Peirce’s Triadic Logic: Modality and Continuity
In the summer of 2020, I submitted an essay that I pulled out of my MA thesis for the Charles Sanders Peirce Essay competition. I ended up winning! Here is a pdf of the draft I originally submitted. A somewhat more polished version should be published soon. In the paper I try to pin down Peirce’s philosophical motivations for experimenting with three valued logic. I locate his motivations within concerns about modality and continuity. To my knowledge, Peirce was the first person to generalize the matrix method for giving truth values to three values. I think this makes understanding his reasons for doing so extremely interesting.