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.
Well I can relay my impressions on Peirce and why people seem to be interested in him (and why I am):
I think that the respect for Peirce comes largely from his "Illustrations in the Logic of Science" series for Scientific American. Particularly "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear".
When it comes to Tychism, it's kind of silly to take it in a vacuum, especially given that the notion of statistics being fundamental to science was new, and Newtonian determinism was the de facto philosophical stance of his day. He was standing in direct conflict to the then popular (but false) view of Newtonian determinism. Observe the following excerpt from the beginning of one of his papers on the subject:
Going further
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). 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).
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.
As far as the "weird numerology" - Peirce's fixation on the number three seems to be mainly a side effect of Hegel's influence - Hegel focused on a tertiary relationship between ideas - thesis, antithesis, synthesis. We have an idea, a conflict is presented, and we synthesize the two into something less wrong. I think that a number of odd ideas held by Peirce were influenced by Hegel (such as his view of continuity which seems borderline incoherent to me). I've found that sometimes this tertiary form yields something nice, but it often seems to result in something strained. I'm not sure why this became so pervasive in Peirce's writings.
That's what I can think of off the top of my head, but if something else occurs to me I'll add it.