Jeff Kasser says:
JK: 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.
REPLY:
JR: The more I think about it the less plausible it seems to me
that either of these is what he meant by the two "psychological
laws". What would the second one be: If x is a belief then
x is a habit? That doesn't even sound like a law. And as
regards the first, what exactly would it be? If a belief is
arrived at then inquiry ends? Or: If inquiry has ended then a
belief has been arrived at? But nothing like either of these
seems much like something he might want to call a psychological
law. Moreover, why would he single out the method of
tenacity as based on these when they are equally pertinent to all four
methods? He does say earlier that "the FEELING of believing
is a more or less sure indication of there being established in our
nature some habit which will determine our actions". That is more
like a law, in the sense he might have in mind, but that has to do with
a correlation between a feeling and an occurrence of a belief
establishment and, again, there is no special relationship there to the
method of tenacity in particular.
I suggest that the place to
look is rather at the simple description of the method of tenacity he
gives at the very beginning of his discussion of it when he says
"… why should we not attain the desired end by taking as answer to a
question any 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 that might disturb it?"
This involves reiteration of effort with anticipation of it having a
result in consequence of it , and thus implicitly makes reference to a
possible sequential regularity of a lawlike nature. The two
psychological laws might then be idioscopic rather than coenoscopic
laws, having to do with the responsiveness of neural tissue to repeated
stimulation and the like, which Peirce would know something
about. It doesn't make any difference that it is not cenoscopic
or properly philosophical since he is referring to it as something the
devotee of tenacity exploits, not as something logic is based
upon. This means that in referring to the two laws he is NOT
referring to the basic principle that inquiry is driven by doubt,
construed as constituted by what would be logically described as a
formal contradiction.
Now, as regards that principle, the
idea that inquiry -- thinking in the sense of "I just can't seem to
think today" or "he is a competent thinker" -- is driven by doubt in
the form of an exerienced contradiction is not a modern idea but
has its origins at the very beginning of philosophy in the West in the
practice of the dialectical craft of Socrates. Let me quote
myself, from a paper I wrote a few years back, on the Socratic
tradition in philosophy, which I claim to be the proper logical
tradition to which we should be putting Peirce in relation
In its origins Socratic dialectic probably developed as a
modification of practices of eristic dispute that made use
of the reductio techniques of the mathematicians, perhaps
as especially modified by the Parmenidean formalists.
Socratic dialectic differs importantly from the earlier
argumentation, though, in at least two major respects,
first, by conceiving of the elenchic or refutational aspect of
the argumentation not as a basis from which one could then
derive a positive conclusion either as the contradictory of
the proposition refuted, as in reductio argumentation, or
by affirming the alternative because it was the sole
alternative available, but rather as inducing an aporia or
awareness of an impasse in thought: subjectively, a
bewilderment or puzzlement. Second, it differs also by using
the conflicting energies held in suspense in the aporia as the
motivation of inquiry. (Ransdell, "Peirce and the Socratic
Tradition in Philosophy", Proceedings of the Peirce Society, 2000)
http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/ransdell/socratic.htm
Peirce could take this for granted not because of some well known
psychological laws but because of the adoption (in a modified form) of
the basic dialectical principle by Hegel and others, following upon the
use of it in the Kantian philosophy in the transcendental dialectic of
pure reason in the First Critique. I do not say that this should
also satisfy us today as sufficient to persuade us to the acceptance of
the thesis that inquiry is driven by doubt, construed as a
"dissatisfaction at two repugnant propositions". But it is
possible that Peirce did, at the time of composition of the Fixation
article, think that this would be regarded as being something no one
would be likely to dispute, or at least as something which no reader of
the Popular Science Monthly would be likely to dispute. (That
Journal was, as I understand it, a rough equivalent of the present day
Nature as regards its targeted audience, whereas the Scientific
American at that time was oriented more towards applications and
inventions than theoretical science.) It is not obvious that
logic should be based in a theory of inquiry, but it is not clear to me
that Peirce regarded that as something which had to be argued
for. In any case, none of this affects your thesis about Peirce
not regarding the Fixation as suffering from
psychologism.
I have a couple
of other comments to make, Jeff, but I will put them in another message
which I probably won't write before tomorrow.
Joe Ransdell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
----- Original Message ----
From: Jeff Kasser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Peirce Discussion Forum <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, October 1, 2006 3:04:13 PM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: What "fundamenal psychological laws" is Peirce referring to?
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