Re: [] Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic

Jon,

The answer to that question is obvious:

JA> It might be time to examine why Peirce's logical graphs
 > have failed to capture the pedagogical and philosophical
 > imagination that many of us have long believed they ought?

They have caught the imagination of every student who has ever
studied the subject.  But the hardest task is to get *professors*
to study anything:

  1. For an assistant professor, the primary goal is to get tenure.
     That requires not only a long list of publications in reputable
     journals, but a list of citations by respectable people (usually
     other professors).

  2. Papers in respectable journals are reviewed by professors and
     their graduate students.  (The more respectable the professor,
     the more likely that students will do the reviewing.)

  3. Students and professors give high scores to papers that make
     incremental improvements to familiar paradigms.  Anything outside
     a familiar paradigm is likely to get a low score.  (A colleague
     showed me a rejection note, in which the reviewer wrote "I never
     saw anyone do anything like this before."  Any research that is
     significantly different from other published research is not
     considered respectable.)

  4. For an associate professor, the primary goal is to get promoted
     to full professor.  (Copy the comment from point #1.)

  5. Full professors are generally in output-only mode.  That means
     they are not likely to read anything that is not directly related
     to getting more funding for their department.  And very few funding
     agencies give grants for R & D on Peirce's graphs.

As just one more example, some graduate students at Stanford tried
to publish a paper on something called a "page rank" algorithm for
evaluating relevance of information.  But that idea was outside any
respectable paradigm, and the students had a little project with
the childish name Google.  So of course, the paper was rejected.
Eventually, however, their project made enough money that they had
enough funds to get the attention of full professors.  That made
their paradigm respectable.  Now, many papers use the term "page
rank" in their titles in order to make them sound respectable.

John

PS:  At large conferences such as IJCAI, the most exciting
presentations are in workshops, not in the main sessions, which
are reserved for boring papers that get high scores.  The ones
that get "best paper" awards are ones that nobody could find
any excuse for rejecting -- they are invariably the most boring.


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