Jeff, I take your point that some circles are much more vicious than others, and that Peirce was "very concerned about avoiding what he takes to be vicious circularities in philosophy". And agree that it's not always easy to sort out the vicious circles from the others.
[[ Peirce was very concerned about building claims that couldn't be established by the coenscopic sciences into the goals and methods of inquiry, because he feared that they would then be placed beyond the possibility of falsification through inquiry. ]] Actually i found myself taking a line like that a couple of months ago, in a review of a book on animal and human cognition. Some of the contributors argue for a discontinuity between human consciousness and that of other primates, and claim that this thesis is testable (i.e. falsifiable). That there's an enormous *difference* is beyond question, i think, but i'm enough of a "synechist" to have doubts about a discontinuity. Anyway, in my review (online at http://users.vianet.ca/gnox/MissingLink.htm ), i pointed to what i see as a circularity in their method of testing. I don't know whether Peirce would see my own logic there as valid, but i think the question may be relevant here in that that part of Peirce's concern about "psychologism" was that it made reasoning too "human" (i.e. made its range of application was too specialized) -- as when he refers to "the psychological or accidental human element" (CP1.537), or says that "A subtle and almost ineradicable narrowness in the conception of Normative Science runs through almost all modern philosophy in making it relate exclusively to the human mind" (CP 5.128). But i'm not sure that i'm reading Peirce right in this respect. gary F. }Once the whole is divided, the parts need names. There are already enough names. One must know when to stop. [Tao Te Ching 32 (Feng/English)]{ gnoxic studies }{ http://users.vianet.ca/gnox/gnoxic.htm --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
