Peirce Disappears: (Non-)Reception of Peirce as a Philosopher of Science
Philosophy of Science Colloquium
The Institute Vienna Circle holds a Philosophy of Science Colloquium with talks by our present fellows.
Date: 27/04/2023
Time: 15h00
This talk is going to be a hybrid event, in-person at NIG (SR 2i) and can be followed via online Plattform.
Online Plattform:
Access:
univienna.zoom.us/j/63035484129
Passcode: 226427
No registered accounts are required, it's enough to click on the link and enter your name. Chrome or Firefox browsers work best.
Abstract:
Charles Sanders Peirce is not generally considered a canonical figure in the history of philosophy of science. But in the early years of the logical empiricist movement in the United States, Peirce’s philosophy, especially his philosophy of science, received a warm reception from prominent representatives, proponents, and sympathizers of this movement including Charles Morris, Ernst Nagel, and W.V.O. Quine. This reception, however, was short-lived and Peirce gradually disappeared from the mainstream philosophy of science while logical empiricism turned into a formidable movement.
In this talk, first I discuss some examples of the early reception of Peirce’s philosophy of science by proponents of the logical empiricist movement. In this section, I primarily focus on Charles Morris, Ernst Nagel and his student Justus Buchler, and A.J. Ayer. Through these examples, I also reveal the peculiar position of Peirce in the philosophy of science literature of the time. Some (e.g., Morris) describe him as a relatively unsophisticated logical positivist with some extra metaphysics while others (e.g., Ayer) describe his philosophy as an anticipation of falsificationism. I use this peculiar position to provide an explanation for the later marginalization of Peirce as a philosopher of science. Second, I discuss two of Peirce’s interesting insights that were not received the attention that they deserved due to this marginalization: (i) Peirce’s dynamic and evolutionary view of scientific method that can be contrasted with the right-wing logical empiricists’ static view of scientific method and (ii) Peirce’s view about the limitations of the intuition-based method of scientific inquiry when the object of inquiry is the “deep” structure of nature.