Wright Chauncey (1830–75), American philosopher and mathematician. He graduated from Harvard in 1852 and until 1872 was employed by the periodical American Ephemeris. His philosophical discussions were stimulating and attracted many, including Peirce, James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who thought of him as their ‘intellectual boxing master.’ Wright eventually accepted British empiricism, especially that of J. S. Mill, though under Darwinian influence he modified Mill’s view considerably by rejecting the empiricist claim that general propositions merely summarize particulars. Wright claimed instead that scientific theories are hypotheses to be further developed, and insisted that moral rules are irreducible and need no utilitarian ‘proof.’ Though he denied the ‘summary’ view of universals, he was not strictly a pragmatist, since for him a low-level empirical proposition like Peirce’s ‘this diamond is hard’ is not a hypothesis but a self-contained irreducible statement. See also PEIRCE, PRAGMATISM. E.H.M.