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Questions tagged [peirce]

One of the greatest American philosophers, Peirce was James's and Dewey's teacher. However, his pragmatism—which he preferred to call "pragmaticism"—differed radically from James's and Dewey's positivist, nominalistic pragmatism. Pragmaticism uploads Scholastic realism.

One of the greatest American philosophers, Peirce was James's and Dewey's teacher. However, his pragmatism—which he preferred to call "pragmaticism"—differed radically from James's and Dewey's positivist, nominalistic pragmatism. Pragmaticism uploads Scholastic realism.

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What are the main differences between Peirce, James, & Dewey?

Peirce, James, & Dewey are generally regarded as the three originators of American pragmatism. Personally, I have noticed each of them for different reasons. James is interesting because of his radical empiricism, Dewey because of his understanding…
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Are "if smoke then fire" arguments deductive or inductive?

I'm new to philosophy and have a question regarding deductive vs. inductive reasoning: I'm told that "John ate a strange plant in the forest and got sick. Clearly, the plant made John sick." I believe that the usage of "clearly" makes this…
Ben
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How far can/should one press philosophical doubt?

Should we keep on questioning until nothing is left to question or is there a point on which we need to stand (which we often tend to do)? Descartes used 'I think' as this fixed point where the skepticism abates, there may be others. But what is a…
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What are the similarities/differences between how Kant thinks 'noumenon' limits understanding compared to C.S. Peirce?

Kant stated in Critique of Pure Reason, pg. 273: What our understanding acquires through this concept of a noumenon, is a negative extension; that is to say, understanding is not limited through sensibility; on the contrary, it itself limits…
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Peirce's law, law of the excluded middle, and intuitionism.

I have no training in formal logic and have tried to understand how Peirce's law is equivalent to the law of the excluded middle to no avail. I hope someone can explain this to me. Also, in passing, I wanted to know why intuitionistic logic rejects…
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In which writings does Charles Sanders Peirce generalize the idea of freedom so that it applies to all creatures?

Charles Hartshorne claimed that Peirce was pretty close to the first philosopher in the world who generalized the idea of freedom so that it applied to all the creatures.... In which writings does Charles Sanders Peirce generalize the idea of…
Frank Hubeny
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Is Peirce's pragmatic maxim self-evident?

Peirce's pragmatic maxim seems to have an appeal, at least as a "tiebreaker": Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the…
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Is there any reason for the heavy focus on binary relations in formal logic?

As a fan of C. S. Peirce, I'm surprised that, at least triadic relations, aren't investigated as much as binary relations are. What I mean is that with binary relations, they have already been classified by reflexivity, symmetry, transitivity, and…
Kevin Holmes
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What is the relation between 'knowledge-that' and 'knowledge-how'?

Quick bit of definitions for the words: Knowledge-that is knowledge that answers a question about a thing. It is informative of a thing's nature or kind. Knowledge-how is knowledge that is expressed in a performance. It is a knowledge that is known…
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How would I translate the following statement into higher order logic? Or what book would you recommend to teach myself higher order logic?

"For every liar Sentence, there exists some person for whom the sentence is either self-referential or (purely) negative." I am a behavior analyst with an undergraduate degree in philosophy and some training in first-order logic. I am interested in…
Preston Campbell
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What would be an intuitive understanding of Peirce's law?

Wikipedia describes Peirce's law as In propositional calculus, Peirce's law says that ((P→Q)→P)→P. Written out, this means that P must be true if there is a proposition Q such that the truth of P follows from the truth of "if P then Q". In…
Frank Hubeny
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Are concepts necessarily false even if useful?

I was listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson on Star Talk the other day, and he was answering a question about orbits. But he added that it's not entirely true that, for instance, the earth orbits the sun, because the earth doesn't orbit the sun's…
Kevin Holmes
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What did evolutionary epistemology discover about our tendency to guess right abductively?

C.S. Peirce wrote: "[...] if the universe conforms, with any approach to accuracy, to certain highly pervasive laws, and if man's mind has been developed under the influence of those laws, it is to be expected that he should have a natural light, or…
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Why can one abstract (prescind) space from color but not color from space? (from C. S. Peirce's article "On a New List of Categories")

In Peirce's paper New List why is possible to prescind (i.e. abstract) space from color but not color from space? Peirce mentions three types of abstraction, the relevant one being called Prescission (var. precision, precisive abstraction,…
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What did C. S. Peirce mean by this remark about the phrase "necessary and sufficient condition"?

As I was reading through The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, I came across the following sentence: I doubt not that readers have been fretting over the ridiculous-seeming phrase “indecomposable element,” which is as Hibernian as…
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