ABSTRACT
By 1868, the results of Peirce’s logical and philosophical investigations during the 1860s were in print; the material that was covered in his two series of lectures on the Logic of Science, at Harvard in 1865 and the Lowell Institute the following year, emerged in five technical papers in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in an important and brilliant series of three papers in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.1 These three papers contain a single unified argument, presenting an account of mind and reality which enabled Peirce, in the third paper, to explain the validity both of deductive reasoning and of ampliative inference. In the course of explaining the possibility of knowledge they introduced many of the pervasive themes in Peirce’s thought; ideas were used which, developed and transformed, were retained throughout the development of his philosophy. So, a survey of these early papers will provide us with an overview of the problems that prompted Peirce’s philosophical work and the sorts of approach to them that he favoured. We shall also be able to understand the difficulties that stimulated the subsequent changes in his doctrines. Therefore, this chapter will offer an account of the arguments and conclusions of the three papers:
I shall refer to them as QFM, CFI and GVL respectively. Peirce begins both of the series of lectures by defending the autonomy of logic against
those-the ‘Anthropological Logicians’ such as James Mill and John Stuart Mill-who ‘think that Logic must be founded on a knowledge of human nature and requires a constant reference to human nature’ (CW1 361). As we shall see in the following chapter, this rejection of psychologism-in fact, the denial that any information from the sciences can have a bearing upon logic or epistemology-was a fundamental feature of Peirce’s work; it places him in a common tradition with Frege and much of twentieth-century philosophy. Thus, he would deny the claim of J.S.Mill that the object of Logic was ‘to attempt a correct analysis of the intellectual process called Reasoning or Inference, and of such other mental operations as are intended to facilitate this’ (Mill, 1891, p. 23). However, he did not divorce logic from ‘intellectual processes’ completely, for he claimed that logic was ‘the science whereby we are enabled to test reasons’ (CW1 358). This does not mean, as Mill claimed, that logic is simply ‘a collection of precepts or rules for thinking, grounded on a scientific
investigation of the requisites for valid thought’ (Mill, 1868, vol. 2, p. 146). Rather, logic is the ‘classifying science’ which underlies the practice of testing reasons.
