Peircean Induction and the Error-Correcting Thesis (Part I)

Today is C.S. Peirce's birthday. You should read him: he's a treasure chest on essentially any topic, and he anticipated several major ideas in statistics (e.g., randomization, confidence intervals) as well as in logic. Links to Parts 2 and 3 are at the end. It's written for a very general philosophical audience; the statistical parts are pretty informal. Peirce's philosophy of inductive inference in science is based on the idea that what permits us to make progress in science, what allows our knowledge to grow, is the fact that science uses methods that are self-correcting or error-correcting: Induction is the experimental testing of a theory.