The Unmet Challenge of Peirce’s Work

Peircers,

I posted the following thoughts on my Inquiry Into Inquiry blog --
they have been nagging me for several months now, so I'm hoping
that giving them this much vent will not only take a bit of the
pressure off but maybe nudge me to develop them as time goes by.

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The Unrealized Potential of Peirce’s Thought

One of my main philosophical and practical concerns for many years now has rested, in its restless way, with the 
potential contribution of Charles Sanders Peirce to our understanding of inquiry. If I were starting a new project 
today, instead of trying to dig my way out from under a mountain of unfinished business, it would get a title like “The 
Unmet Challenge of Peirce’s Work” or “The Unrealized Potential of Peirce’s Thought”. My feeling is that only a small 
fraction of Peirce’s potential contribution to our understanding has yet been realized and that something critical has 
been lost in the years since he lived. Consequently, my concern is less with the thinkers who came after him than with 
the clues their work provides to what was found and what was lost.

It has long been my experience that we cannot grasp the full import of Peirce’s work from the shadows that are cast on 
the analytic, atomistic, logistic, reductive, syntactic plain. I prefer looking at the work of the intervening years 
from Peirce’s conceptual perspective, instead of the other way around. I think that affords a much clearer view of things.

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