As cada vez mais freqüentes referências ao pensamento de Peirce feitas pela contemporânea filosofia da ciência não têm sido capazes de esconder a dificuldade encontrada de assumi-lo em sua integridade. A maior parte das citações é parcial e contradiz o conjunto da doutrina. Parece ser mais fácil chamar para conversação William James e John Dewey do que chamar seu inspirador comum. A razão última deste desafio parece se encontrar na radicalidade do realismo falibilista, dificilmente aceitável pela maioria das filosofias atuais. (...) The increasingly frequent references to Peirce's thought made by the contemporary Philosophy of Science are not able to conceal the difficulty found in assuming that thought in its entireness. The most part of the quotations made are partial and contradict the whole of the doctrine. It seems easier to call James and Dewey to conversation than to call their common inspirer. The ultimate reason for this challenge seems to lie in the radicality of the fallibilist realism, hardly acceptable by almost all the present philosophical currents. (shrink)

As cada vez mais freqüentes referências ao pensamento de Peirce feitas pela contemporânea filosofia da ciência não têm sido capazes de esconder a dificuldade encontrada de assumi-lo em sua integridade. A maior parte das citações é parcial e contradiz o conjunto da doutrina. Parece ser mais fácil chamar para conversação William James e John Dewey do que chamar seu inspirador comum. A razão última deste desafio parece se encontrar na radicalidade do realismo falibilista, dificilmente aceitável pela maioria das filosofias atuais. (...) The increasingly frequent references to Peirce's thought made by the contemporary Philosophy of Science are not able to conceal the difficulty found in assuming that thought in its entireness. The most part of the quotations made are partial and contradict the whole of the doctrine. It seems easier to call James and Dewey to conversation than to call their common inspirer. The ultimate reason for this challenge seems to lie in the radicality of the fallibilist realism, hardly acceptable by almost all the present philosophical currents. (shrink)

Louis Loeb has argued that Hume is pessimistic while Peirce is optimistic about the attainment of fully stable beliefs. In contrast, we argue that Hume was optimistic about such attainment but only if the scope of philosophical investigation is limited to first-order explanatory questions. Further, we argue that Peirce, after reformulating the pragmatic maxim to accommodate the reality of counterfactuals, was pessimistic about such attainment. Finally, we articulate and respond to Peirce's objection that Hume's skeptical arguments in T 1.4.1 and (...) his commitment to common sense indicate that Hume was confused about whether we could have stable beliefs at all. (shrink)

Discussions concerning belief revision, theorydevelopment, and ``creativity'' in philosophy andAI, reveal a growing interest in Peirce'sconcept of abduction. Peirce introducedabduction in an attempt to providetheoretical dignity and clarification to thedifficult problem of knowledge generation. Hewrote that ``An Abduction is Originary inrespect to being the only kind of argumentwhich starts a new idea'' (Peirce, CP 2.26).These discussions, however, led to considerabledebates about the precise way in which Peirce'sabduction can be used to explain knowledgegeneration (cf. Magnani, 1999; Hoffmann, 1999).The crucial question is (...) that of understandinghow we can get the new elements capableof enlarging our theories. Under thesecircumstances, it might be helpful to step outof the entanglement and reconsider the basis ofthe problem that originally triggered Peirce'sinterest in abduction. This will lead us toanother Peircean concept, that of ``diagrammaticreasoning,'' which I discuss here in the contextof his ``pragmatism.'' In this way, I hope toreach a better understanding of thecontribution of ``abduction'' to the knowledgegeneration process. (shrink)

Forrester’s proposed seventh style of reasoning – thinking in cases – functions as an analogous, dyadic relationship that, whilst indebted philosophically to the logical reasoning and semiotics of Charles Peirce, is prone to creating feedback loops between induction and deduction, precluding novel abductive hypotheses from advancing medical knowledge. Reasoning with a Peircean triadic model opens up the contexts and methods of meaning-making and reasoning through medical cases, and the potent influence of their genre conventions, to intellectual critical scrutiny. Vitally, it (...) offers a third mode – abduction – that this article argues needs to be reintroduced into Forrester’s model of reasoning with cases. This article demonstrates this by applying a Peircean triadic model of reasoning to Forrester’s own model, tracing a shared genealogy but one in which the abductive element was lost. The article goes on to illustrate the explanatory and predictive potential of Peircean abductive reasoning and the necessary re-theorising of the case this entails. This argument is supported through an analysis of early case reports of what would become HIV/Aids, drawn from the Case Records of Massachusetts General Hospital series in the New England Journal of Medicine. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Method of Inquiry Doubt, Intuition, and Certainty Peirce's Reconstruction of the “method for guiding one's reason” A Transformed Ontology.

While a number of classical pragmatists crafted their philosophies in conjunction with a careful study of Hegel's works, others saw their philosophies emerge in antagonism with proponents of Hegel. In this paper, we offer an instance of the latter case. Namely, we show that the impetus for Charles S. Peirce's early articulation and avowal of realism (the claim that some generals are real) was William Torrey Harris's claim that the formal laws of logic lacked universal validity. According to Harris, the (...) leading representative of Hegelism in the United States, the universal validity of the laws of logic rested on a nominalistic metaphysics that a Hegelian-realism showed to be false. In response to this charge, we articulate how Peirce's attempt to prove the universal validity of the laws of logic resulted in avowing a realism that differed from both nominalism and Harris's Hegelian-realism. (shrink)

In this article, Peirce’s conception of natural class is discussed. It is shown that Peirce’s mature conception of natural class is intimately related to his conception of causation. Peirce’s originality in respect of natural classes concerns at least two insights: first, he made clear that all classification, be it natural or artificial, must be related to some purpose. Secondly, natural classifications do not primarily involve our purposes, but the final causes of the classified things themselves. According to Peirce, things belong (...) to the same natural class on account of a metaphysical essence and a number of class characters. The metaphysical essence is a general principle by virtue of which the members of the class have a tendency to behave in a specific way; this is what Peirce meant by final cause. This finality may be expressed in some sort of microstructure. The class characters, which by themselves are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for membership of a class, are nevertheless concomitant. Natural classes, though very real, do not exist; their reality is of the nature of possibility, not of actuality. The primary instances of natural classes are the objects of scientific taxonomy, such as elementary particles in physics, gold in chemistry, and species in biology, but also man-made objects and social classes. (shrink)