Science Beyond the Self: Remarks on Charles S. Peirce’s Social Epistemology

Abstract

For Peirce, science is decidedly a social enterprise. However, since Peirce defined science broadly as “the devoted, well-considered, life pursuit of knowledge,” what he said of science applies by and large to the acquisition and assessment of knowledge in general. In this paper I aim to shed light on Peirce’s social epistemology by examining his views on scientific inquiry in the light of his philosophy of mind. I will argue that how Peirce recasts key concepts such as self, mind, thought, and person, has deep repercussions for how to interpret inquiry and assess its end product. The argument I present combines Peirce’s notion of the scientific method as the fourth and most stable manner of fixing our beliefs developed in the late 1870s in Popular Science Monthly, with his notion of the self as he expressed in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy a decade earlier.