[I intend] to make a philosophy like that of Aristotle, that is to say, to outline a theory so comprehensive that, for a long time to come, the entire work of human reason, in philosophy of every school and kind, in mathematics, in psychology, in physical science, in history, in sociology and in whatever other department there may be, shall appear as the filling up of its details.The roll of scientists born in the 19th century is as impressive as any century in history. Names such as Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, George Washington Carver, Alfred North Whitehead, Louis Agassiz, Benjamin Peirce, Leo Szilard, Edwin Hubble, Katharine Blodgett, Thomas Edison, Gerty Cori, Maria Mitchell, Annie Jump Cannon and Norbert Wiener created a legacy of knowledge and scientific method that fuels our modern lives. Which of these, though, was ‘the best’?
C S Peirce, Collected Papers (1931-58)
Remarkably, in the brilliant light of these names, there was in fact a scientist who surpassed all others in sheer intellectual virtuosity. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), pronounced ‘purse’, was a solitary eccentric working in the town of Milford, Pennsylvania, isolated from any intellectual centre. Although many of his contemporaries shared the view that Peirce was a genius of historic proportions, he is little-known today. His current obscurity belies the prediction of the German mathematician Ernst Schröder, who said that Peirce’s ‘fame [will] shine like that of Leibniz or Aristotle into all the thousands of years to come’.
Some might doubt this lofty view of Peirce. Others might admire him for this or that contribution yet, overall, hold an opinion of his oeuvre similar to that expressed by the psychologist William James on one of his lectures, that it was like ‘flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness’. Peirce might have good things to say, so this reasoning goes, but they are too abstruse for the nonspecialist to understand. I think that a great deal of Peirce’s reputation for obscurity is due, not to Peirce per se, but to the poor organisation and editing of his papers during their early storage at and control by Harvard University (for more on this, see André de Tienne’s insightful history of those papers).Such skepticism, however incorrect, becomes self-reinforcing. Because relatively few people have heard of Peirce, at least relative to the names above, and because he has therefore had a negligible influence in popular culture, some assume that he merits nothing more than minor fame. But there are excellent reasons why it is worth getting to know more about him. The leading Peirce scholar ever, Max Fisch, described Peirce’s intellectual significance in this fecund paragraph from 1981:
Who is the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced? The answer ‘Charles S Peirce’ is uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating. Mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short-story writer; phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician [and] metaphysician … He was, for a few examples, … the first metrologist to use a wave-length of light as a unit of measure, the inventor of the quincuncial projection of the sphere, the first known conceiver of the design and theory of an electric switching-circuit computer, and the founder of ‘the economy of research’. He is the only system-building philosopher in the Americas who has been both competent and productive in logic, in mathematics, and in a wide range of sciences. If he has had any equals in that respect in the entire history of philosophy, they do not number more than two.Peirce came from a well-to-do, prominent family of senators, businessmen and mathematicians. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was considered the greatest US mathematician of his generation, teaching mathematics and astronomy at Harvard for some 50 years. Charles’s brother, James, also taught mathematics at Harvard, eventually becoming a dean there. C S Peirce was, on the other hand, despised by the presidents of Harvard (Charles Eliot; where Peirce studied) and Johns Hopkins University (Daniel Gilman; where Peirce initially taught). Eliot and Gilman, among others, actively opposed Peirce’s employment at any US institution of higher education and thus kept him in penury for the latter years of his life. They falsely accused him of immorality and underestimated his brilliance due to input from jealous rivals, such as Simon Newcomb.
Though the story of Peirce’s life and thinking processes is inspiring and informative, this story is not told here. (I recommend Joseph Brent’s 1998 biography of Peirce as an excellent beginning. My own planned intellectual biography of Peirce intends to trace his life from his Pers family roots in Belgium in the 17th century to the history of the influence of his work on modern philosophy and science.) The objective here is rather to highlight some portions of Peirce’s thought to explain why his theories are so important and relevant to contemporary thinking across a wide range of topics.
The importance and range of Peirce’s contributions to science, mathematics and philosophy can be appreciated partially by recognising that many of the most important advances in philosophy and science over the past 150 years originated with Peirce: the development of mathematical logic (before and arguably better eventually than Gottlob Frege); the development of semiotics (before and arguably better than Ferdinand de Saussure); the philosophical school of pragmatism (before and arguably better than William James); the modern development of phenomenology (independently of and arguably superior to Edmund Husserl); and the invention of universal grammar with the property of recursion (before and arguably better than Noam Chomsky; though, for Peirce, universal grammar – a term he first used in 1865 – was the set of constraints on signs, with syntax playing a lesser role).
Beyond these philosophical contributions, Peirce also made fundamental discoveries in science and mathematics. A few of these are: the shape of the Milky Way galaxy; the first precise measurement of the Earth’s gravity and circumference; one of the most accurate and versatile projections of the 3D globe of the Earth onto 2D space; the chemistry of relations and working out the consequences of the discovery of the electron for the periodic table; the axiomisation of the law of the excluded middle, or Peirce’s Law: ((P→Q)→P)→P); existential graphs and the transformation of mathematics into an (quasi-)empirical component of studies on cognition; one of the first studies of the stellar spectra, particularly the spectral properties of argon; the invention of the then most accurate gravimetric pendulum; the first standardisation of the length of the metre by anchoring it to the length of a wavelength of light (which he figured out via his own experiments in multiple stations around Europe and North America). This is by no means an exhaustive list.
by Daniel Everett, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Harvard University Archives
