Charles Sanders Peirce

An American philosopher, logician and scientist who worked for decades at the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey while pursuing philosophy largely outside any university post, and who is generally credited as the founder of pragmatism, a term he coined in the 1870s in discussions with the informal Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Peirce held that the entire meaning of a concept lies in its conceivable practical effects, and that scientific inquiry is a self-correcting community process converging, in the ideal long run, on a single true account of reality. When William James's more popular version of pragmatism diverged from his own, Peirce relabeled his position pragmaticism, a name he said was ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers. He also made foundational, independently developed contributions to formal logic and to semiotics, the general theory of signs.