Listers I would like to approach this section about Kee's discussion of the 'proof of pragmatism' backwards--from experience to theory. I came into my understanding of pragmatism in this way and still find it difficult to analyze from the other direction. I've many years of practical experience with these concepts (15 of the nearly 40 years pre any knowledge that they WERE concepts, let alone Peircean). This experience still shapes the way I am most able to think clearly about these issues.
In 1975, circumstances that left me without any other materials with which to teach junior and senior language arts students forced me to make use of a set of unused workbooks called, "Creative Analysis," by Albert Upton. Once my students and I made it through the first three sections of that workbook, we all (me included) had learned to qualify (affective, sensory, rational), to analyze based upon diagrams developed by deliberate qualitative choices and to understand and apply the immensely complex construct that Upton simply called "Signs." So, I feel that everyone should know that I am not a 'real' philosopher-my only credentials are that I was able to write my first book (and everything else) in isolation (I have still never met a formally trained Peircean in the flesh). I started my first book pre-searchable discs, using only my limited collection (3 anthologies) of Peirce's writings, a few well-answered questions from Dr. Ransdell, Cathy Legg (and some amiable Deweyans) and what I knew (know) from Creative Analysis, as well as a non-verbal assessment of Peirce-based non-verbal inference patterns, which I also did not know was based on Peirce. If Howard Callaway had not read an early snippet from the manuscript and suggested I send it to Rodopi via him when it was complete & if John Shook had not refereed that manuscript and accepted it for publication, that first book would probably still be just a manuscript. If I had not made an online (and now actual and close) friend of Jayne Tristan (a Deweyan) who vetted my manuscript for philosophical trigger words-like "necessary," I would probably have made a complete fool of myself. (I still worry a lot about that, but should probably just say dayenu here). Thus, it is from this perspective of an aging and experience-based amateur that I invite Peirce-l to join me in this excellent adventure. Kee's points out that any ".proof should begin with phaneroscopy and then run through the normative sciences." I understand this as meaning that the proof of pragmatism begins with a close examination of the qualities (potential as well as actual) of phanera (as facts and occurrences). Peirce says that an occurrence is "a slice of the Universe [that] can never be known or even imagined in all its infinite detail" and that every fact within every occurrence is "inseparably combined with an infinite swarm of circumstances, which make no part of the fact itself" (Rosenthal, 1994, pp. 5-6). Peirce points out that a fact, which can be extracted from this swarm of circumstances by means of thought, is only so much of reality as can be represented by a proposition (Rosenthal, 1994, p. 5). One aspect of preparing a proposition for testing is determining which factors within the swarm of circumstances matter and which do not. It seems that the call for the proof of pragmatism to begin with phaneroscopy speaks to the examination of relevant properties (qualities of affect, sense, reason) of whatever fact is under consideration. Since Peirce allows for comparison & contrast, as well as sorting (and by implication) diagrammatic thinking (as a perceptual, rather than a logical judgment) in this non-normative branch of philosophy, it seems there is much "work" that a phenomenologist can do here before engaging the normative sciences, in particular, logic as semiotic (the semiotic paradigm) to craft the theoretical construct. It seems to me that the individual "strands" of the rope are discovered and explored within phaneroscopy, based upon their qualities and their possible relevance to something &/or one another. Only then would they be tested against norms before being added to the rope-like braid that Kees describes. I wonder how many others also see the 'Proof' beginning in phenomenology in this sense of discerning? In another sense? Or do some of you see it beginning somewhere else altogether?
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