[peirce-l] Re: What "fundamental psychological laws" is Peirce referring to?

[Kirsti Määttänen]

Dear Eugene,

Thanks for an inspiring mail. The idea of a progressively broadening social conception I find a very fruitful one, enriching the idea of a logical ordering. This, together with your exhilarating thought-experiment with an evolutionary-historical progression, definitely made some thoughts I was not quite in the clear with, more clear.

But I cannot see that the social should be excluded from the method of tenacity in the way you state:

 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.

Take for example the way things are nowadays in scientific communities, which is no way really furthering finding out truth. It's arranged according to the belief that maximal competition (between individuals) ensures that the 'best ones' win. Well, 'the best ones' in that view may win, but the truth certainly is not a winner. - Anyway, the method of tenacity is bound in this context to become one individuals with some success are pressed to resort to. Because if anything fundamental to the work of that individual is convincingly questioned, and so threatened, the whole career may be at stake. It does not make any difference, whether the person in question has primarily the truth as a personal motivating aim, or the just the aim of a fine career, winning others presents itself either as the means, or as the aim.

In "Economy of Reseach" (or thus titled in CP) Peirce sees the only way of really furthering the finding out of the truth in the practice of just funding generously a lot of people. With a rational HOPE, but nothing more sure, that some of them, but some ones which cannot be identified in advance, will produce something worth funding the whole lot.

Well, it's a long time since I read that piece. But I've had the opportunity for a good many years to be a part of a (quite small) research institute with absolutely no problems with funds. Within a short time it became internationally acknowledged as the leading institute in the field, as well as highly appreciated outside the special field. Then various things happened, and with them the 'normal' scarcity of funding started. Within a VERY short time followed a deep decay in level of research.

I also had the opportunity to discuss with one of the persons in charge of the so called 'golden coller' department in the Finnish company Nokia, which some you may know, before the stupendous success the company later achieved. The principles were the same, except somewhat less rational. They acted on a principle based on spending money on individuals, based on decisions made in upper departments in the hierachy. So they were just sloshing around money, irrationally. At the institute I was a member, all decisions were discussed. But there was no pressure to make them look like reasonable to the outside.

One of my favorite quotes from that particular piece used to be the metaphor by Peirce: Burning diamonds instead of coal to produce heat.

Thanks again,

Kirsti

Kirsti Määttänen
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

  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