Gary, That sentence up to the comma is my primary objection to Jon's writings. As for the substance, my second objection is Jon's claim that his conclusion is what Peirce intended: GR> Your arguments *contra* Jon Alan Schmidt have been consistently methodological, not at all substantive. Jon has done useful work in highlighting some important quotations in Peirce's writings and stating his own opinions about how they are related. That's OK. But I object to his claim of developing a definitive reconstruction of Peirce's semeiotic. That is a task that Peirce attempted to do on several occasions. But his ideas were constantly growing as he was writing. He could never produce a single coherent version. If Peirce himself could not produce a definitive version, nobody can claim that their version is what Peirce intended. GR> More to the point, there are those scholars who rather completely disagree with your and Edwina's (mis)characterization of Jon's work. Please quote anybody who objected to what I said about Jon's work. If you can't dig up some ancient quotations, please ask them to restate their objections. GR> Jon's work falls into a category of Peirce scholarship, *semeiotic grammar*, which you and Edwina seem to oppose almost in principle, but which is seen by many Peirce scholars -- and to this day -- as essential, even quintessential, in the understanding of what Peirce's philosophy involves, the changes in his terminology often being expressions of the conceptual growth -- or fine turning -- of important, even crucial philosophical concepts; and not only in his logic as semeiotic, but also in his phenomenology and metaphysics. I believe that work is very important. I have learned a lot from reading much of it -- certainly not all of it. But the most reliable authors clearly state or imply that their conclusions are their own, not Peirce's. When they do make some claims about what Peirce meant, they add some hedge, such as "Peirce seems to say..." or "If I am right..." What I find most objectionable about Jon's method is the way he constructs a long thread of quotations, each taken out of context, and derives some rigid conclusion that he claims is what Peirce intended. If anybody objects to that conclusion by citing other quotations, Jon find some excuse for rejecting them. GR> Your seeming rush to 'application' is, as I now see it, based on your hubristic (there's no more accurate term for it) estimation that you *already* grasp what's important in Peirce's philosophy... I am writing for 21st c audience. I often quote Peirce's writings as a motivation for the work I'm doing, but I don't claim that my work is what he meant or intended. Following is a revised version of the slides I presented at a Peirce session of an APA meeting in 2015: http://jfsowa.com/talks/ppe.pdf . As a result of that work, Fernando Zalamea invited me to participate in a workshop in Columbia on existential graphs. At that workshop, I presented another version of the ppe.pdf slides. As a result, I was invited to convert those slides to an article for a special issue of the Journal of Applied Logics. Slide 2 of ppe.pdf has the URL of that article, which takes 72 printed pages. Please let me know what you find "rushed" or "hubristic". I have posted many other articles and slides on my web site. If you like, I can send you the URLs of others that rush to apply Peirce's writings to what I'm working on. John
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
