GENIUS
Charles Sanders Peirce was a genius ahead of his time, a man who will continue to affect science into the 21st century.
Written by Pamela Taylor Bloom
This is the story of a genius ahead of his time -- a man who envisioned technology before it existed, understood the nexus of art and science, and will continue to affect science and technology well into the 21st century.
Da Vinci? Einstein? No. Charles Sanders Peirce.
The Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism at Texas Tech University is devoted to the study of the little-known Peirce (1839-1914), a true interdisciplinarian whose research influences fields as disparate as military science, psychiatry, physics and philosophy nearly a century after his death.
"The study of logic, in the widest sense of the word, is the one short phrase that best describes his life work," according to Scott Cunningham, B.A., assistant director for operations at the institute.
In 1865, Peirce founded the distinctive American school of philosophy known as Pragmatism, based on the fact that all scientific disciplines share certain principles of logic and method. According to Kenneth Ketner, Ph.D., Horn Professor, Peirce Interdisciplinary Professor and director of the institute, until 1898 the discipline stayed within a circle of friends that included philosopher and psychologist William James and educational reformer John Dewey. That year, James gave a lecture in Berkeley, Calif., called "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," and the philosophy spread like an intellectual wildfire. Around 1903, Peirce became discouraged that others were changing his approach, so he modified the name for his original ideas to "Pragmaticism."
"A word," he said, "that is too ugly to be kidnapped."
According to Cunningham, Peirce had a long-running professional life as a laboratory physicist with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, where he was in charge of their gravity survey, a responsibility that took him and his laboratory across the United States and around the world, earning an international scientific reputation. Fellow physicists have described his value of the constant for the force of gravity as the best one attained during the 19th century.
For this project, Peirce used what Cunningham called "the Cadillac of pendulum rigs at the time." At one point, Peirce realized that his early pendulum apparatus was in error on a measurement; he examined the apparatus and found a flaw in the tripod supporting the meter-long pendulum.
"He then redesigned it to fix the problem," said Cunningham, "and sent his design to Repsold, the German manufacturer of the pendulum, resulting in a redesign that was called the Peirce pendulum."
Peirce was devoted to the study of logic since before his college days at Harvard, where his father Benjamin was Perkins professor of astronomy and mathematics. According to Ketner, Peirce is ranked among the top three or four of the great logicians of all time.
Gentry Harris M.D.
"Perhaps only Aristotle, the ancient founder of the subject, can equal Peirce," Ketner said, "in that both were highly qualified scientists who brought their scientific inclinations and experiences to the work."
Logic has come to be equated with mathematical logic, and in this respect Peirce was one of the architects of contemporary formal logic, the logic that has made contemporary computing possible. But Peirce's understanding of logic was broader than mathematical logic alone. Throughout his life, he consistently worked on what he called the logic of science, a study of the nature and functioning of the methods used throughout science, and thus was a founder of the study of scientific methodology.
"Many of his insights and methods are now routine within any activity in which a laboratory frame of mind is found," Ketner said.
In recognition of his accomplishments in the logic of science, Peirce was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1877. Other members include engineer Alexander Dallas Bache, a founding member, and physicist Albert Einstein, elected in 1922.
Peirce was also the major inventor of the logic of relations. According to Ketner, among a number of spectacular results Peirce achieved in this area, the most important is known as Peirce's Reduction Principle. This law illustrates that it is impossible to construct a genuine triadic relation -- a fact about three items -- using only dyadic relations, which are facts about two items. An example of an attempt to construct triads from dyads is found in recent psychology. B. F. Skinner and other behaviorists proposed to construct a theory of human intelligence using only stimulus/response sequences, which are basically dyadic relations of a causal nature. Intelligence, on the other hand, contains a number of triadic relations, especially the transmitter-message-receiver triadic relation as found in communication processes, which are clear subsets of intelligent activities.
"Peirce's Principle shows that Skinner's plan to construct an account of intelligence from stimulus/response phenomena cannot succeed on logical grounds alone," Ketner said.
Peirce's Principle has important applications in a number of areas, particularly for engineering of intelligent control systems. According to Ketner, this is true because, until recently, strategies for constructing intelligent devices within computer science have been based on an exclusive reliance on algorithms that are, in effect, long strings of dyadic relations.
"As long as artificial intelligence researchers limit themselves to those resources only," he said, "Peirce's Principle shows that they will not be able to construct genuine triadic relations of the kind found in fully intelligent activity."
Ketner also believes that use of Peirce's work within physics research is about to happen at a significant level, and that aspects of Peirce's Logic of Relations will affect "some very interesting matters within quantum mechanics."
According to Ketner, Peirce left diagrams in his papers for a logic that will illustrate how to build better computers.
"It's been sitting there as if buried in a time capsule," Ketner said. "Indeed, Peirce actually designed an electrical computing circuit. He didn't work out all aspects of the computer as we know it, but he developed some of the fundamentals. An essay published in The Princeton University Library Chronicle (Volume 45, Spring 1984, Number 3, pages 186-224) makes a strong case that Peirce was a founder of modern computing and artificial intelligence research."
Charles S. Peirce
In the 1880s, Allan Marquand, who had been Peirce's student at the Johns Hopkins University, developed one of the earliest mechanical computing devices. Later, Marquand commissioned Peirce to design an electrical computing circuit. In an earlier letter to Marquand, Peirce proposed what is likely the first electrical analog of logic: switches in series used to represent sentences joined as conjunctive, or conjoining, statements, and switches in parallel used to represent sentences joined as disjunctive, or separate, statements.
"By this method," Ketner said, "if we have two simple sentences, Albert is handsome, abbreviated as A, plus 'Betty is beautiful,' abbreviated as B, then we can represent the sentence 'A and B' by two switches A B in series.
"In such a series circuit, current will pass only if both switches are closed, and current will not pass if either or both of switches A B are open. This is directly analogous to the situation with the sentence 'A and B,' in that the whole compound sentence is true only if both A B are independently true, and the whole is false if either or both of the sentences A B are false.
"A similar situation is found with 'either A or B' and switches in parallel. However, in this case the compound sentence is false only when both individual sentences are false, because in the case of parallel switches, current does not flow only in the case that both switches are open."
This insight, which Peirce presented in 1886, has become one of the foundations of current computing machines, but with the function of mechanical switches being realized in transistors.
The circuit that Peirce designed for Marquand survives in the Marquand Papers at Princeton.
"It adds a number of interesting functions," said Ketner, "including a basic form of electrical memory and an operating system. The machine was never built, but through a careful examination of the function of its circuits, one can see that it would be capable of solving useful problems in basic logic."
Peirce's inventions were not limited to hardware. He also made a number of contributions to theoretical and software-related topics.
Perhaps the most spectacular, according to Ketner, is his prior independent discovery of a positive-mode version of the famous Limitation Principle published by Turing in the 1930s.
"Stated mathematically," Ketner said, "Turing discovered that there are numbers that a mechanistic system of algorithms -- a Turing Machine -- cannot compute. This means that there is a range of activities that can otherwise be accomplished, but which a computer constructed only with dyadic resources cannot perform."
Around 1900, Peirce showed that deductive reasoning, instead of being a singular type of reasoning as had been assumed, was in reality two related forms of reasoning, which he called Corollarial Reasoning and Theorematic Reasoning. Corollarial Reasoning is found in a deduction reached through a system of logical diagrammatization, where the premisses of an argument are entered and the conclusion is present immediately with no other action being required. Theorematic Reasoning results in a deduction reached through a system of logical diagrammatization in which a diagram of the premisses of an argument does not immediately contain the conclusion, and requires one or more additional hypothetically generated items in order to obtain the conclusion in a sound way.
"The interesting thing to note about the latter form of deduction is that an active and original step -- a creatively generated hypothesis on the part of the thinker -- is required," Ketner said. "Peirce then noticed that both forms of deduction are required to accomplish all forms of mathematical reasoning."
After 1892, when Peirce was no longer employed by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, he took up residence at his homestead in Milford, Penn., in order to concentrate on the study of logic.
To gain income, he took on engineering consulting jobs, one of them for George Morrison, the world-famous builder of major bridges. Peirce computed the loads for some of Morrison's bridge projects, including the George Washington Bridge connecting Manhattan to New York.
Peirce, an insomniac who survived on as little as five hours of sleep each night, also worked on a number of chemical engineering projects, including one scheme to produce illuminating gas for public lighting.
Throughout his life, he focused on producing a method for teaching logic to beginners, one that would be particularly appropriate for visual display. He was, according to Cunningham, successful in this attempt, and produced an efficient visual logical system, as well as many of the principles needed to use this system effectively within an educational setting.
According to Clyde Hendrick, Ph.D., the institute's associate director and a Horn professor of psychology, military scientists are increasingly interested in Peirce's work as a means to condense information-heavy technology for human comprehension.
"This has a number of applications," he said, "primarily in the area of information analysis. For example, the array of instruments and lights that aviators or astronauts use continue to become increasingly complex, and Peirce's work has implications for better ways to analyze and process information.
"An engineer from Lockheed, who visited the institute, mentioned that the weapons of the future will carry a hundred-fold more information," said Hendrick, "so the need will increase dramatically to find methods of analysis that can overcome human limitations in information-processing."
Kenneth Ketner, Ph.D.
The institute was founded in 1971, when then-Vice President for Research Arlo Childs, Ph.D., requested faculty proposals for research centers and institutes. Because of the promising possibilities for interdisciplinary collaborations, Ketner and then-Dean Charles Hardwick, Ph.D., proposed an institute centered on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. The proposal was accepted. Dean Hardwick subsequently became vice president for academic affairs.
"We were in an old frame building at the time," Ketner said, "and the swamp coolers in the ceiling had been taken out, leaving a big hole in the middle of the roof. Well, one day there was a big West Texas dust storm, and God was on our side: there was a nice little coating of dust over all the valuable papers. I said, 'Quick; call Hardwick! Big disaster; get over here!' He took one look and said, 'OK, you're going into the library.'"
According to its constitutional document, the institute reports directly to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, but coordinates with the dean of libraries. The institute director is the designated curator of the collection, while any holdings that are catalogued are the property of the library, in the status of a special collection.
The Texas Tech institute is one of three university-based facilities in the country with holdings on Peirce. Peirce's widow transported the original Peirce papers, about 80,000 sheets, to Harvard at his death. In 1974, a team of Texas Tech scholars working at Harvard developed an annotated master copy on archival paper to serve as the foundation for detailed study of Peirce's unpublished work. This copy is housed in the Texas Tech institute.
About 1976, with help from the institute, a second project was started at Indiana University in Indianapolis, to focus on completing an edition of Peirce's papers. It has been estimated this task will require 100 volumes. Indiana purchased two copies of the Texas Tech master copy and is using these to prepare its edition, now into volume six.
"So," Ketner said, "we're the proud parent of that center."
With clusters of Peirce scholars located in Brazil, Columbia, England, France, Germany, Holland and Spain, academic interest in Peirce is now worldwide. The institute frequently hosts scholars from other countries and institutions and was the backbone for two international congresses, one held in Amsterdam in 1976 and another at Harvard in 1989, jointly organized by Texas Tech and Harvard on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Peirce's birth.
In August, the institute received a remarkable gift from Gentry Harris, M.D., of Greenbrae, Calif., who contacted the institute after reading an edition of Ketner's long exchange of letters with medical pathologist and novelist Walker Percy, published in "A Thief of Peirce," (University Press of Mississippi Jackson, 1995) and Ketner's biography of Peirce, "His Glassy Essence," (Vanderbilt University Press, 1998).
Since 1955, Harris assembled a collection that includes 300 volumes of materials on or closely related to Peirce; 3,000 volumes of research on psychiatry, psychology, mathematics, logic, natural science and natural history; and more than 20 completed but unpublished papers on Peirce-related topics. According to Cunningham, the gift doubled the institute's holdings in amount and in scope overnight.
"It turned out that not only had Dr. Harris studied Peirce on his own, he'd done quite a scholarly job," said Cunningham, who flew to California in 1999 to catalogue the collection.
Harris was also a 30-year friend of Percy, himself a student of Peirce, who had worked with Harris at the National Institutes of Mental Health on a five-year psychiatric project. Harris included significant research materials compiled with Percy, as well as their 30-year correspondence, in the gift to the institute. These papers include diagrams based on Peirce's semiotic rationale for understanding psychiatric disorders, particularly schizophrenia, along with transcripts of family counseling sessions and Percy's evaluations.
"So the opportunities for interdisciplinary study will now include psychiatric illnesses," Ketner said. "This is remarkably original work, and scholars have not yet seen it." One of Harris' early projects was front-line battlefield psychiatric research on soldiers suffering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder during the Korean War; this work has been published on the U.S. military history Web site. And, in the early 1970s, when there was interest from law enforcement in the profiling of terrorists, Harris was involved in seminal research in this field. The collection includes these documents, as well as a revised, updated and unpublished version of his original papers on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
"The beauty of it," said Ketner, "is that the collection has Peirce at the center. He influenced a considerable part of Walker Percy's book and essay writing, and influenced Harris as well, illustrating again the interdisciplinary use of Peirce's basic insights in logic and methodology."
The Gentry Harris Collection will be maintained as a separate collection within the institute's holdings.
While an emphasis in Peirce Studies is presently offered through the graduate school's interdisciplinary master's degree program, the future development of Peirce Studies as an academic discipline is central to the mission of the institute.
"Our goal is to become a degree-granting institute," said Hendrick, who served as graduate dean for 11 years, "with Peirce professorships in arts and humanities, social and behavioral sciences, and sciences and engineering."
The team of researchers, curators and writers who make up the staff of the institute are involved in research that reflects the scholarly range of Peirce's work. Ketner currently is writing the next volume of Peirce's biography, and Hendrick is pursuing a project on the notion of community as it developed through 19th and 20th centuries, and what he calls the "loss of certainty" that began to surface in the middle of the 19th century over the weakening absolutism of science and religion.
Cunningham is pursuing research on an aspect of Peircian logic that has implications squarely in concerns of the 21st century. While teaching at Hunt Elementary School in the Lubbock Independent School District, he conducted an informal study with two groups of fifth and sixth graders, using Peirce's graph of logic system as a means for focusing on the reasoning process.
"They all received the same instruction," he said, "except that one group was given Peirce's graphs."
The behavior problems of students in that group dropped from 20 percent to zero, while Texas Assessment of Academic Skills scores increased by 10 to 12 percent. He is currently pursuing grant funding to conduct a formal study, which he hopes will result in widespread use of Peirce's graphs in the schools.
"There is clearly something the graphs teach that enhances self-control," he said. "And they clearly taught the kids how to read a question, understand and process a question, look at answers, and see the relations."
"Peirce's work has implications for so many disciplines, almost from astronomy to zoology," said Hendrick. "The mining and development of his ideas is very important. I believe that the impact of his work will still be felt in the next two centuries. He truly was a man ahead of his time."
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