Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed

Cornelis de Waal

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441143273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, is a hugely important and influential thinker in the history of American philosophy. His philosophical interests were broad and he made significant contributions in several different areas of thought. Moreover, his contributions are intimately connected and his philosophy designed to form a coherent and systematic whole. Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed is a clear and thorough account of Peirce's life and thought, his major works and ideas, providing an ideal guide to this important and complex thinker. The book introduces all the key concepts and themes in Peirce's thought, exploring his contributions to logic, pragmatism, truth, semiotics and metaphysics and demonstrating how his ideas developed into a coherent system of thought. Geared towards the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of Peirce's ideas, the book serves as a clear and concise introduction to his philosophy. This is the idea companion to study of this most influential and challenging of thinkers.

CHAPTER ONE

Life and work

In the early morning of 29 December 1914, a young graduate student from Harvard and a local farmer with a droopy moustache sped on a horse-drawn sled to the Port Jervis train station. They carried with them roughly a thousand books and two heavy crates of manuscripts that belonged to the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced “purse”) who had died that spring. The two crates of manuscripts would establish Peirce as one of the great Western philosophers. During his life, Peirce was highly regarded as a scientist and as a logician, but not too much was known of his philosophy, as most of it had remained unpublished.

Charles Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 10 September 1839, as the second son of the renowned mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Peirce. Charles Peirce (hereafter referred to as ‘Peirce’ the focus of this book) was far from a bookish philosopher and the scope of his work is staggering. He did pioneering work on the magnitude of stars and the form of the Milky Way. He worked extensively determining the exact shape of the earth, designing instruments, and improving methodologies. He invented a new map projection that gave a world map with a minimum distortion of the distance between any two points. He was a pioneer in mathematical logic and mathematical economy, did important work on Shakespearean pronunciation, engaged in experimental psychology, wrote several books on logic and mathematics (none of which were published), gave lectures on the history of science, developed a bleaching process for wood pulp, wrote on spelling reform, made calculations for a suspension bridge over the Hudson river, and was the first to use a wavelength of light to determine the exact length of the meter. Almost as an aside, in a short letter to his former student Alan Marquand, Peirce invented the electronic switching-circuit computer—until then computing machines had been wholly mechanical (W5:421–23). However, none of these accomplishments really helped Peirce, who died in abject poverty and almost completely forgotten in a small town called Milford, Pennsylvania, on 19 April 1914. Peirce was survived only by his second wife (whose identity is still a mystery) and by a disarray of over a hundred thousand manuscript pages. The American philosopher Josiah Royce, who was deeply indebted to Peirce’s thought, worked hard to raise money for Peirce’s papers and library, and for the less than impressive sum of five hundred dollars the books and papers went to Harvard, first by sled and then by train. Though the process of getting Peirce’s unpublished writings into print is slow and not without controversy, it is already undeniable that he is a philosopher of great magnitude whose writings are bound to significantly alter the philosophical landscape.

This book aims to guide the reader through Peirce’s philosophy. There are various ways of doing this. One can discuss it chronologically, carefully tracing the important steps he takes during the six decades he is working on philosophical and other issues.¹ Such an approach has great advantages. It will show the external and internal strains that cause pivotal shifts in his position, which leads to a better understanding of what he does and why. But as Peirce is active in so many areas it is also a complicated story, and a story that depends heavily on a good understanding of the main currents of thought in his time. Peirce does not write in a vacuum. He is keenly aware of what is going on in mathematics and in the sciences, and he makes extensive use of it.

Alternatively, one can highlight certain issues, for instance those where Peirce is most innovative or most influential. The problem with such a “greatest hits” approach is that it fails to show the systematic character of his work. A third approach is to focus on its systematic character and discuss Peirce’s contributions in the framework of it. This is the approach taken in this book. Peirce spends an inordinate amount of time classifying the sciences and positioning philosophy among them. Choosing Peirce’s classification of the sciences, which includes an ordered classification of philosophical activities, and structuring the discussion of his work around it, has the further advantage that one can make rather detailed detours without losing sight of the whole.

1.1 The birth of a polymath

Peirce is one of a handful in the history of thought who can truly be called a universal intellect. Robert Crease calls him “a prolific and perpetually overextended polymath,” and that pretty well sums him up.² He is deeply involved in the main currents of thought (mathematics, logic, experimental science), most of which are in rapid transition, and he makes significant contributions to a great variety of areas. Some have called Peirce the American Aristotle, others the American Leibniz,³ and it would certainly be no less appropriate to call him the American Leonardo, after that most famous of polymaths Leonardo da Vinci.

Typically, the making of a polymath begins at childhood, and that’s true here as well. Peirce’s father was a Harvard mathematician and astronomer who played a key role in the establishment of a scientific community within the US.⁴ He was involved in the creation of the National Academy of Sciences and the Smithsonian Institution, and from 1867 to 1874 he was in charge of the US Coast Survey, which at the time was America’s premier scientific institution. Because of this, and because his father was a polymath of sorts as well, Peirce is already at a young age exposed to the workings of science. As he later reminisces: “all the leading men of science, particularly astronomers and physicists, resorted to our house; so that I was brought up in an atmosphere of science. But my father was a broad man and we were intimate with literary people too” (SS:113).

Benjamin Peirce saw early on that young Charles was gifted and he took an active role in his early education. Benjamin was an unconventional teacher who taught his students by inspiring them rather than by carefully guiding them through proofs and to the solutions of problems. He was known to throw his proofs and solutions rapidly onto the blackboard, preferring quick and elegant solutions, and speedily erasing what he had written the moment he ran out of space. The common opinion was that the rings On Peirce.’s ladder stood too far apart and that though he ascended easily most others fell through. Those who fell through, however, still spoke highly of him and were grateful to have been his student. About the education he receives from his father, Peirce later remarks: “He very seldom could be entrapped into disclosing to me any theorem or rule of arithmetic. He would give an example; but the rest I must think out for myself” (R619:5). To help him with the latter, Peirce continues, “[my father] took great pains to teach me concentration of mind and to keep my attention upon the strain for a long time. From time to time he would put me to the test by keeping me playing rapid games of double-dummy from ten in the evening until sunrise, and sharply criticizing every error” (id.). About the extent of his father’s influence, Peirce later writes: “He educated me, and if I do anything it will be his work” (R1608:2).

Hence, from early on Peirce is put into the habit of thinking things out for himself. Though he is an avid reader with a solid knowledge of the history of science and philosophy, and kept up with contemporary work, he retains this habit of thinking things through in his own way, which contributes greatly to his originality as a thinker.

This habit of thinking things out for himself gets a major boost when at the age of twelve his uncle Charles Henry Peirce helped him set up a chemistry laboratory at home. Charles Henry had been a student and assistant of Eben Horsford who had introduced Justus von Liebig’s experimental method of teaching at Harvard (Horsford had studied with Liebig in Germany). Rejecting the purely theoretical way chemistry was being taught, Liebig gave each student a series of bottles marked with the letters of the alphabet. The student was asked to analyze the contents of each bottle, using as the sole guide an introductory textbook in qualitative analysis. Over the years, the number of bottles in Liebig’s course had grown to a hundred and it took the average student about a year to complete the exercise. It was on this model that Peirce’s home laboratory was set up, together with a copy of his uncle’s translation of Stöckhardt’s Principles of Chemistry.

Though Liebig’s method of teaching was strictly an exercise in chemical analysis, it could be applied to experimental science more broadly. Eben Horsford picked up on this. He used the method not only in his own teaching, but when he founded the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard—a school Peirce graduates from in 1863—he modeled the entire school after Liebig’s method. In 1869, the impact of Liebig’s method widened even further when Charles Eliot—also a student of Horsford and Peirce’s chemistry teacher at Lawrence Scientific—becomes President of Harvard. Eliot remains president for 40 years, making Harvard the first American university to be solidly grounded in the principles of experimental science. Briefly, already at the age of twelve, while experimenting with Liebig’s bottles, Peirce is deeply immersing himself in the experimental method. This happens at a time when that method itself and the science it generates are also still in their infancy. Thus, a brilliant mind that still possesses the openness of youth finds before him a fertile land that lies mostly untilled. Moreover, the Liebig method is a very practical way of learning chemical analysis, one where the difference in the contents of the bottles is determined by the practical consequences of the various operations performed upon them. As we will see in the chapters that follow, this too leaves its mark on how Peirce comes to see not only science but also philosophy.

Also at the age of twelve, Peirce reads Richard Whately’s Elements of Logic, a work that revitalized the study of logic in the English-speaking world.⁵ Peirce finds the book in his older brother’s room and promptly devours it. Later he repeatedly says that from then on logic was his strongest passion. For instance, when working as a scientist, Peirce retains a strong focus on methodology, making it his first priority to penetrate into the logic of things. As with chemistry, Peirce’s introduction to logic also comes when the discipline is in the process of a dramatic transformation. It is around this time that the British mathematician George Boole develops an algebra for logic, giving logic a mathematical grounding that not only frees it from the restraints of Aristotelian syllogisms but that also opens the door for extensive new research. Peirce, who thanks to his father already had an affinity for mathematics, comes to play an important role in this. Although Whately’s logic is predominantly Aristotelian, one can also discern a strong influence of John Locke. Whately rejected, for instance, the problematic notion of “abstract ideas,” arguing instead that we think in signs.⁶ Hence, we can find in Whately some of the early seeds of Peirce’s semeiotics (Chapter 5).

Benjamin Peirce did not share his son’s fascination for logic. In fact he had a very low opinion of logic, preferring instead “to draw directly upon the geometrical instinct” (echoes of this return in Peirce’s logical graphs; Section 4.7).⁷ Benjamin Peirce also had a low opinion of the reasoning of philosophers more generally, and time and time again he would force his son to “recognize the extremely loose reasoning common to the philosophers” (CP2.9). After Whately’s logic, Peirce’s first readings in philosophy are Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. It was Schiller who introduces Peirce to Kant, and he begins reading Kant’s first Critique shortly before his seventeenth birthday. Peirce spends roughly three years studying the first Critique, a process during which his father proves very influential. As Peirce puts it: “[the Critique of Pure Reason] was sort of a Bible to me; and if my father had not exposed the weaknesses of some of its arguments, I do not know to what lengths my worship of it might not have gone” (R619:10f). Notwithstanding the sobering influence of his father, Kant continues to have a far-reaching and profound influence on Peirce’s thought.

Peirce goes to Harvard at sixteen. At Harvard the habit his father instilled in him—that of seeking his own way intellectually—works against him, and he performs rather poorly. In 1858, he joins a local expedition of the Coast Survey, which is not uncommon at the time for scientifically inclined students. It is there that Peirce finds his stride; it proves the beginning of a 30-year career as a scientist. In July 1861, Peirce received his first official appointment as a lowly paid computer, but he quickly moves up. In a little over a decade he is in charge of gravitational research and is promoted to the Survey’s highest rank, that of Assistant to the Superintendant. Also in 1861, Peirce enters Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School to study chemistry. Two years later he graduates summa cum laude.

1.2 An outsider

Being found a genius also has its darker side. From early on Peirce is constantly told he is a genius and he is treated as such, and this significantly affects how he comes to see himself. Especially during the first half of his life it leaves a strong mark on his relationships with others, though other personality traits also contribute to this. Although Peirce considers himself a genius, and spends much time studying what he called “great men,” he typically explains his own success as a thinker in terms of his great power of concentration and a dogged, pedestrian persistence which he jokingly calls Peirce-istance, or Peirce-everance.

George Whalley, the editor of the works of Coleridge, once remarked that what sets the genius apart is “not the sheer quantity of learning . . . but the incandescence, the opulence, the extravagant gratuitousness, the rapidity of mind.”⁸ Peirce’s close friend William James makes a similar observation about Peirce when he characterizes Peirce’s 1903 Lowell lectures as “flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness.”⁹ Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the literary figures that frequented the young Peirce’s home, points out another aspect of genius that aptly applies to Peirce: “Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence.”¹⁰ Although Ian Hacking overstates his case when he describes Peirce as a wild man who began almost everything and finished almost nothing,¹¹ Emerson’s observation is much of the reason why the systematic philosopher never completed a book about his philosophy—he is constantly moving in new directions, never satisfied with what he had written.

Overall Peirce provides a painful example of a great thinker with a failed career. Apart from a brief stint as a lecturer in logic at Johns Hopkins (1879–84), he never holds a university position. An initially brilliant career at the Coast Survey comes to a sudden and graceless end in 1891, after roughly 30 years of service. Peirce works the last third of his life as an independent scholar, which forces him to constantly struggle for money. During this period, he writes mostly for a living, gives lectures, and does occasional free-lance work in a variety of fields. In 1887, while he is still working for the Coast Survey, he moves to Milford, Pennsylvania, a small resort town not far from the Port Jervis train station, from which it is only a few hours to New York City. Just outside Milford, he purchases a small farmhouse with quite a bit of land. The house becomes an obsession, and at the time of his death it had grown into a 25-room mansion.

The story of Peirce’s life is complicated and one that still needs to be told.¹² There are many theories on why he fell from grace. He had a difficult personality. He had powerful enemies, including Harvard President Charles Eliot and Simon Newcomb (the latter became America’s premier scientist). He was considered a deeply immoral man and a bad role model for students when he married his mistress, a mysterious French woman with whom he had been living openly, only two days after he divorced his first wife (even though she left him seven years before). Irrespective of his personality traits, his enemies, and the moral reprobation, the mere fact that during the last third of his life he lives in relative isolation and is not connected to a university is by itself enough to make him an outsider. Fortunately, he also has a few good friends. The latter include Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce, who is deeply influenced by Peirce and arranges for his library and papers to come to Harvard.

1.3 The Peirce papers

Peirce thought with his pen, he thought often, and he seldom threw anything away. The result is that upon his death he left behind an enormous mass of manuscripts. Estimates vary, but it is typically conjectured that there are over a hundred thousand manuscript pages preserved in Harvard’s Houghton Library, with substantial deposits elsewhere. The history of the manuscripts may even be more complicated and controversial than Peirce’s life.¹³ From the start, the aim was to organize the manuscripts and extract from them material suitable for publication. This task proved overwhelming, not just because of the sheer volume of the papers, but also because of their disorganized state, Peirce’s propensity to digress and leave things unfinished, and his constant reworking of issues. Martin Heidegger once described his own thoughts as Holtzwege, after the countless trails found in well-traveled woods, often so faint it is unclear whether they even are trails, and many leading nowhere.¹⁴ More recently, Vincent Colapietro described Peirce’s writing as a one-man jam session—it is restle...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• 1 Life and work
• 2 Mathematics and philosophy
• 3 Phenomenology and the categories
• 4 The normative science of logic
• 5 Semeiotics, or the doctrine of signs
• 6 Philosophy of science
• 7 Pragmatism
• 8 Truth and reality
• 9 Mind, God, and cosmos
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index