Peirce, Charles Sanders | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), pronounced "purse," was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 10, and died in Milford, Pennsylvania on April 19. In the year of his birth, the first electric clock was built, ozone was discovered, and the growth of cells was charted, while the year of his death saw Robert H. Goddard (1882–1945) inaugurate his rocket experiments and J. H. Jeans (1877–1946) publish a paper on "Radiation and Quantum Theory." Peirce graduated from Harvard College in 1859, the year English naturalist Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) On the Origin of Species appeared. Peirce's life was thus framed by significant scientific and technological developments; its fruits included a multifaceted contribution to early twenty-first century philosophical understanding of scientific investigation and other human achievements. Trained as an experimental scientist, Peirce worked in this capacity for both the Harvard College Observatory and the U.S. Coast and Geodesic Survey. His contribution, however, was far more that of a philosopher than a scientist.

Peirce is best known in philosophy as the founder of pragmatism and, outside that discipline, as the theorist who, at roughly the same time as the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), envisioned a comprehensive study of signs. But Peirce did far more than envision the possibility of such an investigation: He systematically elaborated, yet left ultimately unfinished, a theory of signs designed to provide indispensable resources for a normative account of objective inquiry and, beyond this, for a systematic analysis of the myriad forms of meaning—not just those observable in the practices of experimental or objective investigators. Saussure coined the word semiologie to designate this study, whereas Peirce used the term semeiotics (now more commonly spelled semiotics).

But the scope of Peirce's concerns is inadequately conveyed by calling attention to his role in the founding of pragmatism and semiotics. He tended to identify himself as a logician, but he vastly expanded the scope of logic. Moreover, he devoted considerable energy to defending an evolutionary cosmology informed by the monumental achievements of such classical metaphysicians as Plato, Aristotle, and Friedrich Schelling as well as by what he judged to be the most important implications of the greatest scientific discoveries of his own day.

While Peirce devoted a great deal of his intellectual energy to an understanding of science, he tended to ignore questions specifically concerning technology. This might seem ironic, given his pragmatic commitments. He tended, however, to draw a sharp distinction between theory and practice. He believed in a strict division of intellectual labor and that the very best work required a steadfast concern with a more or less delimited object of investigation. However, he conceived theory itself to be a historically evolved and evolving practice (or, more accurately, a family of such practices). Indeed, Peirce was keenly interested in preserving the integrity of theoretical practices, defining them ultimately in terms of the objective of simply discovering truths not yet known. At the heart of his pragmatism, then, one finds not only a refusal to subordinate theoretical practices to other forms of practices but also an insistence that theory itself is a unique form of human practice.

Peirce's account of science is distinguished by a number of factors, but most importantly by the role he accords abduction in the conduct of inquirers and the attention he pays to the history of science as a resource for understanding science. He identified abduction as one of the three modes of inference (deduction and induction being the other two). Abduction is that modeby which hypotheses are formulated or initiated. In classifying it as a form of inference, Peirce was refusing to leave the formulation of hypotheses as a mysterious, psychological process. The work of scientists involves the complex interplay of all three modes of inference, but abduction is clearly central to this work. Long before Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Peirce was acutely aware of how an adequate conception of science must be based upon a detailed acquaintance with the actual development of diverse experimental practices. Such acquaintance reveals the intimate relationship between theoretical discoveries and technological innovations. Thus, whereas Peirce did not make technology in general a focal object of his theoretical concern, he did devote attention to how technology operates within science.

Somewhat late in his life Peirce came to an appreciation of the importance of what he called the normative sciences (logic, ethics, and esthetics) and, within this cluster of sciences and his broader classification of human practices, an appreciation of the pivotal role of ethics as both a cultural inheritance and a normative science. He came to see logic as a species of ethics. Whereas ethics offers a normative account of self-controlled conduct, logic provides a normative account of a species of such conduct, namely, self-controlled thought or inquiry. Just as logic in this sense depends upon a more general theory of self-controlled action, so ethics depends upon a critical theory of the intrinsically admirable or worthwhile ends of action. Peirce proposed esthetics as the name for this theory of the ends of action. A critical determination of the ends one espouses is at least as important as a critical assessment of the variable means available for the realization of a given objective.

Peirce's historically informed understanding of experimental inquiry is, arguably, one of the most complete, nuanced, and adequate accounts of science yet articulated. The centrality he accords to abduction distinguishes his account of science from most others and, in addition, more intimately connects his theoretical understanding of scientific investigation to the actual practices of scientific investigators than do rival accounts. Though he did not specifically concern himself with technology, his philosophy of science and theory of signs provide resources for illuminating numerous aspects of the diverse phenomena studied by philosophers of technology and others interested in such phenomena. His classification of the theoretical sciences is, in fact, embedded in a more comprehensive classification of human practices; this classification offers important suggestions for how to understand the relationships between the theoretical and technological undertakings of humankind.

Finally, even though he did not explore ethics or esthetics as deeply as he studied logic, his general conception of the normative sciences and his specific treatments of ethics and esthetics are sites yet to be mined by contemporary inquirers, especially ones interested in the interconnections among science, technology, and ethics.

Pragmatism;; Semiotics.

Anderson, Douglas R. (1995). Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Peirce. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

Eisele, Carolyn, ed. (1985). Historical Perspectives on Peirce's Logic of Science: A History of Science. New York: Mouton.

Kuhn, Thomas. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Peirce, Charles S. (1957). Essays in the Philosophy of Science. New York: Liberal Arts Press.

Peirce, Charles S. (1998). Chance, Love, and Logic; Philosophical Essays, ed. Morris R. Cohen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Peirce, Charles S. (1998). Charles S. Peirce: The Essential Writings, ed. Edward C. Moore.

Peirce, Charles S. (1998). His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Pierce, ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

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