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This introductory chapter begins with a description of a crime solved in the summer of 1879 to shed some light on the importance of theory in social science. The victim of the crime, and also the person who solved it, was philosopher and scientist Charles S. Peirce. In a letter to his friend, he described what had happened as an instance of the “theory why it is so that people so often guess right.” Guessing, in Peirce's view, plays a crucial role in scientific research. It is precisely through guessing that the most important part of the scientific analysis is produced—namely, the explanation. The term that Peirce most often used in his work for the guess of a hypothesis is abduction. Human beings, as he saw it, are endowed by nature with a capacity to come up with explanations. They have a “faculty of guessing,” without which science would not be possible in the first place.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about classical American pragmatic Charles S. Peirce's concept of unintentional racism. It focuses on the compatibility of Peirce's with contemporary social criticism. This book attempts to explain the condition of unintentional discrimination using the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. It also highlights how Peirce's infinitely inclusive communal ideal may be undermined by the habit of unintentional exclusion of historically dominant social groups.

This chapter examines the affectivity of cognition in Charles S. Peirce's Journal of Speculative Philosophy Cognition Series published in 1868–1869. This publication portrays synechistic individuals whose ongoing processes of cognition and habit formation are inescapably shaped by personalized and socialized interests. It analyzes the essays in this publication from the perspective of post-Darwinian affective and social criticism. It also explains that three interrelated issues that emerge from the interplay among Peirce's ideas. These include the uniqueness of an individual's embodiment, cognition and habit-taking; the social and political dimensions of reality, epistemology and human survival; and the politics of child development and habit-taking.

This chapter explores various ways of coming up with an explanation. These include Charles S. Peirce's notion of abduction, or his theory of how to come up with an explanation from the practical perspective of the scientist. Another is colligation, a term coined by William Whewell which means linking facts together in a new way when one makes a discovery. In Peirce's work, one can also find the term retroduction, a word which reminds that to explain a phenomenon means to look at what comes before the phenomenon. Hypothesis is another term that Peirce used in this context. It emphasizes that an abduction is just a suggestion for an explanation, and that the explanation has to be tested against facts before it can acquire scientific value. Finally, guessing indicates that the scientist does not know how to proceed when he or she is looking for an explanation, but must somehow do so anyway.

This chapter examines the concepts of sympathy and association in Charles S. Peirce's Monist Cosmology Series and Association Writings published in the 1890s. In these publications, Peirce presents a synechistic individual who emerges as a potential source of novelty because of her unique experience and creativity. This chapter provides an affectivity- and social criticism-focused interpretation of key insights in Peirce's essays in relation to the synechistic individual and the community. It also shows that agape provides an insightful communal ideal especially for those in hegemonic groups who need to practice loving concern and openness toward community members in non-hegemonic groups.

This chapter examines the affectivity of inquiry in Charles S. Peirce's Illustrations of the Logic of Series published in Popular Science Monthly in 1877–1878. In this series Peirce presents a a robust synechistic individual, one who stands up to her hegemonic community whose belief-habits need to be challenged and proposes the scientific method as the preferred method of communal belief and habit formation. This chapter analyzes how is it possible for community members to internalize hegemonic exclusionary belief-habits that can function nonconsciously.

This chapter pays tribute to Frederic Harold Young (1905–2003), who served as minister of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey, and was a Wyman Fellow in Philosophy at Princeton University. On October 15, 1945, Young delivered to the Pike County Historical Society in Milford, Pennsylvania, an address entitled “Charles Sanders Peirce: America's Greatest Logician and Most Original Philosopher.” The speech not only reveals much of Young's own approach to Peirce and highlights Peirce's achievements in logic and philosophy, but also tells us about the attitudes toward Peirce of several eminent philosophers of that day. Young's paper is important to the background of the founding of the Charles S. Peirce Society.

This chapter introduces and situates the concept of Charles S. Peirce's affectivity within a post-Darwinian context. It explains the post-Darwinian themes in Peircean affectivity using the work of Antonio Damasio, and introduces Pierce's thought to facilitate a rich dialogue between Peircean affectivity and social criticism. This chapter also highlights the specific social criticism thematic of this book, particularly the role of well-meaning people in hegemonic groups in perpetuating unintentional racism and sexism against non-hegemonic groups.

This chapter introduces Peirce’s theory of semiotics in terms of his distinction between dyadic and triadic modes of signification. The triadic concept of the sign is then constructively developed in a three-stage theory of diagrammatic signification. The interpretation of semiotics via triadic relations is contrasted as a postmodern point of view with the dyadic and dualist modern approach of Cartesianism and Saussurean semiology.

After attending lectures on the logic of induction by Charles Sanders Peirce in 1866 and reading Mill’s A System of Logic, Holmes echoed Mill’s critique of the syllogism and his notion of "reasoning from particulars to particulars." In his 1866 Lowell Lectures, Peirce addressed the use of the syllogism with respect to "occasions," as opposed to objects with extension, and criticized Mill’s assumption of a natural similarity of particulars, implying a human contribution. Holmes applied these insights to law, analyzing how legal similarity is negotiated and entrenched in the common law. In 1870 he explored the emergence of generals from particulars, recognizing a social dimension of legal induction, wherein the bearing of particular to general is one of consensual integration from repeated experience into a developing system of classification. This reflects the vision of the British scientist William Whewell, of the growth of human knowledge through the tension between facts and ideas. Legal and scientific knowledge may both be viewed as forms of community inquiry, focusing on the primacy of cases and exemplars in the process of classification, and the role of concepts in guiding the conduct of professional inquirers, framing and maintaining the coherence of expert and general belief.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on Charles S. Peirce's concept of unintentional racism. It suggests that there exist a problematic lack of social critical sensitivity in Peirce's philosophy, and thus he failed to address the oppressive dynamics that can undermine the ideal of infinite inclusion in actual communities. It contends that Peirce may have made more explicit that a community of inquiry is epistemologically deficient if he was not blinded by his own race, sex, heterosexual and social class privilege. This chapter also suggests that the focus of his later works on agape and the repudiation of greed may be an outgrowth of his own experience of poverty in his later years and his exclusion from social and scientific communities of inquiry.

This chapter examines the role of imagination in pragmatism by focusing on the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Despite their differences, both Peirce and James acknowledged the need to understand the concept of action in light of the possibilities of actual existence. They also stressed the importance of the aesthetic, felt, or noncognitive dimension of experience in such a process. Such features were an essential and constitutive element of rationality. A primary instance in Peirce’s philosophical thinking is his notion of abductive or hypothetical inference. The chapter analyzes Peirce’s notion of imagination in relation to aesthetics and James’s aesthetics of rationality in the context of individual action.

According to John Dewey, the aim of philosophy should be to address the meaning of culture and not “inquiry” or “truth.” Following Dewey’s advice, this chapter examines elements of a philosophy of civilization. It offers a general philosophy of culture and civilization and looks at culture in terms of the idea of “spiritual ecology” that sustains the basic need for meaning known as the Human Eros. The objective is to expand the critical horizon beyond pragmatism to humanism, beyond science to culture. The chapter outlines a philosophy of culture drawing on Dewey, Josiah Royce, Charles S. Peirce, and George H. Mead. It also considers “Mythos” and other terms for philosophical anthropology, tropic symbols, teleology, and imagination.

This chapter follows Holmes's readings and discussions after returning to Boston in 1864 from the Union Army. Francis Bacon’s empiricism had guided English scientific progress before the American Civil War, and Holmes and several Cambridge friends followed a renewed debate over the ground of knowledge and discovery, contextualized by early modern philosophy, a debate engaged in by the scientists William Whewell, John Herschel, and Charles Darwin. It encompassed a disagreement between Whewell and John Stuart Mill over scientific method. Holmes’s often misinterpreted perspective stems from surprising sources, the debate over scientific method and the reformism that drove Mill’s empirical attitude; but this collided in Holmes with his experience of violent ideological conflict, creating a sense of the precariousness of human hopes and accomplishments. His view of conflict resolution contemplated a threshold of failure and resort to violence, as had occurred in 1861. Holmes’s interests, meetings with peers, and research are traced through his personal diaries and reading lists to his early essays from 1870 to 1880. They reveal an inductive turn focused on retrospective translation of particular judgments into legal rules and principles. In addressing the problem of conflict, Holmes added a uniquely social element to the logic of induction.

How do we move from observing the world to developing more complex and sophisticated ways of representing and understanding it? This chapter examines the intellectual journey from observing our world to representing it in theory, focussing on three distinct processes that are widely believed to be important in this process—deduction, induction, and abduction. Each of these rational strategies is used in theological or philosophical arguments relating to the existence of God. In each case, careful consideration is given to its application both in the natural sciences and in Christian theology. Particular attention is given to the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce’s use of abduction, and its potential significance for Christian theology.

This chapter attempts to give a philosophical account of the personal experience of immigrations. It proposes to examine the experience of South-North immigration in the Americas, with careful consideration of the reflections that some Anglo- and Latin American thinkers make possible for us regarding this issue. Charles S. Peirce's philosophical account of the evolution of personality undergirds the conceptual structure of Campos' exposition. The chapter describes the experience of immigrating as one in which individuals undergo deeps transformations at the affective level of feeling, emotion, and sentiment, relations to people and places, and goals, aims and objectives in their personal lives.

Endowed law lectureships have, on rare occasions, become great lectures, remembered for their enduring influence on legal thought. Law lectures have played a prominent role, not always positive, in understanding Holmes and American law, and they will elucidate this book and keep it readable. Holmes’s resistance to general propositions is the characteristic theme of his jurisprudence. It derives from Chauncey Wright’s Baconian empiricism. After Holmes's attendance at Charles S. Peirce’s 1866 lectures on induction and reading of John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic, it led to Holmes's original contribution to the logic of induction, the empiricism of conflict, the social dimension of deriving meaning and reference for disputed terms, and naturalization of the dialectic among concepts. Where deduction from existing rules is inconclusive, the question approaches becoming an inductive one. Properly understood, induction seeks to find, from experience, the general rule that will resolve not just the case, but the problem. The problem may be a new one, not yet covered by settled authority. Is medically-assisted death suicide or homicide? The relevant “particulars,” then, are not just the particular facts of this new case, but the judgments, or findings, in a succession of cases.

This chapter begins by posing the question of linguistic meaning within the context of the mathematics of category theory. It then explains the notions of functor categories, natural transformations and presheaves. A formal theory of diagrammatic signs building on Peirce’s semiotic theory is presented as a triadic relation among functors, two of which are presheaves. This theory is illustrated by an example from Peirce’s Existential Graphs.