Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Freedom
Skepticism
Human
Element
Humans
Result
Made
Atheism
Elements
Progress
Philosophy
Results
Methodical

More quotes by Charles Sanders Peirce

Image
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
Image
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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Image
The idea does not belong to the soul it is the soul that belongs to the idea.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Image
The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Image
Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Image
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
Image
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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Image
The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Image
... and it is probably that there is some secret here which remains to be discovered.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Image
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
Image
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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Image
Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Image
Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics.
Charles Sanders Peirce