Jon , On the following point, we agree. And since Gary R takes your side in all these issues, I wish you would tell him to accept it. JAS> I find it extremely inappropriate to make sweeping judgments about who is (or is not) capable of understanding Peirce's writings and discussing them intelligently. After all, "Different people have such wonderfully different ways of thinking" (CP 6.462, EP 2:437, 1908). Some are more inclined toward and adept at abstract theory, others prefer to pursue concrete applications, and others (like Peirce himself) can do both. But the point I was making is that if you want to understand Peirce, you must read his writings as coming from someone who spent a lifetime doing both. Unfortunately, the various collections (CP, W, and NEM) ignore a huge amount of his background in mathematics, science, and engineering. They emphasize the results of his thinking, but they skip the details about his practice. Examples: His father taught him Greek, Latin, and mathematics from early childhood. He was doing chemistry experiments from the age of 8, and he worked his way through the kinds of experiments a college student would be doing. He read his brother's logic textbook, cover to cover, when he was 12. And he published a pioneering book in astronomy in his first full-time job at the Harvard observatory. None of us can redo our early childhood experience. But when we read any theoretical statement by Peirce, we must remember his background, his criteria for evidence, and his 60+ years of empirical/critical methods As Peirce said, it's indeed wonderful that different people have very different ways of thinking. But in order to understand any of them, we must recognize their background in order to understand how and why they came to their conclusions. Otherwise, the evaluation is incomplete or superficial at best, misguided or false at worst John
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