The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Pierce

Adam Crabtree's Esalen paper on CS Pierce

ELEMENTS OF A PEIRCEAN VIEW OF THE WORLD

1. Peirce’s commandment in regard to the investigation of reality: Do not block the road to inquiry!
Everything has intelligibility built into it. There are no fundamental unknowables that will have to remain
forever a mystery.

In other words, there is no unattainable and inconceivable thing-in-itself.

2. We develop our knowledge of the world—whether common sense or scientific—through three types of inference: deduction, induction, and abduction.

3. There are three basic phenomenological categories that apply to all that exists: Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness.

4. It is possible to develop reasonable hypotheses about the origin of the universe. These
hypotheses must be such that they can account for the world as we know it.

These hypotheses should be able to indicate some verifiable evidence of what is and is not possible in our world.

5. All is mind. Reality and logic operate according to the same laws.

6. All things exhibit the features of both Freedom/Chance/Spontaneity and regularity or the tendency for habit-taking.

7. Matter is mind hidebound by habit.

8. Everything evolves.

9. Physical laws evolve and the currently operative laws are simply one phase in that evolution.

10. All laws are fallible, that is, more or less correct for the time being, but never absolutely true.

11. Peirce calls his philosophy objective idealism. This indicates that the only thing that can be called real is what appears in experience. But what appears in experience is what it is regardless of that experience; this is a realism that indicates that reality is independent of thought in general, and that our experiences are determined by that which we experience.

12. The world is a profusion of signs.

13. Human personality is a creative, evolving sign.

14. The world evolves with an intrinsic teleology; final causes are evident in all that happens.

Adam Crabtree's Esalen paper on CS Pierce

A creative thinker who is not fully appreciated, CS Pierce helped open the door for seeing "meanings" as important (or more important) than physics.

 Although this metaphysical view provides a solid platform for a solution to the mind-body problem, for Pierce that question is secondary to the core concept that the world is in its very essence meaningful, a profusion of signs that constitutes and makes intelligible every existing thing (CP 4.55).

A creative thinker who is not fully appreciated, CS Pierce helped open the door for seeing "meanings" as important (or more important) than physics.

I've been thinking a bit more about the idea of reading the world for meaning.

Bernardo had a post about this as well.

The contemporary cultural mindset posits that the world has no intrinsic semantic value. The meaning we see in it is supposedly projected onto the world by ourselves. Underpinning this view is the mainstream physicalist ontology, according to which mind is an emergent property or epiphenomenon of brains. As such, since the world beyond brains isn’t mental, it cannot a priori evoke anything beyond itself. But a consistent series of recent experimental results suggests strongly that the world may in fact be mental in nature, a hypothesis openly discussed in the field of foundations of physics. In this essay, these experimental results are reviewed and their hermeneutic implications discussed. If the world is mental, it points to something beyond its face-value appearances and is amenable to interpretation, just as ordinary dreams. In this case, the project of a Hermeneutic of Everything is metaphysically justifiable.