Talk:Charles Saunders Peirce

Comments on the Peirce article
Philip Meguire, November 5 2005. I am grateful to any and all who take up my call to improve the discussion of Peirce's pragmatism and abduction. I suspect that more could be done. I will now comment on the tiny rival article to which my attention was drawn only today.

Charles Saunders Peirce (1839-1914) founded The initiator of the pragmatism movement in philosophy, Peirce remained largely unknown until his life-long friend William James made pragmatism popular.

PM. From about 1895 until his death in 1910, William James passed the hat around the Boston intellectual community, asking that people contribute to support Peirce, then living in serious poverty in rural Pennsylvania. James also arranged for Peirce to give a series of paid lectures in Cambridge MA in 1898, reprinted as Reason and the Logic of Things. There is a nice Peirce-James correspondence, mostly unpublished I believe. That said, James was far far better known than his contemporary Peirce. The rise of pragmatism a la James and Dewey did little for Peirce's reputation, or his household budget. Moreover, Peirce repudiated James's use of the word pragmatism, going so far as to coin, sarcastically, the term pragmaticism to differentiate his ideas from those of James. The first American academics whose teaching and writing drew attention to the quality and scope of Peirce's thinking, were James's Harvard colleague Josiah Royce, Cassius Keyser, and Morris Cohen.

All Peirces works were published posthumously.

PM. Peirce published a goodly number of papers in academic journals, especially The Monist, which has happily survived to the present day.

Peirce believed any truth is provisional, and in any proposition there must a coefficient of probability taken into account. This theory Peirce called "fallibilism" which he set forth as a substitute for scepticism, a constituent of his philosophical system. Which was to him no lesser in importance than pragmatism, which he in turn substitutes for positivism.

PM. You rightly draw attention to Peirce's falliblism and to his being among the first logicians and philosophers of science to think about probabilitiy and statistical inference. (In Peirce's day, these technical fields were in their infancy. The statistical methods routinely taught to undergrads nowadays did not really get off the ground until 1920-40, thanks to, e.g., Ronald Fisher, Snedecor, Egon Pearson, Jerzy Neyman, Harold Hotelling). Many made nervous by positivism have turned to Peirce with relief. However Peirce did not write much about positivism, founded by his Austrian contemporary Ernst Mach, whom Peirce may not have known about.

By claiming that Peirce argued that a "coefficient of probability" should be associated with the truth of any proposition, you unwittingly suggest that Peirce anticipated the Bayesian viewpoint. He did not; Peirce clearly supported what is now known as the frequentist interpretation of probability. To a remarkable extent, Peirce often anticipated sophisticated directions taken by thought in the 20th century, but here is a rare instance where Peirce did not ally himself with the angels. I hasten to admit that I am very warm to the Bayesian and subjectivist points of view!

Philip Meguire, 4.11.05. I have added links to this article from the article on pragmatism. The latter, BTW, leaves something to be desired.