I just borrowed Kwame Anthony Appiah's new book from the library: As If -- Idealization and Ideas
Life is a constant adjustment between the models we make and the realities > we encounter. In idealizing we proceed "as if" our representations were > true, while knowing they were not. -- rec -- On Sun, Mar 25, 2018 at 10:37 AM, Eric Charles < [email protected]> wrote: > Glen, spot on! Some of this I can hazard some thought on. > > In the meantime, I'll (again) lodge my main objection to what Peirce seems >> to be laying out, in my naive understanding, regarding belief and doubt. >> First, in response to his "But do not make believe; if pedantry has not >> eaten all the reality out of you, recognize, as you must, that there is >> much that you do not doubt, in the least", I absolutely reject that. I do >> doubt everything. But, as he mentions in Note <2>, his discussion here >> disallows "grades of certainty". By disallowing that, he destroys any >> purpose or meaning that might otherwise exist in the entire essay. >> > > You might well, as did Descartes, *imagine *that you doubt everything, as > an intellectual exercise. But you cannot actually doubt everything, because > to do so would be preemptively dysfunctional in all possible ways. You do > not type on your keyboard as if it might disappear at any moment. You do > not wonder if the world might be destroyed unless you flick every light > switch you pass exactly 24 times. Etc., etc.. As a practical matter, much > that in-principle could be doubted is not doubted as you go about your day > to day life. Were you actively doubting any significant portion of that > stuff on a continuous in-the-moment basis, you would be suffering from a > particularly acute variety of what we now call a "mental breakdown." Peirce > likely isn't thinking about things that minute, however. Probably his line > of thinking flows, to a significant extent, out of the Emersonian tradition > of American thought. We find ourselves where we find ourselves, and though > we may change quite a bit over a lifetime, at any given moment in our > lives, if we assess ourselves with simple honesty, we will find that there > are some things we are unable to seriously doubt. Emerson could not find it > in himself to doubt that slavery was bad. He also, prior to the Fugitive > Slave Act, could not find it in himself to doubt that he had no basis for > dictating how people so far away, living in such a different world, should > live their lives. The Fugitive Slave Act forced inadvertently slavery into > his world as a matter of practical course, and thereafter he could not > doubt that he had a firm basis for opposing slavery throughout the country. > Could he have imagined doubting those things as an intellectual exercise, > yes. Could he actually doubt them and live his life in fundamentally > different ways in those moments? No. They *were *his beliefs, and, as a > practical matter, he could not doubt them. > > As for the "grades of certainty" issue, I don't think Peirce is trying to > say that such things do not exist. I think he is merely pointing out that > he is not using the term "belief" for the far extreme on a graded scale. He > is not contrasting absolute doubt with absolute belief, but rather he is > discussing things that are more or less doubted, and whatever the > particular context, a "thing less doubted" is a "thing more believed." > > In this context, a community of scientists is composed of people who > believe various things about a subject matter to various extents, and are > willing to act upon those beliefs in a research context. (That is, of > course, only one of many important qualities.) In one of his earliest major > works, "The Fixation of Belief", Peirce lays out many ways that one might > fixate beliefs, i.e., cease to doubt. The primary merit of the scientific > method of fixating belief, he argues, is that it is the only approach that > cares what is true. Combining that with your observations here, we see the > interesting tension where the scientist must believe something before they > can engage in the scientific process, but she must also be prepared to > change that belief fairly readily if the evidence changes. Note the > similarity with Emerson and slavery. In Emerson's case the circumstances > changed, and his beliefs adjusted to a new world. In the scientists case > the available knowledge changes, but the needed adjustment is of identical > kind. > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
