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Charles Sanders Peirce citations
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Charles Sanders Peirce est un sémiologue et philosophe américain. Il est considéré comme le fondateur du courant pragmatiste avec William James et, avec Ferdinand de Saussure, l'un des deux pères de la sémiologie moderne, ainsi qu'un des plus grands logiciens. Ces dernières décennies, sa pensée a été l'objet d'un regain d'intérêt. Il est désormais considéré comme un novateur dans de nombreux domaines, en particulier dans la façon de concevoir les méthodes d'enquête et de recherche et dans la philosophie des sciences. William James, qui introduisit le terme en philosophie , attribue à Peirce la fondation du pragmatisme. Toutefois, contrairement à d'autres pragmatistes comme James ou John Dewey, Peirce conçoit le pragmatisme comme une méthode pour la clarification d'idées s'appuyant sur l'utilisation de méthodes scientifiques pour résoudre des problèmes philosophiques. Wikipedia  

✵ 10. septembre 1839 – 19. avril 1914
Charles Sanders Peirce photo
Charles Sanders Peirce: 121   citations 0   J'aime

Charles Sanders Peirce: Citations en anglais

“The development of the human mind has practically extinguished all feelings, except a few sporadic kinds, [like] sound, colors, smells, warmth, etc., which now appear to be disconnected and separate.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“Wherever ideas come together they tend to weld into general ideas; and whenever they are generally connected, general ideas govern the connection; and these general ideas are living feelings spread out.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“The recognition by one person of another's personality takes place by means to some extent identical to the means by which he is conscious of his own personality. The idea of the second personality, which is as much as to say that second personality itself, enters within the direct consciousness of the first person, and is immediately perceived as his ego, though less strongly. At the same time, the opposition between the two persons is perceived, so that the externality of the second is perceived.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“But the extraordinary insight which some persons are able to gain of others from indications so slight that it is difficult to ascertain what they are, is certainly rendered more comprehensible by the view here taken.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“The next simplest feature that is common to all that comes before the mind, and consequently, the second category, is the element of Struggle.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 2 : Struggle, CP 5.45
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)

“Second, by this and other means we are driven to perceive, what is quite evident in itself, that instantaneous feelings flow together in a continuum of feeling, which has in a modified degree the peculiar vivacity of feeling and has gained generality. And in reference to such general ideas, or continua of feeling, the difficulties about resemblance and suggestion and reference to the external, cease to have any force.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“What distinct meaning can attach to saying that an idea in the past in any way affects an idea in the future, from which it is completely detached?”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“It has never been in my power to study anything, — mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Letter to Victoria (23 December 1908)

“From these two immediate perceptions, we gain a mediate, or inferential perception of the relation of all four instants. This mediate perception is objectively, or as to the object being represented, spread over the four instants; but subjectively, or as itself the subject of duration, it is completely embraced in the second moment. (The reader will observe that I use the word instant to mean a point in time, and moment to mean an infinitesimal duration.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“Let me now try to gather up all these odds and ends of commentary and restate the law of mind, in a unitary way.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Letter to Victoria, Lady Welby (1908) SS 80-81

“The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Letter to William James (8 January 1909)

“If the sensation that precedes the present by half a second were still immediately before me, then on the same principle, the sensation preceding that would be immediately present, and so on ad infinitum. Now, since there is a time [period], say a year, at the end of which an idea is no longer ipso facto present, it follows that this is true of any finite interval, however short.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Quoted in Essays in Zoosemiotics (1990) by Thomas A. Sebeok

“The old dualistic notion of mind and matter, so prominent in Cartesianism, as two radically different kinds of substance, will hardly find defenders to-day. Rejecting this, we are driven to some form of hylopathy, otherwise called monism.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Architecture of Theories (1891)

“The difference between a pessimistic and an optimistic mind is of such controlling importance in regard to every intellectual function, and especially for the conduct of life, that it is out of the question to admit that both are normal, and the great majority of mankind are naturally optimistic.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Source: A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God (1908), V

“Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Vol. V, par. 265
Collected Papers (1931-1958)

“Since space is continuous, it follows that there must be an immediate community of feeling between parts of mind infinitesimally close together. Without this, I believe it would have been impossible for any co-ordination to be established in the action of the nerve-matter of one brain.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“Second, in the presence of this continuity of feeling, nominalistic maxims appear futile. There is no doubt about one idea affecting another, when we can directly perceive the one generally modified and shaping itself into the other. Nor can there any longer be any difficulty about one idea resembling another, when we can pass along the continuous field of quality from one to the other and back again to the point which we had marked.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“When anything is present to the mind, what is the very first and simplest character to be noted in it, in every case, no matter how little elevated the object may be? Certainly, it is its presentness.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 1 : Presentness, CP 5.44
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)

“The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either —
# That this, that, or the other, is wine; or,
# That wine possesses certain properties.
Such beliefs are nothing but self-notifications that we should, upon occasion, act in regard to such things as we believe to be wine according to the qualities which we believe wine to possess. The occasion of such action would be some sensible perception, the motive of it to produce some sensible result. Thus our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses, our habit has the same bearing as our action, our belief the same as our habit, our conception the same as our belief; and we can consequently mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon. Now, it is not my object to pursue the theological question; and having used it as a logical example I drop it, without caring to anticipate the theologian's reply. I only desire to point out how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceived sensible effects of things. Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself. It is absurd to say that thought has any meaning unrelated to its only function. It is foolish for Catholics and Protestants to fancy themselves in disagreement about the elements of the sacrament, if they agree in regard to all their sensible effects, here or hereafter.
It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The final sentence here is an expression of what became known as the Pragmatic maxim, first published in "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (January 1878), p. 286

“I think that I have succeeded in making it clear that this doctrine gives room for explanations of many facts which without it are absolutely and hopelessly inexplicable; and further that it carries along with it the following doctrines: first, a logical realism of the most pronounced type; second, objective idealism; third, tychism, with its consequent thoroughgoing evolutionism. We also notice that the doctrine presents no hindrences to spiritual influences, such as some philosophies are felt to do.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction … in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

"How to make our ideas clear,” Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (January 1878)

“The third category of which I come now to speak is precisely that whose reality is denied by nominalism. For although nominalism is not credited with any extraordinarily lofty appreciation of the powers of the human soul, yet it attributes to it a power of originating a kind of ideas the like of which Omnipotence has failed to create as real objects, and those general conceptions which men will never cease to consider the glory of the human intellect must, according to any consistent nominalism, be entirely wanting in the mind of Deity.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.62
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)

“Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Vol. V, par. 438
Collected Papers (1931-1958)

“Third, consider the insistency of an idea. The insistency of a past idea with reference to the present is a quantity which is less, the further back that past idea is, and rises to infinity as the past idea is brought up into coincidence with the present.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i. e. anything we can talk about.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

"Reflections on Real and Unreal Objects", Undated, MS 966

“You are of all my friends the one who illustrates pragmatism in its most needful forms. You are a jewel of pragmatism.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Letter to William James (16 March 1903), published in The thought and character of William James, as revealed in unpublished correspondence and notes (1935) by Ralph Barton Perry, Vol. 2, p. 427

“A finite interval of time generally contains an innumerable series of feelings; and when these become welded together in association the result is a general idea.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“First then, we find that when we regard ideas from a nominalistic, individualistic, sensualistic way, the simplest facts of mind become utterly meaningless. That one idea should resemble another or influence another, or that one state of mind should so much as be thought of in another is, from that standpoint, sheer nonsense.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

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