Talk:Charles Sanders Peirce/Archive 4

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Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3 Archive 4 Archive 5

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:

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.
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

GA toolbox
Reviewing
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),[1] Jaakko Hintikka (1997),[2] and Geraldine Brady (2000)[3] 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).

The sentence seems to me quite right about Hintikka (having read the article cited, and other work by him), and the issue to be substantial. Can't speak for Brady. (Greatcathy (talk) 00:26, 20 April 2012 (UTC))

I removed it because of discussion with logic historian Irving Anellis at peirce-l. I tried to cajole him into framing a revision that captures the (apparently complicated) truth in his view, but my cajolery failed and I got increasingly mixed up (I'm no expert in this particular matter though I get that it's signficant and interesting). I hope you don't mind waiting, I'll supply you tomorrow with links to the discussion, see what you think. The Tetrast (talk) 02:25, 20 April 2012 (UTC).
The promised links:
The Tetrast (talk) 01:50, 21 April 2012 (UTC).

References

  1. ^ van Heijenoort (1967), "Logic as Language and Logic as Calculus" in Synthese 17: 324–30.
  2. ^ Hintikka (1997), "The Place of C. S. Peirce in the History of Logical Theory" in Brunning and Forster (1997), The Rule of Reason: The Philosophy of C. S. Peirce, U. of Toronto.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Brady was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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