•  1
    Validity and Induction: Some Comments on T.L. Short's Charles Peirce and Modern Science
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 59 (4): 404-415. 2024.
    Abstract:In Charles Peirce and Modern Science, T.L. Short encourages us to read Peirce’s oeuvre in the spirit of philosophical experimentalism. The result is a rewarding and refreshing book that clarifies longstanding controversies and stakes out novel positions in the debates. In these comments, I subject Short’s statements regarding the validity of induction to critical scrutiny. I argue that while much of what he states is correct, he errs in holding that induction is invalid in the short run…Read more
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    Some persons who believe provably false claims – such as that there were significant voter irregularities in the 2020 election – may nevertheless be evidentially rational for holding their false beliefs. I consider a person I call our average believer. In her daily life, she incidentally gathers evidence favoring the hypothesis that there were significant voter irregularities, but she does not investigate the matter. Her information environment, moreover, is such that it accidentally (through no…Read more
  •  2
    Santayana, Commonsensism, and the Problem of Impervious Belief
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 38 (1): 37-56. 2021.
    Commonsensism is a thesis about commonsense beliefs: our commonsense beliefs are items of knowledge (or should be so regarded) that have epistemic or methodological priority. This account of commonsensism risks making our commonsense beliefs impervious to philosophical argument. But in Santayana's commonsensism, what deserves our trust is not our commonsense beliefs but the development of common sense over successive generations. Our commonsense beliefs deserve only a secondary or subsidiary tru…Read more
  •  9
    C. I. Lewis's Theory of Ideas: Royce's Problem and Lewis's Solution
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1-18. forthcoming.
    Implicit in C. I. Lewis's conceptual pragmatism is an account of how our ideas undergo a process of social development. Lewis's account of that process resolves a problem with Josiah Royce's theory of ideas. Royce holds that there are both sensuous and symbolic ideas. It is, however, possible for someone to have only a sensuous idea of how middle C sounds and for another person to have only the symbolic idea that middle C is 261.63 Hz. In what sense, if at all, can these two persons have the sam…Read more
  •  9
    Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists by Chris Voparil (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 61 (3): 530-531. 2023.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists by Chris VoparilRichard Kenneth AtkinsChris Voparil. Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 377. Hardback, $74.00.A house divided cannot stand, or so Jesus tells us. As far as I can ascertain, Jesus was right about many things (his followers perhaps less so). Accordingly,…Read more
  •  119
    This Proposition is Not True: C.S. Peirce and the Liar Paradox
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 47 (4): 421. 2011.
    Charles Sanders Peirce proposed two different solutions to the Liar Paradox. He proposed the first in 1865 and the second in 1869. However, no one has yet noted in the literature that Peirce rejected his 1869 solution in 1903. Peirce never explicitly proposed a third solution to the Liar Paradox. Nonetheless, I shall argue he developed the resources for a third and novel solution to the Liar Paradox.In what follows, I will first explain the Liar Paradox. Second, I will briefly rehearse Peirce's …Read more
  •  59
    Peirce's “Paradoxical Irradiations” and James's The Will to Believe
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 51 (2): 173. 2015.
    In 1898, Peirce delivered a series of lectures titled Reasoning and the Logic of Things. Peirce scholars have found the first of those lectures—titled “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life”—especially perplexing.Some scholars have a decidedly negative assessment of Peirce’s lecture. Cornelis de Waal, for example, maintains that Peirce’s claims in the lecture are doubtful. He states that “Peirce... takes a radical stance, arguing emphatically that science should stay away from ‘matters of vital imp…Read more
  •  44
    Direct Inspection and Phaneroscopic Analysis
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 52 (1): 1. 2016.
    Peirce repeatedly states that phaneroscopy involves analyzing the phaneron, or “the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not”.1 Here are three representative quotations from different periods of Peirce’s work, all supporting the claim that phaneroscopy involves analysis:[The business of phaneroscopy is] to unravel the tangled skein [of] all that in any sense appears and wind it into distinc…Read more
  •  110
    An "Entirely Different Series of Categories": Peirce's Material Categories
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 46 (1): 94-110. 2010.
  •  100
    A Guess at the Other Riddle: The Peircean Material Categories
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 48 (4): 530-557. 2012.
    In “An ‘Entirely Different Series of Categories,’” I argue that aside from Peirce’s formal categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, Peirceans should acknowledge a second set of categories I call the material categories. I also argue that the material categories are irreducible to the formal categories. However, in that article I offer no account of what the material categories are. Moreover, Peirce himself never provides a clear and explicit account of them. The present essay attempts…Read more
  •  1
    What Is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being
    with Adam Glover, Katie Terezakis, Whitley Kaufman, Steven Levine, Seth Vannatta, Aaron Massecar, Robert Main, and Jerome A. Stone
    The Pluralist 7 (2): 91-94. 2012.
  •  22
    Peirce's Modal Defense of Infant Baptism
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 54 (4): 546. 2018.
    Charles Sanders Peirce is not known for waxing theological. Certainly, he has various writings that may be classed under the head of natural theology or the philosophy of religion, among them "Evolutionary Love", a critique of Hume on miracles, and "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God". Numerous Peirce scholars have endeavored to give expression to Peirce's philosophy of religion. Other manuscripts are suggestive of his religious practices and of how he viewed his religious beliefs (viz.…Read more
  •  17
    On Three Levels of Abstractness in Peirce’s Beta Graphs
    History and Philosophy of Logic 44 (1): 16-32. 2022.
    Peirce’s beta graphs are roughly equivalent to our first-order predicate logic. However, Bellucci and Pietarinen have recently argued that the beta graphs are not well-equipped to handle asymmetric relative terms. I survey four proposed solutions to the problem and find them all wanting. I offer a fifth solution according to which Peirce’s beta graphs function at three different levels of abstractness from natural language. I diagnose the problem of asymmetric relative terms as arising when we t…Read more
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    Peirce, Sentimentalism, and Prison Reform
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 57 (2): 172-201. 2021.
    ARRAY
  •  31
    A Peircean examination of Gettier’s two cases
    Synthese 199 (5-6): 12945-12961. 2021.
    If we accept certain Peircean commitments, Gettier’s two cases are not cases of justified true belief because the beliefs are not true. On the Peircean view, propositions are sign substitutes, or “representamens.” In typical cases of thought about the world, propositions represent facts. In each of Gettier’s examples, we have a case in which a person S believes some proposition p, there is some fact F* such that were p to represent F* to S then p would be true, and yet p does not represent F* to…Read more
  •  17
    Royce’s The Problem of Christianity and Peirce’s Epistemology
    American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 41 (2-3): 39-55. 2020.
    The two concluding chapters of Josiah Royce's The Problem of Christianity pose significant interpretive challenges. The final chapter, "Summary and Conclusion," sets forward Charles S. Peirce's theory of scientific inquiry. Although Royce had earlier explained Peirce's theory of signs and interpretation, he had not examined Peirce's theory of scientific inquiry in detail, making its appearance in the summary and conclusion of the book peculiar. Moreover, it is not wholly evident how a theory of …Read more
  •  17
    The Peirce-Blake Correspondence
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 56 (2): 222. 2020.
    On March 12, 2018, I received an email from André De Tienne, General Editor of the Peirce Edition Project. He recommended that I visit the Francis Blake archives at the Massachusetts Historical Society, remarking, Francis Blake was a cousin of Charles Peirce. I have not yet figured out how that cousinage works out genealogically. In any case, on 13 January 1893, the day CSP and Juliette returned from Boston to New York after the Lowell Lectures, they first took a trip to Weston, MA, to visit Fra…Read more
  •  17
    Exchange on Propositions and Truth
    with Richard M. Rubin and Glenn Tiller
    Overheard in Seville 37 (37): 146-160. 2019.
  •  5
    Peirce’s Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics by Francesco Bellucci
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 57 (3): 563-564. 2019.
    Peirce’s Speculative Grammar is a masterful chronological reconstruction of Peirce’s work on logic as semiotics, or the study of signs and the purposes to which we put them. Peirce’s writings on these topics span more than fifty years. Moreover, his manuscripts number well over 100,000 pages, many of which have yet to be published. Patently, gaining a comprehensive overview of Peirce’s writings on logic is no small feat, and Bellucci is to be celebrated for his efforts. Peirce wanted to be known…Read more
  •  19
    Peirce on facts, propositions, and the index
    Semiotica 2019 (228): 17-28. 2019.
    Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print
  •  17
    John Locke and Thomas Nagel famously dismiss the claim that seeing the color scarlet red is like hearing a trumpet's blare, but Charles Sanders Peirce argues otherwise. Developing an objective phenomenological vocabulary based on formal logic, he contends that we can describe the similarities and differences among diverse experiences.
  •  28
    Santayana on Propositions
    Overheard in Seville 36 (36): 26-40. 2018.
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    Peirce, Muybridge, and the Moving Pictures of Thought
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 53 (4): 511. 2017.
    The System of Existential Graphs may be characterized with great truth as presenting before our eyes a moving picture of thought. Provided this characterization be taken not as a flatly literal statement, but as a simile, it will, I venture to predict, surprise you to find what a strain of detailed comparison it will bear without snapping.Peirce once called his graphical system of logic—the Existential Graphs or EGs—the moving pictures of thought. In this essay, I argue that Peirce meant that us…Read more
  •  28
    Sensation, Nominalism, and the Elements of Experience
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 31 (4): 538-556. 2017.
    Curiously, Charles Sanders Peirce and Maurice Merleau-Ponty raise the same objection to British empiricism: its foundational tenet is nominalist. In his 1869 review of a new edition of James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, Peirce traces the foundational tenet of Mill's work back to Hume's Copy Principle—that all of our ideas are fainter copies of our impressions—and then remarks, If I compare a red book and a red cushion, there is, according to them [the "English psychologist…Read more
  •  29
    Peirce on Truth as the Predestinate Opinion
    European Journal of Philosophy 26 (1): 411-429. 2018.
    : In 1878's ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, Peirce states that truth is the predestinate opinion, or that which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate. Later in his life, though, he would claim both that truth is what would be believed if we could figure out the right method of inquiry and that, instead of affirming that truth is the predestinate opinion in 1878, he ought to have affirmed that truth is what would be believed if inquiry were carried sufficiently far. The aim of…Read more
  •  12
    Charles Sanders Peirce is regarded as the founding father of pragmatism and a key figure in the development of American philosophy, yet his practical philosophy remains under-acknowledged and misinterpreted. In this book, Richard Atkins argues that Peirce did in fact have developed and systematic views on ethics, on religion, and on how to live, and that these views are both plausible and relevant. Drawing on a controversial lecture that Peirce delivered in 1898 and related works, he examines Pe…Read more