Peirce as reader & reading as reverie

Abstract

Scientific inquirers in the modern sense, those thinkers with whom C. S. Peirce most deeply identified, “have been successful because they have spent their lives not in their libraries and museums but in their laboratories and in the field” (CP 1.34). But, in fact, Peirce spent countless hours engaged in an activity he appears to slight in this and other passages. Indeed, he seems to have misread his life as a reader. The author offers a portrait of Peirce as a reader, but of even greater importance he draws upon Georges Poulet to sketch a phenomenology of reading and upon Elaine Scarry to offer an account of reading as a form of reverie. In addition, he shows how Peirce’s thought underwrites both of these endeavors, paying close attention to Peirce’s synechistic account of mind, consciousness, and subjectivity, but also consideration to the semeiotic categories of diagram, symbol, and to a less degree icons.