Jon,
Peirce's writings are a "How-to manual" about thinking and reasoning. If you have a how-to manual about cooking, skiing, or growing flowers, it's impossible to understand the manual without doing the work. If it's a manual on cooking, you have to buy the ingredients and follow the recipes. If it's about skiing, you have to buy the equipment, go out on the slopes, and practice. If it's about growig flowers, you have to buy the seeds, plant them (indoors or outdoors), and follow the instructions. What Jeff wrote (copy below) is advice about following Peirce's how-to manual about thinking and reasoning. Reading a manual about thinking is not sufficient. You have to get the ingredients (food for thought), get the utensils (paper, ink, computers, or whatever), and follow the recipes for analyzing and solving some significant problems. JAS> Observation - What does [Peirce's] text say? Interpretation - What does the text mean? Application - How does the text work? No. You can't learn cooking, skiing, or growing flowers by analyzing the texts. You have to do the much harder work of cooking food, skiing down a mountain, or growing actual flowers. After doing the actual work, you can understand the manual at a much deeper level, and you can then discover fine points that you missed on the first reading. It also helps to watch expert cooks, skiers, and gardners in action. That is why I recommended Peirce's _Photometric Researches_ as an example of Peirce applying his methods of analysis to a significant problem. John _____________________________ On Sat, Jul 18, 2020 at 8:31 PM Jeffrey Brian Downard <jeffrey.down...@nau.edu> wrote: Jon Schmidt, John Sowa, List, Jeff D: If you substitute "texts" for "facts", as you have suggested, how does that constrain the inquiries? Jon Schmidt: Again, I suggest that it constrains the inquiries to discerning the author's intended meaning as expressed in the texts themselves. At this stage, we are only seeking to ascertain what Peirce's actual views were as communicated by his writings, not assessing whether they are correct. JD: Readers need to carry out the inquiries themselves and then check to see if they arrive at the same result. Carrying out these inquiries seems to involve facts that go beyond the words written on the pages. Jon S: I agree, but I see it as a subsequent step. First we test our interpretative hypotheses against "the words written on the pages" in a good-faith effort to make sure that we have properly understood them. Then we test them against reality by conducting our own inquiries along the same lines. Jeff D: I disagree with the suggestion that it should be a two-step process. Let me distinguish the following questions we can ask as readers of Peirce's writings: How should we interpret a given text? How should we understand the methods Peirce is employing in his inquiries? For my part, I think that we should try to understand and employ Peirce's methods at the same time we are reading the texts. That is, (1) and (2) go hand in hand. You really can't make much headway on (1) without considering how Peirce is using experimental methods to push inquiry forward. Often, the arguments he offers in the texts are really just signposts that he is offering readers in the hope that we will be able to follow his lines of inquiry. In many cases, I find that Peirce is moving so fast and covering so much ground that the only way to fill in the gaps is to carry out the inquiries myself--drawing on his instructions and suggestions offered in other texts. If I am not inquiring myself about the same questions he is asking using the same methods he is employing, I often entirely fail to follow the directions contained in those signposts. In such cases, I have to start again in order to figure out where I lost the thread. In your response, you seem to have fastened on the following question, which I think is quite different from (2) above: Are the results that Peirce arrived at using those methods correct, or do we arrive at different results when using the same methods to address the same questions? Even here, we can ask this question in a modest fashion by using this approach as a check on our use of his methods. If I arrive at a different result, then I take it as an indication that I've misunderstood or misapplied his methods. Having said that, I do take myself to be capable of engaging in my own inquiries using these methods, and I find it interesting when I arrive at a different result. What is more, one can ask if Peirce is using the right methods. Where we have doubts about his methods or results that persist, it is only natural to ask how might we improve on those methods in a manner that is consonant with the aim of seeking the truth about what is really the case. Whenever I head down this track on the List, I try to clarify what I'm doing by spelling out where my methods or results differ from Peirce's.
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