I received an offline comment about harmonizing, which raises some important issues.
Offline
I wonder if JAS picked up the "harmonizing" idea from Robert Brandom. I don't see any such reference in his paper, but Brandom's work is widely referenced by Peirceans. Although Brandom does not suggest that we should be harmonizing Peirce's ideas, he does propose that philosophy should demonstrate how to harmonize assertions.
That's a good point. For some person A to take a set of assertions from anywhere and revise them in some harmonious form is fine -- provided that A states that the result is A's own work. But it's totally unjustified for any person A to take some assertions by another person B, harmonize, revise, or paraphrase them in any way -- and then claim that the result is anything that B intended. I've known people who would never talk to reporters because their comments had been hopelessly garbled by so-called summaries and paraphrases on previous occasions. John
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