Why Charles S. Peirce is the GOAT
...of American Philosophy and probably a few other things
Disclaimer: this is kind of unfinished but I have to study for the SAT and write supplementals so here you go:
Peirce who?
Max H. Fisch, the renowned pragmatist philosopher, once wrote:
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.
And, as much as this sounds like straight glaze, it’s not hard to see why. Peirce is probably best known as the founder of American pragmatism, but his influence stretches a lot farther than pragmatism or even philosophy more broadly. It’s almost hard to describe what Peirce did for the American intellectual tradition without sounding like you’re exaggerating, so I’ll just give a few examples.
- Existential graphs, one of the most intuitive and visually appealing representations of logic, were almost entirely invented by Peirce.
- Abduction. You know, the entire type of reasoning that most of us probably use every single day? Yeah, Peirce formulated it and coined the term, establishing it as the primary method for drawing conclusions in scientific domains.
- His 1887 paper, “Logical Machines”, was able to predict the nuances of early AI development and issues with reflexivity that still plague LLMs today. In this paper, he also developed frameworks for symbol grounding—a problem that makes evaluating context with LLMs difficult even today—in the 1800s. This dude was literally 200 years ahead of the game and he doesn’t get nearly the recognition he deserves.
You seriously can’t escape the guy, no matter what you choose to study.
Beyond being a towering figure across almost every domain of intellectual interest, Peirce is genuinely really entertaining and fun to read. One of my fondest memories of English class this past year was reading Peirce’s How to Make Our Ideas Clear, in which techniques to establish a sort of clarity in writing are described in detail. I guess he didn’t take his own advice, though—that essay was probably one of the more difficult works I’ve read.
Why Peirce Changed the Game
Disclaimer: Yes, Indigenous groups developed distinct philosophical traditions and developed complex ethical frameworks. When I refer to the American philosophical identity, I’m referring to post-colonial America and the states.
After America had won Independence from Great Britain through the Revolutionary War, life kind of sucked for most colonists. Each of the states were intensely independent, with little to no interest of sharing any common goals or responsibilities in governance. This led to intense clusters of conflict and revolts, many of which you probably learned about in your APUSH class.
My point though, isn’t to give you a history lesson. Rather, it’s that these specific conditions created a societal desire for a sense of stability and reassurance. Those desires paved the way for early American transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, who, despite their lack of rigor, emphasized values like self-reliance and individual divinity. At this point in time, America’s philosophical identity was more literary than scientific, and Emerson and Thoreau are shining examples of that. More interested in the woods of Maine and the estuary beauty of Cape Cod, they focused on artistic descriptions of nature and life in the early United (or, not so much) States.
Peirce was different. As a scientist by profession and education (Harvard’s first ever summa cum laude chemistry graduate!), he wanted nothing to do with the florid language of the early American philosophical tradition. In his early childhood, Peirce discovered Whateley's Elements of Logic--a work that would continue to influence much of his later writing. Peirce was obsessed with logic and the rigorous testing of his philosophical ideas in a way that stood in stark contrast to early American transcendentalists and gave credence to American philosophy more broadly.
In works such as How to Make Our Ideas Clear, Peirce condemned vague and ambigous writing styles in philosophy. This functioned as an almost-direct rebuttal towards the works of those like Emerson, who relied on complex prose and poetic langauge that lent itself to a sort of opacity.
While Peirce as a writer is hard to read, I wouldn't necessarily say he's opaque or vague. He uses a sort of specificity that might be confusing in form, but this is such that his ideas are impossible to mistake for another. This is probably best outlined in the previously mentioned How to Make Our Ideas Clear, so if you're interested in what that might look like, I'd suggest giving it a read.
Pragmatism
It's impossible to have any discussion of Peirce without mentioning his tremendous influence on pragmatism. How to Make Our Ideas Clear (again...) gave America what many would consider to be the first pragmatic maxim:
Consider what effects, which 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.
This gave American philosophy a scientific ingredient that created a distinct identity, escaping its fate of being the knock-off version of the name-brand European schools of thought. While American philosophy was still thought of as less rigorous and often more artistic than scientific, Peirce laid the foundation for many future developments.
While a discussion on the nuances and points of interest within Peirce's pragmatism would certainly be interesting, I lack the time or will-power to put together such a piece, and I'd imagine very few of you have the will-power to actually read through something like that.
So, to avoid boring you to death
I think my English teacher, Dr. Cheryl Weaver (another GOAT), probably put it best when she said:
Peirce was just the GOAT.