"My Inordinate Reluctance to Repeat a Word." A Lexicometric Report on Peirce's Collected Papers

In this report, we present the results of two lexicometric analyses performed on a digitalized version of Charles S. Peirce's Collected Papers. We calculated the most frequently cited terms in the corpus and its most overrepresented terms, as compared with a sample of the Corpus of Historical American. Combining both analyses allowed us to produce a shorter list of the "most important terms" of the Collected Papers, deemed to be distinctive of Peirce's philosophical interests. One of the most significant findings is the quantitative evidence that Peirce's work is primarily concerned with truth and propositions. We suggest that such statistical analyses offer an interesting overview of Peirce's philosophical interests in an unprecedented way.