Richard Kenneth Atkins

: This essay shows that Peirce's (more or less) final classification of the sciences arises from the systematic application of his Categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness to the classification of the sciences themselves and that he does not do so until his 1903's "An Outline Classification of the Sciences." The essay proceeds by: First, making some preliminary comments regarding Peirce's notion of an architectonic, or classification of the sciences; Second, briefly explaining Peirce's Categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness; Third, examining how Peirce classifies the sciences in 1902 and 1903—and specifically how the 1903 classification utilizes the Categories; Fourth and finally, showing that he is only led to classify the sciences in this fashion as result of his philosophical inquiries during those intervening months—especially as a result of his Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism

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 1865 solution and his reasons for rejecting it.1 Third, I will review his 1869 solution and his reasons for rejecting it in 1903. Lastly, I will propose a novel solution to the Liar Paradox by drawing upon Peirce's later..

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 to provide an account of the Peircean material categories. Like Peirce’s “Guess at the Riddle,” which sought to elucidate his formal categories, this is a guess at the other riddle, his material categories, with..

In the first part of this essay (The Pluralist 7.2, Summer 2012, pp. 1-29), I argued against the Narrow Conception of phaneroscopy by showing that it is not to be found in Peirce's writings and that several passages in Peirce's writings indicate the Narrow Conception is false. As a consequence, we must broaden our understanding of phaneroscopy's aim. In this part, I shall argue that we should broaden our understanding of phaneroscopy's method, that is, our understanding of phaneroscopic observation, description, and analysis.However, before proceeding, I should reply to one claim that has cropped up every now and then. Some interpreters of Peirce have commented in correspondence with me that Peirce's phaneroscopy ..

ABSTRACT: Cheryl Misak has offered a pragmatic argument against a position she calls Scientific transcendentalists hold that truth is something different from what would be believed at the end of inquiry; more specifically, they adhere to a correspondence theory of truth. Misak thinks scientific transcendentalists thereby undermine the connection between truth and inquiry, for (a) pragmatically speaking, it adds nothing to truth and inquiry to ask whether what would be the results of sufficiently rigorous inquiry are really true and (b) they can only accept it as an article of faith that inquiry leads us to truth. I defend against Misak’s objections

Nagel’s challenge is to devise an objective phenomenological vocabulary that can describe the objective structural similarities between aural and visual perception. My contention is that Charles Sanders Peirce’s little studied and less understood phenomenological vocabulary makes a significant contribution to meeting this challenge. I employ Peirce’s phenomenology to identify the structural isomorphism between seeing a scarlet red and hearing a trumpet’s blare. I begin by distinguishing between the vividness of an experience and the intensity of a quality. I proceed to identify further points of structural isomorphism (a) between the experience of seeing a scarlet red and of hearing a trumpet blare and (b) between the qualities of those experiences. Lastly, I gesture towards how these distinctions can be an aid in describing what it is like to be a bat

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 importance,’ moral problems among them, thereby denying the validity of a science of ethics”. He goes on to say that “on Peirce’s account, the ethics of inquiry seems to preclude ethical inquiry. The scientific..

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 distinct forms; or in other words, to make the ultimate analysis of all experiences the first task to which philosophy has to apply itself.I invite the reader to join me in a little survey of the...

This essay shows that Peirce's (more or less) final classification of the sciences arises from the systematic application of his Categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness to the classification of the sciences themselves and that he does not do so until his 1903's "An Outline Classification of the Sciences." The essay proceeds by: First, making some preliminary comments regarding Peirce's notion of an architectonic, or classification of the sciences; Second, briefly explaining Peirce's Categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness; Third, examining how Peirce classifies the sciences in 1902 and 1903—and specifically how the 1903 classification utilizes the Categories; Fourth and finally, showing that he is only led to classify the sciences in this fashion as result of his philosophical inquiries during those intervening months—especially as a result of his Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism.

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 using his graphs to study the movement of thought is akin to Eadweard Muybridge’s use of moving pictures to study animal motion, and I show that this analogy is highly apt for several reasons. The analogy is apt because:...

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 S but some other fact F of which p is false. Since truth is a property of propositions with respect to their representational function, it follows that the belief is not true. Although an examination of Gettier’s two cases, this essay is not a defense of the justified true belief analysis of knowledge, for there are objections to the JTB analysis other than Gettier’s two cases. Rather, Gettier’s two cases are of particular interest for the light they shed on the nature of truth and representation.

: 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 this paper is to provide an account of why the early Peirce endorses the claim that truth is the predestinate opinion and why the late Peirce is compelled to modify that position. I argue that Peirce's early statement that truth is the predestinate opinion is motivated by his theory that all mental action is of the nature of a valid inference and that the later modification of his view is partly motivated by his rejection of that theory.

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 psychologists," among whom Peirce includes Mill, Hume, and Berkeley], no general sensation red which enters into both these images, nor is there any idea of a general respect...

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 fault of her own) excludes counterevidence to the thesis that there were such irregularities and intensifies the flow of information that there were irregularities. As a consequence, she becomes convinced that there were significant voting irregularities in the 2020 U.S. election. I argue that while she is not zetetically rational, for she does not investigate the matter, she is evidentially rational in that she apportions her belief to the evidence. While she has no right to the Cliffordian, or assertoric, belief that there were such irregularities, she is not epistemically blameworthy for having the wagered belief it is true.

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., as heterodox if not...

The founder of both American pragmatism and semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce is widely regarded as an enormously important and pioneering theorist. In this book, scholars from around the world examine the nature and significance of Peirce’s work on perception, iconicity, and diagrammatic thinking. Abjuring any strict dichotomy between presentational and representational mental activity, Peirce’s theories transform the Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian paradigms that continue to hold sway today and, in so doing, forge a new path for understanding the centrality of visual thinking in science, education, art, and communication. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of issues related to Peirce’s theories, including the perception of generality; the legacy of ideas being copies of impressions; imagination and its contribution to knowledge; logical graphs, diagrams, and the question of whether their iconicity distinguishes them from other sorts of symbolic notation; how images and diagrams contribute to scientific discovery and make it possible to perceive formal relations; and the importance and danger of using diagrams to convey scientific ideas. This book is a key resource for scholars interested in Perice’s philosophy and its relation to contemporary issues in mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, semiotics, logic, visual thinking, and cognitive science.

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 transition from the first to the second level of abstractness. Making grammatical information encoded in natural language explicit at the first level of abstractness and interpreting graphs at the second level of abstractness as shorn of grammatical information resolves the problem. The solution is both well-motivated by Peirce’s own commitments and increases the expressiveness of the beta graphs.

Rarely these days are philosophy books both bold and sweeping, but Maddalena’s The Philosophy of Gesture is both. Whether you think that is good will surely depend on your philosophical temperament. Personally, I consider it bad taste to criticize a philosopher for striking out on a new path. Philosophy, as any student of Peirce’s works will affirm, is an experimental science. Some of those experiments might well lead you to the hinterlands, but at least you will have a more detailed map. As with reading any book, the question to ask is not: What is wrong with it? But: What can I learn from it? Reading Maddalena’s book, I had the distinct sense of reading something like James’s Pragmatism. Much is...

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 scientific inquiry is supposed to address the problem with which the second part of the book sets out, viz., how Christianity can possess a "more than human meaning and foundation" given that such...

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 Frank Blake, and from there they went to Worcester to visit W. Stanley Hall at Clark University. … If you look in folder R L49, it...

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 Peirce's theories of sentiment and instinct, his defence of the rational acceptability of religious belief, his analysis of self-controlled action, and his pragmatic account of practical ethics, showing how he developed his views and how they interact with those of his great contemporary William James. This study will be essential for scholars of Peirce and for those interested in American philosophy, pragmatism, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of action, and ethics.