Talk:Charles Sanders Peirce/Archive 1

message: Philip Meguire, 11.7.05: His middle name was Sanders.
Going through several philosophers who hadn't yet been added to the Wikipedia, I added 'Charles Saunders Peirce' as a separate article, but I now see it already exists. If someone else would like to, it can be merged with my entry. The source I gave clearly puts Saunders as a middle, rather than alternate surname (pseudonym Surname?). I would crop this article to the location of mine after merging and leave this as a link, but I'll leave it for someone more impartial to decide. Nagelfar 13:58, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The problem is, his middle name is Sanders, not Saunders. Feel free to add information from your article to this one and then provide a Redirect.  --Blainster 17:45, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: While were on his middle name, what's with this Santiago business? --- Charles Stewart 19:28, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

text: My source must be in error, though it clearly & repeatedly had Saunders, so it isn't a mistake on my part. Nagelfar 16:53, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: How interesting things get with a Google search.  This paper  states (on p.17 of the pdf file, listed as p. 58 on the page): "Peirce himself acknowledged the fictionalizing involved in his self-representations, and Howe cites his written meditation on his name: ('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')".  The Howe source is given as The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. 
Regarding the frequency of use of the middle names, there are only 11 English language hits on Santiago by Google, 391 hits on Saunders, and 90,000 on Sanders, and 64,400 on just the middle initial S. I look for some print sources that may help to explain this.  --Blainster 18:26, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

text: I did a bit of a background check as well.  I found no reference quality works (eg. Stanford E. P., Routledge E. P., Grattan-Guinness's biographical article) that use the name "Santiago", and "Saunders' looks rather like a mispelling (and has no quality source).  This looks like web noise to me, and in the absence of a credible source, we should not be amplifying it. --- Charles Stewart 18:56, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm OK with Sanders in the lead.  The fact remains that the form "Charles S. Peirce" is nearly as widely seen in the literature.  What bears research is the Pierce quote cited by Howe that lists the other versions and says he prefers the middle initial. If it can be located it will show that the other versions were extant long before the Web. --Blainster 19:11, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies) more or less specifies that we should spell out the full name.  It doesn't mean to say that that is how he signed himself, or how he is most often referred to. --- Charles Stewart 20:22, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

text: The philosophical implications of hypertext are most deserving of exploration! I hazard the guess that Peirce would have been very very fascinated by the emergence of the Web. Also keep in mind that Peirce wrote many dictionary and encyclopedia entries in his day. Those of us who contribute to Wiki are but walking in his footsteps.  Concerned Cynic 20:07, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Charles Sanders Peirce article entry

message: I've been toning down the puffery of the "The Logician" section, which contains the remarkable claim:
:In an 1886 letter to another former student, was the first to see that Boolean calculations could be carried out by means of electrical switches, anticipating Claude Shannon by more than 50 years.
This sounds incredible, and given Shannon's research of Pierce sounds almost like a claim of plagiarism.  Does it have any basis?  Which might be the letter referred to?  I've deleted the claim for now. 
Philip Meguire, 11.7.05: No possibility of plagiarism, as Peirce's discussion was in a letter to Alan Marquand (the former student), not discovered until the 1950s, and not widely reproduced until the 1980s. Kenneth Lane Ketner at Texas Tech, and Arthur Burks at Michigan have both written on this. The definitive publication of the letter, with commentary, is in vol. 5 of the Writings.
I've also deleted, of Pierce's existential graphs vs. Frege's notation:
:Peirce's notation, unlike Frege's, was widely used until the 1930s.
Possibly there was a niche culture using Pierce's notation, but the dominant notation was due to Peano, Whitehead, Russell, certainly well established by the time of Hilbert&Ackermann's Principles of Theoretical Logic in 1928. --- Charles Stewart 20:16, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Electrical switches and notation

message: I don't think this requires much discussion, but this is your opportunity to move anything from that article over here before it gets changed to a redirect.  --Blainster 23:01, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge Charles Saunders [sic] Peirce

message: Peirce adopted the middle name "Santiago" in his old age out of gratitude for William James's financial support. For over a decade, William James would send letters to about 50 Boston Brahmins, asking them to make a donation to help Peirce. Much of the blame for Peirce's very hard last 2 decades can be placed on his patrician contempt for making ends meet. 
I am quite pleased that someone took the trouble of adding the material on Peirce the scholastic realist. At the same time, the exposition left something to be desired in my view, and so I gave it an edit. This section also does not say enough about Peirce's peculiar fascination with Duns Scotus. I also have reservations about whether a bold new position staked out in a very recent academic article deserves pride of place in Wikipedia.
(above by User:132.181.160.61
I changed the attributation to Lane a bit because I have found several recent Peirce scholars saying the same thing (apparently unknown to Lane). 
===Unsourced claims===
I'm deleting the following text, plus some other bits and pieces:
:In 1906, Peirce adopted the additional name "Santiago", which in Spanish means St. James, for James' friendship and financial support.
Without credible sources, these changes are inappropriate. --- Charles Stewart 18:48, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I've rved myself and added the ref.  Note the citation says he changed his name in 1910, not 1906 (I searched for 1906, and found little). --- Charles Stewart 22:28, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Santiago & Realism 

message: I'm deleting the following text, plus some other bits and pieces:
:In 1906, Peirce adopted the additional name "Santiago", which in Spanish means St. James, for James' friendship and financial support.
Without credible sources, these changes are inappropriate. --- Charles Stewart 18:48, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I've rved myself and added the ref.  Note the citation says he changed his name in 1910, not 1906 (I searched for 1906, and found little). --- Charles Stewart 22:28, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Unsourced claims

message: Would a few of the many happy Peircians out there please add discussions of Peirce's fallibilism, his evolutionary thinking, his anticipations of process thought, his peculiar metaphysics, and most of all, his three categories Firstness, etc.? As it stands, the article does not make obvious why Peirce has been deemed the greatest abstract thinker ever to emerge in the western hemisphere.
:I'd love to see these additions as well, but they really belong on other pages. For example, a solid description of Peirce's Firstness/Secondness/Thirdness ontology would be appropriate on the Semiotics page. Gecko 21:30, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry; Peirce's semeiotic presupposes his categories, but that does not justify pigeonholing them under the semeiotic, much less deeming them ontological. The categories are metaphysical and as such follow in the footsteps of Kant (for sure) and Aristotle (probably). Keep in mind that Peirce never studied philosophy, instead discovering it by reading the Critique of Pure Reason in the original German, for one hour a day while working on a Harvard degree in chemistry.  Concerned Cynic 17:34, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  "Sorry," but it's quite priceless to argue that studying Kant's Critique of Pure Reason does not constitute studying philosophy. In any event, none of your peculiar arguments are relevant my main point, which is that this page should link to other pages about his ideas rather than globbing all of his intellectual product on this one page. Gecko 19:46, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Please share with all of us the links to those "other pages about his ideas". As they now stand, the pages titled Pragmatism, Pragmaticism, and Semiotics do not do justice to Peirce. My biographical point was not that the Critique is not philosophy (in fact, it is perhaps the most intensely philosophical book written in the modern era), but that Peirce was self-taught in philosophy and logic. By "study" I mean "formal study by enrolling in university classes for a grade."  Concerned Cynic 19:56, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that the existing pages you identified do not do Peirce justice. Ordinarily the solution would be to improve them or to add new pages. Gecko 17:16, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I fear that our discussion has been overtaken by events, namely by Jon Awbrey's attempt to turn this entry into a place to publish his failed Ph.D. thesis proposal of some years back.202.36.179.65 09:41, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Dear 202.36.179.65, if you have specific questions about the accuracy, organization, placement, or relevance of the material that I am contributing to this article, in a spirit that will lead to improving the quality of the article and its service to the reader, then this is the place to discuss them.  Jon Awbrey 13:24, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Please, More On Peirce's Philosophy!

message: Began: Jon Awbrey 16:18, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Work Area

message: Peirce published in some of the premier scholarly and scientific journals of his day, indeed, of the present day, for example, the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Journal of Mathematics, The Monist, and so on, none of which fall under the description of "obscure" journals.
User:Jon Awbrey, 20 December 2005
:Those journals were all relatively obscure in Peirce's day, from the perspective of the continental European minds that then dominated philosophy and logic. The Monist has indeed been a perfectly respectable academic journal for decades. But in Peirce's day it was a commercial enterprise founded and edited by a nonacademic, Paul Carus (who also founded Open Court), and little read in Europe. The standing of the American Journal of Mathematics was far lower when Peirce published in it than what it attained one or more generations later. It is hard to conceive nowadays how low the standing of American math and logic were in Peirce's heyday, although that changed rapidly 1900-1930. Peirce's book reviews and other articles in The Nation enjoyed fair readership in North America, but were almost totally unknown in Europe. The American Academy was new and obscure at the time when Peirce published in its Proceedings. During the latter 1860s, Peirce published several classic papers in the the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. This very obscure journal, not based in any university, was the house organ of a peculiar informal group known as the "St. Louis Hegelians." Fisch, and later Louis Menand, have drawn attention to the importance of philosophical clubs in the 19th century USA. Nevertheless, they and any publications they sponsored were largely obscure.
:Peirce himself was obscure, even among his fellow Americans. Max Fisch (1986: 284) tells us that when William James gave his major 1898 speech at Berkeley, one widely seen as the birth of pragmatism as a self-conscious movement, he told the audience "I refer to Mrs C S Peirce, with whose very existence as a philosopher I dare say many of you are unacquainted." I don't think that James was being ironic or rhetorical. Peirce, who had not led anything like a conventional academic career, was little known even in the USA.202.36.179.65 10:14, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Obscurity

message: I'll be adding some content to the section stem beneath the epigraph, but tomorrow, and I'll need to ask a few questions.
Jon Awbrey 08:04, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Formal Systems

message: I want to add some content and numbered references, but I need to ask about the conventions in place on this article vis-a-vis the various and sundry distinctions as to bibliography, endnotes, footnotes, references, etc.  I started reading the local info on footnotes but my solstice-mode brain blurred at the contemplation of "templates", so I'll just ask.  Will anybody be too upset if I rename the present References section to Bibliography and add a new References section to contain the numbered page refs for numbered citations in the text?  I realize this is an off-season, so no particular hurry, and I'll wait a while before proceeding.  Many Regards, Jon Awbrey 16:24, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Renaming "References" as "Bibliography" is a harmless matter of taste. What do you mean by "numbered citations"? The footnote-intensive citation style common in the humanities literature strikes me as silly in the web context. On and off web, I use (surname year_of_publication: page(s) OR CP paragraph number(s)), then order the references by alphabetically by surname, and within a surname by year_of_publication. It would be nice if clicking on a citation led directly to the reference, but I don't know how to code that using HTML. On the web, I prefer to group the primary and secondary literatures separately.202.36.179.65 10:26, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

text: You need the Collected Papers on CD-ROM, for US$125, if I recall rightly; I've included the link to that as well as to the Writings on CD-ROM. It would be lovely if Harvard were to lift the copyright on the CP so that the whole thing could be browsed via the Arisbe site or some such. Right now, only vol. 1 can be so browsed. Note that Richard Robin and UMass Press waved the copyright on Robin's famous catalog of Peirce manuscripts; I've added the resulting link.202.36.179.65 10:26, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Bibliography, Endnotes, Footnotes, References, Etc.

message: I need to store this quote here for a few days, while I digest the pertinent pith of it for the section on logic:
 | Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe I have shown, only another
 | name for 'semiotic' [Greek: 'semeiotike'], the quasi-necessary, or formal,
 | doctrine of signs.  By describing the doctrine as "quasi-necessary", or
 | formal, I mean that we observe the characters of such signs as we know,
 | and from such an observation, by a process which I will not object to
 | naming Abstraction, we are led to statements, eminently fallible, and
 | therefore in one sense by no means necessary, as to what 'must be' the
 | characters of all signs used by a "scientific" intelligence, that is to say,
 | by an intelligence capable of learning by experience.  As to that process of
 | abstraction, it is itself a sort of observation.  The faculty which I call
 | abstractive observation is one which ordinary people perfectly recognize,
 | but for which the theories of philosophers sometimes hardly leave room.
 | It is a familiar experience to every human being to wish for something
 | quite beyond his present means, and to follow that wish by the question,
 | "Should I wish for that thing just the same, if I had ample means to gratify it?"
 | To answer that question, he searches his heart, and in doing so makes what I term
 | an abstractive observation.  He makes in his imagination a sort of skeleton diagram,
 | or outline sketch, of himself, considers what modifications the hypothetical state
 | of things would require to be made in that picture, and then examines it, that is,
 | 'observes' what he has imagined, to see whether the same ardent desire is there to
 | be discerned.  By such a process, which is at bottom very much like mathematical
 | reasoning, we can reach conclusions as to what 'would be' true of signs in all
 | cases, so long as the intelligence using them was scientific.  (CP 2.227).
 |
 | Charles Sanders Peirce, 'Collected Papers', CP 2.227,
 | Editor Data:  From An Unidentified Fragment, c. 1897.
Jon Awbrey 06:20, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Logic, Semiotic, Formal, Quasi-Necessary Theory Of Signs

message: In preparing the sections on types of reasoning, I will need to store a few longish quotes from Aristotle and from Peirce.
Jon Awbrey 03:00, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Types of Reasoning:  Aristotle & Peirce 

message: Excerpts from Jon Awbrey, "Introduction to Inquiry Driven Systems".  Jon Awbrey 03:48, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Aristotle's "Paradigm"

message: | We have then three different kinds of inference:
 |
 | Deduction  or inference 'à priori',
 |
 | Induction  or inference 'à particularis',
 |
 | Hypothesis or inference 'à posteriori'.
 |
 | C.S. Peirce, Chronological Edition, CE 1, 267
 | If I reason that certain conduct is wise
 | because it has a character which belongs
 | 'only' to wise things, I reason 'à priori'.
 |
 | If I think it is wise because it once turned out
 | to be wise, that is, if I infer that it is wise on
 | this occasion because it was wise on that occasion,
 | I reason inductively ['à particularis'].
 |
 | But if I think it is wise because a wise man does it,
 | I then make the pure hypothesis that he does it
 | because he is wise, and I reason 'à posteriori'.
 |
 | C.S. Peirce, Chronological Edition, CE 1, 180
 |
 | Charles Sanders Peirce, "Harvard Lectures On the Logic of Science (1865)",
 | Writings of Charles S. Peirce:  A Chronological Edition, Volume 1, 1857-1866,
 | Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.
 o---------------------------------------------------------------------o
 |                                                                     |
 |  D ("done by a wise man")                                           |
 |   o                                                                 |
 |    \*                                                               |
 |     \ *                                                             |
 |      \  *                                                           |
 |       \   *                                                         |
 |        \    *                                                       |
 |         \     *                                                     |
 |          \      * A ("a wise act")                                  |
 |           \       o                                                 |
 |            \     /| *                                               |
 |             \   / |   *                                             |
 |              \ /  |     *                                           |
 |               .   |       o B ("benevolence", a certain character)  |
 |              / \  |     *                                           |
 |             /   \ |   *                                             |
 |            /     \| *                                               |
 |           /       o                                                 |
 |          /      * C ("contributes to charity", a certain conduct)   |
 |         /     *                                                     |
 |        /    *                                                       |
 |       /   *                                                         |
 |      /  *                                                           |
 |     / *                                                             |
 |    /*                                                               |
 |   o                                                                 |
 |  E ("earlier today", a certain occasion)                            |
 |                                                                     |
 o---------------------------------------------------------------------o
 Figure 1.  A Thrice Wise Act Jon Awbrey 03:32, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Peirce's Three Kinds of Inference

message: A while back, I put out a call for input into the Peirce entry from Peirce professionals. Are your very recent and very extensive additions to that entry in response to my call?
I am an economist, not a philosopher by trade, and so am NOT qualified to do what you are attempting. I was first drawn to Peirce by his logic. Believe it or not, I do not find pragmatism very interesting. I cleaned up the references, and am quite comfortable with the details of Peirce's life, having studied Brent's bio. As the article now stands, I am responsible for most of its content outside of section 2. A fair bit of what I did was to revise extensively the shabby prose I found 2-3 months ago.
I am intrigued by the semeiotic, but by no means can claim to understand it well at all, even though I own a copy of Liszka (1996)! I became fascinated by how Peirce had more serious experience as a scientist than any other philosopher in the canon. Very recently, I have been trying to come to terms with his system of 3 categories. 
One would suppose that Americans, by virtue of their national history, their economic conditions, and their intensely pragmatic outlook (I submit that the profession truest to the American character is engineering), would not be well disposed to speculative philosophy and to any metaphysical reasoning whatsoever. In other words, I once believed that philosophy in the USA would have unfolded very much along the lines of what Quine would have preferred. But Peirce shows that that has not been the case. Moreover, Peirce was Peirce all while being a serious scientist and a splendid logician.
 
It is also to Peirce's credit that he attracts scholars whose writings and personalities I very much like: Max Fisch, Ken Ketner, Arthur Prior, Arthur Burks, Hintikka, Nathan Houser, Peter Hare, RIchard Robin. Peircians are a happy robust lot.  202.36.179.65 20:22, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi, 202.36.179.65.  I'm going to move your comments above  to the discussion page for the Charles Peirce article, as I find that I'm having trouble conducting or following longer dialogues on the user talk pages, due to seeing only one side of the conversation at a time, and this seems more pertinent to Peirce than personal.  But time is very intermittent this week, and I'm trying to type while the irons are hot on a couple of other topics, so maybe later tonight I'll get time to reflect on your comments more relaxedly.  Regards, Jon Awbrey 19:14, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments Left by [[User:202.36.179.65]] on User Page

message: Is that the right template for Charles Peirce?  Jon Awbrey 03:20, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Rightly or wrongly, Peirce is considered a pivotal figure in Semiotics.  I freely acknowledge that he has contributed to other fields of academic endeavour.  This may require him to be mentioned several different templates or in none. David91 03:39, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  (Moved this discussion to the Charles Peirce talk page, as I'm getting too confused by the other way of doing things.)  More of a request for info and comment from others, as I'm not questioning relevance of Peirce to semiotics, merely the pertinence of everything that somebody or another has called semiotics to Peirce.  It just seems distracting to me to have that congeries on the first page, and if you put every subject that Peirce touched on into the form of a template on the first page, well, that would be a mess.  Is it possible to place it at the end?  Jon Awbrey 04:04, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

text: perhaps we could move the template down to the section on Peirce's Semiotics?  i think that that is an excellent solution.  --Heah talk 04:33, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

text: I tried moving it to the end, with Wikiquote and Wikisource, and think it looks better there.  Again, the question is not the relevance of Peirce to semiotics, but the relevance of most things on that template to Peirce.  Some of the references are positively misinformative with respect to Peirce's take on semiotics.  Jon Awbrey 04:50, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Charles Peirce Template?

message: The GSB/CSP connection is a curious one. Laws of Form cites vol. 4 of Peirce's Collected Papers, where the existential graphs are described. Vol. 5 of the new critical edition of Peirce cites Laws of Form, at the suggestion of its mathematical consulting editor, Ivor Grattan-Guinness. (His understanding of LoF is badly flawed, though.) Nevertheless, the connection did not really become clear until Lou Kauffman's 2001 article in Cybernetics and Human Knowing. I also have concluded that while LoF grounds some decent mathematics and logic, its philosophy is bad, faddish, and pretentious: a sort of "1960s Zen meets Bertrand Russell".202.36.179.65 10:51, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: And I bet that the intersection of the set of those who read LoF with the set of those who knew the existential graphs, or even Peirce's more conventional logic, had a tiny cardinality. I've devoted most of my research time over the past 5 years to LoF and Peirce. And I've detected very little awareness in print of the connection between the two, beyond what I write above. I should grant that I do not have access to back issues of the International Journal of General Systems, the theoretical engineering journal that has had time for LoF and related ideas, because its founder and editor, George Klir, was trained in Boolean algebra and in Eastern European philosophical mathematics.202.36.179.65 20:23, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

text: The balanced parentheses string syntactical rule was no big deal then, and LoF was no innovator at the time. Chomsky and his disciples had that syntax (and much more) down cold by the mid '60s. In turn, they were building on the concept of Dyck languages. Eulenberg, BTW, may be a product of the same Stanford machine intelligence culture that produced William Bricken, who is passionate about the mathematical and engineering worth of LoF. He knows very little about Peirce, though.202.36.179.65 20:23, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

text: An intellectual idea, to attain full stature, must go beyond "folklore/hobbyshop/lab" and achieve the dignity of printed cover, after having run some sort of peer-review gauntlet. Most of my reservations about peer review are not that it is too conservative, but rather that it is too lax, simply because competent people are too busy to carefully go over the work of others.202.36.179.65 20:23, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Charles Peirce & Spencer Brown

message: Some texts that need to be digested down to article size, pertaining to Peirce's Categories and their relationship to the sign relational roles of Object, Sign, Interpretant. Jon Awbrey 17:00, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categories 

message: I'm moving the following two paragraphs here for further work.  Jon Awbrey 19:04, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Not the sort of language I care to see in Wikipedia. The above reads like Floyd Merrell on a very bad day.202.36.179.65 10:23, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Formal Perspective 

message: I have specific reasons for placing the Theory of Categories under Formal Perspective and after the Logic of Relatives, which will become clear as the text develops.  Jon Awbrey 21:42, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Theory of Categories 

message: Dear 132.181.160.60, Let me suggest using the Charles Peirce discussion page as a public place for the discussion of proposed major changes to the article, as it gets too confusing trying to talk about common issues on the scattered user talk pages.  In particular, please don't move major sections again without some discussion, as I lost quite a bit of unbuffered typing the last two times you did it.
Thanks, Jon Awbrey 22:38, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Good Places To Talk