Jon, The short answer to your question is "Always". I admit that you do not use those metalevel terms to describe what you're doing, but your actions speak louder than your words. JAS> When have I ever declared that my "conclusion is what Peirce intended"? In every debate, you use your slender thread of quotations as the primary and sometimes the only criterion for making a decision. You dismiss other quotations of Peirce as not valid for one reason or another, and you don't consider the century of work after Peirce as relevant. Peirce insisted on fallibilism, and his ideas were constantly growing. Note the tentative tone in his letters to Lady Welby. Note the many versions of his attempts to write something definitive. His ideas were never static, and he was constantly debating his positions with himself and his colleagues. JAS> When have I ever described my objective as "developing a definitive reconstruction of Peirce's semeiotic"? You don't describe it, but you act as if you have such a reconstruction in mind. When anybody suggests an alternative that is different from the one you chose, you fight tooth and nail to defend the one you had been considering. JAS: When have I ever maintained that my "version [of semeiotic] is what Peirce intended"? When you post a barrage of quotations by Peirce that you believe refute the position that the other person has proposed. You don't accept their quotations by Peirce, and you don't allow new evidence from more recent developments that Peirce could not have known. As just one example, Peirce preferred the gospel by John the Evangelist (and so do I). Many theologians believe that there is strong evidence for the equation Theos = Logos = Dharma = Tao (or Dao). For example, the translation of the New Testament to Chinese uses 'Dao' as the translation of 'Logos'. One might quibble with that translation for various reasons. But to reject it out of hand is inexcusable. JAS> John's slides linked below are a good example of this, translating some of Peirce's ideas into the concepts and terminology of modern logic. Why is such an approach acceptable for him in a conference presentation, but not for me in an e-mail list discussion? Again, *why the double standard? Because in mathematics and logic, there is no double standard. There is one and only one absolutely precise criterion that determines whether or not two expressions are exact translations of one another: a formal proof. Peirce was a mathematician from early childhood and a logician from the age of 13. For the first-order subset of logic (Alpha and Beta graphs), Peirce's algebraic notation of 1885 and every version of EGs from 1897 to the end had formally precise translations to one another. They also had formally precise translations to and from the FOL subsets of Frege. Schroeder, Peano, Whitehead, Russell... When I say that two expressions are formally identical, I am using the same criteria as Peirce and every logician and mathematician before and after. Please read Peirce's low opinion of the reasoning methods of metaphysicians and his recommendation that they adopt the methods of mathematics. John
Jon,
The short answer to your question is "Always". I admit that you do not use those metalevel terms to describe what you'r doing, but your actions speak louder than your words.
JAS> When have I ever declared that my "conclusion is what Peirce intended"?
In every single argument, you use your slender thread of quotations as the primary and sometimes the only criterion for making a decision. You dismiss other quotations by Peirce as not valid for one reason or another, and you don't consider the century of work after Peirce as relevant.
Peirce insisted on fallibilism, and his ideas were constantly growing. Note the tentative tone in his letters to Lady Welby. Note his many versions of his attempts to write something definitive. His ideas were never static, and he was constantly debating his positions with himself and his colleagues. Note his
> When have I ever described my objective as "developin
g a definitive
> reconstruction of Peirce's semeiotic"? When have I ever maintained that
> my
> "version [of semeiotic] is what Peirce intended"? When have I ever
> denied that my "conclusions are [my] own, not Peirce's"? When have I ever
> "construct[ed] a long thread of quotations ... and derive[d] some rigid
> conclusion that [I] claim[] is what Peirce intended"? Please provide
> *specific
> *quotes from me to back up *each *of these serious allegations.
> Otherwise,
> I request a retraction and an apology.
>
> On the contrary, I have explicitly acknowledged that my speculative
> grammar
> is *not *identical to Peirce's, and I have even pointed out some
> *specific *differences--such
> as abandoning the 66-sign taxonomy based on a linear ordering of the ten
> trichotomies, as well as associating th
e immediate object/interpretant
> with
> a type, the dynamical object/interpretant with a token, and the final
> interpretant with the sign itself. I have recently stated plainly on
> multiple occasions that all my posts are expressions of my personal
> opinions based on my interpretations of Peirce's writings, and that this
> should go without saying.
>
> On the other hand, I have read many books and papers in the secondary
> literature that assert, "Peirce believed X" or "Peirce held Y" or
> "According to Peirce, Z." There is absolutely nothing wrong with such
> statements--even when X, Y, and Z are paraphrases or summaries, rather
> than
> verbatim quotations--as long as they can be adequately supported from
> Peirce's actual writings. John's slides linked below are a good example
> of
> this, translating some of
Peirce's ideas into the concepts and terminology
> of modern logic. Why is such an approach acceptable for him
> in a conference presentation, but not for me in an e-mail list discussion?
> Again, *why the double standard?*
>
> Regards,
>
> Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA
> Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman
> www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
>
> On Sat, Apr 25, 2020 at 8:51 AM John F. Sowa <s...@bestweb.net> wrote:
>
>> 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 subst
antive.
>>
>> 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 i
t -- 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
>>
>
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