Peirce, Charles Sanders

Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839–1914), philosopher, scientist, mathematician, logician, semiotician, founder of pragmatism, America's greatest contribution to philosophy.With Augustus de Morgan, Peirce is one of the founders of the logic of relatives. His pioneering work in semiotics, the study of signs, provides in the judgment of such figures as the philosopher Hilary Putnam and the novelist Walker Percy, a fruitful means of inquiry for the humanities and sciences alike. A polymath, Peirce also made significant contributions to geodesy, geology, metrology, computing, photometrics, spectroscopy, astronomy, cartography, psychology, metaphysics, phenomenology, and the history, philosophy, and logic of science. Peirce's father, Benjamin Peirce (1809–1880), a distinguished mathematician, was professor of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard. There Charles Peirce, despite his brilliance, graduated seventy‐ninth of ninety in 1859, in part because his father had rigorously educated him in mathematics, science, and philosophy, but with little regard for academic requirements. At college, Peirce earned a reputation for arrogance, brilliance, iconoclasm, dangerous mood swings, and dissipation, behaviors owing in part to neurological pathologies. This reputation followed him into old age, undermining both his personal and professional life and resulting in two disastrous marriages and two dismissals, from the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in 1884 and from the U.S. Coast Survey, his employer for thirty years, in 1891.

Peirce's lifelong pursuit of the methods of inquiry into truth derived from his work as an experimental scientist. At age twenty‐five, he began conducting experiments on star brightness at the Harvard Observatory. These resulted in his Photometric Researches (1879), the first modern compilation of star magnitudes and among the first works to suggest a disk shape for the Milky Way galaxy. In 1872, his father, then superintendent of the Coast Survey, placed Peirce in charge of the measurement of gravity. At the 1877 meeting of the International Geodetic Association, his work in gravimetry was recognized as an important advance. In the early 1880s, he used a wavelength of light to determine the length of the meter, a major refinement in metrology.

Peirce integrated this grounding in exact science with a knowledge of philosophy and its history. He was indebted to Aristotle, Plato, medieval realism, Leibnitz, Berkeley, Boole, de Morgan, Scottish commonsense philosophy, Schelling, Hegel, and especially Kant, whose concept of “pragmatic belief” he extended to mean that truth is the ultimate opinion that would survive all possible logical scrutiny and experiential evidence. Peirce is best known for his Illustrations of the Logic of Science, six essays (1877–1878), the first two of which—The Fixation of Belief and How to Make Our Ideas Clear— William James, in 1898, called “the birth certificates of pragmatism.” His only volume of philosophy, Studies in Logic, appeared in 1883. Peirce spent his last twenty‐five years in Milford, Pennsylvania, in increasing isolation and poverty. He left more than eighty thousand pages of unpublished philosophical manuscripts, from which the Peirce Edition Project is publishing a projected thirty‐volume selection.

Peirce's influence on William James, John Dewey, and the idealist philosopher Josiah Royce was fundamental. He greatly influenced such subsequent thinkers as C.I. Lewis, Ilya Prigogine, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Lacan, Richard Rorty, and Karl Popper.

After 1970, Peirce's thought became an important source for philosophers and scientists internationally. For these thinkers, he offered a point of departure for new approaches to issues in metaphysics, philosophy of science, logic, language, computer design, artificial intelligence, cultural studies, and many other fields.
See also Coast and Geodetic Surveys, U.S.; Science: Revolutionary War to World War I.

Bibliography

Murray G. Murphey , The Development of Peirce's Philosophy, 1961.
R. Jackson Wilson , In Quest of Community: Social Philosopny in the United States, 1860–1920, 1968, pp. 32–59.
Christopher Hookway , Peirce, 1992.
Charles Sanders Peirce , The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings Volume I (1867–1893), ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel and with an introduction by N. Houser, 1992, and Volume II (1893–1913), ed. The Pierce Edition Project, 1998.
Charles Sanders Peirce , Reasoning and the Logic of Things, ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and with an introduction by K.L. Ketner and Hilary Putnam, 1992.
Joseph Brent , Charles Sanders Peirce, 1993.

Joseph Brent