Peirce's Epistemology (Davis, 1972)

Peirce's Epistemology (Davis, 1972)

Charles Sanders Peirce [pronounced like purse] (10 September 1839 – 19 April 1914) was an American philosopher, chemist and polymath, who is now remembered as a pioneer of the field of semiotics and, with the formulation of the pragmatic maxim, the founder of the philosophies of Pragmatism and Pragmaticism. He was the son of the mathematician Benjamin Peirce.

Peirce quotes:

"The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise."

"There is a kink in my damned brain that prevents me from thinking as other people think."

"Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false."

"every man who does accomplish great things is given to building elaborate castles in the air"

p.62 Peirce's main approach to God is through what he impishly calls "musement." What he means by this is a kind of mental play

p.62-63 I cannot tell how every man will think. I know the majority of men, especially men, are so full of pedantries - especially the male sex - that they cannot think straight about these things. But I can tell how a man must think if he is a pragmatist.

p.63 Peirce elaborates on musement, saying that he does not mean by it what we would call reverie - an aimless, imbecilic wandering of the mind. But rather a more or less careful thought, lacking only a determined direction or purpose. Peirce likens it to play where one has "a lively exercise of one's powers."

p.64 But let us return to the idea of "musement." The mind must be given free reign when searching for an explanatory hypothesis. Creative leaps are notoriously unpredictable and usually cannot be forced.

Peirce observes that the kind of "free-thinking" he is encouraging in the process of musement... is precisely the kind of thought which is used in all significant discovery of matters of fact

p.64-65 people who are accustomed to a certain kind of highly rigorous thought, perhaps scientists and mathematicians in general, will be inclined to object that this "musement" is nothing in the world except a funny name for sloppy thinking - or if not "sloppy thinking" exactly, then at least speculation of a very uncontrolled kind, speculation that might conceivably lead to any kind of guess which might strike one as clever and powerful...