Joe and other listers,
Thanks, Joe, for your kind words about my paper. I fear that you make
the paper sound a bit more interesting than it is, and you certainly do
a better job of establishing its importance than I did. It's something
of a cut-and paste job from my dissertation, and I'm afraid the prose
is sometimes rather "dissertationy," which is almost never a good thing.
First, as to the question in the heading of your initial message, it
seems to me that Peirce can only be referring to the antecedents of the
two conditional statements that motivate the method of tenacity in the
first place. These are stated in the first sentence of Section V of
"Fixation." "If the settlement of opinion is the sole object of
inquiry, and if belief is of the nature of a habit, why should we not
attain the desired end, by taking any answer to a question which we may
fancy, and constantly reiterating it to ourselves, dwelling on all
which may conduce to that belief, and learning to turn with contempt
and hatred from anything which might disturb it." In the context of
the paper, this would seem to make fairly straightforward sense of the
idea that tenacity rests on "two fundamental psychological laws."
Peirce sure seems to think that it should be apparent to the reader on
which "laws" tenacity rests, and so I don't think we're to wander too
far afield from the paper itself in determining which the laws are.
This interpretation does have two disadvantages, however. If my paper
is at all close to right, then Peirce considered these laws "psychical"
rather than "psychological," in the 1870's as well as in the 1860's and
in the latter half of his career (I don't mean that he had the term
"psychical" available in 1877, however). But this is one of those
places where the fact that Peirce was writing for *Popular Science
Monthly* can perhaps be invoked to account for some terminological
sloppiness. A second consideration is a bit more troublesome,
however. It's not easy to see how Peirce could have considered "the
settlement of opinion is the sole object of inquiry" a psychical or a
psychological law. It seems charitable here to see Peirce as writing a
bit casually once again and to construe him as meaning that the
statement in question is a normative truth more or less forced on us by
psychological (i.e. psychical) facts. But, as the following quote from
another of your messages indicates, Peirce was pretty quick to close
the is/ought gap with respect to this issue:
The following axiom requires no comment, beyond
the remark that it
seems often to be forgotten. Where there is no real doubt or
disagreement there is no question and can be no real investigation.
So perhaps he really meant that a statement about the aim of iqnuiry
could be a (coenscopic) psychological law. This raises an issue you
mention in yet another message, viz. what exactly makes doubts "paper"
or otherwise inappropriate. There's been some good work done on this
issue, but I think Peirce's confidence that the coenscopic data rather
directly warrants his methodological conclusions is puzzling and I'm
trying to wrestle with this problem these days.
I'd like to add to remarks about your message concerning my 1999 paper,
neither of which amounts to a disagreement. First, I'm inclined to
supplement your valuable considerations about the coenscopic sense of
"mind." You focus on some of our locutions concerning minds like ours,
and I'd just add the Peircean thought that the coenscopic notion of
"mindedness" extends to cases at some remove from the human exemplar.
Even something as simple as a sensor is going to, as Peirce sees
matters, need belief-like states (ways of storing information,
assumptions about what the world is like, etc.) and doubt-like states
(ways in which the world can get the sensor's attention). This needs
some working out, but Peirce seems to think that the doubt-belief
theory will hold of anything that can play a certain role (perhaps
picked out communicatively) in inquiry.
Finally, I should note that I'm perhaps less confident than you are,
Joe, that Peirce's apparent complaints about the "psychological" basis
of "Fixation" and "How To" are primarily admissions of a rhetorical
failure in allowing those who don't understand psychologism to accuse
Peirce thereof. That may account for some such passages, but I suspect
that in some cases Peirce had in mind his preferred (at the time)
notion of a philosophical grounding (in phenomenology or semiotics or
the normative sciences, etc.) and was faulting himself for not
providing a sufficiently "deep" argument for some of his methodological
claims, especially the pragmatic maxim. But you and I are in agreement
on the central point, which is that Peirce was not accusing himself of
anything worth calling psychologism.
Best to all,
Jeff
Joseph Ransdell wrote:
As
regards tthe logical vs. psychological distinction: Jeff Kasser
wrote an important paper on what that distinction meant for
Peirce a few years ago. The title is "Peirce's Supposed
Psychologism". It;s on the ARISBE website:
http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/kasser/psychol.htm
Jeff makes it pretty clear, I think, that what Peirce meant by
"psychologism" -- which Peirce frequently inveighs against but is often
accused of himself -- is not what most people who talk about this
now assume that it is. I won't attempt to state Jeff's
conclusions here with any exactitude -- he will be joining the
discussion himself in a few days when he gets some free time -- but
just roughly indicate what he is getting at -- or at least what I
learned or think I learned from his paper -- namely, that the
conception of thought or mind is not uniquely the proper province of
any special science, be it psychology (scientific or otherwise)
or sociology or linguistics or the theory of computing machines or
whatever. The idea of mind or thought is also a basic commonsense
conception which has been around in the West in an overt form since the
time when people first started speculating about thought and mind in
ancient Greece. In the terminology Peirce adopted from Jeremy
Bentham, we should distinguish between a COENOSCOPIC sense of
"mind" or "thought" or other mentalistic term and an IDIOSCOPIC
sense of such terms.. The former is the sense of "mind" or
"thought" which we have in mind [!!] when we say something like "What
are you thinking about?", "What's on you mind?", "He spoke his
mind", and so forth, as distinct from the sense which is appropriate
for use in the context of some special scientific study of mind.
To understand what is meant by the word "mind" as used in scientific
psychology, let us say, we have to find out what people who have
established or mastered something in that field understand by such
terms since the meaning of such terms in that context is a matter of
what the course of special study of its subject matter has resulted in
up to this point. That is the idioscopic sense of "mind", "thought",
etc. But long before there was anything like a science of
psychology and long before we were old enough to understand that there
is any such thing as psychology we had already learned in the course of
our ordinary dealings with people something about the nature of mind in
the "coenoscopic" sense of the term. For we all learn early on,
as small children, that we have to figure out what people are
thinking in order to understand what they are wanting to say, for
example; we learn that people can be sincere or insincere, saying one
thing and thinking another; we learn that they sometimes lie,
pretending to think what what they do not actually think or believe;
people change their minds; they tell us what is on their minds; and we
learn also that they believe us or doubt us, too, when we say
something, and so forth. We become constantly -- I don't mean
obsessively but just as a mater of course -- aware of that sort of
thing in any conversation we have or any communications we read.
In other words it is just the plain old everyday understanding that is
indispensable for ordinary life, which may be shot through with
contradiction and incoherence but,.for better or worse, is
indispensable nonetheless
Now it is a nice question
to get clear on exactly what we must be minimally assuming or taking
for granted in drawing such commonsense distinctions in our ordinary
day-in, day-out dealing with people, and we may very well make big
mistakes in trying to say what they are; but whatever the right
analysis of that yields -- which may take some considerable skill to
get right -- it will be our common sense understanding of what mind is,
what thinking is, etc. That is our "coenoscopic" understanding of
what mind is and that is what philosophers -- including logicians --
are (or ought to be) concerned to explicate when they are doing their
proper job..
Such is, I believe, Peirce's view of the
distinction of two kinds of understanding of what mind is. There
is, by the way, a corresponding distinction to be drawn between our
ordinary commonsense (coenoscopic) physics -- our understanding
of the purely physical aspect of the things we have to deal with in
moving about and moving other things in the world, and then there os
the special scientific (ideoscopic) understanding. Now, at one
point Jeff quotes a passage from Peirce in which he claims that at the
basis of the special sciences we in fact find coenoscopic conceptions
which we think of as being idioscopic though they are not.
==========quote
Peirce=================
Now it is a circumstance most significant for the logic of science,
that this science of dynamics, upon which all the physical sciences
repose, when defined in the strict way in which its founders understood
it, and not as embracing the law of the conservation of energy, neither
is nor ever was one of the special sciences that aim at the discovery
of novel phenomena, but merely consists in the analysis of truths which
universal experience has compelled every man of us to acknowledge.
Thus, the proof by Archimedes of the principle of the lever, upon which
Lagrange substantially bases the whole statical branch of the science,
consists in showing that that principle is virtually assumed in our
ordinary conception of two bodies of equal weight. Such universal
experiences may not be true to microscopical exactitude, but that they
are true in the main is assumed by everybody who devises an experiment,
and is therefore more certain than any result of a laboratory
experiment. (CP 8.198, CN3 230 [1905])
============end quote===========
In other words, Peirce is identifying there the point at which the
coenoscopic and the idioscopic meet, in physical conceptions that
appear in the context of idioscopic (special scientific) research, and
I suggest that the two "psychological laws" which he is referring to in
the passage in the Fixation article which I quoted in my first post on
this topic must be the coenoscopic analogues of those in the case of
the psychological sciences, In other words, those
particular psychological laws must be psychological in the commonsense
psychology of everyday life, though they will appear as fundamental
conceptions in scientific psychology.and thus seem at first to be
idioscopic in type.
Now Jeff's claim in that paper
(among other things) is that "The Fixation of Belief" is
concerned with psychology only in the sense of commonsense psychology,
not scientific psychology, and Peirce's anti-psychologism is as
characteristically present in that paper as it is in any of his more
technical papers on logic. Thus the fact that the Fixation paper
relies as heavily as it does on doubt and belief neither shows
that Peirce lapsed into psychologism there nor that Peirce
ever thought that this was so, but rather -- and I think this is
what Jeff is saying -- it is rather that where Peirce may seem to be
admitting to psychologism in that paper he is in fact admitting to
something rather different, namely, a rhetorical failure in composing
it that mistakenly made it appear to people who do not understand
what the objection to psychologism actually is
that he was making his claims in that paper rest on psychology in the
special or idioscopic sense. when in fact he was not. (I
may be putting words in Jeff's mouth there but I think that is what he
is getting at.)
Well, that will have to do for this post. Sorry for being so
long-winded on that.
Joe
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
. .
-----
Original Message ----
From: Bill Bailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Peirce Discussion Forum <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2006 1:21:48 PM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: What "fundamenal psychological laws" is Peirce
referring to?
Joe, thanks for your response. I "get it"
now.
Festinger
came to mind because "selective exposure" as a mode of dissonance
avoidance was a major topic in communication research. I haven't
read that literature in years--and I didn't particularly buy into it
then--so don't trust me now. As I recall, one mode of dissonance
reduction was similar to the pre-dissonance
mode: "selective perception," or "cherry picking"--selecting
only the data consonant with the threatened belief or behavior.
"Rationalization" was a dissonance reduction means, I think,
though it seems nearly tautological. In terms of Festinger's
smoking-health dissonance I remember it in this form: "We're
all going to die of something." There is also the heroic, the
transcendent "We all owe a death." Simple denial is a common
means: "If smoking causes cancer, most smokers would get it, but
in fact most don't." Researchers turned up so many techniques
of dissonance reduction I no longer remember which were
originally proposed by Festinger and which came later.
Some,
by the way (I think Eliot Aronson among them), argued cognitive
dissonance was not a logical but a psychological phenomena, and
that humans were not rational but rationalizers. And, relevant to
your remarks below, some argued that the need to reduce the dissonance
resulted not from logical tensions, but from the social concept of the
self. For example, the argument goes, if it were only a logical
tension operating, there'd be no tension experienced from telling a lie
for money. It would make logical sense to say anything asked of
you for either a few or many bucks. The tension arises only
as a result of social norms: "What kind of person am I to
tell a lie for a lousy couple of bucks." In my personal
experience with smoking, I could have cared less about the dissonance
between my smoking and the health information. It was simply
desire; I didn't want to quit. I became involved in "dissonance
reduction" behaviors only when socially challenged or when I thought
about dealing such challenges.
As
regards the argument that social consciousness is prior to
the consciousness of self, doesn't "social consciousness" somewhat
load the dice? Social consciousness requires some degree of
"exteriorizing," creating an "out there" of objects through
processes of representation that must be acquired through learning and
language. A parallel consciousness of self would
necessarily be a consequent and never an antecedent development.
Now, I believe that is the case for the "consciousness of . . . "
modality of mind in which the self is a representational
construct. But from what did all that construction arise? I
think we are necessarily forced to accept a more primary mode of
information processing, the more autistic or "child-like" consciousness
in which feelings, actions, and perceptions are merged in a single
plane of experience. I view the learned social consciousness
as a secondary overlay onto the primary mode--which persists
throughout out lives as our everyday mind. In the primary
mode, events and object are experienced pretty much in terms of
their immediate relevances--what we are feeling and
doing. The contents of the acquired secondary mode are
assimilated into the primary mode of information processing.
Hence we can very subjectively find beauty and enjoyment in the
spontaneous elaboration of theories that cause freshmen, stumbling
along in the secondary mode, acute headaches.
Isn't
it the imposition of social consciousness which forces upon us
rationalization if not rationality itself? Even
those who live in literature and want to eat the fruit from still life
paintings must rationalize the irrational. (I
think the "irrational" in human behavior is seldom the
opposite of "rational," but more nearly something like
"autistic," "narcissistic," or "egocentric," and as such more nearly
the opposite of "social.")
Bill Bailey
"Joe,
I don't understand why you think the order might be reversed. To
resort to authority is essentially to cease thinking and to
unquestioningly accept. There's no cognitive
dissonance avoidance necessary. But if we begin with trying
to avoid dissonance, and society forces us to confront it, then
authority is one possible resort. (Leon Festinger's school
of research would suggest still other possibilities of
dissonance reduction.)"
REPLY:
Well, I was thinking of
the argument one might make that social consciousness is prior to
consciousness of self, and the method of tenacity seems to me to be
motivated by the value of self-integrity, the instinctive tendency not
to give up on any part of oneself, and one's beliefs are an important
aspect of what one tends to think of when one thinks of one's
identity. Losing some beliefs e.g. in religion, in one's parents,
in the worthiness of one's country, etc., can be experienced as a kind
of self-destruction and people often seem to demonstrate great
fear of that happening to them. But this sense of self-identity
could be argued to be a later construct than one's idea of the social
entity of which one is a part.
I always liked to use it
in teaching intro to philosophy classes because it is the only paper on
logic I know of where it is made clear that there is no obvious or
self-evident basis for supposing that it is better to be reasonable
than unreasonable: indeed, irrationality is frequently respected
more highly than rationality by people with a literary orientation, for
example. Anyway, what I want to say is that I interpret Peirce as
appealing to four distinct things of value to which appeal can be made
-- which may be existentially at odds with one another as values -- in
a process of belief-fixing: self-integrity, social unity,
coherence or unity of ideas (construable objectively as the idea that
there is a universe), and the idea of the independently real that is
always there, the one thing you can always rely upon. I think of
the fourth method as presupposing the values of the first three but as
introducing a fourth as well, which could be the first three considered
AS ordered, I suppose. (But I am not arguing that.)
What are the other possible kinds of dissonance reduction that
Festinger identifies, by the way?
Joe
-----
Original Message ----
From: Bill Bailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Peirce Discussion Forum <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 11:34:25 PM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: What "fundamenal psychological laws" is Peirce
referring to?
Joe,
I don't understand why you think the order might be reversed. To
resort to authority is essentially to cease thinking and to
unquestioningly accept. There's no cognitive
dissonance avoidance necessary. But if we begin with trying
to avoid dissonance, and society forces us to confront it, then
authority is one possible resort. (Leon Festinger's school
of research would suggest still other possibilities of
dissonance reduction.)
Bill Bailey
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
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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