IN 1903, commenting on an article he had written more than thirty years before, Charles Peirce said that he had changed his mind on many issues at least a half-dozen times but had "never been able to think differently on that question of nominalism and realism" (1.20). For anyone acquainted with Peirce's writings, this remark alone could justify a study of "that question.".

The essays in this volume represent an approach to human knowledge that has had a profound influence on many recent thinkers. Popper breaks with a traditional commonsense theory of knowledge that can be traced back to Aristotle. A realist and fallibilist, he argues closely and in simple language that scientific knowledge, once stated in human language, is no longer part of ourselves but a separate entity that grows through critical selection.

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

A survey of the fields in which Peirce’s relevance is now recognized may best begin with that in which such recognition is most nearly universal. The commonest English form of the name of that field is now semiotics. As a field of systematic study, it is still so young that there are as yet few if any university departments bearing its name; but there are several interdisciplinary programs and research centers, and several national societies and journals; and there is an (...) International Association for Semiotic Studies, which was founded at Paris in 1969; which publishes the most voluminous journal in the field, Semiotica; and which held its first congress at Milan in 1974 and its second at Vienna in 1979. At the latter there were three “working sessions” devoted to “Investigations into Peirce’s Theory of Signs.”. (shrink)

“Arisbe,” the Peirce home near Milford, Pennsylvania, belongs to the National Park Service, and the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area is responsible for its care. In 1979 a geodetic triangulation station was installed in the front yard and named the “C. S. Peirce Station.” This was intended, at least in part, as a recognition of the fact that Peirce's scientific career was in the service of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and that the first of his more than thirty (...) years in its service was spent with triangulating parties along the coasts of Maine and of the Gulf states. It offers a suggestive metaphor for the present occasion. If the questions, methods, answers and reasons of another thinker, or of a whole movement of thought, whether earlier or later than Peirce, are illuminated by locating them, directly or indirectly, positively or negatively, in relation to those of the C. S. Peirce station, we may count that as part of the range of Peirce's relevance. In the case of an earlier thinker or movement, the relevance does not depend on Peirce's awareness or acknowledgment; in the case of a later thinker or movement, it does not depend on awareness or acknowledgment by that thinker or by one or more representatives of that movement. If the thinker is oneself, the triangulating will of course require a certain detachment. At least within limits, and perhaps even without limit, degrees of nearness or remoteness, likeness or difference, do not as such constitute degrees of relevance. And even if our interest is primarily in philosophical relevance, mathematical or scientific relevance may entail philosophical, and so be counted. (shrink)

* [Irrationality]: ___ Irrationality, like rationality, is a normative concept. Someone who acts or reasons irrationally, or whose beliefs or emotions are irrational, has departed from a standard.

Summary To judge a belief, emotion, or action irrational is to make a normative judgment. Can such judgments be objective? It is argued that in an important class of cases they can be. The cases are those in which a person has a set of attitudes which are inconsistent by his or her own standards, and those standards are constitutive of the attitudes. Constitutive standards are standards with which an agents' attitudes and intentional actions must generally accord if judgments of (...) irrationality are to be intelligible.RésuméJuger irrationnelles une croyance, une émotion ou une action, c'est faire un jugement normatif. De tels jugements peuvent‐ils ětre objectifs? On montre qu'ils peuvent l'ětre dans une classe importante de cas: ceux où une personne a un ensemble d'attitudes qui sont inconsistantes avec ses propres normes, ces normes étant constitutives des attitudes considérées. Les normes constitutives sont des normes avec lesquelles les attitudes et les actions intentionnelles des agents doivent s'accorder pour que les jugements d'irrationalité deviennent intelligibles.ZusammenfassungWenn wir einen Glauben, eine Emotion oder eine Handlung als irrational beurteilen, so fällen wir ein normatives Urteil. Kann ein solches objektiv sein? Es wird argumentiert, dass dies für eine wichtige Klasse von Fällen zutrifft. Die Fälle sind diejenigen, in welchen eine Person eine Menge von Haltungen hat, die nach ihren eigenen Massstäben unvereinbar sind, und wo diese Massstäbe für die Haltungen konstitutiv sind. Konstitutive Massstäbe sind solche, mit denen die Haltungen und absichtlichen Handlungen des Handelnden im allgemeinen übereinstimmen müssen, wenn Urteile über Irrationalität verständlich sein sollen. (shrink)

In this systematic introduction to the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, the author focuses on four of Peirce's fundamental conceptions: pragmatism and Peirce's development of it into what he called 'pragmaticism'; his theory of signs; his phenomenology; and his theory that continuity is of prime importance for philosophy. He argues that at the centre of Peirce's philosophical project is a unique form of metaphysical realism, whereby continuity and evolutionary change are both necessary for our understanding of experience. In his final (...) chapter Professor Hausman applies this version of realism to contemporary controversies between anti-realists and anti-idealists. Peirce's views are compared to those of such contemporary figures as Davidson, Putnam, and Rorty. The book will be of particular interest to philosophers concerned with American philosophy and current debates on realism as well as linguists working in semiotics. (shrink)

In informal terms, abductive reasoning involves inferring the best or most plausible explanation from a given set of facts or data. It is a common occurrence in everyday life and crops up in such diverse places as medical diagnosis, scientific theory formation, accident investigation, language understanding, and jury deliberation. In recent years, it has become a popular and fruitful topic in artificial intelligence research. This volume breaks new ground in the scientific, philosophical, and technological study of abduction. It presents new (...) ideas about inferential and information-processing foundations for knowledge and certainty. The authors argue that knowledge arises from experience by processes of abductive inference, in contrast to the view that it arises non-inferentially, or that deduction and inductive generalization are enough to account for knowledge. Much AI research is hypothetical, so the importance of this book is that it reports key discoveries about abduction that have been made as a result of designing, building, testing, and analyzing actual working knowledge-based systems for medical diagnosis and other abductive tasks. The book tells the story of six generations of increasingly sophisticated generic abduction machines, RED-1, RED-2, PEIRCE, MDX2, TIPS, QUAWDS, and the discovery of reasoning strategies that make it computationally feasible to form well-justified composite explanatory hypotheses, despite the threat of combinatorial explosion. The final chapter argues that perception is logically abductive and presents a layered-abduction computational model of perceptual information processing. This book will be of great interest to researchers in AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of science. (shrink)

"... fascinating throughout.... the book is recreative in the highest sense." —Arthur C. Danto, The New Republic "A gem for Holmes fans and armchair detectives with a penchant for logical reflection, and Peirce scholars." —Library Journal.

A comprehensive and systematic reconstruction of the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, perhaps America's most far-ranging and original philosopher, which reveals the unity of his complex and influential body of thought. We are still in the early stages of understanding the thought of C. S. Peirce (1839-1914). Although much good work has been done in isolated areas, relatively little considers the Peircean system as a whole. Peirce made it his life's work to construct a scientifically sophisticated and logically rigorous philosophical (...) system, culminating in a realist epistemology and a metaphysical theory ("synechism") that postulates the connectedness of all things in a universal evolutionary process. In The Continuity of Peirce's Thought, Kelly Parker shows how the principle of continuity functions in phenomenology and semeiotics, the two most novel and important of Peirce's philosophical sciences, which mediate between mathematics and metaphysics. Parker argues that Peirce's concept of continuity is the central organizing theme of the entire Peircean philosophical corpus. He explains how Peirce's unique conception of the mathematical continuum shapes the broad sweep of his thought, extending from mathematics to metaphysics and in religion. He thus provides a convenient and useful overview of Peirce's philosophical system, situating it within the history of ideas and mapping interconnections among the diverse areas of Peirce's work. This challenging yet helpful book adopts an innovative approach to achieve the ambitious goal of more fully understanding the interrelationship of all the elements in the entire corpus of Peirce's writings. Given Peirce's importance in fields ranging from philosophy to mathematics to literary and cultural studies, this new book should appeal to all who seek a fuller, unified understanding of the career and overarching contributions of Peirce, one of the key figures in the American philosophical tradition. (shrink)

A cool, lucid examination of the thought of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce, offering an important clarification and an innovative way to view human ...

Putnam's goal is to embed philosophy in social life. The first part of this book is dedicated to metaphysical questions.

This paper presents an alternative view for understanding abduction as "inference to the best explanation", than can account from the simplest perception to the introduction of any new ideas. Subsequently the view offered is applied to medical practice and some consequences are extracted for it. The discussion is considered in the context of Peirce's theories of men classification, fixation of belief and inquiry.