I was scrolling through a Peirce quote recently and misread it in a way that perfectly illustrates how our cognition reshapes reality to match our priors.
The passage began:
“I once landed at a seaport in a Turkish province; and, as I was walking up to the house which I was to visit, I met a man upon horseback, surrounded by four horsemen holding a canopy over his head.”
But my eyes didn’t see seaport. They saw airport. For a split second, I pictured Charles Sanders Peirce in a Turkish province, stepping off a plane. Then confusion set in—Peirce lived in the 19th century, before airplanes. I blinked, re-read, and only then did the intended word resolve itself: seaport.
The Garden Path of Expectation
This is a textbook garden-path effect: the brain takes the most obvious interpretive shortcut based on modern frequency (airport is far more common in contemporary texts than seaport), and only corrects when the interpretation collapses against context.
In that brief gap between misreading and correction, you can feel the machinery of interpretation exposed: the brain guesses, projects, and only later checks. It’s Bayesian cognition at work—priors dominating until evidence forces an update.
How the Present Colonizes the Past
The funny part is that Peirce’s original readers would never have stumbled here. For them, seaport was the default; ships were the infrastructure of travel. But my 21st-century priors immediately substituted aviation.
This is how the present colonizes the past. We drag our modern assumptions backward, even into contexts where they make no sense. It’s not just a misreading—it’s a distortion of history through the lens of convenience.
And this small stumble is a microcosm of a broader truth: every generation misreads the past by projecting its present categories onto it. We picture medieval peasants with “jobs,” ancient philosophers with “political ideologies,” or tribal elders with “religions.” These weren’t their categories; they’re ours.
The Semiotics of Error
Peirce himself would have appreciated this anecdote. It is an example of semiosis in action: the interpretant (my brain) misaligned the sign (the printed word) with its object (a seaport). The sign didn’t fail—I did, by importing a modern interpretant.
And yet the misfire isn’t wasted. Misreadings reveal how signs live in time. They accumulate sediment from the epochs that use them. Seaport was natural in 1880; airport is natural in 2025. Meaning itself drifts with history.
The Lesson
A trivial error reading Peirce turns into a philosophical parable:
Every reading is conditional on context.
Every era rewrites the past through its own vocabulary.
Errors are not failures but windows into our priors.
What I misread wasn’t just a slip; it was a glimpse into how the present invisibly colonizes interpretation. If Peirce had wanted to give us a semiotic demonstration of historicity and fallibility, he couldn’t have staged it better.
And the next time I stumble on an anachronistic misreading, I’ll take it less as embarrassment and more as a reminder: the mind is always a negotiator between the world and its own assumptions.