On 5/20/2019 4:27 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt wrote:
If each of my premisses is true, and the form of my argumentation is valid --which it unquestionably is, as demonstrated below -- then the conclusion must also be true; i.e., my argumentation is sound.
That is the most anti-Peircean dogma imaginable. Peirce would never state or accept any such claim. First, your premises are your interpretations of Peirce's writings taken from different contexts where he was focusing on different topics. The meanings of words, even for Peirce, shift subtly from one context to another. As Peirce himself said, symbols grow. Formal logic is a fossilized version of language. That is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Fossils are precise only because they stopped growing. Second, Peirce devoted his life to studying, inventing, and using the most advanced logics of his day -- which are still at the forefront of research in the 21st c. He would not accept any reasoning stated in ordinary language as "unquestionably" precise, valid, and sound -- not even his own. Third, Peirce's long experience of using formal logics enabled him to do the diagrammatic reasoning in his own head in a way that enabled him to write English more precisely than almost anybody else. I have never read any commentary about anything Peirce wrote that is more precise, or even as precise, as the original quotations by Peirce. Peirce developed his methodeutic as a "critic" of reasoning. Diagrammatic reasoning is the centerpiece, and EGs are his preferred system. If you want to make any claim that resembles the one at the top of this note, you must translate each statement by Peirce to an EG, translate your statements to EGs, and apply the EG rules of inference to derive the conclusion. If you're willing to do that, I'll offer to help. But if you refuse to do that, you have nothing but a puffy cloud of words. John
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