Talk:Charles Sanders Peirce/Archive 2

message: Dear 132.181.160.60, If you have questions about my citations then ask me here. Please do not change my citations without asking me first. The changes that you are making are not just stylistic, they are incorrect. I have the physical texts in front of me when I code the citations, I am coding them correctly the first time, and I don't like having to go back through a stack of books that I have already put aside to redo something you messed up. Just for one instance, square brackets around an article or chapter title indicate a title that was supplied by the editors, not the author. Jon Awbrey 06:48, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Misinformative Citation Changes

message: Can anybody explain to me why this Vandalbot just wiped out a day's work on the Charles Peirce article? Thanks, Jon Awbrey 19:24, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Vandalbot

message: Another quote to digest for the section on sign relations. Jon Awbrey 22:48, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Sign Relations

message: I am deeply dismayed at how the vast part of this entry, sections 4.3-4.5, now consists of an overly long and highly idiosyncratic interpretation of Peirce written by a single person, Jon Awbrey. Awbrey states that his prose is taken from a Ph.D. proposal. Was that Ph.D. ever completed? If so, has Awbrey ever published parts of that thesis? If the answer to both questions is No, it would appears that he is using Wikipedia as a way of disseminating ideas he cannot disseminate in any other way.
There is a substantial body of interpretive literature on Peirce, a fair bit of it cited in parts of the entry not written by Awbrey. This entry should be respectful of that literature, the way an encyclopedia article on any subject should be respect the relevant literature. Those who have made material contributions to the Peirce literature, I call "professional Peircians." More specifically, a professional Peircian is someone who has published at least one article since 1980 in the Transactions of the CSP Society. I submit that sections 4.3-4.5 of this entry would not pass muster with any professional Peircian. The 1995 article jointly authored with Susan Awbrey, recently added to the Secondary Literature, does not Jon a Peirce authority make.
It was Peirce the logician that first caught my eye some years ago, then the polymath and tragic figure. I am emphatically not an authority on Peirce the philosopher. But I have read some of the secondary literature, and that literature does not read at all like what Awbrey writes. For instance, much of that literature grants pride of place to the Categories. I grant that Goudge (1950) and Murphey (1961) are dated, but I like their sober methodical manner. For that matter, I like the sort of people who become Peirce specialists. I also agree with those who argue that one must always keep in mind that Peirce was educated as a scientist and was a serious practitioner of fairly humble forms of science. He had fair knowledge of the philosophical mathematics of the latter 19th century (e.g., Dedekind, Cantor, Clifford, Kempe, Sylvester). The story of how Peirce influenced James, Royce, and Dewey, who in turn influenced Lewis, Nagel, Morris Cohen, and eventually much of American philosophy, has yet to be written.
Robert Lane had nothing to do with section 4.2, and has yet to comment on how accurately it captures his thinking.202.36.179.65 11:29, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Sections 4.3-4.5 are disturbingly idiosyncratic

message: This article's getting way too long and convoluted. I suggest splitting off the more complicated theories, etc. into their own articles, that'll help make things more managable. I think some of the stuff here is related to the graphical proof that just showed up at Peirce's law, but this stuff is just too dense for me, I can't make head nor tail of it. At very least, the graphical notation being used there needs to be split off into its own page, possibly along with a few sections from here, then linked too.
Once the page has been divvied up, it'll be easier for others to go in and add less technical explanations. Even if they added one now, it'd get lost in all of this text.
The best person to do the splitting is probably Jon Awbrey. He's been doing most of the work here lately, so presumably he understands it all, which I most definitely do not.  FunnyMan 14:46, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Length and confusion

message: I've begun coordinate articles on inquiry, logical graphs, and sign relations to carry away some of the load on this one, and plan to write shorter synopses of this material within the Charles Peirce article, but it may take a while to work out the best balance between the collateral articles and their synopses here. Jon Awbrey 16:40, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Organization & Coordinate Articles

message: I will collect here some of Peirce's basic definitions, that will need to be quoted or excerpted for the main article or one of its coordinate articles. Jon Awbrey 13:42, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Definitions

message: Given the overweaning (sic) influence of nominal thinking -- thinking in name only -- in the century so thankfully just overcome, Peirce's use of not just one, but two brands of abstraction, hypostatic abstraction and prescisive abstraction, is one of the most difficult duos in his entire corpus to which to do justice. Aside from which he spells the word I spelled as "prescisive" in more different ways than any other of which I know, as if the waters weren't muddy enough already. The link between "precise" and "prescind" no doubt lies deep in etymology, but most folks nowadays seem to take it as a confusing pun, so I've tried to settle on a reasonable compromise in this respect. Jon Awbrey 20:18, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: My Prescious ...

message: The reason that I'm finding myself forced to fuss over the citations so much -- and believe me it's not the sort of thing that I'd do for fun -- is that it's so necessary in reading Peirce to keep in mind when and where he wrote each given statement. This is not because of the issue that gets so badly-mintoned about the Peirce net -- whether the development of Peirce's architectonic plating is catastrophic or gradualist -- but simply because it's necessary to follow arguments that take place over decades, and that get played out for audiences of wildly diverse "receiver operating characteristics". So the style sheets that we use for research journals, where the second most important datum is the freshness date of the latest edition, plays havoc here, where we need to be constantly reminded in continuous context of when and where a given keg of ideas was originally broached. I know of some style sheets that use a very complex historical layering, with multiply nested sets of parentheses, but I'm trying to avoid going to that extreme, so it may take some fiddling yet to see what works here. Jon Awbrey 19:48, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Historical Layering

message: JA: I see that there is a whole lot of gear gnashing about where to peg Peirce vis-a-vis the various isms, especially with respect to idealisms, nominalisms, and realisms of various flavors and stripes. I will just put it forward as something to think about that dichotomous thinking hardly ever cuts much ice with Peirce, and generally speaking when he does invoke an ism he adopts it as a heuristic angle on a contingent problem and does not espouse it as a declaration of absolute dogma. If one keeps that in mind and removes the dichotomous reticle from one's own mind's eye, then most of the false dilemmas and appearances of radical mind-alteration in Peirce's work will tend to evaporate. Jon Awbrey 05:30, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Peirce and the Isms

message: Is it me or is that article simply excessively long ...? I think it would make sense to introduce a series of articles like Peirce's semiotics, Peirce's X, Peirce's Y and only leave brief summaries in the Peirce article. This should make the main article much easier to navigate and digest, at the same time providing more flexibility and scalability to the whole thing. (Anonymous Coward) 15:24, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Break up article?

message: * JA: Well, folks, I just wasted a month of my life rewriting the article on relations in mathematics in a way that I thought might eventually be of service to readers of Peirce, only to have every bit, byte, and tilde regressed back to the wholly inaccessible shape that it was in before I started. So it looks like I will just have to try and write a separate article that might be of uberty and utility in this aim. Stay tomed. Jon Awbrey 21:08, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Relations in Peirce

message: The evidence I can find suggests that the reference to this periodical and to its editor William Lloyd Garrison should really refer to The Nation and its editor Wendell Phillips Garrison, the son of WLG. Anyone know where the current statement came from? Colonies Chris 09:32, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The New York Nation

message: Here are some of the principles that I would like to observe in matters of citation, references, bibliography, and so on.
* The most important principles are that the reader be able: (1) to acquire complete and correct bibliographic information (2) as quickly as possible, (3) without having to guess, and (4) in a way that is "robust against information loss" (RAIL), in particular, that preserves the history of the works cited.
* The definitive source of bibliographic data is the title page of the article or book in question.
* Now that search engine visibility is a far more important consideration than conserving bits and bytes, or ink and paper, some of the older practices of abbreviation and compression are no longer necessary, indeed, in many cases they have become a positive obstacle to the quick access of information, and so it is appropriate to modify them.
* More incidentally, the distinction between "works actually cited in the text" and a selected bibliography of a particular author, field, or topic needs to be recogized one way or another.
* It's also nice if the citation style is clean and logical, with a minimum of nonsense, specialized uses of punctuations, excessive nesting of parentheses, and so on.
I'd much rather be adding article content than fussing over these issues, but I am tiring of having to correct uninformed changes by anonymous users, so I have set these principles forth as a basis for discussion. Jon Awbrey 15:00, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Citation Issues

message: I changed the target of "How to Make our Ideas Clear" to the WikiSource page. I assumed this was a good idea ... feel free to correct or change it, but please tell me on my talk page why you did because I need to improve my understanding of Wikipedia conventions. Leon... 23:46, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Hyperlinking

message: * JA: By way of guides to good style, I've been looking to the way that other inciters of complex literatures are handled, say, Aristotle or Chaucer. This has led me to begin spinning off separate articles for each of Peirce's major works, and also to create a separate Charles Peirce (Bibliography) page, so as to avoid reduplicating standard references to primary and secondary literatures in excruciating detail within each separate article. Jon Awbrey 14:42, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Charles Peirce (Bibliography)]]

message: * JA: To say that X reinvented Y, as in X reinvented the wheel, is commonly taken to imply a number of things that are somewhat pejorative of X. It suggests: (1) that X is claiming as an original invention something that somebody else already invented, perhaps a long time ago, (2) that X is claiming as an original invention some idea that was already "in the air" and that most or many people were already familiar with, (3) that X, for lack of scholarship, availability of sources, or desire to know, fails to recognize the derivative nature of X's claimed invention, (4) that X fails to give due credit to X's sources. It is unsourced speculation in some respects and just plain false statement in other repects to attribute these characters to GSB's work in regard to CSP's work. Jon Awbrey 16:36, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: On re*invention

message: I believe that this entry, as it now stands, is in possible violation of the following policy:
Wikipedia:No original research
I learned of this policy only very recently.
Mid-2005, Charles Peirce was in poor shape. The problem is part of a wider one; I fully agree with Larry Sanger when he argues that Wikipedia entries on academic philosophy leave a good deal to be desired, when held up to the standard set by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Sad to say, the Peirce entry was deficient even though it was mostly written by a credentialed academic, Jaime Nubiola, a leading Spanish Peircian; for starters, his command of English left something to be desired. I proceeded to edit the erratic English of the entire article, and to rewrite the sections on Peirce's life and writings (for the record, the source for much of what I did was Brent's well-known biography). I put out a call on Talk: Peirce for persons with academic expertise on Peirce to contribute summaries of his ideas.
Sometime in December 2005, a certain Jon Awbrey began making major additions and reorganizations of this entry. While I value much of his organizing work, I have serious reservations about the content of those edits, namely that that content violates the No Original Research policy.
Awbrey seemed like an answer to my prayers--except that, as far as I can determine, he is no expert. The only peer-reviewed work Awbrey cites by himself is an article by himself and a Susan Awbrey, published in a journal I have never seen cited in another context. Google turns up nothing about Jon Awbrey. He has revealed that the material he has added to the Peirce entry is largely taken from a Ph.D. thesis he submitted about 10 years ago to a computer and information science department. But nowhere does he cite that thesis, much less any publications based thereon. I tentatively conclude that Awbrey's thesis was not accepted. A failed thesis is emphatically not an acceptable source.
Mind you, even if Awbrey were to cite a completed thesis, I would not be satisfied, because that thesis would have been on the history of ideas but screened by computer scientists, a human community whose members are seldom Peirce experts. I have asked Awbrey to base his edits on the Peirce secondary literature. His reply was to assert that one word by Peirce himself is worth a 1000 words cited from the secondary literature. At the time I was ignorant of the No Original Research policy, and I very much suspect that Awbrey was as well. Awbrey indeed does cite Peirce liberally, and sometimes to good effect, but the resulting narrative style, while appropriate for original research taking the form of a thesis or scholarly journal, is not appropriate for an encyclopedia article.
This is not a storm in a teapot; Peirce is now widely seen as the greatest American abstract thinker, and his work makes up a major challenge to historians of ideas. Hence summarizing his ideas is not a straightforward matter. Merely jotting down what can be found by leafing through 2-3 books available in any university library will not do the job. Even though he died in 1914 and a large amount of his work was published 1931-35, a fair amount of the primary literature has been published only since 1975, and a great deal of his writings has yet to be published. His manuscripts were catalogued only in 1971. The secondary literature on Peirce is only a half-century old and is still struggling towards consensus. All in all, coming to terms with Peirce is the second hardest editorial job I know of, exceeded only by the Leibniz corpus. As matters now stand, no academic authority on Peirce will take the trouble to edit or add to the Peirce entry, because whatever they add has to rub shoulders with Jon Awbrey's idiosyncratic perspective.
Needless to say, I think that granting this entry "Good article" status was a mistake; to make it a Featured article would only compound the error.Concerned cynic 16:07, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: NB: There is a No Original Research policy

message: This article was formerly listed as a good article, but was removed from the listing because some of the sections don't have any content, eg under 'Works'. Also I'd recommend not going so far as using sub-sub-subheadings as it makes the TOC look very overwhelming. Worldtraveller 01:01, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Article removed from [[Wikipedia:Good articles]]

message: This sentence from the article "Next one proceeds to 'crank the formula', starting from a form that is true but problematically obscure in its implications, and, circumstances warranting, continuing until a logically equivalent or a lower implied form is reached, but one that is maximally clarified in its implications." is indecipherable. Partly because its too long; But mainly because it used terms that are unexplained. What is a "form" and how can a form be true? What does it mean to call a form problematically obscure" The verb "continuing" makes no sense because we haven't been told what were doing yet, so its means nothing to say that we should continue doing it. What is a "lower implied form" and how is "reached"? What sorts of implications can forms have? I'm going to delete the sentence if someone doesn't rewrite so that it actually says something. --Epistemologist 12:13, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Problematic sentence

message: JA: I will put the suggested concision here, and work on splitting the difference, as there's such a thing as being too telegraphic. Jon Awbrey 04:28, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Reverted edits

message: I tried to read this article to learn something about Mr. Peirce philosophy, but I couldn't get through it. I'm a philosophy major and get As in logic. So I do not think I'm stupid. I can understand a lot of hard stuff. The biography part of this article is ok. But the description of his philosophy is very hard to understand thhe way it is written. You need to stop frequently and give an example of what you are talking about. The part about the story problem is an example of what I mean. The article never says it what is. Is the same as what we called a word problem in grade school arithmetic? Give example of this story problem. Show yourself solveing it using the 3 steps. Thank you. --LogicMan 06:28, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Valuable comments. Let's hope that the author(s) can take them into account. Banno 11:34, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: From the discussion below, apparently not. Banno 22:49, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Thank you AnnMBake. --LogicMan 03:44, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Ann is a new user. Let her do some editing. We don't want to drive away our contributors. Despite your claims, you are not being collaborative. You are not free to summarily revert others edits with no good reason. "I like my way better" is not a reason, and it won't fly on Wikipedia. This project works by consensus, and you have not established one. If you saw some appropriate modifications, then fine, but reversions should be limited to vandalism or group consensus edits. Please try harder to work with the other editors. The ones who have commented here are correct. The present article needs considerable improvement in its clarity. Wikipedia articles should not read like a journal. They are targeted at the general educated reader. --Blainster 19:36, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You reveal more about your psychology and your attitude to Wikipedia than you realize in your answer to Blainster. You think of editing Wikipedia as a process that you are executing. Other people's edits are "interventions" in your process. You think that reverting is ok if you copy the other version to a talk page and declare that you are "considering" it in conjunction "with the work that I was doing." And you assume that your version of any passage is the one that must be used while the passage is in dispute. --LogicMan 23:37, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: This article needs plainer writing

message: It is clear from above that there is a concensus that this article is pitched to journal level and not general educated audience as it should be. For that reason and others, I'm moving the Sholastic realism section to here (for consideration ;-) ). Besides the fact that most of it is taken up with an interpretation dispute among scholars (and it takes sides in that dispute), the first sentence calls "well known" something readers will have never heard of and the second sentence is obviously POV. The second sentence also assumes wrongly that one who believes that reality depends on many minds instead of one is not an idealist. The part beginning "Third" is weird because if Peirce's doctrine is not about realism vs. idealism, then why did this very paragraph start out talking about realism vs. idealism? Why not leave the latter topic out of this section entirely instead of putting it in and suddenly saying well Peirce is not really talking about that anyway. --Wylie Ali 01:49, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Deleted Material: Scholastic Realism

message: This quote is being removed because it is just one expert scoring a point off of others. The point it makes is made just below it more briefly anyway.
:It is not sufficiently recognized that Peirce’s career was that of a scientist, not a philosopher; and that during his lifetime he was known and valued chiefly as a scientist, only secondly as a logician, and scarcely at all as a philosopher. Even his work in philosophy and logic will not be understood until this fact becomes a standing premise of Peircian studies. (Max Fisch, in (Moore and Robin 1964, 486).
--LogicMan 15:16, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed Fisch quote 

message: I am going to remove the whole of the intro to the Formal perspective section for these reasons: 
:It begins with two long (and too long ;-) ) quotations that won't be understandable to the audience of generally educated. Also, we are writing a secondary source, so it is our job to interpret and paraphrase so that the reader doesn't have to decode original material.
:The rest of it is original research about a "crisis" and the "life cycle" of a "symbolist perspective" that is not about Peirce. Looks like somebody has a thesis about symbolism, but they should submit it to a journal; not put it here.
:It suffers from the same writing problems mentioned above.
I am not going to copy it here, since you can get it in the history. --Wylie Ali 16:08, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removing intro to Formal perspective 

message: I am removing the two long quotes from the Logic as semiotic section, for the reasons given above. Also, the first quote is from Peirce tnat is nearly indicipherable even to an expert reader. The second is Putnam making a minor point on the use of Peirce's notation by others. Bits of material before and after the quotes which refers to them goes too. --Wylie Ali 16:24, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removing 2 more long quotes 

message: I am going to remove the following from the Logic as semiotic section: 
:On how the young Bertrand Russell, especially his Principles of Mathematics and Principia Mathematica, did not do Peirce justice, see Anellis (1995).
:Peirce's work on formal logic had admirers other than Ernst Schröder:
:The philosophical algebraist William Kingdon Clifford and the logician William Ernest Johnson, both British; 
:The Polish school of logic and foundational mathematics, including Alfred Tarski; 
:Arthur Prior, whose Formal Logic and chapter in Moore and Robin (1964) praised and studied Peirce's logical work.
The first sentence is an allusion to a complaint about Russell that is not explained. General educated readers won't know what it is talking about. The rest is just a list of people who were influenced by Peirce. All of them are likely to be completely unknown to readers. --Wylie Ali 16:40, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removing inappropriate material 

message: It seems to me that all of the stuff on relationships and relatives at least up to the section "Theory of categories" is way too advanced for a generally educated reader. It is also unmotivated. We are told that a reader of Peirce must understand how Peirce used these terms, but we are not told why. Finally, it is unsourced original research. There's a reference to a Peirce article in Monist, but it is detached from any particular sentence. At any rate, this is obviously somebody's original interpretation of Peircean thoughts about relations. (If I'm wrong about that, then references to the secondary sources where these interpretations come from should be added.) But I'm going to wait to see if there is a concensus among others that it should be removed. Would everyone please give me an opinion yay or nay on removing this? --Wylie Ali 16:56, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I vote to delete it. --LogicMan 16:59, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Delete for the reasons Wylie Ali gives. --AnnMBake 19:02, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Me too. --MengTheMagnificent 08:08, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Relationships and relatives stuff should go 

message: ::Uh... sockpuppet alert. All four users above were created within the last five days. Taking a look at their contributions, they all seem to have quite similar interests (notably this article and, ironically, Truth). FranksValli 14:39, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting. Can an administrator please verify the IP address(es) from which these usernames were posted? This development, if true, would change a recent "vote" about an aspect of truth from 6-2 to 3-2, among other things. ... Kenosis 16:00, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What's a sockpuppet alert? --LogicMan 16:58, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: See WP:SOCK. - CobaltBlueTony 17:24, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't have any sockpuppets. I have talked up The Wikipedia to others lately. --LogicMan 17:55, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

text: OK. I've read the link about sockpuppets, but I do not get FranksValli's inference. Surely the usual way that people learn of Wikipedia is that friends or colleagues with common interests tell them about it. It would be expected that bunches of people with common interests would all join up around the same time. Am I missing something? For what its worth I told two colleagues about my experiences here last week. I know one of them was planning to join up and I'm 99% sure that another did or will too. Does this help? --AnnMBake 20:17, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi Ann, apologies then if these are actual people and not the same person on different names. I agree that it's common for people to hear of Wikipedia through their friends or colleagues. Unfortunately, it's equally common for people to create multiple usernames for the sole purpose of falsifying voting on editing disputes. I found the voting suspicious because Charles Peirce hasn't been a high traffic page, and thus it's unusual to receive so many votes, all from new users, in such a short amount of time. Anyhow, this being said, it's great that this page is now getting more attention, and I'm sure you all will greatly improve the page with your knowledge! I can't really help myself, since I know next to nothing about Peirce.. hopefully this article will expand on my knowledge. FranksValli 00:39, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for being so gracious. I was beginning to think that was in short supply on wikipedia. Since I think I might be an unintentional "meat puppet", I think that I'm going to colleagues that I think might be among the above 4 that we take a break from wikipedia or at least from the Truth and Peirce articles for a while. I do not want people to think that we are ganging up. But I think the concensus decision above is still valid since users Banno and Blainster expressed similiar sentiments. --AnnMBake 01:56, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  sockpuppet issue 

message: ===The Problem of the One and the Many===
JA: An Exercise in Abductive Reasoning for Peirce buffs:
Phenomena (that's Greek for "Appearances", as in "Can Be Deceiving").
* User:24.17.191.142 → Talk → Contributions from Incept Date 10:02, 4 June 2006.
* User:Nathan Ladd on Talk:Truth, Revision as of 00:33, 5 June 2006:
[Context] JA: IMWBO (in my worker-bee opinion), Nathan Ladd's conduct in his recent sorties of drive-by shoutings is just plain vandalism, and should be reverted until he learns to respect the admittedly hard-won consensus process that had until lately resulted in a steadily improving article. The constant "I read a book (Kirkham 1992) on truth once" attitude, on top of the overall ignoratio with regard to the most basic elements of the subject matter and the general campaign of disinformation, has turned the article into a mass of sophomoric confusions that is no longer of any service to the unsuspecting reader. Jon Awbrey 23:58, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I vote to delete it. --LogicMan 16:59, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Delete for the reasons Wylie Ali gives. --AnnMBake 19:02, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Me too. --MengTheMagnificent 08:08, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

text: "Thank you for being so gracious. I was beginning to think that was in short supply on wikipedia. Since I think I might be an unintentional "meat puppet", I think that I'm going to colleagues that I think might be among the above 4 that we take a break from wikipedia or at least from the Truth and Peirce articles for a while. I do not want people to think that we are ganging up. But I think the concensus decision above is still valid since users Banno and Blainster expressed similiar sentiments. --AnnMBake 01:56, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, go'olll'lee gee. Take off one hat, put on another and now i'm the sherrif, put on another and I'm the genrral store clerk but that's just a disgise because when I put on my cape I'm really LogisticMan, put on another and I'm WylECoyte aka "Sancho" his faithful ally and friend, put on another and I'm a collige professer in drag. Heckuva place that intnernet. Gol' dang. ... Kenosis 18:10, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Don't tell me. LogisticMan forgot to take the kryptonite out of the cape? And who disguised as Clark? and also as Lois?, and Jimmie? and Perry White too?, fights a never ending battle for truth? Nooo way. I - would - be - soooo - disillusioned. Tell me it ain't so... Kenosis 02:50, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: [Repeating my statement below in close proximity to these earlier "comments" or "parodies" immediately above] In seriousness, I suppose I would attach an emoticon of some kind to my last several comments, but I am not pleased about this situation no matter what the truth turns out to be. The evidence I see is disturbing, but I conintue to AGF with respect to all parties putatively involved in the current situation here. [See also the post in the section immediately below about the extreme improbability of these events occuring randomly, absent an explanation such as, for instance, sockpuppetry.] Good day all, or any. ... Kenosis 20:47, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Last week I couldn't even spell "CONCENSUS", and today I are one

message: JA: An Exercise in Abductive Reasoning for Peirce buffs:
Phenomena (that's Greek for "Appearances", as in "Can Be Deceiving").
* User:24.17.191.142 → Talk → Contributions from Incept Date 10:02, 4 June 2006.
* User:Nathan Ladd on Talk:Truth, Revision as of 00:33, 5 June 2006:
[Context] JA: IMWBO (in my worker-bee opinion), Nathan Ladd's conduct in his recent sorties of drive-by shoutings is just plain vandalism, and should be reverted until he learns to respect the admittedly hard-won consensus process that had until lately resulted in a steadily improving article. The constant "I read a book (Kirkham 1992) on truth once" attitude, on top of the overall ignoratio with regard to the most basic elements of the subject matter and the general campaign of disinformation, has turned the article into a mass of sophomoric confusions that is no longer of any service to the unsuspecting reader. Jon Awbrey 23:58, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I vote to delete it. --LogicMan 16:59, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Delete for the reasons Wylie Ali gives. --AnnMBake 19:02, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Me too. --MengTheMagnificent 08:08, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The Problem of the One and the Many

message: * JA: So tell me, what were you doing on your second day as a brand spanking newbie in WikiPrimeryskool? Reporting other editors for 3RR violations on the Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/3RR? Yup, I know that's what I was doing. Insert <Ironicon> here \longrightarrow\longleftarrow. P.S. I know that I've always been a slow learner, but I've been here six months and I didn't even know that there was such a thing until the GeeInquistor pinned my theses to the ducking stool thereof. Jon Awbrey 03:04, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Anomalous Features Of Observed Phenomena (AFOOPs)

message: ----
Would someone please request administrative review of the IP addresses involved? Collaboration is one thing, conspiracy is (arguably) another, fraud is yet another. Let's get this straight rather than beating around the bush, OK? ... Kenosis 17:42, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: "Thank you for being so gracious. I was beginning to think that was in short supply on wikipedia. Since I think I might be an unintentional "meat puppet", I think that I'm going to colleagues that I think might be among the above 4 that we take a break from wikipedia or at least from the Truth and Peirce articles for a while. I do not want people to think that we are ganging up. But I think the concensus decision above is still valid since users Banno and Blainster expressed similiar sentiments. --AnnMBake 01:56, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, go'olll'lee gee. Take off one hat, put on another and now i'm the sherrif, put on another and I'm the genrral store clerk but that's just a disgise because when I put on my cape I'm really LogisticMan, put on another and I'm WylECoyte aka "Sancho" his faithful ally and friend, put on another and I'm a collige professer in drag. Heckuva place that intnernet. Gol' dang. ... Kenosis 18:10, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Don't tell me. LogisticMan forgot to take the kryptonite out of the cape? And who disguised as Clark? and also as Lois?, and Jimmie? and Perry White too?, fights a never ending battle for truth? Nooo way. I - would - be - soooo - disillusioned. Tell me it ain't so... Kenosis 02:50, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: [Repeating my statement below in close proximity to these earlier "comments" or "parodies" immediately above] In seriousness, I suppose I would attach an emoticon of some kind to my last several comments, but I am not pleased about this situation no matter what the truth turns out to be. The evidence I see is disturbing, but I conintue to AGF with respect to all parties putatively involved in the current situation here. [See also the post in the section immediately below about the extreme improbability of these events occuring randomly, absent an explanation such as, for instance, sockpuppetry.] Good day all, or any. ... Kenosis 20:47, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Abductive Hypotheses Offered By Way Of Explanation (AHOBWOEs)

message: It might be timely to draw your attention to Wikipedia:Voting is evil and related thoughts on voting on the Wiki. Voting rarely settles an issue here. Banno 22:09, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I suppose this incident could make fairly good grist for further consideration of an open-source procedural method analogous to Roberts rules of order? Or what? Perhaps mandatory re-education camps (online of course) for outvoted participants who insist on retaining their minority views? So, what does one do when this idea of consensus is stymied? Seems like the tradition thus far has been take a vote. This of course raises the ante for diligence in effectively resolving issues like sockpuppetry. It is an interesting and important set of tensions involved here, I would think. ... Kenosis 15:16, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Re: "The O2 is already thick with 'em:" Ain't no kidding about that. ... Kenosis 02:27, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Voting & Limits On The Power Of Consensus

message: JA: Several editors in the past — none of them my avatars or personal associates — have objected to the irrelevant and speculative nature of this section. Being so much more "live and let live" in those early days of my tenure here, I was for my part willing to let it pass. But the more I read past it, the more I begin to agree that it simply does not seem to belong here. Jon Awbrey 15:42, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed Section — Parallels with Leibniz

message: JA: I am moving this infobox here for re-consideration. Peirce has not been well-served by even the most well-meaning capsulizations of his supposed thought, and this particular capsule is just too inaccurate in its current state to be of any help to the reader . Jon Awbrey 12:08, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Let's discuss before removing. If you think some of the infobox data is incorrect, please correct it, or remove the data you know to be incorrect, instead of removing the whole thing to the talk page. Are the picture, the life dates and places, the interests and influences all incorrect? --Blainster 20:55, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

text: OK, so let's remove the details deemed incorrect as previously suggested. Just because some of the facts are incorrect doesn't justify removing all of them. I understand that you do not wish to have Peirce summarized. However, Wikipedia exists to meet many needs, and its flexibility is enhanced by providing tools such as infoboxes for the benefit of those who seek just such summaries. If that is all they want, they won't be reading past the opening paragraph anyway, and we should not force them to struggle through erudite prose that many will not understand. Please re-read your scholarly post and consider your position, Jon. Peirce is obviously very important to you, but removing the infobox short-circuits our goal of spreading knowledge of him to a wider audience. --Blainster 23:36, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

text: I am a fan of infoboxs. All infoboxes have certain entries that are harder to work with than others, and Peirce is certainly one of the harder ones to work with. A infobox will work, but it will be one of the more complicated ones. What an infobox may do is needlessly repeat information in the main article. That is the only real criticism of the infobox. The box can be made to work, and it need not misreprsent, but does it really do anything? I vote we have an info box, but I do understand this part of JA's criticism. He may be right that "[t]he Infobox is by its very nature [ ] utterly redundant". {() 04:16, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

text: I really don't get your criticism. Is it a distortion to say, "He is a great American builder of an architectonic system, and his admirers deem him the most important systematizer since Kant and Hegel, who were major influences." Can we not single out 5 major influences because there were a large number of lesser influences, or because the entire context of philosophy was influenced by Plato and Aristotle? It makes total sense to provide major influences of a particular philosopher's work. Here's my real point: Not everyone is comming to this entry for a article-lenght introduction to Peirce. They want a ballpark estimation of Peirce so they can conceptually place him philosophically. I love reading Peirce, and so reading this long of an entry on him might be fine for me; however, I am not so interested in, e.g., Lovejoy, and so hitting upon an entry for him I might be just looking for the information contained in his infobox.
JA: I am not the one who included that part about the "Great American Builder" (GAB). Like a lot of the stuff in the Bio I suspect that it borders on Copyvio, and I would probably change it or else track down the proper citation, probably somewhere in Brent. For my part I try to avoid xs Peacockery, xs Nationalism, not to mention xs Copyvio. I just haven't myself got around to a copyedit of the Bio yet. Jon Awbrey 13:18, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: To Box Or Not To Box

message: Using the (rather Saussurian, or structuralist) notions of "signifier" and "signified" in order to present or explain Peirce's theory of the sign is misleading. In Saussurian parlance (or linguistic parlance at large) they rather correspond to the "sound" and "mental image" of the (diadic) sign, not to a reference process, and definitely not to Peirce's "representamen" and "object". I propose using Peirce's own analytical vocabulary (representamen, ground, object, interpretant), unless discussed otherwise. I have corrected accordingly the "icon-symbol-index" section. -- Typewritten 14:38, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: "Signifier" and "Signified"

message: The section regarding Peirce's philosophy is pitiful. It begins with an opinionated and one-sided quote, giving the impression that his philosophy is of little consequence, when nothing could be further from the truth. From this point on it is difficult to tell what the purpose of the introductory paragraph is. If it is to give an impartial introduction to the subsections of his philosophy it is utterly unnecessary. It was either written by one idiot with an axe to grind, a multitude of idiots none of whom fully understand his philosophy, or some combination of the two. It should either be rewritten or removed.
-What is more, Peirce was not only familiar with a "few lines" of Kant but thoroughly understood. Also he was not only a philosopher for five or ten years as even a cursory knowledge of his life would reveal.
-If no one has any objections I am going to remove it.
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by JohnDavidBurgess (talk • contribs) 04:39, 15 November, 2006 (UTC).
: No objection, I think you can go ahead. -- Typewritten 23:29, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The introductory paragraph to the "Peirce's philosophy" section