
How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878) - chesterfield
http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html
======
garethrees
In the spirit of "reading philosophy backwards" [1]:

Peirce is spot-on about "force"—in the 138 years since this essay, there has
been no progress on the question of "what is force?", but huge progress on the
question "what mathematical relations do forces satisfy?". Peirce must be
writing in opposition to someone's unsuccessful attempts to describe or define
the nature of "force". (But who was that?)

I'm less convinced about "hardness". Today we'd be happy to describe the
hardness of an object even if it never came into contact with anything,
whereas Peirce writes, "There is absolutely no difference between a hard thing
and a soft thing so long as they are not brought to the test." But maybe
that's because we conceptualize "hardness" differently from Peirce? That is,
now we think of hardness as an intrinsic property that can be deduced from the
structure and chemical composition of an object and measured on something like
the Brinell scale (1900), whereas Peirce is thinking about it as a partial
order based on something like the Mohs scale (1812)?

[1] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/11/read-history-of-
philoso...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/11/read-history-of-philosophy-
backwards/)

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oniMaker
The article contains the text "buried secrets" which points to a gopher link:
gopher://gopher.vt.edu:10010/02/90/1

My curiosity is piqued.

~~~
mietek
Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”:

[http://www.thomasgray.org.uk/cgi-
bin/display.cgi?text=elcc](http://www.thomasgray.org.uk/cgi-
bin/display.cgi?text=elcc)

Found via a Usenet post from 1998:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.gathering.rainbo...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.gathering.rainbow/XtzJSMmzVlA)

~~~
oniMaker
Well done. I thought it might be the same as the lines quoted below, so I had
also found the poem that way. Quite beautiful.

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avdempsey
Surprised to see Peirce on the front page!

If you enjoy this you should check out his other popular essay: "The Fixation
of Belief"
([http://peirce.org/writings/p107.html](http://peirce.org/writings/p107.html)).

My professor had a "swear jar" for mispronouncing his name (it sounds like
"purse", not "pierce").

~~~
ableal
> (it sounds like "purse", not "pierce")

There go a few brain cells I could have used to help with the grocery shopping
list.

