Charles Sanders Peirce, Who Trashes My Steels Options

[Jon Awbrey]

Again, your sufferings clearly have not been your lessons.

Are my lessons done?

Jon

[Peter Damian]

Again, your sufferings clearly have not been your lessons.

Are my lessons done?

Jon

Well I'm sorry about causing suffering, then.

[Moulton]

A troll is defined as someone who asks good questions that the other guy doesn't want to have to answer.

[Peter Damian]

His writings carry too evident marks of that philosophical pride, vanity, and envy, which have often sullied the character of the learned. He determines boldly thngs above all human knowledge; and enters upon the most difficult questions, as his pupil entered on a battle, with full assurance of success.. He delivers his decisions oracularly, and without any fear of mistake. Rather than confess his ignorance, he hides it under hard words and ambiguous expressions, of which his interpreters can make what pleases them. There is even reason to suspect that he wrote often with affected obscurity; either that the air of mystery might procure greater veneration, or that his books might be understood only by the adepts who had been initiated in his philosophy.

[Jon Awbrey]

Unnamed Sources Say —

His writings carry too evident marks of that philosophical pride, vanity, and envy, which have often sullied the character of the learned. He determines boldly thngs above all human knowledge; and enters upon the most difficult questions, as his pupil entered on a battle, with full assurance of success.. He delivers his decisions oracularly, and without any fear of mistake. Rather than confess his ignorance, he hides it under hard words and ambiguous expressions, of which his interpreters can make what pleases them. There is even reason to suspect that he wrote often with affected obscurity; either that the air of mystery might procure greater veneration, or that his books might be understood only by the adepts who had been initiated in his philosophy.

Sorry, Herr Damian, Slim Cherry Picking 101 is meeting 2 doors down, past the unisex toilet, and up yours.

Jon

[Peter Damian]

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22...+pride%22&meta=

[Random832]

Just be sure that derivative content does not turn up again later on, ab initio, as it were. 'Cause y'know, some people still consider that, er, impeachable.

Am I misreading this last line, or do you mean that he can't reuse your contributions to Wikipedia? I may be misreading your wording, because if that is your intent, you gave away any control over that text when you posted it to Wikipedia under GFDL.

There was a past incident where attribution (required under GFDL) was allegedly deliberately removed from an article that Greg Kohs had written.

[Jon Awbrey]

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22...+pride%22&meta=

Peter,

You have already outed yourself as a True Blew Wikipediot, a retrograde perversion and very nearly the exact opposite of a Bona Fide Wikipedian, as I once knew a precious few to be in those heady bygone days.

And now you begin to exhaust the benefit of the doubt that I normally accord to adult members of society with respect to their critical faculties in general.

You may stop now — those who have eyes to see can see you for what you have become.

Jon

This post has been edited by Jon Awbrey: Mon 19th May 2008, 3:28pm

[Peter Damian]

Peter,
You have already outed yourself as a True Blew Wikipediot, a retrograde perversion and very nearly the exact opposite of a Bona Fide Wikipedian, as I once knew a precious few to be in those heady bygone days.
And now you begin to exhaust the benefit of the doubt that I normally accord to adult members of society with respect to their critical faculties in general.
You may stop now — those who have eyes to see can see you for what you have become.

I can’t see you have given any benefit of the doubt.

1. I criticised some of the contributions you made to the article on Peirce as being unintelligible, obscure and badly written.
2. You replied by questioning whether you had written them at all, and challenged me to provide references
3. I provided references
4. You call me a Wikipediot.

Where is the benefit of the doubt?

[Jon Awbrey]

Peter,

You have already outed yourself as a True Blew Wikipediot, a retrograde perversion and very nearly the exact opposite of a Bona Fide Wikipedian, as I once knew a precious few to be in those heady bygone days.

And now you begin to exhaust the benefit of the doubt that I normally accord to adult members of society with respect to their critical faculties in general.

You may stop now — those who have eyes to see can see you for what you have become.

I can’t see you have given any benefit of the doubt.

1. I criticised some of the contributions you made to the article on Peirce as being unintelligible, obscure and badly written.
2. You replied by questioning whether you had written them at all, and challenged me to provide references
3. I provided references
4. You call me a Wikipediot.

Where is the benefit of the doubt?

Really, Peter, I have already stated quite firmly that I will not play these Wikipediot games with you. You have now so confused yourself with your own deliberate or otherwise mis-interpretations that I have no intention of trying to unravel them for you.

Honestly, I suggest that you get away from All Things Wikipedian for a while until you have recovered what intellectual fiber you may have once had.

Sincerely,

Jon

This post has been edited by Jon Awbrey: Mon 19th May 2008, 3:36pm

[Peter Damian]

Peter,

You have already outed yourself as a True Blew Wikipediot, a retrograde perversion and very nearly the exact opposite of a Bona Fide Wikipedian, as I once knew a precious few to be in those heady bygone days.

And now you begin to exhaust the benefit of the doubt that I normally accord to adult members of society with respect to their critical faculties in general.

You may stop now — those who have eyes to see can see you for what you have become.

I can’t see you have given any benefit of the doubt.

1. I criticised some of the contributions you made to the article on Peirce as being unintelligible, obscure and badly written.
2. You replied by questioning whether you had written them at all, and challenged me to provide references
3. I provided references
4. You call me a Wikipediot.

Where is the benefit of the doubt?

Really, Peter, I have already stated quite firmly that I will not play these Wikipediot games with you. You have now so confused yourself with your own deliberate or otherwise mis-interpretations that I have no intention of trying to unravel them for you.
Honestly, I suggest that you get away from All Things Wikipedian for a while until you have recovered what intellectual fiber you may have once had.
Sincerely,
Jon

Where is the misinterpretation?

[edit] And lest we forget what prompted this incredible stream of abuse and insults from Awbrey, I copy my earlier post below.

I disagree with the assessment of Jon Awbrey's work. He was playing it pretty well until the article got derailed by someone's sockpuppets. I think some of Jon's writing on that article was too detailed and provided too many tangents for the Peirce novice like me. But Awbrey was making all kinds of concessions and working with others as per Wikipedia's touted goals.

Well, Awbrey undeniably wrote this:

In the beginning, while it is still evident to everyone concerned that these symbols are mined from the matrix of their usual interpretations, which are generally more diverse than unique, these abstracted symbols are commonly referred to as '[[uninterpreted symbol]]s', the sense being that they are transiently detached from their interpretations simply for the sake of extra facility in processing the more general thrust of their meanings, after which intermediary process they will have their concrete meanings restored.

+ When we start to hear these abstract, general, uninterpreted symbols being described as 'meaningless' symbols, then we can be sure that a certain line in our sand-reckoning has been crossed, and that the crossers thereof have hefted or sublimated '[[formalism]]' to the status of a full-blown [[Weltanschauung]] rather than a simple [[heuristic]] device.

+ What we observe here is a familiar form of cyclic process, with the crest of excess followed by the slough of despond. The inflationary boom that raises 'formalism' beyond its formative sphere as one among a host of equally useful heuristic tricks to the status of a totalizing worldview leads perforce to the deflationary bust that makes of 'formalist' a pejorative term.

+ The point of the foregoing discussion is this, that one of the main difficulties that we have in understanding what the whole complex of words rooted in 'form' meant to Peirce is that we find ourselves, historically speaking, on opposite sides of this cycle of ideas from him.

+ And so we are required, as so often happens in trying to read a writer of another age, to lift the scales of the years from our eyes, to drop the reticles that have encrusted themselves on our 'reading glasses', our [[hermeneutic]] scopes, due to the interpolant philosophical schemata that have managed to enscounce themselves in our unthinking culture over the years that separate us from the writer in question.

It is not very good writing, and the current article is certainly better now that stuff has been removed. Furthermore, at least some people currently in Wikipedia recognise this, and this fact has been used as a stick to beat Wikipedia review with for a long time (witness e.g. Shankbone's recent attack on WR/Awbrey.

It's not very nice to have to criticise someone's writing in public, but there comes a time when it has to be said. Awbrey does no favours for this place. I'll end with an assessment made by someone else on-wiki, which perfectly captures in my view what was wrong with his contributions:

Furthermore, his writing was, frankly, crap. JA did have useful thoughts, but he absolutely refused to write well, a rather critical requirement for a WP editor who claims "English at a professional level" in his userbox. JA chose to write in neither an accessible general audience style that Wikipedia generally seeks, nor in the precise if occasionally non-obvious statements of a careful philosopher or scientist. Instead, at least to my humble opinion, JA wrote in the pretentious blather of a college student who covers for the fact he didn't actually read the works with a haze of unclear statements. Now, this is just how some people write (and they are bad writers, which is unfortunate when they have insight to communicate), but it's also how good writers can cover for a lack of knowledge. Which was it? Beats me. He seemed smart enough, but I'm still not sure on some of his stances.

This post has been edited by Peter Damian: Mon 19th May 2008, 4:09pm

[Jon Awbrey]

Roses need weeding this morning …

Wine needs drinking this evening …

So I'll have to save the wikiφertilizing for another time, but if PD is going to cite eminent scholars and expert witlesses from Our Old Skool Wiki-P-U, then good practice dictates that he do it with attribution and contextual links. The Wikipedia Review demands a higher standard of evidence and scholarship than the surd of shoddy practices they are wonton to permit in Wikiputia.

Jon

What are you talking about? You mean, you didn't write that at all. OK then!

No, he means that you didn't say who you got that quote about his writing from or where.

Kamryn,

"Peter Damian" knows perfectly well what I was saying there. He is simply playing a game of deliberate misreading because that is one of the gambits that gets so much mileage in Wikiputia and because Wikipediots have gotten so e-culturated to playing this game that they have forgotten that no one in the Real World is fooled by it.

Jon

This post has been edited by Jon Awbrey: Tue 20th May 2008, 3:00am

[Jon Awbrey]

One For My MemWars —

In May of 2006, a whole bevy of editors were peacefully collaborating on the article Truth (T-H-L-K-D) when Nathan Ladd (T-C-L-K-R-D) came back from spring break or something and started trashing every hard-won compromise that we had worked out over a couple of months. FeloniousMonk or KillerChihuahua entered the scene and reverted everything back to Ladd's preferences. I quietly copied all the stuff that Ladd complained was "too advanced and technical" and used it to flesh out another editor's previous stub on Truth Theory, which was later linked to by Marshall Poe's article "The Hive" in the Atlantic Monthly (page 5). The Cabal eventually noticed the article on Truth Theory — they became enraged and tried to AfD it. It survived two AfD's in a single summer, and only got axed on the 3rd AfD after they banned me from defending it.

In the mean time, I didn't even know what a puppet was until 7 or 8 meat-or-sock-puppets of Nathan Ladd tracked me back from the article on Truth to the collection of articles on Peircean subjects, to which I often retired when disputes got too hot in other places. They proceeded to engage in mass deletions of several editors' work-in-progress on those articles, and would not listen to several editors reading from the Five Pillars about how Un-Wikipedian that kind of conduct was supposed to be. A more experienced editor in the Peirce arena explained to us then what a sockpuppet was, and another editor emailed KillerChihuahua to ask for help. I did not know about the Cabal at that time either, or else I would have known what to expect. Everything that the Cabal has done since that time has been to support the Vandalism of that first sockpuppet horde, and that gave me my first major lesson in Cabal Hypocrisy about every Pretense of Wikipediot Policy.

[E-vective X-pletives Deleted]

Jon Awbrey

[Jon Awbrey]

Another Bit Of Hystery Repeated …

SlimVirgin and her gang tagged and blocked The Tetrast (T-C-L-K-R-D) as a sock of me — for no better reason than she couldn't wrap her bitty brain around the idea that 2 people in the Universe ever heard of Charles Sanders Peirce — eventually forcing him to reveal his IRL name before he could get unblocked.

They call that "biting" and "stalking" and "outing" in Wikipedese, but of course we don't talk that BabyTalk here.

Jon Awbrey