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Digital Companion to C. S. Peirce



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12/10/2018 Elements Letters to Francis C. Russell preview
12/10/2018 Critic Letters to Francis C. Russell preview
12/10/2018 Methodeutic Letters to Francis C. Russell preview
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Some Wit, Wisdom & Bewilderment

It is my fate to be supposed an extreme partisan of formal logic, and so I began. But the study of the logic of relations has converted me from that error. Formal logic centers its whole attention on the least important part of reasoning, a part so mechanical that it may be performed by a machine, and fancies that is all there is to reasoning. For my part, I hold that reasoning is the observation of relations, mainly by means of diagrams and the like. It is a living process. [---] ...reasoning is not done by the unaided brain, but needs the cooperation of the eyes and hands. Reasoning [...] is a kind of experimentation...
Letter to J. M. Hantz, 1887