Peirce, Charles Sanders

Peirce, Charles Sanders
born Sept. 10, 1839, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.
died April 19, 1914, near Milford, Pa.

U.S. scientist, logician, and philosopher.

He was the son of the mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Peirce (1809–80). After attending Harvard University he spent 30 years with the U.S. Coast Guard Survey (1861–91). As a scientist, he is noted for his contributions to the theory of probability, the study of gravity, and the logic of scientific methodology. He eventually abandoned the physical sciences to study logic, which in its widest sense he identified with semiotics. He lectured on logic at Johns Hopkins University from 1879 to 1894, then spent the rest of his life writing in seclusion. He is regarded as the founder of pragmatism. Though he made eminent contributions to deductive logic, he was a student primarily of "the logic of science"
i.e., of induction and of "retroduction," or "abduction," the forming and accepting on probation of a hypothesis in order to explain surprising facts. His lifelong ambition was to establish induction and abduction as permanent branches of logic.

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▪ American philosopher and scientist
Introduction
born Sept. 10, 1839, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.
died April 19, 1914, near Milford, Pa.
 American scientist, logician, and philosopher who is noted for his work on the logic of relations and on pragmatism as a method of research.

Life.
      Peirce was one of four sons of Sarah Mills and Benjamin Peirce (Peirce, Benjamin), 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 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 metre in terms of a wavelength of light (1877–79). 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.

Work in logic (logic, history of).
      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 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 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.

Work in philosophy
      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 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 (category)” 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.

      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, Pa. He called himself a bucolic logician, a recluse for logic's 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 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. But all of this, and much besides, lay beyond the scope of his professional career.

Additional Reading

The Peirce papers
Collected Papers, ed. by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks, 8 vol. (1931–58), with a bibliography of Peirce's writings in vol. 8, pp. 249–330. The Peirce papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard University are listed and described by Richard S. Robin in his Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce (1967), and in “The Peirce Papers: A Supplementary Catalogue,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 7:35–57 (1971). Peirce's mathematical writings appear in Studies in the Scientific and Mathematical Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, ed. by Carolyn Eisele and Richard M. Martin (1979).

Studies
Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (1952), was edited by Philip P. Wiener and Frederic H. Young. The Second Series, ed. by Edward C. Moore and Richard S. Robin (1964), contains a supplement to Burks's bibliography of Peirce's own writings (pp. 477–485) and also a bibliography of writings about Peirce (pp. 486–514). There are further supplements in Transactions..., 2:51–59 (1966). Carolyn Eisele and Victor F. Lenzen have published numerous studies of Peirce's work in the sciences, mathematics, and in the history of science (see the bibliographies mentioned above). Of the many books on Peirce's philosophy, the one that makes most use of unpublished materials and has greatest biographical value is Murray G. Murphy, The Development of Peirce's Philosophy (1961).

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Universalium. 2010.

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