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Charles S. Peirce, Pioneer of Modern Empiricism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Ernest Nagel
Ernest Nagel*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Abstract

No account of the development of contemporary empiricism is adequate which neglects the writings and the influence of Charles Peirce. Although he is not easily pigeon-holed and can not be claimed as the exclusive property of any school or movement, it is appropriate that the hundredth anniversary of his birth should be commemorated at this Congress. For the movement of which it is a manifestation is engaged in a coöperative, intensive cultivation of the methods of the sciences with the help of the most advanced tools of modern logic; and Peirce's intellectual career was also a single-minded devotion to that task. It is fitting, also, that his birth-year be celebrated at Harvard by an international congress. For although he was denied the privilege of teaching at this university, much of his influence was propagated by William James and Josiah Royce, two of its great teachers; and however much he may have suffered from neglect during his life-time, his work surely merits recognition from a movement not confined by national bounds. It is characteristic of the best established sciences that though individuals may pursue researches in them independently of one another, the conclusions reached tend to support each other and to converge toward a common stream of sound beliefs; and such convergence is indeed the sole identifiable warrant for the confidence that some measure of the truth has been attained. It is therefore a happy sign that so many of the central ideas of the present movement have been independently developed on both sides of the Atlantic. One is not minimizing the contributions of the Vienna Circle in pointing out that many of its recent views have been taken for granted for some time by American colleagues, largely because the latter have come to intellectual maturity under the influence of Peirce.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , January 1940 , pp. 69 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1940

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Footnotes

1

Read at the Fifth International Congress for the Unity of Science, Harvard University, September 3-9, 1939.

References

Notes

2 Cf. Peirce's review of Mach's The Science of Mechanics, in THE NATION, Vol. 57, 1893.

3 Thus he declared in the above review: “Sir Isaac Newton formulated the three laws of motion which stand to-day in all the text books. The first, due to Galileo, is that a body left to itself continues for ever to describe equal spaces in equal times on one straight line. The third, Newton's own achievement in great measure, the law of action and reaction, is that one body cannot be drawn back without other bodies on the same line being drawn forward to balance it. Now Newton, with his incomparable clearness of apprehension, saw that the third law implies that spacial displacement is not merely relative, and further that, this being granted, the first law implies that temporal duration is not merely relative. Hence Newton drew the conclusion that there were such realities as Time and Space, and that they were something more than words expressive of relations between bodies and events. This was a scientific conclusion, based upon sound probable reasoning from established facts. It was fortified by Foucoult's pendulum experiment, which showed that the earth has an absolute motion of rotation equal to its motion relative to the fixed stars. Moreover, Gauss and others were led to ask whether it be precisely true that the three angles of a triangle sum up to two right angles, and to say that observation alone can decide this question. … But Mach will not let it go so. His metaphysics tells him that there is no such thing as absolute space and time, and consequently no such thing as absolute motion. The laws of motion must be revised in such a way that they shall not predict that result of Foucoult's experiment which they did successfully predict, and that non-Euclidean geometry must be put aside on metaphysical grounds. Is not this making fact bend to theory?” Op. cit. p. 252.

4 Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, 1.3. All references, unless otherwise specified, are to volume and paragraph of this edition of Peirce's writings.

5 2.66.

6 His earliest version of it runs as follows: “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 whole of our conception of the object.” 5.402.

7 5.207. Twenty-five years earlier Peirce wrote: “In how many profound treatises is not force spoken of as a ‘mysterious entity’, which seems to be only a way of confessing that the author despairs of ever getting a clear notion of what the word means! In a recent admired work on Analytic Mechanics it is stated that we understand precisely the effect of force, but what force itself is we do not understand! This is simply a self-contradiction. The idea which the word force excites in our minds has no other function than to affect our actions, and these actions can have no reference to force otherwise than through its effects. Consequently, if we know what the effects of force are, we are acquainted with every fact which is implied in saying that a force exists, and there is nothing more to know“. 5.404.

8 5.400.

9 2.769, 2.780, 5.170.

10 6.485.

11 6.319.