Background

Charles Sanders Peirce was born on September 10, 1839, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Peirce was one of four sons of Sarah Mills and Benjamin Peirce. His father was a professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University and proved to be the first seriously researching mathematician in the USA. His living environment was that of a well-off educated middle class.

Education

Even as a boy, Peirce was given a chemistry laboratory by an uncle. His father recognized his talent and tried to give him a comprehensive education. At the age of 16, he began to read Kant‘s Critique of Pure Reason. He needed three years for the study of the work, with which he dealt daily several hours, after which, according to his own statement, he almost knew the book by heart.

After graduating from Harvard College in 1859, Peirce entered the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University, from which, in 1863, he graduated summa cum laude in chemistry. Except for his remarkable marks in chemistry, Peirce was a poor student, typically in the bottom third of his class. Obviously, the standard curriculum bored him, so that he mostly avoided doing seriously its required work.

Career

Charles Sanders Peirce 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 cross-continental triangulation lent urgency to the need for a gravimetric survey of North America directed toward a more precise determination of the Earth’s 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 meter in terms of a wavelength of light (1877-1879). 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.

Through 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.

His primary works have been published in journals such as Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Monist, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Popular Science, the American Journal of Mathematics, The Nation, and others.

His only full-length book published in his lifetime was "Photometric Researches" (1878), which revolved around spectrographic methods and their application to astronomy. At Johns Hopkins, he edited "Studies in Logic" (1883), which contained articles written by him and his students.

Following his death, it was discovered that Peirce had left 1,650 manuscripts unpublished. An anthology of Peirce's articles named "Chance, Love and Logic: Philosophical Essays," was published in 1923.

Some of his most prominent posthumous publications were "Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce" (1931-1958), "Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to The Nation" (1975-1987), "The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce" (1976), "Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby" (1977), "Writings of Charles S. Peirce, A Chronological Edition" (1982), "Historical Perspectives on Peirce's Logic of Science: A History of Science" (1985), "Reasoning and the Logic of Things" (1992), "The Essential Peirce" (1992-1998), "Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking" (1997), and "Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Writings" (2010).

Achievements

• Charles Sanders Peirce was the founder of American pragmatism, an extraordinarily prolific logician (mathematical and general), and a developer of an evolutionary, psycho-physically monistic metaphysical system. Peirce is now recognized as the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced. He is known 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; and three-valued logic, which admits a third truth-value between true and false - and 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.
  
  In the course of his polymathic researches, he wrote voluminously on an exceedingly wide range of topics, ranging from mathematics, mathematical logic, physics, geodesy, spectroscopy, and astronomy, on the one hand (that of mathematics and the physical sciences), to psychology, anthropology, history, and economics, on the other (that of the humanities and the social sciences).

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Essential Peirce

    (Volume 2 of this convenient two-volume chronological read...)

    1913
  • The Essential Peirce

    (A convenient two-volume reader’s edition makes accessible...)

    1893
  • Peirce on Signs

    (Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is rapidly becoming re...)

    1991
  • Chance, Love and Logic

    (Charles Sanders Peirce was one of America's greatest phil...)

    1923
  • Philosophical Writings of Peirce

    (Charles S. Peirce was a thinker of great originality and ...)

Views

Though Peirce’s 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 labored 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 science" - i.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 logic - each 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 insider’s acquaintance with the methods and reasonings of all the sciences.

Peirce’s Pragmatism was first elaborated in a series of "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" in the Popular Science Monthly in 1877-78. 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 1891-93 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 emphasis 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 Kant’s 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 concepts - the 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.

Quotations: "Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already."

"It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamic action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects, whether they react equally upon each other, or one is an agent and the other patient, entirely or partially, or at any rate, is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by "semiosis" I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs."

"Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question."

"I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former."

"The definition of definition is at the bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses."

"It has never been in my power to study anything, mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic."

"When anything is present to the mind, what is the very first and simplest character to be noted in it, in every case, no matter how little elevated the object may be? Certainly, it is its presentness."

Membership

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.

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  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

  1867

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  National Academy of Sciences , United States

  1877

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  London Mathematical Society , United Kingdom

  1880

Personality

Practicing geodesy and chemistry in order to earn a living, he nevertheless considered scientific philosophy, and especially logic, to be his true calling, his real vocation.

Physical Characteristics: Peirce began suffering from facial neuralgia in his late teens. The ailment is now known as trigeminal neuralgia. This condition is attributed to his social isolation later.

Interests

• logic, philosophy of science

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Duns Scotus, Immanuel Kant, George Boole

Connections

Peirce was twice married: first in 1862 to Harriet Melusina Fay, who left him in 1876, and second in 1883 to Juliette Pourtalai (née 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, Pennsylvania, United States.

Father:

Benjamin Peirce

Mother:

Sarah Hunt Mills

Spouse:

Juliette Pourtalai Froissy

ex-spouse:

Harriet Melusina Fay

Brother:

Herbert H. D. Peirce

Student:

John Dewey

Dewey attended Peirce's logic class at John's Hopkins during the years 1882 through 1883. Along with Peirce, Dewey understood the subject of logic in an extremely broad way, so that the subject in his mind, as well as in Peirce's mind, comprised the entire topic of the methodology of the exact sciences.

Student:

Thorstein Veblen

Friend:

Christine Ladd-Franklin

Friend:

Fabian Franklin

Acquaintance:

Francis Abbot

Acquaintance:

Chauncey Wright

References

• His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce
• Charles Sanders Peirce, Revised and Enlarged Edition: A Life
• Peirce's Philosophical Perspectives