BIBLIOGRAPHY:

This is just a starter bibliography.  I will add to it as I develop resources.

Here's a study about McKeon.  It's the only one I know of.  I haven't read it.

Plochmann, George Kimball
Richard McKeon: A Study.
xvi, 260 p., 1 halftone. 1990
LC: 89028254 Class: B945.M48
Cloth $35.95sp 0-226-67109-7
Subjects:
Philosophy: General Philosophy
Rhetoric and Communication
The University of Chicago Press

Here is a transcript of an entire McKeon course, edited in part by his wife.  I haven't read it, but it should be excellent.    Notice especially that it includes "Appendix H: Schema of Philosophic Semantics" which ought to be the famous 17 page paper, or it's equivalent.

McKeon, Richard
On Knowing--The Natural Sciences.
Edited by David B. Owen and Zahava K. McKeon.
Compiled by David B. Owen. xiv, 406 p., 29 line drawings, 13 tables. 1994

LC: 94008953 Class: Q174.8

Cloth $65.00tx 0226560260
Paper $17.95tx 0-226-56027-9

Well before the current age of discourse, deconstruction, and multiculturalism, Richard McKeon propounded a philosophy of pluralism showing how "facts" and "values" are dependent on diverse ways of reading texts. This book is a transcription of an entire course, including both lectures and student discussions, taught by McKeon. As such, it provides an exciting introduction to McKeon's conception of pluralism, a central aspect of neo-Pragmatism, while demonstrating how pluralism works in a classroom setting.

In his lectures, McKeon outlines the entire history of Western thinking on the sciences. Treating the central concepts of motion, space, time, and cause, he traces modern intellectual debates back to the ancient Greeks, notably Plato, Aristotle, Democritus, and the Sophists. As he brings the story of Western science up to the twentieth century, he uses his fabled semantic schema (reproduced here for the first time) to uncover new ideas and observations about cosmology, mechanics, dynamics, and other aspects of physical science.

Illustrating the broad historical sweep of the lectures are a series of discussions which give detail to the course's intellectual framework. These discussions of Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and Maxwell are perhaps the first published rendition of a philosopher in literal dialogue with his students. Led by McKeon's pointed questioning, the discussions reveal the difficulties and possibilities of learning to engage in serious intellectual communication.

Table of Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Foreword
1: An Introduction to Philosophic Problems
2: Philosophic Problems in the Natural Sciences
3: Motion: Method
4: Motion: Method (Part 2) and Principle
5: Motion: Interpretation
6: Motion: Selection
7: Motion: Selection (Part 2)
8: Space: Time: Method, Interpretation, and Principle
9: Time: Method, Interpretation, and Principle
10: Summary: Interpretation, Method, and Principle
Appendix A: Class Schedule
Appendix B: Selected Lecture Notes on Necessity, Probability, and Nature
Appendix C: Selected Lecture Notes on Democritus and the Sophists
Appendix D: Selected Lecture Notes on Cause
Appendix E: Complete Lecture Notes for Lecture 10
Appendix F: Discussion Notes For Einstein
Appendix G: Final Examinations
Appendix H: Schema of Philosophic Semantics
Notes
Index

Subjects:
Philosophy: General Philosophy
Philosophy of Science
The University of Chicago Press

More letters to the Editor of U of C Magazine: February 1995

Article partially copied below discussing McKeon and Walter Watson:

CONCLUSION: THE SUSTAINABILITY DEBATE AND PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY

A Note on Methodology: Making explicit the methodology used in discovering the underlying assumptions of parties to the sustainability debate can move us toward link-ups with the philosophy of technology. Knowing the risks, we have nonetheless utilized the somewhat odd scheme of Walter Watson in The Architectonics of Meaning: Foundations of the New Pluralism.[54] We certainly do not endorse the exaggerated claim (on the book's cover) that Watson has devised "the first truly useful taxonomy of all ideas," but, stripped of such overbloated claims, Watson's book offers an interesting hermeneutic.

In Watson's view, every author (including public speakers) betrays his or her philosophical assumptions by differentially utilizing the four necessary components of any piece of literature:
--author's perspective (which may be entirely personal or that of a tradition and may be hidden even from the author);
--objects discussed;
--the text itself, and especially the methods that link items to one another; and
--the goals or principles (ideals, values, etc.) that drive or motivate the text (and which almost always reflect sets of background assumptions, such as the cultural values influencing both individual authors and intellectual traditions).

According to Watson, authors or speakers who stress objectivity above the other three components employ a scientific writing style (though that is not Watson's term for it). They tend also to use logical methods, invoke reductionistic aims, and try to avoid values as much as possible. Authors who consciously stress values and see the objects of their discourse as this-worldly shadows of otherworldly realities--typically linking the two by a method explicitly referred to as "dialectical"--Watson links to Plato. They tend to emphasize comprehensiveness, and often disparage narrow technical scientific knowledge. Authors, third, who stress method and discipline (in the school subject matter or professional discipline sense), and who emphasize the pigeonholing of objects within large encyclopedic schemes, Watson links to Aristotle. (Some Aristotelians think this is a caricature which ignores the natural-biological, interdisciplinary, and practical aspects of Aristotle--especially in his opposition to Plato.) The fourth perspective requires a little more elaboration.

A significant feature of Watson's scheme--which represents a break with his mentors, especially Richard McKeon" [55] --is his recognition of a fourth basic group. These authors emphasize their own subjective perspective, their own creativity, as an end in itself. In terms of method, they often tend to be anti-methodical, to utilize any means that will move the narrative (story, drama, etc.) along. Watson links this group to the Greek Sophist Protagoras (for whom humans are the measure of all things) and defends this as a philosophical perspective fully parallel with the other three.

Finally, Watson acknowledges that the four basic groups do not exhaust the stylistic field; many authors combine modalities. As Watson recognizes, almost all the great philosophers of the modern period, after Descartes, have tended to use hybrid styles. (Even so, a hybrid style is recognizable--Watson thinks--as a joint use of two or more of the four basic styles.)

This is a perhaps hasty--maybe even more idiosyncratic than Watson's own--account of an enormously complicated scheme. But it may be enough to suggest that a hermeneutic approach, roughly along Watsonian lines, can help discover philosophical presuppositions--in this case, the philosophies of technology implicit (or sometimes explicit) in the sustainability debate. However, where Watson's aim seems to be Aristotelian, to pigeonhole authors, we would call our aim (in Watson's terms) creative. We want to let the authors have their own say about what it is they want to emphasize in the sustainability debate.

The Sustainability Debate and Philosophy of Technology: We can apply Watson's method, however briefly, to summarize and bring this paper to a conclusion.

54. Walter Watson, The Architectonics of Meaning: Foundations of the New Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).

55. Watson acknowledges McKeon, ibid., p. xii. McKeon's works on the topic have been collected by Mark Backman, in Richard McKeon, Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery (Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow, 1987). Another influence on Watson (perhaps only indirect--through McKeon--since Watson does not mention him) is Kenneth Burke, who emphasizes "stage" (or background of discourse) more than either McKeon or Watson. See Kenneth Burke, On Symbols and Society, ed. J. Gusfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).