In 1902 Peirce submitted an unsuccessful[7] application to the Carnegie Institution for economic aid in order to accomplish, as he chose to frame it himself in his opening letter, "certain scientific work". Peirce's application opened with the following brief introductory epistle directed to the Executive Committee of the institution:
Joseph Ransdell (1994a) who has helpfully, while working together with Ken Ketner at the Institute for Studies in Pragmatism at the end of 1970's, had transcribed all the Carnegie Institution application documents and the five draft versions that Peirce wrote in the process of writing the application and subsequently made them available in edited, digital text form[8], notes in his brief introduction and commentary to the transcribed version that in referring to the "Appendix containing a fuller statement." under point 1. above, "Peirce means the entire list of 36 proposed "Memoirs," including his accompanying descriptions of their contents"[9] It is actually this Appendix of 36 Memoirs that makes up the main body of the application, which in the final version ran to in all 80 pages. Ransdell comments too in this connection that:
"...the projected 36 memoirs represent topically Peirce's entire system of philosophy as analysed by him in terms of the presuppositional order of its parts, which he articulates in his classification of the sciences. (Peirce regards a science as a social activity controlled critically by the norm of truth and, in his view, philosophy can be like that.) (Ransdell 1994b, p. 6)[10]
Peirce's application to the Carnegie Institution was in many ways a kind of last-ditch attempt (he was at the time he made it sixty three years old) to gain sufficient economic collateral to realise in a synthesising way what he had always considered to be his true life project, namely the development and refinement of his "Logic" or "Semeiotic", as he often referred to it. As Peirce himself notes candidly at the beginning of the final version of Section 1, "Explanation of what work is proposed":
"Some personal narrative is here necessary. I imbibed from my boyhood the spirit of positive science, and especially of exact science; and early became intensely curious concerning the theory of the methods of science; so that, shortly after my graduation from college in 1859, I determined to devote my life to that study; although indeed it was less a resolve than an overmastering passion which I had been for some years unable to hold in check. It has never abated." [MS L75, FV (346-349)]
Peirce goes on to round off this initial explanatory section with the following statement of intent:
"Therefore, what I hereby solicit the aid of the Carnegie Institution to enable me to do is to draw up some three dozen memoirs, each complete in itself, yet the whole forming a unitary system of logic in all its parts, which memoirs shall present in a form quite convincing to a candid mind the results to which I have found that the scientific method unequivocally leads, adding in each case, rational explanations of how opposing opinions have come about; the whole putting logic, as far as my studies of it have gone, upon the undeniable footing of a science." [ibid.]
The key concepts in the two quotes above are undoubtedly "theory of the methods of science", "a unitary system of logic in all its parts" and finally "putting logic [...] upon the undeniable footing of a science". The particular wordings that Peirce has chosen to represent what he perceived as the main objectives of his project clearly reflect that he was concerned with presenting for the wider scientific community (cf. his formulation "in a form quite convincing to a candid mind" above) in a coherent and synthesised form what Murphey (1993, p. 355) refers to as his "architectonic theory", an "all-embracing system which would serve as the framework for all future discovery and knowledge". The "three dozen memoirs", as Peirce lists them in his final version of his Carnegie application are shown below. Note that although the actual titles of each of the thirty six memoirs in the table below are Peirce's own, the terms in brackets have been usefully inserted by Ransdell when he edited the transcribed version of the text in order to clarify how the various groups of memoirs actually relate to certain central sections of Peirce's classification of the sciences. We shall go on to examine this particular relationship in some more detail later on.
Liszka (1996, p. 3) characterises Peirce's work to develop a systematic classification of the sciences in the following way:
"His system reflects a very broad, classical sense of "science", not restricted to the modern empirical sciences alone, but understood as any attempt to systematise knowledge [CP 1.234]. Thus he could include under the label of "science" not only laboratory sciences such as chemistry but also human sciences such as ethnology, as well as disciplines such as history and literary and art criticism [CP 1.201]. His schema suggests two main branches of science so understood, theoretical and practical [CP 1.239]. These are further subdivided into the sciences of discovery, review and the practical sciences [CP 1.181]. The division in terms of branches corresponds to the purpose of the science, so that the theoretical sciences aim at the discovery of knowledge, whereas the goal of the sciences of review is the organisation of the sciences and the practical ones have as their goal the application of knowledge."
While, in more or less the same vein, Murray Murphey (1993) has noted that:
"[i]t was Peirce's endeavour to build a cosmological theory which would be broad enough to afford a view of the probable course of future events yet specific enough to be scientifically acceptable. To do this there were certain requirements which the theory had to meet. The first was that the system had to be constructed architectonically." (ibid., p. 329)
Framed in Peirce's own words the problem was as follows:
"That systems ought to be constructed architectonically has been preached since the time of Kant, but I do not think that the full import of the maxim has been apprehended. What I would recommend is that every person who wishes to form an opinion concerning fundamental problems should first of all make a complete survey of human knowledge, should take note of all the valuable ideas in each branch of science, should observe in what respect each has been successful and where it has failed, in order that, in the light of the thorough acquaintance so attained of the available materials for a philosophical theory and of the nature and strength of each, he may proceed to the study of what the problem of philosophy consists in, and of the proper way of solving it." (CP 6.9, cited in Murphey 1993, p. 329)
which Murphey goes on to comment on as follows:
"It is clear that this passage involves a generalisation of Kant's idea of architectonic. Kant had asserted a relation between logic and metaphysics; Peirce here suggests a relation between the special sciences in general and philosophy as a whole. As the subsequent argument of this paper[11], and of "A Guess at the Riddle"[12], makes clear, the fundamental ideas of the special sciences turn out to be classifiable by the categories, so that what is being argued is something with which Kant would have fully agreed, namely, that the categories are the basis of all special knowledge. [...] The architectonic theory itself is a kind of classification of science in terms of presupposition although it happens only to involve only logic and metaphysics...the important question is why Peirce should have been interested to do this. After all Kant never bothered to do so. If the categories are true of all thought, they are true of the special sciences by definition - why bother to prove in detail what is obvious a priori? (ibid. p. 329-330)
Interestingly enough, Kant did, in fact, begin considering these kinds of issues later on in his life. His concern with this particular project began around the early 1790's with the idea that in order to complete his life's work it would be necessary to discuss the relationship between physics, and metaphysics; to explain how it would be possible to make, as he phrased it initially, the "transition from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics". This would, he felt finally put in order what he later referred to in a letter written in 1798 to Christian Garve as "the unpaid bill of my uncompleted philosophy"[13]. One month later he wrote to Kiesewetter, a former pupil, that "The transition from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics [...] must not be left out of the system ... [W]ith that work the task of critical philosophy will be completed and a gap that now stands open will be filled."[14] It was not, however, until 130 years after his death that Kant's "Opus postumum", as it is now referred to, was actually made public as volumes 21 and 22 (1936 and 1938) of his collected works (see the reference list for more details of this).