Top 71 Sanders Peirce Quotes
#1. 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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#2. 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
#3. The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#4. It is impossible not to envy the man who can dismiss reason, although we know how it must turn out at last.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. The difference between a pessimistic and an optimistic mind is of such controlling importance in regard to every intellectual function, and especially for the conduct of life, that it is out of the question to admit that both are normal, and the great majority of mankind are naturally optimistic.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#10. If liberty of speech is to be untrammeled from the grosser forms of constraint, the uniformity of opinion will be secured by a moral terrorism to which the respectability of society will give its thorough approval.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#11. Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#17. A pair of statements may be taken conjunctively or disjunctively; for example, "It lightens and it thunders ," is conjunctive, "It lightens or it thunders" is disjunctive. Each such individual act of connecting a pair of statements is a new monad for the mathematician .
Charles Sanders Peirce
#18. To know what we think, to be masters of our own meaning, will make a solid foundation for great and weighty thought.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#19. Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#21. True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#22. It is not knowing, but the love of learning, that characterizes the scientific man.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#23. Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#25. 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
#26. Fate then is that necessity by which a certain result will surely be brought to pass according to the natural course of events however we may vary the particular circumstances which precede the event.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#27. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#28. Let it be considered that what is more wholesome than any particular belief is integrity of belief; and that to avoid looking into the support of any belief from a fear that it may turn out rotten is quite as immoral as it is disadvantageous.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#33. 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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#34. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason. Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#35. 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
#36. Over against any cognition, there is an unknown but knowable reality; but over against all possible cognition, there is only the self-contradictory. In short, cognizability (in its widest sense) and being are not merely metaphysically the same, but are synonymous terms.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#37. The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#38. Third, consider the insistency of an idea. The insistency of a past idea with reference to the present is a quantity which is less, the further back that past idea is, and rises to infinity as the past idea is brought up into coincidence with the present.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#40. 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
#42. Unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#43. 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
#44. Every work of science great enough to be well remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written; and each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#45. 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
#47. The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#48. We, one and all of us, have an instinct to pray; and this fact constitutes an invitation from God to pray.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#49. 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
#50. 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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#52. This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Truly, that reason upon which we plume ourselves, though it may answer for little things, yet for great decisions is hardly surer than a toss up.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#58. 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
#59. There is a kink in my damned brain that prevents me from thinking as other people think.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#61. Among the minor, yet striking characteristics of mathematics, may be mentioned the fleshless and skeletal build of its propositions; the peculiar difficulty, complication, and stress of its reasonings; the perfect exactitude of its results; their broad universality; their practical infallibility.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#63. All the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the power of unaided individuals.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#64. 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
#66. And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. The woof and warp of all thought and all research is symbols, and the life of thought and science is the life inherent in symbols; so that it is wrong to say that a good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is the essence of it.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#71. There is not a single truth of science upon which we ought to bet more than about a million of millions to one.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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