-1950s; the trunk had been secreted, apparently for decades, in an
unlit, obscure part of the basement in Harvard's Widener Library.
In the 1930's volumes of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders
Peirce began to appear, with Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur
Burks as their editors. For almost three decades these volumes, and various
collections of entries culled from them were the only generally available
source for Peirce's thoughts. Unfortunately, many of the entries in the
Collected Papers are not integral pieces of Peirce's own design, but rather
stretches of writing that were cobbled together by the editors at their own
discretion (sometimes one might almost say whim) from different Peircean
sources. Often a single entry will consist of patches of writing from very
different periods of Peirce's intellectual life, and these patches might even be
in tension or outright contradiction with each other. Such entries in the
Collected Papers make very difficult reading if one tries to regard them as
consistent, sustained passages of argument. They also tend to give the
reader a false picture of Peirce as unsystematic, desultory, and unable to
complete a train of thought. In general, even though Peirce is often obscure
and even at his best is seldom easy to read, the Collected Papers make
Peirce's thinking look much more obscure than it really is.
The only sensible and intelligent way to publish the works of someone
like Peirce, who wrote voluminously and over such a long period of time (57
years), is to arrange the publication chronologically and to employ extremely
careful editing. In such a fashion, the entire set of Peircean works can be
presented, as Peirce conceived them and in their natural temporal setting
and order. Finally, beginning in 1976 with the organizational conception of
Max H. Fisch and the help of Edward Moore, the Peirce Dition Project (PEP)

was created at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (UIPUI).

Then, under the PEP, in the 1980s, there began to appear a meticulously
edited chronological edition of carefully selected works of Peirce: this is the
Writings of Charles S. Peirce: a Chronological Edition, edited by The Peirce
Edition Project of the Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.
Although the Chronological Edition has been fettered from time to time by
lack of proper funding, the Chronological Edition has succeeded in covering
extremely well in its first seven published volumes the major writings from
1857 to 1892. (At the present time, October 2014, Volume 7 is still awaiting
publication, even though Volume 8, covering writings from 1890 to 1892
already has been published. Volume 7 is to be an edition of Peirce's
definitions for the Century Dictionary. It is to be edited by the Peirce Edition
Project in conjunction with the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM)),
under the supervision of Professor Francois Latraverse.) The impressive
achievement of the PEP is finally making it possible to assess the real Peirce,
instead of the chopped-up and then re-pasted-together picture of previously
available of Peirce. In particular the Chronological Edition has made it
possible to see the development of Peirce's thinking from its earliest stages
to its later developments. Questions long vexed in Peirce scholarship are
finally beginning to be debated usefully by Peirce scholars: whether there is
genuine systematic unity in Peirce's thought, whether his ideas changed or
remained the same over time, in what particulars his thought did change and
why, when exactly certain notions were first conceived by Peirce, whether
there were definite periods in Peirce's intellectual development, and what
exactly Peirce meant by some of his more obscure notions such as his
universal categories (on which see below). Continued funding for the Peirce
Edition Project is obviously a crucial priority in the ongoing effort to bring to
public light the thoughts of this extremely important American philosopher.
In addition to the Chronological Edition of the Peirce Edition Project,
other venues for editing and publishing Peirce's work are regularly found,
and there are several excellent editions of particular lectures, lecture-series,
chains of correspondence, and the like. Just four such editions will be
mentioned here. First, there is the edition of Peirce's Cambridge Conferences
Lectures of 1898, edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner and with a forward by
Hilary Putnam, entitled Reasoning and the Logic of Things. Second, there is
the edition of Peirce's Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism of 1903, edited by
Patricia Ann Turrisi, entitled Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right
Thinking. Third, there is the four-volume edition of Peirce's mathematical
writings edited by Carolyn Eisele, entitled The New Elements of Mathematics
by Charles S. Peirce. Fourth, there is the two-part edition of Peirce's writings
on the history and logic of science edited by Carolyn Eisele, entitled
Historical Perspectives on Peirce's Logic of Science: A History of Science.

Work in logic
Though Peirces career was in physical science, his ambitions were in
logic. By the age of 31, he had published a number of technical papers in
that field, besides papers and reviews in chemistry, philology, the philosophy
of history and of religion, and the history of philosophy. He had also given
two series of Harvard University lectures and one of Lowell Institute lectures,
all in logic. Though Peirce aspired to a university chair of logical research, no
such chair existed, and none was created for him: the day of logic had not
yet come. His nearest approach to this ambition occurred at Johns Hopkins
University, where he held a lectureship in logic from 1879 to 1884 while
retaining his position in the Survey.
Logic in its widest sense he identified with semiotics, the general
theory of signs. He laboured over the distinction between two kinds of action:
sign action, or semiosis, and dynamic, or mechanical, action. His major work,
unfinished, was to have been entitled A System of Logic, Considered as
Semiotic.
Although he made eminent contributions to deductive, or
mathematical, logic, Peirce was a student primarily of the logic of
sciencei.e., of induction and of what he referred to as retroduction, or
abduction, the forming and accepting on probation of a hypothesis to
explain surprising facts. His lifelong ambition was to establish abduction and
induction firmly and permanently along with deduction in the very
conception of logiceach of them clearly distinguished from the other two,
yet positively related to them. It was for the sake of logic that Peirce so
diversified his scientific researches, for he considered that the logician
should ideally possess an insiders acquaintance with the methods and
reasonings of all the sciences.

Work in philosophy
Peirces Pragmatism was first elaborated in a series of Illustrations of
the Logic of Science in the Popular Science Monthly in 187778. The
scientific method, he argued, is one of several ways of fixing beliefs. Beliefs
are essentially habits of action. It is characteristic of the method of science
that it makes its ideas clear in terms first of the sensible effects of their
objects, and second of habits of action adjusted to those effects. Here, for
example, is how the mineralogist makes the idea of hardness clear: the
sensible effect of x being harder than y is that x will scratch y and not be
scratched by it; and believing that x is harder than y means habitually using
x to scratch y (as in dividing a sheet of glass) and keeping x away from y
when y is to remain unscratched. By the same method Peirce tried to give

equal clarity to the much more complex, difficult, and important idea of
probability. In his Harvard lectures of 1903, he identified Pragmatism more
narrowly with the logic of abduction. Even his evolutionary metaphysics of
189193 was a higher order working hypothesis by which the special
sciences might be guided in forming their lower order hypotheses; thus, his
more metaphysical writings, with their emphases on chance and continuity,
were but further illustrations of the logic of science.
When Pragmatism became a popular movement in the early 1900s,
Peirce was dissatisfied both with all of the forms of Pragmatism then current
and with his own original exposition of it, and his last productive years were
devoted in large part to its radical revision and systematic completion and to
the proof of the principle of what he by then had come to call
pragmaticism.
His one contribution to philosophy, he thought, was his new list of
categories analogous to Kants a priori forms of the understanding, which he
reduced from 12 to 3: Quality, Relation, and Representation. In later writings
he sometimes called them Quality, Reaction, and Mediation; and finally,
Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. At first he called them concepts; later,
irreducible elements of conceptsthe univalent, bivalent, and trivalent
elements. They appear in that order, for example, in his division of the
modalities into possibility, actuality, and necessity; in his division of signs
into icons, indexes, and symbols; in the division of symbols into terms,
propositions, and arguments; and in his division of arguments into
abductions, inductions, and deductions. The primary function of the new list
was to give systematic support to this last division.
Peirce was twice married: first in 1862 to Harriet Melusina Fay, who left
him in 1876, and second in 1883 to Juliette Pourtalai (ne Froissy). There
were no children of either marriage. For the last 26 years of his life, he and
Juliette lived on a farm on the Delaware River near Milford, Pa. He called
himself a bucolic logician, a recluse for logics sake. He lived his last years in
serious illness and in abject poverty relieved only by aid from such friends as
William James.

Significance
Peirce is now recognized as the most original and the most versatile
intellect that the Americas have so far produced. The recognition was slow in
coming, however, and much of his work is still known only to specialists,
each grasping a small part of it, severed from its connections with the rest.
Even his Pragmatism is viewed in relation to that of other Pragmatists rather
than to other parts of his own work. A philosopher will know him also for his
evolutionary metaphysics (theory of basic reality) of chance and continuity. A
mathematician may know him for his contributions to linear algebra. A
logician will know him as one of the creators of the algebra of logic

including the logic of relations; quantification theory (on the usages of every
. . . , no . . . , and some . . . ); and three-valued logic, which admits a
third truth value between true and falseand may know him also for his two
systems of logical graphs, which he called entitative and existential. A
psychologist may discover in him the first modern psychologist in the United
States. A worker in semiotics will know him as co-founder of that science. A
philologist may encounter him as an authority on the pronunciation of
Elizabethan English. A computer scientist may find in one of his letters the
first known sketch of the design and theory of an electric switching-circuit
computer. But all of this, and much besides, lay beyond the scope of his
professional career.
Who is the most original and the most versatile intellect that the
Americas have so far produced? The answer "Charles S. Peirce" is
uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth
nominating. Mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor,
cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist,
philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist,
lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short story
writer;
phenomenologist,
semiotician,
logician,
rhetorician
and
metaphysician. He was, for a few examples, the first modern experimental
psychologist in the Americas, the first metrologist to use a wave-length of
light as a unit of measure, the inventor of the quincuncial projection of the
sphere, the first known conceiver of the design and theory of an electric
switching-circuit computer, and the founder of "the economy of research."
He is the only system-building philosopher in the Americas who has been
both competent and productive in logic, in mathematics, and in a wide range
of sciences. If he has had any equals in that respect in the entire history of
philosophy, they do not number more than two.
Max H. Fisch in Sebeok, The
Play of Musement

Peirces Writings
Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences Series

"On an Improvement in Boole's Calculus of Logic"

Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (1867), 250261.
"On the Natural Classification of Arguments"
Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (1867), 261287.
"On a New List of Categories"

Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (1867), 287298.

"Upon the Logic of Mathematics"
Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (1867), 402412.
"Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension"
Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (1867), 416432.

Journal of Speculative Philosophy Cognition Series

"Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man."

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2 (1868), 103-114.
"Some Consequences of Four Incapacities."
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2 (1868), 140-157.
"Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic: Further Consequences of
Four Incapacities."
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2 (1869), 193-208.

Illustrations of the Logic of Science

"The Fixation of Belief."

Popular Science Monthly 12 (November 1877), 1-15.
"How to Make Our Ideas Clear."
Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878), 286-302.
"The Doctrine of Chances."
Popular Science Monthly 12 (March 1878), 604-615.
"The Probability of Induction."
Popular Science Monthly 12 (April 1878), 705-718.
"The Order of Nature."
Popular Science Monthly 13 (June 1878), 203-217.
"Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis."
Popular Science Monthly 13 (August 1878), 470-482.
"Comment se fixe la croyance."
Revue Philosophique de la France et de L'tranger 6 (December 1878),
553-569.
"Comment rendre nos ides claires."
Revue Philosophique de la France et de L'tranger 7 (January 1879), 3957.