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Charles Sanders Perice was America's greatest thinker

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https://aeon.co/essays/charles-sanders-p...st-thinker

EXCERPT: . . . there was in fact a scientist who surpassed all others in sheer intellectual virtuosity. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), pronounced ‘purse’, was a solitary eccentric working in the town of Milford, Pennsylvania, isolated from any intellectual centre. Although many of his contemporaries shared the view that Peirce was a genius of historic proportions, he is little-known today. His current obscurity belies the prediction of the German mathematician Ernst Schröder, who said that Peirce’s ‘fame [will] shine like that of Leibniz or Aristotle into all the thousands of years to come’.

Some might doubt this lofty view of Peirce. Others might admire him for this or that contribution yet, overall, hold an opinion of his oeuvre similar to that expressed by the psychologist William James on one of his lectures, that it was like ‘flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness’. Peirce might have good things to say, so this reasoning goes, but they are too abstruse for the nonspecialist to understand. I think that a great deal of Peirce’s reputation for obscurity is due, not to Peirce per se, but to the poor organisation and editing of his papers during their early storage at and control by Harvard University (for more on this, see André de Tienne’s insightful history of those papers).

Such skepticism, however incorrect, becomes self-reinforcing. Because relatively few people have heard of Peirce, at least relative to the names above, and because he has therefore had a negligible influence in popular culture, some assume that he merits nothing more than minor fame. But there are excellent reasons why it is worth getting to know more about him. The leading Peirce scholar ever, Max Fisch, described Peirce’s intellectual significance in this fecund paragraph from 1981:

Who is the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced? The answer ‘Charles S Peirce’ is uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating. Mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short-story writer; phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician [and] metaphysician … He was, for a few examples, … the first metrologist to use a wave-length of light as a unit of measure, the inventor of the quincuncial projection of the sphere, the first known conceiver of the design and theory of an electric switching-circuit computer, and the founder of ‘the economy of research’. He is the only system-building philosopher in the Americas who has been both competent and productive in logic, in mathematics, and in a wide range of sciences. If he has had any equals in that respect in the entire history of philosophy, they do not number more than two.

[...] The importance and range of Peirce’s contributions to science, mathematics and philosophy can be appreciated partially by recognising that many of the most important advances in philosophy and science over the past 150 years originated with Peirce: the development of mathematical logic (before and arguably better eventually than Gottlob Frege); the development of semiotics (before and arguably better than Ferdinand de Saussure); the philosophical school of pragmatism (before and arguably better than William James); the modern development of phenomenology (independently of and arguably superior to Edmund Husserl); and the invention of universal grammar with the property of recursion (before and arguably better than Noam Chomsky; though, for Peirce, universal grammar – a term he first used in 1865 – was the set of constraints on signs, with syntax playing a lesser role).

Beyond these philosophical contributions, Peirce also made fundamental discoveries in science and mathematics. A few of these are: the shape of the Milky Way galaxy; the first precise measurement of the Earth’s gravity and circumference; one of the most accurate and versatile projections of the 3D globe of the Earth onto 2D space; the chemistry of relations and working out the consequences of the discovery of the electron for the periodic table; the axiomisation of the law of the excluded middle, or Peirce’s Law: ((P→Q)→P)→P); existential graphs and the transformation of mathematics into an (quasi-)empirical component of studies on cognition; one of the first studies of the stellar spectra, particularly the spectral properties of argon; the invention of the then most accurate gravimetric pendulum; the first standardisation of the length of the metre by anchoring it to the length of a wavelength of light (which he figured out via his own experiments in multiple stations around Europe and North America). This is by no means an exhaustive list.

In spite of his varied accomplishments, however, Peirce considered himself to be mainly a logician and a semiotician. He often said that his achievements were due to his peculiar way of thinking as well as his method of thinking.

[...] To highlight other aspects of Peirce’s thought, which extends far beyond what we have already discussed, Peirce was considered by many to be the leading mathematician of his day, inheriting that title from his father, Benjamin Peirce. Charles argued that mathematics epistemologically precedes all other fields of study, including logic, and that only studies imbued with a strong mathematical foundation were worthy of the label ‘science’. Because of his view of mathematics as the foundation of other disciplines, Peirce considered the Principia Mathematica (1910-13) by Bertrand Russell and A N Whitehead – who used Peirce’s logical notation, rather than Frege’s – to be seriously misguided, because the latter attempted to derive mathematics from logic when it should have been, according to Peirce, the other way around. The failure of the Russell-Whitehead programme would not have surprised Peirce.

Another vital contribution of Peirce’s is his fallibilism, the idea that we cannot guarantee truth for any beliefs (though there is some dispute as to whether to extend this idea to mathematics and logic). Fallibilism is important because it means that no matter how much evidence we have collected, induction doesn’t guarantee that the next bit of data won’t show us to be mistaken. However, Peirce did not take this to mean that truth is never possible. For Peirce, enquiry is a community activity, and it is unbounded by time, in principle. Thus, truth is whatever the community of enquirers would agree to be the case by the end of enquiry – ie, by the end of time. This is not the same as denying the existence of Truth, but Peirce’s views require a certain humility and acceptance of the idea that all knowledge is subject to revision.

Peirce also gave a great deal of thought to the role of chance in life and science, based in part on his reflections on Darwinism...

[...] A further foundational contribution from Peirce was his doctrine of synechism, the idea that everything in the Universe is connected, that nothing can be understood in isolation, not even people. This is expressed well in statements such as the following from his paper ‘Immortality in the Light of Synechism’ (1893):

Nor must any synechist say: ‘I am altogether myself, and not at all you.’ If you embrace synechism, you must abjure this metaphysics of wickedness. In the first place, your neighbours are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in psychology, you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity.

There is much more to say about Charley. We could look at all the modern philosophers, mathematicians, geologists, chemists and others who trace some of their most important working ideas, often the foundational assumptions of their fields, back to Peirce. We could look at his example of fortitude and hard work in the face of adversity, poverty and rejection, and how alone, with almost no positive reinforcement at all, he singlehandedly created a body of work that is without precedent in the history of the Earth... (MORE - details)

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