Review of Jacqueline Brunning and Paul Forster, eds. “The rule of reason: The philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce”

This article reviews the book The Rule of Reason: The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Jacqueline Brunning and Paul Forster.

Peirce and Wittgenstein on Doubt: A Comparison

There are many areas of Peirce and Wittgenstein"s thought\ud which have great affinity for one another such as: the\ud impossibility of a private language, the distinction between\ud believing and knowing, and the role of doubt and certainty\ud in our epistemic practices. I shall focus on the affinity\ud between Peirce and Wittgenstein"s thought on the role of\ud doubt in our epistemic practices. I will argue that Peirce\ud and Wittgenstein give us a "broadly" pragmatic account of\ud the role of doubt and by this I mean, they are interested in\ud the difference doubt makes to our epistemic practices (I do\ud not mean by this that Wittgenstein is part of a philosophical\ud movement called pragmatism). Specifically, Peirce and\ud Wittgenstein argue against the skeptical, or Cartesian,\ud form of doubt that has dominated epistemological discussion.\ud They deny that universal doubt is a genuine doubt;\ud such a "doubt" is idle, because it does not have any practical\ud consequences for us. Genuine doubt must have a\ud ground and of course there is no rule that can determine\ud whether a ground for doubt is genuine in all circumstances.\ud Doubts occur in a context, with all our prejudices and\ud beliefs in place

This is simply what I do: Peirce's real generality meets Wittgenstein's rule-following?

Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following is widely regarded to have identified what Kripke called “the most radical and original sceptical problem that philosophy has seen to date”. But does it? This paper examines the problem in the light of Charles Peirce’s distinctive scientific hierarchy. Peirce identifies a phenomenological inquiry which is prior to both logic and metaphysics, whose role is to identify the most fundamental philosophical categories. His third category, particularly salient in this context, pertains to general predication. Rule-following scepticism, the paper suggests, results from running together two questions: “How is it that I can project rules?”, and, “What is it for a given usage of a rule to be right?”. In Peircean terms the former question, concerning the irreducibility of general predication (to singular reference), must be answered in phenomenology, while the latter, concerning the difference between true and false predication, is answered in logic. A failure to appreciate this distinction, it is argued, has led philosophers to focus exclusively on Wittgenstein’s famous public account of rule-following rightness, thus overlooking a private, phenomenological dimension to Wittgenstein’s remarks on following a rule which gives the lie to Kripke’s reading of him as a sceptic

Wittgenstein's Influence

This paper was presented at the University of Illinois in the northern Spring of 1961. Its title is slightly misleading, as it deals more with influences on Wittgenstein than any particular influences he had on others. In particular, it points to an interesting indirect influence the philosophy of C.S. Peirce on Wittgenstein’s later thought – an of inflluence that came about as a result of the many philosophical interactions between Wittgenstein and Frank Ramsey, who was much impressed by Peirce’s work. The paper provides a sympathetic outline of the development of Wittgenstein’s thought, discussing such central topics as the general nature of language, proofs, and rule following. It concludes with a clear exposition of Wittgenstein’s “private language argument”. (Tim Oakley, March 2019

Peirce and Education - an Overview

The philosophy of Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) enhances our understanding of educational processes

Evolution of Symbolisation in Chimpanzees and Neural Nets

from Introduction: Animal communication systems and human languages can be characterised by the type of cognitive abilities that are required. If we consider the main semiotic distinction between communication using icons, signals, or symbols (Peirce, 1955; Harnad, 1990; Deacon, 1997) we can identify different cognitive loads for each type of reference. The use and understanding of icons require instinctive behaviour (e.g. emotions) or simple perceptual processes (e.g. visual similarities between an icon and its meaning). Communication systems that use signals are characterised by referential associations between objects and visual or auditory signals. They require the cognitive ability to learn stimulus associations, such as in conditional learning. Symbols have double associations. Initially, symbolic systems require the establishment of associations between signals and objects. Secondly, other types of relationships are learned between the signals themselves. The use of rule for the logical combination of symbols is an example of symbolic relationship. Symbolisation is the ability to acquire and handle symbols and symbolic relationships