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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

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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
Would
Towards
Statements
Inaccuracy
Tend
Ideal
Ingredient
Limits
Abstract
Confession
Bring
Scientific
Investigation
Virtue
Endless
Ingredients
Belief
Essential
Statement
Truth
Essentials
Limit
Concordance
May
Ideals
Possess
Sidedness

More quotes by Charles Sanders Peirce

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All the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the power of unaided individuals.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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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
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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.
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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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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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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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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Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.
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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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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But the extraordinary insight which some persons are able to gain of others from indications so slight that it is difficult to ascertain what they are, is certainly rendered more comprehensible by the view here taken.
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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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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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
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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.
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 do not really think, we are barely conscious, until something goes wrong.
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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It has never been in my power to study anything, mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic .
Charles Sanders Peirce
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A true proposition is a proposition belief which would never lead to such disappointment so long as the proposition is not understood otherwise than it was intended.
Charles Sanders Peirce