Talk:Charles Sanders Peirce

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Article Length

This article is huge. Would it not be possible to break out, say, Pierce's more strictly mathematical contributions? Inter-article links are so effective that IMHO little would be lost in those instances where someone had to switch back and forth a few times because of connections between the mathematics and the philosophy. DCDuring 21:11, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

It's a little long, but see data above about comparable thinkers. It has already been through several spin-off phases, and may be due for another. His maths and logic are tightly integrated, though, so care is needed. Saralee Arrowood Viognier 21:36, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

If I didn't think care was needed, I might have taken a run at it myself on the better-to-ask-forgiveness-than-permission principle (which seems especially appropriate with easy undo). I just don't know what the cleavage surfaces are in the edifice. There is nothing that says article length should be proportionate to influence. I am not interested in limiting the total size of Peirce-related articles, just the maximum size of the articles in the Peirce group of articles -- and anything else I might want to browse or edit. DCDuring 00:02, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Odd as it may seem, many people care more about doing the best job possible with a complex and difficult subject than they do about such incidentals as the byte count. Any one who reviews the history of the article over the last couple of years can see that the recurrent episodes of "shoot-first-ask-questions-later" have not done it much justice, not to mention all the human effort that got wasted bye the bye. Now, these concerns have been noted before by all hands on deck and I'm sure that most folks can see a lot of different areas for improvement — some of that work might squeeze out some bytes, but other types of work invariably tend to add more bytes. There are cycles to it, if you're in for the long haul. At any rate, since the article has been frozen with no progress whatever for many moons, I don't see much of a rush about it. I'm sure that those who are familiar with the subject are just itching to get back to work on it. Francisca Wartenberg 01:10, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

It is the definition of "best job" that is at issue -- to whatever limited extent we actually disagree in emphasis. I am counting on high-quality content. Many other articles I look at on WP are terrible; this one is very good, if a little dense for the likely audience -- and to get a FA rating. I just thought that we could also make users have a good experience in reading it and editors have a less tedious time editing it. DCDuring 02:05, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

The current state of the article is due to several factors, both benign and adverse. The more positive influences are due to the fact that several editors with several decades of combined experience in Peirce studies from different angles of approach were once collaborating on the article. Let's pass over the negative for now. All of the desirabilities that you mention have been discussed and addressed time and again, but it's an ongoing process, and the more time that folks spend repeating the obvious on the discussion page the less time they have to do the work required. There's a comment in one of the boxes upstairs that mentions how stubby some of the stub sections are — well, that's precisely because many whole sections have already been cleavered off to separate articles, and now it will take a few more bytes to dress up the "Main Article" links. So there are competing forces that push in opposite directions. Voice Of Xperience 03:08, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

If only old hands can play here, then I think it will turn out to be harder to achieve WP readability and intelligiblity goals. Having an overlong (64 headings!!!) talk page that may not reflect the current state of play is a barrier to participation by willing newbies, who probably aren't all vandals. DCDuring 03:37, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

This article is not necessarily "too long". Just that it should be shorter. There is some good in this article, and some good in the additions by readers, but, all-in-all, not much on Peirce's metaphysics, epistemology, or his view of theology. Here is a pretty good quote from Charles Sanders Peirce himself, on "belief": "The essence of beilef is the establishment of a habit, and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise. If beliefs do not differ in this respect, if they appease the same doubt by producing the same rule of action, then no mere differences in the manner of consciousness of them can make them different beliefs, any more than playing a tune in different keys is playing different tunes. Imaginary distinctions are often drawn between beliefs which differ only in their mode of expression ..." [C.S. Peirce, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear", From: Popular Science Monthly, Volume 12, (January, 1878), pp. 286-302; quoted on page 144, in: White, Morton. (1955). The Mentor Philosophers. The Age of Analysis: Twentieth Century Philosophers. New York: Mentor Books, New American Library; q.v. ].Scott R. Harrington (talk) 05:28, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Semeiotic, Semiotics, Theory of Signs

Note to Tetrast. I see from your user pages that you have been working on these topics. Some of the "missing grapes" vis-a-vis Peirce's theory of signs can be found in a number of other articles that were earlier spun off from this one. Many of these can be found listed in the "Main Article" link in various token sections — "token", ha ha — and others can be found in the "See Also" section, for instance, here:

• Charles_Peirce#Information, inquiry, logic, semiotics

• Semeiotic
• Semiosis
• Semiotics
• Semiology

• Sign
• Icon
• Index
• Symbol

The general confusion about Peirce's sem(e)iotic(s) versus Saussure's semiology is as bad as it ever was, but no one has had the energy, nerve, or time to try and do much about it yet. So there it is.

The Manual of Style seems to weigh against titles like "Sign (Peirce)", so the spin that a given thinker has on a topic tends to become a subsection of the article on that topic. The articles on Semeiotic and Semiotic Triangle are still very short, and may be natural places to elaborate Peirce's own take on the subject, complete with lots of pretty pictures. Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften 12:08, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

They might be good places. But I've noticed articles with titles such as Category_(Kant), Physics_(Aristotle), and Celebrity_Jeopardy!_(Saturday_Night_Live), so that format seems allowed. The stuff that I'm preparing on kinds of signs is definitely about Peirce's system in particular, and not even about all of it, but just the "main" stuff. And it's not done yet -- I have to fix up the stuff about symbols. I'm going to take it slow and watch what happens to the main article. (No reversion wars for me, thanks; I'll make myself scarce if that happens.) Anyway, I don't have the free time that I used to have. The Tetrast 18:12, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

If anyone with the wherewithal is really up for a challenge — don't look at me — the page titled "Semiology" is currently just a redirect to Semiotics, but it could be converted into full-fledged article on Saussure's way of treating signs, sorting all that out from its current misplacements in Semiosis, Semiotics, and Sign. Just a thought. Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften 12:28, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Icon, index, symbol

Jossi wanted to briefen the definitions of icon, index, and symbol, that's okay. But the unexplained use of words like "representamen" and "ground" could only confuse the general reader and many a philosopher as well. The section on classes of signs is not the place to suddenly use Peirce's alternate term "representamen" in place of "sign." The ground is an important concept but it needs to be defined.The Tetrast 22:09, 9 September 2007 (UTC) Revised The Tetrast 23:18, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

"(e.g. fork on a sign by the road indicating a rest stop)" -- too complex an example of an icon, because the sign is also very indexical, "indicating" a rest stop as the examples says. The Tetrast 22:28, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

I've finally noticed that the whole subsection explaining sign, object, and interpretant is gone. Well, why keep icon, index, symbol, without object, sign, interpretant? The explanations of icon, index, and symbol depend on the reader's knowing what object, sign, and interpretant are.
Well, I won't get into a reversion war over this. It was just a bad move. When I finish working on the questions about symbols, I'll put the whole kit and kaboodle into a separate article.The Tetrast 22:57, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Original research and POV-pushing

Please be aware that banned user Jon Awbrey (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · edit filter log · block user · block log) has an obsessive interest int his article, and has used many ban-evading sockpuppets to attempt to force his original research into this article. See Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Jon Awbrey. The majority of arguments on this page appear to come from Awbrey socks. Guy (Help!) 22:02, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Guy, I've posted quite a few comments on this talk page, but am not Jon Awbrey. Visit my user page, where there are links to my activities elsewhere. I am ultimately contactable personally. If you're referring to my saying "When I finish working on the questions about symbols" -- I don't mean my own research on the nature of symbols, I mean my trying to nail down what Peirce's views were on certain aspects of symbols, basically by finding clear statements by Peirce on the subject. As I've said at my User Page, my actual name is Benjamin Udell, and you can find my posts to peirce-l here about the symbols issue which I had in mind, an issue which I'll probably not pursue too far in the article on Peirce's signs.The Tetrast 22:23, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I see this morning that the reversion war was going on yesterday. I've repaired some links in the references, which got reverted to their earlier broken forms. Well that's all for me for the time being, now I'll wait till the dispute is resolved, though as far as I can tell, it won't be, so I have little hope for the article's remaining unprotected or for it's being worth it for me to set up a sub-article on Peirce's signs, which would probably end up suffering the same fate. It's most unfortunate. Peirce deserves better. Still, I thank the administrator(s) who decided to give the article a chance for work under reduced protection. The Tetrast 13:14, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Categories

The article seems quiet now, and I just couldn't resist trying an edit. The section on Peirce's Categories has needed editing. Maybe it should become a sub-article, but it seems a bit stub-like right now. Another consideration is that Peirce's categories really are totally central to his philosophy. The Tetrast 19:28, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

The asterisked note below the table contains the kind of info which a reader needs right away. The other footnotes which I added, footnotes which appear instead near the end of the article, are for helping people check stuff or pursue curiosity. The Tetrast 19:59, 13 September 2007 (UTC) Revised The Tetrast 20:00, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks again to the administrators for attempting to keep this article editable. That's part of why I went ahead and did this -- in order to try to do my part to help make it worth it.
Note also that the Theory of Categories section is now shorter than it was when I found it. The Tetrast 20:09, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Big edit of sections on signs

"Types of signs" was always a bad section title because "type" is itself a word which Peirce used to label a certain class of signs (type = legisign = famisign). There is a new article Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce) where the subject is discussed in more detail.
I added a section on "Semiotic elements" because the sign-object-interpretant triad is one of THE major topics in Peirce. More detail in Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce). Yet, much important stuff remains in Sign relations, especially on correspondence, determination, comprehension, denotation, etc., much of which I don't cover at all and any I don't understand everything in that article very clearly.
I hope it's not terrible to give two "main articles" for a section. I didn't know what else to do.The Tetrast 20:38, 15 September 2007 (UTC) I changed my mind, no two main articles for a single section.The Tetrast 20:49, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Shortening the article as a whole remains a tough task ahead.The Tetrast 21:43, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Distinguishing Charleses

Leaving a link at the top to a man with the same name but with no other distinguishing identification is only moderately helpful and begs the question "Which Charles Pierce?". If someone is looking for a Charles Pierce because of some philosophical or scientific principal, but that someone is not sure whether it is this one, they might waste time clicking on the other Charles Pierce's link. I think it would be more helpful if they could see up front that the other one is known for being a female impersonator, so they know if it's a scientific issue, they are in the right place. -- But|seriously|folks  17:55, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Seems like a very sensible idea, BSF. Thank you. ... Kenosis 18:05, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Too bad I don't know how to spell "Peirce"! -- But|seriously|folks  18:29, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Very funny, but this goes against standard practice, which leaves it to the target of the link to provide the additional details that are distracting in the present context. Ziemia Cieszynska 01:12, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

I believe standard practice is to state why the other individual is notable. Look at Charles Pierce, for example, or Wesley Clark, Douglas Adams or Samuel Beckett (the last three being featured articles). -- But|seriously|folks  01:37, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

See the following usage notes:

• Wikipedia:Disambiguation
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation#Usage_guidelines
• Wikipedia:Hatnotes

The guiding question to ask oneself is this: If a person types "Charles Peirce" into the Wikipedia search box, do they get what they expect or not? On that basis, there is actually no call for any "disambiguation link" at the top of the page. If a person is looking for a philosopher and types the mispelling "Charles Pierce" into the search box, then they will probably be surprised and no doubt amused, so there is a reason to put a disambiguation link on that page. Ziemia Cieszynska 02:06, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

And if they're looking for the famous female impersonator? --Haemo 02:16, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

If they're looking for the famous (a relative term) female impersonator, it's quite unlikely that they'll mistype "Peirce" for the "Pierce" which would have been correct. "Pierce" is a common name, "Peirce" is a bit unusual. And they'll quickly see that they have the wrong one and they'll see "not to be confused with Charles Pierce" and click on that name. The Tetrast 02:21, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

I see that Ziemia completely removed the disambiguation link. Previously Ziemia removed only the part about "female impersonator" and I was okay with the link in minimal form. I thought hanging the phrase "female impersonator" near Peirce's head was meant as a joke but I see that Butseriouslyfolks is a serious editor/administrator. Still, the phrase "female impersonator" is distractingly undignified in the context. That's my motive for agreeing with Ziemia, but she also has presented a good justification. The Tetrast 02:32, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I agree with Ziemia. The Tetrast 02:13, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

How about the people who can't get the "i before e" thing straight? Like this million people. Or this million people? It even took me a while to notice the difference in spelling between the Charleses, and I can spel wel. -- But|seriously|folks  02:34, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Oh pleeease just put "Not to be confused with Charles Pierce" and let the "female imperonator" stuff go. I won't fight a reversion war over it but please please. The Tetrast 02:38, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

I believe the phrase is "i before e expect after c" not "i before e except when you're looking for the famous female impersonator". --Haemo 02:39, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Can I ask what is so objectionable about the dab that we should break from established practice as shown above? -- But|seriously|folks  02:52, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't concede that you have the argument over Ziemia in terms of practice or rules. But what's objectionable about "female impersonator" is that it is distractingly undignified in the context and, if it weren't, then it wouldn't be funny. If you don't think it's funny, say so to Tony Curtis and Dustin Hoffman. I rest my case, for the moment. The Tetrast 03:13, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

So if the other Charles was just a musician or actor, you wouldn't take issue with it? It's a valid Wikipedia article, just like any other. (I guess it's a good thing Peirce wasn't named Ron Jeremy!) Seriously, I really think we're doing people a disservice and encouraging forks if we don't do everything we can to help them find what they're looking for. -- But|seriously|folks  03:26, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

The logic of the above guideline is clear. The Wesley Clark et al. examples are not comparable because there the spellings are the same. This means that a person typing "Wesley Clark" into the search box while looking for one of the other WC's needs to be advised. There is no need for a reader advisory here, much less an excessively prolix one. Ziemia Cieszynska 03:32, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

In addition, the hatnote on the Wesley Clark article is in bad form for the following two reasons: (1) there are potentially a very large number of notables with the same first and last name, not all which should be listed at the top of every comparable article, and (2) one of those listed is a red link. The hatnote should be succinct and refer the reader to a disambiguation page where the variants can be listed in full. Ziemia Cieszynska 03:38, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Ziemia is right and succinct, as usual. Anyway, yes, I wouldn't have taken issue with it if the other Charles were just a musician or actor. I don't think one does more than a very minimal disservice to Wikipedia reader if we leave off mention of "female impersonator" from "Not to be confused with Charles Pierce" which would be quite enough. De minimis. And there is in fact no need to rigorously maximize and extremize a particular kind of benefit to Wikipedia readers in every single case, especially when there is a countervailing concern, in the present case that of not including a distractingly undignified thing. And I have to go to sleep, good night, all! The Tetrast 03:42, 17 September 2007 (UTC) And yes, why one cares and what rules one invokes don't always have to be the same, they legitimately differ often enough in real life. The Tetrast 03:45, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't think Ziemia is Jon

I notice that Ziemia has been banned as one of Jon's suspected sockpuppets. But there's no pun in Ziemia's name like Jon's sockpuppet names usually have. Ziemia's behavior has not been like Jon's. Ziemia reverted once or twice but that's not the same thing as what Jon does, and Ziemia was not involved in today's back-&-forth. I've looked at Ziemia's user page; it doesn't look like Jon's sockpuppet user pages, and Ziemia's contribution history doesn't look like Jon's sort of thing. And, most noticeably, Ziemia's comments don't sound like Jon at all. Ziemia is succinct, straightforward, unsarcastic to the point. I really, really doubt that Ziemia is Jon.

It shouldn't be dangerous to agree with Jon. I agree with Jon about Peirce's Pragmatic Maxim and about a number of other issues regarding Peirce. Jon used to post to peirce-l, where I sometimes agreed with him, sometimes tangled with him. I disagree with Jon (not to mention Peirce) about the adequacy of Peirce's object-sign-interpretant triad as a basis for logical/semiotic relations. I agree with Jon and Ziemia about the inappropriateness of the "female impersonater" label hanging near Peirce's head. I appreciate the administrators' help in letting this article be edited. But the atmosphere around here is like a college dorm now. "Female impersonator." Very funny. Can anybody please stop thinking of Tootsie for five minutes?

Everything was just fine, the article was finally peaceful and editable yet free of its long reversion wars, when disambiguation merely said "Not to be confused with Charles Pierce". Now instead the reversion war has restarted over this stuff. Well, I'll make myself scarce for a while. The Tetrast 00:10, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

The Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms

The Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms should not be confused with any Commons dictionary. It's got its own Website and everything, check it out http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/dictionary.html The word "commens" itself is Peirce's word for that which he also called the "commind". Basically it's com- + mens or "mind". The Tetrast 18:51, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Time to end the female impersonator fun

It turns out that there are the following Charles/Charlie Pierce entries in Wikipedia:

• Charles Pierce -- Female impersonator. Earliest edit: 18 February 2002 156.153.255.195
• Charlie Pierce, a.k.a Charles P. Pierce -- Sportswriter. Earliest edit: 19 November 2005 JB82
• Charles B. Pierce -- American movie director. Earliest edit: 24 September 2006 Lcduke
• Charles Wilson Pierce -- U.S. Representative from Alabama. Earliest edit: 4 June 2007 Polbot

The impression, that the "female impersonator" phrase is intended for humor or spite, rather than for concern about the female impersonator himself, is reinforced by the fact that the disambiguation sentence, so quickly edited to retain the "female impersonator" phrase -- with an un-Jonlike reverter Ziemia so quickly banned as Jon's suspected sock (yes, the others were Jonlike) -- has been allowed to stand with Harrypotter's accidental misspelling of the female impersonator's name as if it were "Peirce" instead of "Pierce". Now that it turns out that there are at least four people named Charles Pierce with Wikipedia pages, perhaps the disambiguation can be edited simply point to Pierce (surname), which I've updated to include the already-existent Pierce pages. But I won't touch that disambiguation sentence, it seems to be some sort of line in the sand. The Tetrast 20:19, 24 September 2007 (UTC) Revised The Tetrast 20:24, 24 September 2007 (UTC). Addendum: If Jon reads this, I would suggest that he leave the disambiguation sentence alone. Let those who insisted on it make the changes which they now must make. The Tetrast 20:45, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Now I see how to do it:

For people with the similar name Charles Pierce ("i" before "e", not after it), see Pierce (surname).

The Tetrast 21:52, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Female impersonator "Peirce" has been corrected to "Pierce" See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Peirce&diff=160109713&oldid=160104920 as result of edit
21:28, 24 September 2007 Jpgordon (Talk | contribs) (69,823 bytes) (No, it didn't.) (undo)
--"No, it didn't"? It didn't reinforce the impression? But the impression is even further reinforced by disregard for Wikipedia:Disambiguation#Disambiguation_links:

Where there are several articles associated with the same ambiguous term, include a link to a separate disambiguation page.

and by disregard for second Charles Pierce (the sportswriter) already mentioned atop the female impersonator's page Charles Pierce.

Now, will you please stop this and repair the disambiguation sentence? The Tetrast 22:52, 24 September 2007 (UTC) Corrected above-mentioned sportswriter "Peirce" to "Pierce" The Tetrast 22:56, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Update: The list now stands at Charles Peirce plus six seven eight people named Charles Pierce.

1. Charles Pierce -- Female impersonator. Earliest edit: 18 February 2002 156.153.255.195
2. Charlie Pierce, a.k.a Charles P. Pierce -- Sportswriter. Earliest edit: 19 November 2005 JB82
3. Charles B. Pierce -- American movie director. Earliest edit: 24 September 2006 Lcduke
4. Charles Wilson Pierce -- U.S. Representative from Alabama. Earliest edit: 4 June 2007 Polbot
5. Charles Pierce Davey (Chuck Davey) -- American-born welterweight boxer and boxing commissioner for Michigan. Earliest edit: 31 August 2007 Chezzles.ze.great
6. Edward C. Pierce (Edward Charles Pierce), U.S. politician and physician from Michigan. Earliest edit: 12 July 2006 Ropcat
7. Justin Pierce (Justin Charles Pierce) -- English-American actor & professional skateboarder. Earliest edit: 26 January 2006 Denee
8. Ricky Pierce (Ricky Charles Pierce) -- retired NBA basketball player. Earliest edit: 22 September 2005 Giantsrule

Seeing that there are pages disambiguating Kyle Pierce, Jack Pierce, and William Pierce, I have created a page Charles Pierce (disambiguation) containing the Charles Pierce's and Charles Peirce as well. Now you can repair the disambiguation sentence with this:

For people with the similar name Charles Pierce ("i" before "e", not after it), see Charles Pierce (disambiguation).

The Tetrast 00:59, 25 September 2007 (UTC) Revised The Tetrast 01:10, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure what I've stepped into, but I hope that the simple reference to the dismbiguation page will suffice. DCDuring 01:15, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Thank you, thank you, thank you! The Tetrast 01:18, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Recent copyedits

I have not looked forward to the time when secondary sources would be needed to clarify some of Peirce's concepts. Where, for instance, is the source justifying this edit? My recollection is that Peirce went farther than referring to just the experimental consequences of the "thing" to which a concept refers, but also was referring to the experimental consequences of the application of the concept itself to the thing it is intended to refer. The distinction is not insignificant. But I'd like to look at the source. Thanks. ... Kenosis 05:28, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

That's just a misconception, not founded in Peirce.

Please supply the source where Peirce goes beyond, in the sense which you seem to recollect, in order to identify a concept's meaning with the actual consequences themselves of the application of the concept.

Peirce usually clearly equates conception of thing with conception of conceivable practical consequences of thing.

You see a source right in the article itself:

Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object. (Peirce, CP 5.438.)

There are more statements by Peirce of the Pragmatic Maxim at the article on the Pragmatic maxim.

Here's one:

Such reasonings and all reasonings turn upon the idea that if one exerts certain kinds of volition, one will undergo in return certain compulsory perceptions. Now this sort of consideration, namely, that certain lines of conduct will entail certain kinds of inevitable experiences is what is called a "practical consideration". Hence is justified the maxim, belief in which constitutes pragmatism; namely:
In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception. (Peirce, CP 5.9, 1905).

And here's another. The following remark by Peirce, about his own previous statements of the Pragmatic Maxim, is especially notable:

This employment five times over of derivates of concipere must then have had a purpose. In point of fact it had two. One was to show that I was speaking of meaning in no other sense than that of intellectual purport. The other was to avoid all danger of being understood as attempting to explain a concept by percepts, images, schemata, or by anything but concepts. I did not, therefore, mean to say that acts, which are more strictly singular than anything, could constitute the purport, or adequate proper interpretation, of any symbol. I compared action to the finale of the symphony of thought, belief being a demicadence. Nobody conceives that the few bars at the end of a musical movement are the purpose of the movement. They may be called its upshot. (Peirce, CP 5.402 note 3, 1906).

Also see Peirce's "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/ideas/id-frame.htm . It is nis classic statement of Pragmatism. Follow the distinction among the first grade of clarity (the familiar immediate), the second grade of clarity (logicians' "distinctness", the clarity of the parts of the definition), and the third grade of clarity (pragmatic clarity, clarification in terms of conceivable practical consequences of the object portrayed by the conception). See how he then defines the real in the second and third grades of clarity.

Second: that which is what it is, independently of what you or I or any definite community of researchers thinks of it.
Third: that which would be reached inevitably by research adequately prolonged.

Note that his definition of the real involves reference to the experimental process, and that his definition of the real is not the same thing as his Pragmatic Maxim, though he employs the latter in arriving at the former.

Now, if you have a passage from Peirce in which he identifies a concept's meaning with actual consequences as such, please supply it.

12:13, 25 September 2007 (UTC) Corrected The Tetrast 12:15, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Now, there is an experimental process for which the Pragmatic Maxim supplies the method, in that which seems to be Peirce's own view, when one is clarifying propositions through their consequences. That is the experimentation beginning with the hypothetical proposition itself and proceeding by the mental testing of said proposition by considering what would be the practical consequences of the proposition's portrayed reality, as when Peirce says, "These propositions cannot be regarded as certain; and, in order to bring them to a further test, it is now proposed to trace them out to their consequences" in "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities Claimed For Man", Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2, 1868, reprinted in CP5.265, see http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/conseq/cn-frame.htm The Tetrast 13:29, 25 September 2007 (UTC) Much corrected The Tetrast 13:54, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

The segue from the Pragmatic Maxim to the discussion of methods of research and verification seemed too abrupt, given the Pragmatic Maxim's being a method of reflection for clarifying concepts by further concepts. I've revised the segue into something that's kind of safe and general, but I may be able to get some help from professional philosophers and scholars of Peirce, if people think there's a need. The Tetrast 01:02, 27 September 2007 (UTC) Minor but helpful revision The Tetrast 01:03, 27 September 2007 (UTC) I mean that I just made a minor but helpful revision of that which I just said here in Talk. I must oftener remember: Preview is my friend. The Tetrast 01:05, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

In the first sentence of the sub-head "Poverty," a word is out of order. The sentence reads: "In 1887 Peirce spent part of his inheritance from his parents to purchase 2,000 acres (8 km²) rural near Milford, Pennsylvania, land which never yielded an economic return." The word "rural" should be placed before "land," to read "rural land near Milford, Pennsylvania...." I would do this, but the page is locked for editing. [WLH, 13 Dec 2007] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.225.247.116 (talk) 16:13, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. I've repaired the problem, which I may myself have accidentally caused! The Tetrast (talk) 18:35, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Theory of Categories

Sorry I put nothing in the edit line, somebody knocked on the door and I hit the enter button by mistake. Anyway, I've shortened the section by creating a new article Categories (Peirce) and restoring some old material there (with a few tweaks and an update), which helps outline the pertinence of the long quote from Peirce's "Prolegomena." Same table both in section here and in separate article? Well, I hope to enrich the version at the separate article, make it more elaborate or something. The Tetrast 01:55, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Reordering of article

Please don't rush to revert! It's done to bring the topics into harmony with Peirce's classification of the sciences. See Classification of the sciences (Peirce). This will create the opportunity to bring in some neglected threads of his thought, in a natural way. The Tetrast 21:03, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

It turns out that Peirce had the same idea, and worked it out into further detail, for his memoirs in 1902 for his Carnegie application. See Joseph Ransdell's comments and his tabular list of titles of Peirce's proposed list of memoirs in 1902 for his Carnegie application, Eprint The Tetrast 21:00, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

On rereading the "Dynamics of Inquiry" subsection, I realized that it, or its text, belonged back somewhere like where it originally stood, anyway near the beginning of the discussion of logic/semiotics. It really is a general discussion of Peirce's interest in inquiry, semiotics, etc., which Peirce himself "filed" under (philosophical) "Logic" which he cast as Formal Semiotic. ("Logic Proper" was a subdivision thereof). The distinction between the syllogistic approach versus the sign-theoretic approach as two approaches to the same thing is one that comes in handy, since new readers often don't get that Peirce's (formal) semiotics is philosophical logic pursued in terms of signs and sign processes. I guess what I'm struggling with here is that I don't see how to significantly shrink it, but I don't see how to spin it off into its own article, either. Well, maybe a little time will help. The Tetrast 21:41, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Influenced

23:57, 10 October 2007 Jlwelsh (Talk | contribs) (81,438 bytes) (Added "Influenced" section to info box and added Habermas to that section.) (undo)

Habermas isn't the only one! This could be fun. Especially one has the TOC unhidden, there's plenty of space for the others whom Peirce has influenced. William James, John Dewey, to begin with. The Tetrast 02:15, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Abbreviation

It's been brought to my attention that the standard abbreviation for the Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A chronological Edition is not "CE" but "W". And that turns out to be the abbreviation already used at the German Wikipedia's Peirce bibliography http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_S._Peirce/Schriften. So I'll make the change here. I've already done so at Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography. The Tetrast 13:02, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Philosophy: Logic, or semiotic

I moved the "F.R.L" quote to the front (it's no longer in "Theory of Inquiry"), shortened the quote, added some discussion, and made lots of briefenings of phrase elsewhere in the section, so that, I hope, overall the section is only a bit longer now than it was before. The Tetrast 20:26, 15 October 2007 (UTC) I've corrected my typo "F.R.I." here in Talk and in one place in the article, to "F.R.L." The Tetrast 21:25, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that your rewrite of Peirce's paragraph on the FRL improved it any, and there's nothing wrong with using a hefty block quote of his original words in a matter as weighty as this. Ian Ouellette 03:46, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

As to "improving" F.R.L., that's a strawman. I managed to get a whole lot more info from "F.R.L" into the article while lengthening the article that much less, and counterbalancing that loud "Semiotics" template that somebody dragged up. The weighty matter about the F.R.L. proper and its corollary were already here, but the weighty matter about the four barriers was not previously here in the section, nor was most of it in the article at all. Now fallibilism and the rest (Peirce's philosophy is large) are right up front in the philosophy: logic, or semiotic section, and their front seats are secured by referenced links regarding the presuppositions of Logic. AND I have included links to where people can read all of "F.R.L." on even the slowest-downloading computers. The Tetrast 12:27, 16 October 2007 (UTC). As to freely adding to article length, I'm not eager to do that, and anyway it's somebody else's goal and battle. Generally I've been lengthening the article, but always while doing my best not to do so by leaps and bounds, and the result is that I've introduced or re-introduced a bunch of things that have been either not here lately or not here at all. Peirce's philosophy is large. The Tetrast 12:31, 16 October 2007 (UTC) Also look at all the little touches, which experienced Peirce readers know are no mere "touches," which I manage to retain. Almost anybody else would have omitted the part about "in one sense, this sole" and the part about metaphysicians' addiction to blocking of inquiry, which I also secured by mentioning Peirce's placement of logic before metaphysics, a placement for which he argued more than once, and which placement is a subject to which current discussion often turns when newbies start pressing about supposedly insufficiently narrow metaphysical assumptions in the logic. The Tetrast 13:30, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

I just think that Peirce's setup works best when left intact, as people often get confused about the relationship between the FRL and its Corollary. Ian Ouellette 15:38, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Not only have I left Peirce's setup intact, discussing the issues in the order in which he discussed them, making explicit the logical connections ("corollarial"), and getting more of "F.R.L"s content into the article than ever was there before, but also generally I'm the one who introduced Peirce's setup for the organization of the article's discussions of his maths and philosophy, and now there's a natural place for it if we get into his scientific work too. Now, somebody may like Peirce's prose best, but there is no option to replace the article (and septuple its length) with a sequence of texts by Peirce. But I've also even provided the reader with a dozen or more times worth of that option, too, than there used to be here ever before, the option to read Peirce's own texts, by embedding so many links here and elsewhere (and look at the bibliography), that the articles all fairly rattle in a joyful way. The Tetrast 20:18, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I emphasized the difference between the F.R.L. proper and its corollary. The Tetrast 20:28, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Article length 2

I subdivided the opening section of "Philosophy: Logic, or semiotic", and while such explicit marks of organization help the reader of a long article, one also notices, gee, the article is long. I rephrased for economy quite a bit a day or two ago in the text now called "Dynamics of inquiry" but there's only so much I can do in that direction. How urgent is the issue of length now for the Peirce article as a whole? I'm still kind of new around here. Should I move the length question to the top of the agenda, or should I not worry about it too much just as yet? The Tetrast 02:04, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Sure has gotten quiet around here. Whoda ever thunk it? The Tetrast 03:56, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Attribution: Logic of relatives, Kaina Stoicheia, etc.

There were four "Logic of relatives" articles, an "On a New List of Categories" article, and a "Kaina Stoicheia" article, all nearly stubs, a few sentences in the main body of each, which Awbrey created way back. I've moved that of his material (some sentences) which was useful into the main Peirce article here. The Kaina Stoicheia article was stub-like except for a long quote of text from Peirce's article, and that text and the rest of Peirce's article are all available (the same text, I checked) in the Arisbe version, to which I linked. The Tetrast (talk) 22:33, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

I added Awbrey's material from the above-mentioned separate articles into the corresponding subsections (the LOR, KS, & ONLC subsections, themselves already mostly by Awbrey) under "Works". The Tetrast 17:47, 30 November 2007 (UTC) Inserted a few words here. The Tetrast 20:44, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Another attribution: I revived the coherentism reference and link, for which Jon Awbrey was originally responsible http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Peirce&diff=104257071&oldid=104126178 The Tetrast 17:17, 4 December 2007 (UTC). Update: I don't know whether that was Awbrey -- actually it says "Farmer Kiss" and I kind of assumed it was Awbrey. I should read less quickly. The Tetrast 18:03, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Long Pragmatism section

Now I'm thinking of moving some of the "Pragmatism" section into the main article on "Pragmaticism". But I'm running out of energy for tonight. The Tetrast (talk) 22:44, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

GFDL

Note to whoever moves contributions from one article to another: The GFDL requires author attribution to be retained, and the customary way to do that at wikipedia is to add appropriate information into the edit summary and/or the talk page. In the case of articles like these that basically have one author, a statement like that indicating Jon Awbrey as the primary author of material in the article prior to (January 2007?) in both an edit summary (perhaps of a null edit?) and on the talk page would be appropriate. (Often I move content from one article to another and say in the edit summary "moved from name of article". That doesn't work if the article is then deleted. Why people don't just make the articles redirects instead of deletions makes no sense to me.) WAS 4.250 (talk) 18:13, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Example Edit summary says: "Agriculture policy concerns - some content from Citrus canker, Foot and mouth disease, Bovine spongiform encephalopathy" WAS 4.250 (talk) 00:08, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I see. I already did some of that just above in Talk:Charles Peirce section "Logic of relatives, Kaina Stoicheia, etc." Maybe that section should have a different name. Or I should add "Attribution" to its name. Also see the talk page at Talk:Semiotic_elements_and_classes_of_signs_(Peirce). Just last night in the Attributions section I added a link to an old version of a section in the main Peirce article, a section which had been deleted and which I revived as the basis for the new "Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce)" article. I had written a lot of that section, and others had written some, maybe a lot -- Jon may have written quite a bit of it but one would have to dig back through the main Peirce article's edit histories to nail down which things he wrote. The Tetrast (talk) 00:23, 30 November 2007 (UTC) Fixed typos. The Tetrast (talk) 00:26, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for that. Jon put a lot of hard work into giving this gift of knowledge to the world and he is legally and ethically entitled to reasonable attribution per its GFDL copy-left copyright. I'm sure that whatever you wind up doing in this regard will be well within what is appropriate. Thank you for helping to improve Wikipedia. WAS 4.250 (talk) 00:54, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

I have restored the subarticles as redirects. Kaldari (talk) 20:28, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

References versus Endnotes

I've been thinking that it would be simpler in a number of cases to link directly to entries in the References section. In fact I already set up some links WITH return links but the return links are a pain, and the complexity of reference will make it hard for others to edit.

How about this?: When the endnote would simply be a reference to a work without annotation or specific page number, I add a superscripted "REF", for example ^REF, with a link to the entry in references, and I somewhere somewhere tell the viewer to use the browser's "back" button in order to return to the original place in the article text.

Then also there would be these advantages:

• When there are multiple links to a single reference entry, it's not like an endnote where you have to make sure that the endnote's text is in the first link. The references' texts are all down in the References section, that's where they're edited, when one edits them at all (no annotations to edit).
• One can link to references from footnotes.

And it's easy to find the span id (since they're all together there).

Or instead of ^REF I could use a whatchamacallit, a ^, maybe boldfaced, like this: ^.

Please, comments, cautions, any? The Tetrast (talk) 20:31, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, the reference would need to be stated at least briefly up in the original text, e.g., "Haack 2002", enough that a person could manually find the reference if they needed to. The Tetrast (talk) 20:36, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

The caron (inverted circumflex) is too small, and maybe not common enough in fonts, likewise the small tilde.
How about † or † ? The Tetrast (talk) 21:02, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture will give you ideas? I suggest you look at other articles and use something that is used somewhere else, perhaps in a featured article. If you invent something new here it will wind up being unmaintainable. WAS 4.250 (talk) 21:21, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, the Aquaculture article simply uses footnotes and calls them "References and Notes". There's no alphabetization. You're right though, if I invent something new, it will wind up being unmaintainable. But maybe I'll come up with an idea that stays within the familiar ways. The Tetrast (talk) 21:57, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Pronunciation of "Peirce"

This article has had enough issues over the question of what to say about the pronunciation of Peirce's name in the past. The resolution was to include no phonetic rendition at the cluttered beginning of the article at all. People keep playing with it, putting in one version or another, and so on. In other words, there's no way that Kawamikagami's edit will last anyway. The resolution was simply to omit such renditions from the main body of the text, especially given the clutter already in the first paragraph.

I was the one who came along and added a footnote including all the phonetic renditions (which I put there especially for those for whom English is not a first language, for instance editors of Peirce wikis in other languages -- a footnote with a link to the Peirce Edition Project explaining how it is that "Peirce" is pronounced like "purse", not "pierce"). Meanwhile what the average reader needs to know is that "Peirce" is pronounced like the word "purse."

Moreover, the phonetic rendition which Kwamikagami is attempting to add is one of the inferior ones. The vowel in Peirce's name is an 'r-colored vowel and whether the "r" is clearly pronounced or not depends on whether the speaker clearly pronounces the "r" in words like "purse" and "word." Peirce himself probably did not clearly pronounce it, since he grew up in the Harvard University area. The Tetrast (talk) 14:22, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

A couple points: (1) Per MoS, pronunciation should be in the IPA, with sound-alikes etc. used as adjuncts. (Not that the MoS has to be followed.) (2) We shouldn't use dialect-specific pronunciations unless we clarify what we're doing. If you follow the help link, you'll be told /ɝ/ is the sound of words like purse, however you pronounce that - exactly what you're saying. (3) SAMPA is obsolete and deprecated in Wikipedia. (4) Your other transcription links to a non-existent pronunciation key. That does nothing to help the non-English speaker, who most likely will have no idea what /û/ is supposed to represent. (And which by the way you specified as being rhotic: "pûrs".)

Right now the name has <ɜr> (that was an easier edit from the bot). Would <ɝ> be preferable as being more rhotically ambiguous? kwami (talk) 14:39, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

The "ɝ" character is barely legible on screen, even when I increase the font size, and only a sharp-eyed linguist will understand it by looking at it.

I used the "pûrs" because that's what that system specified for rendition of the word "purse."

A rendition which encloses the "r" in the parentheses is the one likeliest to be understood, and that's what's good about two of the renditions.

Most foreign-language readers trying to read the article will not be entirely unfamiliar with typical English phonetic renditions.

The rendition of an r-colored vowel is not dialectical, rather it refers to the covariance of pronunciation with dialect.

The enPR link led to an entry when I first added it; now however there's a corresponding page only at Wikipedia, not at Wiktionary.

And again, as I said, when there's a phonetic rendition in the main body of the text, people keep coming along and playing with it, and there's enough clutter in there already. Please let's stick with the previous resolution of the issue, the resolution which actually lasted for a while. The Tetrast (talk) 15:02, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Moreover, the use of all three phonetic renditions in the footnote helps assure not only that fans of each system are happy, it also helps assure the reader that the surprising pronunciation being stated for "Peirce" is no mere typographical error in the wiki itself. The Tetrast (talk) 15:19, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Okay, at least let me clean up the footnote a bit (ASCII double hyphens, etc.), and update the links. When I'd checked, the template had lead to a blank page, so evidently someone fixed it in the last few hours. But it isn't necessary to say 'sounds like "purse"' seven (not three) times - people will understand with just the five! The "rendition of an r-colored vowel" works for all transcriptions, including the IPA, and no one is going to understand SAMPA unless they already can read the IPA - it is simply the IPA in ASCII, and we're not confined to ASCII. Also, ɝ is found in hundreds of articles, and no one has complained that it's illegible, except for one person who couldn't make out any IPA symbols at all. And, actually, most non-English readers are completely baffled by renditions such as 'pûrs'. kwami (talk) 20:44, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

---

I just checked OED for pronunciation of purse (n.). Brit. /pəːs/, U.S. /pərs/ 128.135.239.211 (talk) 05:44, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

I've moved the above comment to after the text in this subsection. Please place new comments after old ones, not before.

Most exact rendition /ˈpɝːs/

The most exact representation of the (vowel + rhotic) + lengthening is "ɝː" but nobody likes it, it's mysterious-looking and hard to read (look at the whole thing without boldface: /ˈpɝːs/) and most of the few general readers to click over to the Wikipedia:IPA for English will end up spending excessive time tracking it down; but it "co-varies" with dialect depending on how that dialect treats "r" and still puts "Peirce" correctly into the class of words which rhyme with "terse" in every dialect of English, including those Scottish and Irish dialects in which "terse" does not quite rhyme with "purse"; that is to say, in whatever way an English-speaker pronounces "terse", that person pronounces "Peirce" correctly by making it rhyme with "terse". "ɜr" does not explicitly indicate the r's droppability but still is best after "ɝː" in other respects, and anyway, it's less likely to baffle the general reader to the point of annoyance. Now, the rendition here was "pɝːs" (which I myself had added after previous proddings) until User:Kwamikagami changed it to "pɜrs". See User_talk:Kwamikagami/Archive_8#IPA_for_.22Peirce.22 for 24 April 2009 discussion of change by User:Kwamikagami (who specializes in language articles) to "pɜrs" at Pragmatism article which was followed (after the discussion) by same change to "pɜrs" (current form) by User:Kwamikagami at Peirce article (edit at 07:38, 13 June 2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Sanders_Peirce&action=historysubmit&diff=296129048&oldid=296052125). Please review other pronunciation discussions on this page. There should be some in archives here too. Also see Wikipedia:IPA for English. It's a well-trodden path at this article. Brits, Bostonites, and other r-droppers will drop post-vocalic r's from speech in spite of written presence, while written representation without r's is very confusing to those who don't drop them from speech. The intro section is cluttered enough without adding dialectical variations unneeded by those who speak those dialects and which thus are more about English than about Peirce. The Tetrast (talk) 16:48, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Article length again

In response to the article's being tagged for length, I've moved a bunch of material from the Pragmatism section into the Pragmaticism wiki. I'll look around to see what else I can do. The Tetrast (talk) 16:14, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Now I've moved most of the material from the "Science of Review" section into the wiki Classification of the sciences (Peirce). The Tetrast (talk) 16:41, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Now I've deleted a paragraph from the "Categories" section. The paragraph still appears in the Categories (Peirce) wiki. The Tetrast (talk) 17:02, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I put some important stuff back into the Pragmatism section, but did a lot of tweaking for brevity throughout the section. Basically, the three grades of clearness, the definitions of truth and the real, and some mention of Peirce's distinction of theoretical from practical standards of inquiry, are important enough to remain in the article somehow. Meanwhile, I'll keep looking for other ways to briefen. The Tetrast (talk) 18:29, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I took out the long Putnam quote, added a footnote linking to it elsewhere, and added a mention of C.I. Lewis's remarks, and added a footnote to them, too. The Tetrast (talk) 19:02, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I dunno, I'm looking at the Wiki on Article Series. Maybe that's the way to go. The Tetrast (talk) 19:50, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

When I copy out the main body into an html email, it comes to around 234 KB. When I copy the sections with Abbrevations, Footnotes, References, etc., that comes to around 107 KB. So almost 1/3 of the artices bytes seems to be outside the main body of the text. Using the ratio 234/107 as a rough gauge, then, if the article is 99 KB right now, then around 68 or 70 KB of it is the main body. The Tetrast (talk) 20:41, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Quick note in passing, editor to editor. (I placed the page length warning on the page.) If you want to figure the total length, when you hit 'edit page' it will show the KB size at the top- no need for laborious cut and pasting.

Additionally, article length is simply a guideline. Personally, I feel that the infobox may be more valuable than the space you win by deleting it. Speaking as a layman on Peirce, an article of this magnitude seriously benefits from the summary the box provides, and its deletion doesn't address the article's problem directly. My humble suggestion would be the creation of two or three subpages on Peirce's major contributions in different fields, e.g., Mathematical contributions of Peirce or Philosophical contributions of Peirce. As far as article length goes, I would aim for around 70KB max, but don't feel the need to sacrifice article clarity just for the sake of length... length is always negotiable.

Excellent work on the article, carry on. Chromancer (talk) 22:18, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm thinking about it. Some might think that it's okay for the Peirce wiki to be about as long as it is, and a lot of it is footnotes, references, further reading, etc., which officially "doesn't count" toward article length, but the fact is that I've been thinking in terms of further expansion, so your kind of solution seems inevitable. The sections on Peirce's maths, philosophy, etc., are now structured according to Peirce's own classifications, which were pretty comprehensive, and he had hoped to write his intellectual memoirs according to that structure. So there is a structure in place to include rather more of his contributions than I've discussed so far, and I haven't even finished with the philosophical ones yet -- there's not even a mention of his "critical commonsensism" yet. I'm hoping to get some help on the mathematical contributions, since he did work in areas besides mathemtical logic and algebra of relations. As to the infobox, I'll put it back in. I didn't mind getting rid of it for certain reasons but a solution has occurred to me regarding those reasons. The Tetrast (talk) 02:31, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Merging and GFDL

Usual reading of the GFDL is that there is no violation since the full list of authors remains stored in the database. The list of authors from any particular deleted article can be asked at the Administrator Noticeboard, if needed. Please do not disrupt Wikipedia to prove a point. -- lucasbfr ^talk 04:24, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Note that Prescisive abstraction is not deleted, and its history is readable. I have undeleted Kaina Stoicheia and The Simplest Mathematics, and their history is now readable too. -- lucasbfr ^talk 04:37, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

A specific explanation of any other problems would be appreciated, should there be any. – Luna Santin (talk) 04:38, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

The other subarticles have been undeleted and changed to redirects. Kaldari (talk) 20:51, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

• If we want to be completely anal about it we can move the pages to subpages of this article and then merge and leave the redirect, but as noted above there is no need to do this as long as we can show where the edit was made, which we can from deleted history. What's most disappointing here is that one person's obsession with having his name in the edit history is causing so much work for others. I rather wish he'd sue us and let the courts decide. Guy (Help!) 21:25, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
  • (drive by comment-commenting only on the GFDL issue raised, not the actual content) Last I checked, the dev's have NOT placed any guarantee on maintaining the deleted edit history, and even if they had this would break attribution for anyone forking or copying this article. — xaosflux ^Talk 04:31, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Agree with Xaos. We should be very careful with such issues. The fact that Awbrey is annoying and cares more about his name than actual GFDL compliance doesn't really figure into it. We should obey the GFDL in both letter and spirit. This does both. JoshuaZ (talk) 15:58, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Birthplace

User:Swampyank added a picture of Peirce's birthplace, which basically show a section of a wooden wall. Should it stay? trespassers william (talk) 09:09, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

It's only 3 or 4 KB but I for one don't feel attached to it. The Tetrast (talk) 14:56, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Nope. That picture is far too blurry and it's completely indecipherable. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 163.238.9.31 (talk) 19:47, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Peirce and Religion

Okay, I havn't read every word of this article or all of the discussion archives, etc... However, I think there ought to be mention of Peirce's attitude toward religion, whether he was religious or not, when he changed his mind if he did, etc... However, I have a copy of a letter he wrote to William James saying that he preferred Buddhism to Christianity. Whats the next step? Putting that in the article somehow, or does someone have something different? --Teetotaler 10 October, 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.67.81.197 (talk) 06:02, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Why? If he didn't write about it a lot, and there's no secondary or tertiary literature on it, why should it be in the article? If the letter has been published somewhere, then cite that and put it in, but it needs to be published somewhere, not just in your possession.--CDart (talk) 22:45, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

There is some secondary literature on it, for example in Brent's biography of Peirce, and there is some primary literature, for example Peirce's account of a religious experience that he had in 1892 http://www.unav.es/gep/LetterJBrown.html. Peirce also wrote some essays on religion. Probably it hasn't received attention here because people (well anyway, I) don't know how to sum it up in a few lines and don't know quite what to make of it in relation to his philosophy, just the obvious stuff, in his philosophy he argues for God's reality and for conservatism about social institutions; as radical as he was in science and philosophy, he wasn't a "sweep it all away" kind of guy, he read deeply in the Scholastic logicians and the Ancients, and all of that coheres with his opposition to Cartesian foundationalism, which Peirce regarded as building philosophy with individual chains with weakest-link frailties on a foundation of mere paper doubts (definitely see his 1868 "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities" http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/conseq/cn-frame.htm). There's some confusion about what sort of commitment he had to religion, and I'm not up to speed on the issues. Here's a downloadable paper by Jaime Nubiola on a letter by Peirce on how papal infallibilism kept him from becoming Roman Catholic http://philpapers.org/rec/NUBCSP . Do a search on Charles Sanders Peirce religion, one finds various things. Well, I guess there ought to be some statement about Peirce's religion in the article. I think I'll pose the question at the peirce-l forum of what the statement ought to be. The Tetrast (talk) 23:52, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Article title

While I know there's been some confusion over Peirce's middle name, this article title is decidedly suboptimal. I don't think I've ever heard him called only by his first and last names. Google confirms my intuitions; here are some variations on his name, ranked by Google popularity:

• "Charles Sanders Peirce" 349,000
• "Charles S. Peirce" 218,000
• "C. S. Peirce" 87,000
• "Charles Peirce" 80,000

I therefore propose to move this article to "Charles Sanders Peirce", if nobody minds too much. — Dan | talk 21:41, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Try looking back through the discussion page's history, especially the early history. I think that there was originally a discussion of the question there, and something about not using three names when two names suffice. The real point would be to avoid repeating the history of battles. For my part, I'm largely indifferent as long as all the redirect pages are in place. The Tetrast (talk) 17:56, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

Now I see that it's already been done! I didn't realize. I wonder how the Wikipedia statistics page deals with this. Compare http://stats.grok.se/en/200901/charles%20peirce versus http://stats.grok.se/en/200901/charles%20sanders%20peirce The Tetrast (talk) 21:06, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

Peirce did not coin the term "abduction" for a kind of inference

The term "abduction" for that which Aristotle called apagôgế (ἀπαγωγή) goes back to Giulio Pacio (1550-1635). See the Century Dictionary on "abduction".

Peirce held for some time that the text of Aristotle's Prior Analytics Book 2 Ch. 25 had been corrupted and apagôgế misunderstood.

Peirce: "There are in science three fundamentally different kinds of reasoning, Deduction (called by Aristotle {synagögé} or {anagögé}), Induction (Aristotle's and Plato's {epagögé}) and Retroduction (Aristotle's {apagögé}, but misunderstood because of corrupt text, and as misunderstood usually translated abduction)." ('Lessons of the History of Science', CP 1.65, c. 1896) http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/abduction.html

Basically, Peirce made the word "abduction" famous in connection with his view of apagôgế as hypothesis formation. The Tetrast (talk) 05:22, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Pronunciation

I removed the IPA template demand for some phonetic rendition of Peirce's name because it revives an endless issue at this article without even offering a solution. I myself have in the past added phonetic pronunciations - in three different systems - of Peirce's name and appended a footnote with an explanation and link to a scholarly note about the pronunciation of Peirce's name. All of that got deleted. To top it off, all the "official" phonetic systems available here are largely unknown to most readers and the symbol for the vowel in Peirce's name is pretty much unreadable except in high magnification.

IF somebody has a solution, it might be a good idea to discuss it here on the talk page first, given this article's history. But please don't go yoking the article's head under big distracting template demanding a solution to a secondary issue when you don't even have a solution to propose.The Tetrast (talk) 21:11, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

It nagged at me, so I've attempted a solution.The Tetrast (talk) 15:25, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
(pronounced /pɝːs/ purse^[1])
The IPA version is for linguists and some subset of foreign-language readers who might actually be acquainted with the IPA system. The second version "purse" is for the general reader, whose first and often only language is English, who usually knows little or none of the IPA system, and to whom the IPA character ː looks, in order of increasing likelihood, like an invading character from Klingon, a colon, the letter "i" with the visual afterimage of a bright point of light or with a sun-caused blindspot superimposed on it, the letter "i" under a light fleck of dust on the computer screen, or a browser glitch. Similarly for the IPA character "ɝ", which might be legible under 300% magnification. (The combination "ɝː" presents a degree of visual difficulty exceeding the sum of the parts.) The footnote is for everybody. The Tetrast (talk) 15:40, 22 March 2009 (UTC). Edited The Tetrast (talk) 16:30, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Note: Please do not add the stress mark as in
(pronounced /ˈpɝːs/ purse^[1]).
Everybody already knows that a last name is stressed in English, and the faint stress mark makes it hard for the general reader to see the slash marks as unambiguously attached on both sides of the phonetic spelling, which already suffers from visual difficulties including appearing superficially to have internal punctuation ("ː"). The use of slash marks are, in the first place, to indicate a broad rather than narrow transcription. The Tetrast (talk) 15:48, 22 March 2009 (UTC). Edited The Tetrast (talk) 16:30, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

One more note: why not the less confusing-looking IPA rendition /pɜrs/ ? That seems like not the best idea, because, technically "ɜr" is for words with a directly subsequent vowel such as "furry", so that the "r" definitely gets pronounced in just about every dialect. That's not the case with "Peirce" and, to top it off, Peirce was a Boston Brahmin, so he himself probably never pronounced the "r" in "Peirce" (not to mention "Charles" and "Sanders") at all. The Tetrast (talk) 16:07, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Semiotics is not the study of symbols

Reverted an intro section edit today because it said semiotics is "the study of symbols." Semiotics is the study of signs, not only of symbols. Anyway there really isn't room in the intro section for saying one or the other, or else there might as well be added parenthetical definitions of pragmatism and epistemology which are mentioned in the intro section. Instead, if people want to know what they are, they can click on the links. The Tetrast (talk) 02:38, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Peirce's criterion

Under Probability and Statistics this article mentions that C. S. Peirce "improved the treatment of outliers." If you click on the word "outliers" in that sentence, you are led to an article on Peirce's criterion, which is "a method devised by Benjamin Peirce", not C. S. Peirce. Either the link in this article is incorrect, or the attribution of Peirce's criterion to Benjamin in the other article is not right.--seberle (talk) 00:46, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Benjamin Peirce devised Peirce's criterion. The implication seems to be that Charles made an improvement in the method devised by his father. The paragraph cites Stephen Stigler's works which I don't have. The paragraph was originally written by editor Kiefer.Wolfowitz. You can leave a comment asking about it at his talk page User talk:Kiefer.Wolfowitz. The Tetrast (talk) 21:24, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

If so, this should be made explicit rather than implicit. As it is, it is simply confusing.--seberle (talk) 15:36, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, it should be made clear, but you haven't asked Kiefer.Wolfowitz for the clarification. Okay, I'll get around to asking him, and sooner rather than later, but not today. Tomorrow. The Tetrast (talk) 03:17, 29 September 2009 (UTC).

Benjamin Peirce proposed a criterion for treating outliers, which was followed at the Coastal Survey. This is described in Stigler's history of American Statistics, which was published in Annals of Statistics, I believe (and also reprinted with 1+ article(s) of Benjamin Peirce in Stigler's 2 volumes of primary sources). Charles Peirce wrote more on outliers and his dad's work (in an article on the theory of errors, which I don't have handy). I shall try to clarify the contributions of C.S. Peirce to the theory and practice of outliers and especially Benjamin Peirce's criterion within the week: Please remind me, if I'm tardy! Thanks. Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 19:16, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Kiefer! I actually didn't get around to asking Kiefer until early today (Oct 4 for me, whatever the time automatically given by Wikipedia is).The Tetrast (talk) 03:24, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Kiefer has now taken care of it, and quite quickly. Thank you, Kiefer. The Tetrast (talk) 00:32, 7 October 2009 (UTC).

Peirce quote on "The Whetstone of Wit"

Trying to trim the article a bit, so removed the following quote from section "Mathematics of logic". I'm putting it here because I'm fond of it and because maybe somebody will convincingly argue that it belongs in the article, or will find it useful in another article. "NEM" stands for The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, Carolyn Eisele, ed.

It may be added that algebra was formerly called Cossic, in English, or the Rule of Cos; and the first algebra published in England was called "The Whetstone of Wit", because the author supposed that the word cos was the Latin word so spelled, which means a whetstone. But in fact, cos was derived from the Italian, cosa, thing, the thing you want to find, the unknown quantity whose value is sought. It is the Latin caussa, a thing aimed at, a cause. ("Elements of Mathematics", MS 165 (c. 1895), NEM 2:50.)

The Tetrast (talk) 19:18, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Not masking section links

I've noticed that, in the Answers.com editions of Wikipedia articles (for example http://www.answers.com/topic/charles-peirce#Wikipedia_d), section links don't work unless they are unmasked, with no pipe in the markup, e.g., American philosophy#Charles Sanders Peirce (when section is in another article) or #Peirce's criterion (when the section is in the same article). I don't know whether one is supposed to care about that sort of thing, but it has inclined me to use unmasked section links where possible. Anyway, that's why they've been appearing lately in the Charles Sanders Peirce wiki. The Tetrast (talk) 19:10, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

I recommend that you mask the links, as is standard practice. What a mirror site does with our content is not a concern. Your unmasked links have # signs, which is kind of ugly, and someone will eventually change them. — goethean ॐ 21:57, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, the # is a bit annoying at the start of a word, and downright ugly when appearing between two words. Darn, I wish that there were some way to outwit the Answers.com problem - after all, it is a huge Website. Well, currently there are only some scattered instances of unmasked section links, maybe nobody will mind a few. The vast majority of the section links can't be unmasked without interrupting the prose flow. The Tetrast (talk) 00:12, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Darn, I wish that there were some way to outwit the Answers.com problem - after all, it is a huge Website.

It's their problem to solve. Eventually, they probably will. — goethean ॐ 00:50, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

It's an interesting problem. They're an aggregator, sometimes many articles get aggregated onto the same Webpage, and that means that different articles' sections could have the same names. They may currently see their problem as being how to defeat section links. But maybe they can figure out how to make them all work. They're already doing some kind of odd link stuff. It took a bit of playing around for me to find a URL that links directly to the Wikipedia article within the Answer.com Charles Sanders Peirce page. Even the source for the page didn't exactly reveal it. The Tetrast (talk) 02:46, 5 November 2009 (UTC) Correction, the source page did reveal it. It was other stuff that was misleading. The Tetrast (talk) 02:52, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Update: I re-masked the long links to CSP bibliography sections - even unmasked, they didn't work at Answers.com, and they were just too ugly. Only links in the form of #Peirce's criterion to sections in the same article work there. The Tetrast (talk) 16:25, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Peirce's infinitesimals

Should there be a section on Peirce's theory of infinitesimals? Tkuvho (talk) 11:19, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

The section "Continuity" alludes to them. It's a difficult subject; in 1908 he gave up on the view of continuity that he had held for many years; and he also applied his ideas about infinitesimals in his discussions of time consciousness. With the article periodically (now, for example) bumping up near the 120KB size at which Wikipedians begin to complain, I've been reluctant to try getting further into the subject myself. The Tetrast (talk) 17:56, 15 April 2010 (UTC).

He may have given up on it but a number of authors have taken it up recently, such as M. Moore and J. Dauben. It may be worth pursuing. Tkuvho (talk) 11:42, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

He didn't give up on all conceptions of continuity, instead he gave up on his long-held conception of it. Anyway it just seems that it would get rather lengthy. How does one briefly explain about Peirce's "exploding points"? I don't know whether he retained those after 1908. The subject might require a spin-off wiki. The Tetrast (talk) 13:52, 16 April 2010 (UTC).

Are you referring to the "intravorticular theory"? Dauben explains it rather nicely. Some things are infinitely small compared to others. I don't see why length should be an issue. It could always be turned into a separate page, or sub-page of infinitesimal, etc. Tkuvho (talk) 12:07, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't know the name of the theory but I recall it from a discussion by Putnam I think it was, anyway it was in the anthology Peirce and Contemporary Thought (Ketner, ed.). I just checked and subpages are apparently still disabled for mainspace articles, and I don't know how the editors of the Infinitesimals page would respond to a large Peirce section. What I'm getting at is that I don't have the background to write much about Peirce's infinitesimals and also I've been running out of ways to briefen the main Peirce article to make room for more material, though I may still have a few tricks left up my sleeve. It seems to me that the best solution is for you to write up a treatment of the subject; you can begin, if you find it convenient, on your userpage or talk page or a subpage of one of them (that's how I began a number of articles; but I included tables so that's why I wanted to draft them at Wikipedia, to get the pipe notation of the tables correct from the start), and when you're happy with your work, create a mainspace article for it. As for the title, I created articles like "Categories (Peirce)" but became unhappy with them because when one pastes the URL into, say, an email, the email program doesn't recognize the final parenthesis as part of the URL. Maybe "Peirce on infinitesimals" or "C. S. Peirce on infinitesimals" or "Peirce on continuity" or whatever. I might even end up moving "Categories (Peirce)" to "Peirce on categories". (Problem is, there do exist other people named "Peirce".) While you do that, I'll see what I can do to whittle down the length of the main Peirce article in order to make more room. Then you or I can rewrite some or all of the "Continuity" subsection in the main Peirce article accordingly and include a link to the Peirce infinitesimals article. And there'll probably be opportunity to link to the new article from more than one spot in the main Peirce article and of course it will be included in the C. S. Peirce articles box. How about it? The Tetrast (talk) 17:41, 18 April 2010 (UTC).

You seem concerned about the length of the Peirce article. Perhaps a solution would be to write an article on continuum (philosophy) that would in particular discuss Peirce's views and their treatment by Putnam, Moore, and Dauben. A good place to start is the article by John Lane Bell in the Stanford encyclopedia on continuity and infinitesimals. What do you think? Tkuvho (talk) 11:29, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

I like your suggestion of an article on philosophy on the continuum with a section on Peirce. I have the feeling that you want me to help with it but I feel diffident about infinities and infinitesimals, I get afraid that I'll make elementary errors. But if you go ahead with the article, I'll try to help out. I might be able to notice when a general statement about Peirce's views on the continuum seems contrary to something that Peirce said. At any rate I'm still good with footnotes, embedding links to Google Books and elsewhere, that sort of thing.
I'm concerned about the Peirce article's length because, in the past when it's gotten longer than it is now, editors (supported by WP guidelines) have complained about the length and, at least once, hung an article length warning atop the article, which amounts to an invitation to editors to come and try radical surgery. The Tetrast (talk) 18:17, 19 April 2010 (UTC).

pseudocontinuum

Did Peirce actually use this term to describe Cantor's real line, or is this an innovation of Havenel's? Tkuvho (talk) 14:58, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Peirce actually used it.

• http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/cl_o_sci_03.htm CP 1.185 (1903): "Mathematics may be divided into a. the Mathematics of Logic; b. the Mathematics of Discrete Series; c. the Mathematics of Continua and Pseudo-continua."

I've just now added the above link into the relevant footnote, also changed the spelling of "pseudocontinuum" to "pseudo-continuum".

• http://www.google.com/search?q=pseudo-continuum+Peirce
• Article's footnote — "Peirce (1902 MS) "Analysis of the Methods of Mathematical Demonstration", Memoir 4, Draft C, Manuscript L75.90-102, see 99-100 Eprint" — links to text including the following on what Peirce considers a true continuum (it's not the multitude of all the "irrationals in analysis" i.e., the reals or the complex reals or etc.): "I prove that there is an infinite series of infinite multitudes, apparently the same as Cantor's alephs. I call the first the denumerable multitude, the others the abnumerable multitudes, the first and least of which is the multitude of all the irrational numbers of analysis. There is nothing greater than these but true continua, which are not multitudes. I cannot see that Cantor has ever got the conception of a true continuum, such that in any |100| lapse of time there is room for any multitude of instants however great."

The Tetrast (talk) 15:40, 29 April 2010 (UTC).

Update. I've just now changed the footnote into two, now omitting the CP 1.185 reference and one footnote now including quote from CP 6.176 (1903 marginal note): "But I now define a pseudo-continuum as that which modern writers on the theory of functions call a continuum. But this is fully represented by [...] the totality of real values, rational and irrational [...]." He publicly used the word "pseudo-continua" in the syllabus (CP 1.185) of the his lectures on Topics of Logic, I don't know where else. The Tetrast (talk) 16:06, 29 April 2010 (UTC).

That's fabulous. Too bad Havenel did not mention this in his article :) Tkuvho (talk) 07:57, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Deleted sub-section "Further reading"

I've deleted a new subsection "Further reading" in the "See also" section. This article is already pushing the upper limit on length as I've discussed just recently on this talk page. That subsection would swell as people added more and more books to it. The editor who created the subsection included three books by Walker Percy and one by Susan Howe plus a footnote with a paragraph from a Kirkus review. There isn't room here for quotes from book reviews of secondary works unless a very unusual situation arises wherein such a quote is needed in order to make a point in the main article. Two of the Percy books were not even focused primarily on Peirce. Percy's & Ketner's A Thief of Peirce and Howe's Pierce-Arrow are primarily about Peirce but there are dozens of books that would deserve at least as much to be included in such a list. Some years ago the Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography wiki was started in order to deal with such a situation. The Tetrast (talk) 14:10, 14 May 2010 (UTC). Edited The Tetrast (talk) 14:22, 14 May 2010 (UTC).

needs some experience of that sign's object

Changed an editor's edit "must experience that sign's object" back to "needs some experience of that sign's object." Peirce's use of the word "experience" was in the older (but far from obsolete) sense, where for example we talk about accumulating some experience involving this and that, not the recenter 20th-Century sense wherein we say that we experience things, with a special emphasis on a vivid or sensory aspect. In discussing collateral acquaintance, there's a passage somewhere in which Peirce talks about somebody seeing a kind of blur at which a friend points and says that it is a ship on the horizon - and that counts as collateral acquaintance. (One has experience with one's friend as reliable spotter, etc.). It's impossible to go into so much detail in the wiki itself, so it's best to keep the wording such that it keeps the door well open to Peirce's sense. The Tetrast (talk) 19:53, 19 July 2010 (UTC).

Recent infobox edit

Somebody altered the C. S. Peirce articles template and removed the CSP personal info from it. I have reverted. I'm happy to change the template's name if that's the issue. The template has grown, that's all.

The standard infobox template which the editor substituted does not contain the field "religious stance". Peirce had a relevant religious stance. When that field was removed from the "Infobox scientist" template a while back, I got rid of that template and simply made an information box out of wiki pipe markup. Moreover the editor removed info about Peirce's fields. Finally, by making a custom information box, I was able to neaten and streamline things. One box instead of a pile of two. At length I turned most of it into a template. Parts of it are used in 11 articles. The Tetrast (talk) 23:36, 1 November 2010 (UTC). Edited.

Edit of footnote on Peirce's suggestion of electrical circuits for logical operations

Editor changed footnote on Peirce's suggestion of electrical logic circuit because

"this citations houldn't be to the primary source but to the editors remark in the preface - it cannot be seen from the primary source what his idea was used for decades later"

To the contrary, the Peirce wiki says it plainly in both places where the footnote is attached:

"As early as 1886 he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, an idea used decades later to produce digital computers"

and

"Seeing that Boolean calculations could be carried out via electrical switches, anticipating Claude Shannon by more than 50 years."

The reference is to a letter dated 1886 in which Peirce talks about Marquand's work on a machine for mathematical problems and says "I think electricity would be the best thing to rely on," and draws an electrical circuit for logical multiplication and logical addition. There is a link that allows you to view the letter's text, a rendition of Peirce's drawing of the circuit and, then, to top it off, a photoimage of the page of Peirce's original letter with his suggestion and drawing. So it is as clear as any editor's note could be, and is the material of primary interest to anybody interested in the topic. The Tetrast (talk) 01:52, 9 November 2010 (UTC).

You misunderstand what the change was about. I am not throwing doubt on the statement that pierce's ideas were lkater used for computing - I am correcting the way it is sourced. You are sourcing it to the primary source - the letter to marquand. That is incorrect that letter contains the original idea it does not tell us that the idea was later used for making computers. The one who tells us that the idea was used for making computers is the editor of the collected volume of pierces writings, Max H Fisch. On page xliv he writes that "pierce provided the clue that mioght have lead to modern computing". This is where the idea in the lead comes from and where it should be sourced to. The sourcing as it is now is encouraging the reader to do OR - this is not necessary when Fisch, a fine scholar, has already done the research. Please revert back to the way I made the footnote. By the way I am reviewing this article for GA status - it would be good if you don't revert all of my edits before you are sure what it is I was doing.·Maunus·ƛ· 03:11, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Also I should probably guide your attention to our policy on the use of primary sources.·Maunus·ƛ· 03:15, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

The use of a primary source's self-endorsement doesn't make sense for backing primary source's own claims. But the present question is not one of whether Peirce was right or wrong about something, but of whether he said something.
That logic circuits are used for making computers certainly does not require a reference to Peirce editors. Note that Peirce's idea was used but not as Peirce's idea. A simple embedded wikilink to a wiki on logic circuits will suffice.
I will treat your edits in the usual way. The Tetrast (talk) 04:15, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

An editors note is preface a primary source's "self endorsement" An editors preface is a secondary source and the letter itself is a primary source. What pierces idea was used for mosty certainly requires a reference to the editor or some other reliable secondary source that supplies the claim. If it is only referenced to the letter it self it would be OR and I would have to remove the claim entirely. You should of course treat my edits as usual - but it is usually a good idea to understand edits and the policies they are based on before undoing them.·Maunus·ƛ· 13:24, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

I've added "Also see p. xliv" into the footnote, as you should have originally done. In your version you misspelt Fisch as "Hisch". You didn't notice the abbreviations in use here and you wrote out the edition's name. In your version, you didn't say what the reader would find at p. xliv, so I haven't done so either. back when I noticed that the wiki had been nominated as a good article (GA) in the mathematics category, I added the link to Peirce's lette, because I figured that mathematicians and Peirce readers alike would like to see what Peirce actually said, not because I care about a GA rating. The Tetrast (talk) 04:52, 9 November 2010 (UTC).

It is still formatted wrong. It is citing a fact about computers to a letter from 1898. The quote doesn't support the statement. The statement about computers is supported by the statement from Max Fisch -not by the letter from Marquand. That is not the way we use primary sources here in wikipedia. Please change it back to the version I made where it is obvious who stated that the idea could be used for computers. obviously with the spelling of Fisch corrected.·Maunus·ƛ· 13:35, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

I assumed that you had checked who wrote the intro to W5 but now I've checked. If you would actually check the W5 intro which you cite, you would find:
1. It was Nathan Houser, not Max Fisch (or "Hisch") who wrote the intro. You could also have discovered this by following the wiki's links to the W entry in the CSP bibliography wiki, where you will find W 5's editors listed as Kloesel, Fisch, et al., plus links to the list of eight W 5 volume editors and to the intro written by Houser.
2. Houser was not claiming that the idea actually traveled from Peirce to people like Shannon; Houser would have provided some argument or reference to back such a claim. Arthur W. Burks, a computer expert and Peirce editor (CP 7-8), discusses the 1886 letter (see p. 917, the pdf file's page 5) and makes no such claim.
3. Houser wrote merely that "Peirce provided the clue that might have opened the way to modern electrical computing". Houser made a common-sense inference; Houser makes no claim of special expertise on modern electrical computing or Claude Shannon.
The wiki is not claiming that Peirce was correct in a statement about computers, such that it needs corroboration; the article merely summarizes the content of Peirce's statement and says that Peirce stated it in an 1886 letter, fifty years before Shannon. The footnote (A) tells you where the letter is published and (B) links to it online so that you can see for yourself.
However, just to make you happy, I've edited the footnote to include a secondary source, but used Arthur W. Burks as the main secondary source, and corrected your mistaken reference from Fisch to Houser. The Tetrast (talk) 15:03, 9 November 2010 (UTC).

Now I've corrected your reference from "Preface" (to W 5) to "Introduction". The Tetrast (talk) 15:15, 9 November 2010 (UTC).

Well done, thanks.·Maunus·ƛ· 16:18, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

GA Review

Toolbox
dashboard disambig links external links See WP:DEADREF for dead URLs

This review is transcluded from Talk:Charles Sanders Peirce/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: ·Maunus·ƛ· 18:30, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

I'll, be conducting the review of this article over the next couple of weeks. I am mostly familiar with Pierce's work in semiotics and pragmatics. I am going to read up on the basic source material while I review so the review will be a little slower than some reviews, but I think that we should have some progress within two weeks. ·Maunus·ƛ· 18:30, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

The article is being actively edited - so I am going to wait a little while to see if it becomes stable, then I will conduct a review.·Maunus·ƛ· 17:07, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

A month later, there's still modifications. I'd say either review now or fail until it's stable; ideally the former since it's just ref additions, but up to you. Wizardman _{Operation Big Bear} 18:02, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

You are probably right.·Maunus·ƛ· 19:17, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Actually, it's not only ref additions. But, as I've said before, I do not care about whether a random editor gives this article GA status. The Tetrast (talk) 04:54, 16 December 2010 (UTC).

I am not going to go to the trouble of reviewing it if the main contributor is not interested in collaborating. I think this must have been a 'driveby-nomination' where the nominator failed to check with the article's contributors that they were interested in getting the article to GA. I am failing the article on criteria 5 (not stable) and possibly 3b(does seem to go into unnecessry detail - it has 81kb readable prose which is definitely in the heavy end of WP:SIZE), it also has MOS issues regarding table incorporation and bulleted lists. ·Maunus·ƛ· 14:47, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

"Instability" suggests reversion wars and the like. You have no idea how unstable this article used to be. Much of my recent editing is the direct result of your desire for improved references. I caught some inaccuracies, some mine, some the legacy of the article as it was when I first started editing it extensively (it used to have no footnotes at all, only a list of references). The Tetrast (talk) 16:54, 16 December 2010 (UTC). Edited The Tetrast (talk) 17:06, 16 December 2010 (UTC).

I thought you didn't care about the internal review process, so what is the matter? You can nominate it again if you change your mind and feel like collaborating with a reviewer. ·Maunus·ƛ· 19:22, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Maunus, your last comments may needlessly irritate Tetrast, who obviously does care about improving the article (by his current editing, etc.). Tetrast, would you please revise your comments so that Maunus doesn't feel that his volunteering is being dismissed from the start? (Maunus has acknowledged many strong points of the article below.) Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 19:52, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

I agree with Tetrast's judgment, in its last expression. There are no edit-warring, and the content is stable (but under regular polishing, because of Tetrast's drive for excellence and his leadership which inspires comments from many collaborators).

About the length, Peirce is typically regarded as the greatest American philosopher and one of the greatest logicians of all time (superior to Frege in Hintikka's judgment); Peirce is considered the greatest North-American mind of the 1800s (only John Willard Gibbs is known to me as a credible rival), and would there are sizable literatures devoted to his secondary interests in mathematics and experimental science and statistics (where he is often considered a rival of Laplace, Fisher, and Neyman, in theory and in practice).

Length (2): Tetrast has made extraordinary efforts to shorten the article, and has emphasized size constraints many times. Indeed, Tetrast has suggested that I and other editors start articles on special subjects (e.g. statistics and Peirce, for me).

A GA-status review should generate good suggestions for improvements. Tetrast and other editors have shown extraordinary civility and welcoming of newbies, shouting our barbaric yawp, like myself nearly two years ago; I would bet that a GA review would receive the same consideration from Tetrast and the other senior editors. It may be difficult for an outside GA reviewer to appreciate how much discussion occurs on other users' talk pages, even for relatively minor edits, because of Tetrast's welcoming personality and drive to improve the article.

Indeed, the preliminary GA (not yet ready) review seems to have spurred Tetrast on towards a heroic editing effort, resulting in shorter subsections. Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 19:09, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

I trust that Tetrast shall strike-through the unfortunate Homeric nod (or nods)--- "I do not care about whether a random editor gives this article GA status" --- particularly since Peirce emphasized the distinction between a random sample and a haphazard selection! ;) I agree with Tetrast that this article is well done. In my opinion, it is superior to a number of featured articles on Wikipedia, and I think that an outside-review editor would feel honored to review it. (It may be better for WP for outside-reviewers to focus on articles with more problems, imho.)

Best regards, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 18:19, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

I agree completely that the article has potential for eventually making it to FA. I would also GA review of the article - but that would require a willingness to cooperate from the article's contibutors. I have not felt that willingess during the initial stages of this review and I think the nominator had failed to communicate with the main contributors. Any kind of review requires interest in collaboration between reviewers and contributers, the requirements are much greater of course for FA than for GA nominations - but unless there is this a collaborative spirit reviewing is futile.·Maunus·ƛ· 19:17, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

That sounds reassuring. Judge The Tetrast by his editing practice, which takes serious and even casual comments very seriously, not just by writing a friendly "thank you" note on the talk page, but by crafting an improved and even more scrupulously referenced and economically expressed paragraph. Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 19:29, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for the vote of confidence, Kiefer. Kiefer added the sourced info about Peirce's contributions to probability and statistics, in bolder, clearer strokes than I ever saw elsewhere; the average Peirce scholar is not a statistician like Kiefer. My general effort has been to try to make the article clarify all the usual initial confusions about Peirce (his view of logic, his truth theory, his pragmatism, etc.) that I've encountered over time - occasionally running things by the scholars at peirce-l and just trying to keep readers from getting off on the wrong foot. Peirce can be complex and surprising, so sometimes one needs to pursue a nuance. My biggest single step was reorganizing the sections on his mathematics and philosophy in accordance with his classifications (though I'm not sure yet just where synechism belongs), which brought order to the article reflecting the logical order which he built into his philosophy; a lot of good material already here, for which people like Jon Awbrey and the original editor Jaime Nubiola (at Nupedia) deserve credit, fell in chunks mostly into place, though it would be nice if there were more room to explore the continuities between his math (and mathematical logic) and his philosophy.
  I don't think that the article is particularly unstable. For my not caring about the GA review, there is a prologue on the CSP talk page's previous section, a case where I mainly criticized; for the time being, I'm at stet, and I'd rather forget.
  I shortened a bio subsection just now because, once I finally got the references and quotes for its last paragraph (it was slightly inaccurate), I thought it was all too much anyway, and the GA review made me think, why not truncate? People take interest in Peirce's life mainly because of his work, not vice versa.
  I don't mind adding more footnotes and references, and I like it when somebody increases the references' accuracy. I added footnotes, starting in September 2007 (there were none), around 80 footnotes for the material already here and turned 20 or so references into footnotes, tracking down references for the things (usually correct) which earlier editors (Jon Awbrey was the most frequent editor for some time - see WikiDashboard Charles Sanders Peirce) had written, and considered myself cutting-edge at the time, adding lots of links for verification and info, but then I focused on other things and let many loose ends go; also, reference standards have risen and I'm not so cutting-edge anymore, if I ever was; but now I'm back on the case. The Tetrast (talk) 20:51, 16 December 2010 (UTC).

Good faith editing and citations

In the previous section of this talk page, the lead editor (The Tetrast) and the GA-editor Maunus bumped heads initially, but managed to achieve an accurate footnote that is consistent with WP guidelines on secondary sources. Well done, indeed, both of you!

In retrospect, some of the two editors' comments and tone may have been irritating rather than soothing; nonetheless, you both agreed on one footnote! Today, The Tetrast noted that WP citation-standards have been updated, and that the article's referencing needs some upgrading. I certainly recognize that my immature efforts on statistics need improvement, if they are to be acceptable . In the next two months, I shall improve the referencing in statistics in this article. I would suggest that other editors help the Tetrast to do the same.

Maunus, do you need to review everything in this long article yourself? I read on your user page that you are interested in languages and you wrote above that you were more familiar with semiotics. However, I must agree with Putnam etc. that Peirce's philosophy is extremely mathematical, and so it might be good to recruit a logician or mathematican or theoretical computer-scientist review the mathematical sections, especially given the length of the article. Also, WP policy doesn't require that every fact be footnoted, and I am a bit concerned that you previously chose to focus on Peirce's electronic logic, which is very well known and widely documented. I assure you that my statistics section assertions are less known and less documented!

 ;)

Rather our scarce time should be devoted to the sections and assertions that are in serious doubt — like my statistics section! — rather than things that are so very well known. Later, we can address details, which are better known and not in doubt (to anybody looking even with a Google search). There's no doubt that the article's referencing needs revised, particularly for secondary sources: On the other hand, when things are well known, then it's a waste of time to reference a secondary source, imho.

Thanks for your consideration. Sincerely, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 00:15, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

The article is not currently a GA candidate. You need to renominate it if we want to start up the GA process again. Also it shouldn't be necessary to be an expert in a topic to review it for GA status (that is more important for FA) - the GA criteria don't really require a comprehensive treatment of the topic only a broad one. I can say right now that when the couple of MOS issues regarding tables and bulleted list are fixed then the article is at GA level. Maybe, if you are interested in getting the article to the best state possible, you should rather take a good look at the FA criteria and try to get the article and start working towards those. FA status requires the article to comply with every detail of the MOS - this is going to be the issue for this article. References would have to be standardized, notes should be separated from citations etc. I think the article has FA potential the question is if you are willing to make the effort. (FA reviewers can be very demanding and and often not very accomodating or polite).·Maunus·ƛ· 01:29, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

I just de-table-ized the two tables in the article that might normally be done by other means - the Peirce Arrow table is now divs with CSS, and the three modes of inference are now in col-begin etc., all for 87 extra bytes, which is why I didn't do it before. Most of the bulleted lists do help the reader; still I debulletized some and numerized some others. All the numbered lists reflect Peirce's own numerations. I'll go a certain distance to "make happy" but I remain indifferent to GA status. As for FA status, it's farther off than indicated above, and I'm positively against trying for it. The Tetrast (talk) 04:21, 17 December 2010 (UTC).

The List problem isn't whether you use a table format or a column format it the problem is that lists, bulleted or numbered break up the flow of the article and makes it difficult to read. The section of works contain several lists and hardly any prose at all - I think it would be better to summarise his works in prose and shoot the lists in to a list e.g. List of Works by Charles Sanders Pierce. As it is now it really break up the flow. The same goes for the bulleted list in the mathematics section, the contents of which could just as well be presented in prose. The table in the section on categories works fine and couldn't really be well presented in any other format. I am unsure about the rests of the incorporated lists (almost every section have one) some of them do seem to be warranted as ways of presenting complex material and material that is numbered in the first place. ·Maunus·ƛ· 13:44, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

I didn't think that there was any connection between the table and list issues. I looked for table issues, found two borderline cases, and changed them.
There already is a Wikipedia article listing Peirce's writings, but it's much denser with detail, more extensive, and organized differently.
The list of writings: One couldn't adequately discuss those Peirce writings in the list without adding too much to the article; I tried drafting up such a discussion a while back. It does need more annotations here and there where titles aren't explanatory enough. It is meant most of all to supply at a glance (1) the chronological dimension of Peirce's works and (2) a glancing acquaintance with the article titles; with other philosophers often you can name four or five books, books written as whole works, as the important works; with Peirce it doesn't work that way because he didn't write philosophy books. I've also thought of putting it into a sidebar but I'm not sure how much that really helps with the article's flow. All I can say about its current effect on the flow is that one can see at a glance that one does not need to read it in order to understand some point or argument being made at that stage in the article - one can just skip over it.
Okay, I've just broken it into chunks which I moved down and deleted what I didn't move down. The Tetrast (talk) 20:10, 17 December 2010 (UTC).

The MOS clearly says that paragraphs should preferable contain flowing prose - not chronological lists - this does require articles to be read instead of scanned - but long lists can be split out to a List article and summarised in situ. See: Wikipedia:Manual of Style (embedded lists). I think summarising his works in the article and point to the list as main article is the best solution for the reader.·Maunus·ƛ· 21:23, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

I just said (see above) "Okay, I've just broken it into chunks which I moved down and deleted what I didn't move down." The remnants are right-floated in little boxes. This achieves some of the goals which I described above, which see. The Tetrast (talk) 21:28, 17 December 2010 (UTC).

Kiefer, do you really mean that your statistics material is "in serious doubt"? I think that you mean that a reasonable person could actually doubt it, not that people are seriously doubting it. The Tetrast (talk) 04:28, 17 December 2010 (UTC).

Maunus, thanks for clarifying the lack of GA-review status. I think that a couple of months will improve the citations so that they comply with the referential standards of WP GA articles. As I understand it, the MOS guidelines explicitly allow reasonable deviations; even though it doesn't use the memory-hungry citation templates, the economical & uniform citation-style (by The Tetrast) should be accepted and perhaps applauded, imho.

The Tetrast: Nobody has expressed doubt about any of the statements, as far as I know. I have avoided possibly OR topics in the article that we have discussed informally on talk pages. I remember only one question or call for explanation, on Peirce's criterion, for which it was easy to supply the sources. As The Tetrast noted, I was alluding to Peirce's discussion of doubt in the economy of science.

Doubt may occur with some of the statistics statements because of a lack of citations (other than vague references to Stigler, etc.) and the disinterest in history (apart from ritual invocations of the miraculous invention of statistics by Ronald A. Fisher) of most mathematical scientists. Peirce (like Laplace) is often slighted in accounts of the history of statistics, e.g. WP's article on Ronald A. Fisher, and in textbook clichés. I believe that many statisticians without a special interest in history would be puzzled by the statements, and doubt the veracity of one or more statements; readers of the mature Ian Hacking or of Stephen Stigler would know enough to agree with most of the statements. Specialists (amateur historians like Stigler, Hacking, Deborah Mayo, Roger Koenker) would not be surprised and could think of appropriate references, for most claims, I would bet. Best regards, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 08:25, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

I made a few improvements to the statistics citations, months later than I'd wished to begin.  Kiefer.Wolfowitz  (Discussion) 03:21, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

The MOS allows for exceptions, when those exceptions are warranted because they make the presentation easier and better for the reader.·Maunus·ƛ· 13:44, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Excellent! Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 17:28, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Personal Life

Regarding his second wife: She is included in the 1900 Census with a mother's birthplace as France, her father's birthplace as France, and her own birthplace as France. Why is there doubt about her being French? Derrick Chapman 16:20, 15 November 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Derrickchapman (talk • contribs)

There's quite a bit of literature on the subject. I see that I have to beef up the footnotes at the Juliette Peirce wiki. According to Peirce's biographer Joseph Brent (Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, 2nd edition, p. 141), she called herself both "Pourtalai" and "Froissy". Brent, Kenneth Laine Ketner, Cornelis de Waal, and others have written on the subject. Scholars are not really sure who she was. See Juliette Peirce#Literature for some links. Also http://www.google.com/search?q=Juliette-Peirce%2BPourtalai should bring up a relevant passage in Brent's Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life. The Tetrast (talk) 17:46, 15 November 2010 (UTC).
Kenneth Ketner (His Glassy Essence (1998), p. 279ff) thinks that she was of Gitano (Andalusian Spanish Gypsy) origin. The Tetrast (talk) 17:50, 15 November 2010 (UTC).

Thank you, yes. I did some further research online after posting the question and came across many accounts that prove some sort of misdirection was going on, practiced by both husband and wife. I was following my General Rule #1: assume that what people say is the truth, especially in the case of a foreign-born individual talking to a US government official (census taker). Not only is Juliette's identity a mystery, but I also don't understand how this subterfuge could ensnare a philosopher ("lover of truth") so completely. This period was the Golden Age of Fraud and Hoaxes, but why perpetrate a falsehood so thoroughly? Is it possible that Juliette, the "born actress," was as much a polymath as her husband? More of a social adept, able and eager to function as a counterpoint to her husband's lack of people skills? I don't think she was a social climber or a gold digger or a con artist, but maybe she and her husband were conducting psycho-social experiments on people they met. Some say she was timid and frail, others say she was at ease with the New England elite. She was a graceful lady; she put Gypsy curses on the neighbors. BTW, I haven't located her grave. Any clues? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Derrickchapman (talk • contribs) 12:55, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Universes as plentiful as blackberries

Peirce often derided Laplacian uniform prior (antecedent) probability distributions as nonsense, "even if universes were as common as blackberries". I noticed that there is a book by Martin Gardner with this title.

• 2003 Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?: Discourses on Gödel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics, ISBN 0-393-05742-9 (collection of "Notes of a Fringe Watcher" columns and others. The title alludes to Charles Sanders Peirce's ridiculing of Laplace's " principle of insufficient reason", which suggested uniform prior probability for Bayesian statistics.)

Thanks!  Kiefer.Wolfowitz  (Discussion) 12:05, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Minimal negation operator

There's a proposal to delete the article Minimal negation operator, which may be related to Peirce's logic. However, its nonstandard terminology and vacuous referencing make it impossible for non-Peircian civilians to evaluate or save. Some help would be useful! Thanks! Sincerely,  Kiefer.Wolfowitz  (Discussion) 20:55, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

External links

I've removed the template that was added

in the External links section.

My edit line: The links don't mirror non-Wikipedia site. They don't dwarf wiki or detract from Wikipedia's purpose. Current & past scholarly sites, several internally linked as refs from text

From Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not a mirror or a repository of links, images, or media files

1. Mere collections of external links or Internet directories. There is nothing wrong with adding one or more useful content-relevant links to an article; however, excessive lists can dwarf articles and detract from the purpose of Wikipedia. On articles about topics with many fansites, for example, including a link to one major fansite may be appropriate. See Wikipedia:External links for some guidelines.

I scoured many places on the Internet to find them. In many cases the original links needed updating. FWIW in my opinion it's the best set of links to scholarly Peirce sites on the Internet, a real aid to scholarly research, and a feather in Wikipedia's cap. It does not dwarf the article. Also, internal links to items in it saved about seven or eight footnotes.

Furthermore it is limited in scope: Mostly the online Peirce biographical accounts are found through a link in the External links section's first paragraph to the biographical section in the CSP bibliography.

If needed, please discuss here. The Tetrast (talk) 19:51, 22 June 2011 (UTC).

Update: Okay, I've replaced the Semiotics, Conceptual graphs, & Pragmatism link sets with three links to their respective sections in other wikis. However, I saw the same 'too many external links' template in the Pragmatism wiki and there are much fewer links there. If they push them out there I'll have to bring some back here. The Tetrast (talk) 20:26, 22 June 2011 (UTC).

Removing claim about Logistic Regression

I'm removing the claim that Peirce used Logistic Regression. It is uncited, and would, if true, make him the inventor of the technique. An article entitled "The Origins of Logistic Regression" does not name him at all: http://dare.uva.nl/document/204 Larstebil (talk) 23:41, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Removed sentence for time being - van Heijenoort etc.

I've removed the following sentence from the article for the time being because the logic historian Irving Anellis indicated at peirce-l that it mis-states van Heijenoort's view and that it's generally problematic, at least in its current form. The sentence has long been in the article and I'm not in a good position to check the references, at least not quickly. It does touch on an important issue and I hope that it can be gotten right with some professional help.

Jean Van Heijenoort (1967), Jaakko Hintikka (1997), and Geraldine Brady (2000) divide those who study formal (and natural) languages into two camps: the model-theorists / semanticists, and the proof theorists / universalists. Hintikka and Brady view Peirce as a pioneer model theorist.

The Tetrast (talk) 18:54, 6 December 2011 (UTC).

Jon Awbrey's edits

Why were they rejected? Ceebaby (talk) 10:47, 9 February 2012 (UTC)