In this interview, we talk to Dan Everett about the life and work of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and Everett’s application of Peirce’s ideas to create a Peircean linguistics.

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References for Episode 38

Cole, David. 2023. “The Chinese Room Argument”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), eds. Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/chinese-room/

Everett, Daniel L. 2012. Language: The Cultural Tool. New York: Pantheon Books.

Everett, Daniel L. 2017. How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention. New York: Liveright.

Everett, Daniel L. 2023. ‘Underspecified temporal semantics in Pirahã: Compositional transparency and semiotic inference’, in Understanding Human Time, ed. Kasia M. Jaszczolt, pp. 276–318. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Transcript by Luca Dinu

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, [00:15 ] online at hiphilangsci.net. There you can find links and references to [00:19 ] all the literature we discuss. Today we’re joined by Dan Everett. Dan is Professor [00:25 ] of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley College in Massachusetts. His background is in field [00:31 ] linguistics and linguistic theory, and he’s of course best known for his work with the [00:37 ] Pirahã in the Brazilian Amazon. The conclusions he’s drawn about the structure of the Pirahã [00:43 ] language have significant consequences for much of mainstream linguistic theory, especially [00:49 ] for generative grammar in the Chomskyan tradition. These consequences have been debated extensively. [00:56 ]

At the moment, Dan is researching most keenly the life and work of the American philosopher [01:01 ] Charles Sanders Peirce. This project is not unrelated to his work on Pirahã and his previous [01:08 ] contributions to linguistic theory. These various threads are now coming together in Dan’s proposal [01:15 ] for a Peircean linguistics, and this is what he’s going to talk to us about today.

So to set the [01:22 ] scene for us, can you tell us, who was C.S. Peirce? What were his intellectual contributions, [01:29 ] and why are they important?

DE: I’m actually writing a biography of Charles Sanders Peirce for [01:35 ] Princeton University Press, and I’ve been interested in Peirce now for about six years [01:42 ] seriously, and before that I did cite him quite a bit in my How Language Began from 2017 and [01:51 ] also in my Language: The Cultural Tool from 2012, but I got seriously interested in Peirce [01:59 ] some years later. The first time I heard about Peirce, and then I’ll get to who he is, was [02:05 ] actually from Chomsky, who called him his favorite philosopher and talked about the [02:10 ] Peircean concept of abduction, which is the formalization of hypothesis formation. [02:16 ]

Charles Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Benjamin and Sarah Peirce in 1839. [02:26 ] Benjamin was for 50 years professor of mathematics at Harvard and was considered the leading [02:33 ] mathematician in the United States and the person who put U.S. science on a nearly equal footing [02:41 ] with the European science of mid-19th century, and he was a very interesting person in his own [02:47 ] right, founder of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement [02:53 ] of Science, co-founder.

Charles was raised in Harvard Yard. When he was a boy, they lived [03:02 ] actually in Harvard Yard, and his friends and his father’s friends were some of the leading [03:07 ] intellectuals of the United States, and later as Peirce grew, his own friends became leading [03:15 ] intellectuals and friends of people such as Thomas Huxley and others.

But Charles initially became [03:23 ] interested in logic and chemistry, and for most of his life… The only degree that he actually ever held [03:33 ] was in chemistry. He held a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from [03:41 ] Harvard, and he was then hired as an astronomer and as a geophysicist with what was then called [03:51 ] the U.S. Coastal Survey, which is now NOAA. They actually launched a ship called C.S. Peirce. [03:59 ] So he got mainly interested in logic, but he was also one of the greatest polymaths in history. He [04:07 ] was the first person in the United States to do experimental psychology. He was the inventor of [04:15 ] propositional and first-order logic with quantifiers, nearly simultaneously with Frege. [04:20 ] They didn’t know about each other’s work. Peirce is also known as the inventor of American pragmatism, [04:26 ] or just pragmatism. That’s a philosophical school of America that is often associated with [04:30 ] William James. He is the inventor of semiotics, and there’s evidence that Saussure actually [04:38 ] was able to consult some of Peirce’s work on semiotics before he came out with his own work [04:44 ] on semiotics, which was very different and designed for a very different purpose. [04:51 ]

So in mathematics, Peirce took his father’s place as the number one mathematician in the United [04:57 ] States, and there are many articles on mathematics. So he was a phenomenal polymath. He was one of the [05:03 ] leading Egyptologists in the world, and he was… In his notebooks I have copied, there are analyses of [05:12 ] Tagalog syntax, and he was very interested in languages. He published about 127 articles on [05:21 ] linguistics or linguistic themes, including the first-ever phonetic study of Shakespearean [05:27 ] pronunciation. His father had produced the first formal study of phonetics in the United States, [05:33 ] or one of the first.

So he was this astounding person, but when he died, [05:40 ] he never held an academic post except for four years at Johns Hopkins. He was one of the first [05:46 ] professors hired at the new University of Johns Hopkins, but Peirce was a very egocentric person. [05:54 ] He thought he was smarter than everybody else. He probably was. He didn’t like to take orders. [05:59 ] So he lost his job at Johns Hopkins. Also from the fact that he liked to drink, and he was seen [06:06 ] coming out of a hotel with a woman who was not his wife, and that really got the trustees of [06:11 ] Johns Hopkins upset. He eventually married her. But he was fired. He was eventually fired from [06:17 ] his job at the U.S. Coastal Service after 31 years, and this was in the day before pensions, [06:22 ] before retirement plans.

So he was left penniless when he was roughly 60 years old, 62 years old. [06:31 ] He was left penniless and survived through the contributions of William James, who led a great [06:39 ] effort to round up people from Alexander Graham Bell to Andrew Carnegie to contribute monthly [06:46 ] to Peirce. But it was very pov… It was a poverty-level contribution, but it kept him from death, I mean, [06:53 ] and starvation.

Peirce, according to his diaries, was usually up at 7:30 in the morning and worked [06:59 ] till about midnight or 1 AM every day, seven days a week, and his neighbors said that the light [07:05 ] was always on in his study, and poverty did not keep him from working a tremendous amount. [07:11 ]

His papers originally were not well organized after his death. They were picked up and sold [07:17 ] for a very small price to Harvard, and Harvard took them and tried to organize them, but because [07:23 ] of his reputation for immorality, in part, Harvard wouldn’t allow access to those papers, [07:30 ] and so it was very hard to do work on Peirce. And one of the chairmen of the Harvard philosophy