Preface
In an assessment of Charles Peirce as a philosopher, Ernest Nagel wrote that “there is a fair consensus among historians of ideas that Charles Sanders Peirce remains the most original, versatile, and comprehensive philosophical mind this country has yet produced.”1 Although Peirce published a wide variety of papers and reviews, he published only one major work (Photometric Researches, Leipzig, 1878) and that was not in philosophy. In 1923, Morris R. Cohen edited a volume, collecting two series of Peirce’s published papers, under the title of Chance, Love and Logic, but it was not until Harvard University Press published volumes 1 through 6 of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce from 1931 to 1935 under the editorship of Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss and volumes 7 and 8 in 1958 under the editorship of Arthur W. Burks that American philosophers began to be aware of the range and depth of Peirce’s work.
Although Peirce is best known as the founder of the philosophical doctrine known as pragmatism, it is becoming increasingly clear that the philosophical problems that interested him the most were those of the scientist. Peirce’s father, Benjamin Peirce (1809–1880), was a distinguished professor of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard University; Peirce himself received a bachelor of arts degree from Harvard in 1859, a master of arts in 1862, and a bachelor of science in chemistry in 1863.
He was employed for over thirty years by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey as a scientist. In 1963 the Survey commissioned the CSS Peirce. At that time the Director of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, Rear Admiral H. Arnold Karo, wrote me that, “In addition to being a logician and philosopher, Peirce made many important scientific and technical contributions to the Coast and Geodetic Survey during his thirty years of service in the bureau.”
Incidental to his work for the Coast Survey, Peirce worked as an assistant at the Harvard Observatory from 1869 to 1872 and made a series of astronomical observations from 1872 to 1875 of which Solon I. Bailey says, “The first attempt at the Harvard Observatory to determine the form of the Milky Way, or the galactic system, was made by Charles S. Peirce.… The investigation was of a pioneer nature, founded on scant data.”2
Peirce made major contributions also in mathematics and logic. C. I. Lewis has remarked that, “The head and front of mathematical logic is found in the calculus of propositional functions, as developed by Peirce and Schröder.…”3
Peirce invented, almost from whole cloth, the study of signs. Ogden and Richards say that, “By far the most elaborate and determined attempt to give an account of signs and their meanings is that of the American logician C. S. Peirce, from whom William James took the idea and the term Pragmatism, and whose Algebra of Dyadic Relations was developed by Schröder.”4
Peirce was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1867), the National Academy of Sciences (1877), the London Mathematical Society (1880), and the New York Mathematical Society (later the American Mathematical Society) (1891), but his personality traits were such that he often offended men of eminence and he had difficulty obtaining an academic appointment. He taught for a few years at The Johns Hopkins University and gave several series of public lectures at Harvard and in Boston. Through 1891 most of his income came from his work for the Coast and Geodetic Survey. In the 1880s he inherited enough money to buy a farm house and sixty acres of land along the Delaware River near Milford, Pennsylvania. He lived there from 1888 until his death in 1914. He died in the greatest poverty, unknown except to a few friends. Upon his death his unpublished manuscripts were obtained by Harvard University. Difficulties in editing the cartons of manuscripts protracted the process of making the papers generally available to scholars. Only in 1964 were most of these handwritten papers reproduced in microfilm by the Harvard University Microreproduction Service. The series, titled “The Microfilm Edition of the Charles S. Peirce Papers in the Houghton Library of Harvard University,” consisted originally of thirty rolls of microfilm which were later supplemented by two additional rolls from the papers and a six-roll selection from Peirce’s professional correspondence, making thirty-eight rolls in all. Richard S. Robin’s Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967) and his “The Peirce Papers: A Supplementary Catalogue” (Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 7[1971]:37–57) serve as guides to that edition.
The writings Peirce himself published run to approximately twelve thousand printed pages. At five hundred pages to the volume, these would make 24 volumes. The known manuscripts that he left unpublished run to approximately eighty thousand handwritten pages. If, on the average, two manuscript pages yield a book page, it would take 80 additional volumes for the unpublished papers and would require 104 volumes for his complete works.
Every previously printed edition of Peirce’s writings might therefore fairly be entitled “Selected Papers,” with a subtitle indicating the scope of the selection. The present edition is no exception. What follows here is a statement of the aims and the editorial policies that have determined the selections for this edition.
The general aim of our edition is to facilitate the study of the development of Peirce’s thought. We believe that it is important to know how a philosopher arrives at his conclusions. For that reason the present edition is chronological. It brings into a single chronological order papers published by Peirce and papers which he left unpublished. With the exception of papers read at conferences, papers published appear in our volumes as of the dates of their publication. Papers left unpublished appear as of the dates of their composition when Peirce himself dated them or when their dates can be determined from other evidence. In the case of papers datable only within a year or two, we permit ourselves some latitude in placing them in relation to dated papers.
The second principal aim of our edition is to make it as easy as possible to determine the degree of coherence and systematic unity which Peirce’s thought had at each stage of its development. Accordingly, we depart from the chronological arrangement wherever it is necessary in order to present every series of papers as a unit, uninterrupted by other papers published or composed between the first and last of a series. And, with very few exceptions, we publish no excerpts. We hope by these procedures to preserve the integrity of every effort Peirce made to give an orderly and more or less comprehensive exposition of his views.
Our third principal aim is to include as high a proportion of previously unpublished papers as our other aims permit. We shall be able to attain our first and second aims only by including some material published by Peirce himself or included in previous letterpress editions. However, in all cases of material not published by Peirce himself, we have returned to the original manuscripts and edited them anew. With material which Peirce published, we have returned to the original printing. In our edition as a whole, we aim at one-half to two-thirds new material, not previously published. In another sense, however, we expect that nearly everything in our edition will seem new in virtue of the fresh context provided for it by our single chronological sequence.
One further word as to the aims of our edition. Recently an increasing proportion of the readers of Peirce come to him from semiotics, the general theory of signs, and think of him as one of the founders of that science; often as the founder, or at least as the American founder. Peirce from the beginning conceived of logic as coming in its entirety within the scope of the general theory of signs. All of his work in logic was done within that framework. At first he conceived of logic as a branch of a branch of semeiotic (his preferred spelling). For a time in his fifties he distinguished a narrow and a broad sense of logic. In the broad sense logic was coextensive with semeiotic. Eventually he abandoned the narrow sense. The comprehensive treatise on