From: http://www.radicalacademy.com/amphilosophy7.htm
Charles Sanders Peirce, a philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 10, 1839. He was the founder of the pragmatic movement in American philosophy. Son of the mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Peirce, he attended Harvard and the Lawrence Scientific School, receiving a degree in chemistry in 1863. At Harvard he met William James, who later developed and popularized pragmatism. Peirce worked as an astronomer at the Harvard Observatory and as a physicist for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, at the same time pursuing his interests in philosophy. He taught briefly at Harvard and then at The Johns Hopkins University.
Overview
Peirce was a distinguished physicist, a scholar of erudition and originality. He borrowed the term "pragmatic" from Kant, and later William James took it over from Peirce. Kant, in the Critique of Practical Reason, used the term pragmatic to distinguish technique derived from and applicable to experience from those which he regarded as prior to or logically independent of experience (a priori principles).
It should be noted that Peirce invented the term pragmaticism in his later years to differentiate his position from that of William James.
Peirce regards pragmatism as a method of clarifying conceptions. His basic principle is that the meaning of ideas is best discovered by putting them to an experimental test and then observing the consequences. He was especially interested in methodological procedure as evidenced in laboratory science. He maintained that the testing of hypotheses by laboratory experimentation will produce a definite type of experience. Hence the complete definition of any concept is the totality of the experimental occurrences implied in that concept by logical meaning.
Doctrine
Until William James turned to philosophy and made pragmatism popular, his lifelong friend, Charles Sanders Peirce, the initiator of this movement, had been almost unknown. As the founder of American pragmatism, Peirce developed a criterion of meaning in terms of conceivable effects or consequences in experience and a view of beliefs as "habits of action." His metaphysics embraces a theory of cosmic evolution and a theory of causal laws. He also wrote extensively on logic, epistemology, scientific method, cosmology, semiotics, and mathematics and more briefly on aesthetics, religion, phenomenology, and history. He had had no time to complete a book, except his Grand Logic which, however, was published after his death, together with other works he had left.
Before men like James and Dewey made Peirce's name famous, he could state: "I am a man of whom critics never found anything good to say." But once he was rather happy to be blamed by a malicious critic who reproached him for not being sure of his own conclusions. Peirce regarded this reproof as a praise. For to him any truth is provisional. In any proposition there must be taken account of coefficient of probability. This theory, called by Peirce "fallibilism," is a substitute for skepticism, and a constituent of his philosophical system, of no lesser importance than pragmatism, which he substitutes for positivism.
Before he concentrated upon philosophical studies, Peirce had worked for ten years in chemical laboratories, and had been devoted to the exact sciences. He was, by nature, a logician, and it was his interest in logic that made him a philosopher. His conception of pragmatism was not a metaphysical but a logical theory. After studying German and English philosophies, Peirce declared that the Germans acquainted him with "a rich mine of suggestions," which were "of little argumentative weight," while the results of the British were "meager but more accurate."
Peirce was an active member of the "Metaphysical Club," where he met such thinkers as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., John Fiske, and William James. In 1878 he wrote an article, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," published in the Popular Science Monthly, and formulated his ideas on pragmatism, his new approach to philosophy. His main interest, however, was logic, in which he followed A. de Morgan and G. Boole, and he developed the logic of relations and made important contributions to other fields of modern logic. And he also anticipated the discoveries of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell in their Principia Mathematica.
Peirce's pragmatism, though a logical theory, interprets thought in terms of operation and control. Its striking feature is the inseparable connection between rational cognition and rational purpose. The whole function of thinking, says Peirce, is but one step in the production of habits of action. His statement of the close relation between thought and human conduct has often been misunderstood as though Peirce had proclaimed subordination of reason to action, or even to profit and particular interests. In fact, Peirce defined the meaning of a concept or proposition as that form which is most directly applicable to self-control in any situation and to any purpose. To him, the rational meaning of every proposition lies in the future which is regarded as the ultimate test of what truth means.
Peirce's professional life was not all that successful. Quite capable of scientific and philosophic writing, he seemed to shun topics of general interest and alienated publishers. His projects of extensive writing invariably met with cold response and eventually came to naught; his publications were limited almost entirely to book reviews. But he continued to write voluminously and to revise his unpublished manuscripts. Charles Sanders Peirce died poor, in despair and unrecognized, on April 19, 1914.
In The Radical Academy
Elsewhere On the Internet
* The Charles S. Peirce Website
* Charles S. Peirce's Logic
* "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," by Charles Sanders Peirce
* "The Fixation of Belief," by Charles Sanders Peirce