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All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

Charles Sanders Peirce

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Charles Sanders Peirce
Age: 74 †
Born: 1839
Born: September 10
Died: 1914
Died: April 19
Geodesist
Linguist
Logician
Mathematician
Philosopher
Pragmatist
Statistician
University Teacher
Phillips Place
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Charles Peirce
Charles S. Peirce
Charles Sanders Santiago Peirce
CSP
Proceeds
Vague
Definite
Evolution

More quotes by Charles Sanders Peirce

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When anything is present to the mind, what is the very first and simplest character to be noted in it, in every case, no matter how little elevated the object may be? Certainly, it is its presentness .
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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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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.
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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Still, it will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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It is not knowing, but the love of learning, that characterizes the scientific man.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The method of authority will always govern the mass of mankind and those who wield the various forms of organized force in the state will never be convinced that dangerous reasoning ought not to be suppressed in some way.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since Newton's time, his saying that we are little children picking up pretty pebbles on the beach while the whole ocean lies before us unexplored remains substantially as true as ever, and will do so though we shovel up the pebbles by steam shovels and carry them off in carloads.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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All the progress we have made in philosophy ... is the result of that methodical skepticism which is the element of human freedom.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Some think to avoid the influence of metaphysical errors, by paying no attention to metaphysics but experience shows that these men beyond all others are held in an iron vice of metaphysical theory, because by theories that they have never called in question.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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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 of inert matter 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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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We should chiefly depend not upon that department of the soul which is most superficial and fallible (our reason), but upon that department that is deep and sure, which is instinct.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit.
Charles Sanders Peirce