Jon,
just a funny sidenote:
Thomas Telford founder and lifelong president of the Institution of
Civil Engineers denied, according to Karl Polanyi, all phycicists
membership in the institution, because physics was at that time only
theoretical and of no practical use ;)
Something many people forget: The industrial revolution was a revolution
led by engineers and social scientists (just think of Owen, Bentham
etc.). Peirce classification of the sciences in some way reflects the
rewriting of history in favour of the natural sciences.
Best,
Stefan
Am 01.10.16 um 22:48 schrieb Jon Alan Schmidt:
Mike, List:
Alas, as I anticipated, there was no further discussion of principles
of classification in R 1343. There were some fragments of alternative
drafts of the portion that I already excerpted, but they did not seem
different enough to warrant typing up and posting.
I was also quite disappointed when I finally got to the point in
Peirce's elaborate classification of the practical sciences where my
discipline of structural engineering should have appeared, on pages
82-83. The relevant text consisted entirely of the following.
CSP: The Moloperous Sciences, or Engineering ... The
Classification of the Sciences of Nontransportational Construction
Engineering will not at present be attempted. It must include the
Science of Contracting.
Seriously? Pages and pages about twelve different kinds of instinct
(whose names all start with G), a lengthy discourse about balloons and
airships, but no attempt whatsoever to classify the one category that
corresponds to what I do for a living--except to say that it includes
/contractors/? Peirce did include bridge-building among the Sciences
of Road Construction, and there is a paragraph about Invention under
Mechanical Engineering that is loosely related to my Logic of
Ingenuity; but he really let me down this time.
Fortunately, my earlier transcription of R 1357--drafts and fragments
from Peirce's mid-1890s report to civil engineer George S. Morison on
the effect of live loads on the latter's proposed suspension bridge
across the Hudson River, near the eventual site of the George
Washington Bridge--was more fruitful. There he extolled the virtues
of engineers who design aesthetically pleasing structures, rightly
called the 19th century "the classical age of engineering ... before
it shrinks to small ambitions," reiterated the essential role of
diagrammatic reasoning in engineering analysis, and recognized the
superiority of energy methods over the "method of moments" that was
being used by most engineers at the time.
Regards,
Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA
Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman
www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt
<http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt> -
twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt <http://twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt>
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