Re: Higher Order Sign Relations • 4
Re: Conceptual Graphs • Gary Zhu

GZ:

Is there any good contemporary reading of Peirce & James that you recommend?  Their original works have been quite challenging for me.

Dear Gary,

As fortune would have it, I haven’t found much to recommend in the secondary literature on Peirce over the last couple of decades.  Most of it looks bent on assimilating Peirce to the conventional wits of analytic and continental philosophy.  As a result, I hew pretty close to Peirce himself in my current reading.  You could try the two volumes of the Essential Peirce for general orientation, if a trifle light on the math side of Peirce.

The last contemporary work I read with anything like the spirit of Peirce about it would probably be Sowa’s Conceptual Structures, so try that if you haven’t already.  Still worth reading are Pragmatism by William James and How We Think by John Dewey.  James and Dewey lacked the mathematical perspective needed to take in Peirce’s full scope and Dewey was a little slow getting up to speed with Peirce’s message but he kept at it and had the benefit of living long enough to become an able expositor of pragmatic and scientific ways.  Plus he understood people and society far better than Peirce ever did.

There are a few references at the end of the following paper.

• Awbrey, J.L., and Awbrey, S.M. (1995), “Interpretation as Action : The Risk of Inquiry”, Inquiry : Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 15(1), 40–52.  Archive.  Journal.  Online (doc) (pdf).

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