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
---
Message from
peirce-l forum to subscriber
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
---
Message from peirce-l
forum to subscriber
[EMAIL PROTECTED]