Charles Sanders Peirce

The whole of pragmatism is born of a rule about meaning: to make a conception clear, ask what conceivable practical effects its object would have, for meaning resides nowhere but in those effects. To say a diamond is hard is to say it would resist being scratched; an idea from which no conceivable difference of experience could be drawn simply has no meaning. The move breaks with the referentialism that lodges meaning in the named object: Peirce places it in regulated conduct, the habit of action the idea engages, which brings him close to a theory of meaning as use, while keeping an experimental anchorage that sets him apart from a Wittgenstein. It is a weapon against verbal metaphysics, those disputes where one believes oneself to be thinking though no practical difference is at stake.

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878)

How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878)

Peirce attacks head-on Descartes's hyperbolic doubt: one cannot doubt at will nor feign a doubt one does not have, real doubt is born of a surprise, a jolt of experience, never of a decision. He likewise rejects intuition, that supposed first cognition deriving from no other: all thought is inference from prior thoughts, sign referring to other signs. As a result, justification rests on no indubitable basic belief, but on the holding of the whole: knowledge is a cable whose strength comes from the multitude of intertwined fibres, not a chain as weak as its frailest link. This coherentist bent is doubled by a reliabilist strand, since what validates a belief is also the tested reliability of the method that produced it.

Reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (1868)

Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man (1868) · Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (1868)

None of the three poles captures Peirce exactly, for he added precisely the missing piece: abduction, the inference that invents the hypothesis, upstream of the deduction that draws out its consequences and the induction that tests them. Science for him is this complete cycle, not one of its moments. He is nonetheless ranged on the inductivist side, since he remains an experimenter who grounds everything on the test of facts and makes induction the decisive trial; but he claims to defuse the flaw Hume denounced by holding that repeated induction corrects itself in the long run. His training as a statistician also gives him a probabilist strand, attentive to frequencies and to error, that foreshadows Bayesianism without reducing to it. What makes science is not a single rule of inference but the long-run self-correction of a community accountable to the real.

The Fixation of Belief (1877) · Collected Papers, V, 180-212 (on abduction)

Peirce is a scientist for whom all knowledge is tested against experience, and doubt itself arises only from a sensible jolt, never from a decision of the mind: the bent is clearly empiricist. But he refuses the atomist empiricism of pure sensation and restores to inference, logic and real generalities a constitutive role, abduction introducing ideas no observation contains. Neither blank slate nor innatism: an empiricism tempered by logic, nearer to criticism than to Hume.

Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (1868)

The Fixation of Belief sets four methods against one another, tenacity, authority, the a priori taste, science, and keeps only the last: only the scientific method submits our opinions to something external capable of contradicting, and so of correcting, us. This trust in method brings Peirce close to a certain scientism. But his fallibilism and his refusal of all closure hold him at a distance from a Comte: science has no ready answer to everything, it is the indefinite march of a community that knows itself correctable, nearer to a critical rationalism than to a sovereign knowledge.

The Fixation of Belief (1877)

From his rejection of intuition Peirce draws a radical consequence about the self: there is no immediate self-consciousness, the self is a late inference, which the child constructs to account for its errors and the ignorance others reveal to it. Above all, since all thought is sign, man himself is a sign: what I am unfolds in the semiotic fabric of my thoughts referring to other thoughts, with no substantial core beneath the flux. We are far from Descartes's thinking thing; the position leans toward the bundle, but a bundle reinterpreted in terms of signs rather than pure perceptions.

The word or sign which man uses is the man himself.Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (1868)

Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (1868)

Against the strict mechanism that sees in nature only rigid, necessary laws, Peirce upholds tychism: chance is an objective reality, and laws are not given in advance but are habits that have formed and grow firmer in the course of an evolution. The cosmos has a history, it grows, and this growth is oriented by a tendency, evolutionary love or agapasm, which tips Peirce toward a finalist kind of explanation, while keeping the creative spontaneity that recalls vitalism. Far from the Cartesian machine, his nature is an organism in the making.

The Doctrine of Necessity Examined (1892) · Evolutionary Love (1893)

Synechism, the principle of continuity, commands in Peirce a refusal of sharp breaks and holds the continuous to be primary: between matter and mind, between the levels of the real, there are transitions, not jumps. Nature evolves by forming habits that bring forth new orders, irreducible to the mechanics of their elements. Against atomist reductionism, this is a metaphysics of emergence and growth, where the whole is more than the sum of parts that are, besides, never truly separate.

The Law of Mind (1892)

In his late, speculative metaphysics Peirce calls himself an objective idealist: the one intelligible theory of the universe makes matter an effete mind, habits grown so inveterate as to become physical laws. This is neither the materialism that reduces mind to matter, nor Berkeley's subjective idealism for which the world exists only as perceived: mind here is primary and objective, and continuity (synechism) forbids separating the two into substances. The position stays fragile, stated in programmatic, unfinished texts, hence an extrapolated status.

The Architecture of Theories (1891)

In A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God, Peirce holds that the mind's free reverie, musement, leads naturally to the hypothesis of God as to the finest of abductions, a fruitful hypothesis rather than a demonstrated dogma. Peirce's God is less the personal God of the religions than an ordering reality correlated with his growing cosmos, hence a theism real but restrained, with no extreme.

A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God (1908)