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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 which he was working in the last decade of his life was entitled “A System of Logic, considered as Semeiotic.” Our edition will be the first to give prominence to this development and to facilitate the tracing of it in detail.

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.