I view psychology, throughout its many branches, as a fascinating and compelling collection of subjects, so much so that I spent one of my parallel lives in the 1980s earning a Master’s degree in it, submitting a “Plan B” thesis in the form of a computer program that integrated a module for complex sequential learning with a module for propositional constraint satisfaction based on an extension of Peirce’s logical graphs. I wandered through three universities during that time, taking graduate courses in math, psychology, statistics, and computer science, finally finishing in 1989.
The hot topics of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science from those times have lately enjoyed a revival on the Peirce List, and though it brings me a twinge of seasonal nostalgia now and then to hear those old chestnuts being fired up again, those problems seem to me now as problems that exist for and within a peculiar tradition of thought, a tradition of chasing will o’ th’ wisps that Peirce side-stepped before it began.
I hear in Peirce a different drummer …
I remember when others heard it, too …
