The Peirce Blog

Shapiro letter to the NY Times

2011-11-13T12:33:00.002-05:00

The New York Times published this letter from Michael Shapiro, on the Internet October 28, 2011 and on paper on October 30, 2011 on page BR6 of the N.Y.T. Sunday Book Review. Shapiro's letter was in response to an essay "I Was an Under-Age Semiotician" by Steven Johnson in the Sunday Book Review October 16, 2011, on the 1980s semiotics scene and some of its intellectual and verbal excesses. For my part, I remember SemioTexte; it was such that, twenty or so years later, I balked when I started reading Peirce for his categorial work only to find him deeply focused on semiotics; but I kept reading, joined Joe Ransdell's peirce-l, and came to appreciate Peirce's sem(e)iotic as something quite different. I don't know how Shapiro restrained himself from adding that, for Peirce, signs (including books) are indeed about things. Shapiro's letter:

To the Editor:

Having taught at Brown for 16 years, including a course on Charles Sanders Peirce, the modern founder of sign theory, I found Steven Johnson's essay to be a depressingly accurate characterization of the academic times during his college years. However, readers should know that his identification of semiotics as a field of study by linking it with Peirce, an American philosopher, and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is a serious, albeit common, misconception. Saussure's version is defective next to Peirce's, and not curable by patch-up. That it was Saussure's ideas about signs, and not Peirce's, that gave rise to the Continental form Jacques Derrida and others propagated — and gullible American academics swallowed whole — should not be so glibly elided. Peirce is the greatest intellect the Americas ever produced, and it is his whole philosophy, including his semeiotic (note the spelling and the singular number) that now bids fair to prevail as doctrine.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO
New York

The writer is an emeritus professor of Slavic and semiotic studies at Brown University.

Shapiro is well known among Peirce scholars as editor of the five-volume series Peirce Seminar Papers (1993–2002) and author of numerous works on linguistics and semiotics.

Jerry Dozoretz

2011-08-22T12:13:00.004-04:00

Jerry Dozoretz passed away earlier this month. Condolences to his beloved wife Ann and family. Ann emailed Nathan Houser, Gary Richmond, and me about it yesterday.

Denver Post obituary (August 12-14) http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/denverpost/obituary.aspx?n=jerry-dozoretz&pid=153047257 .

Jerry had a Ph.D. in Philosophy from University of Californis, Santa Barbara. He was an Instructor and Assistant Professor of Philosophy from 1970 to 1983. An article of his was published in Peirce Studies 1. Starting in 1983 he worked in the private sector, eventually going into business for himself. He had five children.

Jerry was the chief operating officer of the Peirce Group, which owns the Arisbe website and peirce-l, which were created and long maintained by Joe Ransdell, who passed away in December 2010. Jerry was working on their relocation to the Institute for American Thought at I.U.P.U.I. He was also working on the relocation of Joseph Ransdell's voluminous papers and library to the I.A.T.

In a peirce-l post yesterday, Steven Ericsson-Zenith said,

I am very sorry to hear this.

Jerry and I exchanged email in January. He was open and kind, generous with his support and friendship. He was greatly affected by Joe's passing and wanted very much to ensure the future of peirce-l and related materials. It had been on my todo list to follow up with him.

My best wishes and condolences to Jerry's friends and family.

Jerry was a pleasure to work with. I've been at a loss for words. In our last phone conversation Jerry told me that he and Joe Ransdell had been friends since childhood. As usual he sounded well and upbeat and 20 years younger than he was.

Update October 4, 2011. I thought that Jerry said that they had been friends since childhood; I remember responding during that phone call with that understanding uncontradicted by him. But I must have misunderstood. They were born over 15 years apart.

Joseph Ransdell June 5, 1931 — Dec. 27, 2010

Jerry Dozoretz Jan. 11, 1947 — Aug. 5, 2011

Michael Shapiro - Course Announcement

2011-07-28T14:56:00.085-04:00

Post last revised/repaired August 2, 2011. - B.U.

The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University presents

FALL 2011 NEW COURSE

CPLS G4340, 3 pts
Interpretation: Theory and Practice

Michael Shapiro
W 2:10pm-4pm, location: Fayerweather 311

Relying on Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of interpretation in the context of his semeiotic, this course develops a common language powerful enough to underwrite modern interdisciplinary studies in the 21st century. It explores three themes in particular: signs and cognition; the analogy between grammar and nature; historical explanation in the humanities and the sciences.

For more information, please contact ICLS at (212)854-4541 or
send email to
(contact information is at this link).

Registrar link:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/subj/CPLS/G4340-20113-001/

CourseWorks page:
https://courseworks.columbia.edu/cms/public/mainpage.cfm?crs=CPLSG4340_001_2011_3

Note: For more information on the works by Peirce listed below, go to the Main Editions section of the sidebar on the right.

Sem I, 2011-12; Wed 2:10-4:00
FAYERWEATHER 311
Office Hours: Wed 10-12
HB 1-6, Heyman Center

Michael Shapiro
send email
website: http://www.marianneandmichaelshapiro.com/
blog: http://www.languagelore.net/

CPLS G4340.001 INTERPRETATION: THEORY & PRACTICE

MEETING DATES: Sep 7, 14, 21, 28; Oct 5, 12, 19, 26; Nov 2, 9, 16, 23; Dec 7

COURSE REQUIREMENTS: (1) two short papers (3-5 pp.) on a topic to be approved by the instructor, due Oct 26 and Nov 16, resp.; (2) EITHER a longer research paper (10-15 pp.) OR a take-home final exam, due Dec 23.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

C. S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, 2 vols. (Indiana U.P.)
T. L. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs (Cambridge U.P.)
Supplementary Readings[= SR] (Course Packet)

RECOMMENDED:

Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Harvard U.P.)
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books)
E. H. Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (Phaidon Press)
Roman Jakobson, On Language (Harvard U.P.)
James J. Liszka, A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce (Indiana U.P.)
Ernst Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist (Harvard U.P.)
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (Bantam Books)
Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (U of Chicago Press)

RESERVE LIST (in addition to the above):

Carolyn Eisele (ed.), A History of Science: Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science
Max H. Fisch, Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism
Eugene Freeman (ed.), The Relevance of Charles Peirce
Michael Cabot Haley, The Semeiosis of Poetic Metaphor
Charles S. Hardwick (ed.), Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby
Robert S. Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven : Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation
Kenneth L. Ketner (ed.), A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Published Works of Charles Sanders Peirce with a Bibliography of Secondary Studies
Kenneth L. Ketner (ed.), Peirce and Contemporary Thought

RESERVE LIST (cont.)

Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, 8 vols.
Charles S. Peirce, Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Writings
Charles Sanders Peirce, Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking
Charles Sanders Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things
Charles S. Peirce, The New Elements of Mathematics, 4 vols.
Charles S. Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, 7 vols.
David Savan, An Introduction to C. S. Peirce’s Full System of Semeiotic
Michael and Marianne Shapiro, Figuration in Verbal Art
Michael Shapiro (ed.), The Peirce Seminar Papers: Essays in Semiotic Analysis, 5 vols.
Michael Shapiro, The Sense of Change: Language as History
Michael and Marianne Shapiro, The Sense of Form in Literature and Language, 2nd ed.
Michael Shapiro, The Sense of Grammar: Language as Semeiotic

READING ASSIGNMENTS (except for pages in Gombrich, all references are to chapters):

I (Sep 7 – 21): Peirce's theory of signs

Essential Peirce I: 1, 2, 3
Essential Peirce II: 2, 11, 12, 15, 16, 22, 28, 32, 33
Liszka: 1
Short: 7, 8, 9
SR: 1, 2, 3

II (Sep 28 – Oct 26): signs and cognition; grammar and nature

Essential Peirce I: 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24
Bruner: 3
Geertz: 1, 2
Gombrich: 1, 12, 45, 56
Jakobson: 4, 5, 6, 7, 20, 21, 23, 27, 28, 29
Liszka: 2
Mayr: 1, 2, 3
Prigogine & Stengers: 3, 4, 5, 6
Sahlins: 2
SR: 4, 5, 6

III (Nov 2 – Dec 7): historical explanation

Bruner: 2
Geertz: 3, 5
Gombrich: 86, 106
Jakobson: 2, 9, 10, 25
Mayr: 5, 6, 7, 8
Prigogine & Stengers: 7, 8, 9
Sahlins: 5
Short: 4, 5, 6
SR: 7, 8, 9, 10

General Description

This course is inspired by the life and work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), widely acknowledged as an American Renaissance man, our country's greatest thinker, and the only native son who ranks among the world's great philosophers. It is distinguished by its interdisciplinary scope and its orientation towards Peirce's theory of signs (what he called the semeiotic, following Locke), which offers the hope that it may reveal and also foster links of method and of aim among the "three worlds"––the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities (including here the academic disciplines, criticism, and the creative arts). Peirce's whole philosophy, of which his theory of signs is the centerpiece, is an immense synthesis of the key ideas of modern science with the classical logical paradigm that traces its origins from Aristotle through the Stoics, Locke, and Kant. Peirce's great achievement is the addition of the theory of interpretation. The course's significance, therefore, derives in part from its focus on interpretation as the key to understanding the foundations of the separate disciplines.

The purpose of the course is to introduce students to a common language that has the power to underwrite modern interdisciplinary studies––in this century and beyond. Peirce's theory of interpretation, which is at the heart of his semeiotic, treats ideas as integral to the "reality" of human experience, whether the data are derived from observation of the natural world, the earth and the heavens, or people and societies. Science adds to our knowledge, advancing from the known to the unknown, by a coordinate use of both abductive hypothetical) and inductive inference, both by the recognition of similarities and the shock of contrast and opposition. Peirce's conception of the interpretant as a law or rule, invariably instantiated in individual signs, is his most radical advance and provides a systematic understanding of the way this coordination does its work.

The course will draw upon various theoretical and methodological perspectives: the study of behavior and of the structural generalities that bind individuals and groups typologically and historically; the study of ideology or of a culture's representation of itself in its visual and verbal forms; and the study of the articulation of meaning, wherever it might be situated, whether in scientific analysis or in humanistic discourse. Each of these approaches and emphases offers important insights into the role of interpretation in defining the foundations of the various disciplines in their interconnections.

The centrality of interpretation will be brought out by pursuing three themes, which have been chosen to give students of diverse backgrounds and interests a feeling for the kind of synthesis that a coherent interdisciplinary perspective can provide. The themes, in order of presentation during the semester’s work, together with their associated issues, are as follows:

1. Signs and cognition. Peirce conceived of his semeiotic as a theory of cognition (following Plato and Locke). What research program will enable sign theory and cognitive science to join hands successfully with the natural sciences? Like many other philosophers and scientists, Peirce was fascinated by the morphology of the natural world. How can modern cognitive science, particularly linguistics, implement Peirce's understanding that the natural world's diversity and complexity cannot be explained merely by reference to physical, mechanical, or thermodynamic forces? What is the role of interpretation and the structure of thought in relation to the various disciplines? How can Peirce's sign theory and his concept of final causation be understood as congruent with contemporary notions in evolutionary biology such as genetic program? Peirce's theory proposes general answers to some of the questions enumerated above, specifically in alignment with his pragmatist conception of meaning and reality.

2. The analogy between grammar and nature. The course will raise questions about language as a foundational metaphor, an issue that goes back beyond Aristotle to prehistory and is to be found in almost all cultures. Should one attempt to analyze the language of nature like the human body, or the human psyche, "grammatically?" Which aspects of nature are (so to speak) its nouns, verbs, and adjectives? What is its syntax? Pursuing the analogy between grammar and nature in the spirit of such queries will necessarily involve confronting various disciplinary paradigms in their conceptual foundations. The semeiotic approach in Peirce's sense takes anything whatever, including inorganic matter, as potentially significant: anything is capable of signifying if taken to be a sign, i.e., capable of "causing" an interpretation.

3. Historical explanation in the humanities and the sciences. Since historical explanation is the mode of explanation in all disciplines where the agent's purpose is central, what kind of logic do we need in order to deal with historical and evolutionary change as well as action? To what extent is the idea underpinning historical method, that a good description constitutes an explanation, applicable to the language-oriented disciplines? What is the relationship between synchronic and diachronic explanation? Can any given state of affairs (the "synchronic slice") be explained with a more exact understanding of its causality by its evolution? Historical inquiry can be called a "science" in the measure that it utilizes rules of appropriateness grounded in schemas of practical inference. Do these schemas provide an objective framework for the explanatory practice of historians as well as all who utilize (retrospective) interpretation, like biologists and linguists? Peirce's entire philosophy is based on a profound understanding of the role of history and evolutionary growth in the structure of knowledge. His theory of final causation is coordinated with the theory of signs in an organic way.

The major objectives and emphases of this course can be characterized by considering the "eccentric" position peculiar to human beings and the "third world" (in Karl Popper's terminology) which expresses our eccentricity. Peirce's conception of man as a sign, and of the universe as a semeiotic universe, is perhaps the deepest, most fertile, most imaginative, and most practically applicable form of this fundamental matrix of the human universe. Our bodies make us members of the physical world, permeated by forces and energies, events and interactions. Our psyche is a center, a perspective of feelings, emotions, and efforts, tendencies, dreams, by which the world of bodies is captured, tasted, chewed, swallowed, digested, or spewed back in disgust or enjoyment. Our eccentricity lies in the third world, the world of dialogue between the external and the internal worlds--what Peirce (early in his career) called the "Tuistical" (ego.id.tu) and (later) the Semeiotic World.

Although Peirce was a mathematician, logician, and scientist, his semeiotic recognizes the importance of feeling, emotion, sensation, sentiment, action. Put another way, the semeiotic offers us not only a way to understand science as a human enterprise, it also offers an approach to literature and the arts, to religion, to society, to the whole of the third world that lies between the private incommunicable interior and the vast spaces of the exterior universe.

Joseph Morton Ransdell

2011-01-06T14:07:00.003-05:00

Joseph Morton Ransdell
June 5, 1931 - December 27, 2010.

I've discussed things with Joe for years on peirce-l and occasionally off-list.
I owe him; but for him and peirce-l I might have remained intellectually isolated and semi-articulate. I spoke with him for the first and only time, on November 19th by phone. His intelligence was as energetic as ever, but he was ill. I'm glad I called him and managed to mention that I look up to him.

Joe opposed the concept of intellectual authority; but he was marked by something similar but genuine: possession of ideas and understandings to which those who are interested in the same matters owe attention and response.

The obituary was posted today at http://lubbockonline.com/obituaries/2011-01-06/joseph-morton-ransdell. Somebody added it to the Peirce article at Wikipedia and that's how I found out (so I emailed peirce-l). Robert Lane soon followed with this:

From: "Robert Lane"
To: [The Charles S. Peirce Society]
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2011 1:16 PM
Subject: Peirce Society: Joe Ransdell

Fellow members of the Charles S. Peirce Society,

I have just learned the sad news of the recent death of Joe Ransdell. Joe was a Peirce scholar who taught at Texas Tech University from 1974 until his retirement in 2000. Among his contributions to the study of Peirce and to the community of Peirce scholars were his creation of the "Arisbe: the Peirce Gateway" website (http://www.cspeirce.com/) and his founding of the Peirce-L Discussion Forum, for which he also served as moderator. Joe was a Fellow of the Peirce Society, having served as our president in 1999.

An online obituary is here:
http://lubbockonline.com/obituaries/2011-01-06/joseph-morton-ransdell

A memorial service will be held this Saturday, January 8, in Lubbock,
Texas. Details are here:
http://www.memorialdesigners.net/obituaries/Joseph-Ransdell2/

Sincerely,
Bob

--
Robert Lane, Ph.D.
Secretary-Treasurer, Charles S. Peirce Society
Associate Professor and Director of Philosophy
Department of English and Philosophy
University of West Georgia
Carrollton, GA 30118

[phone number & email removed]
http://www.westga.edu/~rlane

I've just received this note on Joe from a past peirce-lister:

Blessed repose and eternal memory...

Perennial philosopher

2011-01-03T13:02:00.004-05:00

Just a quick note to draw folks' attention to Cosma Shalizi's remark in the course of his 1998 review of Deborah G. Mayo's Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge (University of Chicago Press 1996). Here it is, with yellow highlight added:

In the next to last chapter Mayo tries her hand at one of American philosophy's perennial amusements, the game of Peirce Knew It All Along. (If, as Whitehead said, European thought is a series of footnotes to Plato, American thought is a series of footnotes to Peirce --- and Jonathan Edwards, worse luck.) Usually this is a mere demonstration of cleverness, like coining words from the names of opponents, or improving on the proof that if 1+1=3, then Bertrand Russell was the Pope. But in this case it seems that Mayo is really on to something. It is sometimes forgotten that Peirce was by training an experimental scientist, was employed as an experimental physicist for years, and as such lived and breathed error analysis. His opposition to subjective probabilities and paint-by-numbers inductivism is plain. For him "induction" meant the experimental testing of hypotheses; the probabilities employed in induction are the probabilities of inductive procedures leading to correct answers:
The theory here proposed does not assign any probability to the inductive or hypothetic conclusion, in the sense of undertaking to say how frequently that conclusion would be found true. It does not propose to look through all the possible universes, and say in what proportion of them a certain uniformity occurs; such a proceeding, were it possible, would be quite idle. The theory here presented only says how frequently, in this universe, the special form of induction or hypothesis would lead us right. The probability given by this theory is in every way different --- in meaning, numerical value, and form --- from that of those who would apply to ampliative inference the doctrine of inverse chances [i.e., Bayes's theorem]. [2.748, quoted p. 414]

Well, Shalizi seems a bit jaded at the amount of crediting of Peirce, but his "Peirce Knew It All Along" remark is too delicious to pass up. As to Shalizi, he's an assistant professor in the statistics department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his original training was in the statistical physics of complex systems.

Note: I redid Shalizi's broken link on coinages to go to the Internet Archive version of that to which he linked. The recentest version is the 2008 edition at an unrelated URL http://www.philosophicallexicon.com/ .

(Now let's see whether for once I've done a post that I don't need to revise afterward! Update: No such luck. I had omitted the year of Shalizi's 1998 review.)

Richard Robin

2010-10-06T14:28:00.003-04:00

Received from Robert Lane, Secretary-Treasurer, Charles S. Peirce Society.

Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2010 1:53 PM
Subject: PEIRCE SOCIETY: Richard Robin

Members of the Charles S. Peirce Society,

I am sad to report that Richard Robin has died. He passed away peacefully at his home on Monday night. I have not yet received any information about arrangements but if I do I will send it along.

For those who may not know much about Dick and his many contributions to Peirce scholarship and to American philosophy generally, I share a brief excerpt of an essay that Peter Hare wrote for the 2002 issue of the Transactions honoring Dick's work:

"Richard S. Robin was present at the creation - more exactly, at many creations, including the creation of these Transactions and of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. With deep roots in the American tradition as a student of Ralph Barton Perry and C. I. Lewis, Robin has played a major role in the development of scholarship in the history of American philosophy. I shudder to think of how many scholars would have wandered helplessly in the wilderness of Peirce's papers if his celebrated Catalogue had not been published. And for almost 40 years his Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, co-authored and co-edited with Edward Moore, has served as a touchstone of Peirce scholarship. No less influential has been his meticulous work as editor since 1971 of this journal. With quiet, self-deprecating discernment, Dick has nurtured hundreds of aspiring Peirce scholars from all over the globe. Never has a mind as sharp as a tack been matched so well with a warm heart."

Sincerely,
Robert Lane
--
Robert Lane, Ph.D.
Secretary-Treasurer, Charles S. Peirce Society
Associate Professor and Director of Philosophy
Department of English and Philosophy
University of West Georgia
Carrollton, GA 30118

[email & office phone at http://www.westga.edu/~rlane/ ]

Hookway reviews W 8

2010-08-12T20:56:00.002-04:00

Surfed via Philosophy's Other to Christopher Hookway's review (posted August 10, 2010 at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews) of the recently published Volume 8: 1890-1892 of Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition.

Hookway (University of Sheffield, U.K.) is the author of Peirce (1985), Quine: Language, Experience and Reality (1988), Scepticism (1990), Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce (2000, 2002), and numerous articles.

Hookway begins:

This book is volume eight of a multi-volume edition of Peirce's writings in logic and philosophy that was launched in the 1970s. The edition is important because, unlike most of its predecessors, it presents material chronologically, making it possible to study the development of Peirce's thought. It is also invaluable because of the extensive study of manuscripts and texts which has been involved in its production. Many manuscripts have been re-dated, others have been reconstructed from fragments, and we are now provided with extremely reliable transcripts of their contents. And, as in previous volumes, the editors have included drafts of important published papers and a lot of unpublished material. The current volume contains fifty-six items, ranging from published papers on metaphysics to manuscripts on logic and mathematics and reviews, mostly from The Nation, on a wide variety of topics, including William James's Psychology. Like earlier volumes, it contains a long introduction which gives us yet another chapter in a fascinating detailed and scholarly account of Peirce's life and work as well as providing insights into American academic and philosophical life in the later nineteenth century.
The period covered by this volume is an important one in Peirce's life. His teaching post at The Johns Hopkins University had lapsed in 1884, and he was struggling to earn enough to live on by working for the US Coast Survey and by writing definitions for the Century Dictionary. Around this time, Paul Carus launched a philosophical journal, The Monist. Peirce was in regular contact with Carus, and most of his writings between 1890 and his death in 1914, were either published in The Monist or intended for publication there, including five papers on metaphysics included in the present volume. Although not all are among the most accessible of his writings, these papers presented ideas that he had been working on for ten years or more and that continued to be important for his later work. Because these papers provide the intellectual core of the current volume, my comments will focus on them.

Read the whole thing. http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20888

New Peirce

2010-08-11T14:24:00.008-04:00

Re-posted with updatePhilosophy of Mathematics: Selected Writings by Charles S. Peirce, edited by Matthew E. Moore, has been published, according to Amazon. Indiana University Press is publishing it: Catalog page (cloth). Catalog page (paper).

The publisher says "This volume collects Peirce’s most important writings on the subject, many appearing in print for the first time."

It is the first in a new IUP series Selections from the Writings of Charles S. Peirce.

The Amazon item mentions Joseph W. Dauben as a contributor to the book, but there's nothing about that at the IUP site. Here's the Table of Contents. Irving Anellis (a historian of logic) said at peirce-l that he has just received the book and that Dauben does not appear to be contributor.

This is from the publisher's page, also quoted in the Amazon entry:

"Focuses on the major writings Peirce produced that are of greatest significance for a correct appreciation of his larger philosophical agenda." —Joseph W. Dauben, City University of New York

The philosophy of mathematics plays a vital role in the mature philosophy of Charles S. Peirce. Peirce received rigorous mathematical training from his father and his philosophy carries on in decidedly mathematical and symbolic veins. For Peirce, math was a philosophical tool and many of his most productive ideas rest firmly on the foundation of mathematical principles. This volume collects Peirce's most important writings on the subject, many appearing in print for the first time. Peirce's determination to understand matter, the cosmos, and "the grand design” of the universe remain relevant for contemporary students of science, technology, and symbolic logic.

The publisher's page adds:

Matthew E. Moore is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College. He is editor of New Essays on Peirce's Mathematical Philosophy.

Update: I had said that New Essays on Peirce's Mathematical Philosophy, Matthew E. Moore, ed., Open Court (catalog page), 384 pages, trade paper, was "recently published" but in fact it is available by pre-order from Amazon. Thank you to Matthew E. Moore for noting that it's still and very soon to be published. I had bcc'd Moore on a discussion of his new edition of Peirce's writings, and he responded, also adding a list of contributors to the anthology New Essays on Peirce's Mathematical Philosophy:

Christopher Hookway, Sun-Joo Shin, Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, Daniel Campos, Susanna Marietti, Claudine Tiercelin, Elizabeth Cooke, Fernando Zalamea, Philip Ehrlich, Jérôme Havenel, and Moore himself.

End of Update.

Moore has written essays including:

(2009). Peirce on Perfect Sets, Revised. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 45 (4):pp. 649-667.
(2007). Naturalism, Truth and Beauty in Mathematics. Philosophia Mathematica 15 (2).
(2007). The Genesis of the Peircean Continuum. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 43 (3).
(2006). Naturalizing Dissension. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (3):325-334.
(2002). A Cantorian Argument Against Infinitesimals. Synthese 133 (3).

2010-11 CSPS Essay Contest

2010-08-03T10:09:00.003-04:00

Received from the Charles S. Peirce Society:

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

2010-11 Charles S. Peirce Society Essay Contest

Topic: Any topic on or related to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce.

Awards: $500 cash prize; presentation at the Society's next annual meeting, held in conjunction with the Pacific APA (in San Diego, California, April 20-23, 2011); possible publication, subject to editorial revision, in the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society.

Submission Deadline: January 23, 2011

Length: Because the winning essay may be published in the Transactions, the length of contest submissions should be about the length of an average journal article. The maximum acceptable length is 10,000 words, including notes. The presentation of the winning submission at the annual meeting cannot exceed 30 minutes reading time.

Open to: Graduate students and persons who have held a Ph.D. or its equivalent for no more than seven years. Entries from students who have not yet begun their graduate training will not be considered. Past winners of the contest are ineligible. Joint submissions are allowed provided that all authors satisfy the eligibility requirements.

Advice to Essay Contest Entrants:

The winning entry will make a genuine contribution to the literature on Peirce. Therefore, entrants should become familiar with the major currents of work on Peirce to date and take care to locate their views in relation to published material that bears directly on their topic.

Entrants should note that scholarly work on Peirce frequently benefits from the explicit consideration of the historical development of his views. Even a submission that focuses on a single stage in that development can benefit from noting the stage on which it focuses in reference to other phases of Peirce's treatment of the topic under consideration. (This advice is not intended to reflect a bias toward chronological studies, but merely to express a strong preference for a chronologically informed understanding of Peirce's philosophy.)
We do not require but strongly encourage, where appropriate, citation
of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. Ideally, citation of texts found in both the Collected Papers and the Writings should be to both CP and W.

Submissions should be prepared for blind evaluation and must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Cover letter or email should include complete contact information, including mailing address and phone numbers, and a statement that the entrant meets the eligibility requirements of the contest.

Electronic submissions are preferred. Submissions should be sent as email attachments (Microsoft Word documents, RTF files, or PDF files only) to Robert Lane, secretary-treasurer of the Society:
[find email address at http://www.westga.edu/~rlane/ ]. Please include "Peirce Essay Contest Submission" in the subject line of your email.

Submissions by traditional mail are also acceptable. Please mail submissions to:
Robert Lane
Philosophy Program
University of West Georgia
Carrollton, GA 30118
Attn: Peirce Essay Contest

[To be removed from the Charles S. Peirce Society list-serv, please respond to this email with the word "remove" in the subject line.]

--
Robert Lane, Ph.D.
Secretary-Treasurer, Charles S. Peirce Society
Associate Professor and Director of Philosophy
Department of English and Philosophy
University of West Georgia
Carrollton, GA 30118

(xxx) xxx-xxxx
xxxxxxxx.edu
[find phone number & email address at] http://www.westga.edu/~rlane

Triadomany?

2010-07-14T17:20:00.010-04:00

Interesting material on threefold divisions' having been taken curiously far in past anthropology was recently deleted by some editors from Wikipedia's "3 (number)" article. It lacks references but is, I thought, worth preserving, but I didn't know where, but then I thought, why not here? (The reason for the deletion was not the lack of references but the editors' desire to strip the article down).

One really would little expect the evolution of kinds of primates or any living thing to exhibit a pattern of threefold division. But maybe it really did seem that way for a while with primates, as the material's original writer suggests (I myself, before its recent deletion, did some mostly stylistic and link-embedding later edits of it at Wikipedia). As a four-ist myself, I would not expect a pattern of fourfold division in biological evolution either! Peirce, of course, had a few things to say about triadomany - in "Triadomany" - wherein he argues that trichotomies are not to be expected to abound in natural history, and that logical division is to be distinguished from, among other things, genealogical division; the text as rendered by the Collected Papers' editors ends with his noting, with a kind of twinkle in his eye, Huxley's division of vertebrates into Ichthyopsida, Sauropsida, and Mammalia.

So here it is, discarded from Wikipedia:

Anthropology

Attempts to recognize tripartite patterns in human evolution were somewhat popular in the early-mid 20th century. Today, with new knowledge about the fossil record and phylogeny, they are all but refuted. However, one must wonder why there ever was a recurring predilection for a tripartite organization instead of some other pattern, whether or not a specific enumerative identity (such as the "three") presented itself.

With the realization that the Bonobo represents another and very distinct chimpanzee, humans are instead being referred to as "third chimpanzee", as among living creatures they are most similar to the Bonobo and Common Chimp.

3 distinct species of the genus Homo: 1. Homo habilis "capable man". 2. Homo erectus "upright man". 3. Homo sapiens "wise man".
- But many additional species are now known.
3 distinct species of the genus Paranthropus: 1. Paranthropus robustus. 2. Paranthropus boisei. 3. Paranthropus aethiopicus.
- But the validity of Paranthropus, although it is possible, has never been unequivocally proven.
3 Proconsul species: 1. Proconsul africanus. 2. Proconsul major. 3. Proconsul nyanzae.
- But P. heseloni has been described since; and the genus Proconsul might not be an ape.
3 Pan troglodytes sub-species: 1. Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii (Eastern Common Chimpanzee). 2. Pan troglodytes troglodytes (Central Common Chimp). 3. Pan troglodytes verus (Western Common Chimp).
- But P. t. vellerosus has been described since.
3 types of primates: 1. Prosimians. 2. Monkeys (old & new world). 3. Apes (lesser & greater apes, as well as humans).
- But Old World and New World monkeys are not a natural
  group.
3 social group types of the great apes: 1. Orangutans (solitary - little amount of both sexes). 2. Gorillas (harems - great amount of one sex). 3. Common chimpanzees (live in territories defended by related males - great amount of both sexes).
- But Bonobos represent a fourth type of social structure, with equal sex ratio but unique hierarchy.
3 traditional families of hominoids (apes) : 1. Hylobatidae - include the so-called lesser apes of Asia, the gibbons and siamangs. 2. Hominidae (great apes) - include living humans and typically fossil apes that possess a suite of characteristics such as bipedalism, reduced canine size, and increasing brain size such as the australopithecines. 3. Pongidae - include the remaining African great apes including gorillas, chimpanzees, and the Asian orangutan.
- But Pongidae are united with the Hominidae by modern science, as they are paraphyletic otherwise.

Material from Wikipedia Copyright Wikipedia (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License).

Graphic Peirce

2010-07-09T13:10:00.004-04:00

Long time no post! Happened upon a time upon a Trip to Berlin March 2010 post at the Thoughts in Progress blog of Aud Sissel Hoel. Read her whole post there. She visited a workshop "Peirce's Pictorial Thinking":

March 21 and 22 this year I took part in a scholarly event quite out of the ordinary. The focal point of this event was a tableau of drawings made by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), exhibited here, in the premises of the Collegium for the Advanced Study of Picture Act and Embodiment (Humboldt University, Berlin), for the first time in history. As it turns out, Peirce drew incessantly throughout his life, quite literally sketching out his philosophical ideas.

Having found that, I searched around a bit and added the following to External links at the Charles Sanders Peirce article at Wikipedia:

Collegium for the Advanced Study of Picture Act and Embodiment: The Peirce Archive, John Michael Krois, Horst Bredekamp, Humboldt U, Berlin, Germany. Cataloguing Peirce's innumerable drawings & graphic materials.

Those are the drawings and graphic materials in Peirce's Nachlass in the Houghton Library at Harvard. The project was initiated by John Michael Krois.

Aud also says:

Similar attempts are made by the Graduiertenkolleg Schriftbildlichkeit at the Free University of Berlin, directed by Sybille Krämer, where Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer is currently pursuing a postdoctoral project focusing on Peirce’s notation systems.

Perhaps many already know about all this, but it was news to me at the time. (I should have posted this sooner, but I didn't find out till after the exhibition anyway.)

Correction: I originally embedded a linked search on Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer and Peirce inside Meyer-Krahmer's name in the quote from Aud, but I shouldn't add things to people's quotes! (Unless they obviously didn't embed a URL, like back in the 1800s.)

Explaining Experience In Nature / memeio

2010-02-23T09:30:00.002-05:00

Here is an update on two contemporary works that relate to Peirce, Ben mentioned my memeio project in an earlier post here.

After two years of intense and difficult work I represent the "Introductory Remarks" to "Explaining Experience In Nature." This constitutes the most accessible 50 pages or so of the book.

"memeio," meant to imply the input and output of contagious ideas, is the technology that I have developed to aid me in my work. The above document was generated by memeio.

The technology, which uses a constrained English grammar, captures a semeiotic model of the kind advocated by Peirce and an epistemology that is evolved from Peirce through Carnap. In this case the primary epistemological distinction is between "necessary distinctions" and "ways of speaking."

Things to note as a reader are the document decorations and the concept map.

In this project I pursue an "exploratory" learning method, i.e. the reader will discover these features and thereby learn them more deeply as they engage with the document. So if your first questions are "where is the concept map and where are the decorations?" just look a little harder. All of this is automatically generated by memeio.

At this stage memeio is not a product, it is a research project that happens to aid me in my work. It consists of a set of code in a mix of standard technologies, written by me, that enables a deep analysis of the concepts an author is dealing with. See my comments on the memeio website for more detail.

The platform for the project is the latest and most advanced set of XML technologies produced by the W3: including the latest versions of XML Schema, XSLT, XPath and XQuery. Technology-wise it is currently a little bleeding-edge, but this stuff ages quickly.

I have released the above document early, before I am finished refining the presentation through memeio. I have, for example, yet to finish my "concept reconciliation," a central feature of memeio. This feature enables me to process the document, constructing a concept database and reconciling the concepts, biographies and references in the document against a database assembled from other parts of the work and other works, of mine and others, containing similar concepts. I have to finish a little XQuery code to implement all that I am trying to achieve here.

I hope to find the time and resources to apply this technology to the work of Peirce, where it will make an excellent scholarly exercise and tool. Certainly Peirce's work is among the first on my list to demonstrate the power of the technology on documents other than my own.

With respect,

Steven

Peirce Obituary May 16, 1914

2009-12-27T13:40:00.011-05:00

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=RmknAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EQQGAAAAIBAJ&pg=3073,3222890&dq=charles-peirce

Part Three

Boston Evening Transcript, Saturday, May 16, 1914

————————————

CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE

———

Some Appreciation of a Harvard Philosopher, First Among American Pragmatists, Who Recently Died in Secluded Retirement

———

Charles Sanders Peirce, second son of the late Benjamin Peirce, Perkins professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University for forty years, and of his wife, Sarah Hunt Mills, who died at his home in Milford Pa., on April 19 last, in his seventy-fifth year, was born in September, 1839, of a family eminent in scientific pursuits and in the higher branches of education. Beginning with Benjamin Peirce, Sr., for several years librarian of Harvard, the sum of the services of the Peirce family in that seat of learning, including that of his son Benjamin and of his grandson James Mills Peirce, numbered over one hundred years.

Charles Peirce, from his youth to the end of his life, exhibited in marked degree the family trait of mathematical ability as well as the allied sciences, his mind finally centering itself upon logic and philosophy, but never forsaking mathematical research.

Even in childhood Dr. Peirce exhibited remarkable qualities of mind an a profound love of study and research, pursued, however in his own way and by original methods. He appeared to have acquired the art of reading and writing by himself without the usual course of instruction. As a child he was forever digging into encyclopedias and other books in search of knowledge upon abstruse subjects, while discussions with his learned father upon profound questions of science, especially higher mathematics and philosophy, were common matters of astonishment, not only to his brothers and sister, but to his parents as well.

Charles however was no prig or pedant. His mirthful, contagious laugh, his keen sense of humor and ready wit made him a bright and ever welcome companion in all gatherings. He was always capable of holding his own with unconscious ease whether among his elders or with simple unpretentiousness joining in the sports of the youngest and smallest. His own choice was for intellectual games, especially chess, of which he early became a master.

Mr. Peirce was mainly fitted for college at the Cambridge High School, with one term, prior to the entrance examinations, at the famous school of Mr. Epes Sargent Dixwell, in Boston. He was graduated from Harvard in 1859, among the youngest of his class, and entered the Lawrence Scientific School where he took the highest honors for research work in chemistry which attracted the attention of some of the great German universities as valuable contributions to science. Pure mathematics, astronomy and logic, however, early attracted Peirce more deeply than the more practical pursuit which he then abandoned, and devoted himself to astronomy, passing long nights at the Harvard observatory, and, later, to pendulum observations and computations for determining the earth’s density. His research regarding it was noted with warm praise by the French Academy and by other European scientists.

It was during this period of Peirce’s practical work in the field of physics, that he published his book on “Photometric Research” besides many articles on the history of science, metaphysics, psychology, gravitation, chemistry, map projection and astronomy. He also edited his father’s work on “Linear Associative Algebra,” a mathematical contribution which was contemporaneously considered to ascend so far into the realm of pure mathematics as to make it improbable that it could ever find a reading public sufficient to warrant further publication than the one hundred lithographed copies which constituted the original edition. At this time also he was employed by the publishers of the Century Dictionary to prepare the greater part of the scientific definitions for that great lexicon.

Research in the domain of his chosen subject, logic, and the art of reasoning, had long been drawing Peirce away from the more practical and immediately profitable paths of science. He had already formulated and given to the world the principle of logic which he was first among Americans to call “Pragmatism” and which the late Professor William James of Harvard afterward amplified and carried to higher development. In 1887 Mr. Peirce, feeling the burden and friction of the busily active world too distracting for the pursuit of his studies, retired to the place he bought in Pike Country, Pennsylvania, where, surrounded by his voluminous library, he immersed himself in the sea of philosophic thought from which he rarely emerged, living in Milford the life of a recluse and an anchorite.

During the pursuit of his studies this profound thinker contracted a gnawing and a progressing malady which greatly impaired the regular continuity of his labors defeating the full fruition of the brilliant promise of his life. His pursuits could not win for him popular applause, but to those who knew him well he gave a light which can never fade.

————————————

Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce, ’59

2009-12-27T12:04:00.019-05:00

http://books.google.com/books?id=mJIBAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA549

Harvard Alumni
Bulletin

Volume XVI

Wednesday, May 27, 1914

Number 34

[Pages 549-50]

Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce, ’59

By George F. Becker, ’68, U. S. Geological Survey.

IT would be difficult to bring home to the average reader of American periodicals a due sense of the loss sustained by the community on April 19 in the death of Charles Peirce at the age of 75, for his work was done in the least popular realms of knowledge: Logic, mathematics, metaphysics and physics. To the worshipers of the Golden Calf his name is meaningless, but none the less he has added to the sum of human knowledge and to the fecundity of human thought, leaving the world the wiser for his existence.

From boyhood he showed great aptitude for learning and a very unusual originality, qualities which he inherited from his father, Benjamin, the leading American mathematician of his clay. Benjamin Peirce’s most brilliant achievement was an investigation on linear associative algebras. These form a large group of methods of mathematical reasoning each distinct from the rest, and including as special cases ordinary algebra, infinitesimal calculus and quaternions. In this investigation Charles collaborated, and to it he made extensive additions after his father’s death. Charles himself also wrote a memoir of great originality on the algebra of logic, of which the purpose is to apply the infallible mechanism of mathematics to the elucidation of logical relations, whencesoever these may be derived. Peirce was not the first to make such an attempt, but is said to have attained a far greater measure of success than his predecessors. On the whole, these memoirs and others which need not be mentioned here show that he was quite as able a mathematician as his father.

C. S. S. Peirce, ’59.

Allied to these researches in pure reason, but distinct from them, are Peirce’s two great contributions to philosophy. Of these, the first, is now known as “pragmatism”; his own term, but first used in print by the famous philosopher, William James, with due acknowledgments to the originator. This ambiguous term denotes a method of thought founded upon the very simple and fundamental generalization, now called by so eminent a philosopher as Mr. F. C. S. Schiller, “Peirce’s Principle”, viz.; Every truth has practical consequences and these are the test of its truth. To the uninitiated this may seem a truism, but by purely logical processes it is capable of development into a whole system of philosophy ; or conversely, a certain philosophic system is reducible in ultimate analysis to “Peirce’s Principle.”

Not less important is his treatment in a series of papers, published during the last decade of the last century, of the statistical method as applied to the nature of evolutionary processes depending upon the association of entities in large numbers. This method (which likewise underlies most of the very recent investigations into the properties of matter) is proving efficacious in philosophy in the hands of Professor Josiah Royce on the lines laid down by Peirce.

His most important contribution to physics resulted in an increase in the precision of geodetic surveys, which are useless unless they are of extreme exactness. Peirce detected the fact that the flexibility of the stone piers, on which pendulums are swung to determine the force of gravity, is great enough to introduce important errors into the observations, and showed how to apply appropriate corrections.

Passing by his various contributions to astronomy and other subjects, be it mentioned that Peirce was responsible for nearly all of the excellent definitions of mathematical terms in the two editions of the Century Dictionary, as well as those on mechanics, astronomy, logic and metaphysics. In this enormously laborious and responsible task he came closer to the habitat of the man of ordinary education than in any of his other works.

Genius Peirce indubitably had; he also had its eccentricities; they stood sadly in his way, diminished his intellectual output, and exposed him to privations. Though he could be very charming, he was so intensely individualistic that cooperation was for him almost an impossibility, he could not “get along” with associates, and, as he grew older, ill-health aggravated his peculiarities. To his friends these were an inconvenience, speedily forgotten; to himself they were a misfortune, and this is the only considerable reason for regretting them or referring to them ; they deprived him of the popularity, prosperity, and honors to which his great achievements would have entitled him.

Peirce was for many years a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His official biography will be prepared by a colleague eminently fitted for that difficult task, Josiah Royce.

Stanley on Peirce

2009-07-10T18:54:00.004-04:00

I've found William A. Stanley's 1978 Peirce essay online at http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/history/peirce.html. (If I had missed it before, so did the Wayback Machine, which still has no record of it, though it does have things from that Website.)

I first learnt of the essay's existence through online searches for books related to Peirce. Here's the info which I had eventually compiled at the Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography:

Stanley, William A. (1978), Charles Peirce, scholar, cartographer, mathematician, and metrologist: An American philosopher, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA Reprint, v. 8, no. 2, 4 pages. Reprinted 1986, U. S. Department of Commerce.

Stanley, a Peirce Edition Project advisor, headed the NOAA's history division until it was shut down in 1994 http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/news/1_1/1_1x.htm#surv.

Don't look now, but

2009-06-26T19:29:00.006-04:00

Arisbe has been growing. Joseph Ransdell has been adding numerous texts of manuscripts by Peirce. Joe has been tracing the development of Peirce's pragmatic conception of truth back through Peirce's draft texts on logic.

From from Joe's June 17, 2009 peirce-l post:

...for those especially interested in this topic, let me list the manuscripts especially relevant to this, all of which are available from the website ARISBE, with a brief indication of what to look for in them. I list them more or less in the order I will be dealing with them (a number of them being quite short, by the way):

Joe then lists a number of manuscript texts. Here they are in the same order but also with their names (not necessarily assigned by Peirce) and online locations, plus links. Seasons and months of the year are mostly from Joe's peirce-l post. Annotations are Joe's from Arisbe.

MS 164 Winter 1869-70: Lessons in Practical Logic. PEP.
MS 165a Winter 1869-70: A Practical Treatise on Logic and Methodology. PEP.
MS 165b Winter 1869-70: Rules for Investigation. PEP.
Introductory paragraphs for a logic text based on idea that the aim of reasoning is to arrive at a settled opinion.
MS 165c Winter 1869-70: Practical Logic. PEP.
First formulation of inquiry as settlement of opinion with choice of methods, with only two methods recognized.
MS 166 Winter 1869-70: Chapter 2. PEP.
MS 171 Spring 1870: Notes for Lectures on Logic to be given 1st term 1870-71. Arisbe.
Logic described as based on concept of a sign.
MS 179 Winter-Spring 1872: Logic, Truth, and the Settlement of Opinion. Arisbe.
First statement of four methods model
MS 189 May-June 1872: Chapter 4: Four Methods of Settling Opinion.
MS 209 April 1872: [I can't an MS either 209 or April 1872 at Arisbe.]
MS 200 Fall 1872: Of Reality. Arisbe.
MS 204 Fall 1872: Chapter IV. Of Reality. Arisbe.
MS 208 March 10th, 1873: [I can't find this at Arisbe. Maybe Joe means MS 218? Joe comments on MS 218 below. Anyway, here's the MS 218 title and annotation at Arisbe: MS 218 (March 1873) Chap. 6th.
Chiefly conncerned with causal connection between sign and object, thought and the thing to which it relates; the hardness of the diamond as what will happen under certan conditions.]
MS 233 Spring 1873: Chap. XI. On Logical Breadth and Depth. Arisbe.

Joe then continues:

When I get back, I will be replacing some of these with more legible versions which Jerry Dozoretz and I have been working on, intermittently, in the past year or so; but these will do for the moment. Discussion can be deferred altogether until I get back, but in case anybody wants to go ahead and get into it before then, I will just try to indicate what to look for in them. I suggest that even the early and apparently least informative of these fragments should be read very carefully with a eye to noticing the way in which Peirce initially announces that logic is concerned with the investigation of truth, while at the same time showing much hesitation about the wisdom of thinking of it that way and actually going ahead at first to describe the aim of logic in such a way as to make no use of the concept of truth at all and describing logic instead as being the general theory of inference, sometimes stating more specifically that it is the theory of the syllogism, sometimes that it is the theory of consequences (which was a way of doing logic developed in the 13th Century), which he regarded as an alternatively equivalent way of representing inference. Then when he does first introduce the idea of inquiry as originating in doubt and the insistent need to escape it by a "settlement of opinion", which is where the conception of truth first becomes operative in his account of logic, notice that he at first talks as if treating the aim of inquiry as settlement of opinion is not actually the same as regarding it as pursuit of truth but is to be regarded rather as a substitute for doing so, enabling us to avoid getting lost in the usual philosophical wrangling over what truth is. But this reticence doesn't last, as you will see.

MS 218 is the most extensively developed account of the pragmatic conception of truth in these manuscripts, but I suggest that to get the hang of his thinking you bear down instead very closely on what he is saying in the first few items in the list above, for it is in doing this that you can see his thought in the process of development from a quite crude and implausible initial statement to an increasingly careful one as he reformulates the conception again and again.

MS 171 is also worth special mention. It is not actually a part of the MS material for the projected logic book, but rather a page of lecture notes for a course he was to teach; but it is conceptually of a piece with the Logic book and in it he makes the peculiar (and mind-boggling) nature of his idealism clear when he concludes by saying:

"The real thing is the ultimate opinion about it. About IT, that is, about the ultimate opinion, but not involving the reflection that the opinion is itself that ultimate opinion and is the real thing."

Joe has also added a number of things by Peirce which he doesn't mention in the peirce-l post. If you haven't gone there lately, you might wish to take a look.

Update June 27, 2009: MS 165 contains an untranslated Latin quote from Summulae Logicales written circa the early 1230s by Petrus Hispanus (who became Pope John XXI):

Dialectica est ars artium scientia scientiarum, ad omnium methodorum principia viam habens. Sola enim dialectica probabiliter disputat de principiis omnium aliarum scientiarum.

The word summulae means "small sums." Hispanus intends by it "small summaries." Anyway here is my amateur translation of the passage, as close to word-for-word as I can make it (enim means "for indeed"):

Dialectic is [the] art of arts, science of sciences, having [the] way to all methods’ principles [or sources] . For alone indeed dialectic credibly argues about [or from] principles of all other sciences.

Update June 27, 2009, around 10pm ET: MS165b "Rules for Investigation" says

If a sufficiently long course of experience and reasoning will produce a settlement of opinion, this final opinion is the only legitimate aim of experience and reasoning. For this is all that experience and reasoning really tend to. If experience and reasoning will not lead to a final settlement of opinion, they lead to nothing, and can have no legitimate object. In any case, therefore, the only legitimate aim of experience and reasoning is to reach the final opinion, or in other words to ascertain what would be the ultimate result of sufficient experience and reasoning.

It makes you wonder what Peirce means by "experience." There are the definitions of Experience from the 1900s in the Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms. Then there is the definition of "Experience," also viewable at http://peircematters.blogspot.com/#experience_n, in the Century Dictionary. It appears under "E" in PEP UQÀM's list of words whose definitions Peirce wrote or reviewed. Here are excerpts:

1. The state or fact of having made trial or proof, or of having acquired knowledge, wisdom, skill, etc., by actual trial or observation; also, the knowledge so acquired; personal and practical acquaintance with anything; experimental cognition or perception: as, he knows what suffering is by long experience; experience teaches even fools.

2. In philos., knowledge acquired through external or internal perception; also, the totality of the cognitions given by perception, taken in their connection; all that is perceived, understood, and remembered. Locke defines it as our observation, employed either about external sensible objects or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected upon by ourselves. The Latin experientia was used in its philosophical sense by Celsus and others, and in the middle ages by Roger Bacon. It translates the Greek empeiría of the Stoics. See empiric.

Specifically—3. That which has been learned, suffered, or done, considered as productive of practical judgment and skill; the sum of practical wisdom taught by all the events, vicissitudes, and observations of one's life, or by any particular class or division of them.

4. An individual or particular instance of trial or observation.

5 (Obs.). An experiment.

6. A fixed mental impression or emotion; specifically, a guiding or controlling religious feeling, as at the time of conversion or resulting from subsequent influences.

= Syn. Experience, Experiment, Observation.

Experience is strictly that which befalls a man, or which he goes through, while experiment is that which one actively undertakes. Observation is looking on, without necessarily having any connection with the matter: it is one thing to know of a man's goodness or of the horrors of war by observation, and quite another to know of it or them by experience. To know of a man's goodness by experiment would be to have put it to actual and intentional test. See practice.

Peirce in "Lectures on Pragmatism", CP 5.51, 1903 (see the Commens "Experience" link above), says of experience:

In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience. She says,
Open your mouth and shut your eyes
And I'll give you something to make you wise;
and thereupon she keeps her promise, and seems to take her pay in the fun of tormenting us." ('Harvard )

Reviewing the Century Dictionary and Commens Dictionary definitions, my sense of it is that Peirce uses the word "experience" with some variation in feeling, but still with a narrower sense than the word came to have during the 20th Century, such that it could easily refer to whatever a person is cognitively or affectively aware of undergoing, or to the raw subjective undergoing itself.

Peirce and the problem of the single case

2009-05-08T17:32:00.003-04:00

I just ran into this April 30, 2009 post "Peirce and the Problem of the Single Case" by Jonah Schupbach at the blog Choice & Inference. It's always fun to take a look at what people are saying about Peirce's ideas, and there are a number of comments on the thread there.

The question is that of how probabilities can be meaningful in a single case. Peirce's example is that of a man who must pick one card either (1) from a deck correctly identified to him as containing 25 white cards and 1 black card or (2) from a deck correctly identified to him as containing 25 black cards and 1 white card. The man will go straight to heaven if he picks a white card and straight to hell if he picks a black card, so there will be no repetition by him of the "experiment." Obviously he should pick from the deck with 25 white cards and 1 black card but, Peirce asks, what consolation can be given to the man if he mischances to draw the single black card from the deck with 25 white cards and 1 black card? Peirce says ("The Doctrine of Chances", 1878, CP 2.652, EP 1:142-154), "He might say that he had acted in accordance with reason, but that would only show that his reason was absolutely worthless." Peirce goes on to say:

[...] in the case supposed, which has no parallel as far as this man is concerned, there would be no real fact whose existence could give any truth to the statement that, if he had drawn from the other pack, he might have drawn a black card. Indeed, since the validity of an inference consists in the truth of the hypothetical proposition that if the premisses be true the conclusion will also be true, and since the only real fact which can correspond to such a proposition is that whenever the antecedent is true the consequent is so also, it follows that there can be no sense in reasoning in an isolated case, at all.

This ties into Peirce's theme that logic is rooted in the social principle and that one must identify oneself with a larger community, even though, as Peirce says elsewhere with possibly a pun alluding to himself, "For an individual whose purse is finite, there really is no such thing as the 'long run' of probabilities."

Now, maybe I'm a dumb bunny, but I must confess that I've never seen the sting of the single-case probability problem, aside from the sting of losing suffered by the man who bets wisely in the scenario. In a universe anything like ours, there will be indefinitely many situations involving 25-1 odds. I don't see why the drawing by a particular individual of a card from a particular deck should be considered a unique instantiation of 25-1 odds even though he cannot repeat the act; and it seems to me that he and anybody else would take all such cases into account, howsoever multiform such cases are, as being governed, in their collective run, by the law of probability; The repetition of exact same actual conditions for a coin flip or a card draw is impossible anyway. One considers idealized cases to which the actual approximates. And if there were not indefinitely many such actual cases, what practical assurance would one have about how the deck is stacked in one way or another in this case? As in Peirce's example, one would need a divine revelation.

So I come to a conclusion, not only like Peirce, that there can be no sense in reasoning about probability in a genuinely isolated case, but also that in a sufficiently isolated case no probability is involved. The conception of a simple, isolated universe consisting of nothing 26 equiprobable options for just one choice ever to be made, implies a degree of determination within that universe which bursts the bounds of that supposed simplicity; the conception merely veils it, or so I figure. So, one needs to take the view not only of an indefinitely large community, but of being ultimately in an indefintitely large universe, which sounds almost like a tautology now that I say it; I mean, one won't find an indefinitely large community in a universe that isn't indefinitely large.

Well, the thought of having actually to defend certain of the ideas that I've stated here makes me feel unsure of my chances. But I'll post it anyway, nobody's posted here for over two weeks!

What is meant by 'in the mind'? (part 3)

2009-04-18T13:00:00.002-04:00

In the third of his 1903 Lowell Lectures, Peirce has the highest praise for Kant (CP 1.522). Yet he includes Kant in his remark that ‘all modern philosophy of every sect has been nominalistic’ (CP 1.19). ‘Kant was a nominalist; although his philosophy would have been rendered compacter, more consistent, and stronger if its author had taken up realism, as he certainly would have done if he had read Scotus’. Of course Peirce himself was a realist, as he went on to explain (CP 1.20):

In a long notice of Frazer's Berkeley, in the North American Review for October, 1871, I declared for realism. I have since very carefully and thoroughly revised my philosophical opinions more than half a dozen times, and have modified them more or less on most topics; but I have never been able to think differently on that question of nominalism and realism.

According to Peirce's Berkeley review, a realist like himself will ‘deny that there is any reality which is absolutely incognizable in itself, so that it cannot be taken into the mind’ (CP 8.13). Thus he would reject the idea of a ‘Kantian thing-in-itself’ (CP 6.108, 1892). Is this where Peirce parted company with Kant? He wrote in 1905 that the ‘Kantist has only to abjure from the bottom of his heart the proposition that a thing-in-itself can, however indirectly, be conceived; and then correct the details of Kant's doctrine accordingly, and he will find himself to have become a Critical Common-sensist’ (CP 5.452).

Yet Peirce appears to take a different perspective on Kant in the 1871 Berkeley review itself (CP 8.15):

what Kant called his Copernican step was precisely the passage from the nominalistic to the realistic view of reality. It was the essence of his philosophy to regard the real object as determined by the mind. That was nothing else than to consider every conception and intuition which enters necessarily into the experience of an object, and which is not transitory and accidental, as having objective validity. In short, it was to regard the reality as the normal product of mental action, and not as the incognizable cause of it.

Is this compatible with Peirce's later remarks about Kant's nominalism and the ‘Kantian thing-in-itself’? We might try to account for the differences by guessing that he changed his mind about Kant after 1871. But in a later lecture from the same 1903 Lowell series quoted above, Peirce returned to the subject of Kant in a fashion very similar to his 1871 remarks. He did so in a passage which he described in advance as ‘so brief that only the most thorough student of philosophy could fully grasp the meaning of it at the single hearing.’ Since it is so brief, i will quote it here in full:

The first thing to be taken into consideration is the general upshot of Kant's Critic of the Pure Reason. The first step of Kant's thought – the first moment of it, if you like that phraseology – is to recognize that all our knowledge is, and forever must be, relative to human experience and to the nature of the human mind. That conception being well digested, the second moment of the reasoning becomes evident, namely, that as soon as it has been shown concerning any conception that it is essentially involved in the very forms of logic or other forms of knowing, from that moment there can no longer be any rational hesitation about fully accepting that conception as valid for the universe of our possible experience. To repeat an example I have given before, you look at an object and say ‘That is red.’ I ask you how you prove that. You tell me you see it. Yes, you see something; but you do not see that it is red; because that it is red is a proposition; and you do not see a proposition. What you see is an image and has no resemblance to a proposition, and there is no logic in saying that your proposition is proved by the image. For a proposition can only be logically based on a premiss and a premiss is a proposition. To this you very properly reply, with Kant's aid, that my objections allege what is perfectly true, but that instead of showing that you have no right to say the thing is red they conclusively prove that you are logically justified in doing so. At this point, the idealist appears before the tribunal of your reason with the suggestion that since these metaphysical conceptions, that repose upon their being involved in the forms of logic, are only valid for experience and since all our knowledge is relative to the human mind, they are not valid for things as they objectively are; and since the conception of existence is preeminently a conception of that description, it is a mere fairy tale to say that outward objects exist, the only objects of possible experience being our own ideas. Hereupon comes the third moment of Kant's thought, which was only made prominent in the second edition, not, as Kant truly says, that it was not already in the book, but that it was an idea in which Kant's mind was so completely immersed that he failed to see the necessity of making an explicit statement of it, until Fichte misinterpreted him. It is really a most luminous and central element of Kant's thought. I may say that it is the very sun round which all the rest revolves. This third moment consists in the flat denial that the metaphysical conceptions do not apply to things in themselves. Kant never said that. What he said is that these conceptions do not apply beyond the limits of possible experience. But we have direct experience of things in themselves. Nothing can be more completely false than that we can experience only our own ideas. That is indeed without exaggeration the very epitome of all falsity. Our knowledge of things in themselves is entirely relative, it is true; but all experience and all knowledge is knowledge of that which is, independently of being represented. Even lies invariably contain this much truth, that they represent themselves to be referring to something whose mode of being is independent of its being represented. This is true even if the proposition relates to an object of representation as such. At the same time, no proposition can relate, or even thoroughly pretend to relate, to any object otherwise than as that object is represented. These things are utterly unintelligible as long as your thoughts are mere dreams. But as soon as you take into account that Secondness that jabs you perpetually in the ribs, you become awake to their truth. Duns Scotus and Kant are the great assertors of this doctrine, for which Thomas Reid deserves some credit too. But Kant failed to work out all the consequences of this third moment of thought and considerable retractions are called for, accordingly, from some of the positions of his Transcendental Dialectic. Nor in other respects must it be supposed that I assent to everything either in Scotus or in Kant. We all commit our blunders.
(CP 6.95)

Perhaps it is my blunder to suggest that the various remarks about Kant quoted above are somehow incompatible. But i confess that i don't quite see how they can all be included in a single consistent view. On the other hand, i can't take very seriously the idea that Peirce changed his mind about Kant's nominalism and then changed it back again. Probably i am missing some nuances of Peirce's logic here, or just don't understand how his realism relates to Kant's nominalism. If so, maybe some intrepid blog reader (nobody else would have got this far!) can straighten it all out for me (and possibly for others too).

Even if that doesn't happen, i think the long quote just above (CP 6.95) is worth several readings, as an elucidation of Peirce's realism. So maybe that's enough to justify this post.

The Peirce Pages

2009-04-13T12:38:00.007-04:00

In the sidebar you'll find links to a Peirce Blog adjunct The Peirce Pages at http://sites.google.com/site/cspmem/ . (I would have put "csp3" into the URL but Google Sites demands at least six characters for the folder name. The "mem" is for "memory".) Right now there are just a few things there, and I've been wondering what else I could put or start there in the short term.

Joe gave me an idea with his recent post here when he said, "...this is an excellent definition of "normal" and it should be picked up on for the Commens definitions of Peirce's terminology." If I gather enough such definitions I could start a miniature supplement to the Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms with the understanding that the definitions in the "supplement" would not necessarily reflect, as the Commens entries seem to reflect, a thoroughgoing search for definitions of a given word. They would be material for such, that's all.

Umm...does anybody have any other ideas? If so, please post a comment on it.

What is meant by 'in the mind'? (part 2)

2009-04-12T10:19:00.001-04:00

Ben's post of last Wednesday quotes a key passage from Peirce's 1871 review of a new edition of Berkeley, in which he explained the scholastic debate between realists and nominalists on the reality of universals. According to Peirce, nominalists and realists differ in their concept of reality, and ‘the distinction between these two views of the real – one as the fountain of the current of human thought, the other as the unmoving form to which it is flowing – is what really occasions their disagreement on the question concerning universals’ (EP1:91). For the nominalist, anything real must be external to the mind, and anything internal to the mind can't be also external to it. The realist also believes in an external reality, but not that an object's being internal to the mind necessarily disqualifies it as real. ‘When a thing is in such a relation to the individual mind that that mind cognizes it, it is in the mind; and its being so in the mind will not in the least diminish its external existence.’

In one of his last writings on logic, Peirce returned to the difference between reality and externality. According to the CP editors, this was written for the 1908-9 Monist series ‘Some Amazing Mazes’, but not published at the time. I would recommend reading the whole text beginning at CP 6.318, but that's a bit much for a blog post, so i will jump to CP 6.327-8:

What is meant by calling anything real? I can tell you in what sense I always use the word. According to my use of it, there is a certain resemblance between the Real and the External which renders the discrimination of each from the other important for right reason. Any object whose attributes, i.e. all that may truly be predicated, or asserted, of it, will, and always would, remain exactly what they are, unchanged, though you or I or any man or men should think or should have thought as variously as you please, I term external, in contradistinction to mental. For example, a dream is mental, because it depends upon what passed in the thoughts of the dreamer whether it be true that the dream was of a dog or was of the Round Table of King Arthur or of anything else. On the other hand, the colors of objects of human experience and in particular the contrast between the color of the petals of a Jaqueminot rose and that of the leaves of the bush, although it is relative to the sense of sight, is not mental, in my sense of that word.

[I omit here Peirce's discussion of the ‘difference between a color and a sensation of color’.]

Color, therefore, is a quite remarkably vague quality, as well as being relative to the normal sense of sight. If by ‘normal’ were meant merely the average (or any other kind of mean) of actually occurring instances, say the average sensation of all the inhabitants of the globe on a certain date, then this might have been modified by some disease affecting a large part of the people who happened to be living at the time; and since ‘color’ refers to normal chromatic sense, it would depend upon what passed in the minds of a certain body of men. But, in fact, the ‘normal’ is not the average (or any other kind of mean) of what actually occurs, but of what would, in the long run, occur under certain circumstances. Now what would be, can, it is true, only be learned through observation of what happens to be; but nevertheless no collection of happenings can constitute one trillionth of one per cent of what might be, and would be under supposable conditions; and therefore, though it might conceivably prevent many generations from rightly determining what is normal, it could not affect the true – and ultimately ascertainable (provided there were anybody to ascertain it) – mean and normal; and thus, the result is that no such accident could affect the normal or the true color. So, in general, what I mean by the external might vary with how persons of a given general description would think under supposable circumstances; but it will not vary with how any finite body of individuals have thought, do now think, or will actually think.
So much for what I mean by the external. The main difference between the external, as I use the term, and the real, as I employ that term, seems to be that the question whether anything is external or not is the question of what a word or other symbol or concept (for thinking proper is always conducted in general signs of some sort) is, I say, a question of what a symbol signifies; while the question of whether anything is real or is a figment is the question what a word or other symbol or concept denotes. If the attributes of or possible true assertions about an object could vary according to the way in which you or I or any man or actual body of single men, living at any time or times, might think about that object, then that object is what I call a figment. But if even although its attributes, or what is true of it, should possibly vary according to what some man or men might think, yet if no attribute could vary between being true and being false, according to what any plural of single men could think about that thing, then, and though it were accordingly not external but mental, it would nevertheless be real, since precisely that is what I mean by calling an object real.

This might have some bearing on the question Ben posed in the Addendum to his message: ‘what would be the practical difference between the immediate object and the dynamic object of a TRUE proposition?’ My guess is that there would be no difference at the end of inquiry, but the difference does make a difference in the actual practice of inquiry, because that process can never be known to have reached its end, which is truth itself.

I have another question arising from Peirce's Berkeley review, specifically his comments about Kant's view of reality as Peirce describes it there and in some later writings. But i'd better save that for another post.

Peirce-picacity

2009-04-11T11:56:00.005-04:00

My fellow four-ist (though not always the same fours!), Hyatt Carter, aware of my Peircean proclivities, has alerted me, by an email titled like this post, to an article appearing in the current issue (45.2) of The James Joyce Quarterly:

“The Index Nothing Affirmeth”: The Semiotic Formation of a Literary Mandate in James Joyce’s “The Sisters”

by Murray McArthur

My purpose in this essay is to consider certain aspects of the way James Joyce discovers and deploys the central semiotic resource of literary language, indexicality, to stage in “The Sisters” the—to adapt a Hollywoodism to Giambattista Vico’s writing—precorso of his literary mandate. [….] Specifically, I am interested in that “certain signifying formation” as it manifests itself in the disposition of the index in Joyce’s opening frame. To focus on this disposition, I want to examine closely three scenes: the first from Stephen Hero that represents directly the “certain signifying formation” of the artistic mandate and the second and third from “The Sisters.” In these scenes, the “signifying formation” disposes itself in a triune or trinitarian structure of the sign that C. S. Peirce, an American forty years older than Joyce and completely unknown to him, was defining, in his major contribution to semiotics, as the index. The index, as Peirce so strikingly describes it in the passage cited below, is itself the sign type that compels attention.

In 1903 and 1904, Peirce was beginning the last great revision of and addition to his triadic classification of the sign, starting with his Lowell Institute Lectures in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 1903. Peirce divided semiosis or sign-making and sign-interpreting into a firstness or icon or resemblance, a secondness or index or indication, and a thirdness or symbol or arbitrariness [….]

Quibble: (There's always a quibble.) McArthur's version of Peirce's conception of the symbol sounds more like Saussure's than Peirce's but you can't have everything. The symbol is any sign which is "arbitrary" or independent with respect to resemblance or actual connection to its object. It signifies, nevertheless, because of how it will be interpreted, that is to say that it signifies as an interpretive norm or habit (in a system of same) and is not eminently arbitrary or independent with respect either to itself, or to the symbol system in which it participates, or to logical / semiotic / representational relations to its object

Anyway, let me attempt a self-fulfilling prophecy (why should only Joe Ransdell be able to do them?). A Joycean among us desires to look into Murray McArthur's article and report back!

What is meant by 'in the mind'?

2009-04-08T18:53:00.009-04:00

(Quote of the Day.)

The realist will hold that the very same objects which are immediately present in our minds in experience really exist just as they are experienced out of the mind; that is, he will maintain a doctrine of immediate perception. He will not, therefore, sunder existence out of the mind and being in the mind as two wholly improportionable modes. When a thing is in such a relation to the individual mind that that mind cognizes it, it is in the mind; and its being so in the mind will not in the least diminish its external existence. For he does not think of the mind as a receptacle, which if a thing is in, it ceases to be out of. To make a distinction between the true conception of a thing and the thing itself is, he will say, only to regard one and the same thing from two different points of view; for the immediate object of thought in a true judgment is the reality.

—Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers 8.16 (1871), and still timely.

Addendum. Suddenly I was struck by Peirce's use of the phrase "immediate object." By "immediate", Peirce means "immediate to something" in the sense of "in or at something". Peirce came, many years after the above quotation, to use the phrase "immediate object" as a technical term for the object as it is represented by the sign, the object as it is in the sign. (Quotes thanks to the Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms.)

"... the requaesitum which we have been seeking is simply that which the sign "stands for," or the idea of that which it is calculated to awaken. [---]
This requaesitum I term the Object of the sign; - the immediate object, if it be the idea which the sign is built upon, the real object, if it be that real thing or circumstance upon which that idea is founded, as on bedrock." ('Pragmatism', EP 2:407, 1907).

"... we have to distinguish the Immediate Object, which is the Object as the Sign itself represents it, and whose Being is thus dependent upon the Representation of it in the Sign, from the Dynamical Object, which is the Reality which by some means contrives to determine the Sign to its Representation." ('Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism', CP 4.536, 1906)

Peirce came consistently to call the real object the "dynamic object" or "dynamoid object", etc., rather than the "real object", since that object could be altogether fictive, for example Hamlet. Anyway, would Peirce hold that the immediate object and the dynamic object are one and the same when they're the object of a true thought? (For Peirce, a thought is a sign.)

This post's first quotation is from 1871. In 1868, Peirce wrote:

"Every cognition involves something represented, or that of which we are conscious, and some action or passion of the self whereby it becomes represented. The former shall be termed the objective, the latter the subjective, element of the cognition. The cognition itself is an intuition of its objective element, which may therefore be called, also, the immediate object." ('Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man', W 2:204, 1868)

That doesn't seem the quite the same conception as in the quotes from 1906 and 1907 . Yet, what would be the practical difference between the immediate object and the dynamic object of a TRUE proposition?

Charles S. Peirce at the Johns Hopkins, by Christine Ladd-Franklin

2009-04-07T08:44:00.005-04:00

http://books.google.com/books?id=rWzhSTaKgwYC&jtp=715
http://www.archive.org/details/journalofphiloso13lancuoft

The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods

Vol. XIII. No.26: December 21, 1916. Pages 715–723.

Charles S. Peirce at the Johns Hopkins

The keenest pleasure which can offer itself to the university student who is about to grapple with the profoundest thinking that the world has done and is doing is his when he finds himself by chance in the actual presence of one of the creators of the world’s store of thought. This had been the happy lot of the students of the Johns Hopkins University from its opening days. They felt, with reason, that they were assisting at the foundation of an important new development in university life in this country. For the first time the atmosphere of the great European centers of research had been created in America. Departments headed by such men as Sylvester, Gildersleeve, Remsen, Rowland, Martin, a group of scholars all fitted to inspire their students with the ardor of research—this was something new. To this atmosphere the students of those early days, reinforced by enthusiastic young docents fresh from their experience of the then simple and ideal German university life, responded with due appreciation of the lucky days upon which they had fallen. Probably there has never been in this country a center of learning where the conditions were more ideal for producing in its best form the joy of the intellectual life—nor a group of students better fitted to profit by their novel opportunities. To share the life of this ardent body of workers was, they one and all felt, an experience to be remembered.

To this group of students, eager for intellectual adventure, came, in 1880–1881, Charles S. Peirce. His reputation had preceded him, and his hearers were quickly receptive to the inspiration to be had from one more master mind. Sylvester and Peirce both possessed recognized elements of the temperament of genius a thing which adds much to the effectiveness of personal intercourse with a great man but that temperament was exhibited in them in very different forms. Sylvester was as oblivious as Peirce of the presence of his audience (though he did once by chance discover, to his evident amazement, that his most distinguished auditor, Professor Cayley, was fast asleep, his bald head frankly covered with his handkerchief), but he had a boyish enthusiasm which was in full harmony with his fresh English color and his nervous Jewish temperament. He was always brimming over with the importance of his subject-matter, which had usually been produced during the three days’ interval between his lectures, and which was brought forth with the keen joy of the immediate discoverer. Peirce, on the contrary, was of the brooding type. He sat when he addressed his handful of students (who turned out afterwards, however, to be a not unimportant handful) and he had all the air, as has been noted by Professor Jastrow, of the typical philosopher who is engaged, at the moment, in bringing fresh truth by divination out of some inexhaustible well. He got his effect not by anything that could be called an inspiring personality, in the usual sense of the term, but rather by creating the impression that we had before us a profound, original, dispassionate and impassioned seeker of truth. No effort was made to create a connected and not inconsistent whole out of the matter of each lecture. In fact, so devious and unpredictable was his course that he once, to the delight of his students, proposed at the end of his lecture, that we should form (for greater freedom of discussion) a Metaphysical Club, though he had begun the lecture by defining metaphysics to be “the science of unclear thinking.”

Several of Professor Sylvester’s students—understanding that the New Logic which Professor Peirce professed had connections with existing mathematics and that, even if it had not, it was something which, unlike the mechanical logical exercises of the schools, was expected to have a vivifying and clarifying effect upon one’s actual reasoning processes—joined his class in logic, composed otherwise, of course, of students of philosophy. This mixed character of the audience, as is too often the case in lectures on modern logic, made it impossible for the lecturer to adapt his subject-matter with exactness to the needs of either part. Peirce’s lectures did not go very extensively into the details of his mathematical logic (Symbol Logic, I maintain, is the only proper name for it, and I note with pleasure that Dr. Karl Schmidt has adopted this term). His lectures on philosophical logic we should doubtless have followed to much greater advantage if he had recommended to us to read his masterly series of articles on the subject which had already appeared in the Popular Science Monthly in 1878 under the title “Some Illustrations of the Logic of Science.” We should have had from these at first hand a better idea of “how to make our ideas clear” concerning the methods of science as he understood them. But that, in spite of his apparent aloofness and air of irresponsibility, he really had the interests of his hearers deeply at heart will appear from a sympathetic letter which he wrote me some years later, when I came to lecture myself on logic at the Johns Hopkins University:

Milford, Pa.
Thanksgiving Day, 1902
My dear Mrs. Franklin: It gives me joy to learn that you are to lecture on logic at the Johns Hopkins. But, oh, you will not have such a wonderful and charming class as I had, especially the first year. In those days I knew very little about logic, and did not even thoroughly understand upon what logic is based. I was not in possession of the proof that the science of logic must be based on the science of ethics, although I more or less perceived that sound reasoning depends more on sound morals than anything else. I at any rate tried hard to see what I was about, and not to build logic upon anything that must on the contrary be built upon it. In a certain measure I appreciated the precise nature of the utility of logic, and rated it high; but I did not know what I know now. I am finding out every day something new to me in logic. I wish most earnestly that you may succeed in animating your students with the true spirit of science and of logic, and that is the very greatest happiness I could wish for you. Whether you do or not depends chiefly on how much you care to do so. I return Keynes.
Very faithfully,
C. S. Peirce.
P. S. I hope that Schröder's manuscripts will be printed. I would do anything in my power to that end. Can't you find out what is needed?

The following letter, which I have quoted in part, indicates, among other things, the extreme value which Peirce attributed to his form of pragmatism. The important collection of his reprints which he presented to me at this time, I have now deposited in the library of Columbia University. This letter, too, is not so much a personal letter as it is a definitive setting out of some of his views and experiences; if he has left no complete autobiography, it should furnish important material concerning the wonderful intellectual life which he took part in, in Cambridge, during his early years.

My dear Mrs. Franklin: It is most kind of you to think of me and of doing what you propose, and it happens that, just at this time, it would be very serviceable to me. For in a forthcoming number of the Monist, I am to have an article about pragmatism, explaining what I conceive it to be. Although James calls himself a pragmatist, and no doubt he derived his ideas on the subject from me, yet there is a most essential difference between his pragmatism and mine. My point is that the meaning of a concept . . . lies in the manner in which it could conceivably modify purposive action, and in this alone. James, on the contrary, whose natural turn of mind is away from generals, and who is besides so soaked in ultra-sensationalist psychology that like most modern psychologists he has almost lost the power of regarding matters from the logical point of view, in defining pragmatism, speaks of it as referring ideas to experiences, meaning evidently the sensational side of experience, while I regard concepts as affairs of habit or disposition, and of how we should react. Without particularly referring to him, my Monist article (already sent in and accepted) is to explain what my position is; and I desire to follow it up by two others, of which the first shall show how this principle at once affords solutions of a great variety of problems, and shall show what the general color of those solutions is, while the third article shall show what facts and phenomena I appeal to as proving the truth of the pragmatist principle. But it is altogether problematical whether the second and third articles ever appear. It all depends upon whether the readers of the Monist are interested in the first article. Now if you were to write what you propose, it would call attention to the first article, increase the sales of that number of the Monist, and render the acceptance of a second much more likely. I have no fears but that the second should excite of itself sufficient interest to insure the third; but the first, being a definition of an individual opinion, is not calculated to attract new readers.
It is true that I have not received much credit either for pragmatism or any other part of my work. However, as it was not done for the sake of anything of that kind, I have no reason to complain. What I expected to gain when I did it, I have gained. I began on the scale of printing a logical research every month. My motive then was a mixed one. I wanted the statement of my results in print for my own convenience in referring to them, and I thought it would be a gain to civilization to have my entire logical system. But after a very few months, I found that nobody took any notice of my papers, and I lost all interest in their publication, and simply filed away my mss. for my own use.
It must have been about 1857 when I first made the acquaintance of Chauncey Wright, a mind about on the level of J. S. Mill. He was a thorough mathematician of the species that flourished at that time, when dynamics was regarded (in America) as the top of mathematics. He had a most penetrating intellect. There were a lot of superior men in Cambridge at that time. I doubt if they could have been matched in any other society as small that existed at that time anywhere in the world. Wright, whose acquaintance I made at the house of Mrs. Lowell, was at that time a thorough Hamiltonian; but soon after he turned and became a great admirer of Mill. He and I used to have long and very lively and close disputations lasting two or three hours daily for many years. In the sixties I started a little club called the Metaphysical Club. It seldom if ever had more than half a dozen present. Wright was the strongest member and probably I was next. Nicholas St. John Green was a marvelously strong intelligence. Then there were Frank Abbott, William James, and others. It was there that the name and the doctrine of pragmatism saw the light. There was in particular one paper of mine that was much admired and the ms. went around to different members who wished to go over it more closely than they could do in hearing it read. While I was in charge of the Coast Survey office in 1873, I employed some Sundays in putting that piece into a literary form, though without any intention of printing it. But in 1875 or 1876 I met old William Appleton, the publisher, on a steamer, and he offered me a good round price for some articles for the Popular Science Monthly. I patched up the piece I speak of for the first; and it appeared in November, 1877. In the autumn of 1877 I went abroad in order to urge a certain truth upon the Geodetical Association. As I should have to speak in French and conduct a discussion in that language, by way of practise I began and finished on the voyage between Hoboken and Plymouth an article about pragmatism in French. I afterward translated into French my article of November, 1877, and these two appeared in the Revue Philosophique, about Volume VI. I left in the library of the J. H. University a bound volume of my pieces containing these two. I have not a copy of either now. I should say that the word pragmatism does not appear in that article, nor did I insert it in the Century Dictionary or ever use it in print previous to the article in Baldwin’s Dictionary. I translated the steamer article into English and in that dress it appeared in the Popular Science of January, 1878, some time previous to the publication of the original text.
There never was the smallest disloyalty on James’s part. On the contrary, he has dragged in mention of me whenever he could.
In the spring of 1903 I was invited, by the influence of James, Royce, and Münsterberg, to give a course of lectures in Harvard University on Pragmatism. I had intended to print them; but James said he could not understand them himself and could not recommend their being printed. I do not myself think there is any difficulty in understanding them, but all modern psychologists are so soaked with sensationalism that they can not understand anything that does not mean that, and mistranslate into the ideas of Wundt whatever one says about logic. . . . How can I, to whom nothing seems so thoroughly real as generals, and who regard Truth and Justice as literally the most powerful powers in the world, expect to be understood by the thoroughgoing Wundtian? But the curious thing is to see Absolute Idealists tainted with this disease, or men who, like John Dewey, hover between Absolute Idealism and Sensationalism. Royce’s opinions as developed in his “World and Individual” are extremely near to mine. His insistence on the element of purpose in intellectual concepts is essentially the pragmatistic position. . . .
Pragmatism is one of the results of my study of the formal laws of signs, a study guided by mathematics and by the familiar facts of everyday experience and by no other science whatever. It is a maxim of logic from which issues a metaphysics very easily. It solves almost all problems of metaphysics in short metre and it solves them in such a way as never to bar the way of any positive inquiry. It also has the gratifying effect of encouraging the simplest ideas of religion and anthropomorphic conceptions of the Absolute.
I have some of my quarto papers bound up together and I am sending you this volume begging your acceptance of it. I wish I had copies of some of my octavo papers bound up; but I have not. I have some loose copies of some of them which I would have bound for you; but one never knows when a binder is going to send one’s books home. One only knows that he will try to do so in time to get the bill paid before both parties die. So I send such papers as I can find, as they are, along with a few newspapers containing articles on “French Academy,” “Napoleon Bonaparte,” “Great Men of the Nineteenth Century,” etc.
With best regards to Mr. Franklin,
Very faithfully,
C. S. Peirce.

Professor Peirce had a mind of great originality and productiveness; he lacked, no doubt, as do too many geniuses, that keen self-criticism which would have enabled him to distinguish rigidly, in what he produced, between the wheat and the chaff. Much of what he wrote, especially during the later years of his life, was incomprehensible beyond even the privilege of the maker of new philosophies; articles in the Monist which William James has said will be a rich mine for the future student will just as probably remain forever indecipherable by him. Once when I was in search of an article of his which had lately appeared in the Monist, entitled, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “Man’s Glassy Essence,” and could not remember its name, the young librarian who assisted me said, “Oh yes,—you mean the article on ‘Glacial Man’”—a title which would doubtless have served as well as the other. Indeed, many of his contributions to the philosophical dictionary were of the purely cabalistic type. The second part of the article on Symbolic Logic, for instance, was finally, against the urgent advice of Professor Couturat, who had himself contributed the admirable first part, sent to the printer, though it is doubtful if any one will ever be able to read it.¹ But it will never be known what reams of closely written matter were excluded! Professor Peirce had already completed a great part of a book on logic, largely medieval logic, which (save for what came out in the Dictionary) he was never in a position to publish: his future disciples will no doubt see to it that this great work is eventually given to the press. So difficult at the time, however, was the rejection, in the interest of sanity, of such a mass of closely written pages that at last I found it necessary to call in the aid of my husband, who undertook to play the traditionally unpleasant rôle of the candid friend. The ingrained sweetness of Peirce’s character—an essential to the acceptance of irksome criticism—is here brought into evidence; in fact, this bit of correspondence may perhaps be regarded as a model of its type,—no easy type.

¹ The death of Professor Couturat, who was run over by a military autotruck at the beginning of the war, is one of the many irreparable losses of the European war.

[Milford, Pa., Nov., 1900.]
My dear Mrs. Franklin:
I want you kindly to read the enclosed article Exact Logic and show it to your husband whose judgment I have much faith in, if he will be so good as to look at it. I told Prof. Baldwin when I took up this work that I should expect “unlimited swing” in exact logic. Still, I don’t know but it is too much to ask him to print this; and I don’t want to ask what is not right. The purpose of it is to put Exact Logic in its place as a branch of philosophy. It is an extremely careful statement of the small ground it covers. I do not see how I could say less without reducing it to a general statement that would be without force. I am too close to it to get a good mental sight at it. I request you to read it and tell me plainly whether it seems to you and your husband calculated to do the cause of exact logic any good, . . . also whether there are any modifications you can suggest, especially to shorten it. A short vocabulary of terms omitted in Vol. I. of the Dictionary will have to be added. You had better, I should think, follow my example in this respect in your articles, inserting, for instance, ... I should not wonder, if you look into my Virgo symbol, but you might find it resulted in a valuable rule of elimination.
Very faithfully,
C. S. Peirce.

My dear Mr. Peirce,
... I feel bound to say that, according to my notion of such a work—one, to be sure, very commonplace in comparison with that which you entertain—an article in a cooperative dictionary such as this should not be devoted to pioneer work, however eminent the writer of it, but to the exposition of what is either fairly well established and current or, if not, is capable of being so expressed within the necessary limits as to be intelligible to the ordinary properly-equipped reader. Now, the views which you lay down in your article seem to me absolutely to require for their adequately intelligible presentation far more space than you have given to them, and, a fortiori, far more space than the dictionary can spare. . . .
Very faithfully yours,
F. Franklin

Milford, Pa., 1900, Nov.
My dear Franklin: Your letter is at hand. I asked of you a disagreeable thing, and I thank you for having done it so faithfully. Would there were more courage between friends! You give me wholesome counsel, and I shall follow it, notwithstanding the suggestions of the Evil One.
Yours faithfully
C. S. Peirce.

This same advice, might, I have no doubt, have been repeated to advantage under later letters of the alphabet.

If Charles S. Peirce had happened to have a longer period of activity at the Johns Hopkins University—if the years had not been cut off during which he was kept upon the solid ground of intelligible reason by discussions with a constantly growing group of level-minded students,—there is no doubt that his work would have been of more certain value than it can be affirmed to be now; it is probable, for instance, that his grateful pupil, William James, would not have found his generously provided for Lowell lectures too incomprehensible to be printed at the time. At the meetings of the Philosophical Congresse in Göttingen, in 1908, Peirce had two warm defenders of his views, as against the James form of pragmatism, in the Italian philosophers, Calderoni and Vailati. Vailati, a man of most acute intellect, is no longer living; Calderoni would no doubt be able to throw much illumination more perhaps than any other living writer upon the real bearing of the philosophical views of Mr. Peirce.

Christine Ladd-Franklin.

Columbia University.

In Memoriam Charles S. Peirce, by Francis C. Russell

2009-04-05T19:03:00.004-04:00

http://books.google.com/books?id=LArKGEe3UrgC&jtp=469

The Monist Vol. XXIV. July 1914 No. 3. Pages 469–472.

In Memoriam Charles S. Peirce.
(Born 1839, died 1914.)

Concerning genius, its advent discovery and nurture, history informs us that with rare exceptions its worldly case is one of the utmost austerity. On reflection this appears not at all strange. Pro re nata, genius issues as an outlaw. It breaks over and through the accustomed rules and conceptions to the confusion and perplexity of a world otherwise comfortable in conventions regarded by it as settled possessions. Hence it is unwelcome. Hence the futility of all extant provisions in its favor. Had any Nobel foundation been in existence in 1841, would any of its benefits have found its way to Hermann Grassmann? Not in a thousand years. His case is typical of the general case of genius. Neglect and poverty are its portion in life. Then afterwards lapse of time reveals to a stupid, jealous and oftentimes spiteful world that it has conspired for the suffocation of a divine messenger.

In the late sixties the distinguished Prof. Benjamin Peirce of Harvard, lecturing before the Boston “Radical Club” on “The Impossible in Mathematics,” spoke of his son Charles and of his expectations that the latter would develop and fertilize the vistas he had been able only to glimpse. On April 19, 1914, after at least a half century of assiduous probings into the most recondite and the most consequential of all human concerns, in a mountain hut overlooking the serene Delaware, in privation and obscurity, in pain and forsakenness, that son, Charles S. Peirce, left this world and left also a volume of product the eminent value of which will sooner or later be discovered, perhaps only after it has been rediscovered. For his issues have so far anticipated the ordinary scope of even professional intellectual exercise that most of them are still only in manuscript. Publishers want “best sellers.” At least they want sellers that will pay the expenses of publication, and buyers of printing that calls for laborious mental application are scarce. Let me here with the utmost solicitude beg all to whom it falls to handle his books and papers to beware how they venture to cast away any script left by him.

Is this panegyric unwarranted? If so, then why should Professor James in his Varieties of Religious Experience call Mr. Peirce “our great American philosopher”? Why should Professor Schroeder base his great work “Exact Logic” on the prior work of Mr. Peirce? Why should the editors of the great Century Dictionary employ Mr. Peirce to write so many of its logical, mathematical and scientific definitions? Why should the editors of Baldwin’s Dictionary make a similar draft? Why should the editors of the New York Evening Post and of The Nation for years refer their books of serious import to Mr. Peirce for examination and review? Why should Dr. Carus recognize in Mr. Peirce a foeman worthy of his incisive steel on the fundamental problem of necessity?

Of course genius is unconformable. “’T is its nature to.” It is often very hard to get along with. It tries the patience to the limit. It is so immersed in and so saturated with the inspiration of non-conformity that it often neglects to observe what is really and plainly only a merely defensive right on the part of the world of conformity. There ought to prevail a mutual spirit of forgiveness. If much is to be forgiven because of much love why should not much be forgiven to much promising and well directed power?

Mr. Peirce died a faithful man. His earlier studies led him far towards the goal of materialism, but in the course of those studies he was led to the discovery of that touchstone of values, that at first until the conception and word became mangled and aborted out of its true intent and utility he called Pragmatism, the principle that all rational significance of conceptions and of the terms embodying the same lies between the four corners of their conceived consequences in and to actual practice mental and otherwise. Since all logic is only a comparison and criticism of conceptions, this principle affects and effects our whole rational life and conduct. He was thus led to his conception of reality as that which has the natural prerogative of persistence as a possession forever. He perceived that intellectual entities, like, say, the law of gravitation or the ratio of the radius to the circumference of a circle, have just as abiding a persistence as any material entity and hence just as real an obtaining. Hence actual medieval realism, when better introduced and explained, is more pragmatically valuable than any case of nominalism or conceptualism can possibly be. The recognition of ideal realities opens out into the recognition that all existence is grounded in and upon that ideal substance the best names for which are Form, alias Reason, alias Mind, alias Truth, alias the Good, alias Beauty. The perception of Reason immanently in and throughout the universe and identical in nature with human reason solves at once the vexed question of the relation of body and mind, invites the soul to faith and repose and at the same time stimulates the soul to a vivid aspiration after cooperation with the Universal Spirit in accordance with its course of procession.

So lives Charles S. Peirce. The Universal Spirit has him and the world that neglected him will care for him—after many days perhaps, but most assuredly.

Francis C. Russell.

Chicago.

Charles S. Peirce as a Teacher, by Joseph Jastrow

2009-04-04T21:18:00.009-04:00

http://books.google.com/books?id=rWzhSTaKgwYC&jtp=723
http://www.archive.org/details/journalofphiloso13lancuoft

The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods

Vol. XIII. No.26: December 21, 1916. Pages 723–726.

Charles S. Peirce As a Teacher

TO record an impression of Charles S. Peirce as a teacher is a grateful opportunity. A deep conviction of the significance of the problems presented and a mastery of the intellectual processes were his sole and adequate pedagogical equipment. The logical quality was the dominant trait of his thinking; rectitude became a rational virtue. In the deductive field where premises were sharply defined and under control, the orderly development of conclusions was the true function of the well-trained mind, and the mark of the scholar. The “Algebra of Logic” was an expert tool usable only by the expert and extending the scope of the logical grasp. Deeply mathematical, his thinking had not the trace of a scholastic quality; there was no love of the tool for its own sake, but an admiration of its cutting edge as the issue of human care and skill. His interests were comprehensive, though not scattered. In the field of inductive problems the fertility of his resources imparted a breadth to his treatment that brought to the student the constant leadership of a rich mind. His knowledge never gave the impression of a burden, but of strength. His command of the history of science was encyclopedic in the best sense of the word. The hypotheses of the great thinkers of the past were transformed into logical exercises for the present-day student. The great advances of science were due as much (if not more) to an increased hold over the logical instrument as to an enlarged realm of observation. The history of science was a record of man’s growth in logical stature. In dealing with the more fluid and versatile considerations of induction, as in the more rigid and closed systems of deductive reasoning, the skilled focusing of his mind excited admiration. The irrelevant was discarded, the significant composition revealed. The chips fell away and the statue in the block appeared. This sense of masterly analysis accomplished with neatness and dispatch, all seemingly easy, but actually the quality of the highest type of keen thinking remains as the central impression of a lecture by Professor Peirce.

When I came to the Johns Hopkins University in the autumn of 1882, Mr. Peirce’s career was well established. He had inspired a remarkable group of young men, now leaders in intellectual affairs; a group to which is to be added the name of Christine Ladd-Franklin, whose exceptional abilities secured for her exceptional privileges. The “Studies in Logic” by “Members of the Johns Hopkins University” appeared in 1883. The concluding paper which Mr. Peirce contributed to the volume on “A Theory of Probable Inference” exhibits the qualities of his teaching and the charm and lucidity of his language, and remains an admirable example of the construction of his thought and the finish of his art. I refer to it because it reflects the interplay of logical and psychological trends, which he developed as a fertile principle of interpretation. Logic was an emanation of habit; the trend was biological, the product required the schooling of discipline and the inspiration of genius. It was this side of his teaching that gave the humanistic value; out of it grew the insight that made him the father of pragmatism. The doctrine had a distinct pedagogical value; it made the student feel the reality of the discussions by adding a moderate insight to a growing capacity. “In point of fact a syllogism in Barbara virtually takes place when we irritate the foot of a decapitated frog.” After developing the idea, he concludes : “Although these analogies, like all very broad generalizations, may seem very fanciful at first sight, yet the more the reader reflects upon them, the more profoundly true I am confident they will appear. They give a significance to the ancient system of formal logic which no other can at all share.”

My predilections at that formative period were, I must confess, rather negative. My college course had left me with a series of dislikes, not violent, but distinctive. By elimination I enrolled as a student in philosophy. Mr. Peirce’s courses in logic gave me my first real experience of intellectual muscle. Though I promptly took to the laboratory of psychology when that was established by Stanley Hall, it was Peirce who gave me my first training in the handling of a psychological problem, and at the same time stimulated my self-esteem by entrusting me, then fairly innocent of any laboratory habits, with a real bit of research. He borrowed the apparatus for me, which I took to my room, installed at my window, and with which, when conditions of illumination were right, I took the observations. The results were published over our joint names in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The demonstration that traces of sensory effect too slight to make any registry in consciousness could none the less influence judgment, may itself have been a persistent motive that induced me years later to undertake a book on “The Subconscious.”

As a further illustration of his fertile suggestiveness and use of cooperative stimulus I mention his study of great men. He prepared an elaborate question-sheet regarding the ancestry, qualities of mind and body, mode of work, stages of growth, etc., of the great men of all times. He invited a small group of students to join him in reading the chief biographies of great men and extracting the data that might furnish the entries for the syllabus. We then held conferences for the discussion and tabulation of the results. The project was never completed. A number of years later, I was permitted to formulate two rather simple conclusions, the one relating to “Longevity,” the other to “Precocity.” This was done at a time when such studies were not general, though Galton’s work was known. Such a conclusion as that later associated with Dr. Osier’s misquoted verdict regarding the correlation of early manhood with germinal ideas, was anticipated in this study. Such were his methods.

Mr. Peirce’s personality was affected by a superficial reticence often associated with the scientific temperament. He readily gave the impression of being unsocial, possibly cold, more truly retiring. At bottom the trait was in the nature of a refined shyness, an embarrassment in the presence of the small talk and introductory salutations intruded by convention to start one’s mind. His nature was generously hospitable; he was an intellectual host. In that respect he was eminently fitted to become the leader of a select band of disciples. Under more fortunate circumstances, his academic usefulness might have been vastly extended. For he had the pedagogic gift to an unusual degree, had it by dower of nature, as some men handle a pencil and others the bow of a violin. It may be an inevitable result of the conventional system of education, but it is none the less a sad one, that his type of ability does not flourish readily in an institutionalized atmosphere ; and no university had a more wholesome atmosphere than had Johns Hopkins in those days. The moral, if there be one, is that systems must give way to personalities, if the best talents of the best men are to be available.

The young men in my group who were admitted to his circle found him a most agreeable companion. The terms of equality upon which he met us were not in the way of flattery, for they were too spontaneous and sincere. We were members of his “scientific” fraternity; greetings were brief, and we proceeded to the business that brought us together, in which he and we found more pleasure than in anything else. This type of cooperation and delegation of responsibility came as near to a pedagogical device as any method that he used. One instance of it stands out with embarrassing clearness. To my consternation I was informed by Mr. Peirce that he would be absent at the time of the next lecture in logic, and that he would like me to present the next stage in the development of his topic to the class of graduate students. About half the hour was over, when Mr. Peirce walked in, took his place and insisted upon my concluding the exercise. I know of no more enlightening comment upon the atmosphere of the place and the day than that the procedure was accepted naturally by all concerned except myself.

It should be mentioned that during these years Mr. Peirce was continuing his work in the Geodetic Survey and was thus carrying on a considerable range of scientific work of quite different scope. He came of a family of exact scientific men with academic traditions. It needed no change of manner or interest to set his activities in the professorial direction. By those who knew him in other relations I am confirmed in my impression that he had more pleasure in the academic pursuits. To these he turned when he retired, recognizing in his work as a scholar surveying broadly the field of intellect, the strongest bent of his versatile mind. To those who believe that for the training of the leaders of men, nothing is more inspiring and more helpful than training by example—than the privilege of association in the cooperative spirit with a master mind—the example of Charles S. Peirce will continue to remain a cherished memory. An educational policy that makes it possible to find a place for such men as Peirce in the faculties of the great universities is a worthy ambition for those who control the educational future of America.

Joseph Jastrow.

University of Wisconsin.

Santiago

2009-04-02T18:26:00.028-04:00

This post is intended as a standing reference about Peirce's middle name "Santiago", linked from the sidebar, and subject to revision and addition. It is an expansion of the footnote which I wrote on "Santiago" in the Wikipedia article "Charles Sanders Peirce" (see the Creative Commons license, which covers the footnote. Update: I expanded that footnote into a Wikipedia article Wikipedia article "Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce". End of update.

The one who did the most to help Peirce in his desperate later times was his old friend William James, who

dedicated his book Will to Believe to Peirce in 1897;
arranged for Peirce to be paid to give two series of lectures at or near Harvard

1898 Feb. 10 – Mar. 7: Cambridge (MA) Conference lectures on "Reasoning and the Logic of Things".
1903 Mar. 26 – May 17: Harvard lectures on "Pragmatism".
1903 Nov. 23 – Dec. 17: Sedgwick followed by arranging Peirce's Lowell lectures on "Some Topics of Logic bearing on Questions now Vexed".

and, most importantly, each year from 1907 until his death in 1910, wrote to his friends in the Boston intelligentsia, asking that they make a financial contribution to help support Peirce. Peirce reciprocated by designating James's eldest son as his heir should Juliette predecease him. Brent (1998) wrote that the fund continued after James's death.

It has been said that this was also Peirce's motive for adding "Santiago", "Saint James" in Spanish, to his full name. Sources for this claim include William James's wife Alice as quoted by F.C.S Schiller (1927). Others followed with the same idea, including the Collected Papers editors (Charles Hartshorne & Paul Weiss) in CP 6 (1934), Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Peter Skagestad (1981), and Joseph Brent (1998). Skagestad said that it began in 1910, Brent said 1909, but Peirce is mentioned in print as Charles Santiago Peirce in 1890, 1891, and 1892 — some years even before James's Will to Believe dedication, the lecture series, and James's gathering of funds for Peirce. Peirce typically used "Charles Sanders Peirce" in his articles but started using the name "Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce" in Monist articles in 1906.

"Santiago" 1890
In a November 2007 thread at peirce-l, Joseph Ransdell wrote:

Ben asks;

"Where did Peirce use "Santiago" in 1890, and in that decade? I just looked at the following Monists (the ones that are easy for me to check) and the earliest use in those was 1906."

The source probably isn't on-line, but it is in the third volume of Ernst Schroeder's Vorlesungen Ueber die Algebra der Logik (if I've got my "dies" and "ders" right, which I probably don't), where that is given as Peirce's middle name in the bibliography. I think I was the first to notice this, way back when I was still a grad student at Columbia and ran across it while browsing through stuff in the library stacks there. (It was in the original edition of the book.) I passed the info on to Max Fisch at that time but I don't know that Max ever did anything with it. Then I told Ken Ketner about it some years later, when he was writing the first volume of his biography of Peirce.

Joe

Note: Joe got the year 1890 right but meant Volume 1, the only volume published in 1890 of Schröder's Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik (exakte Logik). In it, below "Peirce, Benjamin (gesprochen: Pörss)", appears "Peirce, Charles S(antiago)", followed by a list of 15 published C. S. Peirce papers in 11 publications, beginning on page 710 in the bibliography; see it at the link. (Meanwhile Volume 3 (they're both online now in 2009) was published in 1905, and refers only to Charles S. Peirce, not Charles Santiago Peirce.) In a comment on the present post (in an earlier version), Joe adds that it was back in 1965 that he passed the information to Fisch. In his 1998 Peirce biography His Glassy Essence, Ketner on page 280 describes the 1890 Schröder reference to "S(antiago)" and mentions Ransdell's bringing it to his attention (thanks on November 8, 2009 to Harold L. Orbach for the Ketner information).

Jaime Nubiola added in email to the same 2007 thread, that "I can confirm also that the first mention in print of the "Santiago" is in the p. 710 of Ernst Schroeder, Vorlessungen ueber die Algebra der Logik (Leipzig: Teubner, 1890)"; also that Andre DeTienne, in a message to peirce-l of 16 May 1995 (from the years lost from the archives) said, that the first apparent "Santiago" signature is on the manuscript of the last of the 1903 Harvard Pragmatism Lectures, MS 316a, dated 15 May 1903. Nubiola added that the reason for Peirce's adoption of "Santiago" remains a mystery. He said: "My latest finding on this issue has been -thanks to Andre de Tienne- the letter of CSP's cousin Mary E. Huntington of January 31, 1909, in which she asks to Peirce: "What is the meaning of the Santiago in your name?". Perhaps Peirce gave some explanation to Mary in his answer, but the letter is not kept."

"Santiago" 1891 & 1892
Nubiola found published papers by the mathematician Ventura Reyes Prósper which use "Charles Santiago Peirce": the paper "Christine Ladd Franklin" in El Progreso Matemático 12, pp. 297-300 (20 December 1891) and the paper "CHARLES SANTIAGO [*] PEIRCE y OSCAR HOWARD MITCHELL" in El Progreso Matemático 18, pp. 170-173 (15 June 1892). Prósper's footnote to the astrisk, as translated by Nubiola, says: "[*] Although it may seem strange, his first name is in English and his second is in Spanish; I do not know why." For the letters and papers, see Jaime Nubiola and Jesús Cobo, "The Spanish Mathematician Ventura Reyes Prósper and his connections with Charles S. Peirce and Christine Ladd-Franklin" (version 11-6-2000).

Before the days of Google Book Search
Joseph Brent, history professor at the U District of Columbia, on pages 315–16 of his Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, revised & enlarged edition, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1998, wrote:

"William James died in August 1910, leaving Peirce without the company of his one great friend although James's goodwill lived on in the Peirce fund, which went on without him. Peirce had taken the name Santiago (St. James) in May 1909, and thereafter often styled himself Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce.[122]

122. MS 318.

Brent in emails to the peirce-l forum claimed to have found Peirce explaining his motive in MS 318, but other scholars don't find it there. The issue was raised at peirce-l back in 2000. Brent at peirce-l wrote on September 6, 2000 and again on September 7, 2000 that he clearly remembers some manuscript wherein Peirce does say that he adopted "Santiago" in honor of William James. Brent suspected a manuscript numbering problem. Now, Peirce's use of the name "Santiago" before he had any reason for gratitude to James does not preclude that Brent read, somewhere, something similar to that which he remembers. The Peirce manuscript collection is vast. Maybe somewhere Peirce wrote that he retained (as opposed to adopted) the middle name "Santiago" in honor of James. I haven't heard that Brent has found the relevant manuscript.

Peter Skagestad's Endnote 1 (page 234) for Chapter 4 of The Road to Inquiry (1981) consists in the sentence:

After James' death in 1910, Peirce began signing his own name Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce, thereby canonizing his old friend 'Santiago,' i.e. St. James.

Brent said that it was May 1909, Skagestad said that it was 1910. Not so far apart. Might Skagestad have seen the manuscript that Brent seemed to remember? Responding to a question asked about it on peirce-l 28 years later (2009), Skagestad says, that the claim was quite uncontroversial at the time and he no longer remembers his source clearly but he talked with a great many people about Peirce in the late 1970s and it may have been oral tradition; he vaguely remembers hearing it from Henry David Aiken, who was a student of Ralph Barton Perry.

The claim of a gratitude connection between "Santiago" and William James goes back at least to William James's wife Alice, quoted in 1927 by F.C.S. Schiller on pp. 90-91 in "William James and the Making of Pragmatism" in The Personalist 8, April 1927: "In one of the last quinquennial catalogues, Peirce changed his middle name from Saunders to Santiago. It was long before I understood that it was a way of calling himself St. James, but there it stands Charles Santiago Peirce." (I gleaned that much from the Internet. I'm too lazy to shlep to the big libraries in Manhattan.) Anyway, the earliest Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of Harvard University which mentions Peirce with the middle name Santiago is 1910:

"Charles Sanders Peirce"
1890 http://books.google.com/books?id=zh9OAAAAMAAJ&q=Charles%2BSanders%2BPeirce
1895 http://books.google.com/books?id=pWJOAAAAMAAJ&q=Charles%2BSanders%2BPeirce
1900 http://books.google.com/books?id=JWNOAAAAMAAJ&q=Charles%2BSanders%2BPeirce
1905 http://books.google.com/books?id=byFOAAAAMAAJ&q=Charles%2BSanders%2BPeirce

"Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce," "Charles S. Sanders Peirce," "Charles Sanders Peirce"
1910 http://books.google.com/books?id=BmROAAAAMAAJ&&q=Charles%2BSanders%2BPeirce
1915 http://books.google.com/books?id=JiNOAAAAMAAJ&q=Charles%2BSanders%2BPeirce

Here via Google Books you can see Peirce mentioned as "Charles Santiago Peirce" on Page 65 in the Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik, Yearbook on the Progress of Mathematics It says, in German, "Volume XXIV. Vintage(?) 1892 Berlin. Printing and Publishing by Georg Reimer. 1895." Here is the entry on Page 65:

Capitel 2. Philosophie und Pädagogik. 65
V. REYES y PRÓSPER. Charles Santiago Peirce y Oscar
Honward Mitchell. Progreso mat. II. 170-173.
Notiz über die auf die mathematische Logik bezüglichen Ar-
beiten dieser beiden Schriftsteller. Tx. (Lp.)

***

In MS 1611 (1903), for manuscript directory and biographical dictionary of the Men of Science in the United States (see page at the Robin Catalogue), Peirce wrote: "(I am variously listed in print as Charles Santiago Peirce, Charles Saunders Peirce, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Under the circumstances a noncommittal S. suits me best)" (as quoted and sourced by Susan Howe, Pierce-Arrow, 1999, page 7, here via Google Book Search, and here (scroll down, click on "Features", scroll down) via Barnes & Noble).

Why "Santiago"?
Did it start as somebody's misprint which Peirce let stand? Ken Ketner has another theory on it in his biography (His Glassy Essence, p. 279ff, h/t Joe Ransdell), having to do with his hypothesis about Peirce's second wife being of Gypsy origins. Harold L. Orbach, in his November 2009 peirce-l post also linked a few paragraphs above, writes:

I will not attempt to summarize or paraphrase Ketner's discussion of why the apocryphal story that the adoption of _Santiago_ was a tribute to William James is erroneous, nor his presentation of the basis for viewing it as "informally ... paying tribute to his wife ... and to her cultural origins as a Spanish woman who was a Gitano, or Spanish Gypsy of Andalusia." It involves the historical relationship of the movement of the Gypsys into Spain along the famous pilgimage to Santiago de Compostella, Santiago as the patron Saint of Spain, Julliette Peirce's being in Spain at the time Schroeder's _Logik_ was published, and other reasons which everyone interested in the matter should read in Ketner's own words in the full context of his discussion of Mrs. Peirce's background and the origins and character of their relationship and marriage.

I will note that some thirteen years ago I was travelling with two French friends in the backroads of Dordogne and we passed along a number of historical sites that formed part of the route used by those making pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, all having plaques or other forms of identifying these parts of the route through southern France.

For my part, I turned up something that leads to the conjecture that the name "Santiago" has something to do with a visit by Louis Agassiz to Chile. Agassiz arrived in Santiago, Chile, to find news of winning a high honor which the Emperor of Brazil had sought for him. Agassiz was a close friend of Benjamin Peirce, and Charles studied under Agassiz. Charles likely heard a lot about that trip.

***

In 1906 and later, Peirce used "Santiago Sanders" -- both middle names together.

1906: "Mr. Peterson's Proposed Discussion", The Monist, vol. XVI, no. 1, pp. 147 to 151: "Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce".
1906: "Prolegomena To an Apology For Pragmaticism", The Monist, vol. XVI (misprinted "VI"), no. 4 , pp. 492 to 546 "Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce".
1908: "Some Amazing Mazes", The Monist, vol. XVIII, No. 2, pp. 227 to 241 "Charles S. S. Peirce"
1908: "Some Amazing Mazes (Conclusion), Explanation of curiosity the First", The Monist, vol. XVIII, No. 3, pp. 416 to 464: on p. 461: "Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce".
1910: Passage from letter to Francis C. Russell quoted in Carus, Paul, "On the Nature of Logical and Mathematical Thought", The Monist, vol. XX, no. 1, pp. 33-75, quote on on p. 45, Carus mentions "Charles S. S. Peirce".
1910: Added explanatory note quoted in Carus, Paul, "Non-Aristotelian Logic", The Monist, vol. XX, no. 1 on pp. 158 - 159, Carus mentions "Charles S. S. Peirce".

Steven Ericsson-Zenith's memeio project

2009-03-30T16:54:00.005-04:00

Steven Ericsson-Zenith's account of his memeio project should be conveniently memorialized here as well, I think. I simply quote from his recent message to PEIRCE-L, omitting the earlier part of it on a related but different topic.

Steven says:

So now a note on the "memeio" project.

There is a lot of confusion around this project because whenever I talk about it people think it is some kind of publishing system. And it is, but publishing is the least of it. Unfortunately, a lot of technology has to be built and I work on it incrementally. Recently, in an attempt to accelerate the project, I have begun to fund an engineering team to do small parts of it that I specify. The project is the means by which I currently produce all of my own documentation except email. I hope to change that soon, but will have to have an iPhone client to satisfy that need.

When I first started to develop the project you may recall that I spent sometime exploring the issues of security and the first implementation used SQL and a traditional RDBMS. I ended up with a splendid schema to which I continue to refer but a system architecture that required an insurmountable level of effort to implement, just to get the foundations in place and have something useful.

A few years ago I changed direction, abandoned the first implementation and the project adopted the latest XML technologies. Now memeio is built upon an open source XML database for structured storage, XSLT for transformation of documents, XQuery with update for editing and analysis, and related technologies in browsers and Javascript. It is all cutting edge stuff and you need the latest W3 Standards and implementations of everything to make it work. However, since I am doing basic research this is not important. The important thing is that I am making incremental progress that is immediately useful to us here.

Recent engineering provides the functions to add comments, copy and proof edit, annotate documents from a web browser. I have to integrate the results of this engineering over the next few weeks when I find the time. This will enable me to produce decorated documents like the one at http://senses.info that enable comments, annotations and editor/ author editing. In addition, from engineering conducted last year, I can also now generate multipart decorated structured documents with tables of contents, navigation and references, concept glossaries and so on, not just a page at a time.

However, I am still some way from having the infrastructure I need to conduct the research and analysis I want.

Memeio has several related research goals. The one that I have been focusing on in the past year I call "Structured Text." In essence, this is a high resolution document schema that identifies concepts, statements, questions, explanations, asides, caveats, elaborations, formal structures ... and so on. This will lead to a language that is strict to author but more accessible to English readers. Think of it as a constrained English. Recall however that my interests are academic literature at one end of the spectrum and poetry at the other.

The longer term goal is a concept database. In that I am investigating whether or not concepts are denumerable. The goal here is to have a document description that is abstracted from language and target audience. So imagine a document that could be regenerated for children and adults, for people from differing cultural conventions and even languages (although I am not introducing this complexity, I have enough on my plate).

This relates to the overarching project goal of identifying what types of new digital document are available to assist human understanding, especially as it relates to the development and apprehension of difficult ideas.

When I have the technology to a sufficient level of critical mass in terms of technology then I will start to build a document database of structured text memeio documents. This will initially include the obvious interesting classic documents like from Locke, Peirce, etc...

I will also experiment with the ad hoc text of the PSYCHE-D archive and potentially Peirce-L and others, so that we can conduct some serious analysis of the content.

In addition, I now include a degree of behavioral analysis in this research. This extends my interest in reasoning about behavior in social networks and what one needs to show an individual to increase the probability of identified behaviors.

I don't know if this helps you any. Archive.org and a memeio server both rely upon endless funding and regular transitions to new technologies to support the long term memory goals. Digital media does not survive for very long and technology dies quickly. If you have anything important that you want to keep I suggest you have it carved in stone, or failing that you print it out on archival paper with an ink in the visible spectrum that never fades.

There are concerns that are separate from the above that you also seek to address. These have to do essentially with the interface between people and technology. I'm working in this area too and to that end we continue my long interest in affinity categorization and conversational interfaces in which, from only a little initial data, the interface can lead you through a task.

The issue here is not "broadcast" but rather the existence of a convention, a "place" that people go to frequently. Email lists like Peirce-l work because people use their email clients on a daily basis.
There is somewhere to broadcast Peirce-l to.

There are frequent suggestions that we will move away from email to some destination based messaging like Facebook, I wish we would, but it would require a radical shift for the community to do so. It is the case that many people (at least, here in Silicon Valley) do communicate primarily via social networks today and hardly use email.

Obviously, I need more help :-)

With respect,
Steven
--
Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering
http://iase.info
http://senses.info

Peirce's contributions to Baldwin's Dictionary

2009-03-29T08:50:00.002-04:00

Ben, you might want to include among the links here the page on my site devoted to
Peirce's Contributions to Baldwin's Dictionary. The whole Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology is now online in a few places, as you've noted in your Wikipedia Peirce-bibliography page, but those online versions are not very easy to use for finding Peirce's contributions to it, unless you already know where to look. The page on my site makes it easier to find them, especially those in the P-Z range, than any other resource i know of. Some are included in the file itself, and i've given the original Baldwin page numbers for those i haven't yet had time to include. The Peirce Edition Project will eventually publish a volume devoted to these, no doubt, but that's probably at least a decade away; in the meantime, i think my page can be useful to researchers. (I'd like to include more of the P-Z entries in the file itself but have some other priorities at the moment.)

Ransdell's principles for The Peirce Blog

2009-03-28T14:35:00.007-04:00

Now that we've got The Peirce Blog fairly well launched, I'll post (having obtained Joseph Ransdell's general permission) the peirce-l post which he sent suggesting the idea for this blog.

But first, this note which Joe sent to peirce-l yesterday:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph Ransdell"
To: "Peirce Discussion Forum"
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2009 11:38 AM
Subject: RE: [peirce-l] Query

Irving Anellis asks whether "this new Peirce blog is a replacement for the listserve forum".

No, definitely not. The idea is rather to augment the functionality of the peirce-l forum by establishing some connections that will result insomething like an accumulating memory of the forum user community. In otherwords, the Peirce Blog could be regarded as a facility of the forum. The ARISBE website could be regarded as another facility of it. All three --peirce-l, ARISBE, and The Peirce Blog -- are independently based. But the real world physical basis -- the vast global complex of computing machinery-- underlying all of it is not normally of interest to the participants or users of the facilities.

Joe

Joseph Ransdell
ARISBE website: http://www.cspeirce.com/
PEIRCE-L archives:
http://lyris.ttu.edu/read/?forum=peirce-l
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce

Now for the main course. You can read the thread with further posts by clicking on the link http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/5285.

From: Joseph Ransdell
To: "Peirce Discussion Forum"
Sent: Monday, March 23, 2009 8:04 PM
Subject: [peirce-l] problem of giving real memory to the forum

To the list generally, but to Ben Udell and Steve Ericsson-Zenith in particular:

In reading through your messages recently in connection with the tables you created, Ben, I noticed that you were able to provide links (URLs) which not only accessed the messages in the archives effectively but also enabled access to the attachments to the messages, such as some of the diagrams of the sign classification system. This will doubtless seem relatively trivial to you, but It never occurred to me that one could do this. Thinking about this referential ability rather than about the content retrieved, it occurred to me that with one additional element added, namely, something like a topical blog or a topically ordered system of blogs for referential messages of that sort, it might be possible to provide something like a real memory structure for the forum, or perhaps I should say a standing basis for such a structure. Or at least a step towards that.

I suppose the memory structure proper for the forum would have to be regarded as primarily a property of its user community -- a complex of skills and propensities of use -- rather than of any technical structure of access such as the internet as a physical mechanism or the computer as a programming resource for shaping that mechanism might provide. But you certainly don't have human memory simply in virtue of having a record of informational content available for use in principle in the form of archives containing configurations of switches on computer systems here and there if people cannot avail themselves of these mechanisms easily enough and "naturally" enough for them to be willing to go to the trouble of doing so. The archive for the Lyris listserver system which PEIRCE-L uses (which was not of my choice) enables access in principle and is of some practical use but not much, as it seems to me, unless it is augmented in some way. Your use of it shows that it can in fact be used effectively, but this is a special skill (or is embedded in a complex of skills) that most of us don't have and won't be likely to cultivate enough to make it possible to integrate that continually accumulating archival content into an ongoing collective understanding that would constitute a real growth of an ongoing communal understanding unless some further component is added to it: some further facility that would be, in some sense, constantly at hand. Something like the blog, or a system of blogs, might provide what is wanted -- one which featured messages like yours in response to Søren, which leads very efficiently back into the archival material and makes it current again.

I realize that this might seem at first to be describing an exercise in futility, in which one is simply adding more to what is going to be forgotten, but what is missing in the above description is the nature of the forum itself and the possible connection of the blog with the forum. The forum is essentially constituted by (1) the listserver broadcast mechanism, which insures that what is said is made directly available to the members of the forum (who can of course ignore it just as what is said in a public forum like a plaza can simply be ignored by others in the plaza), and (2) the imagination of those to whom the messages are broadcast who naturally add to the bare message they receive the idea that others are more or less simultaneously experiencing it (i.e. it is AS IF they were and that qualification, though recognized, is simply ignored as the imagination tries to fill out enough context to make what is said intelligible). I think the reason the discussion tends to die down when I am not making my presence known in one way or another is not because it is me that people are addressing primarily but rather because if I am contributing regularly it is simply taken for granted that at least one person will be reading what is said, which functions as a sort of guarantee that at least somebody -- and, who knows?, maybe a great many people -- is listening to what one is saying. And most people -- nearly everyone, I think -- finds it difficult to say anything at all when they do not think there is anyone who is hearing or is going to be hearing what they say.

The point is that it is the BROADCASTING function of the listserver than constitutes its special virtue, whereas the blog lacks that virtue but has another virtue (also as a sort of imaginative illusion) which the listserver lacks, namely, the messages appearing there have a sort of seeming constancy of enduring or standing presence: one need only look further down the page or perhaps laterally across the page to another column to perceive those others waiting patiently to be read, if there is any possible interest in doing so, whether one actually does so or not. The messages of the listserver have an ephemerality as they disappear to give temporary presence to others. Of course one can simulate continuing or constancy of presence -- the sense of availability -- to some extent with listserver discussion, too, by keeping all messages and sorting through them as necessary, but this quickly tends to get too difficult as the messages pile up to provide the illusion of old messages simply being readily at hand unless one spends much time as they come in in categorizing them and moving them about -- the subject headers are not in general reliable enough for the necessary illusion -- whereas the blog provides enough initial organization to eliminate that to a substantial degree by embodying, in effect, a critically informed ordering within the process of the blogging entry. To be sure, the blogs must then be ordered, and so on, but the ordering principle(s) might somehow be neatly incorporated on the front page of the blog.

Well, something like that. Anyway, what I am suggesting is that if were to somehow introduce a coordinated blogging as a regular feature of the forum in addition to its broadcast function, we might be taking an important step toward developing something like a true memory here. How to do this, though, I do not know. But my guess is that you and others will have a much better insight into this than I, and be able, perhaps, to isolate further factors as well that might somehow be added that would contribute to that goal.

I should add that I've been thinking about this sort of thing also in connection with the Facebook and Windows Live programs and the combinations of facilities they involve, the former because it seems to have captured something about the need to establish personalities as standing substantial factors in holding content together in an intelligible way, and the latter because of its feeble attempt to combine that with tools such as the word processor, the spreadsheet, the database, and so forth. It is not the goals of Facebook as such which interest me but rather the elements it has pressed into service and other uses to which some combination of them might be put.

I mention Steve as well because of his experience with his mimeio project, which seems to have a far more ambitious aim than this but which might include something bearing importantly on this.

Joe

Joseph Ransdell
ARISBE website: http://www.cspeirce.com/
PEIRCE-L archives: http://lyris.ttu.edu/read/?forum=peirce-l http://news.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce

P.S. (about an hour after I first posted this). Clark Goble a few days ago set forth some ideas which told me what this blog could start out by doing, thus giving me the impetus actually to launch it.

Metaponderance on 'A Neglected Argument'

2009-03-28T09:33:00.006-04:00

Tracy Witham at his blog Metaponderance discusses features of Peirce's "Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" (Click on the essay title for Peirce's complete essay). His posts on the article are a tad too thoughtful for me to quickly summarize here, so here are just a few notes.

In his post "'A Neglected Argument'" (March 7, 2009), near the discussion's end, Witham says that Peirce's view of God "turns the Templeton Foundation's Big Question, 'Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?' on its head. To investigate Peirce's point of view we would have to ask, 'Does Science Make Belief in God More Credible?'"

In his post "A Fascinating Feature of Peirce's Neglected Argument'" (March 13, 2009), Witham starts off by saying that Peirce's "A Neglected Argument" has "this extraordinary feature: It blocks critique on the level at which it is presented. That feature is at once, potentially, a troubling and/or exciting feature of the argument. It deserves our attention."

In his post "Peirce's 'Suggestion' of God" (March 16 2009), Witham starts off by saying about Peirce's "A Neglected Argument" that "1. It overturns the usual view that science and belief in God are at odds. And 2. It has a one-way valence with respect to logical entailment." Witham says, among other things, that the Anthropic Principle can't be used against Peirce's argument.
Witham also gets at something which seems to me to be at least akin to a transcendental argument, possibly a retorsive argument, about an abductive inference. If human understanding's aptness and provision for its own future stages suggests something mindlike about the universe, then a critique of the analogy arguably supports it by purporting to understand it, enough so at least to make it impossible to eliminate the suggestion of God's existence.

New address

2009-03-27T04:05:00.003-04:00

It was now or never. I've changed The Peirce Blog's address to http://csp3.blogspot.com/.

Tardy update: Thank you for your patience.

All that ism

2009-03-26T23:32:00.017-04:00

It could be a parlour game, among some, to list all of Peirce's isms. He, who was quining distinctions before Quine was a gleam in any eyes, and who was careful to leave doors open and anticipate his own future thought, was also "ismatic" to a fault.

The next level is to say where, in his classifications, his isms belong.

So what I have omitted or misplaced? How well do you know Peirce?

Philosophy:

Phenomenology or Phaneroscopy. Tri-categorialism, trichotomism, triadism.
Normative Sciences.
- Esthetics.
- Ethics.
- Logic. Presuppositons of logic: Fallibilism (refusal of absolute certainty).
Metaphysics.
- General Metaphysics, or Ontology. Scholastic Realism about generals and about modalities.
- Religious Metaphysics.
  - On God. Monotheism. Moreover, God is the necessary being, real although not an actually existent individual or reactive.
  - On the soul. Anti-necessitarianism (we are free, though destinies solicit us)
  - On immortality. (The soul persists though perhaps in indefinitely attenuated form)
- Physical Metaphysics. Objective Idealism (that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming laws). Tychism (that chance is real). Anancism (that mechanical necessity is real). Agapism (that creative love is real)

Peirce opposed:
Nominalism, Materialism, ~~Idealism~~ Absolute Idealism (thank you for the correction, Joe!), Dualism, Foundationalism, Necessitarianism, and...?

This is useful to me for the Charles Sanders Peirce article at Wikipedia. Its account of his thoughts is organized along his classifications; so, in order to outline his critical common-sensism, I need to know where it belongs in his classification.

Any help here would be appreciated.

Out of Our Minds

2009-03-26T23:21:00.003-04:00

Hey, Folks!

As a first post on this spiffy new blog... is anyone familiar with the book Out of Our Minds by Cal Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë? Here's an excerpt from an interview he did with Salon... and if I'm not deluded I think what he says here seems either "Peircian" or in the ballpark, as far as mentality and the inner versus outer shag-nasty dilemma...

Imagine that we find the Holy Grail of neurobiology, the patterns of neural activation that correlate perfectly with different events in our mental lives. We would still never understand or make sense of why those correlations exist. There is no intrinsic relationship between the experience and the neural substrates of the experience. We always need to look at what factors bring the two together. The environment, other people, our needs and desires -- all these things exist outside the brain and have to be seen as essential parts of our selves and consciousness. So we aren't just our brains, we're not locked inside our craniums; we extend beyond our skulls, beyond our skin, into the world we occupy.

...and further along...

Seeing is a certain way of relating to the world around you; the brain plays a critical role in supporting that relation. It's not revealing something about the cells themselves -- or the way they are firing -- that does the explanatory work. Rather, it's understanding the way the cells participate in a larger interaction with the world that will shed light on what it is to see. This is a whole new way of approaching the problem. The "it's all in your brain" approach doesn't work. If we expand our idea of the machinery of mind to include the body and the world, whole new ways of thinking about and explaining consciousness come into view.

The whole interview is located here...

Zero

2009-03-25T16:17:00.009-04:00

The Definition of the Week (link repaired!) is "Zero" at the Peirce Edition Project’s branch at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), where members are at work on Peirce's contributions to the Century Dictionary for Volume 7 of Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition.

The excerpt begins with some nice concision:

Zero

2. The defect of all quantity considered as quantity; the origin of measurement stated as at a distance from itself; nothing, quantitatively regarded.

Then Peirce whisks you through the techno-historical aspect of a thermometer's scale. Each week they have a different definition at that same URL, so you might want to stop by there now (at the link at this post's start) and enjoy Zero, sez I (awful pun there).

*
* *
Which numbers spark the most curiosity? Among the smallest positive integers, that number is Three, no surprise there. But why is Eight even hotter? Thirteen has an unfair advantage. But Zero out-sparks them all, if Wikipedia readers are anything to go by. Meanwhile, the article statistics service is described on its own page as "very much a beta service."

February 2009
Wikipedia Article Traffic Statistics
Article.	Volume.
-1 (number)	134
0 (number)	87,771
1 (number)	14,174
2 (number)	14,041
3 (number)	20,008
4 (number)	16,563
5 (number)	13,564
6 (number)	11,161
7 (number)	18,734
8 (number)	30,496
9 (number)	14,681
10 (number)	7,774
11 (number)	5,654
12 (number)	16,718
13 (number)	45,924	(with a 6.5K spike on Jan. 13th)
14 (number)	11,921

New blog

2009-03-25T09:23:00.003-04:00

Ben, all,

Great work getting this going, Ben. In line with the principles Joe recently outlined, I hope it helps to create a new dimension of group memory for peirce-l.

Tagging and searching

2009-03-25T06:41:00.004-04:00

It looks fine to me, Ben! I was a little surprised not to see a place in the layout for a list of labels. From the conversation on peirce-l i gathered that labels or keyword tags would facilitate finding information in the peirce-l archives and elsewhere. We can of course search the blog for a key word, but if the blog is successful in attracting a lot of users and posts, then a search of the whole blog text for common words will increasingly tend to produce too many hits and defeat the purpose. Since labels can be listed alphabetically, that could help to mitigate this problem. For instance someone looking for information on Peirce's use of the term "information" would look for that word in the list of labels first, and then use the "Search" function if it didn't appear there.

But maybe i'm assuming too much about what this blog is for. And maybe this post should be on peirce-l rather than here. But i thought i'd try it out anyway.

It may look funny

2009-03-24T22:09:00.004-04:00

I'm still playing around with the new-fangled template, so the layout may look a bit strange sometimes today.

Ben Udell (Blog Admin)
Send email

Clark's idea:

2009-03-24T20:34:00.003-04:00

The idea for this specific blog comes from Clark Goble (corrected!), whom I'm sure won't mind my quoting his post at peirce-l this one time without asking in advance:

One of my favorite blogs, Enowning, actually does nothing but (a) search for interesting blog posts on Heidegger, quote a snippet and link to it and (b) post short paragraphs out of major works on Heidgger that are illuminating. Lots of blogs try to do longer posts but while I like many of those blogs I think the authors have a hard time maintaining the energy. Following a model ala Enowning but perhaps allowing submitted longer posts would be extremely valuable IMO).

But, as to quoting, Clark adds in his following post:

One thing to keep in mind though (and this is true of any mailing list) is privacy. A lot of people feel a little freer to write on a mailing list because they know only a small group of people read it. (Even if in theory it is searchable) Some people don't like the idea of egregious errors and stupid comments coming back to haunt them. (Me, I tend to think the greatest impediment to learning is being thought a fool. When you don't care if you look like an idiot you're more open to experiment and inquiry.)

Anyway, if we do a blog make sure we get permission to quote anyone from the list.

First!

2009-03-24T18:29:00.001-04:00

This is the first post at Peirce Lines. Of course I could change my mind and delete it.