Charles Sanders Peirce: America's Greatest Unemployed Philosopher
In his last decades the founder of pragmatism and of modern semiotics could not afford to heat his house in winter and lived on stale bread donated by the local baker. He had held exactly one academic appointment in his life, and had been fired from it. Bertrand Russell, writing in 1959, delivered the verdict that history has since ratified: "Beyond doubt [...] he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever."
The Son of Harvard's Mathematician
Charles Sanders Peirce was born on 10 September 1839 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into the closest thing America then had to a scientific aristocracy. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was Harvard's professor of mathematics and astronomy and a dominant figure in American science; his mother was Sarah Hunt Mills. The boy grew up inside that discipline, and the expectations that came with the surname were mathematical ones.
He took a Bachelor of Arts and, in 1862, a Master of Arts from Harvard, and in 1863 the Lawrence Scientific School awarded him a Bachelor of Science — Harvard's first summa cum laude degree in chemistry. He was, in other words, a laboratory scientist by training long before he was a philosopher by reputation, and the distinction matters: his philosophy is the philosophy of a man who had actually done experiments.
Thirty Years of Pendulums
From 1859 to 1891, on and off, Peirce worked for the United States Coast Survey — renamed the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1878 — specialising in geodesy and gravimetry. His central technical work was the refinement of pendulum measurements used to determine variations in the Earth's gravitational field, painstaking metrological work in which the whole problem is the management of error. The post also kept him out of the Civil War, a convenience for a young man whose Boston Brahmin family sympathised with the Confederacy.
Three decades of measuring quantities that never quite agree with one another left their mark on everything he later wrote about truth. Peirce's philosophy takes inquiry to be fallible, self-correcting and communal — the temperament of the survey office rather than the seminar room.
The Metaphysical Club
In 1872, in Cambridge, Peirce founded the Metaphysical Club, an informal discussion group whose membership included the future Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and the psychologist William James. It lasted less than a year, dissolving in December 1872, but out of its arguments came the idea that would make Peirce's name.
He set it out in two articles: "The Fixation of Belief" in 1877 and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" in 1878. The proposal was that to clarify a concept you specify its conceivable practical consequences — what difference its truth would make to experience. This was pragmatism, and it became the first distinctively American contribution to world philosophy.
It also, in Peirce's view, got away from him. James and others developed the doctrine in directions he did not accept, and in 1905 he coined the term "pragmaticism" to distinguish his original formulation from the later variants.
The Logician
Peirce's technical achievements in logic are less famous than pragmatism and arguably more consequential. He developed the logic of relatives, extending logic beyond the one-place predicates inherited from the Aristotelian tradition to relations holding between several terms — without which nothing resembling modern mathematics can be formalised. He distinguished first-order from second-order quantification. He devised existential graphs, a diagrammatic notation for the predicate calculus that treated inference as a matter of drawing and transforming figures rather than manipulating strings of symbols.
The philosopher C. I. Lewis's assessment stands: "The contributions of C.S. Peirce to symbolic logic are more numerous and varied than those of any other writer — at least in the nineteenth century."
Signs
He also founded semiotics, the study of signs, and regarded logic as "the formal branch of semiotics" — a subordination that tells you how large he thought the subject was. Where most logicians treat symbols as given, Peirce asked what makes anything a sign of anything else at all, and built a general theory of signification alongside a tripartite theory of predication. Twentieth-century linguistics, literary theory and cognitive science all draw on that work, usually without much idea of where it came from.
Johns Hopkins, and the Ruin
In 1879 Peirce became a lecturer in logic at Johns Hopkins University — the only academic appointment he would ever hold. He was productive there, editing *Studies in Logic by Members of the Johns Hopkins University* in 1883, a volume of work by himself and his graduate students.
It ended in 1884, and it ended in scandal. Peirce's first wife, Harriet Melusina Fay, known as Zina, had left him in 1875. While still legally married he had become involved with Juliette, a woman whose full surname and nationality remain uncertain to this day; when his divorce was finalised in 1883 he married her. In 1884 the astronomer Simon Newcomb informed a Hopkins trustee that Peirce had cohabited with a woman to whom he was not then married. He was dismissed, and no American university employed him again. He had no children by either marriage.
Arisbe
In 1887 Peirce used an inheritance to buy 2,000 acres near Milford, Pennsylvania. He named the place Arisbe and had a farmhouse remodelled to his own design. The land produced no income whatsoever, and the couple slid into a poverty that lasted the rest of his life: unable to afford heat in winter, subsisting on old bread donated by the local baker. Friends and family — his brother James Mills Peirce, and relatives of the conservationist Gifford Pinchot among them — eventually settled his debts and property taxes.
William James, whose fame Peirce's ideas had helped build, became his closest supporter. James dedicated *The Will to Believe* in 1897 to him, arranged for him to give lecture series at Harvard in 1898 and 1903, and from 1907 until his own death in 1910 solicited money for Peirce annually from Boston intellectuals. The support continued after James died. Peirce repaid the debt in the only currency he had: he designated James's eldest son as his heir.
Milford, 1914
Peirce died destitute at Milford, Pennsylvania, on 19 April 1914. Juliette outlived him by twenty years, keeping his ashes in an urn at Arisbe until 1934, when Governor Gifford Pinchot arranged for her burial in Milford Cemetery; her husband's ashes were interred with her.
He left behind an enormous mass of unpublished manuscript and a reputation that took most of a century to assemble itself. The verdict of the twentieth century — Russell's, Lewis's, and that of the logicians and semioticians who kept finding their own discoveries already anticipated in his papers — was that America's most original philosophical mind had spent his working life measuring gravity for the government and his last years cold and hungry in Pennsylvania.
