de Waal Cornelis - Illustrations of the Logic of Science

Illustrations of the Logic of Science

ILLUSTRATIONS

OF THE

LOGIC OF SCIENCE

CHARLES S. PEIRCE

Edited by

Cornelis de Waal

OPEN COURT

Chicago, Illinois

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Front cover illustration: Corner of the laboratory of Pierre and Marie Curie, photo by photos.com, Getty Images.

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Copyright 2014 by Carus Publishing Company, dba ePals Media

First printing 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 18391914.

Illustrations of the logic of science / Charles S. Peirce ; edited by Cornelis de Waal.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-81269-852-7 (trade paper : alk. paper) 1. Pragmatism 2. SciencePhilosophy. I. De Waal, Cornelis, editor of compilation. II. Title.

B945.P43I45 2014

191dc23

2013048870

Table of Contents

Work on this Open Court edition of the Illustrations of the Logic of Science began well over a century ago, on January 23, 1907. On that day Paul Carus wrote Peirce of his desire to publish in book form the six articles that had appeared in the Popular Science Monthly almost a quarter century before. In response, Peirce spent much time and effort trying to revise the articles and align them with how his thought had developed over time, but in the end he simply had to give uphe needed, or wanted, to change too much and no longer felt up to the task. The current edition contains a selection of these revisions, made in 1909 and 1910, as well as earlier revisions, made mostly when Peirce was working on his 1894 logic book How to Reason, which remained unpublished. The result is quite far removed from what Peirce, or Carus, imagined the republication of the Illustrations to be. It is not a polished revised edition of the original articles, but rather a scholarly work that allows the reader to connect some of Peirces canonical papers with his later thoughts about the matter, without the latter having reached a publication-ready form.

While working on this edition I greatly benefited from the abundant resources at the Institute for American Thought at IUPUI, which houses the Peirce Edition Project, and from my own involvement as Associate Editor of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. I especially owe thanks to the General Editor at the time, Nathan Houser, for his continuous support and inspiration, and to my wife Kelly (Tully-Needler) de Waal, who was Assistant Textual Editor for the Writings, for many long discussions about editing, transcribing the Popular Science Monthly articles, proofreading, and for so much more. In addition, I want to thank my graduate research assistant Stephanie Harris for some additional transcriptions and for proofreading as well. This edition would not have been possible without the great support I received from the staff of the Special Collections Research Center at the Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, which houses the Open Court papers and correspondence, and from Harvards Houghton Library, which houses the Peirce papers and correspondence. I want to thank both institutions also for giving their permission to use transcriptions of their manuscript holdings for this edition. Im further a most grateful recipient of an Alwin C. Carus Research Grant and an IUPUI School of Liberal Arts manuscript preparation grant. Last but not least, a special, posthumous thanks goes to Max H. Fisch, who left behind thousands of small notecards that together form an easily accessible, immensely detailed, and truly impressive account of the life and work of Charles Sanders Peirce. And like much of Peirces best work, this work too remained unfinished and unpublished.

Charles Sanders Peirces six papers of Illustrations of the Logic of Science first appeared in the Popular Science Monthly for 1877 and 1878 (vols. 12 and 13). They stand outside his chief contributions to logicwhich consist principally of papers on what he called the logic of relativesand are not mentioned by Schrder in his bibliography of Peirces logical works.

Peirces own logical work is hardly touched upon in these essays, and his enduring workwhich ranks next to De Morganon the logic of relations is not touched upon at all. And yet anyone who is even slightly acquainted with Peirces later logical work will recognize in these essays the very characteristic thought and mode of expressing it of our author. The sixth chapter, in particular, contains much that is purely logicalsuch as a discussion of syllogisms; but, in the main, it is probability and induction to which these chapters on the logic of science are devoted.

Paul Carus

1913

NOTES

Vorlesungen ber die Algebra der Logik (exakte Logik), Vol. I (Leipzig, 1980), 71011; Vol. II, Part II (Leipzig, 1905), 603.

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York, 1907), 46.

Truth on Trial (Chicago, 1911), 5.

London, 1910, articles Pragmatism and William Jamess Conception of Truth, 87149.

What Pragmatism Is, Monist (April 1905); Carus, Truth on Trial, 116.

[It is unclear what made Carus think that James did not know Peirce before 1897. For a more accurate account, see the introduction and chapter 7.]

CN volume:page. Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to The Nation. 4 vols. Edited by Kenneth L. Ketner and James E. Cook. Lubbock: Institute for the Studies of Pragmaticism, 197587.

CP volume.paragraph. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 8 vols. Vols. 16, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Vols. 78, edited by Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 193158.

EP volume:page. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. 2 vols. Vol. 1, edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Vol. 2, edited by The Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 199298.

HPPLS volume:page. Historical Perspectives on Peirces Logic of Science. 2 vols. Edited by Carolyn Eisele. The Hague: Mouton, 1985.

NEM volume:page. The New Elements of Mathematics. 4 vols. in 5. Edited by Carolyn Eisele. The Hague: Mouton, 1976.

P followed by a number assigned by Kenneth L. Ketner et al. refers to a publication by Peirce as listed in Kenneth L. Ketner et al.,