Charles S. Peirce

@charlespeirce.bsky.social

230 followers 11 following 1.9K posts

Philosopher (deceased).

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Charles Sanders Peirce was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". According to philosopher Paul Weiss, Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician". Bertrand Russell wrote "he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever". .. more

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Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 4d

On the contrary, we cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing just what we do believe.

Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 4d

Nor must we overlook a third point of difference. Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.

Reposted by Charles S. Peirce

Center for PhilSci @center4philsci.bsky.social · 4d

New Publication

The Center for Philosophy of Science is proud to congratulate former visiting fellow Mousa Mohammadian on the publication in Philosophy of Science:

"Theoretical Virtues, Truth, and the Epistemic Aim of Scientific Theorizing"

Read here: https://ow.ly/pP8A50XnVVR

Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 4d

We generally know when we wish to ask a question and when we wish to pronounce a judgment, for there is a dissimilarity between the sensation of doubting and that of believing.

Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 4d

On the other hand, it is easy to believe that those rules of reasoning which are deduced from the very idea of the process are the ones which are the most essential; and, indeed, that so long as it conforms to these it will, at least, not lead to false conclusions from true premisses.

Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 4d

As these are facts which we must already know before we can have any clear conception of reasoning at all, it cannot be supposed to be any longer of much interest to inquire into their truth or falsity.

Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 4d

the object of thought remaining the same, and that this transition is subject to some rules by which all minds are alike bound.
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Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 4d

A moment's thought will show that a variety of facts are already assumed when the logical question is first asked. It is implied, for instance, that there are such states of mind as doubt and belief — that a passage from one to the other is possible,
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Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 5d

but according as the habit which determines it is such as to produce true conclusions in general or not.
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Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 5d

The habit is good or otherwise, according as it produces true conclusions from true premisses or not; and an inference is regarded as valid or not, without reference to the truth or falsity of its conclusion specially,
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Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 5d

That which determines us, from given premisses, to draw one inference rather than another, is some habit of mind, whether it be constitutional or acquired.

Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 5d

while in the others are all which have any other interest as objects of research. This division is between those which are necessarily taken for granted in asking why a certain conclusion is thought to follow from certain premisses, and those which are not implied in such a question.
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Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 5d

The subject could hardly be treated, however, without being first limited; since almost any fact may serve as a guiding principle. But it so happens that there exists a division among facts, such that in one class are all those which are absolutely essential as guiding principles,
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Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 5d

or even carry him entirely astray. He is like a ship in the open sea, with no one on board who understands the rules of navigation. And in such a case some general study of the guiding principles of reasoning would be sure to be found useful.
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Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 5d

But let a man venture into an unfamiliar field, or where his results are not continually checked by experience, and all history shows that the most masculine intellect will ofttimes lose his orientation and waste his efforts in directions which bring him no nearer to his goal,
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Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 6d

but according as the habit which determines it is such as to produce true conclusions in general or not.
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Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 6d

That which determines us, from given premisses, to draw one inference rather than another, is some habit of mind, whether it be constitutional or acquired.

Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 6d

but outside of these it is probably of more advantage to the animal to have his mind filled with pleasing and encouraging visions, independently of their truth; and thus, upon unpractical subjects, natural selection might occasion a fallacious tendency of thought.
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Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 6d

Logicality in regard to practical matters (if this be understood, not in the old sense, but as consisting in a wise union of security with fruitfulness of reasoning) is the most useful quality an animal can possess, and might, therefore, result from the action of natural selection;
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Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 7d

the true conclusion would remain true if we had no impulse to accept it; and the false one would remain false, though we could not resist the tendency to believe in it.
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Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 7d

It is not in the least the question whether, when the premisses are accepted by the mind, we feel an impulse to accept the conclusion also. It is true that we do generally reason correctly by nature. But that is an accident;
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Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 7d

In the same way, every work of science great enough to be well remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written; and each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic.

Reposted by Charles S. Peirce

Center for Dewey Studies @deweycenter.siu.edu · 7d

the science of life, it was impossible that the new ideas and method should be made at home in social and moral life.” – John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920, MW 12: 122-123).
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Reposted by Charles S. Peirce

Center for Dewey Studies @deweycenter.siu.edu · 7d

“Until the dogma of fixed unchangeable types and species, of arrangement in classes of higher and lower, of subordination of the transitory individual to the universal or kind had been shaken in its hold upon...
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A photo of an older John Dewey with a quote reading: “Men cannot easily throw off their old habits of thinking, and never can throw off all of them at once.” Citation: Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920, MW 12: 122).

Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 8d

The early scientists, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, and Gilbert, had methods more like those of their modern brethren.

Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 8d

But, superior as Lord Bacon's conception is to earlier notions, a modern reader who is not in awe of his grandiloquence is chiefly struck by the inadequacy of his view of scientific procedure.

Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 8d

Four centuries later, the more celebrated Bacon, in the first book of his Novum Organum, gave his clear account of experience as something which must be open to verification and reexamination.

Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 8d

To Roger Bacon, that remarkable mind who in the middle of the thirteenth century was almost a scientific man, the schoolmen's conception of reasoning appeared only an obstacle to truth.

Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 9d

We come to the full possession of our power of drawing inferences, the last of all our faculties; for it is not so much a natural gift as a long and difficult art. The history of its practice would make a grand subject for a book.

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