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Peirce's Theory of Methodology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Otto Bird
Otto Bird*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
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Abstract

Peirce conceived of methodology, or methodeutic, as he preferred to call it, as one of the three major parts of logic taken broadly—the other two being the theory of signs and formal logic. Unlike these two, however, his theory of methodology remained mostly programmatic, and there is little more than fragmentary suggestions about it scattered through his writings. But by gathering them together and pursuing their insights, it is possible to indicate how he might have divided and developed it: 1) The nature of scientific discourse and how it differs from non-scientific. 2) The logic of inquiry, both heuristic and systematic, according to the modes of argument as deductive, inductive, or abductive (i.e. hypothesis) or a combination or all three. 3) The assurance of science considered in the factors that thwart or promote inquiry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , July 1959 , pp. 187 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © 1959 by Philosophy of Science Association

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References

1 Citations in bracketed numerals are, by volume and paragraph number, to the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. 1-6 edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss; Vols. 7-8 edited by A. W. Burks, Cambridge, Harvard 1931-35; 1958.

2 Arthur W. Burks, The Logical Foundations of the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, doctoral dissertation, Ann Arbor, 1941.

3 In Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, edit. P. P. Wiener and F. H. Young, Cambridge, Harvard, 1952, p. 166-182.

4 For the whole question of Peirce's complex division of signs, cf. P. Weiss and A. Burks, “Peirce's Sixty-Six Signs” in Journal of Philosophy, XLII (1945), p. 383-388, repeated with minor changes in Lieb, cited below in n. 5. I am much indebted to it. In the divisions I use I give usually only one of the many names that Peirce at various times assigned to them; all of them are included in this article by Weiss and Burks.

5 Citations by bracketed “LW” and numeral refer, by page number, to Charles S. Peirce's Letters to Lady Welby, edit. I. C. Lieb, New Haven, Whitlock's, 1953.

6 Cf. for example, M. L. Prior and A. N. Prior, “Erotetic Logic” in Philosophical Review, 1955, p. 43-59 and A. Hofstadter and J. C. C. McKinsey, “On the Logic of Imperatives” in Philosophy of Science, VI (1939), p. 446-457.

7 An example of such an analysis as Peirce suggests may be found in G. Polya, How to Solve It, Princeton, 1948.

8 Since abduction is “nothing but guessing” (7.219), Peirce would certainly have welcomed as a contribution to the methodology of abduction, Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning by G. Polya, Princeton, 1954, 2 vols. Cf. also A. W. Burks, “Peirce's Theory of Abduction” in Philosophy of Science, XIII (1946), p. 301-306.

9 Cf. M. H. Fisch & J. I. Cope, “Peirce at Johns Hopkins University,” in the Wiener-Young Studies (above, n. 3), p. 288, p. 357, n. 39.

10 In Values in a Universe of Chance : Selected Writings of Charles S. Peirce, edit. P. P. Wiener, Stanford, 1958, p. 250-257.