Charles Sanders Peirce and the Nature of Belief
All we have are beliefs so how we develop them is very important.
Peirce (not “Pierce” and pronounced “purs”)(1839–1914) developed the basic idea of pragmatism as a method for improving the accuracy of science in its search for truth. Peirce’s innovative philosophical method created a new school of philosophy. He was, first and foremost, a physical scientist, spending more than 30 years studying minute differences in the Earth’s gravitational field. The importance of exact measurements and rigorous interpretation of data motivated his philosophy.
Peirce approached in multiple ways the question of what truth is. His first approach is to renew the old idea that words are signs. The first to discuss words as signs was John Duns Scotus, who inspired William of Ockham’s nominalism. Peirce, informed by John, William, and Immanuel Kant, takes the idea of signs further and uses the term “semiotics” to refer to the study of the formal usage of signs. Signs were traditionally seen in a dyadic formula of signifier (the word) and signified (that to which the word refers) as seen by John, William, and even Augustine before them, and in Peirce’s time, by linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913).
Peirce added to this the “interpretant” — the social set of meanings that interpret…
