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515 Essay on Editorial Theory and Method The structures of spoken and written language fascinated Peirce throughout his intellectual life. His early study of Shakespearean pronunciation (1864) and his comprehensive but fragmentary editor’s manual (c. 1900) bookend a lifetime of engagement with issues of presentation and publication, but Peirce also exhibited an implicit awareness of textual patterns in nearly everything he wrote. His general ideas on punctuation and spelling sometimes ran against standard practice, and his complex papers in logic, mathematics, and philosophy presented constant challenges in layout. Consequently, Peirce was destined to fight a well-documented battle with editors throughout his publishing career. But it was his misfortune to write for editors who often were not quali- fied to edit (or even to understand) his work; those few who understood and believed in Peirce had to contend with authorial chaos at every turn, for the eccentricities of his personal life and his unusual methods of composition led Peirce himself to despair at the chances of ordering his papers in his own lifetime . Peirce’s complex habits of composition and the unfinished state of many of his manuscripts create a number of problematic editing situations for the unpublished materials that constitute by far the greater portion of his surviving canon. Peirce often composed parallel versions of a document without indicating which was the preferred form, and we must deal with variant passages and entire variant documents, any one of which might be worthy of publication. Even when only one finished form of a work exists, the editing problems will almost always go beyond simple cases of missing punctuation or incomplete revision. Often Peirce’s “finished” work falls far short of fair-copy form in terms of textual development, and may also contain unfinished revisions to mathematical formulae, diagrams, and illustrations. These complications make it all the more important to describe in the clearest terms how editors establish critical texts of Peirce’s writings. Our specific editing policies for Peirce’s published and unpublished work follow an overview of the general principles of critical editing as we have applied them to our own edition. The essay closes with a brief textual survey of the W8 selections and an overview of special editing challenges encountered in establishing the texts for this volume. Writings of C. S. Peirce 1890–1892 516 I. General Editing Guidelines The Writings of Charles S. Peirce consists of chronological volumes prepared in the critical editing tradition as it has evolved in the twentieth century. Our central goal is to provide critically edited and reliable texts of Peirce’s work across the wide range of disciplines to which he contributed. Where the documentary editor focuses on preserving the text, the critical editor focuses on recovering the author’s discernible intention for the text. Rather than simply reproducing a single surviving form of a document, we (as critical editors) identify the most mature, coherent form closest to Peirce’s composing hand, and, by incorporating identifiable authorial revisions and corrections from subsequent presswork, produce an eclectic text that aims to represent his most fully developed intention. Variants from subsequent published forms of the text judged to be editorial sophistications and compositorial errors are rejected; Peirce’s own errors of content are corrected. This new text, when combined with an apparatus documenting the evolution of the various forms of the work, listing the historical variants, and identifying all of our editorial emendations (and their sources), constitutes the “critical edition” of Peirce’s work. A full statement of editorial goals is part of W6’s editorial essay (535–538), which represents the fullest discussion to date of our methods and the theories that inform them. The following summary of that discussion presents the guidelines and basic procedures common to all of our volumes, beginning with the way we compare multiple forms of the same document. We use standard collation schedules for horizontal comparisons of Peirce’s printed articles against all forms of the text prepared from the same typesetting (galleys, proofs, and offprints) to discover variant readings. Texts transmitted vertically through two or more manuscript, typescript, or copy-set forms are also collated to identify variations. We also compare parallel but distant versions of a text to recover the full family tree for a given document. Although we work from master sets of microfilm, microfiche, and photographic copies of Peirce’s papers, we proofread our transcriptions against the original documents to verify the accuracy of the...

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