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The Pragmatism and Scientific Metaphysics of C. S. Peirce

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Henry S. Leonard*
Affiliation:
Harvard University

Extract

The fifth volume of the Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce, entitled Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, contains papers dealing with two distinguishable, but interconnected doctrines: Pragmatism and Critical Common-sensism. The latter, antedating in its earliest expositions the first formulation of the pragmatic doctrine in 1877, 8, is however later conceived by Peirce as a consequence of pragmatism. The two doctrines will be advisedly treated here in isolation, and first pragmatism.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1937

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References

1 “Pragmaticism” is the name given by Peirce in later years to his own form of Pragmatism in order to distinguish it from the doctrines of other Pragmatists, with whom he was not in complete accord. See Volume V, ¶ 414.

2 Peirce did not give it this name until much later (1905), but it is plainly the doctrine aimed at in Bk. II, Papers I–III (1868). See 5.439. All isolated numerical references in the review are to the numbered paragraphs of Peirce's Collected Papers. The whole number specifies the volume, the decimal number, the paragraph.

3 Bk. II, Papers IV, V, on “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” from Popular Science Monthly. The Papers of Bk. II had all been published previously. Bk. I and III are published here for the first time.

4 5.439.

5 5.467.

6 Ibid.

7 5.429 ff.

8 5.469.

9 5.430 ff.

10 5.467.

11 Ibid.

12 5.206.

13 5.423.

14 See e.g. 5.412.

15 5.480, 491.

16 5.427.

17 5.28, 121, 452.

18 5.472, 3.

19 Ibid.

20 5.212.

21 Cf., e.g., 5.181.

22 5.407.

23 5.430.

24 5.430.

25 Cf., e.g. 5.102.

26 Cf. 5.449.

27 Cf., e.g., 5.99, 105.

28 Vol. V., Bk. I.

29 Cf. Bk. I, Lect. IV, §1; also 5.37.

30 Lectures, II, III, IV.

31 Cf. Bk. II, Paper V, §1,2.

32 Book I, Lecture VII, §3. “Abduction” is the name given by Peirce to that type of reasoning in which we pass from the observation of facts to the suggestion of an explanatory hypothesis that will subsequently be tested by induction. It is a type of inference and hence its guiding principles would be principles of logic. Cf. 5.171.

33 Rudolf Carnap: Die logische Syntax der Sprache (1934).

34 5.427.

35 5.432.

36 5.486, 491.

37 5.428.

38 5.439.

39 Bk. II, Paper VII, §1.

40 5.512.

41 See his essay on “Logical Positivism and Speculative Philosophy” in Philosophical Essays for Alfred North Whitehead (Longmans, 1936), §18. See also §12 and §13.

42 Cf., Ibid., 13, 15.

43 Vol. VI, Bk. I, ch. 2, §4..

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., ch. 5.