Charles Sanders Peirce

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The mistake I kept making was calling it thinking.

Not the machine's output. My own process. I would sit with Claude for hours, building, iterating, watching ideas take shape on the screen, and I would call what was happening "thinking." The collaboration felt like thought. It produced artifacts that looked like the products of thought. The experience had the texture of intellectual work at its most alive.

But Peirce draws a line I had never seen. Not between human thinking and machine processing — that distinction is familiar enough to be boring. A sharper line. Between different kinds of inference, each with its own logic, its own relationship to novelty, its own dependence on reality pushing back. Deduction, induction, abduction. Three operations