Given the context, although he might have been guilty of the mind projection fallacy (he was a realist when it comes to probabilities), and was pretty much a frequentist, I don't think it's reasonable to criticize him very harshly for either position - he was a very early pioneer in statistics (just look over the second paragraph). His embrace of statistical inference was, as far as I can tell, somewhat unusual for the day, and he made several contributions to the use of statistics in psychology and psycho physics (including the use of double blind studies to re-examine previous findings).
I think his Tychism might have been justified. Statistics could make predictions assuming Tychism but it wasn't obvious that the same results were predicted by determinism. That's Bayesian evidence in favour of Tychism. His more useful statistical work is also impressive.
This is in addition to his contributions to logic, mathematics and geology - so if his logic is on par with Frege (just look at his contributions to mathematics and logic).
That's definitely a lot of math and logic.
His semiotics is interesting as well as it seems to yield an early attempt to look at science as a process of improving statistical models. Pierce's semiotic reflects this, and he uses it in his phenomenological characterizations of the scientific method. I think that this allowed him to view human scientists as statistical learners. When I read some of this it certainly invoked a more machine learning/information theoretic picture of scientific discovery than any other (non-modern) philosophers of science had managed to touch on.
That would be very impressive, but I don't see that in any of the stuff on his semiotics on Wikipedia. The passage you linked to seems to just be saying that with sufficient study it is possible to understand things. I don't see anything that anticipates information theory or knowledge as statistical modelling.
Peirce's fixation on the number three seems to be mainly a side effect of Hegel's influence
Oh, he seems to have disobeyed endoself's first law of philosophy: "Have as little to do with Hegel as possible."
That would be very impressive, but I don't see that in any of the stuff on his semiotics on Wikipedia.
A caveat: I'm not at all sure how much I'm projecting on Peirce as far as this point goes. I personally think that his writings clarified my views on the scientific method (at the time I originally read them, which was a good while back) and I was concurrently thinking about machine learning - so I might just be having a case of cached apophenia.
However; if you want a condensed version of his semiotic look over this. You might actually need to read s...
Hello all,
I'm working on a top-level post about how Stoicism is an instrumentally useful philosophy to adopt, and figured I should give other philosophies a fair shake as well. Does anyone know of any other philosophies out there that seem to be practically useful or otherwise provide strategies and thought patterns that have practical value? A solid grounding in experimental research is of course desirable.