Clark, List,
This is an unprepared reply (= my books aren't available to me now), but if I remember right, Peirce's classification is not static. In the 1898 lectures on Reasoning and the Logic of Things (I think), he mentions how the various disciplines evolve - even the Platonic forms are dynamic in this respect - so that a field began as a descriptive science and developed into a classificatory one. As a field's body of understanding grows, it becomes more lawlike because it discovers laws governing that area of inquiry. I don't have my books unpacked yet, so I can't cite pages, but I think it's in the above work. And I could well be misunderstanding things. But this is how I recall my understanding (!) of Peirce on his classification of the sciences. Best, Jacob ________________________________ From: Clark Goble <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, December 7, 2016 6:54 PM To: Peirce-L Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce and Science (was Democracy) I'll confess that much of Peirce's classification of the sciences never made much sense to me - if only because in practice anyone actually working in any field seemed to not fit the category. However the above type of classifications seem much more useful in that they are talking about aspects or modes one uses. As John noted these are always at play to varying degrees in any science.
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