## 1. Brief Biography




Charles Sanders Peirce was born on September 10, 1839 in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and he died on April 19, 1914 in Milford,
Pennsylvania. His writings extend from about 1857 until near his
death, a period of approximately 57 years. His published works run to
about 12,000 printed pages and his known unpublished manuscripts run
to about 80,000 handwritten pages. The topics on which he wrote have
an immense range, from mathematics and the physical sciences at one
extreme, to economics, psychology, and other social sciences at the other
extreme.




Peirce's father Benjamin Peirce was Professor of Mathematics at
Harvard University and was one of the founders of, and for a while 
a director of, the U. S. Coast and
Geodetic Survey as well as one of the founders of the Smithsonian
Institution. The department of mathematics at Harvard was essentially
built by Benjamin. From his father, Charles Sanders Peirce received
most of the substance of his early education as well as a good deal of
intellectual encouragement and stimulation. Benjamin's didactic
technique mostly took the form of setting interesting problems for his
son and checking Charles's solutions to them. In this challenging
instructional atmosphere Charles acquired his lifelong habit of
thinking through philosophical and scientific problems entirely on his
own. To this habit, perhaps, is to be attributed Charles Peirce's
considerable originality.




Peirce graduated from Harvard in 1859 and received the bachelor of
science degree in chemistry in 1863, graduating *summa cum
laude*. Except for his remarkable marks in chemistry Peirce was a
poor student, typically in the bottom third of his class. Obviously,
the standard curriculum bored him, so that he mostly avoided doing
seriously its required work. For thirty-two years, from 1859 until the
last day of 1891, he was employed by the U. S. Coast and Geodetic
Survey, mainly surveying and carrying out geodetic
investigations. Some of this work Peirce undertook simply to finance
his diurnal existence (and that of his first wife Melusina (Zina)
Fay), while he devoted the main force of his thinking to abstract
logic. Nevertheless, the geodetic tasks involved making careful
measurements of the intensity of the earth's gravitational field by
means of using swinging pendulums. The pendulums that Peirce used were
often of his own design. For over thirty years, then, Peirce was
involved in practical and theoretical problems associated with making
very accurate scientific measurements. This practical involvement in
physical science was crucial in his ultimately coming to reject
scientific determinism, as we shall see.


 From 1879 until 1884, Peirce maintained a second job teaching
logic in the Department of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins
University. During that period the Department of Mathematics was
headed by the famous mathematician J. J. Sylvester, whom Peirce had
met earlier through his father Benjamin. This teaching period also was
characterized by Peirce's having several students who made names for
themselves in their own right. Among these were Oscar Howard Mitchell,
Allan Marquand, Benjamin Ives Gilman, Joseph Jastrow, Fabian Franklin,
Christine Ladd (later, after having married Fabian Franklin, Christine
Ladd-Franklin), Thorstein Veblen, and John Dewey. Brief commentary
will be offered at the end of this essay on three of these figures:
John Dewey, Oscar Howard Mitchell, and Christine Ladd. It is
sometimes said that William James was also one of Peirce's students,
but this claim is erroneous: it conflates the fact of James's being an
old and a close friend of Peirce, as well as being a fellow-member
with Peirce in the so-called "Metaphysical Club" in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the non-fact of James's being a student
of Peirce at Johns Hopkins University along with John Dewey and
others.




Peirce's teaching job at Johns Hopkins was suddenly terminated for
reasons that are apparently connected with the fact that Peirce's
second wife (Juliette Annette Froissy, a.k.a. Juliette Annette
Pourtalai) was Romani, moreover a Roma with whom Peirce had more or
less openly cohabited before marriage and before his divorce from his
first wife Zina. (In fact Peirce obtained his divorce from Zina only
two days before marrying Juliette.) The Johns Hopkins position was
Peirce's only academic employment, and after losing it Peirce worked
thereafter only for the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey (and
constructing entries for the *Century Dictionary*) and writing
book reviews for the *Nation*. The government employment came
to an end the last day of 1891, ultimately because of funding
objections to pure research (and perhaps also to Peirce's extravagant
spending and to his procrastination in finishing his required reports)
that were generated in an ever-practical-minded Congress. Thereafter,
Peirce often lived on the edge of penury, eking out a living doing
intellectual odd-jobs (such as translating or writing occasional
pieces) and carrying out consulting work (mainly in chemical
engineering and analysis). For the remainder of his life, except for
money inherited from his mother and aunt, Peirce was often in dire
financial straits; sometimes he managed to survive only because of the
overt or covert charity of relatives or friends, for example that of
his old friend William James.




In his youth Peirce was amazingly precocious, and he began to study
logic seriously at an extraordinarily early age. According to noted
Peirce scholar Max Fisch in his"Introduction" to Volume 1
of *The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological
Edition*, p. xviii, Peirce's introduction to and first immersion
in the study of logic came in 1851 within a week or two of his turning
12 years of age. Remembering the occasion in 1910, in his "Note
on the Doctrine of Chances," in *Collected Papers of Charles
S. Peirce*, Volume II, Section 408 (hereinafter such *Collected
Papers* references will be cited as *CP*, 2.408), Peirce
himself remembered the crucial event as having occurred in 1852, when
he was 13 years old. Regardless of his exact age, at the time of the
event Charles encountered and then over a period of at most a few days
studied and absorbed a standard textbook of the time on logic by
Bishop Richard Whately. Having become fascinated by logic, he began to
think of all issues as problems in logic. During his freshman year at
college (Harvard), in 1855, when he was 16 years old, he and a friend
began private study of philosophy in general, starting with Schiller's
*Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man* and continuing with
Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason*. Schiller's distinction among
the three basic human drives of *Stofftrieb*,
*Formtrieb*, and *Spieltrieb* Peirce never forgot or
renounced, and it became the basis for Peirce's distinction between
the man of practical affairs, the man of scientific activity, and the
man of aesthetic practice. By Kant Peirce was initially more or less
repelled. After three years of intense study of Kant, Peirce concluded
that Kant's system was vitiated by what he called its "puerile
logic," and about the age of 19 he formed the fixed intention of
devoting his life to the study of and to research in logic. It was,
however, impossible at that time, as indeed Peirce's father Benjamin
informed him, to earn a living as a research logician; and Peirce
described himself at the time of his graduation from Harvard in 1859,
just short of his 20th birthday, as wondering "what I would do
in life." Within two years, however, he had more or less
resolved his problem. During those two years he had worked as an Aid
on the Coast Survey, in Maine and Louisiana, then had returned to
Cambridge and had studied natural history and natural philosophy at
Harvard. He said of himself that in 1861 he "No longer wondered
what I would do in life but defined my object." It is evident
that his adoption of the profession of chemistry and his practice of
geodesy allowed Charles both to support himself (and before long also
his first wife Zina) and to continue to engage in researches on
logic. From the early 1860s until his death in 1914 his output in
logic was voluminous and varied. One of his logical systems became
the basis for Ernst Schroeder's great three-volume treatise on logic,
the *Vorlesungen ueber die Algebra der Logik*.




Peirce, then, had early and deep disagreements with Kant's position
about logic, and he never altered his view that Kant's view of logic
was superficial: "... he [i.e. Kant] never touches this
last doctrine [i.e. logic] without betraying marks of hasty,
superficial study" (*Collected Papers of Charles Sanders
Peirce*, Volume 2, Section 3; hereafter such *Collected
Papers* references will be cited as as *CP*, 2.3). Even
worse, Peirce held, was the *Logik* of Hegel: Kant's fault
"... is a hundredfold more true of Hegel's *Logik*
... . That work cannot justly be regarded as anything more
than a sketch" (*CP*, 2.32).




Nevertheless, Peirce continued to respect and read the first
*Critique* throughout his life. For a fuller discussion
of Peirce's own views about how his work related to that of
Kant, Hegel, and Schelling, see the supplementary document:



> 
> Peirce's View of the Relationship Between His Own Work and German Idealism
> 


## 2. Difficulty of Access to Peirce's Writings




Peirce's extensive publications are scattered among various
publication media, and have been difficult to collect. Shortly after
his death in 1914, his widow Juliette sold his unpublished manuscripts
to the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. Initially they
were under the care of Josiah Royce, but after Royce's death in 1916,
and especially after the end of the First World War, the papers were
poorly cared for. Many of them were misplaced, lost, given away,
scrambled, and the like. Carolyn Eisele, one of several genuine heroes
in the great effort to locate and assemble Peirce's writings,
discovered a lost trunk full of Peirce's papers and manuscripts only
in the mid-1950s; the trunk had been secreted, apparently for decades,
in an unlit, obscure part of the basement in Harvard's Widener
Library.




In the 1930s volumes of *The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders
Peirce* began to appear, with Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and
Arthur Burks as their editors. For almost three decades these volumes,
and various collections of entries culled from them were the only
generally available source for Peirce's thoughts. Unfortunately, many
of the entries in the *Collected Papers* are not integral
pieces of Peirce's own design, but rather stretches of writing that
were cobbled together by the editors at their own discretion
(sometimes one might almost say "whim") from different Peircean
sources. Often a single entry will consist of patches of writing from
very different periods of Peirce's intellectual life, and these
patches might even be in tension or outright contradiction with each
other. Such entries in the *Collected Papers* make very
difficult reading if one tries to regard them as consistent, sustained
passages of argument. They also tend to give the reader a false
picture of Peirce as unsystematic, desultory, and unable to complete a
train of thought. In general, even though Peirce is often obscure and 
even at his best is seldom
easy to read, the *Collected Papers* make Peirce's thinking look 
much more obscure than it really is.




The only sensible and intelligent way to publish the works of someone
like Peirce, who wrote voluminously and over such a long period of
time (57 years), is to arrange the publication chronologically and to
employ extremely careful editing. In such a fashion, the entire set of
Peircean works can be presented, as Peirce conceived them and in their
natural temporal setting and order. Finally, beginning in 1976 with
the organizational conception of Max H. Fisch and the help of Edward
Moore, the Peirce Edition Project (PEP) was created at Indiana
University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (UIPUI). Then, under the
PEP, in the 1980s, there began to appear a meticulously edited
chronological edition of carefully selected works of Peirce: this is
the *Writings of Charles S. Peirce: a Chronological Edition*,
edited by The Peirce Edition Project of the Indiana University-Purdue
University at Indianapolis. Although the *Chronological
Edition* has been fettered from time to time by lack of proper
funding, the *Chronological Edition* has succeeded in covering
extremely well in its first seven published volumes the major writings
from 1857 to 1892. (At the present time, October 2014, Volume 7 is
still awaiting publication, even though Volume 8, covering writings
from 1890 to 1892 already has been published. Volume 7 is to be an
edition of Peirce's definitions for the *Century
Dictionary*. It is to be edited by the Peirce Edition Project in
conjunction with the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM)), under
the supervision of Professor Francois Latraverse.) The impressive
achievement of the PEP is finally making it possible to assess the
real Peirce, instead of the chopped-up and then re-pasted-together
picture of Peirce previously available. In particular the
*Chronological Edition* has made it possible to see the
development of Peirce's thinking from its earliest stages to its later
developments. Questions long vexed in Peirce scholarship are finally
beginning to be debated usefully by Peirce scholars: whether there is
genuine systematic unity in Peirce's thought, whether his ideas
changed or remained the same over time, in what particulars his
thought did change and why, when exactly certain notions were first
conceived by Peirce, whether there were definite "periods"
in Peirce's intellectual development, and what exactly Peirce meant by
some of his more obscure notions such as his universal categories (on
which see below). Continued funding for the Peirce Edition Project is
obviously a crucial priority in the ongoing effort to bring to public
light the thoughts of this extremely important American
philosopher.




In addition to the *Chronological Edition* of the Peirce
Edition Project, other venues for editing and publishing Peirce's work
are regularly found, and there are several excellent editions of
particular lectures, lecture-series, chains of correspondence, and the
like. Just four such editions will be mentioned here. First, there is
the edition of Peirce's Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898, edited
by Kenneth Laine Ketner and with an introduction on the consequences
of mathematics by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Hilary Putnam and comments
on the lectures by Hilary Putnam, entitled *Reasoning and the Logic
of Things*. Second, there is the edition of Peirce's Harvard
Lectures on Pragmatism of 1903, edited by Patricia Ann Turrisi,
entitled *Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right
Thinking*. Third, there is the four-volume edition of Peirce's
mathematical writings edited by Carolyn Eisele, entitled *The New
Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce*. Fourth, there is
the two-part edition of Peirce's writings on the history and logic of
science edited by Carolyn Eisele, entitled *Historical Perspectives
on Peirce's Logic of Science: A History of Science*.


## 3. Deduction, Induction, and Abduction




Prior to about 1865, thinkers on logic commonly had divided arguments
into two subclasses: the class of deductive arguments (a.k.a.
necessary inferences) and the class of inductive arguments (a.k.a.
probable inferences). About this time, Peirce began to hold that there
were two utterly distinct classes of probable inferences, which he
referred to as inductive inferences and abductive inferences (which he
also called hypotheses and retroductive inferences). Peirce reached
this conclusion by entertaining what would happen if one were to
interchange propositions in the syllogism AAA-1 (Barbara): All
*M*s are *P*s; all *S*s are *M*s;
therefore, all *S*s are *P*s. This valid syllogism
Peirce accepted as representative of deduction. But he also seemed
typically to regard it in connection with a problem of drawing
conclusions on the basis of taking samples. For let us regard being
an *M* as being a member of a population of some sort, say
being a ball of the population of balls in some particular urn. Let us
regard *P* as being some property a member of this population
can have, say being red. And, finally, let us regard being
an *S* as being a member of a random sample taken from this
population. Then our syllogism in Barbara becomes: All balls in this
urn are red; all balls in this particular random sample are taken from
this urn; therefore, all balls in this particular random sample are
red. Peirce regarded the major premise here as being the Rule, the
minor premise as being the particular Case, and the conclusion as
being the Result of the argument. The argument is a piece of
deduction. In this example the argument is also an argument from
population to random sample that is also a necessary inference.




But now let us see what happens if we form a new argument by
interchanging the conclusion (the Result) with the major premise (the
Rule). The resultant argument becomes: All *S*s are *P*s
(Result); all *S*s are *M*s (Case); therefore, all
*M*s are *P*s (Rule). This is the invalid syllogism
AAA-3. But let us now construe it as pertaining to drawing conclusions
on the basis of taking samples. The argument then becomes: All balls
in this particular random sample are red; all balls in this particular
random sample are taken from this urn; therefore, all balls in this
urn are red. What we have here is an argument from sample to
population. This sort of argument is what Peirce understood to be the
core meaning of induction. That is to say, for Peirce, induction in
the most basic sense is argument from random sample to population. It 
should be clear that inductive inference is not necessary inference: it 
might well turn out that the claims stated in the premises are true 
even though the claim made in the conclusion is false.




Let us now go further and see what happens if, from the deduction
AAA-1, we form a new argument by interchanging the conclusion (the
Result) with the minor premise (the Case). The resultant argument
becomes: All *M*s are *P*s (Rule); all *S*s are
*P*s (Result); therefore, all *S*s are *M*s
(Case). This is the invalid syllogism AAA-2. But let us now regard it
as pertaining to drawing conclusions on the basis of taking
samples. The argument then becomes: All balls in this urn are red; all
balls in this particular random sample are red; therefore, all balls
in this particular random sample are taken from this urn. What we have
here is nothing at all like an argument from population to sample or
an argument from sample to population: rather, it is a form of probable
argument entirely different from both deduction and induction. It has
the air of conjecture or "educated 
guess" about it. This new type of
argument Peirce called hypothesis (also, retroduction, and also, 
abduction). It should be clear that abduction is never necessary 
inference




There is no need to consider the variant of AAA-1 that is obtained by
interchanging the Rule and the Case in AAA-1. The resultant argument
is of the form AAA-4, which is exactly the same argument as AAA-1 with
interchanged premises. So it is simply deduction over again.




Peirce's thinking about deduction, induction, and abduction can be seen 
also from examples he gives of arguments that are similar to the syllogisms 
he discusses, but retain the universal affirmative judgment only for the 
Case, using a definite percentage between 0% and 100% for both the Rule 
and the Result.




Corresponding to AAA-1 (deduction) we have the following
argument: *X*% of *M*s are *P*s (Rule);
all *S*s are *M*s (Case); therefore, *X*%
of *S*s are *P*s (Result). Construing this argument, as
we did before, as applying to drawing balls from urns, the argument
becomes: *X*% of the balls in this urn are red; all the balls
in this random sample are taken from this urn; therefore, *X*%
of the balls in this random sample are red. Peirce still regards this
argument as being a deduction, even though it is not--as the
argument AAA-1 is--a necesary inference. He calls such an
argument a "statistical deduction" or a
"probabilistic deduction proper."





Corresponding to AAA-3 (induction) we have the following
argument: *X*% of *S*s are *P*s (Result);
all *S*s are *M*s (Case); therefore, *X*%
of *M*s are *P*s (Rule). Construing this argument as
applying to drawing balls from urns, the argument becomes: *X*%
of the balls in this random sample are red; all the balls in this
random sample are taken from this urn; therefore, *X*% of the
balls in this urn are red. Here we still have an argument whose
essence is the logical transition from a random sample to the
population from which the sample is taken. The inference is made by
virtue of what Hans Reichenbach called "the straight
rule": the proportion of a trait found in the sample is
attributed also to the population.




Corresponding to AAA-2 (abduction) we have the following
argument: *X*% of *M*s are *P*s
(Rule); *X*% of *S*s are *P*s (Result);
therefore, all *S*s are *M*s (Case). Construing this
argument as applying to drawing balls from urns, the argument becomes:
*X*% of the balls in this urn are red; *X*% of the balls
in this random sample are red; therefore, all the balls in this random
sample are taken from this urn. Again here we have the character of an
educated guess or inference to a plausible explanation.




Over many years Peirce modified his views on the three types of
arguments, sometimes changing his views but mostly extending them by
expanding his commentary upon the original trichotomy. Occasionally
he swerved between one view and another concerning which larger class
of arguments a particular instance or sub-type of argument belonged
to. For example, he seemed to have some hesitation about whether
arguments from analogy should be construed as inductions (arguments
from a sample of the properties of things to a population of the
properties of things) or abductions (conjectures made on the basis of
sufficient similarity, which notion might not easily be analyzed in
terms of sets of properties).




The most important extension Peirce made of his earliest views on
what deduction, induction, and abduction involved was to integrate the
three argument forms into his view of the systematic procedure for
seeking truth that he called the "scientific method." As
so integrated, deduction, induction, and abduction are not simply
argument forms any more: they are three phases of the methodology of
science, as Peirce conceived this methodology. In fact, in Peirce's
most mature philosophy he virtually (perhaps totally and literally)
equates the trichotomy with the three phases he discerns in the
scientific method. Scientific method begins with abduction or
hypothesis: because of some perhaps surprising or puzzling phenomenon,
a conjecture or hypothesis is made about what actually is going
on. This hypothesis should be such as to explain the surprising
phenomenon, such as to render the phenomenon more or less a matter of
course if the hypothesis should be true. Scientific method then
proceeds to the stage of deduction: by means of necessary inferences,
conclusions are drawn from the provisionally-adopted hypothesis about
the obtaining of phenomena other than the surprising one that
originally gave rise to the hypothesis. Conclusions are reached, that
is to say, about other phenomena that must obtain if the hypothesis
should actually be true. These other phenomena must be such that
experimental tests can be performed whose results tell us whether the
further phenomena do obtain or do not obtain. Finally, scientific
method proceeds to the stage of induction: experiments are actually
carried out in order to test the provisionally-adopted hypothesis by
ascertaining whether the deduced results do or do not obtain. At this
point scientific method enters one or the other of two "feedback
loops." If the deduced consequences do obtain, then we loop back
to the deduction stage, deducing still further consequences of our
hypothesis and experimentally testing for them again. But, if the
deduced consequences do not obtain, then we loop back to the abduction
stage and come up with some new hypothesis that explains both our
original surprising phenomenon and any new phenomena we have uncovered
in the course of testing our first, and now failed, hypothesis. Then
we pass on to the deduction stage, as before. The entire procedure of
hypothesis-testing, and not merely that part of it that consists of
arguing from sample to population, is called induction in Peirce's
later philosophy.




An important part of Peirce's full conception of scientific method is
what he called the "economics (or: economy) of research."
The idea is that, because research is difficult, research labor-time
is valuable and should not be wasted. Both in the creation of
hypotheses to be tested and in the experiments chosen to test these
hypotheses, we should act so as to get the very most cognitive bang
for the buck, so to say. The object is to proceed at every stage so as
to maximize the reduction in indeterminacy of our beliefs. Peirce had
an elaborate, mathematical theory of some aspects of the economy of
research, and he published several complex papers on this topic. The
following section of the present article contains further information
on Peirce's notion of the economy of research.


## 4. Pragmatism, Pragmaticism, and the Scientific Method




Probably Peirce's best-known works are the first two articles in a
series of six that originally were collectively entitled
*Illustrations of the Logic of Science* and published in
*Popular Science Monthly* from November 1877 through August
1878. The first is entitled "The Fixation of Belief" and
the second is entitled "How to Make Our Ideas Clear." In
the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with
not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method
over other methods of overcoming doubt and "fixing
belief." In the second of these papers Peirce defended a
"pragmatic" notion of clear concepts.




Perhaps the single most important fact to keep in mind in trying to
understand Peirce's philosophy concerning clarity and the proper
method of fixing belief is that all his life Peirce was a practicing
physical scientist: already mentioned is the fact that he worked as a
physical scientist for 32 years in his job with the United States
Coast and Geodetic Survey. As Peirce understood the topics of
philosophy and logic, philosophy and logic were themselves also
sciences, although not physical sciences. Moreover, he understood
philosophy to be the philosophy of science, and he understood logic to
be the logic of science (where the word "science" has a
sense that is best captured by the German
word *Wissenschaft*).




It is in this light that his specifications of the nature of
pragmatism are to be understood. It is also in this light that his
later calling of his views "pragmaticism," in order to
distinguish his own scientific philosophy from other conceptions and
theories that were trafficked under the title
"pragmatism," is to be understood. When he said that the
whole meaning of a (clear) conception consists in the entire set of
its practical consequences, he had in mind that a meaningful
conception must have some sort of experiential "cash
value," must somehow be capable of being related to some sort of
collection of possible empirical observations under specifiable
conditions. Peirce insisted that the entire meaning of a meaningful
conception consisted in the totality of such specifications of
possible observations. For example, Peirce tended to spell out the
meaning of dispositional properties such as "hard" or
"heavy" by using the same sort of counterfactual
constructions as, say, Karl Hempel would use. Peirce was not a simple
operationalist in his philosophy of science; nor was he a simple
verificationist in his epistemology: he believed in the reality of
abstractions, and in many ways his thinking about universals resembles
that of the medieval realists in metaphysics. Nevertheless, despite
his metaphysical leanings, Peirce's views bear a strong family
resemblance to operationalism and verificationism. In regard to
physical concepts in particular, his views are quite close to those
of, say, Einstein, who held that the whole meaning of a physical
concept is determined by an exact method of measuring it.




The previous point must be tempered with the fact that Peirce
increasingly became a philosopher with broad and deep sympathies for
both transcendental idealism and absolute idealism. His Kantian
affinities are simpler and easier to understand than his Hegelian
leanings. Having rejected a great deal in Kant, Peirce nevertheless
shared with Charles Renouvier the view that Kant's (quasi-)concept of
the *Ding an sich* can play no role whatsoever in philosophy or
in science other than the role that Kant ultimately assigned to it,
viz. the role of a *Grenzbegriff*: a boundary-concept, or,
perhaps a bit more accurately, a limiting concept. A supposed
"reality" that is "outside" of every logical
possibility of empirical or logical interaction with "it"
can play no direct role in the sciences. Science can deal only with
phenomena, that is to say, only with what can "appear"
somehow in experience. All scientific concepts must somehow be
traceable back to phenomenological roots. Thus, even when Peirce calls
himself a "realist" or is called by others a
"realist," it must be kept in mind that Peirce was always
a realist of the Kantian "empirical" sort and not a
Kantian "transcendental realist." His realism is similar
to what Hilary Putnam has called "internal realism." (As
was said, Peirce was also a realist in quite another sense of he word:
he was a realist or an anti-nominalist in the medieval sense.)




Peirce's Hegelianism, to which he increasingly admitted as he
approached his most mature philosophy, is more difficult to understand
than his Kantianism, partly because it is everywhere intimately tied
to his entire late theory of signs (semeiotic) and sign use
(semeiosis), as well as to his evolutionism and to his rather puzzling
doctrine of mind. There are at least four major components of his
Hegelian idealism. First, for Peirce the world of appearances, which
he calls "the phaneron," is a world consisting entirely of
signs. Signs are qualities, relations, features, items, events,
states, regularities, habits, laws, and so on that have meanings,
significances, or interpretations. Second, a sign is one term in a
threesome of terms that are indissolubly connected with each other by
a crucial triadic relation that Peirce calls "the sign
relation." The sign itself (also called the representamen) is
the term in the sign relation that is ordinarily said to represent or
mean something. The other two terms in this relation are called the
object and the interpretant. The object is what would ordinarily
would be said to be the "thing" meant or signified or
represented by the sign, what the sign is a sign
*of*. The interpretant of a sign is said by Peirce to be that
*to which* the sign represents the object. What exactly Peirce
means by the interpretant is difficult to pin down. It is something
like a mind, a mental act, a mental state, or a feature or quality of
mind; at all events the interpretant is something ineliminably
mental. Third, the interpretant of a sign, by virtue of the very
definition Peirce gives of the sign-relation, must itself be a sign,
and a sign moreover of the very same object that is (or: was)
represented by the (original) sign. In effect, then, the interpretant
is a second signifier of the object, only one that now has an overtly
mental status. But, merely in being a sign of the original object,
this second sign must itself have (Peirce uses the word
"determine") an interpretant, which then in turn is a new,
third sign of the object, and again is one with an overtly mental
status. And so on. Thus, if there is any sign at all of any object,
then there is an infinite sequence of signs of that same object. So,
everything in the phaneron, because it is a sign, begins an infinite
sequence of mental interpretants of an object.




But now, there is a fourth component of Peirce's idealism: Peirce
makes everything in the phaneron evolutionary. The whole system
evolves. Three figures from the history of culture loomed exceedingly
large in the intellectual development of Peirce and in the cultural
atmosphere of the period in which Peirce was most active: Hegel in
philosophy, Lyell in geology, and Darwin (along with Alfred Russel
Wallace) in biology. These thinkers, of course, all have a single
theme in common: evolution. Hegel described an evolution of ideas,
Lyell an evolution of geological structures, and Darwin an evolution
of biological species and varieties. Peirce absorbed it all. Peirce's
entire thinking, early on and later, is permeated with the
evolutionary idea, which he extended generally, that is to say, beyond
the confines of any particular subject matter. For Peirce, the entire
universe and everything in it is an evolutionary product. Indeed, he
conceived that even the most firmly entrenched of nature's habits (for
example, even those habits that are typically called "natural
laws") have themselves evolved, and accordingly can and should
be subjects of philosophical and scientific inquiry. One can sensibly
seek, in Peirce's view, evolutionary explanations of the existence of
particular natural laws. For Peirce, then, the entire phaneron (the
world of appearances), as well as all the ongoing processes of its
interpretation through mental significations, has evolved and is
evolving.




Now, no one familiar with Hegel can escape the obvious comparison: we
have in Peirce an essentially idealist theory that is similar to the
idealism that Hegel puts forward in the *Phaenomenologie des
Geistes*. Furthermore, both Hegel and Peirce make the whole
evolutionary interpretation of the evolving phaneron to be a process
that is said to be logical, the "action" of logic
itself. Of course there are differences between the two
philosophers. For example, what exactly Hegel's logic is has been
shrouded in mystery for every Hegelian after Hegel himself (and some
philosophers, for example Popper, would say for every Hegelian
including Hegel). By contrast Peirce's logic is reasonably clear, and
he takes great pains to work it out in intricate detail; basically
Peirce's logic is the whole logical apparatus of the physical and
social sciences.




One implication of the unending nature of the interpretation of
appearances through infinite sequences of signs is that Peirce cannot
be any type of epistemological foundationalist or believer in absolute
or apodeictic knowledge. He must be, and is, an anti-foundationalist
and a fallibilist. From his earliest to his latest writings Peirce
opposed and attacked all forms of epistemological foundationalism and
in particular all forms of Cartesianism and *a
priorism*. Philosophy must begin wherever it happens to be at the
moment, he thought, and not at some supposed ideal foundation,
especially not in some world of "private references." The
only important thing in thinking scientifically to apply the
scientific method itself. This method he held to be essentially public
and reproducible in its activities, as well as self-correcting in the
following sense: No matter where different researchers may begin, as
long as they follow the scientific method, their results will
eventually converge toward the same outcome. (The pragmatic, or
pragmaticistic, conception of meaning implies that two theories with
exactly the same empirical content must have, despite superficial
appearances, the same meaning.) This ideal point of convergence is
what Peirce means by "the truth," and
"reality" is simply what is meant by "the
truth." That these Peircean notions of reality and truth are
inherently idealist rather than naively realist in character should
require no special pleading.




Connected with Peirce's anti-foundationalism is his insistence on the
fallibility of particular achievements in science. Although the
scientific method will eventually converge to something as a limit,
nevertheless at any temporal point in the process of scientific
inquiry we are only at a provisional stage of it and cannot ascertain
how far off we may be from the limit to which we are somehow
converging. This insistence on the fallibilism of human inquiry is
connected with several other important themes of Peirce's
philosophy. His evolutionism has already been discussed: fallibilism
is obviously connected with the fact that science is not shooting at a
fixed target but rather one that is always moving. What Peirce calls
his "tychism," which is his anti-deterministic insistence
that there is objective chance in the world, is also intimately
connected to his fallibilism. (Tychism will be discussed below.)
Despite Peirce's insistence on fallibilism, he is far from being an
epistemological pessimist or sceptic: indeed, he is quite the
opposite. He tends to hold that every genuine question (that is, every
question whose possible answers have empirical content) can be
answered in principle, or at least should not be assumed to be
unanswerable. For this reason, one his most important dicta, which he
called his first principle of reason, is "Do not block the way
of inquiry!"




For Peirce, as we saw, the scientific method involves three phases or
stages: abduction (making conjectures or creating hypotheses),
deduction (inferring what should be the case if the hypotheses are the
case), and induction (the testing of hypotheses). The process of going
through the stages should also be carried out with concern for the
economy of research. Peirce's understanding of scientific method,
then, is not very different from today's idea of scientific
method which, seems to have been derived historically both from
William Whewell and Peirce (see Niiniluoto 1984, 18; Ambrosio 2016;
and Wagenmakers, Dutilh, & Sarafoglou 2018, 423). Today's
understanding sees the scientific method as the method of constructing
hypotheses, deriving consequences from these hypotheses, and then
experimentally testing these hypotheses (guided always by the
economics of research). Also, as was said above, Peirce increasingly
came to understand his three types of logical inference as being
phases or stages of the scientific method. For example, as Peirce came
to extend and generalize his notion of abduction, abduction became
defined as inference to and provisional acceptance of an explanatory
hypothesis for the purpose of testing it. Abduction is not always
inference to the best explanation, but it is always inference to some
explanation or at least to something that clarifies or makes routine
some information that has previously been "surprising," in
the sense that we would not have routinely expected it, given our
then-current state of knowledge. Deduction came to mean for Peirce the
drawing of conclusions as to what observable phenomena should be
expected if the hypothesis is correct. Induction came for him to mean
the entire process of experimentation and interpretation performed in
the service of hypothesis testing.




A few further comments are perhaps in order in connection with
Peirce's idea of the economy (or: the economics) of research. Concern
for the economy of research is a crucial and ineliminable part of
Peirce's idea of the scientific method. He understood that science is
essentially a human and social enterprise and that it always operates
in some given historical, social, and economic context. In such a
context some problems are crucial and paramount and must be
attended-to immediately, while other problems are trivial or frivolous
or at least can be put off until later. He understood that in the real
context of science some experiments may be vitally important while
others may be insignificant. Peirce also understood that the economic
resources of the scientist (time, money, ability to exert effort,
etc.) are always scarce, even though all the while the "great
ocean of truth," which lies undiscovered before us, is
infinite. All resources for carrying out research, such as personnel,
person-hours, and apparatus, are quite costly; accordingly, it is
wasteful, indeed irrational, to squander them. Peirce proposed,
therefore, that careful consideration be paid to the problem of how to
obtain the biggest epistemological "bang for the buck." In
effect, the economics of research is a cost/benefit analysis in
connection with states of knowledge. Although this idea has been
insufficiently explored by Peirce scholars, Peirce himself regarded it
as central to the scientific method and to the idea of rational
behavior. It is connected with what he called "speculative
rhetoric" or "methodeutic" (which will be discussed
below).


## 5. Anti-determinism, Tychism, and Evolutionism




Against powerful currents of determinism that derived from the
Enlightenment philosophy of the eighteenth century, Peirce urged that
there was not the slightest scientific evidence for determinism and
that in fact there was considerable scientific evidence against
it. Always by the words "science" and
"scientific" Peirce understood reference to actual
practice by scientists in the laboratory and the field, and not
reference to entries in scientific textbooks. In attacking
determinism, therefore, Peirce appealed to the evidence of the actual
phenomena in laboratories and fields. Here, what is obtained as the
actual observations (e.g. measurements) does not fit neatly into some
one point or simple function. If we take, for example, a thousand
measurements of some physical quantity, even a simple one such as
length or thickness, no matter how carefully we may do so, we will not
obtain the same result a thousand times. Rather, what we get is a
distribution (often, but not always and certainly not necessarily,
something akin to a normal or Gaussian distribution) of hundreds of
different results. Again, if we measure the value of some variable
that we assume to depend on some given parameter, and if we let the
parameter vary while we take successive measurements, the result in
general will not be a smooth function (for example, a straight line or
an ellipse); rather, it will typically be a "jagged"
result, to which we can at best *fit* a smooth function by
using some clever method (for example, fitting a regression line by
the method of least-squares). Naively, we might imagine that the
variation and relative inexactness of our measurements will become
less pronounced and obtrusive the more refined and microscopic are our
measurement tools and procedures. Peirce, the practicing scientist,
knew better. What actually happens, if anything, is that our
variations get relatively greater the finer is our instrumentation and
the more delicate our procedures. (Obviously, Peirce would not have
been the least surprised by the results obtained from measurements at
the quantum level.)




What the directly measured facts of scientific practice seem to tell
us, then, is that, although the universe displays varying degrees of
*habit* (that is to say, of partial, varying, approximate, and
statistical regularity), the universe does not display deterministic
*law*. It does not directly show anything like total, exact,
non-statistical regularity. Moreover, the habits that nature does
display always appear in varying degrees of entrenchment or
"congealing." At one end of the spectrum, we have the nearly law-like
behavior of larger physical objects like boulders and planets; but at
the other end of the spectrum, we see in human processes of
imagination and thought an almost pure freedom and spontaneity; and in
the quantum world of the very small we see the results of almost pure
chance.




The immediate, "raw" result, then, of scientific
observation through measurement is that not everything is exactly
fixed by exact law (even if everything should be constrained to some
degree by habit). In his earliest thinking about the significance of
this fact, Peirce opined that natural law pervaded the world but that
certain facets of reality were just outside the reach or grasp of
law. In his later thinking, however, Peirce came to understand this
fact as meaning that reality in its entirety was lawless and that pure
spontaneity had an objective status in the phaneron. Peirce called his
doctrine that chance has an objective status in the universe
"tychism," a word taken from the Greek word for
"chance" or "luck" or "what the gods
happen to choose to lay on one." Tychism is a fundamental
doctrinal part of Peirce's mature view, and reference to his tychism
provides an added reason for Peirce's insisting on the irreducible
fallibilism of inquiry. For nature is not a static world of unswerving
law but rather a dynamic and dicey world of evolved and continually
evolving habits that directly exhibit considerable
spontaneity. (Peirce would have embraced quantum indeterminacy.)




One possible path along which nature evolves and acquires its habits
was explored by Peirce using statistical analysis in situations of 
experimental trials in which the probabilities of outcomes in later trials 
are not independent of actual outcomes in earlier trials, situations of 
so-called "non-Bernoullian trials." 
Peirce showed that, if we posit a certain primal habit
in nature, viz. the tendency however slight to take on habits however
tiny, then the result in the long run is often a high degree of
regularity and great macroscopic exactness. For this reason, Peirce
suggested that in the remote past nature was considerably more
spontaneous than it has now become, and that in general and as a whole
*all* the habits that nature has come to exhibit have evolved. Just 
as ideas, geological formations, and biological species have evolved, 
natural habit has evolved.




In this evolutionary notion of nature and natural law we have an added
support of Peirce's insistence on the inherent fallibilism of
scientific inquiry. Nature may simply change, even in its most
entrenched fundamentals. Thus, even if scientists were at one point in
time to have conceptions and hypotheses about nature that survived
every attempt to falsify them, this fact alone would not ensure that
at some later point in time these same conceptions and hypotheses
would remain accurate or even pertinent.




An especially intriguing and curious twist in Peirce's evolutionism is
that in Peirce's view evolution involves what he calls its
"agapeism." Peirce speaks of evolutionary love. According
to Peirce, the most fundamental engine of the evolutionary process is
not struggle, strife, greed, or competition. Rather it is nurturing
love, in which an entity is prepared to sacrifice its own perfection
for the sake of the wellbeing of its neighbor. This doctrine had a
social significance for Peirce, who apparently had the intention of
arguing against the morally repugnant but extremely popular
socio-economic Darwinism of the late nineteenth century. The doctrine
also had for Peirce a cosmic significance, which Peirce associated
with the doctrine of the Gospel of John and with the mystical ideas of
Swedenborg and Henry James. In Part IV of the third of Peirce's six
papers in *Popular Science Monthly*, entitled "The
Doctrine of Chances," Peirce even argued that simply being
logical presupposes the ethics of self-sacrifice: "He who would
not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is, as it seems to
me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively." To social
Darwinism, and to the related sort of thinking that constituted for
Herbert Spencer and others a supposed justification for the more
rapacious practices of unbridled capitalism, Peirce referred in
disgust as "The Gospel of Greed."


## 6. Synechism, the Continuum, Infinites, and Infinitesimals




Along with Richard Dedekind and Georg Cantor, Peirce was 
one of the first scientific thinkers to argue in favor of the existence of 
actually infinite collections, and to maintain that the paradoxes that 
Bernard Bolzano had associated with the idea of infinite collections were 
not really contradictions at all. His criterion of the difference between finite 
and infinite collections was that the so-called "syllogism 
of transposed quantity," which had been introduced 
by Augustus de Morgan, constituted a deductively valid
argument only when applied to finite sets; as applied to infinite sets
it was invalid. The syllogism of transposed quantity runs as
follows. We have a binary relation *R* defined on a set
*S*, such that the following two premises are true of the relation 
(where the quantifications are taken over the set
*S*). First, for all *x* there is a *y* such that
*Rxy*. Second, for all *x*, *y*, *z*,
*Rxz* and *Ryz* implies that *x = y*. The
conclusion (of the syllogism of transposed quantity) is that for all
*x* there exists a *y* such that *Ryx*. One of
Peirce's favorite examples helps elucidate the idea, even if it
perhaps be not perfectly politically correct: Every Texan kills some
Texan; no Texan is killed by more than one Texan; therefore every
Texan is killed by some Texan. The argument's conclusion follows
validly only if the set of Texans is finite.




If by *Rxy* in the syllogism of transposed quantity we take 
*f*(*x*) = *y*, where the function is defined on
and has values in the set *S*, then the second premise of the 
syllogism of transposed quantity says that *f* is a one-one function. 
The conclusion says that every member of *S* is the image 
under *f* of some member 
of *S*. Thus the syllogism of transposed quantity says that no one-one 
function can map the set *S* to a proper subset of itself. This 
assertion holds, of course, only if *S* is a finite set. So, as it turns 
out, Peirce's definition of the difference between finite and infinite sets is 
virtually equivalent to the standard one, which is found in Section 5 of Richard 
Dedekind's *Was Sind und Was Sollen die Zahlen?*, to the effect that an 
infinite set is one that can be placed into a one-to-one correspondence with a 
proper subset of itself. Peirce claimed on various occasions to have 
reached his definition of the difference between finite and infinite collections 
at least six years before Dedekind reached his own definition.




Peirce held that the continuity of space, time, ideation, feeling, and
perception is an irreducible deliverance of science, and that an
adequate conception of such continua is an extremely important part of
all the sciences. The doctrine of the continuity of nature he called
"synechism," a word deriving from the Greek preposition
that means "(together) with." In mid-1892, somewhat under
the influence of reading Cantor's works, Peirce defined a (linear)
continuum to be a linearly-ordered infinite set *C* such that
(1) for any two distinct members of
*C* there exists a third member of *C* that is strictly
between these; and (2) every countably infinite subset of *C*
that has an upper (lower) bound in *C* has a least upper bound
(greatest lower bound) in *C*. The first property he called
"Kanticity" and the second "Aristotelicity."
(Today we would likely call these properties "density" and
"closedness," respectively.) The second condition has the
corollary that a continuum contains all its limit points, and
sometimes Peirce used this property in conjunction with
"Kanticity" to define a continuum.




Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, Peirce began to
hold that Kanticity and Aristotelicity, even when conjoined, were
insufficient to define adequately the notion of a continuum. He
maintained that he had framed an updated conception of continua by
somewhat loosening his attachment to Cantor's ideas. He began to write
in ways that, at least at first glance, seem close to falling into
Cantor's Paradox; Peirce, however, tried to avoid outright
contradiction by means of embracing some sort of non-standard idea
about the identity of points on a line. For example, in Lecture 3 of
his *Cambridge Conferences Lectures* of 1898, published
as *Reasoning and the Logic of Things*, Peirce says that if a
line is cut into two portions, the point at which the cut takes place
actually becomes two points. What Peirce's new approach is, in
mathematical detail, and whether or not it contains hidden but real
contradictions, is a problem that has not yet been solved by
researchers into Peirce's logic and mathematics.




Connected with his new conception of the continuum is Peirce's
increasingly frequent and sometimes pugnacious defenses of the
doctrine of the reality of infinitesimal quantities. The doctrine was
not newly taken up by Peirce late in the nineteenth century; indeed,
he had held the doctrine for some time, and it had been the doctrine
of his father Benjamin. He considered it superior to the newer
doctrine of limits for providing a foundation for the differential and
integral calculus. What was new was that Peirce began to see the
doctrine of infinitesimals as the key to his updated doctrine of the
continuum. Thus, adding to his long-standing defense of infinitely
large magnitudes (Peirce often used the word
"multitudes."), Peirce began vigorously to defend
infinitely small magnitudes, infinitesimal magnitudes. Many examples
of such defenses can be found. Carolyn Eisele collected a number of
such examples in her edited work *The New Elements of Mathematics
by Charles S. Peirce*. See, for example, Volume 2, pages
169-170, where Peirce says "My personal opinion is that
there is positive evidence of the real existence of infinitesimals;
and that the admission of them would considerably simplify the
introduction to the calculus." See also Volume 3, Part 1, pages
121-124, 125-127, 128-131, and 742-750. By the
end of the nineteenth century Peirce's view about infinitesimals was
so rare and remarkable that Josiah Royce remarked, in a footnote of
his "Supplementary Essay" for *The World and the
Individual, First Series*, that outside of Italy Peirce was
virtually the only mathematical philosopher who believed in
infinitesimals. (See footnote 2, page 562 of this work by Royce.)




Not only did Peirce defend infinitesimals. He furthermore claimed that he
had proved the consistency of introducing infinitesimals into the
system of real numbers in such a way as to form a new system in which
there were infinitely many entities that were not equal to zero and
yet were all smaller than any real number *r* that is not equal
to zero, no matter how small *r* might be. To use modern
terminology, Peirce was claiming to have shown the existence of
ordered fields that were non-Archimedean. It was these non-Archimedean
fields that Peirce now wanted to call genuine continua. Additionally,
Peirce wanted to use his notion infinitesimal quantities and his
revised concept of the continuum in order to justify the traditional
pre-Gaussian definitions and underpinnings of the differential
calculus.




Peirce also made a number of remarks that suggest, in connection with
the foregoing enterprise, that he had a novel conception of the
topology of points in a continuum. All these remarks he connected with
his previous defenses of infinite sets. For these reasons some Peirce
scholars, and in particular the great Peirce scholar Carolyn Eisele,
have suggested that his ideas were an anticipation of Abraham
Robinson's non-standard analysis of 1964. Whether this actually be so
or not, however, is at the present time far from clear. Peirce
certainly says many things that are quite suggestive of the
construction of non-standard models of the theory of ordered fields by
means of using equivalence classes of countably infinite Cartesian
Products of the standard real numbers and then applying Los's
Theorem. However, no commentator up to now has provided anything even
remotely resembling a careful and detailed exposition of Peirce's
thinking in this area. Unfortunately, most of Peirce's published
writing and public talks on this topic were designed for audiences
that were extremely unsophisticated mathematically (a fact that he
lamented). For that reason most of what Peirce said on the topic is
picturesque and intriguing, but extremely obscure. The entire analysis
of Peirce's notion of an infinitesimal, as well as the exact bearing
this notion has on his concept of a real continuum and on his idea of
the topology of the points of a continuum, still awaits meticulous
mathematical discussion.


## 7. Probability, Verisimilitude, and Plausibility




Given Peirce's tychism and his view that statistical information is
often the best information we can have about phenomena, it should not
be surprising that Peirce devoted close attention to the analysis of
situations in which perfect exactness and perfect certitude were
unattainable. It is only to be expected that he would devote a great
deal of attention, for example, to probability theory. Indeed, Peirce
did so from the dates of even his earliest thinking. Not only, for
example, did he extensively employ the concept of probability, but
also he offered a pragmaticistic account of the notion of probability
itself. Yet it would be a huge mistake to think that Peirce's
philosophizing about situations of imperfection of exactness and
certitude were confined merely to the theory of probability.




Rather, from the outset of his thinking about the matters, in about
1863, his attention was directed to the broadest sorts of issues
connected with statistical inference. And, as his thinking progressed,
Peirce came ever more clearly to see that there are three distinct and
mutually incommensurable measures of imperfection of certitude. Only
one was probability. The other two he called
"verisimilitude" (or "likelihood") and
"plausibility". Each of the three measures was associated
with one of his types of argument. Probability he associated with
deduction. Verisimilitude he associated with induction. And
plausibility he associated with abduction. Let us look more closely at
each of these three distinct measures of uncertainty.




By the time Peirce wrote on probability, the concept and its calculus
were well over two hundred years old. The probability calculus itself
had become more or less standardized by Peirce's time, and indeed
Peirce's own axioms for the calculus are more or less the same that
Kolmogoroff gives for his "elementary theory of
probability." By contrast with the calculus, the philosophical
theory of the meaning of probability was hotly disputed. Two sides to
the dispute existed. There were the subjectivists, or
"conceptualists," as Peirce designated them. These
believed that probability was a measure of the strength of belief
actually accorded to a proposition or a measure of the degree of
rational belief that ought to be accorded to a proposition. Among the
defenders of this sort of view, Augustus de Morgan and Adolphe
Quetelet were major figures. And there were the objectivists, or
"materialists," as Peirce designated them. These believed
that probability was a measure of the relative frequency with which an
event of some specific sort repeatedly happened. John Venn was a
major defender of this sort of view. Pierre Simon Laplace had spoken
sometimes in a subjectivist way, sometimes in an objectivist way; but
his arguments basically depended on a subjectivist interpretation of
probability.




Peirce vigorously attacked the subjectivist view of de Morgan and
others to the effect that probability is merely a measure of our level
of confidence or strength of belief. He allowed that the logarithm of
the odds of an event might be used to assess the degree of rational
belief that should be accorded to an event, but only provided that the
odds of the event were determined by the objective relative frequency
of the event. In other words, Peirce suggested that any justifiable
use of subjectivism in connection with probability theory must
ultimately rest on quantities obtained by means of an objectivist
understanding of probability.




Rather than holding that probability is a measure of degree of
confidence or belief, then, Peirce adopted an objectivist notion of
probability that he explicitly likened to the doctrine of John
Venn. Indeed, he even held that probability is actually a notion with
clear empirical content and that there are clear empirical procedures
for ascertaining that content. First, he held, that that to which a
probability is assigned, insofar as the notion of probability is used
scientifically, is not a proposition or an event or a state; nor is it
a type of event or state. Rather, what is assigned a probability is
an *argument*, an argument having premisses (Peirce insisted on
this spelling rather than the spelling "premises.") and a
conclusion. Peirce's view in this regard is virtually
indistinguishable from the view of Kolmogoroff that all probabilities
are conditional probabilities. Second, Peirce held that, in order to
ascertain the probability of a particular argument, the observer notes
all occasions on which all of its premisses are true, case by case,
just as they come under observation. For each of these occasions the
observer notes whether the conclusion is true or not. The observer
keeps a running tally, the ongoing ratio whose numerator is the number
of occasions so far observed on which the conclusion as well as the
premisses are true and whose denominator is the number of occasions so
far observed on which the premisses are true irrespective of whether
or not the conclusion is also true. At each observation the observer
computes this ratio, which obviously encompasses all the observer's
past observations of occasions on which the premisses are true. The
probability of the argument in question is defined by Peirce to be the
limit of the crucial ratio as the number of observations tends to grow
infinitely large (if this limit exists).




Peirce's earliest account of the meaning of probability, then, is a
version of what is called the "long run relative frequency
view" of probability. Late in his philosophical career, about
1910, Peirce found fault with his earliest views on account of their
failure to make clear just how the occasions of observation are to be
chosen. He also emphasized that probability judgments are judgments
about what he called "would-be's." For this reason Peirce
is often considered to be the originator of the sort of
"propensity view" of probability that is associated with
Karl Popper. One should not, however, think that viewing Peirce as a
propensity theorist is in conflict with viewing him as some sort of
long term relative frequency theorist. Rather, Peirce's view seems to
be that the propensity in question, when its sense is spelled out in
accord with the pragmatic (or: pragmaticistic) theory of meaning, is a
dispositional property that manifests itself in the set of concrete
facts that amount to a certain long term relative frequency tending
toward a certain limit as the number of appropriate occasions of
observation increases indefinitely.




There is an interesting connection between Peirce's tychism, his view that 
there is objective spontaneity in the universe, and the foregoing account 
of probability. For Peirce understood the universe of appearances as a logical 
process, somewhat in the same manner that Hegel understood the universe of 
appearances as the phenomenology of spirit. He tended to consider a given 
state of the universe as being a given set of premisses, so to say, of a 
possible inference. Then a subsequent state of the universe could be seen as 
being the conclusion of an actual inference. Thus Peirce tended to see the 
universe of appearances as bringing itself into being by a process 
that is ultimately *logical*. The world, as it were, evolves by abducing,
deducing, and inducing itself. It is in some sense Hegel's 
"Thought thinking thought."




Along with his attack on a subjectivist account of probability, Peirce
also attacked the use of what came to be called the method of
"inverse probabilities" as a way of solving the problem of
induction. In the process, he also excoriated the theoretical work, in
this connection, of de Morgan and Adolphe Quetelet (the Belgian
criminologist and early user of statistical analysis in
sociology). Induction, as we have seen, Peirce counted as an inference
from sample to population. The method of inverse probabilities offers
itself as a way of calculating the (conditional) probability that a
population has a trait in a certain proportion given that a sample
drawn from that population has the trait in that proportion. It
proposes to calculate this conditional probability by applying the
so-called "Bayes's Theorem" in order to express it in
terms of the (inverse conditional) probability that the sample has the
trait in the crucial proportion given that the population has the
trait in the crucial proportion. In the expression of the first
conditional probability in terms of the second conditional
probability, however, there occur certain quantities, known as the
"Bayesian prior probabilities." What Peirce pointed out is
that there is no way to assign any quantities in a rational fashion to
the requisite Bayesian prior probabilities. The appearance that one
does have a reason for assigning particular quantities results only
from an illicit substitution of subjective probabilities for the
needed objectivist probabilities. What the user of the method of
inverse probabilities does is to equate complete lack of information
about something with the claim that all possibilities must have equal
probabilities. This equation was called "the principle of
insufficient reason" in the nineteenth century; John Maynard
Keynes later named it "the principle of indifference."
This principle is, however, completely irrational without a dependence
on a subjectivist account of probability. What we need, however, is
objective probabilities, and so we have no reason for assigning any
particular values to the Bayesian prior probabilities. Only "if
universes were as plenty as blackberries," wrote Peirce, would
the analysis of de Morgan and Quetelet make any sense.




In rejecting Bayesianism and the method of inverse probabilities,
Peirce argued that in fact no probability at all can be assigned to
inductive arguments. Instead of probability, a different measure of
imperfection of certitude must be assigned to inductive arguments:
verisimilitude or likelihood. In explaining this notion Peirce offered
an account of hypothesis-testing that is equivalent to standard
statistical hypothesis-testing. In effect we get an account of
confidence intervals and choices of statistical significance for
rejecting null hypotheses. Such ideas became standard only in the
twentieth century as a result of the work of R. A. Fisher, Jerzy
Neyman, and others. But already by 1878, in his paper "The
Probabilitiy of Induction," Peirce had worked out the whole
matter. (This topic has been discussed expertly by Deborah Mayo, who
also has shown that the error-correction implicit in statistical
hypothesis-testing is intimately affiliated with Peirce's notion of
science as self-correcting and convergent to "the
truth.")




Peirce's accounts of his third type of deviance from perfect
certitude, namely plausibility, are much sketchier than his accounts
of probability and verisimilitude. Unlike the other two forms of
uncertainty, which can be spelled out mathematically with great
precision, plausibility seems to be capable of only a qualitative
account, even though plausibility does seem to comes in greater and
lesser degree. The question of the plausibility of a claim arises,
apparently, only in contexts in which one is seeking to adduce an
explanatory hypothesis for some actual fact that is surprising. The
key point is that the hypothesis must be plausible in order to taken
seriously. If we were, for example, to come upon a lump of ice in the
middle of a desert, we might plausibly say that perhaps someone put it
there, or perhaps a freak storm had left a great hailstone. But we
would not plausibly say that it had been thrown off a flying saucer
that previously had swooped through. It should be obvious that the
notion of plausibility is a difficult one, which strongly invites
further analysis but which is not easy to analyze in technical
detail.


## 8. Psycho-physical Monism and Anti-nominalism




Peirce held that science suggests that the universe has evolved from a
condition of maximum freedom and spontaneity into its present
condition, in which it has taken on a number of habits, sometimes more
entrenched habits and sometimes less entrenched ones. With pure
freedom and spontaneity Peirce tended to associate mind, and with
firmly entrenched habits he tended to associate matter (or, more
generally, the physical). Matter he tended to regard as
"congealed" or "effete" mind (1891; CP, 6.25;
EP, 1.293). Thus he tended to see the universe as the
end-product-so-far of a process in which mind has acquired habits and
has "congealed" (this is the very word Peirce used) into
matter.




This notion of all things as being evolved psycho-physical unities of
some sort places Peirce well within the sphere of what might be called
"the grand old-fashioned metaphysicians," along with such
thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel,
Schopenhauer, Whitehead, *et al*. Some contemporary
philosophers might be inclined to reject Peirce out of hand upon
discovering this fact. Others might find his notion of psycho-physical
unities not so very offputting or indeed even attractive. What is
crucial is that Peirce argued that mind pervades all of nature in
varying degrees: it is not found merely in the most advanced animal
species.




This pan-psychistic view, combined with his synechism, meant for Peirce
that mind is extended in some sort of continuum throughout the
universe. Peirce tended to think of ideas as existing in mind in
somewhat the same way as physical forms exist in physically extended
things. He even spoke of ideas as "spreading" out through the same
continuum in which mind is extended. This set of conceptions is part
of what Peirce regarded as (his own version of) Scotistic realism,
which he sharply contrasted with nominalism. He tended to blame what
he regarded as the errors of much of the philosophy of his
contemporaries as owing to its nominalistic disregard for the
objective existence of form.


## 9. Triadism and the Universal Categories




Merely to say that Peirce was extremely fond of placing things into
groups of three, of trichotomies, and of triadic relations, would fail
miserably to do justice to the overwhelming obtrusiveness in his
philosophy of the number three. Indeed, he made the most fundamental
categories of all "things" of any sort whatsoever the
categories of "Firstness," "Secondness," and
"Thirdness," and he often described "things"
as being "firsts" or "seconds" or
"thirds." For example, with regard to the trichotomy
"possibility," "actuality," and
"necessity," possibility he called a first, actuality he
called a second, and necessity he called a third. Again: quality was a
first, fact was a second, and habit (or rule or law) was a
third. Again: entity was a first, relation was a second, and
representation was a third. Again: rheme (by which Peirce meant a
relation of arbitrary adicity or arity) was a first, proposition was a
second, and argument was a third. The list goes on and on. Let us
refer to Peirce's penchant for describing things in terms of
trichotomies and triadic relations as Peirce's
"triadism."




If Peirce had a general technical rationale for his triadism, Peirce
scholars have not yet made it abundantly clear what this rationale
might be. He seemed to base his triadism on what he called
"phaneroscopy," by which word he meant the mere
observation of phenomenal appearances. He regularly commented that the
phenomena in the phaneron just *do* fall into three groups and
that they just *do* display irreducibly triadic relations. He
seemed to regard this matter as simply open for verification by direct
inspection.




Although there are many examples of phenomena that do seem more or
less naturally to divide into three groups, Peirce seems to have been
driven by something more than mere examples in his insistence on
applying his categories to almost everything imaginable. Perhaps it
was the influence of Kant, whose twelve categories divide into four
groups of three each. Perhaps it was the triadic structure of the
stages of thought as described by Hegel. Perhaps it was even the
triune commitments of orthodox Christianity (to which Peirce, at least
in some contexts and during some swings of mood, seemed to
subscribe). Certainly involved was Peirce's commitment to the
ineliminability of mind in nature, for Peirce closely associated the
activities of mind with the aforementioned triadic relation that he called
the "sign" relation. (More on this topic appears below.)
Also involved was Peirce's so-called "reduction thesis" in
logic (on which more will given below), to which Peirce had concluded
as early as 1870.




It is difficult to imagine even the most fervently devout of the
passionate admirers of Peirce, of which there are many, saying that
his account (or, more accurately, his various accounts) of the three
universal categories is (or are) absolutely clear and compelling. Yet,
in almost everything Peirce wrote from the time the categories were
first introduced, Peirce's firsts, seconds, and thirds found a
place. Giving their exact and general analysis and providing an exact
and general account of their rationale, if there be such, constitute
chief problems in Peirce scholarship.


## 10. Mind and Semeiotic




Connected with Peirce's insistence on the ubiquity of mind in the
cosmos is the importance he attached to what he called
"semeiotic," the theory of signs in the most general
sense. Although a few points concerning this subject were made earlier
in this article, some further discussion is in order. What Peircean
meant by "semeiotic" is almost totally different from what
has come to be called "semiotics," and which hails not so
much from Peirce as from Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles
W. Morris. Even though Peircean semeiotic and semiotics are often
confused, it is important not to do so. Peircean semeiotic derives
ultimately from the theory of signs of Duns Scotus and its later
development by John of St. Thomas (John Poinsot). In Peirce's theory
the sign relation is a triadic relation that is a special species of
the genus: the representing relation. Whenever the representing
relation has an instance, we find one thing (the "object")
being represented by (or: in) another thing (the
"representamen") and being represented to (or: in) a third
thing (the "interpretant.") Moreover, the object is
represented by the representamen in such a way that the interpretant
is thereby "determined" to be also a representamen of the
object to yet another interpretant. That is to say, the interpretant
stands in the representing relation to the same object represented by
the original representamen, and thus the interpretant represents the
object (either again or further) to yet another
interpretant. Obviously, Peirce's complicated definition entails that
we have an infinite sequence of representamens of an object whenever
we have any one representamen of it.




The sign relation is the special species of the representing relation
that obtains whenever the first interpretant (and consequently each
member of the whole infinite sequence of interpretants) has a status
that is *mental*, i.e. (roughly) is a cognition of a mind. In
any instance of the sign relation an object is signified by a sign to
a mind. One of Peirce's central tasks was that of analyzing all
possible kinds of signs. For this purpose he introduced various
distinction among signs, and discussed various ways of classifying
them.




One set of distinctions among signs was introduced by Peirce in the
early stages of his analysis. The distinctions in this set turn on
whether the particular instance of the sign relation is
"degenerate" or "non-degenerate." The notion
of "degeneracy" here is the standard mathematical notion,
and as applied to sign theory non-degeneracy means simply that the
triadic relation cannot be analyzed as a logical conjunction of any
combination of dyadic relations and monadic relations. More exactly, a
particular instance of the obtaining of the sign relation is
degenerate if and only if the fact that a sign
*s* means an object *o* to an interpretant *i*
can be analyzed into a conjunction of facts of the form
*P*(*s*) & *Q*(*o*) &
*R*(*i*) & *T*(*s*,*o*) &
*U*(*o*,*i*) &
*W*(*i*,*s*) (where not all the conjuncts have to
be present). Either an obtaining of the sign relation is
non-degenerate, in which case it falls into one class; or it is
degenerate in various possible ways (depending on which of the
conjuncts are omitted and which retained), in which cases it falls
into various other classes. Other distinctions regarding signs were
introduced later by Peirce. Some of them will be discussed very
briefly in the following section of this article.


## 11. Semeiotic and Logic




Peirce's settled opinion was that logic in the broadest sense is to be
equated with semeiotic (the general theory of signs), and that logic
in a much narrower sense (which he typically called "logical
critic") is one of three major divisions or parts of
semeiotic. Thus, in his later writings, he divided semeiotic into
speculative grammar, logical critic, and speculative rhetoric (also
called "methodeutic"). Peirce's word
"speculative" is his Latinate version of the Greek-derived
word "theoretical," and should be understood to mean
exactly what the word "theoretical" means. Peirce's
tripartite division of semeiotic is not to be confused with Charles
W. Morris's division: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics (although
there may be some commonalities in the two trichotomies).




By speculative grammar Peirce understood the analysis of the kinds of
signs there are and the ways that they can be combined
significantly. For example, under this heading he introduced three
trichotomies of signs and argued for the real possibility of only
certain kinds of signs. Signs are qualisigns, sinsigns, or legisigns,
accordingly as they are mere qualities, individual events and states,
or habits (or laws), respectively. Signs are icons, indices (also
called "semes"), or symbols (sometimes called
"tokens"), accordingly as they derive their significance
from resemblance to their objects, a real relation (for example, of
causation) with their objects, or are connected only by convention to
their objects, respectively. Signs are rhematic signs (also called
"sumisigns" and "rhemes"), dicisigns (also
called "quasi-propositions"), or arguments (also called
"suadisigns"), accordingly as they are
predicational/relational in character, propositional in character, or
argumentative in character. Because the three trichotomies are
independent of each other, together they yield the abstract possibility
that there are 27 distinct kinds of signs. Peirce argued, however,
that 17 of these are logically impossible, so that finally only 10
kinds of signs are genuinely possible. In terms of these 10 kinds of
signs, Peirce endeavored to construct a theory of all possible natural
and conventional signs, whether simple or complex.




What Peirce meant by "logical critic" is pretty much logic
in the ordinary, accepted sense of "logic" from
Aristotle's logic to present-day mathematical logic. As might be
expected, a crucial concern of logical critic is to characterize the
difference between correct and incorrect reasoning. Peirce achieved
extraordinarily extensive and deep results in this area, and a few of
his accomplishments in this area will be discussed below.




By "speculative rhetoric" or "methodeutic"
Peirce understood all inquiry into the principles of the effective use
of signs for producing valuable courses of research and giving
valuable expositions. Methodeutic studies the methods that
researchers should use in investigating, giving expositions of, and
creating applications of the truth. Peirce also understood, under the
heading of speculative rhetoric, the analysis of communicational
interactions and strategies, and their bearing on the evaluation of
inferences. Peirce's important topic of the economy of research is
closely affiliated with his idea of speculative rhetoric. The idea of
methodeutic may overlap to some small extent with Morris's notion of
"pragmatics," but the spirit of Peirce's notion is much
more extensive than that of Morris's notion. Moreover, Peirce handled
the notion of indexical reference under the heading of speculative
grammar and not under the heading of speculative rhetoric, whereas the
topic certainly belongs to Morris's pragmatics. There clearly exist connections 
between Peirce's speculative rhetoric, on the one hand, and the attention paid 
by twentieth-century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin 
to matters having to do with language as a set of various social practices. 
Unfortunately, however, little attention has been paid by Peirce scholars 
to the relations between Peirce's thinking and familiar twentieth-century 
notions such as Wittgenstein's language-games and Austin's speech-acts.




Speculative rhetoric, however, has attracted considerable
philosophical attention in recent years, especially among Finnish
Peirce scholars centering about the University of Helsinki. These have
noted that there are extensive affiliations between Peirce's
discussions of the communicational and dialogical aspects of
semeiotic, on the one hand, and the many and varied
"game-theoretical" approaches to logic that have been for
some time of interest to Finnish philosophers (as well as many
others), on the other hand. Various proposals for game-theoretic
semantical approaches to logic have been developed and applied to
Peirce's logic, as well as being used to understand Peircean
points.


## 12. The Classification of the Sciences




Peirce maintained a considerable interest in the topic of
classification or taxonomy in general, and he considered biology and
geology the foremost sciences to have made progress in developing
genuinely useful systems of classification for things. In his own
theory of classification, he seemed to regard some sort of cluster
analysis as holding the key to creating really useful
classifications. He regularly strove to create a classification of all
the sciences that would be as useful to logic as the taxonomies of the
biologists and geologists were to these scientists. Of special
interest in this regard is the fact that he considered the relation of
similarity to be a triadic relation, rather than a dyadic
relation. Thus, for Peirce taxonomies and taxonomic trees are only one
sort of classificatory system, albeit the most highly-developed
one. He would not be in the least surprised to find that the topic of
constructing "ontologies" is in vogue among computer
scientists, and he would applaud endeavors to construct ontologies. He
would not find in the least alien many contemporary analytic
discussions of the notion of similarity; he would be right at home
among them.




As with many of Peirce's classificatory divisions, his classification
of the sciences is a taxonomy whose tree is trinary. For example he
classifies all the sciences into those of discovery, review, and
practicality. Sciences of discovery he divides into mathematics,
philosophy, and what he calls "idioscopy" (by which he
seems to mean the class of all the particular or special sciences like
physics, psychology, and so forth). Mathematics he divides into
mathematics of logic, of discrete series, and of continua and
pseudo-continua. Philosophy he divides into phenomenology, normative
science, and metaphysics. Normative science he divides into
aesthetics, ethics, and logic. And so on and on. Very occasionally
there is found a binary division: for example, he divides idioscopy
into the physical sciences and the psychical (or human) sciences. But,
hardly surprisingly given his penchant for triads, most of his
divisions are into threes.




Peirce scholars have found the topic of Peirce's classification of the
sciences a fertile ground for assertions about what is most basic in
all thinking, in Peirce's view. Whether or not such assertions run
afoul of Peirce's anti-foundationalism is itself a topic for further
study.


## 13. Logic




In the extensiveness and originality of his contributions to
mathematical logic, Peirce is almost without equal. His writings and
original ideas are so numerous that there is no way to do them justice
in a small article such as the present one. Accordingly, only a few of
his numerous achievements will be mentioned here.




Peirce's special strength lay not so much in theorem-proving as rather
in the invention and developmental elaboration of novel systems of
logical syntax and fundamental logical concepts. He invented dozens of
different systems of logical syntax, including a syntax based on a
generalization of de Morgan's relative product operation, an algebraic
syntax that mirrored Boolean algebra to some extent, a
quantifier-and-variable syntax that (except for its specific symbols)
is identical to the much later Russell-Whitehead syntax. He even
invented two systems of graphical two-dimensional syntax. The first,
the so-called "entitative graphs," is based on disjunction
and negation. A version of the entitative graphs later appeared in
G. Spencer Brown's *Laws of Form*, without anything remotely
like proper citation of Peirce. A second, and better, system of
graphical two-dimensional syntax followed: the so-called
"existential graphs." This system is based on conjunction
and negation. Even though the syntax is two dimensional, the surface
it actually requires in its most general form is a torus of finite
genus. So, the system of existential graphs actually requires three
dimensions for its representations, although the third dimension in
which the torus is embedded can usually be represented in two
dimensions by the use of pictorial devices that Peirce called
"fornices" or "tunnel-bridges" and by the use
of identificational devices that Peirce called
"selectives." The existential graphs are essentially a
syntax for logic that uses the whole mathematical apparatus of
topological graph theory. There are three parts of it: alpha (for
propositional logic), beta (for quantificational logic with identity
but without functions), and gamma (for modal logic and
meta-logic).




In 1873 Peirce published a long paper (completed in 1870)
"Description of a Notation for the Logic of Relatives" in
which he introduced (six years before Frege's 
*Begriffsschrift* was published) a complete syntax for the
logic of relations of arbitrary adicity (or: arity). In this paper the
notion of the variable (though not under the name
"variable") was invented, and Peirce provided devices for
negating, for combining relations (basically by building upon de
Morgan's relative product and relative sum), and for quantifying
existentially and universally. By 1883, along with his student
O. H. Mitchell, Peirce had developed a full syntax for
quantificational logic that was only a very little different (as was
mentioned just above) from the standard Russell-Whitehead syntax,
which did not appear until 1910 (with no adequate citations of
Peirce).




Peirce introduced the material-conditional operator into logic,
developed the Sheffer stroke and dagger operators 40 years before
Sheffer, and developed a full logical system based only on the stroke
function. As Garret Birkhoff notes in his *Lattice Theory* it
was in fact Peirce who invented the concept of a lattice (around
1883). (Quite possibly, it is Peirce's lattice theory that holds the
key to his technical theory of infinitesimals and the continuum.)




During his years teaching at Johns Hopkins University, Peirce began to
research the four-color map conjecture, to work on the graphical
mathematics of de Morgan's associate A. B. Kempe, and to develop
extensive connections between logic. algebra, and topology, especially
topological graph theory. Ultimately these researches bore fruit in
his existential graphs, but his writings in this area also contain a
considerable number of other valuable ideas and results. He hinted
that he had made great progress in the theory of provability and
unprovability by exploring the connections between logic and
topology.


## 14. Peirce's Reduction Thesis




Peirce's so-called "Reduction Thesis" is the thesis that
all relations, relations of arbitrary adicity, may be constructed from
triadic relations alone, whereas monadic and dyadic relations alone
are not sufficient to allow the construction of even a single
"non-degenerate" (that is: non-Cartesian-factorable)
triadic relation. Although the germ of his argument for the Reduction
Thesis lay in his 1873 [1870] paper "Description of a Notation for the
Logic of Relatives," the Thesis was for over a century doubted
by many, especially after the publication of a proof by Willard Van
Orman Quine that all relations could be constructed exclusively from
dyadic ones. As it turns out, both Peirce and Quine were correct: the
issue entirely depends on exactly what constructive resources are to
be allowed to be used in building relations out of other
relations. (Obviously, the more extensive and powerful are the
constructive resources, the more likely it is that all relations can
be constructed from dyadic ones alone by using them.) An exact
exposition and proof of Peirce's Reduction Thesis was finally
accomplished in 1988 (Burch 1991), and it makes clear that Peirce's
constructive resources are to be understood to include only negation,
a generalization of de Morgan's relative product operation, and the
use of a particular triadic relation that Peirce called "the
teridentity relation" and that we might today write as *x = y
= z*.




Peirce felt that the teridentity relation was in some way more
primitive logically and thus more fundamental than the usual dyadic
identity relation *x = y*, which he derived from two instances
of the triadic identity relation by two applications of the relative
product operation of de Morgan. Peirce also felt that de Morgan's
relative product operation was logically a more primitive and
fundamental operation than, say, the Boolean product or the Boolean
sum. The full philosophical import of his Reduction Thesis, and the
philosophical importance of his triadism insofar as this triadism
rests on his Reduction Thesis, cannot be ascertained without a prior
understanding of his non-typical theory of identity and his special
view of the fundamental nature of the relative product operation.


## 15. Contemporary Practical Applications of Peirce's Ideas




Currently, considerable interest is being taken in Peirce's ideas by
researchers wholly outside the arena of academic philosophy. The
interest comes from industry, business, technology, intelligence
organizations, and the military; and it has resulted in the existence
of a substantial number of agencies, institutes, businesses, and
laboratories in which ongoing research into and development of
Peircean concepts are being vigorously undertaken.




This interest arose, originally, in two ways. First, some thirty years
ago in the former Soviet Union interest in Peirce and Karl Popper had
led logicians and computer scientists like Victor Konstantinovich Finn
and Dmitri Pospelov to try to find ways in which computer programs
could generate Peircean hypotheses (Popperian
"conjectures") in "semeiotic" contexts
(non-numerical or qualitative contexts). Under the guide in particular
of Finn's intelligent systems laboratory in VINITI-RAN (the
All-Russian Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of the
Russian Academy of Sciences), elaborate techniques for automatic
generation of hypotheses were found and were extensively utilized for
many practical purposes. Finn called his approach to hypothesis
generation the "JSM Method of Automatic Hypothesis
Generation" (so named for similarities to John Stuart Mill's
methods for identifying causes). Among the purposes for which the JSM
Method has proved fruitful are sociological prediction,
pharmacological discovery, and the analysis of processes of industrial
production. Interest in Finn's work, and through it in the practical
application of Peirce's philosophy, has spread to France, Germany,
Denmark, Finland, and ultimately the United States.




Second, as the limits of expert systems and production rule
programming in the area of artificial intelligence became increasingly
clear to computer scientists, they began to search for methods beyond
those that depended merely on imitating experts. One promising line of
research has been to automate phases of (Peirce's concept of) the
scientific method, complete with techniques for hypothesis generation
and making assessments of the costs and benefits of exploring
hypotheses. In some areas of research added impetus has been provided
by the similarity of Peircean techniques to techniques that have
already proven useful. For example, in the field of automated
multi-track radar, the similarity of Peircean scientific method to the
so-called "Kalman filter" has been noted by many systems
analysts. Again, those interested in military command-and-control
often note the similarity of Peircean scientific method to the classic
OODA loop ("observe, orient, decide, act") of
command-and-control-theory. The aerospace industry, especially in
France and the United States, is currently investigating Peircean
ideas in connection with avionics systems that monitor aircraft
"health."




Almost simultaneously with Finn's development of Automatic Generation
of Hypotheses, German mathematicians Rudolf Wille and Bernhardt Ganter
were developing an aspect of Galois Theory and lattice theory (the
latter being, as was said, Peirce's invention) that came to be known
as "Formal Concept Analysis." Interestingly enough, even though the
two groups of researchers initially were working completely
independently of each other, the mathematical apparatus of Finn's
Automatic Generation of Hypotheses is at its core the very same
apparatus as that of Wille's and Ganter's Formal Concept Analysis.
For obvious reasons, then, there has now grown up an extensive
cooperation between the German researchers and the Russian
researchers, principally through the writings and intermediary work of
Sergei Kuznetsov, who has been working both with the German group and
with the Russian group.




The heart of both sets of ideas is the notion of clustering items by
similarity. The algorithms for clustering into formal concepts are the
same as the algorithms for preliminary groupings by similarity for the
purpose of automatically generating hypotheses. As it turns out, and
as Kuznetsov has shown, these algorithms are equivalent in their
effect to algorithms for finding the maximal complete subgraphs of
arbitrary graphs. This fact has proved extremely useful in recent
years, since the latter algorithms are the core of what has come to be
known as "Social Network Analysis." And Social Network Analysis has
become a major intellectual tool in the world's battles against
criminal organizations and terrorist networks. So all three sets of
ideas have become matters of crucial practical importance and even
urgency in contemporary affairs.




Such practical applications of Peircean ideas may seem surprising to
many philosophers whose minds are rooted strictly in the academic
world. The applications, however, most certainly would not have
surprised Peirce in the least. Indeed, given his lifelong ideas and
goals as a scientist-philosopher, he probably would have found the
current practical importance of his ideas entirely to be expected.


## 16. Significant Students of Peirce




During the time of Peirce's teaching logic at Johns Hopkins
University, that is: during the years from 1879 through 1884, Peirce
had a number of students in logic who then went on to establish
significant reputations in their own right. Often mentioned in this
connection are John Dewey, Allan Marquand, Christine Ladd-Franklin,
Oscar Howard Mitchell, Benjamin I. Gilman, Fabian Franklin, and 
Thorstein Veblen. Here we provide brief descriptions of
three of these students, Dewey, Ladd-Franklin, and Mitchell. Of
necessity the accounts given here of the work of these students will
be extremely brief. It is obvious that full-length accounts of each of
them can be given, and in the case of one of them, John Dewey,
full-length accounts have, indeed, often been given.




Without a doubt, the best known of all Peirce's students, even including 
Thorstein Veblen, is John Dewey (1859-1952). 
Dewey attended Peirce's logic class at John's
Hopkins during the years 1882 through 1883. Along with Peirce, Dewey
understood the subject of logic in an extremely broad way, so that the
subject in his mind, as well as in Peirce's mind, comprised the entire
topic of the methodology of the exact sciences. It is not surprising,
then, that the structure of logic in Dewey's own works in logic,
viz. most notably in his book *Logic: the Theory of Inquiry*
(1938), is a close approximation of the structure of the scientific
method as Peirce understands it. Recall that for Peirce inquiry begins
with an anomalous situation, in which a particular puzzle or set of
puzzles is elicited from an indeterminate background. Then, by an
ongoing, and in fact ultimately endless, process, hypotheses are
formulated (abduction) and tested (deduction and induction). so that
at each iteration of the methodological "loop," indeterminacy as to
the original anomalous situation is successively, though never
totally, eliminated. Dewey's own account of inquiry, especially
insofar as Dewey considers it to be the successive elimination of
indeterminacy, is remarkably akin to Peirce's account of scientific
methodology in action. Of course there are differences. Dewey often
writes as though at each stage of development of the method of logic
(of science) the next stage is more or less already specified; for
example, at any stage of indeterminacy, Dewey writes as if the
relevant hypothesis or hypotheses to test at the next stage are more
or less already determined. By contrast, Peirce (although he sometimes
speaks this way) more often emphasizes the creative and non-determined
aspect of eliciting/developing hypotheses. Nevertheless, even despite
the differences in emphasis from Peirce to Dewey, the similarities
between their positions are unmistakeable.




Unlike Dewey, both Christine Ladd and Oscar Howard Mitchell
concentrated on formal deductive logic, i.e. mathematical logic,
rather than on the informal methodology of the sciences. Also unlike
Dewey, Ladd and Mitchell both published articles in the 1883
volume *Studies in Logic*, which was edited by Peirce. Again,
in his own "Preface" to this volume Peirce singles out
both Ladd and Mitchell for commentary and overt praise
(p. *v*). To these two students of Peirce we now turn.




Christine Ladd, born December 1, 1847, was later (from her marriage to
Fabian Franklin in 1882) known as Christine Ladd-Franklin. Although
she is almost unknown today, she was very well-known and
highly-regarded as a mathematician, logician, and psychologist from
the 1870s until her death on March 5, 1930 at the age of 82. Her
earliest published work was in mathematics, in the *Educational
Times* of England. Here it attracted the attention of the great
mathematician J. J. Sylvester, who also published in the *Educational Times* and who in 1876 assumed the position of the
first professor of mathematics at the new Johns Hopkins
University. (It was Sylvester who hired Peirce in 1879.) On the
strength of her already-published work, as known by Sylvester, Ladd
applied to Johns Hopkins in 1888 to become a graduate student in
mathematics. Although, because she was a woman, she could not become
a regular graduate student at Johns Hopkins, still at the ardent and
insistent urgings of Sylvester, she was admitted as a special-status
student, and she was even awarded a fellowship to study
mathematics. She held this fellowship from 1879 until 1882, when she
completed all the requirements for the Ph.D. degree. It was during
this period that she became attracted to mathematical logic, and to
the teachings on logic of Peirce, with whom she studied
carefully. Because of her gender, her status as a student of
mathematics was recorded only in notes rather than on the usual
student lists. For the same reason, she could not actually be given
the Ph.D. degree in 1882, although she was ultimately (but not until
1926), awarded the Ph.D. degree in mathematics. (Meanwhile, Vassar
College awarded her an LL.D. degree in 1887.) On August 24, 1882, upon
the completion of her mathematics fellowship, she married a member of
the Johns Hopkins department of mathematics and a fellow-student of
Peirce's, Fabian Franklin (b. 1853, d. 1939). Both she and Fabian
Franklin seem to have stayed closely connected to Peirce until his
death in 1914.




As can be gathered from the foregoing, it was studying with Peirce
that focussed Ladd's attention from mathematics in general to
mathematical logic (also called symbolic logic) in particular. Ladd's
best-known, and most-celebrated work was her paper "On the Algebra of
Logic," published in *Studies in Logic by the members of the Johns
Hopkins University* (C. S. Peirce, editor), Little, Brown, 1883,
pp. 17-71. In it, she is (or at least was once) widely regarded
as having achieved for the first time in history a completely general
and unified account of the Aristotelian syllogism, including a general
account of the differences between valid and invalid
syllogisms. (Josiah Royce, for example, held this view of
Ladd-Franklin's work in logic.) It is thus worth looking in some
detail at how she achieves this result through the algebraizing of the
syllogism, but here such detail will not be entered into. Basically,
however, we can say that her basic idea is to associate with each
possible syllogism a certain "triad". The syllogism is
valid if and only if the "triad" is an
"antilogism," that is to say, is an inconsistent
"triad". Ladd-Franklin wrote on the antilogism as late as
1928 in volume 37 of *Mind*, pp. 532-534. Whether or not
her work is really the first work to unify the theory of the
syllogism, and whether or not she ultimately merits the exalted status
as a logician that Royce assigns to her must remain a task for future
exploration to determine.




In addition to her major work on the syllogism, equivalently on the
notion of the antilogism, Ladd-Franklin as well wrote some of the
entries in the three-volume work of James Mark Baldwin
(1861-1934), *Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology*,
1901-1905, for example the entries "syllogism,"
"symbolic logic," and "algebra of logic." In
fact she was an associate editor of Baldwin's *Dictionary*. She
also wrote at least one related paper in the *Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method*, later named simply
the *Journal of Philosophy*.

 Her specialty in psychology
was the theory of vision, and she early espoused the theory that all
color vision both developed historically and was based on three
primary colors, hence three distinct processes of chemical
reaction. Her writings on the psychology of vision continued to pour
firth voluminously, and these continued from the early 1890s through
at least 1926, when she published a paper on the mysterious visual
phenomenon known as "blue arcs" in the *Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences*.



Peirce praised O. H. Mitchell as being his very best student in
logic. Mitchell was trained as a mathematician even befoe coming to
Johns Hopkins, and he was especially noted by all those who knew him
as being extraordinarily meticulous and attentive to detail. He was so
attentive to exactitude that he was even noted for slowness and
ponderousness in speech. But what was there in Mitchell's 1883 paper
that stimulated Peirce's high praise? It seems to be closely
connected, perhaps identical, with what Peirce praises Mitchell for
accomplishing in Peirce's entry in Baldwin's *Dictionary of
Philosophy and Psychology*, particularly in his article there for
the word "dimension." In the article Peirce credits
Mitchell with having introduced "the concept of a
multidimensional logical universe" into exact logic, and Peirce
claims that it is one of the "fecund contributions" that
Mitchell made to exact logic. There seem to be two components to the
idea of a multidimensional logical universe. The first one is simply
the idea of multiple quantification in connection with polyadic
predicates, so that (in modern terminology) we can have propositions
with quantifiers occurring within the scope of other quantifiers. That
Mitchell employs a formalism suggestive of this idea is undeniable,
but whether he successfully distinguishes (for all *x*)(there
exists a *y*) from (there exists a *y*)(for
all *x*) is very much less than obvious. Moreover, that
Mitchell was the very first logician to have conceived of multiple
quantification and polyadic predicates seems a bit dubious, especially
since by 1870 Peirce himself was already making use of notions for
which multiple quantification and polyadic predicates are
involved. The second component of the idea of a multidimensional
logical universe is (again, using modern terminology) the idea that
the universe of discourse relevant to one variable might not be the
same as the universe of discourse relevant to another
variable. Moreover, since the universe of discourse relevant to one
variable might be all the times there are, all the places there are,
all possible situations, or even all possible worlds, it is not
difficult (though it is perhaps a bit far-fetched) to connect
Mitchell's idea of a multidimensional logical universe to the idea of
tense logic or even modal logic. Whether a careful study of Mitchell's
logical contribution really supports such a reading of Mitchell's
contributions to logic is not as yet clearly determined.




Clearly, close study of the logical accomplishments of Peirce's
notable students is in order.