Peirce Quotes

We are the star and the darkness it peirces

There is a kink in my damned brain that prevents me from thinking as other people think.

Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.

In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.

Give a boy - ANY boy - enough time, and he WILL eventually pick his nose!

Wearing a bath towel around the school yard and pretending it's a cape doesn't mean you have magical powers.

To know what we think, to be masters of our own meaning, will make a solid foundation for great and weighty thought.

My language is the sum total of myself.

We think only in signs.

It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

How come you're always calling that TV weather guy? Yeah you're obsessed with him!

Take a look, kid! Everywhere around you, there are moments happening! They happen, and then they're gone!

All human affairs rest upon probabilities, and the same thing is true everywhere. If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted would betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every great fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. Harold Whitman

Let it be considered that what is more wholesome than any particular belief is integrity of belief; and that to avoid looking into the support of any belief from a fear that it may turn out rotten is quite as immoral as it is disadvantageous.

Being stuck in negativity is caused by four things: low personal vibration, improper use of willpower, not working harmoniously with waves and cycles, and not being fully present and aware in each moment.

If liberty of speech is to be untrammeled from the grosser forms of constraint, the uniformity of opinion will be secured by a moral terrorism to which the respectability of society will give its thorough approval.

It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop. Confucius

it was a good book and it was an awesome and fun thing to be in color.

Comic

Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions.

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 start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of negation. For not means other than, and other is merely a synonym of the ordinal numeral second. As such it implies a first; while the present pure zero is prior to every first. The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom.

It’s vital to understand this, because most of us naturally have only about fifteen minutes of self-regulatory capacity available at a time.

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying “Amen” to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. Robert Louis Stevenson

The greatest revolution in our generation is that of human beings, who by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. Marilyn Ferguson

Patience is just procrastination without the anxiety

Turning points announce themselves through a variety of vague symptoms: deep restlessness, a yearning with no name, inexplicable boredom, the feeling of being stuck. Gloria Karpinski

I hear you say: ‘All that is not /fact/ : it is poetry’. Nonsense! Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for.

We live in a culture of secrecy, where hiding and lying are accepted as natural, even though we don’t like it. We want honesty, transparency, and authenticity in our loved ones, our groups and organizations, and in our own self so we can reach the heights of our capacity. By clinging to the opaque reality we stall our evolution.

Act of Grace my former state; how soon Would highth recal high thoughts, how soon unsay What feign’d submission swore: ease would recant Vows made in pain, as violent and void. For never can true reconcilement grow Where wounds of deadly hate have peirc’d so deep: Which

The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason.

Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea; for induction does nothing but determine a value and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of a pure hypothesis.

Science proceeds by inference, rather than by the deduction of mathematical proof. A series of observations is accumulated, forcing the deeper question: What must be true if we are to explain what is observed? What "big picture" of reality offers the best fit to what is actually observed in our experience? American scientist and philosopher Charles S. Peirce used the term "abduction" to refer to the way in which scientists generate theories that might offer the best explanation of things. The method is now more often referred to as "inference to the best explanation." It is now widely agreed to be the philosophy of investigation of the world characteristic of the natural sciences.

The cosmos is the ordering of number. Perception is the imaging of form contained in the potential of number. Robert Lawlor

You trust you’ll know what you need to know just when you need to know it.

Take care of your body with steadfast fidelity. The soul must see through these eyes alone, and if they are dim, the whole world is clouded. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. Anaïs Nin

The voice of our original self is often muffled, overwhelmed, even strangled, by the voices of other people’s expectations. The tongue of the original self is the language of the heart.

L'homme a un penchant naturel à imaginer des théories correctes de toutes espèces... Si l'homme n'était pas doué d'un esprit adapté à ses besoins, il n'aurait jamais pu acquérir aucune connaissance

What the pragmatist has his pragmatism for is to be able to say, Here is a definition and it does not differ at all from your confusedly apprehended conception because there is no practical difference.

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers. M. Scott Peck

Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since Newton’s time, his saying that we are little children picking up pretty pebbles on the beach while the whole ocean lies before us unexplored remains substantially as true as ever, and will do so though we shovel up the pebbles by steam shovels and carry them off in carloads.

I absolutely know that you can, under your own steam, dissolve the shell that separates you from a higher experience of Self and a much better life. You don't need gurus or to be catapulted into super-natural experiences by dramatic events — you are becoming such a high-frequency being right here in your physical body, that what used to be meta-physical, trans-personal, and para-normal is now almost ordinary." —from Frequency: The Power of Personal Vibration

All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo Big Nate series by Lincoln Peirce The Black Cauldron (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Book Thief  by Markus Zusak Brian’s Hunt by Gary Paulsen Brian’s Winter by Gary Paulsen Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis The Call of the Wild by Jack London The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The Giver by Lois Lowry Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling Hatchet by Gary Paulsen The High King (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien Holes by Louis Sachar The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins I Am LeBron James by Grace Norwich I Am Stephen Curry by Jon Fishman Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell Johnny Tremain by Esther Hoskins Forbes Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson LeBron’s Dream Team: How Five Friends Made History by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger The Lightning Thief  (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) by Rick Riordan A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle Number the Stars by Lois Lowry The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton The River by Gary Paulsen The Sailor Dog by Margaret Wise Brown Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury Star Wars Expanded Universe novels (written by many authors) Star Wars series (written by many authors) The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann D. Wyss Tales from a Not-So-Graceful Ice Princess (Dork Diaries) by Rachel Renée Russell Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt Under the Blood-Red Sun by Graham Salisbury The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Signs are of three classes, namely, Icons (or images), Indices, and Symbols. Article 6. An icon is a sign which stands for its object because as a thing perceived it excites an idea naturally allied to the idea that object would excite.

Most often, a problem is pointing your attention to an experience you need to have. So instead of looking for a strategy or action that will change the problematic situation, try relaxing into the situation to see what your soul wants you to notice

Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has, nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some bright morning to find it gone, clean vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of his life goes with it.

She remembered her granny telling her, “Men are like coal boilers, Ellie. If you find a man you reckon to keep, you got to feed his belly every day, make him burn for you, then release some steam purty regular, or you ain’t ever gonna get him to work.” Hell, Saroya could take a lesson from Granny Peirce!

As a professional philosopher, I very rarely hyperventilate while doing research, but Peirce was a notorious recluse. Most of his books had been sold or carried off to Harvard at the end of his life, but somehow this little treasure—Peirce’s own copy of his first and most famous publication—had ended up here. *

{Before the time of Benjamin Peirce it never occurred to anyone that mathematical research} was one of the things for which a mathematical department existed. Today it is a commonplace in all the leading universities. Peirce stood alone—a mountain peak whose absolute height might be hard to measure, but which towered above all the surrounding country.

War isn't hell. War is war, and Hell is hell, and of the two, war is a lot worse.

We do not attract what we want, but what we are.

frequency. It’s

your mind a petty tyrant who needs to organize and control the people and environment around you to establish serenity?

All you have to do is win it.

I'd finally reached the end of myself, all my self-reliance and denial and pride unraveling into nothingness, leaving only a blank Alison-shaped space behind. It was finished. I was done. But just as I felt myself dissolving on the tide of my own self-condemnation, the dark waves receded, and I floated into a celestial calm. I saw the whole universe laid out before me, a vast shining machine of indescribable beauty and complexity. Its design was too intricate for me to understand, and I knew I could never begin to grasp more than the smallest idea of its purpose. But I sensed that every part of it, from quark to quasar, was unique and - in some mysterious way - significant. I heard the universe as an oratorio sung by a master choir of stars, accompanied by the orchestra of the planets and the percussion of satellites and moons. The aria they performed was a song to break the heart, full of tragic dissonance and deferred hope, and yet somewhere beneath it all was a peircing refrain of glory, glory, glory. And I sensed that not only the grand movements of the cosmos, but everything that had happened in my life, was a part of that song. Even the hurts that seemed most senseless, the mistakes I would have done anything to erase - nothing could make those things good, but good could still come out of them all the same, and in the end the oratorio would be no less beautiful for it. I realized then that even though I was a tiny speck in an infinite cosmos, a blip on the timeline of eternity, I was not without purpose. And as long as I had a part in the music of the spheres, even if it was only a single grace note, I was not worthless. Nor was I alone. God help me, I prayed as I gathered up my raw and weary sense, flung them into the wormhole - And at last, found what I'd been looking for.

The appearance of Professor Benjamin Peirce, whose long gray hair, straggling grizzled beard and unusually bright eyes sparkling under a soft felt hat, as he walked briskly but rather ungracefully across the college yard, fitted very well with the opinion current among us that we were looking upon a real live genius, who had a touch of the prophet in his make-up.

When you see through a defense mechanism, you don’t stop at the intimidating behavior but go right on into the underlying misperception about life and through that to the path back to harmony. When you see through people’s fear-based actions, motives, and secrets, you’re really aiming for their sweet vulnerability, inner beauty, and magnificence—and you find their soul.

Kepler’s discovery would not have been possible without the doctrine of conics. Now contemporaries of Kepler—such penetrating minds as Descartes and Pascal—were abandoning the study of geometry ... because they said it was so UTTERLY USELESS. There was the future of the human race almost trembling in the balance; for had not the geometry of conic sections already been worked out in large measure, and had their opinion that only sciences apparently useful ought to be pursued, the nineteenth century would have had none of those characters which distinguish it from the ancien régime.

[According to Peirce] ‘The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.’ … nominalism denies the social altogether … ‘the community is to be considered as an end in itself’… knowledge cannot depend on the inferences of single individuals … Logic is rooted in the social principle.

There is a part of every living thing that wants to become itself—the tadpole into the frog, the chrysalis into the butterfly, the damaged human being into a whole one. That is spirituality. Ellen Bass

All human affairs rest upon probabilities, and the same thing is true everywhere. If man were immortal, he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death. But what, without death, would happen to every man, with death must happen to some man . . . It seems to me that we are driven to this, that logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community.

Our own private intuition is the catalyst for self-improvement and self-realization, because when it comes to making deep and lasting changes in one’s personal life, it is only subjective experience, not facts, that registers as real.

Charles Peirce wrote the definition of University in the Century Dictionary. He called it an institution for purposes of study. They wrote to him that their notion had been that a university was an institution for instruction. He wrote back that if they had any such notion they were grievously mistaken, that a university had not and never had had anything to do with instruction and that until we got over this idea we should not have any university in this country.

You-the-organism are energy efficient and looking for love to sustain you. You learn that your energy doesn’t bounce back uncomfortably if you adapt your behavior to match your parents’ beliefs and unconscious body postures. You copy them and stop trying to express yourself when you can’t get through. You won’t be expansively creative if you’re punished for it. You stop being affectionate if it makes your parents uncomfortable and rigid. You stop radiating warmly from your chest or eyes if your mother’s eyes are unresponsive or your father’s heart is hard. You learn to be silent because your mother is more relaxed then, or walk like your father because it validates him, or act funny because the moments of laughter feel better than the absences created by your workaholic parents.

[…] it has never been in my power to study anything,—mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semiotic.

Are you sure twice two are four? Not at all. A certain percentage of the human race are insane and subject to illusions. It may be you are one of them, and that your idea that twice two is four is a lunatic notion, and your seeming recollection that other people think so, the baseless fabric of a vision.

[Benjamin Peirce's] lectures were not easy to follow. They were never carefully prepared. The work with which he rapidly covered the blackboard was very illegible, marred with frequent erasures, and not infrequent mistakes (he worked too fast for accuracy). He was always ready to digress from the straight path and explore some sidetrack that had suddenly attracted his attention, but which was likely to have led nowhere when the college bell announced the close of the hour and we filed out, leaving him abstractedly staring at his work, still with chalk and eraser in his hands, entirely oblivious of his departing class.

Every piece of clutter you dissolve back into clear light allows your higher inner blueprint, your soul’s destiny, to translate fluidly and accurately into the form of your life. The clearer you become, the easier it is to evolve along with the planet—with no snags, stuckness, or suffering. This is the act of becoming transparent.

Letting go is not about sacrifice, nor does it breed lazy inactivity; it’s simply a return to Being. It is a shift from an assertive focus on action and results in a softer, intuitive state where you will “be with,” notice, and appreciate what’s in the moment with you. It’s about moving from noise into silence. When done right, letting go is about centering, and it always leads to your home frequency.

You’ve shifted the emphasis just enough from fear to love that your old reality has destabilized and the new reality of your soul is starting to break through. At this point, your life may malfunction and you may have to let go of goals, possessions, people, or parts of your lifestyle. You may lose whole aspects of your identity, your motivation and direction, and your comfortable habits. It’s important not to backtrack into more fight-or-flight reactions. What’s really happening is that your soul is saying, “You are not this old, limited self anymore. It’s time to discover who you really are and what you can do.” This is the point where the phoenix lights itself on fire and mysteriously turns to gold. It’s where you come face to face with the choice of who you really want to be. Excerpt From: Penney Peirce. “Frequency.” iBooks.

Pierce Hutton gave him a highly amused smile as they went over updated security information from the oil rig in the Caspian Sea. “So you’ve finally decided to do something about Cecily,” Peirce murmured. “It’s about time. I was beginning to get used to that permanent scowl.” Tate glanced at him wryly. “I thought I was doing a great job of keeping her at arm’s length. She’s pregnant, now, of course,” he volunteered. The older man chuckled helplessly. “So much for keeping her at arm’s length. When’s the wedding?” Tate’s smile faded. “That’s premature. She ran. I finally tracked her down, but now I have to convince her that I want to get married without having her think it’s only because of the baby.” “I don’t envy you the job,” Pierce replied, his black eyes twinkling. “I had my own rocky road to marriage, if you recall.” “How’s the baby these days?” he asked. Pierce laughed with wholehearted delight. “We watch him instead of television. I never expected fatherhood to make such changes in me, in my life.” He shook his head, with a faraway look claiming his eyes. “Sometimes I’m afraid it’s all a dream and I’ll wake up alone.” He shifted, embarrassed. “You can have the time off. But who’s going to handle your job while you’re gone?” “I thought I’d get you to put Colby Lane on the payroll.” He held up his hand when Pierce looked thunderous. “He’s stopped drinking,” he hold him. “Cecily got him into therapy. He’s not the man he was.” “You’re sure of that?” Pierce wanted to know. Tate smiled. “I’m sure. “Okay. But if he ever throws a punch at me again, he’ll be smiling on the inside of his mouth!” Tate chuckled. “Fair enough. I’ll give him a call before I leave town.

Each moment fully perceived contains eternity. With intuition, trust increases, both in yourself and others. You can see the good reasons for why things happen. You experience less anxiety-producing hopelessness and hopefulness about the past and the future and a more acute awareness of your surroundings. There’s more synchronicity. Inspiration increases. Enthusiasm expands, because when things flow, you feel happy. When you’re happy, creativity and productivity soar and satisfaction becomes profound. For instance, you rush frantically to the grocery store to do the weekly shopping, squeezing in the errand between work, time with your children, and repairs on the house. You could make the experience entertaining and magical if you pay attention to the smells, shapes, and colors of the foods and packages and the emotional tones of the people you meet in the aisles. You might enjoy the smooth motion of your grocery cart or notice exactly which piece of fruit your body wants to select.

It’s so interesting how transparency works. Not only can you see yourself when you open, relax, show up fully, and allow vulnerability to be natural, but that empowers others to see more of you—and of themselves. On the other hand, when you’re open, exposed, and undefended without even trying, you can see through layers of interference or illusions of opacity in people and situations that used to stop you. You have Superman’s X-ray vision!" —from Transparency: Seeing Through to Our Expanded Human Capacity

motivation for not eating meat and dairy is to maintain optimal health, not to rid myself of the obsession and compulsion that are the hallmark of addiction. If obsession and compulsion are the issue—smoking cigarettes, not being able to stop texting your toxic ex, self-harm—and you want to get past it, you need a Bright Line. If health is your objective, there is no evidence that perfect is better than “really good.” Seriously. You can comply with a health goal 95 percent of the time, and it will benefit you as much as 100 percent perfection.

When planning and setting goals, it’s important to oscillate intentionally and often between your personal daily reality and your highest vision. Your destiny evolves along with everyone else’s, so you can’t lock in plans for very long; they must be fluid and in the moment. Problem solving and planning in the Intuition Age change your experience of time and working with timelines, as you realize that past and future are being absorbed into an expanded present moment, accelerating the materialization process. Timelines are affected by the choices and plans of all people and must be checked often.

Willpower is not about resisting, forcing, or controlling—it’s about choosing. And there are just two basic choices: to feel expansive, loving, and connected to the high vibrations of your soul—to literally be your soul—or to feel contracted, afraid, and immersed in the low vibrations of suffering—to not be your soul. If you choose to feel alone and separate, you’ll assume you must do everything under your own steam by controlling yourself and the world, as I did for many years. If you choose to feel connected to life, you’ll need very little of the old type of willpower. You’ll discover that concepts like flow and synchronicity take the place of willpower.

Some persons fancy that bias and counter-bias are favorable to the extraction of truth–that hot and partisan debate is the way to investigate. This is the theory of our atrocious legal procedure. But Logic puts its heel upon this suggestion. It irrefragably demonstrates that knowledge can only be furthered by the real desire for it, and that the methods of obstinacy, of authority and every mode of trying to reach a foregone conclusion, are absolutely of no value. These things are proved. The reader is at liberty to think so or not as long as the proof is not set forth, or as long as he refrains from examining it. Just so, he can preserve, if he likes, his freedom of opinion in regard to the propositions of geometry; only, in that case, if he takes a fancy to read Euclid, he will do well to skip whatever he finds with A, B, C, etc., for, if he reads attentively that disagreeable matter, the freedom of his opinion about geometry may unhappily be lost forever.

Over the next year, he practiced every day. In his diary, he wrote as if his control over himself and his choices was never in question. He got married. He started teaching at Harvard. He began spending time with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, and Charles Sanders Peirce, a pioneer in the study of semiotics, in a discussion group they called the Metaphysical Club.9.30 Two years after writing his diary entry, James sent a letter to the philosopher Charles Renouvier, who had expounded at length on free will. “I must not lose this opportunity of telling you of the admiration and gratitude which have been excited in me by the reading of your Essais,” James wrote. “Thanks to you I possess for the first time an intelligible and reasonable conception of freedom.… I can say that through that philosophy I am beginning to experience a rebirth of the moral life; and I can assure you, sir, that this is no small thing.” Later, he would famously write that the will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating belief in change. And that one of the most important methods for creating that belief was habits. Habits, he noted, are what allow us to “do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all.” Once we choose who we want to be, people grow “to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.” If you believe you can change—if you make it a habit—the change becomes real. This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be. Once that choice occurs—and becomes automatic—it’s not only real, it starts to seem inevitable, the thing, as James wrote, that bears “us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.

Recognize crests and troughs (beginnings and endings). I’ve learned after torturing myself—and finally deciding I don’t like being tortured—that as a self-employed person, my workflow parallels my inner needs. I used to think life was capriciously “having its way with me,” but eventually I saw there was another principle operating. If I’d been in a period of intensive work with clients, for example, and was beginning to complain that the crammed schedule was a problem, the truth was that I was ready to shift into a spacious phase with some alone time during which I might process insights, collect myself, and gestate new projects. Then my phone wouldn’t ring, or work I had tried to get would fall through, and I’d have my quiet time. I usually wouldn’t recognize it as a personal need; I’d feel I was being punished by having this “slump” and would make the gift of my alone time into a problem. “What’s wrong with me? Don’t people like my work? I have to make more money!” I’d mutter. If I stayed in complaining mode, the period of “space” would be prolonged. If, instead, I thanked myself for the renewal time, saw what I’d learned, and realized I was now hungry for people, communication, and external stimulation, the cycle would shift easily and opportunities would show up on my doorstep within days—sometimes hours.

Cheryl Misak, who is perhaps the strongest defender of a Peircian conception of truth, reality, and objectivity, acknowledges the difficulties with Peirce’s formulation. She offers an alternative formulation of the notion of a true belief that takes account of Peirce’s revisions, one that is also intended to defuse some of the obvious objections: “A true belief is one that would withstand doubt, were we to inquire as far as we fruitfully could on the matter. A true belief is such that no matter how much further we were to investigate and debate, that belief would not be overturned by recalcitrant experience and argument.” Misak’s formulation “does not require the pragmatist to attempt the doomed task of saying just what is meant by the hypothetical end of inquiry, cognitively ideal conditions, or perfect evidence, whatever these might be. Any attempt at articulating such notions will have to face the objection that it is a mere glorification of what we presently take to be good” (Misak 2007, pp. 49–50).9

Nevertheless, Dewey believes (as we all do, when we are not playing the skeptic) that there are better and worse resolutions to human predicaments – to what he calls “problematical situations.” He believes that of all the methods for finding better resolutions, the “scientific method” has proved itself superior to Peirce’s methods of “tenacity,” “authority,” and “what is agreeable to reason.” For Dewey, the scientific method is simply the method of experimental inquiry combined with free and full discussion – which means, in the case of social problems, the maximum use of the capacities of citizens for proposing courses of action, for testing them, and for evaluating the results. And, in my view, that is all that Dewey really needs to assume. (Putnam 1991, p. 227)10

A conclusion cannot be more certain than that some one of the facts which support it is true, but it may easily be more certain than any one of those facts. Let us suppose, for example, that a dozen witnesses testify to an occurrence. Then my belief in that occurrence rests on the belief that each of those men is generally to be believed upon oath. Yet the fact testified to is made more certain than any one of those men is generally to be believed. In the same way, to the developed mind of man, his own existence is supported by every other fact, and is, therefore, incomparably more certain than any one of these facts. (Peirce 1992, pp. 20–1)

The capital error of Hegel which permeates his whole system in every part of it is that he almost altogether ignores the Outward Clash” (Peirce 1992, p. 223).

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts. (Peirce 1992, pp. 28–9)

Peirce speaks about our prejudices when we embark on the study of philosophy, although he argues that all inquiry begins with background prejudices. We do not get rid of them by feigned or paper doubt. We must distinguish paper doubt from real doubt – the type for which we have positive reasons. Doubt, then, is not a mere psychological state; it is a normative concept insofar as it requires positive reasons.

Peirce shifts our attention from the origins of ideas and hypotheses to their consequences for our conduct.

Peirce relentlessly criticizes the subjectivism that lies at the heart of so much modern epistemology, and he develops an intersubjective (social) understanding of inquiry, knowing, communication, and logic.

Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premises which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness to any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected. (Peirce 1992, p. 29)

Experience constrains and checks our fancies, prejudices, and speculations. When empiricist and phenomenalist philosophers became more concerned with the character of “sensations,” “impressions,” “sense data,” etc., the brute constraining force of experience tended to get obscured and neglected. But the insight that originally led philosophers to valorize experience – its brute compulsiveness – is what Peirce underscores with Secondness. Acknowledgment of this bruteness – the way in which experience “says NO!” – is required to make sense of the self-corrective character of inquiry and experimentation. Experiments must always finally be checked by experience. Peirce would have been repelled and horrified by Rorty’s claim that the only constraints upon us are “conversational constraints.” To speak in this manner is to ignore the facticity, the surprise, shock, and brute constraint of our experiential encounters.

We do not need to reify a realm of facts that exist independently of any language, thought, or inquiry. Peirce does justice to the fallibility and openness of all justificatory practices and inquiry without losing touch with a reality “that is independent of vagaries of me and you” (Peirce 1992, p. 52). Contrary to the prevailing prejudice that the linguistic turn displaces old-fashioned talk about experience, Peirce’s conception of experience helps us to escape from some of the dead-ends of the linguistic turn.

Putnam finds in American pragmatism “a certain group of theses which can and indeed were argued differently by different philosophers with different concerns, and which became the basis of the philosophies of Peirce, and above all James and Dewey” (Putnam 1994, p. 152). Cursorily summarized, those theses are (1) antiskepticism: pragmatists hold that doubt requires justification just as much as belief (recall Peirce’s famous distinction between “real” and “philosophical” doubt); (2) fallibilism: pragmatists hold that there is never a metaphysical guarantee to be had that such-and-such a belief will never need revision (that one can be both fallibilistic and antiskeptical is perhaps the unique insight of American pragmatism); (3) the thesis that there is no fundamental dichotomy between “facts” and “values”; and (4) the thesis that, in a certain sense, practice is primary in philosophy. (Ibid.)

But one night, while reading lectures by the philosopher Charles Peirce, James decided to conduct a little experiment. In his diary, he wrote that he would spend one year believing that he was 100 percent responsible for everything that occurred in his life, no matter what. During this period, he would do everything in his power to change his circumstances, no matter the likelihood of failure. If nothing improved in that year, then it would be apparent that he was truly powerless to the circumstances around him, and then he would take his own life.

Now be honest-wouldn't you have expected e^i*pi to be (a) gibberish aling the lines of "elephant inkpie," or, if it were mathematically meaningful, to be (b) an infinitely complicated irrational number? Indeed, e^i*pi is a transcendental number raised to an imaginary transcendental power. And if (b) were the case, surely e^i*pi would not compute no matter how much computer power were available to try to pin down its value. As you know, neither (a) nor (b) is true, because e^i*pi = -1. (I suspect the fact that both (a) and (b) are provably false is the reason that Benjamin Peirce, the nineteenth-century mathematician, found Euler's formula (or a closely rekated formula) "absolutely paradoxical.") In other words, when the three enigmatic numbers are combined in this form, e^i*pi , they react together to carve out a wormhole that spirals through the infinite depths of number space to emerge smack dab in the heartland of integers. It's as if greenish-pink androids rocketing toward Alpha Centauri in 2370 had hit a space time anomaly and suddenly found themselves sitting in a burger joint in Topeka, Kansas, in 1956. Elvis, of course , was playing on the jukebox.

What [Peirce] meant was that since nature evolves by chance variation, then the laws of nature must evolve by chance variation as well. Variations that are compatible with survival are reproduced; variations that are incompatible are weeded out. A tiny deviation from the norm in the outcome of a physical process can, over the long run, produce a new physical law. Laws are adaptive.

…Peirce’s theory of signs—there are no prerepresentational objects out there. Things are themselves signs: their being signs is a condition of their being things at all.

For Peirce, inquiry is always communal—it is the median of many observations that gives the position of the star—and the last analysis really is the last. In Peirce’s cosmology, everyone’s beliefs have to be the same in the end, because all opinion must converge.

Dreyfus (1991) claims that Heidegger radicalized “the insights already contained in the writings of such pragmatists as Nietzsche, Peirce, James, and Dewey” (p. 6). See also Haugeland 1982, where he writes: “I make Heidegger out to be less like Husserl and/or Sartre than is usual, and more like Dewey (and to a lesser extent) Sellars and the later Wittgenstein” (p. 15).