Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes About Mathematics

Quotes about: Mathematics

• It has never been in my power to study anything, mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic .

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Wine, Men, Psychology

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1958). “Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance)”, p.408, Courier Corporation

• ...mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics. Every other science, even logic, especially in its early stages, is in danger of evaporating into airy nothingness, degenerating, as the Germans say, into an arachnoid film, spun from the stuff that dreams are made of. There is no such danger for pure mathematics; for that is precisely what mathematics ought to be.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Dream, Math, Science

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1931). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”

• Among the minor, yet striking characteristics of mathematics, may be mentioned the fleshless and skeletal build of its propositions; the peculiar difficulty, complication, and stress of its reasonings; the perfect exactitude of its results; their broad universality; their practical infallibility.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Stress, Math, Perfect

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1931). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”

• ... and it is probably that there is some secret here which remains to be discovered.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Secret, Mathematics, Mathematical

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser, Christian J.W. J. W. Kloesel (1992). “The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings? (1867–1893)”, p.182, Indiana University Press

• It is a common observation that a science first begins to be exact when it is quantitatively treated. What are called the exact sciences are no others than the mathematical ones.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Science, Firsts, Common

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser, Christian J.W. J. W. Kloesel (1992). “The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings? (1867–1893)”, p.142, Indiana University Press

• Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Math, Needs, Ethics

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1933). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Exact logic (Published papers).. The Simplest mathematics”, Harvard University Press

• Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Ontology, Logic, Mathematics

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1931). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”

• The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Art, Math, Doubt

• Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Success, Science, Thinking

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1933). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Exact logic (Published papers).. The Simplest mathematics”, Harvard University Press

• Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus "theoretically," is to uselanguage in a Pickwickian sense. In practice, and in fact, mathematics is not exempt from that liability to error that affects everything that man does.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Men, Errors, Practice

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1992). “Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898”, p.167, Harvard University Press

• This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Believe, Branches, Mathematics

  Writings of Charles. Sanders Peirce Volume 3 (p. 279)

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