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

[Bill Bailey]

Jim, Joe, List: This discussion brought to mind the comparison by Claud Levi-Strauss of "primitive" thought and that of western science.  I think the discussion is in The Savage Mind.  Levi-Strauss argues that there is no real difference in terms  of complexity between "primitive" and scientific thought; he found the primitive's categories and structurings in botany, for example, to be as complex as any western textbook might offer.  The difference he found was that the primitive botany was based upon use--what plants were good for.  My response upon first reading this was, leave it to a structuralist to miss the obvious (I was young and arrogant).   Structural complexity was not the defining feature of western science.  And what plants were good for was based upon subjective relevance whereas the essence of western science was objective classification with empirically verifiable criterial features.  A few years down the road, (humbler if no wiser) I re-read The Savage Mind and wondered, well, what classification system isn't based upon relevance?  Western scientists aren't a bunch of uninterested schizoid types; they too are filling needs, have uses for their systems.  I still think Levi-Strauss erred in being driven by the concerns of his day, possibly responding to developmentalists like Heinz Werner, and was out to prove "primitives" were not "simple."  But what he ended up describing as the primitive mind is the everyday mind of socialized people everywhere--habits of willful tenacity and authority.   If you think of all the complex, unconscious structures guiding our behavior through a single day, they would largely be driven by relevance and pursued out of social habits of mind.  Once habit is established socially, authority is necessary to break in and change it.  We get in our cars to drive to work, motivated only by the function--getting to work.  Authority says "New law:  must wear seat belts, and to insure you develop the habit, you'll be punished if you don't wear them.  The authorities may be motivated by the lobbying and election campaign contributions of insurance companies, but the ostensible reason is to save lives and reduce financial costs.  Most of us (who would never do anything like get into an accident) probably buckle up more to avoid getting a ticket than to reduce injury.   I don't accept the notion of "man in a state of nature."  What few studies/examples of feral children and social isolates there are suggest, unless rescued before puberty, they do not achieve normal human development.  I don't know what "laws" there are governing the human mind, but whatever they are, they're largely social.  To be socialized means to be locked into belief systems based upon tenacity and authority, initially those you are born into.  These two social requisites of belief are perfectly capable of the most radical kinds of error and monstrosity.  They have historically supported all sorts of superstition, tyranny, genocide--you name it--along with the heights of human achievement.  I think this is why Peirce devalues them and valorizes science.  Until the age of nuclear  and grant money it was easy to see scientists as passionately disinterested, objective seekers of truth, and I think that is the image Peirce holds as the ideal for his community of investigators.  The mode of scientific belief is rooted in the subject-object distinction, our ability to differentiate between what something is in disinterested observation from what we subjectively experience.  We live socially in an objective world, and we must separate the objectively real from subjective desire to survive.   It should be noted that it is to the social universe of subjective tenacity and authority that the scientist returns when he/she takes off the lab coat and goes home--perhaps to be an autocrat, an abuser, a molester, but most likely a loving and caring family member.  One thing the scientific method does not support is a social system of relationships which value spontaneity and emotional involvement.  The habits of tenacity and authority are required to provide the glue for the cohesion that defines a social group.     I think Peirce is probably right to represent these three requisites of social belief as "laws," but they seem to me more sociological than psychological.  We could use other, more modern, terms, but the point is that we'll end up covering the same ground.  Bill Bailey           Jim Piat wrote:   I agree with your characterization of the scientific method as including the distinctive elements of the other three.  You have clarified the issue in a way that is very helpful to me.  I agree as well that taken individually each of the lst three methods (tenacity, authority and reason)  can lead to disaster.  So, without going into all the details let me just sum up by saying I agree with you and that includes your cautions about my misleading metaphors, etc.  Thanks for two very helpful posts.   Picking up on your suggestion of a possible hierachical relationship between the methods I have been thinking about some of their possible connections with Peirce's categories.  Again, my ideas on this are vague and meant only to be suggestive and I look forward to your thoughts.  First, very roughly,  it strikes me that iconicity is the crux of direct apprehension of reality.  In essence perception is the process by which one becomes impressed with (or attunded to)  the form of reality.  In effect a kind of resonance is established by which subject and environment become similar.  This I think accounts for the conviction we all have that in some fundamental way what we perceive "is"  the case -- which I think is in part the explanation for the method of tenacity.    Second is the notion of otherness or dissimilarity.  The existance of resistance which we experience as the will of others or as the limits of our own wills.   Third is the notion of thought or reason by which one is able to mediate between these two modes of existence.  Unfortunately, as you point out, one can get lost in thought (or without it) and thus we are best served not by some form of degenerate representation (minimizing either the iconic, indexical -- or mediative component) but by a full blown common sense form of reasoning or inquiry that has been formalized as the scientific method.    So, to recap  -- method one is a form of overly iconic settlement, method two a over-reaction in the direction of excessively referentially settlement, and method three an overly rationalistic form of settlement at the expense of the other two.      I think that Peirce did not intend that we take the lst three methods as examples of belief fixation which folks actually employ in their pure form.  By itself each method is not a example of symbolic or representational thought but of something more akin to a degenerative form of representation.   So,  I think Peirce intended them as exaggerations in order to illustrate degenerative ways of representation and inaequate ways of belief fixation or settlement of doubt.   What he did was to describe the three modes of being involved in representation (the fourth method) as isolated forms of belief settlement.  The result of course was a bit of a stretch or caricature of the degenerative ways in which we distort common sense in the settlement of our doubts.   Because we are in fact symbols using symbols we can in theory come up with all sorts of false possiblities  -- which is part of what makes thinking about thinking so difficult.  Even erroneous thinking or representation involves representation.  Sometimes we build sand castles in the air and pretend we are on the beach pretending the waves will never come.    Again, just some vague notions   -- I can't help but feel that in the case of Peirce his categories are properly and consistently the foundation of all he says.    Jim Piat   ------- Joe wrote:   "But I would disagree with this part of what you say, Jim.  Considered simply as methods in their own rights, I don't think one wants to speak of them as being incorporated AS methods within the fourth method.  As a methodic approach to answering questions the method of tenacity is surely just a kind of stupidity, and it seems to me that the turn to authority, not qualified by any further considerations -- such as, say, doing so because there is some reason to think that the authority is actually in a better position to know than one is -- apart, I say, from that sort of qualification, the turn to authority as one's method seems little more intelligent than the method of tenacity, regarded in a simplistic way.  The  third method, supposing that it is understood as the acceptance of something because it ties in with -- coheres with -- a system of ideas already accepted, does seem more intelligent because it is based on the properties of ideas, which is surely more sophisticated than acceptance which is oblivious of considerations of coherence.   But it is also the method of the paranoid, who might reasonably be said to be unintelligent to a dangerous degree at times.   But I think that what you say in your other message doesn't commit you to regarding the methods themselves as "building blocks", which is a mistaken metaphor here.  It is rather that what each of them respectively appeals to is indeed something to which the fourth method appeals: the value of self-identity, the value of identification (suitably qualified) with others. the value of recognition of a universe -- all of which are redeemed as valuable in the fourth method by the addition of the appeal to the force majeure of the real given the right sort of conditions, i.e. objectiviy." 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