Jon, et al. I just want to emphasize one point: It's extremely rare for anybody to approve or be satisfied with anybody else's summary or paraphrase of what they said or wrote. If it's highly favorable, they probably won't complain. But even then, they realize that the paraphrase is not what they themselves would have said. JAS> The debates are rarely about there being only one "right" interpretation of only one particular passage, but rather whether and how we can integrate different passages to arrive at an overall interpretation of Peirce's thought, usually stated in our own words rather than his. No!!! Even Peirce could not "integrate different passages to arrive at an overall interpretation of [his own] thought". No Peircean scholar or committee of scholars would attempt to do that. If Peirce himself couldn't do that, it's the height of hubris for anybody else to claim that they could. Note: I am not complaining about what you write -- provided that you state it as your own opinion. But I strongly object to any claim by anybody that they could do what Peirce himself could never accomplish. JAS> John Sowa recently claimed that "Peirce would cringe at most, if not all attempts to paraphrase his thoughts," but offered no citation or quote to support this projection of his own feelings onto Peirce. If you want to see people cringe at a paraphrase, just watch children cringe when their parents try to repeat what they said on some previous occasion. As for Peirce, I'll turn the question around. Can you find any paraphrase that Peirce approved? Look at his reviews of writings by William James or Ernst Schröder. Or note they way he introduced the word 'pragmaticism'. For more examples in ordinary language, look at any email debates on any list or blog on any subject: Few, if any people, fully agree with any paraphrase of what they said. Sometimes, they might admit that the other person made a clearer or better statement on the same topic. But an improvement is not an exact paraphrase. For my own writings, I have *never* seen any paraphrase -- favorable or unfavorable -- that I would consider accurate. Some of them are worse than others. But even the favorable comments are not exact.As for Peirce, his background and knowledge were unique. Even the best Peircean scholars can't write a truly accurate paraphrase of anything he wrote. I would never attempt to do that. But every mathematician, including Peirce, recognizes that mathematical derivations are guaranteed to absolutely precise or completely false. If anybody derives a conclusion from some proposition p in formal math or logic, the original authors will accept any statement derived from p -- *provided that* the derivation correctly follows the rules of inference for that notation. In mathematics, every derivation is either exactly correct or exactly false. There is no room for charity. But a good teacher can be charitable by being sympathetic and helpful in showing students how to correct and avoid mistakes. That is human charity, not mathematical charity. John
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