Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce
Peirce in 1891
Born(1839-09-10)September 10, 1839
Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
DiedApril 19, 1914(1914-04-19) (aged 74)
Milford, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Alma materHarvard University
RelativesBenjamin Peirce (father)
EraLate modern philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolPragmatism
Pragmaticism
InstitutionsJohns Hopkins University
Notable students
List
Main interests
Signature

Charles Sanders Peirce (/pɜːrs/[8][9] PURSS; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism".[10][11] According to philosopher Paul Weiss, Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician".[12] Bertrand Russell wrote "he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever".

Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for thirty years, Peirce meanwhile made major contributions to logic, such as theories of relations and quantification. C. I. Lewis wrote, "The contributions of C.S. Peirce to symbolic logic are more numerous and varied than those of any other writer—at least in the nineteenth century." For Peirce, logic also encompassed much of what is now called epistemology and the philosophy of science. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics or study of signs, of which he is a founder, which foreshadowed the debate among logical positivists and proponents of philosophy of language that dominated 20th-century Western philosophy. Peirce's study of signs also included a tripartite theory of predication.

Additionally, he defined the concept of abductive reasoning, as well as rigorously formulating mathematical induction and deductive reasoning. He was one of the founders of statistics. 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.[13]

For metaphysics, Peirce was an "objective idealist" in the tradition of German philosopher Immanuel Kant as well as a scholastic realist about universals. He also held a commitment to the ideas of continuity and chance as real features of the universe, views he labeled synechism and tychism respectively. Peirce believed an epistemic fallibilism and anti-skepticism went along with these views.

  1. ^ Hacking, Ian (1990). The Taming of Chance. A Universe of Chance. Cambridge University Press. pp. 200–215. ISBN 978-0-52138884-9.
  2. ^ Stigler, Stephen M. (1978). "Mathematical statistics in the early States". Annals of Statistics. 6 (2): 239–265 [248]. doi:10.1214/aos/1176344123. JSTOR 2958876. MR 0483118.
  3. ^ Crease, Robert P. (2009). "Charles Sanders Peirce and the first absolute measurement standard". Physics Today. 62 (12): 39–44. Bibcode:2009PhT....62l..39C. doi:10.1063/1.3273015. S2CID 121338356. Archived from the original on 2013-01-12. In his brilliant but troubled life, Peirce was a pioneer in both metrology and philosophy.
  4. ^ Cadwallader, Thomas C. (1974). "Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914): The first American experimental psychologist". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. 10 (3): 291–298. doi:10.1002/1520-6696(197407)10:3<291::AID-JHBS2300100304>3.0.CO;2-N. PMID 11609224.
  5. ^ Wible, James R. (December 2008). "The economic mind of Charles Sanders Peirce". Contemporary Pragmatism. Vol. 5, no. 2. pp. 39–67.
  6. ^ Nöth, Winfried (2000). "Charles Sanders Peirce, Pathfinder in Linguistics".
    Nöth, Winfried (2000). "Digital Encyclopedia of Charles S. Peirce".
  7. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference grads was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ "Peirce", in the case of C. S. Peirce, always rhymes with the English-language word "terse" and so, in most dialects, is pronounced exactly like the English-language word "purse".
  9. ^ "Note on the Pronunciation of 'Peirce'". Peirce Project Newsletter. Vol. 1, no. 3–4. December 1994. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2009-04-06.
  10. ^ Weiss, Paul (1934). "Peirce, Charles Sanders". Dictionary of American Biography. Arisbe. Archived from the original on 2013-11-03. Retrieved 2007-12-12.
  11. ^ "Peirce, Benjamin: Charles Sanders". Webster's Biographical Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Springfield, Massachusetts. 1960 [1943].{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  12. ^ Weiss, Paul (1934). "Peirce, Charles Sanders". Dictionary of American Biography. Internet Archive.
  13. ^ Peirce, Charles Sanders (1886). "Letter, Peirce to A. Marquand". Writings of Charles S. Peirce. Indiana University Press. pp. 5:541–543. ISBN 978-0-25337201-7. See Burks, Arthur W. (1978). "Charles S. Peirce, The new elements of mathematics" (PDF). Book Review. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. Eprint. 84 (5): 913–918. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1978-14533-9. Also Houser, Nathan. "Introduction". Writings of Charles S. Peirce. Vol. 5. p. xliv.