Charles Sanders Peirce | Biography

Charles Sanders Peirce remains one of the enigmatic figures in the history of American science. He made substantial contributions to a number of fields, especially logic, but his use of unusual terminology makes it difficult to appraise much of his work. As the project of publishing his collected writings continues, it may become possible to do justice to this many-sided thinker.

Charles Sanders Peirce was born on September 10, 1839 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was not only a professor of mathematics at Harvard University but also perhaps the most accomplished American mathematician of his generation. Peirce's early education outside the home was at various private schools in Boston and Cambridge, and he showed an interest in puzzles and chess problems. By the age of 13, he had read Archbishop Whately's Elements of Logic, perhaps a hint of the interests to come. Peirce entered Harvard in 1855, and the results were not impressive. Although he succeeded in graduating four years later, it was with a class rank of 71 out of 91. Upon graduation Peirce obtained a temporary position with the United States Coast Survey, which was to be his employer for most of his working life. His contributions to geodesy were many, and his service to the Coast Survey have been recognized with a memorial.

In the early 1860s Peirce studied under Louis Agassiz at Harvard, but his work with the Coast Survey proved to have had its benefits. He had become a regular aide to the Survey in 1861, which resulted in his exemption from military service. He was an assistant to the Coast Survey from 1867 to 1891, but that did not prevent his continuing researches in other areas. In particular, not only did he observe a solar eclipse in the United States in 1869, a year later he led an expedition to Sicily to observe a solar eclipse from a position that he had selected.

Peirce had developed a technical competence in mathematics that came in handy when he turned to logic. As an example of a result in mathematics itself, he succeeded in showing that of linear associative algebras (a subject to which his father had devoted a book) the only three that had a uniquely defined operation of division were real numbers, complex numbers, and the quaternions of Sir William Rowan Hamilton. Perhaps the most significant innovation he made in logic was the extension of Boolean algebra to include the operation of inclusion. The most widely influential treatise on the algebra of logic was produced by the German mathematician Ernst Schröder beginning in 1890, and he displayed a detailed familiarity with Peirce's work. In fact, had Peirce made the effort to produce a systematic account of the subject before Schröder, it would be easier to measure the importance of Peirce's contributions.

One of the factors that played a role in Peirce's interest in logic and its algebraic expression was his having taken a position in 1879 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. During the five years that he worked at the university, he stayed on at the Coast Survey. As Nathan Houser remarked in an article about Peirce, "during those years Peirce was a frequent commuter on the B & O Railroad between Baltimore and Washington." Peirce's first paper on the algebra of logic was published in the American Journal of Mathematics in 1880. The period 1880 to 1885 saw Peirce's introduction of two ideas to mathematical logic: truth-functional analysis and quantification theory. Truth-functional analysis is the ancestor of the technique used by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to serve as the basis for logic in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. Quantification theory was at the heart of the logical apparatus introduced by Gottlob Frege for the reduction of mathematics to logic. It is difficult to imagine two more crucial contributions at the time, although Peirce's share of the recognition suffers by virtue of the scattered nature of his contributions.

Peirce was never one to limit his scientific investigations to a single discipline. In 1879, he determined the length of the meter based on a wavelength of light. This provided a natural alternative to the standard meter bar on deposit in Paris. Three years later, he worked on a mathematical study of the relationship between variations in gravity at different points on the Earth's surface and the shape of the Earth. Better known is his role in serving as an advocate of a philosophy of science called pragmatism. Peirce's pragmatism was heavily dependent on the idea of inference to the best explanation. In other words, what existed was determined by what was needed for successful scientific practice at the time. While neither realists nor their opponents were happy with Peirce's position, it has continued to offer an alternative. In particular, philosophers of science with an inclination to take the history of science seriously find Peirce's approach one of the few that take change in one's scientific models to heart.

In light of Peirce's contributions in so many areas of science and mathematics the puzzle remains of why he was unable to secure an academic position commensurate to his abilities. One factor may have been domestic; he married Harriet Melusina Bay in 1862 and was divorced from her in 1883, the year of his second marriage (to Juliette Froissy of Nancy, France). Peirce and his first wife had been separated since 1876, and public sentiment was on her side. More generally, however, Peirce's personality tended to go between extremes, and it was difficult for others to adjust to his mood swings. He was quick to enter into disputes (and frequently with the wrong party) and was easily influenced by others.

Peirce spent his later years in Milford, Pennsylvania, removed from the centers of intellectual life. He had been asked to resign from the Coast Survey in 1891 and for the rest of his life his income was uncertain, despite prodigious periods of writing. Even his philosophy, to which he continued to devote his best efforts, was neglected, if only as a result of his remoteness from university settings. He died in Milford on April 19, 1914, having made contributions across the intellectual map, but more to the benefit of the discipline than his own.