Charles Peirce, inference, and category theory

Abstract

The American philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce (1839-1914) had much to say about the nature of intellectual enquiry. In the realm of deductive logic, category theorists have made important use of his string-diagrammatic logical calculus. But Peirce’s interests in inference extended beyond deduction to induction and abduction. In this talk I shall be exploring the thesis that we can understand this triple in terms of the category-theoretic notions of composition, extension and lift. We will also touch on his broader semiotics and his account of concept formation.