List: While refraining from posting over the last couple of weeks, I have been reflecting on my overall approach to Peirce's writings. Some participants seem to contend that the *only* valid interpretations of them are those that follow *deductively* from his verbatim statements. By contrast, I generally formulate interpretative *hypotheses* and then assess whether and how well they hold up in light of Peirce's actual words. After all, consider the following passage from a discarded draft of his seventh 1903 Harvard Lecture, "Pragmatism as the Logic of Abduction."
CSP: A mass of facts is before us. We go through them. We examine them. We find them a confused snarl, an impenetrable jungle. We are unable to hold them in our minds. We endeavor to set them down upon paper; but they seem to be so multiplex intricate that we can neither satisfy ourselves that what we have set down represents the facts, nor can we get any clear idea of what it is that we have set down. But suddenly, while we are poring over our digest of the facts and are endeavoring to set them into order, it occurs to us that if we were to assume something to be true that we do not know to be true, these facts would arrange themselves luminously. (EP 2:531-532n12) Peirce adds, "That is *abduction*." Now substitute "texts" (here in bold) for each instance of "facts." A mass of *texts* is before us. We go through them. We examine them. We find them a confused snarl, an impenetrable jungle. We are unable to hold them in our minds. We endeavor to set them down upon paper; but they seem to be so multiplex intricate that we can neither satisfy ourselves that what we have set down represents the *texts*, nor can we get any clear idea of what it is that we have set down. But suddenly, while we are poring over our digest of the *texts* and are endeavoring to set them into order, it occurs to us that if we were to assume something to be true that we do not know to be true, these *texts* would arrange themselves luminously. I add, that is *interpretation*. As Umberto Eco puts <https://books.google.com/books?id=H4q8ZosSvB8C&pg=PA59> it, "The logic of interpretation is the Peircean logic of abduction" (*The Limits of Interpretation*, p. 59). This is especially true when reading a prolific author who never assembled a *magnum opus* providing his own comprehensive exposition of his entire system of thought. Instead we have "a confused snarl, an impenetrable jungle" of various published articles, personal letters, and tens of thousands of manuscript pages, many of which are "multiplex intricate" and none of which can be considered definitive or final. As a result, my conclusions are not *deductive implications* of the extensive quotations that I routinely provide; rather, they purport to be *retroductive explanations* of those quotations. They are by no means certain, but they are plausible. As Peirce observes during the actual lecture ... CSP: The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of *insight*, although of extremely fallible insight. It is true that the different elements of the hypothesis were in our minds before; but it is the idea of putting together what we had never before dreamed of putting together which flashes the new suggestion before our contemplation. (CP 5.181, EP 2:227) He twice uses the word "suggestion" here, and for more than a year now I have been trying--although admittedly not always succeeding--to be more conscientious about prefacing my hypotheses with "I suggest that ..." rather than presenting them in a way that makes them sound (misleadingly) like definitive assertions. Moreover, I do not consider myself to be an original thinker in the sense of coming up with new ideas. The tendency that I *do* seem to have is "putting together" someone else's ideas in a new way--what I have variously called "harmonizing," "regularizing," "synthesizing," or "systematizing." As Peirce states plainly, this kind of insight is "extremely fallible" and must be put to the test. I will elaborate on that in another post. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Structural Engineer, Synechist Philosopher, Lutheran Christian www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
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