Dear Joe,
The
ordering of the methods seems to me to be based on a progressively
broadening social conception:
1 You believe what you believe.
2 You believe what you are forced by social power to believe or can force
on others to believe.
3 You believe what you take to be intrinsically believable to believe
in.
4 You believe what self-correcting conduct informed by observation and
experience leads you to believe in.
A
tenaciously held belief is still social, as any habit is. Yet the social
is excluded from the method of tenacity. What you believe by tenacity may
also be social and learned, or perhaps social and instinctive, but
believed in because you simply continue to believe in it, regardless of
others' beliefs. Authority is a social method for compelling belief.
Peirce also describes the movement from authority to a priori as the
opening of a broader social outlook, which becomes yet broader in the
scientific method.
Surely
Peirce is not implying a historical progression, a kind of a modified,
more social version of Hobbes, of humans capable of tenacious belief, who
become capable of believing others' beliefs only through imposed
authority? I agree with Kirsti that the goodness of the method is what
determines order, not historical development. Still, one could argue that
the development of modern philosophy involved the replacement of
scholastic authority as method with a priori, in turn displaced by method
of science. But who then would the pre-medieval tenacious be? Or one
could take Peirce's 5.564 statement introduced here by Joe as
developmental, but would it be an individual's development or that of
history?
Let me try
this for fun. If one did attempt to look at these methods as
evolutionary-historical development, which, again, I don't take to be
Peirce's point, one could reverse the order completely and see it
regressively as: 1 the wild human mind emerging alive in its landscape in
omnivorous observation and learning, in participation-art-science, until,
2 fascinated by its own products, it holds them/itself as its own mirror,
domesticating itself, and 3 invents and imposes an authority structure
made in its human mind-image abstraction, personified by a king, written
by scribes, and executed by institutionalized warriors, and...eventually,
4 the modern era introduces Isolatoism, as Melville called it in Moby
Dick, the tenacious Ahabian self, severed from the common continent of
humanity and nature, whose tenacity results ultimately in diabolic
unmediated fusion with its object, tethered to it by the line of its
monomaniacal thought: The ghost in the rational-mechanical megamachine
that is modern nominalized consciousness, tenaciously opening and
reopening Pandora's Box whatever it might bring, idealizing it as science
and civilization.
Ishmael
survives in Moby Dick, because he is able to re-grasp 1 through Queeqeg,
the wild human mind. Peirce's philosophy does something similar,
harpooning the Leviathan of modern consciousness in the process. Sorry if
this seems too metaphoric and obscure.
Cheerily,
Gene
At 01:07 AM 9/23/2006, you wrote:
Subject: What "fundamenal
psychological laws" is Peirce referring to?
From: Joseph Ransdell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 16:21:17 -0700 (PDT)
In "The Fixation of Belief" Peirce says that
"a man may go through life, systematically keeping out of view
all that might cause a change n his opinions, and if he only succeeds --
basing his method, as he does, on two fundamental psychologicl laws -- I
do not see what can be said against his doing so".
This is in Part V, where he is explaining the method of tenacity,
where he then goes on to say that "the social impulse" will
nevertheless somehow cause him, at times, to face up to some
contradiction which impels recourse to adopting the second method, which
is the method of authority.
His explanation of this is very unsatisfactory, far too sketchy to
be very informative, and I wonder if anyone has run across any place
where he says anything that might flesh that out or, regardless of that,
whether anyone has any plausible explanation themselves of exactly what
accounts for the transition from the first to the second
method. One might wonder, too,whether Peirce might not have
the order wrong: might it not be argued that method #1 should be
authority and method #2 tenacity? I wonder if anyone has ever tried
to justify his ordering of the methods in the way he does? I don't recall
anyone ever trying to do that, but then I don't trust my memory on this
since it has not always been a topic in which I had much interest until
fairly recently. That he has somehow got hold of something right in
distinguishing the methods can be argued, I believe, but can the ordering
really be argued for as plausible?
Joe Ransdell
In a manuscript c. 1906 which was printed in the Collected Papers at
5.564, Peirce describes "The Fixation of Bellief" (1877) as
starting out from the proposition that "the agitation of a
question" ceases only when satisfaction is attained with the
settlement of belief, and then goes on
to consider how:
"...the conception of truth gradually develops
from that principle under the action of experience; beginning with
willful belief, or self-mendacity [i.e. the method of tenacity], the most
degraded of all intellectual conditions; thence rising to the imposition
of beliefs by the authority of organized society [the method of
authority]; then to the idea of a settlement of opinion as the result of
a fermentation of ideas [the a priori method]; and finally reaching the
idea of truth as overwelmingly forced upon the mind in experience as the
effect of an independent reality [the method of reason or science, or, as
he also calls it, in How to Make Our Ideas Clear, the method of
experience]." My words
are in brackets Joe
Ransdell
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