ABSTRACT
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) can seem one of the most modern or contemporary of philosophers. If many of his views are controversial or implausible, still, on reading his work, we are likely to feel that many of his problems are close to the issues that are philosophically pressing today. Like Frege, he recognizably inhabits our philosophical world, forging tools and concepts which are still central to philosophical debate. One of the founders of the quantificational logic which is the staple of contemporary textbooks in the subject, we find him groping towards an understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of logic, and discussing the implications of the new logic for our grasp of thought and reality. He appears to attach great importance to the philosophical analysis of meaning which is to occupy a foundational role for logic and the rest of philosophy. In his discussions of pragmatism, the doctrine for which he is best known, we find familiar themes concerning the extent to which our grasp of abstract concepts can be articulated as an understanding of the conditions in which the assertion of a proposition is justified by available evidence. Furthermore, he appears to be concerned with familiar problems about truth and verification, attempting to reconcile the view that reality has an objective character which is independent of our view of it with the claim that this character is available to us if we conduct our inquiries efficiently or correctly. He offers sophisticated and informed treatment of complex and modern issues in the philosophy of science. It is no accident that the literature contains frequent claims that Peirce has anticipated this or that doctrine which became a focus of concern in the twentieth century. One can readily see the force of Rorty’s claim, in Rorty (1961); that ‘Peirce’s thought envisaged, and repudiated in advance, the stages in the development of empiricism which logical positivism represented, and that it came to rest in a group of insights and a philosophical mood much like those we find in the Philosophical Investigations’ (pp. 197-8).
