Nubiola, Jaime. "Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914)." Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought Vol. II. Edited by Michel Weber and Will Desmond. Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag, 2008. 481-487.

Abstract

Charles Sanders Peirce was born on September 10th, 1839 in Cambridge Massachusetts to Sarah and Benjamin Peirce. His family was already academically distinguished, his father being professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard. Though Charles himself received a graduate degree in chemistry from Harvard University, he never succeeded in obtaining a tenured academic position. Peirce's academic ambitions were frustrated in part by his difficult - perhaps manic-depressive - personality, combined with the scandal surrounding his second marriage, which he contracted soon after his divorce from Harriet Melusina Fay. He undertook a career as a scientist for the United States Coast Survey (1859-1891), working especially in geodesy and in pendulum determinations. From 1879 through 1884, he was a part-time lecturer in Logic at Johns Hopkins University. In 1887, Peirce moved with his second wife, Juliette Froissy, to Milford Pennsylvania, where in 1914, after 26 years of prolific and intense writing, he died of cancer. He had no children. Peirce published two books, Photometric Researches (1878) and Studies in Logic (1883), and a large number of papers in journals in widely differing areas. His manuscripts, a great many of which remain unpublished, run to some 100,000 pages. In 1931-1958, s selection of his writings was arranged thematically and published in eight volumes as the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Beginning in 1982, a number of volumes have been published in the series A Chronological Edition, which will ultimately consist of thirty volumes. William James credited Peirce with being the founder of pragmatism. Peirce is also considered to be the father of modern semiotics, the science of signs. Moreover, his - often pioneering - work was relevant in many areas of knowledge, such as atronomy, metrology, geodesy, mathematics, logic, philosophy, theory and history of science, semiotics, linguistics, econometrics, and psychology. Since his death, Peirce has been made the subject of lavish praise. Thus Bertrand Russell writes that "beyond doubt [...] he was one of the most original minds of the nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever" (Russell 1959, 276) Karl Popper views him as "one of the greatest philosophers of all times" (Popper 1972, 212) It is thus no surprise that recently his work and his views on many subjects have become the subject of renewed interest; this revival is animated not only by Peirce's intelligent anticipations of recent scientific developments, but especially because he shows how philosophy may be responsibly applied to human problems. Though in some ways Peirce was a systematic philosopher in the traditional sense of the word, his work deals primarily with modern problems of science, truth, and knowledge, starting from his own valuable personal experience as a logician and experimental researcher laboring within an international community of scientists and thinkers. "He was the most scientifically trained philosopher I've ever read; in some ways much closer to concrete experimental science than Whitehead," Hartshorne recalls (Lieb 1970, 157-158). Though Peirce made relvant contributions to deductive logic, he was primarily interested in the logic of science, and more especially in what he called "abduction"(as opposed to deduction and induction). Abduction is the process whereby a hypothesis is generated, so that surprising facts may be explained. Indeed, Peirce considered abduction to be at the heart not only of scientific research, but of all ordinary human activities as well. Peirce's pragmatism may be understood as a method of sorting out conceptual confusions by relating the meaning of concepts to their practical consequences. Emphatically, this theory bears no resemblance to the vulgar notion of pragmatism, which connotes such things as ruthless search for profit or political convenience. In Modes of Thought, Whitehead notes that his own method of philosophizing is "pragmatist" in Peirce's sense: "Thus deductive logic has not the coercive supremacy which is conventionally conceded to it. When applied to concrete instances it is a tentative procedure, finally to be judged by the self-evidence of its issues. This doctrine places philosophy on a pragmatic basis" (MT 106; Lowe 1964, 453). Aware of possible misunderstandings, Whitehead highlights the exact sense in which he uses the term: "But the meaning of pragmatism must be given its widest extension. In much modern thought, it has been limited by arbitrary specialist assumptions. There should be no pragmatic exclusion of self-evidence by dogmatic denial. Pragmatism is simply an appeal to that self-evidence which sustains itself in civilized experience. Thus pragmatism ultimately appeals to the wide self-evidence of civilization, and to the self-evidence of what we mean by 'civilization'" (MT 106).