I don't normally do reviews of all the books I read. But this one is one of the best I've read in some time. It's well worth buying even if you aren't a big Peirce guy. It's Reasoning and the Logic of Things which were a series of lectures given late in Peirce's life on his mature philosophy. Originally it was supposed to have been much more mathematical and logical but William James convinced Peirce to tone down all the technical stuff. One wishes Peirce had kept two versions of the lectures since the technical stuff often anticipated many "discoveries" by others in the decades to come and still is quite different from how most mathematics developed in the 20th century. The book is a fantastic summary, written for a more lay audience, of Peirce's mature thought. It also comes with a commentary partially written by Putnam that is excellent.
The background to the lectures Peirce gave is also tremendously useful. Peirce, as many know, was basically "excluded" from academia due to his living with a woman before his divorce was final. This, along with his somewhat arrogant attitude and the novelty of his thought, pretty well kept him from Harvard or the other schools of the era which were extremely conservative. This meant that towards the end of his life Peirce was quite destitute, depending largely upon William James for his survival. These lectures were both an attempt by James to get Peirce's thought out but also to help Peirce survive. (Peirce wrote that he often didn't even have food!) It's an amazing story when you read of it - quite tragic overall. Yet it was arguably in this period that Peirce's thought came to some amazing maturity. We are quite lucky that most of the voluminous writings of Peirce survived.
The commentary to the lectures are uniformly excellent. In particular the discussion of how Peirce takes geometry is probably the single best work on Peirce's conception of infinity I've read. I plan to do a post on it so. Basically Peirce ends up being a constructivist of the Brouwer variety but instead of simply disallowing infinite constructions he only allows the highest cardinality of infinities. (Often written as a capital Omega and which roughly is Aleph infinity with integers being Aleph 0 and reals being Aleph 1) The mathematics is so interesting that, as I said, I really wish that Peirce had done the technical version of the lectures he'd initially intended.
There are all sorts of little gems both in the lectures and the commentaries. I'll be probably mentioning a few of these along the way. One that is quite interesting is the issue of risk or care in developing ideas. Peirce famously says science works only by scientists not caring about the results. That is, there is no risk. I'm not sure I agree with Peirce here but the issues are pretty interesting - especially in context of some of Herbert Dreyfus' writings.
I just bought a copy (literally just now), so it'd better be good! Kidding, I've wanted something like a less technical intro to Pierce's thought, so that I could use it as a launching point into understanding his more technical work. This sounds like it could be just what I'm looking for.
On risk in science, this is something I've been thinking a great deal about, recently. In psychology, and even within the narrower field of cognitive psychology, there are two different approaches to science on the risk dimension. Most research psychologists are trained on one or two methodological paradigms, and spend their entire careers studying a pretty narrow subject using those paradigms. Then there are a few researchers who use a more seat-of-their-pants approach to science. These researchers are constantly coming up with new methods, coming up with new concepts, and integrating disparate concepts and methods. The latter drive innovation in science, but at great risk both in terms of time spent on potentially fruitless ideas, and to their careers. The former drive the steady progress of science, often filling out the big gaps left by risk-taking innovators.
I've been thinking about this because I'm a.) looking for a job, and b.) have been, since the day I set foot in graduate school, one of the seat-of-their-pants researchers. I've yet to use an established methodology, and my dissertation research, which has become my primary selling point job-wise, used a methodology that was entirely new (and of my own creation) to test a novel theory of one of the more fundamental concepts in cognitive psychology (schematic memory), by integrating disparate concepts (models of analogy and empirical findings in schematic memory research). As a result, publishing has been a struggle (reviewers demand extended explanations of a method they don't recognize), though the fact that every prediction my theory has made has been supported in experiment after experiment does help. Hiring committees have been reluctant, because my primary research program is built on a methodology, and theory, that has yet to be tested outside of my own work, and so they're not convinced that I have a research program that can produce work consistently for 5-10 years. It probably doesn't help that my other research programs (on concepts, embodied cognition, counterfactuals, and metonymy) are also built on novel theoretical and empirical grounds, and thus don't inspire a lot of confidence either. So each time I begin an experiment, or come up with an idea, I become very invested in it, because its success or failure is uncertain, and my own career and reputation will depend on that success or failure. However, each time something works, I feel like I've made a very real contribution to my field, which more than makes up for the struggle that comes with undertaking risky research.
Chris, I'm not sure it's the best intro for Peirce or not. I think a nice little reader like Peirce on Signs which contains most of his important writings might be better. But it definitely gives a taste for Peirce.
The first chapter does a lot on care, sentimentality, and the like in connection to philosophy. I'm not sure I agree with Peirce here. Especially with his view of philosophy of science as being tied up with not have care for the results, as opposed to everything else. He brings up Aristotle and Plato as the types for the two ways of thinking. I suppose I'm much more Plato than Aristotle in that regard. But I also think that his view of science is simply never achieved.
The examples you give in science are well made. There is a lot of risk in doing science. As anyone with a family who is on their second post-doc looking for a job can tell you. Arguably Peirce, who was unable to find a teaching position and who was in quite dire straights, also demonstrates it.
Comparing and contrasting Peirce and James on this point is quite interesting since they are, in many ways, polar opposites. James is the progressive and Peirce the conservative (in the methadological sense). I think most of us will see Peirce saying we ought be conservative in our beliefs and adopt what our society gives us ethically as something quite distasteful. (Reminds me of Heidegger and das Man) There's even, (IMO), a tension within Peirce's thought on this point, given his views of inquiry.
As to your example on novel thinking. It's a very good point. And indeed, along with the sexual mores issues (and arrogance) that hurt Peirce I think his way of thinking was simply too novel for the universities of the era, even though a lot of his thought on everything from non-Euclidean physics to chance and logic ended up becoming the norm. I halfway wonder if his comments on conservativism are biased somewhat towards trying to please his audience somewhat. (Harvard and Cambridge at the time were very conservative places)
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