Peirce’s last philosophic will and testament: Uberty in the Logic of Instinctive Reasoning

Abstract

In essential continuity with his argument for Musement in “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” of 1908, Peirce’s last unfinished papers MS 682 and MS 683 of 1913 contain his self-considered “legacy” contribution to the history of logic, as well as reprising his career-long integration of epistemological and ontological dimensions of an idealism-realism, which he expressed as a “universe perfused with signs.” Peirce’s semiotic universe involves the coalescent plasticity of evolutionary nature and mind, the heuristic front edge of which is the quale-consciousness of instinct-rooted abductive inference, for which he introduced the technical term uberty (“gravid with new births”), in distinction from deduction and induction, in reasoning.