C. S. Peirce
@CSPeirceSpeaks
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Charles Sanders Peirce, America's first great philosopher, speaks from beyond the grave.
Joined June 2016
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“…something like, ‘I read Spinoza for two hours this morning until I heard the rumble of a herd of buffalo outside my door, so I grabbed my rifle and chased after them.’ That, to me, is American philosophy in a nutshell. I had to read Spinoza, but I just had to grab my gun.”
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In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.
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“Real” is a word invented in the thirteenth century to signify having Properties, i.e. characters sufficing to identify their subject, and possessing these whether they be anywise attributed to it by any single man or group of men, or not.
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Kant (whom I _more_ than admire), is nothing but a somewhat confused pragmatist.
(CP, 5.525)
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The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
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Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
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Mathematicians always have been the very best reasoners in the world; while metaphysicians always have been the very worst. Therein is reason enough why students of philosophy should not neglect mathematics.
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There are three kinds of reasoning, the Inductive, the Deductive, and the Hypothetical. The last consists in the introduction into a confused tangle of given facts of an idea not given whose only justification lies in its reducing that tangle to order.
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Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.
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Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
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Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
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Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.
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Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
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Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination and does not extend to that of other men.
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In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.
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If the universe is thus progressing from a state of all but pure chance to a state of all but complete determination by law, we must suppose that there is an original, elemental, tendency of things to acquire determinate properties, to take habits.
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Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
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Logicians generally, and especially the Germans, hold that the mere fact of reasoning, or endeavoring to reason, commits us to the categorical assertion of a considerable body of doctrine.
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“Peirce was a strange and unruly man. He was a crank. He was arrogant. He was his own worst enemy. In an obituary notice, his nephew wrote, "He loved and hated and quarelled with almost everyone he came in contact with." He thought to make a bundle by his investments and lost
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42. Which philosopher claimed that he “did all the major vices”?
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Chance is First, Law is Second, the tendency to take habits is Third. Mind is First, Matter is Second, Evolution is Third.
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Concepts are mental habits; habits formed by exercise of the imagination.
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"Real" is a word invented in the thirteenth century to signify having Properties, i.e. characters sufficing to identify their subject, and possessing these whether they be anywise attributed to it by any single man or group of men, or not.
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“Pierce wrote as a logician and James as a humanist.”
—John Dewey
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The only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution. This supposes them not to be absolute, not to be obeyed precisely.
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Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination and does not extend to that of other men.
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We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol-parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow.
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What the true definition of Pragmatism may be, I find it very hard to say; but in my nature it is a sort of instinctive attraction for living facts.
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Science is not a fixed, unchangeable body of propositions. After a thousand years the general face of science may be modified past recognition.
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“James called Peirce the most original thinker of their generation; Peirce placed himself somewhere near the rank of Leibniz. This much is now certain; he is the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician.”
—Paul Weiss
Revisiting Weiss’s book. Really amazing how some of the issues he first articulated are still core debates within organismal and developmental biology, such as the nature of genetic determinism, and the utility of concepts such as information and control in understanding ontogeny
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I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.
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It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction … in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his
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Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea; for induction does nothing but determine a value and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of a pure hypothesis.
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To explain is to show the unity at the heart of the manifold.
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Some think to avoid the influence of metaphysical errors, by paying no attention to metaphysics; but experience shows that these men beyond all others are held in an iron vice of metaphysical theory, because by theories that they have never called in question.
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We now come to the difficult question, What is continuity?
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The one primary and fundamental law of mental action consists in a tendency to generalisation.
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This leads us to undertake an account of the idea of Force in general.
Peirce revealing the pragmatic maxim.
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The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
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It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction … in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness
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Logicians generally, and especially the Germans, hold that the mere fact of reasoning, or endeavoring to reason, commits us to the categorical assertion of a considerable body of doctrine.
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True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.
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The term “logic” is unscientifically by me employed in two distinct senses. In its narrower sense, it is the science of the necessary conditions of the attainment of truth. In its broader sense, it is the science of the necessary laws of thought, or, still better
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The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
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Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there. Consistently adhere
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“James called Peirce the most original thinker of their generation; Peirce placed himself somewhere near the rank of Leibniz. This much is now certain; he is the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician.”
—Paul Weiss
No list is adequate without Descartes, Hume, & Kant.
The top 10 greatest, most important philosophers of all time, according to philosophers:
1. Plato
2. Aristotle
3. Kant
4. Hume
5. Descartes
6. Socrates
7. Wittgenstein
8. Locke
9. Frege
10. Aquinas
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The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
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Concepts are mental habits; habits formed by exercise of the imagination.
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True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.
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The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
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Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and
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True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.
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Chance is First, Law is Second, the tendency to take habits is Third. Mind is First, Matter is Second, Evolution is Third.
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1. We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned.
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We now come to the difficult question, What is continuity?
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The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
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The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. But before this can be accepted it must show itself capable of explaining the tridimensionality of space, the laws of motion,
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Deduction proves that something must be; Induction shows that something actually is operative; Abduction merely suggests that something may be.
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Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination and does not extend to that of other men.
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The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses.
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@chrisschuringa
@Jeff_Leader
There is a logical doctrine called Pragmatism. It is the doctrine that what any word or thought means consists in what it can contribute to an expectation about future experience, and nothing more.
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[Pragmatism:] The opinion that metaphysics is to be largely cleared up by the application of the following maxim for attaining clearness of apprehension:
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By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about.
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The hypothesis of God is a peculiar one, in that it supposes an infinitely incomprehensible object, although every hypothesis, as such, supposes its object to be truly conceived in the hypothesis. This leaves the hypothesis but one way of understanding itself;
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Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this
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True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.
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“pragmaticism (prag-mat′i-sizm), n. [pragmatic + ism.] A special and limited form of pragmatism, in which the pragmatism is restricted to the determining of the meaning of concepts (particularly of philosophic concepts) by consideration of the experimental differences in the
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It has never been in my power to study anything, — mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology,
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"The term “abduction” was coined by Charles Sanders Peirce in his work on the logic of science. He introduced it to denote a type of non-deductive inference that was different from the already familiar inductive type."
(SEP)
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“…Peirce in 1887 was successfully doing what the mainstream of logic ad computing science was just beginning to do around 1950. That Charles Peirce was roughly 63 years ahead of his time can perhaps be described as _the_ curse of his career.”
—K. L. Ketner and A. F. Stewart
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Pragmatism is the principle that every theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence
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The kind of philosophy that interests me and must, I think, interest everybody, is that philosophy which uses the most rational methods it can devise, for finding out the little that can as yet be found out about the universe of mind and matter from those observations which
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We do not really think, we are barely conscious, until something goes wrong.
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The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
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Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.
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Kant gives the erroneous view that ideas are presented separated and then thought together by the mind. This is his doctrine that a mental synthesis precedes every analysis. What really happens is that something is presented which in itself has no parts, but which nevertheless
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The French utterly despise Americans. No people think so poorly of us. For my part, I have tried to make out what it is that we are lacking in.
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True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.
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The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
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The universe is, thus, not a mere concept, but is the most real of experiences.
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“Charles Sanders Peirce took strong exception to those who associated him with Bergson. In response to a letter comparing their work, Peirce wrote, "a man who seeks to further science can hardly commit a greater sin than to use the terms of his science without anxious care to
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Happy Father’s Day to moi, Barry Allen’s Bergson book has Čapek,
@CSPeirceSpeaks
, Spencer, Popper, Quine, Ravaisson in the index. This is going to be a banger.
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My philosophy resuscitates Hegel, though in a strange costume.
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Consciousness must essentially cover an interval of time; for if it did not, we could gain no knowledge of time, and not merely no veracious cognition of it, but no conception whatever. We are therefore, forced to say that we are immediately conscious through an infinitesimal
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The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. But before this can be accepted it must show itself capable of explaining the tridimensionality of space, the laws of motion,
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Descartes is the father of modern philosophy, and the spirit of Cartesianism -- that which principally distinguishes it from the scholasticism which it displaced -- may be compendiously stated as follows:
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But by "semiosis" I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.
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Kant (whom I more than admire), is nothing but a somewhat confused pragmatist.
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It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction … in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his
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of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty.
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The truth is that pragmaticism is closely allied to the Hegelian absolute idealism,from which,however,it is sundered by its vigorous denial that the third category (which Hegel degrades to a mere stage of thinking) suffices to make the world,or is even so much as self-sufficient.
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The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight, although of extremely fallible insight. It is true that the different elements of the hypothesis were in our minds before; but it is the idea of putting together what we had never before dreamed of
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…what we call matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hide-bound with habits. It still retains the element of diversification; and in that diversification there is life.
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