C. S. Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced: “purse”) was born September 10, 1839 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He was the son of Benjamin Peirce, who was a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard College.

Joseph Brent writes of the father:

          Benjamin Peirce was an extraordinary man.  He was successful as both an academic and public figure, and he was at the center of the movement to improve American education, especially higher education in the sciences. As a member of the Lazzaroni (the Beggars), an informal group of leading American scientists, he lobbied Washington for funds for science and also supported the movement for a national university.  He was instrumental in convincing Abbot Lawrence to endow the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard in 1847.  In 1853 and 1854, he was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1863, with Louis Agissiz and others, he helped found the National Academy of Sciences.  From 1867 until his resignation in 1874 (while still holding his Harvard professorship), he was superintendent of the United States Coast Survey, and thereafter until his death in 1880 served as its “consulting geometer.”  He published two major works (along with many lesser ones), both influential, Analytic Mechanics and Linear Associative Algebra (Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life [rev. and enlarged edition, 1998]).

Both father and son suffered from what they termed “facial neuralgia” but is now

          called trigeminal neuralgia, a neurological disease for which only in the past decade has a cause and treatment been found.  Until this discovery, the specificity of the pain and lack of cure for the disease were its defining characteristics.  It is always marked by the kind of acute, intense, and sometimes unbearable facial pain described on many occasions by Charles.  The term facial neuralgia was used medically the nineteenth century to refer to the same neurological disorder as the modern term trigeminal neuralgia: acute pain affecting one or more of the three branches of the fifth cranial nerve on either side of the face, usually though to be the result of pressure on the nerve sheath from a then-unknown source. “There are few ailments which give rise to greater suffering” [Note: Encyclopedia Britannica, 11^th ed.].  An attack may be trigger by a draft, a touch somewhere on the face, or stress, or sometimes for no apparent reason.  Sometimes the pain occurs every few minutes for several days or even weeks.  Sometimes it does not recur for months.  Peirce often associated the incidence of neuralgia with other disorder and conditions, such as prolonged fever, rheumatism, bronchitis, excessive stress, high emotion, bad weather, depression, overwork, and even madness of a kind. To abate the terribel pain, both father and son regularly took ether and decoctions of opium.  Charles probably also later used morphine regularly, since it does not leave behind the kind of long-lasting lassitude produced by the other two drugs [significant, critical endnote omitted in which Brent qualifies and defends this medical diagnosis].  Charles, at least, appears to have been addicted, and to have later used cocaine as well.  Support for the likelihood of his early addiction comes from a letter written to him when he was twenty-one by Carrie Badger, and early love whom he seduced with a pretended marriage, apparently asking him to give up opium: “regarding the request I made of you the other evening about the opium—would you do for me when my husband what you would not do as a lover?” [citation omitted: Brent 40]

Cultural resources of his home:

The academic culture of Harvard College and Boston and many illustrious guests played an important role in the development of [Peirce’s] children’s attitudes and minds.  Frequent visitors at the Mason Street house in Cambridge where Peirce lived until he was six were J.J. Sylvester of mathematical eminence and later Charles’s colleague at Johns Hopkins University; the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; the poet and essayist James Russell Lowell; the historian Francis Parkman; the abolitionist theologian Theodore Parker; the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and his brother Dr. John Holmes; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Seer; the abolitionist feminist Margaret Fuller; the jurist Rufus Choate; the paleontologist Louis Agassiz; Senator Daniel Webster; Superintendent Alexander Dallas Bache of the Coast Survey; and Secretary Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution, among others.  Of Emerson, Peirce said that his “address in the early forties greatly impressed me; for it was not necessary to understand Emerson or to have more than the slightest contact with him to be greatly impressed [Note: Ms. 296].”  Despite his often expressed opposition to transcendentalism, Peirce, with heavy irony, did proclaim, when he was fifty-two, its profound influence on him:

          I was born and reared in the neighborhood of Concord. . . . at the time when Emerson, [Frederick H.] Hedge, and their friends were disseminating the ideas they had caught from [Friedrich von] Schelling [with whom Perice identified his own metaphysical position in the Monist papers of 1891-93], and Schelling from Plotinus, from Boehm[e], or from God knows what minds stricken with monstrous mysticism of the East.  But the atmosphere of Cambridge held many an antiseptic against Concord transcendentalism; and I am not conscious of having contracted any of that virus.  Nevertheless it is probable that some cultured bacilli, some benignant form of the disease was implanted in my soul, unawares, and that now, after long incubation, it comes to the surface, modified by mathematical concpetions and by training in physical investigations [Brent 45f].

At age 13 Peirce discovered logic but he was not a very good student, finishing in the bottom 20% of his class at Harvard.  In 1859 he earned the BA then entered Lawrence Scientific School, receiving his M.A. in 1862, but in 1863 he earned a BS in chemistry and graduated summa cum laude!

In 1859 after graduating from Harvard, he begins working for the US Coast Survey, with which he would be associated for over 30 years.

Peirce married Harriet Melusina Fay (Zina) in 1862.

In 1866 he delivered the Lowell Lectures on the logic of science, but by 1870 it seemed clear, according to Brent (p. 74) that he would not get an academic position.

In 1872 he was promoted to Assistant Superintendent of the US Coast Survey, and Brent observes:

                   Peirce believed himself to be in a very fortunate position as he considered his future when he returned, aged thirty-one, from Europe in March 1871.  He had made a strong impression on Britain’s finest logicians and philosophers.  He had published, if not extensively, influentially in his chosen field of logic and in a number of other fields as well.  He was asked regularly to review books for the Nation, the North American Review, and other journals.  His scientific reputation was increasing in stature.  His father was one of the most influential and respected men of science in the United States.  He was married to an intelligent, strong-minded, and loving wife from a good New England family, whose beliefs and politics, though considered eccentric, did not detract from her respect in the Brahmin world.  Although with a characteristic edge of desperation and doubt, Peirce anticipated as his due a brilliant life and career (81).

But he did not enjoy such a life and career.  Despite his brilliance his life was often marked by professional and personal failure and disappointment, even periods of poverty. 

The pragmatic principle of understanding what something means by observing its “sensible effects” was first published by Peirce in 1878 in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” but he discussed the concept and used the term “pragmatism” in the meetings of an informal group, known as the Metaphysical Club, which met in the early 1870s in Cambridge and included William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Chauncey Wright and Nicholas St. John Green.  [READ Phelps article, “Pragmatism and Its Critics”]

Peirce’s anti-Cartesianism

NOTE: Do not struggle through “The Consequences of the Four Incapacities.”  Read the part dealt with by this chart:

NOTE: Peirce’s age; pre-Metaphyscial Club authority shifts from self/god to community of inquirers (this secularizes Royce’s idealism); there are suggestions of pragmatism, but can only know this by reading from the latter to the text.

·        doubt-inquiry model

·        no indubitble foundations; work from where you are

·        science (and logic) is the model of knowing

·        secular orientation

·        content with probability

Similarly, Phelps writes, in "Pragmatism and Its Critics":"Peirce's Popular Science Monthly articles expressed in germinal form all the core elements of the first‑generation conception of pragmatism: a theory of mind that views concepts or ideas as plans for action, a theory of meaning in which ideas are best understood and clarified by assessment of the whole of their consequences, a theory of truth that judges ideas according to the scientific method of observation and verification, and a concept of inquiry crediting the search for knowledge to the stimulus of doubt when expectations are shattered after ideas are confounded by experience."

Peirce’s “Fixation of Belief”

Let’s talk about major problems in the world.  What are some of them?    Which one of these can be solved by inquiry?  Investigation?  What is the purpose of inquiry?

Peirce’s essay:

1.     What are the four ways of fixing belief that Peirce discusses?

·        Tenacity

·        Authority

·        Agreeable to Reason/A Priori

·        Scientific

2.     Each has its advantages and disadvantages, but only the scientific method is truly social and able to withstand challenges.  The others cannot withstand challenge; the scientific can because it responds to a challenge by revising its conclusions as needed.

3.     It can do so because it encounters reality and is determined by it.

8.     The similarities and dissimilarities of doubt and belief:

“How to Make Our Ideas Clear”

First grade of clarity: tacit familiarity

Second grade: abstract definition

Third grade: pragmatic clarification:  we do not know what something is until we discover the habit of conduct that exemplifies the idea.  Hence the pragmatic maxim: "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have.  Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."

Take "real"; we are tacitly familiar with the real and can use the term successfully, as in, "My daughter's imaginary playmate is not a real person.  It is a projection of one facet of her personality and her interaction with it helps her to cope with reality and form her identity."

We can, if we choose, formulate a definition, as does Peirce: The real is "that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be."

But the pragmatic clarification of "real" will involve the over-the-long-run understanding which comes from observing "the habit of conduct" which is reality.  Hence: "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality."