1. Mid-West Quarterly
2 (1914), 49.
2. There is a vast body of exegetical and critical literature dealing with Peirce’s philosophy. The following are concerned explicitly with Peirce’s treatment of self-correction: A. W. Burks, ‘Peirce’s Theory of Abduction’, Philosophy of Science
13 (1946), 3016. C. W. Cheng, Peirce’s and Lewis’s
Theories of Induction (The Hague, 1969), H. G. Frankfurt, ‘Peirce’s Notion of Abduction’, Journal of Philosophy 55 (1958), 5937; J. Lenz, ‘Induction as Self-Corrective’, in Moore and Robin (eds.), Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (Amherst, Mass., 1964 ); E. Madden, ‘Peirce on Probability’, in ibid.; F. E. Reilly, The Method of the Sciences According to C. S. Peirce, Doctoral dissertation, St Louis University, 1959. While acknowledging a debt to all of these works, I believe it is fair to say that none of these authors treats Peirce’s approach to SCT within the historical framework in which I have tried to place it.
3. See, for instance, Burks, ‘Peirce’s Theory’. Even Peirce himself tries to give the impression that he was the first to enunciate the view that scientific reasoning is self-corrective. For instance, he wrote in 1893 that “you will search in vain for any mention in any book I can think of” of the view “that reasoning tends to correct itself”. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. Hartshorne, Weiss et al., 8 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–58) Vol. 5, p. 579. Without questioning Peirce’s integrity, we do have some grounds for doubting his memory. Peirce makes numerous references to the works of may of the writers whom I cite below as Peirce’s predecessors in this matter. (See, for example, ibid., Vol. 5, p. 276 n., where he writes knowledgeably of the philosophies of science of both LeSage and Hartley, who had stressed the self-correcting aspects of scientific reasoning.)
4. This point requires some qualification. As is well known, passages can be adduced from all these authors where they seem to abandon the infallibilism of TICT and to replace it by a more modest “probabilism”. (Many of the relevant texts are discussed in Chapter 4.) However, it would be a serious error of judgment to let these concessions to fallibilism obscure the fact that all of these figures shared the classical view that science at its best is demonstrated knowledge from true principles. Bacon, Descartes, Locke, and Boyle all see it as a goal that science become infallible; until that goal is realized they are willing to settle — but only temporarily — for merely probable belief. Their long-term aim, however, is to replace such mere opinion by genuine knowledge.
5. See Robert Hooke’s posthumously published account of “inductive logic” in The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, ed. R. Waller (London, 1705), pp. 3 ff.