Jon, I have never initiated any criticisms of your notes. But I do respond to criticisms that you initiate of my notes or of notes by other authors who I believe are on the right track. JAS> the allegations against me, which instead are grounded entirely in transparently uncharitable interpretations of my List posts over the years. In logic and mathematics, there is no such thing as charity. Each step of a proof is determined by unambiguous rules of inference. Each step that anyone takes is either right or wrong. No amount of charity can correct a mistake in logic or mathematics. Peirce was extremely critical of the usual reasoning by metaphysicians and theologians because they were entirely dependent on vague interpretations of ordinary language. But he did have a high regard for the Scholastics, who had developed the logics of the Greeks and Arabs to a high degree of precision. In fact, one of the reasons why he was so far advanced in 19th c logic is that he had combined the best insights of the Scholastics with the latest mathematics of his day. Your criticisms of my work have almost always been about issues related to logic. When it comes to logic and mathematics, charity does not apply. Phaneroscopy requires a solid grounding in math & formal logic. Without that foundation, it's impossible to do any serious work in semeiotic. See the excerpts in the attached file R602.htm And by the way, please remember the distinction between formal logic, which is part of mathematics, and logic as semeiotic, which is part of the normative sciences. Since phaneroscopy precedes metaphysics, it depends only on formal logic, not logic as semeiotic. This distinction is one that many people miss when they read his 1903 classification. R602, which Peirce wrote a few years later, clarifies that issue. John
Title: R 602
Classification of the Sciences (M)
A. MS., n.p., later than the Minute Logic, but before 1908.
Page 1
Thus far we have left untouched that which is at this moment the problem of problems for us, for the sake of which has been said all that has been sais concerning the classification of the sciences, namely the subdivisions of Philosophy, or Cenoscopy, and in particular of the place of logic among them...Page 2
The inquiry is threefold: What are the kinds of phenomena to be observed in the physicopsychical universe, and what are their essential relations, that is, what are those relations which should appear in the very descriptions of the phenomena? What are their dynamical relatios and the course of their evolution? And what are their rational relations and the need of their getting somehow to be such as they are? ...
Page 3
the science of metaphysics must depend for its successful prosecution upon the recognition that a part if not all the conceptions which this science attaches to real objcts are merely logical concepts put to different applications than that which logic makes of them; in consequence of which metaphysics depends to a very great degree upon the science of logic...
Pages 12 and 13
But preliminary to normative science, which is essentially classificatory, — stop to take that well in, I beg you, gentle reader, there should be a nomological science, which shall make out all the different indecomposable elements which enter into everything that is conceivably possible, discriminates them with care, and shows how they can be varied and combined. This science I hesitate to call phenomenology after Hegal, for fear of marring his peculiar conception of it; and therefore, though I think it is essentially the same thing under a somewhat different aspect, I will name phaneroscopy.
It is the science of the different elementary constituents of all ideas. Its material [m13] is, of course, universal experience, — experience I mean of the fanciful and the abstract, as well as of the concrete and real. Yet to suppose that in such experience the elements were to be found already separate would be to suppose the unimaginable and selfcontradictory. They must be separated by a process of thought that cannot be summoned up Hegel-wise on demand. They must be picked out of the fragments that necessary reasonings scatter; and therefore it is that phaneroscopic research requires a previous study of mathematics.
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