Peirceâs Science of Economics and Economics of Science

Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) is most famous today as a philosopher, the founder of the philosophical school of Pragmatism, and as a logician. In his own day, he was better known as a bench scientist, astronomer, and metrologist, renowned in the international scientific community for his measurements of gravity. Peirce was, in fact, one of history's great polymaths: mathematician, a founder of semiotics and one of the earliest experimental psychologists, as well as a contributor to a number of other disciplines, lexicography, and for decades a scientific contributor to The Nation. Perhaps the least understood of Peirce's many contributions are his forays into economics. In the 1870s, no one in the world had a better understanding of mathematical economics or its applications to real-world problems. Peirce's Science of Economics and Economics of Science is a careful examination of his engagement with economics. It takes an interdisciplinary approach. As history of economics, it reconstructs how Peirce came to possess a cutting-edge knowledge of mathematical economics at the dawn of the so-called "marginalist revolution," how he used that knowledge in concrete applications, and how he understood the nature of economics as a science. As a wider history of science, it shows how Peirce created the economics of science out of a whole cloth as part of resolving methodological problems that arose in his work of measuring gravity. The book explores applications of Peirce's ideas about economics to some long-standing problems in the philosophy of science and shows how these ideas have implications for real-world science.

James R. Wible is Professor of Economics at the University of New Hampshire. Kevin D. Hoover is Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Duke University.