"By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about."
Charles Sanders Peirce
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"All the progress we have made in philosophy is the result of that methodical skepticism which is the element of human freedom."
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"The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs."
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"It is easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague."
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"Unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all."
Charles Sanders Peirce
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"Truly, that reason upon which we plume ourselves, though it may answer for little things, yet for great decisions is hardly surer than a toss up."
Charles Sanders Peirce
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"The woof and warp of all thought and all research is symbols, and the life of thought and science is the life inherent in symbols; so that it is wrong to say that a good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is the essence of it."
Charles Sanders Peirce
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"Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way."
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"And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life."
Charles Sanders Peirce
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"The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you."
Charles Sanders Peirce
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"We cannot begin with complete doubt."
Charles Sanders Peirce
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"A true proposition is a proposition belief which would never lead to such disappointment so long as the proposition is not understood otherwise than it was intended."
Charles Sanders Peirce
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"Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business. But do not make believe; if pedantry has not eaten all the reality out of you, recognize, as you must, that there is much that you do not doubt, in the least. Now that which you do not at all doubt, you must and do regard as infallible, absolute truth."
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"The method of authority will always govern the mass of mankind; and those who wield the various forms of organized force in the state will never be convinced that dangerous reasoning ought not to be suppressed in some way"
Charles Sanders Peirce
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"There is a kink in my damned brain that prevents me from thinking as other people think."
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"The one the logician studies the science of drawing conclusions, the other the mathematician the science which draws necessary conclusions.
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"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."
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"In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience"
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"Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing."
Charles Sanders Peirce
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"Over against any cognition, there is an unknown but knowable reality; but over against all possible cognition, there is only the self-contradictory"
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"When anything is present to the mind, what is the very first and simplest character to be noted in it, in every case, no matter how little elevated the object may be? Certainly, it is its presentness"
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"One will meet, for example, the virtual assumption that what is relative to thought cannot be real. But why not, exactly? Red is relative to sight, but the fact that this or that is in that relation to vision that we call being red is not itself relative to sight; it is a real fact."
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"A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be."
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"We shall do better to abandon the whole attempt to learn the truthunless we can trust to the human mind's having such a powerof guessing right that before very many hypotheses shall have been tried, intelligent guessing may be expected to lead us to one which will support all tests, leaving the vast majority of possible hypotheses unexamined"
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"The truth is, that common-sense, or thought as it first emerges above the level of the narrowly practical, is deeply imbued with that bad logical quality to which the epithet metaphysical is commonly applied; and nothing can clear it up but a severe course of logic."
Charles Sanders Peirce
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"We, one and all of us, have an instinct to pray; and this fact constitutes an invitation from God to pray."
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"Three elements go to make up an idea. The first is its intrinsic quality as a feeling. The second is the energy with which it affects other ideas, an energy which is infinite in the here-and-nowness of immediate sensation, finite and relative in the recency of the past. The third element is the tendency of an idea to bring along other ideas with it."
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"The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise."
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"All the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they can be applied."
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"Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object."
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"When an image is said to be singular, it is meant that it is absolutely determinate in all respects. Every possible character, or the negative thereof, must be true of such an image."
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"Fate then is that necessity by which a certain result will surely be brought to pass according to the natural course of events however we may vary the particular circumstances which precede the event."
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"But the extraordinary insight which some persons are able to gain of others from indications so slight that it is difficult to ascertain what they are, is certainly rendered more comprehensible by the view here taken."
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"A pair of statements may be taken conjunctively or disjunctively; for example, "It lightens and it thunders ," is conjunctive, "It lightens or it thunders" is disjunctive. Each such individual act of connecting a pair of statements is a new monad for the mathematician."
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"Theology, I am persuaded, derives its initial impulse from a religious wavering; for there is quite as much, or more, that is mysterious and calculated to awaken scientific curiosity in the intercourse with God, and it [is] a problem quite analogous to that of theology."
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"Every work of science great enough to be well remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written; and each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic."
Charles Sanders Peirce
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