(18391914)

Charles Sanders Peirce was brought up in an academic atmosphere in

Cambridge (Massachusetts), where his father was a professor of
mathematics and astronomy at Harvard. He himself studied science at the
university, gaining a degree in chemistry in 1863. He subsequently worked
as an astronomer in the Observatory and as a physicist for the United States
Coast and Geodetic Survey (1861-91), devoting his spare time to study and
research in philosophy. In 1914, in poverty and suffering from cancer, he
died as a frustrated isolated man.
SEMIOSIS- is any form of activity, conduct or process that involves
signs, including the production of meaning. It has three elements:
1) Sign- means represent
2) Object- a subject matter of a sign and interpretant
3) Interpretant- the effect of the sign on someone who reads or
comprehends it.
FOUR METHOD OF FIXING BELIEFS:
1) The method of Tenacity- sticking to initial belief and adhered to
without question
2) The method of Authority- an institution is empowered to create,
teach, and enforce set of doctrines
3) The a Priori Method- answer agreeable to reason
4) The scientific Method- wherein inquiry supposes that the real is
discoverable but independent of particular opinion
THREE METAPHYSICAL DOCTRINES:
1) Tychism- the doctrine of chance
2) Synechism- the doctrine of continuity
3) Agapesm- the doctrine of evolutionary love

THREE FORMS OF INFERENCES

1) Deduction- unfolds the necessary consequences of a pure
hypothesis
2) Induction- the logical form of actual process of inquiry
3) Abduction-the process of molding a clear hypothesis
PRAGMATISM
- A philosophical movement, which holds that both meaning of
truth and ideas is a function of its practical outcome.

Peirce regards pragmatism a a method of clarifying

conceptions
Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt,
not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt.

THEOLOGY
Peirce believed in God, and characterized such belief as founded
in an instinct explorable in musing over the worlds of ideas, brute
facts, and evolving habits and it is a belief in God not as an actual or
existent being (in Peirce's sense of those words), but all the same as a
real being.

ETHICS
It is in assisting the cosmic process to realize rationality, and
thereby to recognise and express in universal love his common
interests with the "unlimited community of mankind", that man finds
the objective basis for ethical action.

ON MEANING AND TRUTH

Peirces has defined truth as: universal propositions could be
true. Certainty is possible about the definitive validity of every
individual before the completion of the process of inquiry. As sciences
advance, there is an objective accumulation of opinions.