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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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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
Habit
Belief
Action
Modes
Give
Distinguished
Giving
Establishment
Different
Beliefs
Rise
Essence

More quotes by Charles Sanders Peirce

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It is a common observation that a science first begins to be exact when it is quantitatively treated. What are called the exact sciences are no others than the mathematical ones.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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It is certain that the only hope of retroductive reasoning ever reaching the truth is that there may be some natural tendency toward an agreement between the ideas which suggest themselves to the human mind and those which are concerned in the laws of nature.
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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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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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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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Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.
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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Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The idea does not belong to the soul it is the soul that belongs to the idea.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit.
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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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We shall do better to abandon the whole attempt to learn the truthunless we can trust to the human mind's having such a powerof guessing right that before very many hypotheses shall have been tried, intelligent guessing may be expected to lead us to one which will support all tests, leaving the vast majority of possible hypotheses unexamined.
Charles Sanders Peirce