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Charles Sanders Peirce

107 quotes

“True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, selected and edited with an introducton by Justus Buchler. p. 49”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination and does not extend to that of other men. 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.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Illustrations of the Logic of Science" First Paper — The Fixation of Belief", in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (November 1877)
“The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either —”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction … in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) first seen 1878 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How to make our ideas clear,” Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (January 1878)
“The consciousness of a general idea has a certain "unity of the ego" in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person, and indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) first seen 1892 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Man's Glassy Essence" in The Monist, Vol. III, No. 1 (October 1892)
“You are of all my friends the one who illustrates pragmatism in its most needful forms. You are a jewel of pragmatism.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) first seen 1903 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to William James (16 March 1903), published in The thought and character of William James, as revealed in unpublished correspondence and notes (1935) by Ralph Barton Perry, Vol. 2, p. 427
“It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamic action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects, — whether they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient, entirely or partially, — or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by "semiosis" I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) first seen 1907 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pragmatism" (1907) in The Essential Peirce : Selected Philosophical Writings (1998) edited by the Peirce Edition Project, Vol. 2, p. 411, Indiana University Press.
“I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) first seen 1908 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Victoria, Lady Welby (1908) SS 80-81
“It has never been in my power to study anything, — mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) first seen 1908 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Victoria (23 December 1908)
“The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) first seen 1909 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to William James (8 January 1909)
“By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Essays in Zoosemiotics (1990) by Thomas A. Sebeok ISSN 08385858 -->
“Now, to say that a lot of objects is finite, is the same as to say that if we pass through the class from one to another we shall necessarily come round to one of those individuals already passed; that is, if every one of the lot is in any one-to-one relation to one of the lot, then to every one of the lot some one is in this same relation.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A pair of statements may be taken conjunctively or disjunctively; for example, "It lightens and it thunders," is conjunctive, "It lightens or it thunders" is disjunctive. Each such individual act of connecting a pair of statements is a new monad for the mathematician.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To suppose universal laws of nature capable of being apprehended by the mind and yet having no reason for their special forms, but standing inexplicable and irrational, is hardly a justifiable position. Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to be accounted for. That a pitched coin should sometimes turn up heads and sometimes tails calls for no particular explanation; but if it shows heads every time, we wish to know how this result has been brought about. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The old dualistic notion of mind and matter, so prominent in Cartesianism, as two radically different kinds of substance, will hardly find defenders to-day. Rejecting this, we are driven to some form of hylopathy, otherwise called monism.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. But before this can be accepted it must show itself capable of explaining the tridimensionality of space, the laws of motion, and the general characteristics of the universe, with mathematical clearness and precision ; for no less should be demanded of every Philosophy.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Three conceptions are perpetually turning up at every point in every theory of logic, and in the most rounded systems they occur in connection with one another. They are conceptions so very broad and consequently indefinite that they are hard to seize and may be easily overlooked. I call them the conceptions of First, Second, Third. First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else. Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else. Third is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and second are brought into relation.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“May some future student go over this ground again, and have the leisure to give his results to the world.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The tendency to regard continuity, in the sense in which I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in philosophy conveniently may be be termed synechism. The present paper is intended chiefly to show what synechism is, and what it leads to.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Logical analysis applied to mental phenomenon shows that there is but one law of mind, namely that ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectibility. In this spreading they lose intensity, and especially the power of affecting others, but gain generality and become welded with other ideas.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are accustomed to speak of ideas as reproduced, as passed from mind to mind, as similar or dissimilar to one another, and, in short, as if they were substantial things; nor can any reasonable objection be raised to such expressions. But taking the word "idea" in the sense of an event in an individual consciousness, it is clear that an idea once past is gone forever, and any supposed recurrence of it is another idea. These two ideas are not present in the same state of consciousness, and therefore cannot possibly be compared.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What distinct meaning can attach to saying that an idea in the past in any way affects an idea in the future, from which it is completely detached?”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have here a question of difficulty, analogous to the question of nominalism and realism.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some minds will jump here jump to the conclusion that a past idea cannot in any sense be present. But that is hasty and illogical. How extravagant too, to pronounce our whole knowledge of the past to be mere delusion! Yet it would seem that the past is completely beyond the bounds of possible experience as a Kantian thing-in-itself.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can a past idea be present?... it can only be going, infinitesimally past, less past than any assignable past date. We are thus brought to the conclusion that the present is connected to the past by a series of real infinitesimal steps.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the sensation that precedes the present by half a second were still immediately before me, then on the same principle, the sensation preceding that would be immediately present, and so on ad infinitum. Now, since there is a time [period], say a year, at the end of which an idea is no longer ipso facto present, it follows that this is true of any finite interval, however short.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consciousness must essentially cover an interval of time; for if it did not, we could gain no knowledge of time, and not merely no veracious cognition of it, but no conception whatever. We are therefore, forced to say that we are immediately conscious through an infinitesimal interval of time.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In fact, this infinitesimally spread-out consciousness is a direct feeling of its contents as spread out. In an infinitesimal interval we directly perceive the temporal sequence of its beginning, middle, and end... Now upon this interval follows another, whose beginning is the middle of the former, and whose middle is the end of the former. Here we have an immediate perception of the temporal sequence of its beginning, middle and end, or say, of the second, third, and fourth instants.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From these two immediate perceptions, we gain a mediate, or inferential perception of the relation of all four instants. This mediate perception is objectively, or as to the object being represented, spread over the four instants; but subjectively, or as itself the subject of duration, it is completely embraced in the second moment. (The reader will observe that I use the word instant to mean a point in time, and moment to mean an infinitesimal duration.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, let there be an indefinite succession of these inferential acts of comparative perception; and it is plain that the last moment will contain objectively the whole series. Let there be, not merely an indefinite succession, but a continuous flow of inference through a finite time; and the result will be a mediate objective consciousness of the whole time in the last moment. In this last moment, the whole series will be recognized, or known as known before.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Indeed, even this last moment will be recognized like the rest, at least, be just beginning to be so.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the most marked features about the law of mind is that it makes time to have a definite direction of flow from past to future. ...This makes one of the great contrasts between the law of mind and the law of physical force, where there is no more distinction between the two opposite directions in time than between moving northward and moving southward.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time with its continuity logically involves some other kind of continuity than its own. Time, as the universal form of change, cannot exist unless there is something to undergo change, and to undergo a change continuous in time, there must be a continuity of changeable qualities.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The development of the human mind has practically extinguished all feelings, except a few sporadic kinds, [like] sound, colors, smells, warmth, etc., which now appear to be disconnected and separate.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the case of colors, there is a tridimensional spread of feelings. Originally all feelings may have been connected in the same way, and the presumption is that the number of dimensions was endless. For development essentially involves a limitation of possibilities. But given a number of dimensions of feeling, all possible varieties are obtainable by varying the intensities of the different elements.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Accordingly, time logically supposes a continuous range of intensity of feeling. It follows then, from the definition of continuity, that when any particular kind of feeling is present, an infinitesimal continuum of all feelings differing infinitesimally from that, is present.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since space is continuous, it follows that there must be an immediate community of feeling between parts of mind infinitesimally close together. Without this, I believe it would have been impossible for any co-ordination to be established in the action of the nerve-matter of one brain.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A finite interval of time generally contains an innumerable series of feelings; and when these become welded together in association the result is a general idea.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The first character of a general idea so resulting is that it is living feeling. A continuum of this feeling, infinitesimal in duration, but still embracing innumerable parts, and also, though infinitesimal, entirely unlimited, is immediately present. And in its absence of boundedness a vague possibility of more than is present is directly felt.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Second, in the presence of this continuity of feeling, nominalistic maxims appear futile. There is no doubt about one idea affecting another, when we can directly perceive the one generally modified and shaping itself into the other. Nor can there any longer be any difficulty about one idea resembling another, when we can pass along the continuous field of quality from one to the other and back again to the point which we had marked.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Third, consider the insistency of an idea. The insistency of a past idea with reference to the present is a quantity which is less, the further back that past idea is, and rises to infinity as the past idea is brought up into coincidence with the present.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here we must make one of those inductive applications of the law of continuity which have produced such great results in all of the positive sciences. We must extend the law of insistency into the future. Plainly, the insistency of a future idea with reference to the present is a quantity affected by the minus sign; for it is the present that affects the future, if there be any effect, not the future that affects the present.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Feeling which has not yet emerged into immediate consciousness is already affectible and already affected. In fact, this is habit, by virtue of which an idea is brought up into the present consciousness by a bond that has already been established between it and another idea while it was still in futuro.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wherever ideas come together they tend to weld into general ideas; and whenever they are generally connected, general ideas govern the connection; and these general ideas are living feelings spread out.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In deduction the mind is under the dominion of a habit or association by virtue of which a general idea suggests in each case a corresponding reaction. This is the way the hind legs of a frog separated from the rest of the body, reason, when you pinch them. It is the lowest form of psychical manifestation.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let me now try to gather up all these odds and ends of commentary and restate the law of mind, in a unitary way.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“First then, we find that when we regard ideas from a nominalistic, individualistic, sensualistic way, the simplest facts of mind become utterly meaningless. That one idea should resemble another or influence another, or that one state of mind should so much as be thought of in another is, from that standpoint, sheer nonsense.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Second, by this and other means we are driven to perceive, what is quite evident in itself, that instantaneous feelings flow together in a continuum of feeling, which has in a modified degree the peculiar vivacity of feeling and has gained generality. And in reference to such general ideas, or continua of feeling, the difficulties about resemblance and suggestion and reference to the external, cease to have any force.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source