Re: Peirce on Definition and Determination

Note 3

RC = Rafe Champion

RC: Jon, can you give a preliminary indication of the value that
     Peirce's thought would add to our attack on current problems
     in your favorite intellectual field and your major area of
     practical concern, whatever it may be?

RC: There is a danger of spending so much time on preliminaries
     that the main job does not get started, like the criticism
     of the ordinary language philosophers of years gone by who
     were accused of endlessly cleaning the spectacles of
     language without ever getting around to using them.

Rafe & All,

Where to begin? Perhaps in the middle ...

In the early 90s -- having spent a quarter of a century acquiring
a Bachelor's in "Mathematical and Philosophical Method", a Master's
in mathematics, and a Master's in psychology -- I returned to grad
school in a Systems Engineering program with the aim of "capstoning"
or "unifying the manifold" of unfinished projects that I had started
in the years gone by.

My study of Peirce went back to my freshman year in college, so many
of my pet unfinished projects involved the development and extension
of his ideas in one way or another.  The application to grad school
asked for statement of my current interests.  I wrote out an eighty
page essay, of which I submitted 20 pages and a 20 page bibliography,
being what I considered the more settled part of the overall vision.

That would be here ...

Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems
• http://mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey/Essays/Prospects_For_Inquiry_Driven_Systems

That may provide some indication of what I still regard as worthy goals,
but of course few people will ever read much of that, so I'll make the
old college try to succintify it as we go.

Regards,

Jon

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