PERSON
Charles Sanders Peirce
American philosopher and logician (1839–1914), founder of pragmatism, whose fallibilism and self-correcting inquiry influenced Haack's foundherentism—'genuine inquiry' as the method of science, distinguished from tenacity, authority, and a priori reasoning.
Charles Sanders Peirce was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist whose work founded pragmatism and transformed epistemology, semiotics, and the philosophy of science. Despite professional marginalization (he never held a permanent academic position after Johns Hopkins dismissed him in 1884), Peirce produced a body of work—published in scattered articles, lectures, and manuscripts—whose influence on twentieth-century philosophy was profound. His pragmatic maxim ('consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object') grounded meaning in consequences. His fallibilism (no belief is immune to revision) rejected Cartesian certainty while maintaining the possibility of knowledge. His 'Fixation of Belief' (1877) distinguished four methods: tenacity (clinging to prior belief), authority (accepting what trusted sources declare), the a priori method (believing what seems reasonable), and the method of science (submitting beliefs to experiential testing). Only the last is self-correcting.
