The Good, the Effective and the Ugly. Computational Insights into the Philosophical Style of C.S. Peirce

C.S. Peirce devoted several writings, spanning the whole of his production, to the topics of philosophical terminology and the ideal style of philosophy, culminating in the definition of "precepts" of good scientific and philosophical style. After contextualizing these reflections, we present the methodology and the results of two experimental computational analyses performed on the Collected Papers. We show how to translate some of Peirce’s stylistic ideals into measurements a machine can perform, with the aim of gathering computer-assisted insights into the Peircean corpus, and ultimately developing tools to assess the technical style of an author. To this end we focus on two specific stylistic features, which are investigated by means of machine-learning techniques: the deliberately unusual appearance of technical nomenclature (a well-known mark of the author and the more explicitly stylistic requirement of his precepts) and the tendency towards repetition of technical terms which is typical of scientific style.