Jon and Gene,
Jon
We have made our respective cases for our positions
I have no quarrel with your positions. My *only* complaint
is about the word 'harmonize' and the claim that your theory is
a harmonization of what Peirce intended.
Peirce himself could not harmonize his own work, and it's
impossible for anybody else to reconstruct what Peirce would
have or might have added to his available MSS.
JFS: My concerns: CP 6.24 is quite clear as Peirce stated it;
there is no need for a paraphrase to make it clearer. But this
paraphrase distorts CP 6.24 in several ways:
JAS: I have already addressed your concerns, and I continue to
reject the charge of distortion.
CP 6.24-25 is nuanced, tentative, and qualified. Deleting the
two occurrences of 'seems' makes a sharper claim. The last
sentence of 6.25 qualifies the claim by saying that more research
-- "with mathematical clearness and precision" -- is required.
Without that qualification, the paraphrase suggests that Peirce
had completed his research. Then the word 'unambiguously' turns
the suggestion into an assertion.
When Hartshorne edited CP vol. 6 in the late 1920s, he knew
that Einstein had gone far beyond Peirce in developing a theory
of the space, time, and physics of the universe. To his enormous
credit, Peirce had anticipated many aspects of relativity and
quantum mechanics. But Einstein and others did the work.
Hartshorne was also listening to Whitehead's lectures and reading
Whitehead's books while he was working on Peirce's MSS. He saw
that Whitehead had independently developed many Peircean-style
insights and had integrated them with more recent theories of
relativity and quantum mechanics.
Hartshorne (1995) was his retrospective view of the thirty years
of progress from Peirce's CP vol. 6 to Whitehead's book,
_Process and Reality_. Potter (1995) agreed with Hartshorne
about Peirce's "strengths and weaknesses". I recommend their
articles in _Peirce and Contemporary Thought_, edited by
K. L. Ketner. I also recommend the dissertation by Brioschi:
https://air.unimi.it/retrieve/handle/2434/264520/367902/phd_unimi_R09823.pdf
Note that Hartshorne called his process theology Whiteheadian,
not Whitehead's. If you called your theory Peircean, I would
have no quarrel. But if you call it Peirce's or claim that it
is what Peirce intended, I can't let it stand.
Gene
EXPERT TESTIMONY
The opinion stated in court by an expert witness. An admissible
expert opinion given in court.
Thanks for that correction. I admit that I should have been
more precise. In a court of law, opinions are admissible
*provided that* the person who states the opinions is available
for cross-examination by the opposing side.
John
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