Picturing the Paradoxes of Pragmatism: C. S. Peirce’s Drawings

Within the longer Anglo-American empiricist tradition, C. S. Peirce's many drawings help distinguish his celebrated mode of thinking. If Locke notoriously claimed that "ideas" were the "pictures drawn in our minds," Peirce's drawings seem to evidence his development of this proposition even further. Though the many pictures that Peirce made are largely informal and mostly unpublished, recent scholarship has begun to analyze them to better clarify what has been called Peirce’s “imagistic thought.” In this paper I will consider some of these drawings in relation to some of Peirce’s writings and aim to show how the drawings help us understand Peirce’s harnessing of visual elements of cognition. In so doing, relations between physical pictures and mental images are investigated and paradoxes of empiricism, both as practiced within and outside of art history, are highlighted.