Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
As a logician, mathematician, and philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce was one of North America’s most original and versatile thinkers. However, hisaccomplishments are less acquainted than those of others. Peirce was the originator of the philosophy known as pragmatism, a cofounder of the science of signs, which is called semiotics; the designer of anelectric switching-circuit computer, a creator of the algebra of logic, the first modern psychologist in the United States, and an authority on the pronunciation of Elizabethan English. Basically hemade improvements in mathematics, mathematical logic, physics, geodesy, spectroscopy, and astronomy, psychology, anthropology, history, and economics. Peirce argued that beliefs are essentially habitsof action and that beliefs may be fixed by scientific method. The characteristic of the scientific method that makes its ideas clear in terms first of the sensible effects of their objects and secondof habits of action adjusted to those effects; or at least this is what Peirce believed. Peirce identified Pragmatism more narrowly with the logic of abduction. “Abduction is the process of forming anexplanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea" (Peirce, 1903:CP 5.171). When Pragmatism became a popular movement in the early 1900s, Peirce was dissatisfiedboth with all of the forms of Pragmatism then current and with his own original exposition of it, and his last productive years were devoted in large part to its radical revision and systematiccompletion and to the proof of the principle of what he by then had come to call “pragmaticism.”His “one contribution to philosophy,” he thought, was his “new list of categories”, which he reduced from 12to 3: Quality, Relation, and Representation. In later writings he sometimes called them Quality, Reaction, and Mediation; and finally, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. At first he called them...