Edwina, I changed the subject line to emphasize fallibility. See below for some quotations in which Peirce admits his own limitations.
Peirce would *never* say that any universal principle is the absolutely final truth. But he did say that it's possible to detect falsehood. One example is sufficient to refute a universal statement, but there is no limit to the number of tests that would be necessary to guarantee its truth. ET
when I write that we should 'agree to disagree' - I am not attempting to solve anything. I am instead showing that I am aware that I stand by my view [for my reasons] and other people stand by their views [for their reasons] - and I am not going to waste their or my time in attempting a 'finale' where we must all agree.
That's OK as method for ending a pointless debate on Peirce list. But Peirce would never sign a contract to "agree to disagree" about any serious issue. That would block the way of inquiry. A noncommittal statement would be "We're not getting anywhere. Let's drop this matter until we can find more evidence one way or the other." ET
I do, however, agree that the better solution is to work with diagrams and images, rather than words and terms, and delete, replace or ignore words that inhibit the understanding of the diagram/image.
Yes. As Peirce said (below, MS 694, 1902), "I have always been so ardently bent upon correcting and improving my own opinions and conceptions..." but his EGs in RLT (1898) are identical to his diagrams of 1903, of 1906, and (with shading added) of 1911. Furthermore, those diagrams at every stage have exactly the same mapping to and from his algebraic notation of 1885. That gives the diagrams priority in resolving any debates about terminology. John ___________________________________________________________________ I am, as far as I know, a pioneer, or rather a backwoodsman, in the work of clearing and opening up what I call semeotic, that is, the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental varieties of possible [semeosis]; and I find the field too vast, the labor too great, for a first-comer. [MS 318:96; CP 5.488 (1905); EP 2:413 (1907); note date discrepancies because of many variants of this MS] What has chiefly prevented my publishing much has been, first, that my desire to teach has not been so strong as my desire to learn, and secondly, that so far from there being any demand for papers by me, I have found considerable difficulty in getting them printed as a favor to myself. [L75 (1902)] The truth is that I am far too well acquainted with the depths of my own stupidity to know what it is to be satisfied with any product of my mind. [MS 316a] I have always been so ardently bent upon correcting and improving my own opinions and conceptions that before I would reach the later chapters of a long book, those that I had written earliest would appear to me poor, and the whole plan of the work, which, of course, had been laid out first of all, to be unenlightened. [MS 694, 1902] When I first got the general algebra of logic into smooth running order [in 1884], by a method that has lain nearly twenty years in manuscript and which I have lately concluded is so impossible to get printed that it had better be burned, — when I first found myself in possession of this machinery I promised myself that I should see the whole working of the mathematical reason unveiled directly. [MS 303] For years in the course of this ripening process, I used for myself to collect my ideas under the designation fallibilism; and indeed the first step toward finding out is to acknowledge you do not satisfactorily know already; so that no blight can so surely arrest all intellectual growth as the blight of cocksureness; and ninety- nine out of every hundred good heads are reduced to impotence by that malady — of whose inroads they are most strangely unaware! [fragment, c. 1897] All that you can find in print of my work on logic are simply scattered outcroppings here and there of a rich vein which remains unpublished. Most of it I suppose has been written down; but no human being could ever put together the fragments. I could not myself do so. [MS 302, 1903]
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