Charles Peirce and Modern Science

Argues that Peirce wrote philosophy as a scientist, expanded empiricism, and conceived of science as responsible for its own philosophy.

T. L. Short (Author)

9781009223546, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 September 2022

300 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.1 cm, 0.57 kg

'T. L. Short's book is an enormously important contribution to Peirce scholarship that masterfully weaves together many different strands from Peirce's writings to present a rich, detailed, and tightly argued account of his view of science, his work as a scientist, and how that view and that work informed, motivated, and nourished his philosophy. Even the most knowledgeable Peirce scholars will come away from Short's book with a deeper understanding of familiar ideas and doctrines–like Peirce's pragmatism, realism, phenomenology, view of the normative sciences, etc.–and how they relate to each other and to Peirce's life as a working scientist.' Robert Lane, University of West Georgia

In this book, T. L. Short places the notorious difficulties of Peirce's important writings in a more productive light, arguing that he wrote philosophy as a scientist, by framing conjectures intended to be refined or superseded in the inquiries they initiate. He argues also that Peirce held that the methods and metaphysics of modern science are amended as inquiry progresses, making metaphysics a branch of empirical knowledge. Additionally, Short shows that Peirce's scientific work expanded empiricism on empirical grounds, grounding his phenomenology and subverting the fact/value dichotomy, and that he understood statistical explanations in nineteenth-century science as reintroducing the idea of final causation, now made empirical. Those innovations underlie Peirce's late ideas of a normative science and of philosophy as a branch of science. Short's rich and original study shows us how to read Peirce's writings and why they are worth reading.

1. Peirce's life in science: 1859–91
2. Peirce's concept of science
3. Modern science contra classical philosophy
4. The meaning of pragmatism
5. Misleading appearances of system
6. Devolution of the cosmogonic program
7. Experiments expanding empiricism
8. Phaneroscopy and realism
9. Normative science
10. Modern science contra modernity.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], Philosophy of science [PDA], Western philosophy, from c 1900 - [HPCF]