Peirceans

Peirceans are scholars, philosophers, and students who adhere to or study the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, an American logician, mathematician, and philosopher who lived from 1839 to 1914. The label describes followers of Peirce’s ideas or those who work within his intellectual tradition, rather than a formal school or movement.

Core to Peirce’s thought are semiotics, pragmatism, and a distinctive theory of logic. In his sign theory, a sign is a triadic relation among the representamen (the sign itself), its object, and its interpretant. Peirce also categorized phenomena according to Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, emphasizing that meaning arises through interpretive processes within inquiry. He promoted fallibilism, the view that all beliefs are provisional, and he distinguished abduction as a form of inference for generating hypotheses, alongside deduction and induction. His broader outlook includes synechism (the doctrine of continuity) and a scientific approach to knowledge.

Historically, Peirce’s ideas matured across the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although they influenced later pragmatists such as William James, Peirce preferred the term pragmaticism to distinguish his position from other uses of pragmatism. Today, Peirce scholarship is sustained by academic societies, journals, and numerous interpretive programs that explore his logic, semiotics, and theory of inquiry.

In contemporary usage, Peirceans appear in philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, cognitive science, and information theory. Their work often centers on refining Peirce’s triadic sign theory, his method of inquiry, and his normative commitments about how meaning and knowledge arise in practice, while engaging with ongoing debates about interpretation and scientific method.