Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839-1914) | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Born in 1839 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Charles Sanders Peirce was the second and favorite son of Benjamin Peirce, who was a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard University and was superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. Along with Abraham Lincoln in 1863, Benjamin Peirce founded the National Academy of Sciences. Charles graduated with high honors in 1854 from Cambridge High School, where one of his favorite pastimes was the debating society, a source of his reputation as an engaging conversationalist and dynamic lecturer. He then graduated from Harvard with a B.A. in 1859 and an M.A. in 1862. In 1863, he graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in chemistry from the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. He had an erratic and confrontational personality, largely preventing him from permanent employment in the academic world. He was a part-time lecturer in logic at Johns Hopkins University from 1879 to 1884. Despite the persistent efforts of William James, he never obtained a position at Harvard. His more periodic employment with the Coast Survey, and later with the U.S. Assay Commission, fared no better. He suffered seven mental breakdowns between 1876 and 1911 due to a condition now known as trigeminal neuralgia, associated with manic depression. With a small inheritance, he purchased a retirement home at Milford, Pennsylvania, and lived in extreme poverty. During the years between 1903 and 1908, he corresponded on logic and semiotics with Victoria Lady Welby in England. Peirce died of cancer on April 19, 1914.

Peirce comes closest to being America's only systematic philosopher, writing widely and in detail. His principal philosophic system draws from medieval learning focused on the semiotic trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric—the building blocks of modern communication theory and mathematical (information) exchange theory. But, the behaviorist division of semiotics, proposed by Charles Morris, is better known. For Morris, grammaris syntactics, or the study of sign structures (codes), whether animal, machine, or human. Logic is semantics, or the study of choices in meaning that govern intention in communication. Last, rhetoric is pragmatics, or the use of discourse to inform and convince. These three elements combine to create the world of human reference (named the "semiosphere" by Juri Lotman).

Peirce uses the covering term "semiotic" to include his major divisions of thought and communication process: (1) speculative grammar, or the study of beliefs independent of the structure of language (i.e., unstable beliefs); (2) exact logic, or the study of assertion in relation to reality (i.e., stable beliefs); and (3) speculative rhetoric, or the study of the general conditions under which a problem presents itself for solution (i.e., beliefs dependent on discourse). This division previews Peirce's famous triadic models of analysis. Peirce goes on to make the distinction between communication (a process) and signification (a system). Communication is the study of messages and the process of meaning, whereas signification is the study of codes and the system of referential signsused. Messages may contain codes (e.g., linguistics or computer programs) or codes may contain messages (e.g., cryptography or measurement). Messages constituting codes are Peirce's doctrine of "tychism," or the study of probabilities where absolute chance is real. What is probable can be understood as the distinction among type, token, and tone. A typology is a category Peirce called "firstness," the condition under which something exists. A token is an example illustrating the type and is a case of "secondness." The tone is "thirdness," a unique individual (a paradigm or prototype example) known by the connection between the type and token. In short, firstness and secondness are two categories held together, related, by thirdness. Thus, types are more probable than tokens; tokens are more probable than tones. For example, one's actual ability to drive a car is more probable than one's ability to own a car, but one's owning a car is more probable than one's buying a new Ford. The communication process of tychism for Peirce is the existential experience of learning how to learn in a general communication experience. When one learns, an object presents itself to the person's consciousness as a sign or "representamen" that "stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity." An equivalent sign or "interpretant" is created in the mind and this new sign stands for the object. How this communication process of representation (phenomenology) works is the study of signification.

Signification or the doctrine of "synechism" is the analysis of possibilities where codes contain messages. This doctrine holds that all problems can be solved because there is an absolute continuity among things that can be generalized as such. This basic doctrine is applied in Peirce's classification of signs. He divides signs into three basic types, although there are sixty-four subtypes. First, an icon is a sign that has a similarity to its object. Second, an index is a sign that physically connects to its object. Third, a symbol is a sign that arbitrarily links to its object. For example, a statue of a person is an icon, a photograph taken of that person is an index, and the naming noun "person" is a symbol of that person. As Umberto Eco suggests, keep in mind that in complex communication systems the types of signs are often "overcoded" in one object; for example, a traffic stop sign is an icon (similar to a raised hand), an index (red color of danger, octagon shape of convergence), and a symbol (contains the word "stop" on the sign face). Film and television images have much the same overcoded effect. Undercoding occurs when one or more of the signs are taken away, such as when a stop sign does not have the word "stop" on it or when one suddenly loses the audio while watching a television set.

Peirce is noted for his philosophic realism, or the belief that probability and possibility are linked to the actual existence of things or that which can become actual. Hence, people inherit the association of "pragmatism" with a test of real-world application that Peirce called the doctrine of "fallibilism." This existential and phenomenological orientation made Peirce a polymath, according to his biographer Joseph Brent. Peirce was conversant with chemistry, geodesy, metrology, and astronomy. He was the first experimental psychologist in America, a mathematical economist, a logician and mathematician, a dramatist, an actor, a writer, and a book reviewer. He created the modern discipline of semiotics to include all the arts and sciences of communication, information (informatics), and exchange.

Language Structure; Rhetoric; Semiotics.

Brent, Joseph. (1998). Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, revised edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Eco, Umberto. (1976). A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Freeman, Eugene, ed. (1983). The Relevance of Charles Peirce. La Salle, IL: The Hegeler Institute, Monist Library of Philosophy.

Lanigan, Richard Leo. (1992). The Human Science of Communicology. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

Liszka, James Jakob. (1996). A General Introduction to the Semiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Lotman, Juri. (1990). Universe of Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Nöth, Winfried. (1990). Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. (1931-1935, 1958). Collected

Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. 1-6, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; Vols. 7-8, ed. Arthur Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. (1976). The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, 4 vols., ed. Carolyn Eisele. The Hague: Mouton Publishers.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. (1982-1999). Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Vols. 1-6 (with 30 projected), ed. Christian J. W. Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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