Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes on Knowledge
Peirce founded American pragmatism — which he later renamed pragmaticism to distinguish his own austere version from James's — in two 1878 papers, How to Make Our Ideas Clear and The Fixation of Belief. The pragmatic maxim holds that the meaning of a concept is exhausted by the practical effects we attribute to its object, and the famous account of inquiry treats the fixation of belief as the resolution of genuine doubt by the methods of authority, tenacity, the a priori, or — uniquely capable of indefinite improvement — the method of science. Peirce's parallel work in formal logic, the philosophy of signs (semiotics), and the metaphysics of categories supplies the systematic backbone that organizes the more familiar pragmatist arguments.
Quotes
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“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.”
Vol. V, par. 438 -
Attributed to Charles Sanders Peirce:
“Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief.”
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Attributed to Charles Sanders Peirce:
“We must not begin by talking of pure ideas, vagabond thoughts that tramp the public roads without any human habitation, but must begin with men and their conversation.”
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Attributed to Charles Sanders Peirce:
“The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth.”
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Attributed to Charles Sanders Peirce:
“Cherish your doubts, for doubt is the attendant of truth.”
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Attributed to Charles Sanders Peirce:
“There is no greater stupidity than to deny what is supported by overwhelming evidence.”
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“True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.”
Wikiquote -
“The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism in Philosophical Writings of Peirce , selected and edited with an introducton by Justus Buchler. p. 49”
See also Aristotle#Metaphysics A.1 -
“See also Aristotle#Metaphysics A.1”
The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism in Philosophical Writings of Peirce , selected and edited with an introducton by Justus Buchler. p. 49 -
“Few persons care to study logic , because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination and does not extend to that of other men. We come to the full possession of our power of drawing inferences the last of all our faculties, for it is not so much a natural gift as a long and difficult art .”
Illustrations of the Logic of Science" First Paper — The Fixation of Belief", in Popular Science Monthly , Vol. 12 (November 1877) -
“Few persons care to study logic , because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination and does not extend to that of other men. We come to the full possession of our power of drawing inferences the last of all our faculties, for it is not so much a natural gift as a long and difficul”
Illustrations of the Logic of Science" First Paper — The Fixation of Belief", in Popular Science Monthly , Vol. 12 (November 1877) -
“That this, that, or the other, is wine; or,”
Wikiquote -
“That wine possesses certain properties.”
Wikiquote -
“It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction … in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty.”
How to make our ideas clear,” Popular Science Monthly , Vol. 12 (January 1878)