Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.

It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamic action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects, — whether they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient, entirely or partially, — or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by "semiosis" I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.

You are of all my friends the one who illustrates pragmatism in its most needful forms. You are a jewel of pragmatism.

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. To an earlier age knowledge was power — merely that and nothing more; to us it is life and the summum bonum. Emancipation from the bonds of self, of one's own prepossessions, importunately sought at the hands of that rational power before which all must ultimately bow, — this is the characteristic that distinguishes all the great figures of nineteenth-century science from those of former periods.

The consciousness of a general idea has a certain "unity of the ego" in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person, and indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea.

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.

The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either —

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.

The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, selected and edited with an introducton by Justus Buchler. p. 49

True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.

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.

If a man burns to learn and sets himself to comparing his ideas with experimental results in order that he may correct those ideas, every scientific man will recognize him as a brother, no matter how small his knowledge may be.

Now it is plainly not an essential part of this method in general that the tests were made by the observation of natural objects. For the immense progress which modern mathematics has made is also to be explained by the same intense interest in testing general propositions by particular cases — only the tests were applied by means of particular demonstrations. This is observation, still, for as the great mathematician Gauss has declared — algebra is a science of the eye, only it is observation of artificial objects and of a highly recondite character.

Они који извршавају на различите начине организовану моћ у држави неће се никада моћи уверити у то да опасна размишљања не треба на неки начин потчињавати. Тамо где право говора није отворено спречавано, јединство мнења се постиже моралним терором са којим су поштовани у друштву изричито сагласни. Следити мишљење владајућих значи ићи стазом мира. Нека су скретања допуштена, друга која важе као несигурна, забрањена. Она су различита у различитим земљама и различитим епохама, али ма где био: ако је познато да припадаш табуисаној вери можеш бити сигуран да ће с тобом поступати с окрутношћу која је мање брутална, али рафинованија од лова на вука. Највећи духовни доброчинитељи човечанства никада се нису усудили а и данас се не усуђују да изнесу своје мисли. Сенка сумње прима фацие пада на свако размишљање које се чини важним за сигурност друштва. По правилу прогањање долази само споља: човек се сам раздире и често је преплашен тиме што заступа ставове против којих су га његовог мишљења ауторитету учили да се бори. Мирном и добронамерном карактеру стога тешко пада да се супротстави покушају потчињавања.

„Oni koji izvršavaju na različite načine organizovanu moć u državi neće se nikada moći uveriti u to da opasna razmišljanja ne treba na neki način potčinjavati. Tamo gde pravo govora nije otvoreno sprečavano, jedinstvo mnenja se postiže moralnim terorom sa kojim su poštovani u društvu izričito saglasni. Slediti mišljenje vladajućih znači ići stazom mira. Neka su skretanja dopuštena, druga koja važe kao nesigurna, zabranjena. Ona su različita u različitim zemljama i različitim epohama, ali ma gde bio: ako je poznato da pripadaš tabuisanoj veri možeš biti siguran da će s tobom postupati s okrutnošću koja je manje brutalna, ali rafinovanija od lova na vuka. Najveći duhovni dobročinitelji čovečanstva nikada se nisu usudili a i danas se ne usuđuju da iznesu svoje misli. Senka sumnje prima facie pada na svako razmišljanje koje se čini važnim za sigurnost društva. Po pravilu proganjanje dolazi samo spolja: čovek se sam razdire i često je preplašen time što zastupa stavove protiv kojih su ga njegovog mišljenja autoritetu učili da se bori. Mirnom i dobronamernom karakteru stoga teško pada da se suprotstavi pokušaju potčinjavanja.