Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is considered to be among the half dozen most important philosophers the United States has produced. The Charles S. Peirce Sesquicentennial International Congress opened at Harvard University on September 5, 1989 and concluded on the 10th - Peirce's birthday. The Congress was host to approximately 450 scholars from 26 different nations. Papers concerning Peirce's philosophy of science were given at the Congress by representatives from Italy, France, Sweden, Finland, Korea, India, Denmark, Greece, Brazil, Belgium, Spain, Germany, and the United States. The present volume is a compilation of some of the papers that were presented at that Congress. One of the themes in the work of Charles Peirce that has been of greatest interest to students of his thought, centres around his view of the philosophy of science and its logic. Peirce was himself a physical scientist. He worked as an assistant at the Harvard Astronomical Observatory from 1869 to 1872 and made a series of astronomical observations there from 1872 to 1875. Those observations form the basis of Peirce's only published book, "Photometric Researches". Solon I. Bailey says of these observations, "The first attempt at the Harvard Observatory to determine the form to the Milky Way, or the galactic system, was made by Charles S. Peirce...The investigation was of a pioneer nature, founded on scant data." Peirce was employed for over 30 years as a physicist by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, and he did significant work on the determination of the gravitational constant. He also made major contributions in fields as diverse as mathematical logic and psychology. C.I. Lewis has remarked that "the head and font of mathematical logic is found in the calculus of propositional functions as developed by Peirce and Schroeder". Peirce subsequently invented, almost from whole cloth, semiotics - the science of the meaning of signs. Ogden and Richards, the British authors, say that "by far the most elaborate and determined attempt to give an account of signs and their meanings is that of the American logician C.S. Peirce, from whom William James took the idea and the term pragmatism, and whose algebra of dyadic relations was developed bu Schroeder". Because Peirce left few published writings, his importance was not recognised until long after his death, but his influence on 20th-century philosophers has been considerable.