I gradually grow accustomed to the distinct possibility that there will always be different readings, and even divergent interpretations of Peirce’s writings. Some of that appears to be a two- or three-cultures issue — the readings that befit aesthetic, cultural, and literary aims often part ways with the readings that work best for logical, mathematical, and scientific ends. Partly this is due to the fact that applications to the humanities are soon over-whelmed with the vastly greater complexities of their theatres of operation, and so must be satisfied with very impressionistic and highly sketchy surveys of their realms.

It hasn’t always been this way with me, but most of the time these days I approach Peirce’s work from the standpoint of a practical mathematician focused on applications to empirical sciences, as luck would determine it, to the Odyssean no man’s land between qualitative and quantitative methods. That is far from how I started out, and there were many crises of mind and mood occasioned by the transits of my transdisciplinarity, but that is how it came to be at the present moment.

At any rate, what I find in Peirce are not antiques but tools toward the future.