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Fourth, this supreme law, which is celestial and living harmony, does not so much as demand that the special ideas shall surrender their peculiar arbitrariness and caprice entirely; for that would be self-destructive. It only requires that they influence and be influenced by one another.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Time with its continuity logically involves some other kind of continuity than its own. Time, as the universal form of change, cannot exist unless there is something to undergo change, and to undergo a change continuous in time, there must be a continuity of changeable qualities.
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The tendency to regard continuity, in the sense in which I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in philosophy conveniently may be be termed synechism. The present paper is intended chiefly to show what synechism is, and what it leads to.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The word "God," so "capitalised" (as we Americans say), is the definable proper name, signifying Ens necessarium; in my belief Really creator of all three Universes of Experience.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.
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Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business. But do not make believe; if pedantry has not eaten all the reality out of you, recognize, as you must, that there is much that you do not doubt, in the least. Now that which you do not at all doubt, you must and do regard as infallible, absolute truth.
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In those sciences of measurement which are the least subject to error — meteorology, geodesy, and metrical astronomy — no man of self-respect ever now states his results, without affixing to it its probable error; and if this practice is not followed in other sciences it is because in those the probable errors are too vast to be estimated.
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The truth is, that common-sense, or thought as it first emerges above the level of the narrowly practical, is deeply imbued with that bad logical quality to which the epithet metaphysical is commonly applied; and nothing can clear it up but a severe course of logic.
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Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.
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If an opinion can eventually go to the determination of a practical belief, it, in so far, becomes itself a practical belief; and every proposition that is not pure metaphysical jargon and chatter must have some possible bearing upon practice.
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There is here no need of throwing out "extreme cases." Far from that, it is precisely in the extreme cases that the power and beauty of the magic eyeglass is most apparent and most marvellous. Let me take back the word "magic," though; for the reasonableness of it is just its crowning charm.
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A hypothesis is something which looks as if it might be true and were true, and which is capable of verification or refutation by comparison with facts.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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One will meet, for example, the virtual assumption that what is relative to thought cannot be real. But why not, exactly? Red is relative to sight, but the fact that this or that is in that relation to vision that we call being red is not itself relative to sight; it is a real fact.
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A chemical compound might be expected to be quite as much a proposition as like an algebraic invariant.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Modem mathematics is highly artistic. A simple theme is chosen, some conception pretty and charming in itself. Then it is shown that by simply holding this idea up to one's eye and looking through it, a whole forest that before seemed a thick and tangled jungle of bushes and briers is seen to be in reality an orderly garden.
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The scientific spirit requires a man to be at all times ready to dump his whole cartload of beliefs, the moment experience is against them.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Time and the heavens came into being at the same instant, in order that, if they were ever to dissolve, they might be dissolved together. Such was the mind and thought of God in the creation of time.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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When an image is said to be singular, it is meant that it is absolutely determinate in all respects. Every possible character, or the negative thereof, must be true of such an image.
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Science, when it comes to understand itself, regards facts as merely the vehicle of eternal truth, while for Practice they remain the obstacles which it has to turn, the enemy of which it is determined to get the better.
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The a priori method is distinguished for its comfortable conclusions. It is the nature of the process to adopt whatever belief weare inclined to, and there are certain flatteries to the vanity of man which we all believe by nature, until we are awakened from our pleasing dream by rough facts.
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Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus "theoretically," is to uselanguage in a Pickwickian sense. In practice, and in fact, mathematics is not exempt from that liability to error that affects everything that man does.
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Had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Theology, I am persuaded, derives its initial impulse from a religious wavering; for there is quite as much, or more, that is mysterious and calculated to awaken scientific curiosity in the intercourse with God, and it [is] a problem quite analogous to that of theology.
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Whenever a man acts purposively, he acts under a belief in some experimental phenomenon. Consequently, the sum of the experimental phenomena that a proposition implies makes up its entire bearing upon human conduct.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Charles Sanders Peirce
Creative Commons
Born:
September 10, 1839
Died:
April 19, 1914
(aged 74)
Bio:
Charles Sanders Peirce was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years.
Known for:
The essential Peirce
Peirce on signs
Chance, love, and logic
Philosophical Writings of Peirce
Most used words:
idea
time
mind
general
feeling
law
science
thought
second
consciousness
logic
future
moment
infinitesimal
objects
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