Charles Sanders Peirce was brought up in an academic atmosphere in Cambridge (Massachusetts), where his father was a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard. He himself studied science at the university, gaining a degree in chemistry in 1863. He subsequently worked as an astronomer in the Observatory and as a physicist for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey (1861-91), devoting his spare time to study and research in philosophy. In 1914, in poverty and suffering from cancer, he died as a frustrated isolated man.

SEMIOSIS- is any form of activity, conduct or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. It has three elements:

1) Sign - means represent2) Object - a subject matter of a sign and interpretant3) Interpretant - the effect of the sign on someone who reads or

comprehends it.

FOUR METHOD OF FIXING BELIEFS:1) The method of Tenacity - sticking to initial belief and adhered to

without question2) The method of Authority - an institution is empowered to create,

teach, and enforce set of doctrines3) The a Priori Method - answer agreeable to reason4) The scientific Method - wherein inquiry supposes that the real is

discoverable but independent of particular opinion

THREE METAPHYSICAL DOCTRINES:1) Tychism - the doctrine of chance2) Synechism - the doctrine of continuity3) Agapesm - the doctrine of evolutionary love

THREE FORMS OF INFERENCES1) Deduction - unfolds the necessary consequences of a pure

hypothesis2) Induction - the logical form of actual process of inquiry3) Abduction -the process of molding a clear hypothesis

PRAGMATISM

(1839-1914)

- A philosophical movement, which holds that both meaning of truth and ideas is a function of its practical outcome.

- Peirce regards pragmatism a a method of clarifying conceptions

- Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt.

THEOLOGY

Peirce believed in God, and characterized such belief as founded in an instinct explorable in musing over the worlds of ideas, brute facts, and evolving habits — and it is a belief in God not as an actual or existent being (in Peirce's sense of those words), but all the same as a real being.

ETHICS

It is in assisting the cosmic process to realize rationality, and thereby to recognise and express in universal love his common interests with the "unlimited community of mankind", that man finds the objective basis for ethical action.

ON MEANING AND TRUTH

Peirce’s has defined truth as: universal propositions could be true. Certainty is possible about the definitive validity of every individual before the completion of the process of inquiry. As sciences advance, there is an objective accumulation of opinions.