C.S. Peirce (1839-1914) was an American scientist, philosopher, and polymath who did foundational or important work in science- and philosophy-adjacent fields like formal logic, experimental statistics, semiotics, scientific method, and metaphysics.
I think his philosophical ideas are, at the very least, interesting. Some are novel, even today. I think them frequently useful for getting around in the world (especially for those of a scientific bent). However, his writing is difficult for a modern audience.
Resources like Peirce’s entry in the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy or Murray Murphey’s The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy (archive.org) are easier, but still difficult without a solid background in philosophy (more solid than I have). And, even given those summaries, I find it useful to read Peirce’s originals.
So, since my writers' block makes it excruciating to get my own ideas set down, I’ve decided to rewrite Peirce’s in a modern (and shorter) style, replacing allusions and references that are likely puzzling to modern readers, and explaining philosophical background and terminology that an autodidact like the last year’s me wouldn’t know.
Notes on what you’ll read
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Because I’m a philosophical dilettante, I’m likely to misunderstand some of Peirce’s points or the controversies he’s participating in – and so restate them wrongly. Corrections solicited. (I confess to an idle dream that some serious Peirce scholar will help me polish these so that I might one day supplement collections like The Essential Peirce (volumes 1 and 2) with The Essential Peirce (Champaign covers).
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Peirce was active at a tumultuous time in intellectual life. He was a contemporary of Boole and De Morgan, who were converting logic from syllogisms to Boolean algebra and first-order predicate calculus. Statistical mechanics was introducing uncertainty into a mechanistic physics (Maxwell, Bolzman, Gibbs). Peirce died too soon to see the flowering of quantum mechanics, but he was aware that scientists were finding ever more hints that things at the atomic level are weird. And, very importantly, Darwin rocked the world when Peirce was only 20 years old.
That is to say: Peirce was, at least implicitly, publicly reacting to issues we’ve long since considered resolved. That context is essential to understanding Peirce. I’ve tried to provide it. This is a little like the New Historicists, who loved to juxtapose literature to whatever else was going on in the culture. A typical example is that Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” was written during a heyday of English colonialism. Could our understanding of Prospero’s enslavement of Caliban be informed by that somehow? Maybe, maybe not, but it can’t hurt to understand the context.
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Some of Peirce’s assertions about history and science are now known to be wrong. I haven’t been scrupulous about correcting him. I’ll occasionally comment on them in a “Looking Backward” appendix.
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Directly inspired by Kant, Peirce spent his life trying to weave together formal logic, science, epistemology, ontology, cosmology, semiotics, and the kitchen sink into one giant “architectonic” system. He changed his mind over time, but did a poor job of informing the reader that, say, his understanding of the “firstness” concept kept changing. That makes it hard to compare earlier writing to later writing. I’ll treat each paper as stand-alone, but I will occasionally note (in an appendix) how his future opinion will change. I find that useful when reading his earlier, less developed essays.
“Champaign cover”?
I’m using “cover” in the sense of a musical cover like Nirvana’s cover of “Where did you sleep last night,” originally recorded by Lead Belly.
That is, I think of myself as using new instruments (new words) to faithfully render the same theme, message, and attitude.
I’m calling them “Champaign covers” because Champaign is where I live. It amuses me that I live in a misspelling of Champagne, and using my town’s name will remind me (and you) that I’ll make mistakes when covering Peirce. (And perhaps that Peirce himself made mistakes.)
By the way, “Peirce” is pronounced “purse.” I doubt it will ever sound that way in my head.