• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Philosophy Professor logo

PhilosophyProfessor.com

  • Philosophers
  • Philosophies

Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders PeirceCharles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914).

Table of Contents

  • 1 Ideas
  • 2 Biography
  • 3 Major Works of Charles Sanders Peirce
  • 4 Quotes from Charles Sanders Peirce
    • 4.1 Related:
  • 5 Videos
  • 6 Related Products
    • 6.1 The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
    • 6.2 The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well
    • 6.3 Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life
    • 6.4 Philosophical Writings of Peirce
    • 6.5 Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides for the Perplexed)
    • 6.6 The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings (1867–1893)
    • 6.7 Diagrammatic Immanence: Category Theory and Philosophy
    • 6.8 Chance, Love, and Logic: Philosophical Essays
    • 6.9 The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings (1893-1913)
    • 6.10 Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce

Ideas

– What we expect from our forms of inference is that they give us true conclusions from true premises – if not all the time, then at least most of the time.

– Beliefs are established habits of action.

– Consider all the possible effects that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have: Our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

– The opinion that is fated to be agreed to by the community of those who follow the scientific method indefinitely is what we mean by truth.

– The phaneron is all of that which is before the mind and its aspects: Firsts, feelings or qualitative possibilities; Seconds, actualities; Thirds, laws, habits, or customs.

– A sign is something in the phaneron that stands for something else in the phaneron and gives rise to an interpretant in the phaneron by virtue of some habit, law, or custom.

– All mental activity is of the nature of sign activity and every thought is a sign, which by virtue of some habit gives rise to another sign of the same object.

Biography

Charles Sanders Peirce is regarded as the founder of philosophical pragmatism, and, with Saussure, of modern semeiotic, and also as one of the founders of mathematical or symbolic logic. He was also deeply absorbed by linguistic researches throughout his life, learning languages in remote areas while travelling on geodetic surveys.

A natural scientist by training and the son of the eminent mathematician Benjamin Peirce, he developed the philosophical basis of semeiotic in a series of articles in the late 1860s (‘Questions Concerning Certain Capacities Claimed for Man’, ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’). There Peirce levelled a devastating critique of Cartesian philosophy and foundationalism, arguing that all cognition is irreducibly triadic, of the nature of a sign, fallible, and thoroughly immersed in a continuing process of interpretation. He considered his semeiotic (as he spelled it, in contrast with current usage of ‘semiotics’ as an inclusive term for all the various studies of signs) as a general theory of logic, and saw language as but a portion of semeiosis.

Some of Peirce’s letters to Lady Welby were included in the appendix to Ogden and Richards The Meaning of Meaning, and, with Charles Morris’s largely unacknowledged appropriation of Peirce’s ideas in his influential monograph Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938), Peirce’s ideas were problematically brought to the linguistics community and social sciences more generally.

Peirce’s writings are pervaded by triadic divisions, which, given that he felt himself to be at heart a mathematician, he expressed most basically in numerical form as Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. While still in his twenties Peirce first began to formulate these divisions using personal pronouns: I (Firstness), IT (Secondness), and THOU (Thirdness). In Peirce’s evolutionary cosmology, Thirdness, or triadic relation, or semeiosis, is considered to be a fact of the universe and not simply limited to the human mind, and therein lies the difference between Peirce and Kant, and between Peirce and much of modern linguistics and language theory.

By Peirce’s semeiotic realism language does not simply refer to things outside of signs. Though largely of a conventional nature, language is a mode of conduct, and as such, produces conceivable consequences and is normatively bounded. In its abilities to body forth new possibilities for conduct, to determine and be determined by further experience, and to communicate valid generals bearing conceivable consequences, language is real, in Peirce’s non-modern version of semeiotic realism. Both his realism and pragmatism are theoretically at odds with the positivism and behaviorism of Charles Morris, and to the nominalist conventionalism of Saussure and more recent poststructuralists.

Though linguists and semioticians have been most fascinated by Peirce’s elaborate triadic technical divisions of signs, such as icon, index, and symbol and type, token and (usually ignored) tone, the larger philosophical outlook and anthropology underlying those divisions have yet to be incorporated into linguistic studies.

Major Works of Charles Sanders Peirce

– Collected Papers, Volumes I, II: Principles of Philosophy and Elements of Logic, III, IV: Exact Logic and The Simplest Mathematics, V, VI: Pragmatism and Pragmaticism and Scientific Metaphysics, VII, VIII: Science and Philosophy and Reviews, Correspondence and Bibliography, 1860-1911
– The Fixation of Belief, 1877
– How to Make Our Ideas Clear, 1878
– Photometric Researches, 1878

Quotes from Charles Sanders Peirce

– “The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else which we do not know.” (from “The Fixation of Belief” published in Science Monthly, 1877)

Related:

  • pragmatic (or pragmatist) theory of truth
  • pragmatism
  • fallibilism
  • propensity theory of probability
  • Charles Bonnet

  • Videos

  • Related Products

     
    The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

    The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

    • Amazon Kindle Edition
    • Menand, Louis (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 561 Pages - 04/10/2002 (Publication Date) - Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well
    42 Reviews

    The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well

    • Amazon Kindle Edition
    • Baggini, Julian (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 320 Pages - 05/25/2021 (Publication Date) - Princeton University Press (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

    Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

    • Amazon Kindle Edition
    • Kaag, John (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 223 Pages - 03/17/2020 (Publication Date) - Princeton University Press (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    Philosophical Writings of Peirce
    60 Reviews

    Philosophical Writings of Peirce

    • Amazon Kindle Edition
    • Peirce, Charles S. (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 419 Pages - 05/11/2012 (Publication Date) - Dover Publications (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides for the Perplexed)

    Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides for the Perplexed)

    • Amazon Kindle Edition
    • de Waal, Cornelis (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 198 Pages - 01/03/2013 (Publication Date) - Bloomsbury Academic (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings (1867–1893)

    The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings (1867–1893)

    • Amazon Kindle Edition
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 437 Pages - 11/22/1992 (Publication Date) - Indiana University Press (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    Diagrammatic Immanence: Category Theory and Philosophy
    3 Reviews

    Diagrammatic Immanence: Category Theory and Philosophy

    • Amazon Kindle Edition
    • Gangle, Rocco (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 264 Pages - 08/18/2016 (Publication Date) - EUP (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    Chance, Love, and Logic: Philosophical Essays
    16 Reviews

    Chance, Love, and Logic: Philosophical Essays

    • Amazon Kindle Edition
    • Peirce, Charles S. (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 251 Pages - 11/05/2021 (Publication Date) - Good Press (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings (1893-1913)

    The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings (1893-1913)

    • Amazon Kindle Edition
    • Peirce Edition Peirce Edition Project (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 621 Pages - 06/22/1998 (Publication Date) - Indiana University Press (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce
    13 Reviews

    Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce

    • Amazon Kindle Edition
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 294 Pages - 02/01/2014 (Publication Date) - The University of North Carolina Press (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
  • Last update 2020-06-17. Price and product availability may change.

    Moses Maimonides

    Aristotle

    Isaac Newton

    Alexius von Meinong

    William Godwin

    • Contact
    • Facebook

    Copyright © 2023 · CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME. “AS AN AMAZON ASSOCIATE I EARN FROM QUALIFYING PURCHASES.”