Information and Truth in Peirce’s Philosophy

Abstract

Along all the philosophical carrier of Charles S. Peirce, the notion of state of information and its relations with Truth are present conferring realism to his conception of the logical aspects of knowledge. Information is conceived as the product of breadth and depth of the logical terms including concepts and propositions. So Peirce truly innovates in considering the quantity of the logical terms, do not accepting to generalize to all kind of terms, concepts and propositions the traditional inverse relation by which breadth decreases in the exact proportion the depth increase, and vice-versa. Only for analytical propositions this lemma is valid. But to the synthetic ones, that search for truth about their objects, and not only to make the concepts clear, each case must be considered in order to know if there is information different from zero, if itincreases, decreases or stay the same and what is the destiny of each of the quantities on stake. The question remaining practically the same, the treatment
furnished to it will suffer very important evolution during the years, following the very evolution of Peirce´s Philosophy.