Jeff Kasser
Thu, 05 Oct 2006 12:27:15 -0700
Good stuff, Jim. Thanks. I've raised a query about the relationship between the two laws and the method of tenacity in my just-posted response to Joe, who broached a similar issue. I'd like, of course, to hear your thoughts on this matter. I'm not sure that the tenacious person's basing his method on these laws would need to be done as explicitly or self-consciously as your message suggests. If the method were adequately grounded in the proper laws, that would count in favor of the practices of someone deploying the method, even if the deployer were unaware of the grounding. Lots of questions about the different objects of epistemic evaluation (people, beliefs, methods, arguments, etc.) could arise here, but Peirce seems most directly interested in the virtues and vices of methods, rather than of those who deploy them. Also like Joe, you don't quite make it clear which two laws you think Peirce has in mind. I don't have my text with me just now and will go over it with both your message and Joe's in mind in the next day or so. I'm excited to see what we all manage to come up with. The suggestion in your message could, I suppose, be combined with Joe's about the properties of neural tissue. Your law will need to be hedged a good bit to protect it from falsification, but that's not an objection, since that holds of most laws. Best, Jeff -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu> Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2006 00:05:50 -0400 Subject: [peirce-l] Re: What Thanks for the response Jeff. I guess my first question is whether the passage which reads "basing his method, as he does, on two fundamental psychological laws" could refer to something not specifically targeted for the method of tenacity. The settlement of opinion is common to all four methods, and thus, does not seem to reflect laws peculiar to the method of tenacity. I previously suggested: "an instinctive dislike of an undecided state of mind....makes men cling spasmodically to what views they already take." (FOB sec.5) This is target specific. Now, the data for this law (presuming we could frame it in terms of all men at some time) may be understood as coenoscopic in the sense of an observation about our common moral psychology. But it could also be expressed idioscopically in terms of association and habit. It is difficult given the passage above to imagine the tenacious individual "basing his method" on association or habit since these could hardly be as transparent to the tenacious individual as the passage suggests the psychological laws are. (basing his method, as he does...) Jim W -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 11:24 AM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: What I agree with you, Jim, that Peirce must have thought that the statement about the aim of inquiry must be pretty close, at least, to being a psychological law. I claimed as much in my post. It's nevertheless a somewhat puzzling claim. Precisely because, as you note, the (alleged) fact that doubt is necessary for inquiry does not directly settle the question about the aim of inquiry, it's a bit peculiar that Peirce called his claim about the aim of inquiry a psychological law. Generalizations about what some people desire when they inquire won't get us anywhere near the status of a law. Even a generalization about what all inquirers in fact "desire when they inquire seems to fall far short of nomological status. Peirce seems to be talking about an aim that is internal to inquiry in the way that checkmate is internal to playing chess (though the motivations for chess-playing can be quite various). Nobody would be tempted to say that the aim of chess is a psychological law or fact. But Peirce seems to be claiming, not just in "Fixation" but in many other places, that the aim of the activity of inquiry can be derived from psychological (i.e. psychical) facts. And he also seems to claim that an activity doesn't count as inquiry unless it is done from a certain aim (or maybe even from certain motivations). So these psychical facts about doubt and belief are doing a lot of peculiar and intriguing work for Peirce. Best, Jeff -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu> Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 12:49:49 -0400 Subject: [peirce-l] Re: What "fundamenal psychological laws" is Peirce referring to? J Kasser says, "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. " (end) The question is whether "the settlement of opinion is the sole object of inquiry" is a normative truth or a psychological law. The fact that doubt is a necessary condition for inquiry does not settle this question. It merely suggests what is required for any inquiry to begin. Peirce does not say "the settlement of inquiry ought to be the sole object of inquiry." Thus, the statement is a generalization about what all (some?) men desire when they inquire. It is the major premise in a practical syllogism. The conclusion is the normative claim that we ought to pursue the scientific method. Maybe there is an implicit premise that we ought to pursue the best method for settling opinion. This might satisfy those concerned with the "naturalistic fallacy." Peirce overstates his case about his own psychologism. His statement about the "origin of truth" is unfortunate. He should have spoken of either a "desire for truth" originating in the impulse to self-consistency or of "belief." In the latter case, it makes perfectly good sense to talk about psychological concepts such as self-control, satisfaction, conviction, habit etc. The interesting question is whether we can make sense of practical reason and talk of ends and actions without the introduction of psychological concepts. The problem here has less to do with replacing psychologizing tendencies with phenomenological observations than with using the "intentional idom" to assess practical reason. I have always thought of FOB as an "ethics of inquiry." And unless one wants to try and eliminate the concepts involved in moral psychology, they are always there as a conceptual resource for articulating the normative basis of methodology in the sciences. It appears then, that logical methodology is based on ethics. Jim W -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 3:04 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 deter mining 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 dis tinguish 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, pre tending 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 challe nges. 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] --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.12.6/453 - Release Date: 9/20/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] No virus found in this incoming message. 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