We come finally to the question of how the actual selecting of our particular “Selected Papers of Charles S. Peirce” is done. In general, (a) by giving preference to his more philosophical writings in logic and metaphysics; (b) by including fewer selections from his technical scientific, mathematical and historical writings; and (c) by giving preference among the latter only to those that are more relevant to his philosophical writings.
We rest our case for this procedure on the fact that our aim is to show the development of Peirce’s thought, and that development is not shown in his technical scientific papers but in his philosophical papers. However, Peirce wrote “natural philosophy” almost in the tradition of Bacon and Newton. From the beginning, philosophy for Peirce meant primarily those problems in logic and metaphysics that are encompassed today by the philosophy of science. While Peirce was primarily a logician, the most widely accepted division of logic in his time was into the logic of mathematics (deductive logic) on the one hand and the logic of science (inductive logic) on the other. In his own eyes his work in mathematics, in the sciences, and in the history of science, was all for the sake of a logic that included both the logic of mathematics and the logic of science. The development of Peirce’s thought was a development primarily in the philosophy of logic in that inclusive sense.
Nevertheless, our policies of selection are open to the objection that Peirce’s professional career was in science, not in philosophy. He made original contributions to an extraordinarily wide range of the special sciences and was not only a mathematical physicist but a pure mathematician who made professional contributions to pure mathematics as well as to mathematical pedagogy, and he was also an historian of science and mathematics. A selection from his writings that encourages its readers to ignore or to forget these facts may be considered to be radically defective.
To counter this objection there are two possible replies. The first is that a selected edition of Peirce’s writings cannot be all-inclusive or comprehensive. To attempt to do equal justice to everything would be to do justice to nothing. We believe that twenty volumes will be adequate to the aims we have set for the present edition, but this will necessarily limit our accommodating of other aims.
The second point in reply is that nearly all of Peirce’s scientific and some of his mathematical writings were published and are therefore available in the journals in which they originally appeared as well as in a microfiche edition: Charles Sanders Peirce: Complete Published Works, including Selected Secondary Materials, edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner, Christian J. W. Kloesel, and Joseph M. Ransdell (Greenwich, CT: Johnson Associates, 1977). The mathematical writings Peirce left unpublished are well represented also in The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, edited by Carolyn Eisele, 4 volumes in 5 (The Hague: Mouton; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1976). Professor Eisele also has in preparation a separate edition of Peirce’s writings, both published and unpublished, on the history of science. Finally, the articles and reviews Peirce wrote for the Nation contain much of scientific interest and are now available in Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to THE NATION, compiled and annotated by Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook, 3 volumes (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1975–78). Our option to concentrate on Peirce’s philosophical writings relies heavily on the fact that these excellent editions of his scientific work are available, leaving our edition free to meet significant needs of present and future students of Peirce’s work which are not now met.
Each of these replies is sound and just, but even together they may not entirely suffice. The solution to which we have finally come is to include in each volume, immediately after the editorial notes, a single chronological list of all the papers Peirce either published or wrote but did not publish within the period covered by the volume. Papers he wrote but did not publish are listed if they seem to have been drafted with a view to eventual publication, or for delivery as lectures, for presentation at professional meetings, or for circulation to correspondence course students. A few professional letters will also be included in the list.
Thus any reader wishing to make a thorough study of Peirce’s work during the period covered by a given volume of our edition will find within that volume itself a guide leading to the papers we omit, and placing them in relation to the papers we include. The chronological list will thus provide, volume by volume, the only kind of completeness and comprehensiveness that is open to an edition whose aims and policies are those we have outlined above.
Each volume will moreover contain a brief historical introduction giving an account of Peirce’s activities within its time span, including the work he was doing in the sciences, in mathematics, and in the history of science.
We trust that the historical introduction near the beginning and the chronological list near the end of each volume will serve to frame the papers that appear between them, and that reference to these additional materials will, in turn, enrich and support our comprehensive aim of encouraging the careful study of Charles Peirce’s philosophical development by tracing his thought chronologically and in his own words.
The reader should be aware that, so far as editing is concerned, our policy has been one of restraint. Those writings of Peirce which are in handwritten form can be edited to the point where a reader may doubt that he is still reading Peirce. We therefore exercise caution. If a spelling (e.g., proceedure) is shown in the Oxford English Dictionary as being in use in the nineteenth century, we leave it in. If Peirce spells it “Compte,” we leave it that way (although in the index we show “Comte” because that is where a modern reader would look for it). In short, it is our intent that the reader of our volumes should read what Peirce wrote, not what we thought he should have written. Such emendations as we make are done only where we find the original text to be unclear and where we are relatively certain of Peirce’s intentions. We have noted these changes in our emendations list. Our double-reader, multiple proof-readings give us confidence that very few typographical errors will be found in the Peirce text. The eccentricities and anomalies that occur are those of the author.
Our volumes are inspected by the Center for Scholarly Editions, Modern Language Association of America. They are clear-text editions and bear the Center’s seal as “An Approved Edition.”
EDWARD C. MOORE
Indianapolis
January 1983
NOTE TO THE SECOND PRINTING
The following corrections have been incorporated in this second printing (with the original readings in brackets): xv.16 thought [thought,]; 13.61 a, b, [a,b]; 64.6 n [m]; 64.8 n [u]; 71n.3 est, aliud [est aliud,]; 71n.8(1) secundum [secundem]; 218n.15 antecedent [antecendent]; 227.2 that no [that that]; 265.22 it with [with it]; 312.17 relatifs [relatives]; 312.21 (also 534.20, 21) âge [age]; 485.14 Hume [Hume’s]; 525.31 magician [magican]; 527.6-7 (should read: Peirce’s “the memory” is “it” in the original, “compared with” is “in comparison of,” and “are” is “were.”); 589.15 94.1-4 [194.1-4]. Appropriate emendations have been added on pages 590, 608, 609, 614, and 627.
Indianapolis
July 1990
1Ernest Nagel, Scientific American, 200(1959):185.
2Solon I. Bailey, The History and Work of Harvard Observatory, 1839–1927, Harvard Observatory. Monograph No. 4 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1931), pp. 198–99.
3C. I. Lewis and C. H. Langford, Symbolic Logic (New York: Century, 1932), p. 21.
4C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), p. 279.
Acknowledgments
We are indebted to Indiana University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation, for their continuing support of the Peirce Edition Project; to the Harvard University Department of Philosophy for permission to use the original manuscripts, and to the officers of the Houghton Library, where the Charles S. Peirce Papers