This is intriguing stuff, Joe and I'd like to hear more about what you have in mind.
First,
I'm not sure what sort of special relationship the
two psychological laws in question need to bear to the
method of tenacity. If they're in fact psychological (i.e.
psychical) laws, then it would be unsurprising if the other methods of
inquiry made important use of them. I thought that the only
special connection between the laws and tenacity is that the method
tries to deploy those laws especially simply and directly.
Next,
can you help me see more clearly how the passage you quote in support
of your suggestion that Peirce has in mind laws concerning the
properties of neural tissue, etc. is supposed to yield *two*
psychological (in any sense of ""psychological," since you rightly
point out that idioscopic laws might be fair game at this point)
laws? I don't love my interpretation and would like to find
a way of reading Peirce as clearer and less sloppy about this
issue. But I don't see how your reading leaves us with two
laws that Peirce could have expected the reader to extract from the
text.
Thanks to you and to both Jims and the other participants;
Ithis discussion makes me resolve to do less lurking on the list
(though I've so resolved before).
Jeff
-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Ransdell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 15:57:59 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: What "fundamenal psychological laws" is Peirce referring to?
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
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