Charles Sanders Peirce
American philosopher and scientist
born Sept. 10, 1839, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.
died April 19, 1914, near Milford, Pa.
Main
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, 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.
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” 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.
