  Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was the founder of American pragmatism (after about 1905 called by Peirce “pragmaticism” in order to differentiate his views from those of William James, John Dewey, and others, which were being labelled “pragmatism”), a theorist of logic, language, communication, and the general theory of signs (which was often called by Peirce “semeiotic”), an extraordinarily prolific logician (mathematical and general), and a developer of an evolutionary, psycho-physically monistic metaphysical system. Practicing geodesy and chemistry in order to earn a living, he nevertheless considered scientific philosophy, and especially logic, to be his true calling, his real vocation. In the course of his polymathic researches, he wrote voluminously on an exceedingly wide range of topics, ranging from mathematics, mathematical logic, physics, geodesy, spectroscopy, and astronomy, on the one hand (that of mathematics and the physical sciences), to psychology, anthropology, history, and economics, on the other (that of the humanities and the social sciences).