Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American scientist, logician, and philosopher. A founder of American pragmatism, he argued that the meaning of a belief is to be understood by the actions and uses to which it gives rise.
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Peirce was the son of Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce. Charles graduated from Harvard (1859) and began his career as a scientist, working for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey (1861.) He became a lecturer in logic at Johns Hopkins University (1879) but left (1894) to devote the rest of his life in seclusion to the private study of logic and philosophy.
Peirce is noted for his work on the logic of relations and pragmatism as a research method. In his scientific work, Peirce developed the theory of gravity measurement using pendulums and conducted gravity experiments in Europe and North America. He also made an early determination of the meter in terms of the wavelength of light.
Peirce was a pioneer in developing modern, formal logic and the logic of relations in philosophy. He is still best known as the founder of pragmatism, which he later named ‘pragmaticism’ to distinguish it from the work of William James. His theory of meaning helped establish the new field of semiotics, which has become central in linguistics and philosophy.
Peirce’s enormous papers were collected and published posthumously in eight volumes (1931–58.)
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It is… easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.
—Charles Sanders Peirce
If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.
—Charles Sanders Peirce
Topics: Death
All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.
—Charles Sanders Peirce
Topics: Evolution
Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.
—Charles Sanders Peirce
We, one and all of us, have an instinct to pray, and this fact constitutes an invitation from God to pray.
—Charles Sanders Peirce
Topics: Prayer
Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics. Every other science, even logic, especially in its early stages, is in danger of evaporating into airy nothingness, degenerating, as the Germans say, into an arachnoid film, spun from the stuff that dreams are made of. There is no such danger for pure mathematics; for that is precisely what mathematics ought to be.
—Charles Sanders Peirce
Topics: Ethics
We should chiefly depend not upon that department of the soul which is most superficial and fallible (our reason), but upon that department that is deep and sure, which is instinct.
—Charles Sanders Peirce
Topics: Instincts, Reason
There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be.
—Charles Sanders Peirce
Topics: Science, Intelligence
It is a common observation that those who dwell continually upon their expectations are apt to become oblivious to the requirements of their actual situation.
—Charles Sanders Peirce
Topics: Acceptance, Secrets of Success
Looking out of my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I do not see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see. That is a proposition, a sentence, a fact; but what I perceive is not proposition, sentence, fact, but only an image which I make intelligible in part by means of a statement of fact. This statement is abstract; but what I see is concrete.
—Charles Sanders Peirce
Topics: Observation
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