Jeff, List,
Well, there is faith. But it is also not very
self correcting. I say "not very" since I agree
with some that faith is grounded in fear and
hope. Resolution of fears or limitations of hopes can alter faith.
On a separate issue, I think a close reading of
FoB indicates that Peirce thinks that each of the
methods for the fixation of belief might have its
place. I certainly rely on authority a lot, for
example, and sometimes I am (I think not
irrationally) stubborn. The a priori is a dimension that is foreign to me.
John
At 12:25 AM 2014-04-12, Jeffrey Brian Downard wrote:
Sam, Ben, Jeff K., List,
You point out that "An interesting
interpretation of the moral dimension of FoB is
to be found in the 5th Chapter of Richard
Smyths <Reading Peirce Reading>, where Smyth
draws an extended comparison between Peirces
argumentative strategy in FoB and the
argumentative strategy Kant uses in his ethics,
particularly the second Critique." A nice way
to test this reconstruction of Peirce's argument
is to ask if the list of methods is meant to be
a complete of the major classes of methods, or
if there is a larger list of possible methods
for fixing belief--some of which he does not consider in this essay.
The basic gist of Smyth's reconstruction of the
argument is that Peirce is employing a Kantian
strategy, and that the target of his argument is
any philosophical position to tries to ground
the methods of inquiry on material practical
principles. As such, he thinks that Peirce is
borrowing the strategy Kant uses in his ethics
and is putting it to work in his theory of
logic. As such, Peirce is arguing that the
scientific method is the only one that is
grounded on an understanding of the requirements
of logical inquiry as *formal* constraints on
our conduct. As you suggest, the defect of all
material practical principles is that, in one
way or another, they are all based on a
principle of self-love. That is, they all rely
on a pattern of justification that is based on
the idea that the fact that someone has a desire
for X is a good enough reason to adopt X as an
end. Kant points out that this kind of
principle does not function as an
imperative. As such, it is does not function as
a rational constraint on deliberation. When
Peirce claims that we should adopt those ends
that can be consistently pursued, it certainly
has echoes of Kant's claims that moral duties
are grounded on rational constraints of consistency.
Here is a follow up question that is designed to
see who agrees and who disagrees with this
reconstruction of the argument in
"Fixation": Do you think Peirce's list of
tenacity, authority and the a priori methods is
exhaustive of the major classes of material
principles that one might claim are fundamental
in a normative theory of logic? Or, is this
list of three methods for fixing belief only a
partial list of the possible alternatives to the scientific method?
I think it is worth noting that, if it is a
partial list, it would be hard to see how Peirce
could argue that the scientific method is the
only method that admits of any distinction of a
right and a wrong way of fixing beliefs. At
most, he could argue that the scientific method
is the only one of the four that he considers
that admits of such a difference, but that
others methods he has not considered might admit of the same difference.
--Jeff
Jeff Downard
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
NAU
(o) 523-8354
________________________________________
From: Sam Bruton [[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2014 2:03 PM
To: Benjamin Udell; [email protected]
Subject: RE: Fwd: [PEIRCE-L] RE: de Waal
Seminar: Chapter 6, Philosophy of Science
Ben, Jeff, Jeffrey, List,
I appreciate Bens reconstruction and
interpretive remarks thanks. With regards to
Jeffs question about the role of ethics in
FoB, and at the risk of stating the obvious,
paragraph 5.387 seems to me simply shot through
with ethical claims that are clearly distinct
from the various efficiency-related points that
also run through the essay, e.g., what is more
wholesome than any particular belief is
integrity of belief, and that to avoid looking
into the support of any belief from a fear that
it may turn out rotten is quite as immoral as
it is disadvantageous. And at the end of the
para., one who dares not know the truth and
seeks to avoid it, is in a sorry state of mind indeed.
So perhaps Im missing the point at
issue, but my simple-minded reconstruction is
that Peirce is arguing that anyone who
experiences doubts (i.e., virtually all of us)
is committed to an interest in arriving at the
truth, or caring about the truth, or something
like that. For all such people, there is an
essentially moral obligation not to avoid
looking at the truth, i.e., an obligation not
to adopt one of the failed three methods
described in the essay. Its an assertion of
the moral status of epistemic responsibility. Or at least thats how I take it.
An interesting interpretation of the
moral dimension of FoB is to be found in the
5th Chapter of Richard Smyths Reading Peirce
Reading, where Smyth draws an extended
comparison between Peirces argumentative
strategy in FoB and the argumentative strategy
Kant uses in his ethics, particularly the
second Critique. Hints of that strategy can be
seen in Peirces passing reference to the
costs of the method of science, and his
praise of the advantages of the other three
methods. Like a commitment to morality, the
method of science may require sacrifice of personal interests.
Hopefully someone else can take these thoughts further. Sam
From: Benjamin Udell [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2014 2:12 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Fwd: [PEIRCE-L] RE: de Waal
Seminar: Chapter 6, Philosophy of Science
Jeff, Jeffrey, Sam, list,
Jeff, I have trouble making more of Peirce's
esthetic and ethical frames of inquiry in "The
Fixation of Belief." When the inquirially good
is the inquirially efficient (apart from
countervailing moral concerns such as
involuntary tests of people), it seems a simple
Peircean genus-species relation of the good to
the true. Insofar as theoretical inquiry is
subject to extra-inquirial ends, the ethical and
esthetic issues get more complex, and this
happens inevitably. A lot may be implicit, but
the explicit statements toward the end of
"Fixation" seem to sum up pretty well the
esthetic and ethical frames as conceived of in
that article. But I think that the problem is
probably just me, in need of an IQ boost.
Anyway, in "Fixation" he is trying to get away
from, or perhaps to _precede_, metaphysical
nominalist-realist arguments over truth, the
real, etc., so he pursues the issues in terms of
belief, belief's security, a hypothesis that
there are reals, etc., and even denies that
anybody cares about truth _per se_. In later
years he embraces the inquirial importance of a
hearty will to truth, and even disparages the
idea of beliefs (in some sense) in genuine
science. But in those later years it is still
essentially truth as eventually distinguished
from falsehood and defined in "Fixation" and
"How to Make Our Ideas Clear" - e.g., that
opinion which, unlike a false opinion, will not
steer one wrong in what one aims at, and the
final opinion that _would_ be reached by
sufficient inquiry - it is truth so
distinguished and presuppositionally defined
that he embraces as inquiry's end. He does not
come to drop the idea that belief and doubt are
important terms in which to understand the ideas
of truth and inquiry - for example in the 1902
Carnegie application. Thus truth is a belief's
ideal security or 'stability' as some put it -
but it's a stability not only in actual
situations but across would-be situations as
well. I think that Peirce is quite right to see
modal realism as a necessary implication of his kind of pragmatism.
Peirce in later years allows of practical
certainty, as opposed to theoretical certainty.
A practical general certainty would still in
principle be 'falsifiable', i.e., testable for
falsity, at least by critical discussion.
Otherwise it would be a belief that makes no
practical difference, and thus, as you put it,
not to be prized, not worth having. One might
say that an in-principle untestable belief lacks
all intellectual _vividness_, at least at heart.
It's interesting how you link this with how we
don't value that which comes to us inevitably
and free of cost, risk, etc. I wish that I had
thought of that; you've traced a connection from
logic back through ethics to esthetics.
There's another point that I can make, however.
In "Fixation", Peirce argues that the scientific
method is, _among the four methods that he
outlines_, the only one that leaves room for its own misapplication.
Peirce's big picture of inquiry methods is part
of an even bigger picture of methods of learning
and development cognitive and otherwise, which
beckons when one starts to consider esthetic and
ethical frames of inquiry, a bigger picture that
people like me, who are far less encyclopedic
than Peirce, find it helpful to thematize and explore now and then.
From here onward, my post becomes something of
a ramble. Those who continue should not worry
too much about what I'm 'driving at'.
One could outline further methods - e.g., the
method of struggle, trial as combat - which
could be seen as a
not-generally-obviously-infallibilistic genus of
which the method of (despotic) authority is an
infallibilistic species, a species such that one
side in combat has become dominant and seemingly
infallible. Then there is the method of
trial-and-error, which is fallibilistic, and is
the method of 'men of experience', whom
Aristotle rated below artisans and scientists,
because the 'men of experience' are least able
to give an account of their supposed knowledge.
Yet Peirce defines a scientific intelligence as
an intelligence capable of learning from
experience. One could argue that the method of
trial-and-error is a rudiment of scientific
method, in a way trial-and-error, especially as
involving personal stakes (even if 'only' those
of one's time, energy, reputation, etc.), is the
struggle-level of scientific inquiry. However,
struggle as trial-and-error is also, in addition
to that, a way of learning not so much
cognitively as volitionally, i.e., some sort of
strengthening or unshackling of virtues or
character strengths, particularly in areas,
arenas so to speak, where the struggle element
is predominant - conflicts for power and
freedom, competition for means and wealth,
more-or-less cultural rivalries for glory,
glamour, and at least non-eclipse, and
more-or-less societal disputes for standing,
honor, legitimacy. From these one could derive
conceptions of (infallibilistic) inquirial
methods of authority - authority of power,
authority of wealth, authority of glamour
(obviously related to the method of the _a
priori_), and authority of status (like the
traditional 'argument from authority', known in
Latin as _argumentum ad verecundiam_ (respect,
reverence, etc.)), which settle opinions by the
wrongs of coercion, corruption, emotional
manipulation, and delusion. Anyway, while all
inquiry involves learning, there is a broad
sense of 'learning' such that not all learning
is cognitive (and even cognitive learning is not
always particularly inquirial or
opinion-fixative even when it is a bit of struggle, e.g., rote memorization).
Among the methods of authority, perhaps the
biggest temptation in discovery research is the
method of status, especially when it is a method
of _self_-deception, such that one grants
oneself a status of greater knowledgeability,
etc., than one fairly has; it's a temptation of
the intelligent; magicians find it easier to
bewilder or beguile 'smart' people than to do so
with 'stupid' people, by whom magicians mean,
the people who are unimpressed and chuckle,
"well, you did it somehow" (but those people are
obviously smart enough in another way). As
Feynman said, the person whom it is easiest for
one to fool is oneself. Peirce focuses, near the
end of "Fixation," on the closing of one's eyes
or ears to the information or evidence that
might bring one the truth particularly when one
should know better. This closing of one's
perception, in sometimes less guilty ways, plays
a particularly vulnerable role in the method of
tenacity because it is there unprotected by
folds of authority or of aprioristic emulation
of some fermented paradigm; instead there is to
keep practicing and repeating one's initial
opinion, it seems a bit like the gambler's
fallacy, boosted sometimes by some initial luck.
Well, practice and repetition of something that
has shown _some_ success is the core
practical-learning method, not inevitably
infallibilistic, of artisans and more generally
practitioners productive and otherwise; to which
method they add the appreciational method of
devotees (including the religious) -
identification (appreciation) and imitation
(emulation) and, these days, the methods of
reflective disciplines as well (sciences, fine
arts, etc.). What I'm getting at is that some
infallibilistic methods of inquiry can be seen
as misapplications, or at least as echoes, of
methods that have some validity outside of
inquiry as the struggle to settle opinion, and
thus have validity in applications in inquiry
(e.g., one needs to keep _in practice_ in doing
math, etc.), as long as those applications are
not confused with inquiry itself. Anyway, one's
barring of one's own way to truth inhabits the
core of all infallibilistic inquiry. Perhaps one
can reduce all logical sins to this, as long as
one remembers the difference between logical sin
and other logical errors, errors sometimes imposed on one.
Best, Ben
On 4/9/2014 1:09 AM, Kasser,Jeff wrote:
Sorry. I originally sent this only to Ben.
Sent from my iPhone
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Kasser,Jeff"
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> >
Date: April 8, 2014 at 10:54:58 PM MDT
To: Benjamin Udell <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> >
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] RE: de Waal Seminar: Chapter 6, Philosophy of Science
Hi Ben, Sam, Jeffrey, et al.
I like Jeffrey's question about the status in
Peirce's argument of the claim that the
scientific method is the only method that leaves
room for its own misapplication. And I like the
answer Ben gave below. Peirce rightly prefers
overlapping strands of argumentation to a single
line of reasoning, but it's hard to resist
raising questions about what in "Fixation" depends on what.
I tend to trace his argumentative resources back
to the doubt-belief theory. I think Peirce
wants to come as close as he can to deriving
such things as fallibility and openness to
improvement from those resources centered on
Section III of the paper. For belief to be worth
wanting, it has to be something that can go
wrong. Any game that makes it trivially true
that I win every time isn't worth playing, and
if there's no prospect at all of going wrong,
there's no real sense in which one can claim to
be right. So belief couldn't be satisfactory
unless it were, in principle at least, open to
correction. I can use a method that as a matter
of fact guarantees that I can't go wrong, but I
can't think of myself as doing that w/o
undercutting the very notion of success. So such
methods as authority can be used but can't be
voluntarily and clear-headedly adopted. This
comes close to building the hypothesis of
reality into the notion of belief, but Peirce
does that a couple of times in "Fixation," so far as I can tell.
I'd like to hear and talk more about how you see
the role of ethics and esthetics in the argument
of "Fixation," Ben. I think you and I agree that
the contrast between the efficiency aspects of
the argument and the normative appeals involved
isn't as clear as it's often been taken to be.
Best to all,
Jeff
________________________________________
From: Benjamin Udell [[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> ]
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2014 11:10 AM
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] RE: de Waal Seminar: Chapter 6, Philosophy of Science
Jeffrey, Jeff,
Off to an excellent start!
Jeffrey, you wrote,
[Peirce] says: This is the only one of the
four methods which presents any distinction of a
right and a wrong way. (EP, vol. 1, 121)
What is Peirce saying here? Let us try to
clarify the bases of this claim. In a number of
places, including the lectures in Reasoning and
the Logic of Things, he stresses and develops
the idea that the scientific method is
self-correcting. Id like to ask a question
about the relationship between these two claims.
Peirce means that, of the four methods, the
scientific method is the only one whereby
inquiry, according to the method's own account,
can go wrong as well as right; scientific method
alone among them presupposes, or hypothesizes,
that there are real things that are what they
are independently of the opinion of particular
minds or communities - hence the scientific
method's fallibilism. According to each of the
other three methods' own accounts, inquiry by
the method in the account cannot go wrong. On
the other hand, scientific method is like the
other methods in that, according its own
account, inquiry by it can go right - hence, the
scientific method's rejection of radical
skepticism, a rejection also expressed in the
opposition to merely quarrelsome or verbal
doubt. The scientific method's supposition of
real things, external permanency, to be cognized
albeit fallibly, is what gives it hope of
inquiry's not floundering in opinion's
vicissitudes. The scientific method takes
fallibility as well as the possibility of
success into account by having inquiry genuinely
address genuine doubts. By this it can improve
the security of beliefs, sometimes by changing
them. It lets such doubts in, instead of leaving
them to accrue against overall scientific method itself.
It seems to me that the claim that the inquirer
is fallible but has the potential for success is
the basis for the scientific method's claim that
inquiry should be self-critical and
self-corrective. The argument does not seem to
me to run in the opposite direction.
Near the end of "The Fixation of Belief" Peirce
does frame inquiry in terms of ethical and
esthetic issues, even though he did not at that
time regard the studies of esthetics and ethics
as preceding the study of logic.
http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html
But, above all, let it be considered that what
is more wholesome than any particular belief is
integrity of belief, and that to avoid looking
into the support of any belief from a fear that
it may turn out rotten is quite as immoral as it
is disadvantageous. The person who confesses
that there is such a thing as truth, which is
distinguished from falsehood simply by this,
that if acted on it should, on full
consideration, carry us to the point we aim at
and not astray, and then, though convinced of
this, dares not know the truth and seeks to
avoid it, is in a sorry state of mind indeed.
Yes, the other methods do have their merits: a
clear logical conscience does cost something --
just as any virtue, just as all that we cherish, costs us dear. [....]
"...immoral...", "Just as any virtue..." - those words point to ethics.
"...just as all that we cherish..." - those
words point to esthetics (in Peirce's sense of 'esthetics').
Now, in ethics there is usually the idea of a
struggle, e.g., in virtue ethics, courage is due
boldness (or at least due confident behavior)
despite pressure to do otherwise; prudence is
due caution despite contrary pressure; and so
on. In the above-quoted passage, Peirce sees
issues of struggle, costs, and trade-offs
reaching into issues of one's most general
values, i.e., the esthetic level. "The Fixation
of Belief" starts with the idea of inquiry as
struggle, and this struggle is also a case of
ethical right and wrong and of esthetic good and
bad, in Peirce's view at that time, even though
he didn't yet see the studies of esthetics and
ethics as preceding that of logic.
As regards your last paragraph, the scientific
method's fallibilism about opinion seems quite
thoroughgoing enough to apply to premisses,
conclusions, methods, etc., since all premisses,
conclusions, and methods that are actually
adopted are adopted on the basis of actual
opinions. The infallibilism of the other three methods seems likewise.
Best, Ben
On 4/7/2014 3:12 PM, Jeffrey Brian Downard wrote:
List,
In addition to joining Jeff K. in looking
forward to the prospect of bouncing ideas off
each other as we explore this chapter of the
<Guide for the Perplexed>, Id like t0o start by
saying that I found his introductory remarks
about The Fixation of Belief clear and to the point.
For the sake of getting the discussion started,
Id like raise a question about a claim Peirce
makes in part V of the essay. He says: This
is the only one of the four methods which
presents any distinction of a right and a wrong way. (EP, vol. 1, 121)
What is Peirce saying here? Let us try to
clarify the bases of this claim. In a number of
places, including the lectures in Reasoning and
the Logic of Things, he stresses and develops
the idea that the scientific method is
self-correcting. Id like to ask a question
about the relationship between these two claims.
Peirce seems to suggest that the self-correcting
character of the scientific method is quite
remarkable because it is able to correct for three kinds of errors:
1) in the premises (i.e., the observations)
weve used as starting points,
2) in the conclusions weve drawn (i.e.,
the beliefs weve formed) in our scientific reasoning,
3) and in the method itself.
I want ask a question about these three
different kinds of error. Call them, if you
will, observational errors, errors in our
conclusions, and methodological errors. How
might the claim that the scientific method is
the only one that admits of any distinction of a
right and wrong way be used in arguments to
support each of these three claims about the
self-correcting character of scientific
inquiry? My hunch is that the other three
methods he is consideringtenacity, authority
and the a priori methods--fail on each of these three fronts.
Yours,
Jeffrey D.
Jeff Downard
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
NAU
(o) 523-8354
________________________________________
From: Kasser,Jeff
[[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
<mailto:[email protected] > ]
Sent: Monday, April 07, 2014 10:55 AM
To: Jeffrey Brian Downard
Cc: Peirce List
Subject: de Waal Seminar: Chapter 6, Philosophy of Science
----------
Professor John Collier [email protected]
Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
Http://web.ncf.ca/collier
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