American pragmatism can be traced back to Charles F. Kennedy. S. Pearce (1839-1914), who articulated the principles of pragmatism in an epoch-making article entitled "How to Make Our Ideas Clear", was published in the Monthly Journal of Popular Science in January 1878. As his title implies, Pearce's principle of pragmatism is a code of conduct designed to promote the clarification of the meaning of concepts and propositions. The meaning of an intellectual idea or concept, as formulated by the principle of pragmatism, is the foreseeable practical result of the concept: "In order to determine the meaning of an intellectual idea, one should consider what imaginable practical results can be necessarily drawn from the truth of the concept; the totality of these results will constitute the whole meaning of the concept." Another exposition of the principles of pragmatism—the most widely quoted—is the following statement from the article Popular Science: "Consider considering what effects the objects of the concepts we conceive of have, and which effects may have imaginable practical effects." Therefore, our concept of these effects is the whole of our concept of objects. "We should prevent the distortion of the doctrines deduced by Pears's contemporary or overly fanatical disciples in His early exposition of the principles of pragmatism. As Pierce himself agreed, "pragmatism is not a worldview, but a reflective method aimed at clarifying ideas"; it is not even a theory of truth, but only a technique for determining the meaning of a concept. Peirce's own interpretation clearly illustrates the limited intent of the pragmatist principles he foresaw. He uses two examples, hardness and weight: "... Let's ask what it means when we call something hard. It's obviously meant that it won't be scraped by a lot of other entities. The whole concept of this property, like all others, lies in the effect it imagines... Let's pursue another clear concept of weight... To say that an object is heavy is to say that without independent force, it will fall. "The meaning of ideas is composed of imagined or foreseen effects; therefore, determining the meaning of a concept is an ideal, intellectual activity that does not require the actual execution of the planned action. Peals warns us that pragmatism "if action is truly made the primary and ultimate goal of life, it is the demise of pragmatism itself." For to say that we act only for the purpose of action, without any regard for the thoughts carried by action itself, is to say that there is no such thing as a rational end."
Peirce's methodological insights were important, but because of his position as founder of the pragmatist movement, he was often overemphasized to the point of ignoring other aspects of his system. Pearce was an original and expansive philosophical and scientific genius who, in the eyes of his admirers, could stand shoulder to shoulder with Leibniz. As in Leibniz' case, he faced many difficulties in expounding his system, because his philosophical works were fragmented and did not produce a single-line tome. However, we can still discern the program of his ideological system in his works.
Semiotics and epistemology
The core of Pearce's discourse on cognition is "semiotics" or the theory of symbols. A symbol is any kind—used to refer to an object independent of itself—a thing. Thus, the word "triangle" is a symbol used to represent and support geometric patterns. In describing the use of symbols, Pears distinguishes between (1) the symbol itself (the word "triangle" spoken or written), (2) the object of the symbol (the triangle that refers to the object), and (3) the "interpreter" of the symbol, which is another symbol that acts as an interpretation or translation of the original symbol (the interpretation of the "triangle" will be a "trilateral flat figure"). Since the use of symbols, in Pearce's view, is the privilege of the mind, the interpreter, that is, the person who uses and interprets the symbol, should perhaps be listed as the fourth indivisible element of the symbolic situation. Pearse's theory of signs underpins his entire theory of cognition; in perceptual cognition, the perceptual object is the symbol of the object being known. His theory of perception is primarily realism. "Nothing can prevent us from knowing external things as they really are, and most likely, we know things in an infinite number of cases..." In the context of his theory of signs, Peirce proposed a corresponding theory of truth: as long as there is a correspondence between the proposition that is regarded as a symbol and the object that the proposition refers to, the proposition is true. The pursuit of truth is the constant approach to the ideal truth—an ideal that can never be fully realized. Peirce's denial of the possibility of obtaining absolutely certain, intuitive truths—his doctrine of irreducivism—is a hallmark feature of his cognitive theory. The principle of Immeuticism in fact means that no comprehensive statement can be conclusively and thoroughly confirmed. "There are three things that we can never hope to get: absolute certainty, absolute precision, and absolute universality." However, fallacyism should not be confused with agnosticism or skepticism. Any question with clear meaning can be answered, and in this sense everything is knowable, as long as our research is carried out to a sufficient extent. Although it is impossible to know everything, everything is knowable. As knowledge progresses, we acquire more and more knowledge with increasing certainty, although we cannot know anything with absolute certainty, nor can we expect to gain knowledge of everything. There is no number large enough to "express the relationship between the number of known things and the number of unknown things."
Phenomenology and ontology
Metaphysics includes epistemology (the science of knowledge) and ontology (the science of existence or reality), and in Pilsch it is a science of observation: "Metaphysics, even bad metaphysics, is consciously or unconsciously based on observation..." The strict application of Pils's pragmatic principles deprives most of traditional metaphysics of its full meaning; yet Pils is convinced that after removing the pseudo-problem from philosophy, " What remains in philosophy will be a series of questions that can be studied through the methods of observation of true science." The legitimate type of metaphysics is rooted in phenomenology, which is "a science that studies phenomena purely as phenomena, simply opening its eyes and describing what it sees..." Pearse's phenomenology has many similarities with Husserl's phenomenology: both attempt to describe the phenomena that are given, and both focus on the universal or essential elements of phenomena. But Pilscher's phenomenology was in some respects even more extreme than Husserl's; in an 1898 discussion of Husserl, Pils strongly denounced what he considered to be the irreducible psychological nature of the existence of Husserl's phenomenological foundations.
Phenomenological inquiry points to the universal and pervasive aspect of phenomenal experience—it is a doctrine of categories. Categories are universal and pervasive in the sense that all categories belong to all phenomena, although in a given phenomenon one category may be more pronounced than others. Pils found only three categories that are necessary and sufficient for the interpretation of phenomena; they—for some logical reason we shall not explain—are called the first, the second, and the third. The first category, the category of the first nature, "constitutes the properties of phenomena, such as red, bitter, dull, hard, sad, noble..." The nature is not a simple speciality, rather the nature of the qualitative nature; moreover, they merge with each other to form an ordered sequence or system in the nature of sight and hearing. Peirce makes an interesting insight that without the fragmentation of our experience, all properties would be integrated into a continuous system without any abrupt dividing lines. Pearse's phenomenological description of nature, within the framework of extreme empiricism, offers an important alternative to the qualitative atomism held by Hume and the followers of Hume in the English tradition: Hume's impressions are special, unrelated, and in nature discontinuous, while Pils's properties are universal, interpenetrating, and possibly continuous. In his realist interpretation of the nature of phenomena, Pearce avoided the psychologism or psychicism of Hume's theory. The second category, the category of the second nature, consists of a crude factuality of phenomenal experience; this nature is universal, somewhat vague and latent, while the facts are concrete, certain and real. Peirce speaks of the "crudeness" of facts, in which he uses them to illustrate their resistance to our will. By feeling the material that is directly understood by man, this aspect of crude factuality is exemplified. The second nature, therefore, is the element of crude fact, which meets us in chance and the coincidence of things and events, in the disobedience of our feelings. The third category, the category of the third nature, refers to the laws of things and is distinguished from the qualitative and factual nature of things. The law of phenomena is universal because it does not simply point to all real things, but to all possible things. "No set of facts can constitute a law; for the law transcends the finished facts and determines how the possible—but the whole of these possible facts would never have appeared—and how the facts will be characterized." The nature, facts, and laws of the metaphysical categories exhaust the essential categories of phenomena; there is no need for anything else to explain the phenomenal world.
Pearce can be classified as an original thinker—like Socrates, St. Augustine, and Leibniz—whose rich ideas stretched out in many ways and guided ideas for later, more systematic philosophers. In his philosophical guiding conception, we will pay attention to pragmatism, experimentalism, phenomenology, realism, and Yi Miao; these and other tendencies in his fruitful thought have already exerted influence, and it can be safely predicted that in the second half of the 20th century, Peirce will continue to influence pragmatists, instrumentalists, operators, and positivists, as well as realism and idealism.
Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, the Collected Papers of Charis Sanders Peirce was published by Harvard University Press between 1931 and 1935 in six volumes: 1. Philosophical Principles; 2. Fundamentals of Logic; 3. Exact Logic; 4. The Simplest Mathematics; 5. Pragmatism and Pragmatism; and 6. The Metaphysics of Science. All citations in the previous discussion refer to the number of volumes and paragraphs in the Proceedings; therefore, 5.9 refers to paragraph 9 of volume V. J. Buchler's 1939 book Charis Pils's Empiricism contained an explanation of Pils's logical and epistemological doctrines and clarified the relationship between Pils's empiricism and the recent doctrine of logical positivism. J. Feiblemand's Introduction to The Philosophy of Peirce, 1946, is an explanation of Peirce's entire system, including an introduction to Peirce's academic development, his relationship with Kant, Duns Scott, Darwin, and Descartes, and also notes Peals's influence on James, Reuss, Dewey, and, more recently, positivism and realism.