Pursuing Peirce

Charles S. Peirce, polymath, philosopher, logician, lived a life of often wild extremes and, when he died in 1914, had earned a vile reputation as a debauched genius. Yet he created a unified, profound and brilliant work, both published and unpublished, a fact difficult to explain. In my 1993 biography, I proposed three hypotheses to account for his Jekyll-Hyde character: his obsession with the puzzle of meaning, two neurological pathologies, trigeminal neuralgia and left-handedness, and the powerful influence of his father. After publication, further research has led me to propose two additional hypotheses to explain his extraordinary life: manic-depressive illness and mystical experience, the last greatly influencing the development of his doctrine of semeiotic, of which his logic of science is a part.     

Peirce on Educational Beliefs

This article contends that Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) may enhance our understanding of educational beliefs and that Peirce’s logic may be a tool to distinguish between a dogmatic and a pragmatic justification of such beliefs. The first part of the article elaborates on Peirce’s comprehension of beliefs as mediated, socially situated and future-oriented. The second part points to how Peirce promotes his “method of inquiry” as an ethos of science. The method is not judged by the conclusions it lead to or by the knowledge it may produce. Contrary, as the results are unavoidably provisional and rectifiable, Peirce holds the method productive due to the norms guiding the inquiry: (1) the pragmatic principle, (2) the social principle, (3) fallibilism and (4) abduction. In sum, when adopting a peircean conception, educational research, theory building and practice should be characterized as a mutual commitment towards shared processes of joint learning. In that, Peirce’s method of inquiry may be fruitful in sorting dogmatism from pragmatism.     

Peirce and the autonomy of abductive reasoning

Essential to Peirce's distinction among three kinds of reasoning, deduction, induction and abduction, is the claim that each is correlated to a unique species of validity irreducible to that of the others. In particular, abductive validity cannot be analyzed in either deductive or inductive terms, a consequence of considerable importance for the logical and epistemological scrutiny of scientific methods. But when the full structure of abductive argumentation — as viewed by the mature Peirce — is clarified, every inferential step in the process can be seen to dissolve into familiar forms of deductive and inductive reasoning. Specifically, the final stage is a special type of practical inference which, if correct, is deductively valid, while the creative phase, surprisingly, is not inferential at all. In neither is abduction a type of inference to the best explanation. The result is a major reassessment of the relevance of Peirce's views to contemporary methodological studies.     

Kant's Syntheticity Revisited by Peirce

This paper reconstructs the Peircean interpretation of Kant's doctrine on the syntheticity of mathematics. Peirce correctly locates Kant's distinction in two different sources: Kant's lack of access to polyadic logic and, more interestingly, Kant's insight into the role of ingenious experiments required in theorem-proving. In this second respect, Kant's analytic/synthetic distinction is identical with the distinction Peirce discovered among types of mathematical reasoning. I contrast this Peircean theory with two other prominent views on Kant's syntheticity, i.e. the Russellian and the Beckian views, and show how Peirce's interpretation of Kant solves the dilemma that each of these two views faces. I also show that Hintikka's criterion for Kant's synthetic judgments, i.e. a new individual introduced by the -instantiation rule, does not capture the most important characteristic of Peirce's theorematic reasoning, i.e. the process of choosing a correct individual.     

Some more similarities between Peirce and Skinner

C. S. Peirce is noted for pioneering a variety of views, and the case is made here for the similarities and parallels between his views and B. F. Skinner's radical behaviorism. In addition to parallels previously noted, these similarities include an advancement of experimental science, a behavioral psychology, a shift from nominalism to realism, an opposition to positivism, a selectionist account for strengthening behavior, the importance of a community of selves, a recursive approach to method, and the probabilistic nature of truth. Questions are raised as to the extent to which Skinner's radical behaviorism, as distinguished from his S-R positivism, may be seen as an extension of Peirce's pragmatism.     

查尔斯·桑德斯·皮尔士：物理学家而非哲学家

所有皮尔士的研究者们都应注意到:皮尔士对于哲学本性的理解在今天很不常用.皮尔士首先是一位科学家,其次是一位物理学家,再次才是一位对于哲学感兴趣的物理学家.从根本上说,他的哲学就是科学逻辑.哲学被他视为一种严重依赖于科学的努力,另一方面他对于哲学的理解就是概括意义上的科学.从历史上澄清这一点,对于正确把握和深刻理解皮尔士的相关思想,具有至关重要的意义.皮尔士对于科学本性及哲学与科学关系的论述,对于当代哲学研究也不无启示作用.     

皮尔士的符号学自然主义

这篇文章将对下面这两个论题进行论证：第一,在认识论上,皮尔士是一个辩护主义者（justificationist）。但是,与经典的或理性主义的辩护模式相反,他并不认为个人意识是辩护或确定性的来源。事实上,皮尔士开创了关于辩护或确定性的符号学模式。第二,在认识论上,皮尔士又是一个自然主义者。在他看来,人的思考和研究、询问和回答、断言和拒绝、怀疑、相信、预期和说明都是行为和反应,而这些行为和反应像其他高等动物的行为和反应一样能够被观察、描述和理解。从经典意义上看,他既不是一个经验主义者,也不是一个理性主义者。     

A reduction rule for Peirce formula

A reduction rule is introduced as a transformation of proof figures in implicational classical logic. Proof figures are represented as typed terms in a -calculus with a new constant P ⁽⁽⁾⁾. It is shown that all terms with the same type are equivalent with respect to -reduction augmented by this P-reduction rule. Hence all the proofs of the same implicational formula are equivalent. It is also shown that strong normalization fails for P-reduction. Weak normalization is shown for P-reduction with another reduction rule which simplifies of (( ) ) into an atomic type.This work was partially supported by a Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research No. 05680276 of the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, Japan and by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Hiroakira Ono     

Subjectivity as an Unlimited Semiosis: Lacan and Peirce

The discussion on subjectivity isbased on the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan'sunderstanding of subjectivity as constructed inand through language, and the philosopherCharles Sanders Peirce's general ideas ofsignifying construction as an unlimitedsign-exchanging process – the idea of theunlimited semiosis. The article advocatescombining Lacanian subjectivity and Peirceansemiosis in a model of the formal structure ofthe semiosis of Lacanian subjectivity. In thelight of this model the article claims thatLacanian subjectivity opens to a process ofsubjectivization within the semiosis ofsubjectivity, whereby that which is other ismade our own. Two researchers' differentarguments on subjectivity, both of which referto Lacan's ideas on subjectivity, are used asdiscussion partners in the exploration of thesemiosis of Lacanian subjectivity. While theone researcher claims that subjectivity is anideological construction, the other maintainsthat subjectivity is a free play of signs. Thearticle claims that neither of these tworesearchers considers that there may be aprocess of subjectivization in the semiosis ofsubjectivity. Thus the one researcher can claimthat subjectivity `is constituted outside ofitself', and the other can maintain that `thesubject is doomed to perpetual exile fromitself' in the construction of her or hissubjectivity.     

Hume and Peirce on the Ultimate Stability of Belief

Louis Loeb has argued that Hume is pessimistic while Peirce is optimistic about the attainment of fully stable beliefs. In contrast, we argue that Hume was optimistic about such attainment but only if the scope of philosophical investigation is limited to first‐order explanatory questions. Further, we argue that Peirce, after reformulating the pragmatic maxim to accommodate the reality of counterfactuals, was pessimistic about such attainment. Finally, we articulate and respond to Peirce's objection that Hume's skeptical arguments in T 1.4.1 and his commitment to common sense indicate that Hume was confused about whether we could have stable beliefs at all.     

Peirce, Perry and the Lost History of Critical Referentialism

This paper traces a lost genealogical connection between Charles S. Peirce’s later theory of signs and contemporary work in the philosophy of language by John Perry. As is shown, despite some differences, both accounts offer what might be termed a multi-level account of meaning. Moreover, it is claimed that by adopting a ‘Peircian turn’ in his theory, Perry might overcome alleged shortcomings in his account of cognitive significance.

Peirce on Education: Nurturing the First Rule of Reason

Through an exegetic reading of Peirce’s minor texts on higher education, I find that Peirce’s conception of a “Liberal Education” is close to the Herbartian conception of Bildung. Peirce calls for a general education with the ambition of qualifying critical thinkers with the capacity to go beyond the strict rules and narrow borders of the artes liberales, – the different subject matters or sciences taught at a university. Thus, Peirce’s conception of a liberal education is closely linked to his interpretation of common sense – or sensis communis – as a critical commonsensism. To him, it is urgent to educate and nurture “the first rule of reason,” described as a will to learn, a curiosity, a dissatisfaction of what you already incline to think, and an intense desire to find things out. The nurturing of this “first rule of reason” is thus about educating an intellectual community of critical thinkers who are able to question authoritative beliefs, knowing how to debunk them, and how to turn away from obiter dictum.