Ideas Quotes by Charles Sanders Peirce

If we are to define science, ... it does not consist so much in knowing, nor even in "organized knowledge," as it does in…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

It will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

One will meet, for example, the virtual assumption that what is relative to thought cannot be real. But why not, exactly? Red is relative…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

... and it is probably that there is some secret here which remains to be discovered.

— Charles Sanders Peirce

Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus "theoretically," is to uselanguage in a Pickwickian…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

Looking out of my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I do not see that; though…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

Fate then is that necessity by which a certain result will surely be brought to pass according to the natural course of events however…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust,…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

Some think to avoid the influence of metaphysical errors, by paying no attention to metaphysics; but experience shows that these men beyond all others…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

The percept is the reality. It is not in propositional form. But the most immediate judgment concerning it is abstract. It is therefore essentially…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.

— Charles Sanders Peirce

A hypothesis is something which looks as if it might be true and were true, and which is capable of verification or refutation by…

— Charles Sanders Peirce