We, the Jeffs of the American Mountain West, take pleasure in welcoming you to the discussion of Chapter 6 of Kees' book. As you might recall from Gary's post of a couple of days ago, I plan to go by "Jeff" and Jeff Downard will take an extra syllable for the team and go by "Jeffrey." I write to provide a brief and somewhat selective recap of the chapter, and Jeffrey will launch us with some discussion questions.
Chapter 6 begins where many of us in the philosophy biz began with Peirce. "The Fixation of Belief" almost single-handedly redirected me from ethics to epistemology when I encountered it as a graduate student. Kees begins his chapter by reminding us how broadly Peirce used "science," viz. to refer to any inquiry aimed at ascertaining positive fact. So philosophy of science for Peirce will encompass most of what today gets called epistemology. I'd like to emphasize a point that Kees makes in passing. On p. 94, he notes that "Fixation" and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" remained important papers to Peirce throughout his life. "How to" figures centrally in Chapter 7, so I'll say little about it here, but I think that Peirce's self-criticism about the example of the unscratched diamond, combined with the relative accessibility of these papers, the fact that they appeared in *Popular Science Monthly*, and the fact that they are the only Peirce papers many thinkers have read, can work against these essays. They are as close as Peirce came to popularity, but they are no less serious for that, and Peirce scholars should not leave these papers to the uninitiated. I won't go into details here, but Peirce remained largely committed to his theory of inquiry throughout his life, and I do not think that these papers are youthful, naïve, psychologistic or popular in any pejorative sense. Kees situates Peirce's theory of inquiry somewhat differently than do most introductory presentations. The doubt-belief theory is typically contrasted with foundationalism, which is roughly the doctrine that some beliefs or belief-like states can serve as justifiers without themselves requiring justification. Kees instead contrasts Peirce's view with "epistemic agnosticism," which seems to be a thesis primarily about the role of passions and prejudices in inquiry. Proponents of epistemic agnosticism think that inquiry can and should begin from and remain importantly isolated from the passions, prejudices and affinities of inquirers. Peirce, Kees argues, considers epistemic agnosticism descriptively unrealistic and (as we'll see in a moment) normatively unnecessary. I hope that we will be able to discuss this intriguing way of situating the doubt-belief theory. Kees nicely brings out the modesty of the normative inputs and the majesty of the normative outputs involved in the doubt-belief theory. Peirce begins from the satisfactoriness of belief and the fact that doubt stimulates toward its own removal. He modestly proposes that the removal of doubt and the attainment of belief amount to the sole aim of inquiry, and that methods of inquiry are to be judged solely in terms of their effectiveness at producing stable belief. I will allow myself the following small bit of editorializing: I think that there's a lot more to be said about the basic ingredients of Peirce's theory of inquiry: what constitutes stability, what makes for a "positive reason" for doubting, etc. than we Peirceans have yet reckoned with. Editorializing over. "Fixation" is a classic largely because of how much Peirce tries to make out of such slight normative resources. Peirce famously argues that the methods of authority and tenacity are not effective ways of managing doubt. Nor is the a priori method, which Kees interestingly contrasts with the first two methods; some treatments emphasize what is common among the three unsatisfactory methods. Only the method of science, Peirce concludes, can be self-consciously deployed by those seeking to settle questions about what to believe. A lot of ink has been spilled to good effect about whether Peirce can build so much out of so little, and there's lots to talk about about how "Fixation" works and how well it works. Among the puzzling features of the argument of "Fixation" is the extent to which it relies on "the social impulse" as a generator of doubt. Kees tackles this issue with more charity and more sophistication than can be found in most introductory treatments. He emphasizes Peirce's tendency to use earth sciences, rather than particle physics, as an exemplary scientific discipline, and he emphasizes the extent to which science is, for Peirce, constituted by an attitude or moral commitment rather than a method. This approach allows a fresh look to be taken at the classic problem of demarcating science from pseudo-science, and it raises a host of intriguing questions about how Peirce would respond to recent work on the epistemology of disagreement, the psychology of belief polarization, and similar matters. I am sure that I can speak for Jeffrey when I say that we look forward to bouncing our beliefs and doubts off of one another concerning these important ideas. Jeff
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