Charles Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
Born: 10 Sept 1839 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Died: 19 April 1914 in Milford, Pennsylvania, USA
Charles Sanders Peirce was the son of Benjamin Peirce the mathematician and studied at Harvard and worked for many years on the Coast and Geodetic Survey. He worked on geodesy but became interested in conformal map projections where he invented a quincuncial map projection using elliptic functions.
He was also interested in the Four Colour Problem and problems of knots and linkages studied by Kempe. He then extended his father's work on associative algebras and worked on mathematical logic and set theory. Except for courses on logic he gave at Johns Hopkins University, between 1879 and 1884, he never held an academic post.
Peirce's work in philosophy was mainly in epistemology and metaphysics. His main legacy is the pragmatist notion of truth as what would be represented by best opinion in the ideal limit of scientific inquiry. He also gave the name `abduction' to the process of inference to the best explanation, namely the process of building a simple theory of wide scope to `postdict' or explain all past observational data, and correctly to predict future observations.
References:
- Dictionary of Scientific Biography
- Charles Sanders Peirce, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 13 (1916), 701-737.
- C Eisele, The Mathematics of Charles S Peirce, Actes du XIe Congrès International d'histoire des sciences (Warsaw, 1965), 229-234.
- C Eisele and R M Martin (eds.), Studies in the Scientific and Mathematical Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce (1971).
- J Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce : A Life (Indiana, 1993).
- G Debrock and M Hulswit (eds.), Living doubt : essays concerning the epistemology of Charles Sanders Peirce (Dordrecht, 1994).
- J W Dauben, Charles S. Peirce, Evolutionary Pragmatism and the History of Science, Centaurus 38 (1996), 22-82.
- P Weiss, Peirce, Charles Saunders, Dictionary of American Biography 14 (1934), 398-403.
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