Gary R, I agree that those suggestions are helpful: GR: [Margaretha's] ideas and suggestive metaphors about how List discussion might be improved -- along with the suggestions by John Sowa and Gary Furhman which Jon Alan Schmidt just quoted -- if taken up in the spirit of collegiality, could help improve communication here considerably.
I would like to add a few more suggestions. The first one is that the method of asking questions, as in Plato's dialogues with Socrates as the discussion leader, is one of the best ways to promote fruitful discussions. People may be offended by a direct contradiction of what they just said, but nobody is offended by an honest question. (A loaded question can be offensive. e.g. "Have you stopped beating your wife?") The so-called "Socratic method" can also be annoying when pushed to an extreme. But an honest question is more likely to generate a fruitful discussion. For Peirce, it's especially important to recognize that he had a very fertile imagination, and his ideas were constantly growing .and developing over the years. His comment "symbols grow" indicates that the same words on different occasions may have very different meanings and implications: 1903: For every symbol is a living thing, in a very strict sense that is no mere figure of speech. The body of the symbol changes slowly, but the meaning inevitably grows, incorporates new elements and throws off old ones. (CP 2.222). The only statements by Peirce that remain constant are the ones in mathematics and formal logic A statement in math or logic has a fixed meaning forever. But Peirce's comments about then may change, as we have noted in various discussions. The following point is significant: CSP: The little that I have contributed to pragmatism (or, for that matter, to any other department of philosophy), has been entirely the fruit of this outgrowth from formal logic, and is worth much more than the small sum total of the rest of my work, as time will show. (CP 5.469, R318, 1907) The categories of 1-ness, 2-ness, and 3-ness are based on logic, and they have been central to his thought throughout. But his applications of those ideas continued to grow. Even in his late writings of 1913, his ideas continued to grow, and he had hopes of writing more. Nobody on planet earth can be certain that any ideas outside of mathematics and logic would remain unchanged. The recent discussions of comments by De Tienne and Atkins about phaneroscopy were interesting, but nobody can be certain that their opinions about the "science egg" are what Peirce intended. On these issues, good questions are more valuable than definitive answers. In summary, a good way to improve the level of discourse on Peirce-L is to ask more questions and to avoid making definitive pronouncements about what Peirce meant. De Tienne read as much or more than anybody else, and even he doesn't know. We can state our own opinions, but we can't claim that our opinions are what Peirce intended. John
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