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Charles Sanders Peirce Biography

Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce (/pɜːrs/, like "purse"; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism.

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Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

A pair of statements may be taken conjunctively or disjunctively; for example, "It lightens and it thunders ," is conjunctive, "It lightens or it thunders" is disjunctive. Each such individual act of connecting a pair of statements is a new monad for the mathematician.

Conjunctively, Disjunctively, Example, May, Taken, Thunders

Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.

Avoid, Doubt, Pass, Struggle, Uneasy, Wish

All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

Definite, Evolution, Knows, Proceeds, Vague

Unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.

Chance, Men, Natural, Understanding Nature, Unless

All the progress we have made in philosophy. . . is the result of that methodical skepticism which is the element of human freedom.

Atheism, Human, Philosophy, Progress, Skepticism

Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since Newton's time, his saying that we are little children picking up pretty pebbles on the beach while the whole ocean lies before us unexplored remains substantially as true as ever, and will do so though we shovel up the pebbles by steam shovels and carry them off in carloads.

Beach, Children, Lies, Lying, Remains, Unexplored

The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.

Exercise, Thinking, Finals, Part, Forms, Future

Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

Success, Science, Thinking, Mathematical, Generalize, Characteristic

Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business. But do not make believe; if pedantry has not eaten all the reality out of you, recognize, as you must, that there is much that you do not doubt, in the least. Now that which you do not at all doubt, you must and do regard as infallible, absolute truth.

Believe, Eaten, Make, Reality, Recognize, Writing

Theology, I am persuaded, derives its initial impulse from a religious wavering; for there is quite as much, or more, that is mysterious and calculated to awaken scientific curiosity in the intercourse with God, and it [is] a problem quite analogous to that of theology.

Curiosity, Intercourse, Mysterious, Religious, Wavering

This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.

Believe, Branch, Branches, Mathematics, Writers

Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing.

Actuality, Chaos, Existence, Ingredients, Mere, Reality

If liberty of speech is to be untrammeled from the grosser forms of constraint, the uniformity of opinion will be secured by a moral terrorism to which the respectability of society will give its thorough approval.

Giving, Liberty, Approval, Respectability, Moral

It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.

Drinking, Fact, Fountain, Men, Science

Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus "theoretically," is to uselanguage in a Pickwickian sense. In practice, and in fact, mathematics is not exempt from that liability to error that affects everything that man does.

Errors, Grant, Mathematics, Men, Practice, Speak

If an opinion can eventually go to the determination of a practical belief, it, in so far, becomes itself a practical belief; and every proposition that is not pure metaphysical jargon and chatter must have some possible bearing upon practice.

Determination, Practice, Jargon, Chatter, Metaphysical

All the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they can be applied. . . . This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. 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.

Truth, Real, Mean, Fully, Enough, Solution

By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i. e. anything we can talk about.

Mean, Objects, Talk, Think, Thinking

The percept is the reality. It is not in propositional form. But the most immediate judgment concerning it is abstract. It is therefore essentially unlike the reality, although it must be accepted as true to that reality. Its truth consists in the fact that it is impossible to correct it, and in the fact that it only professes to consider one aspect of the percept.

Accepted, Facts, Immediate, Impossible, Propositional, Reality

The universe ought to be presumed too vast to have any character.

Character, Ought, Presumed, Universe

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