Welcome back, Cathy!
Your classification of the four methods of fixing belief describes the "A
Priori Method" as "private, reasoned". But as Peirce describes it (EP1:118-19),
it is no more "private" than the method of Authority; indeed it is more public,
in that it recognizes a broader range of other people's ideas as being worthy
of consideration. Actually I don't like to call it the "A Priori Method"
because that does make it sound private, when actually it's quite social in
practice. I think it might better be called the method of Consensus, where
beliefs are fixed by agreement rather than tested against experience. It is
reasoning prior to experiment, not prior to dialogue and debate with other
reasoners. (Though of course a dialogue *can* be internal.)
gary f.
} A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest. [Havelock Ellis] {
www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm }{ gnoxics
-----Original Message-----
From: Catherine Legg [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 2-May-14 5:59 AM
Hi everyone,
Having not been able to wrest open my peirce-l inbox for some time, I was able
to peruse the chapter 6 thread pretty much in one reading last night.
It was very nice to see the various themes unfold and develop before my eyes.
Thank you Jeff K for your rich account of Peircean epistemology - informed by
your own research career in this area - that you used to put a very lucid
context around Kees' treatment. Thank you Jeffrey D for the sophisticated
Kantian scholarly framework you brought to bear, and the many probing questions
you asked to try to push the discussion deeper.
Here are some thoughts I had:
Ben pointed out how ethics and aesthetics might be seen to be in the background
even of Peirce's remarks at the end of his very early paper FoB. It was
possibly even unrecognised by Peirce at that point that these prior sciences
were already 'growing there'. This was really interesting to me - thanks, Ben.
Jeff K (and others) drew this out by distinguishing between an 'efficiency
argument' and an 'ethical argument' in FoB for the method of science over the
other three methods, suggesting that Peirce might have vacillated between the
two. I wonder if we might put the two back together, though, via the discussion
of 'ultimate ends' and 'the only evil is not to have an ultimate end', that
took place at the tail-end of Chapter 4 between Stefan, Phyllis, Gary, Matt and
others.
Sam said we should distinguish between the claim that the 4th method is the
only one for which it makes sense to say there is a right and wrong way of
applying it, and the claim that science is self-correcting. Jeff D conceded
this point, but I'm not sure I agree. What is it to self-correct other than to
recognise that one is going about one's chosen task wrongly?
This led into a very interesting discussion of whether the 4th method really is
the only one that allows self-correction, as Peirce claims. I was thinking
perhaps the method of authority also allows for *some* kind of right or wrong
way of applying it. For instance we might imagine a group of scholastic
philosophers realising that they had 'got Aristotle all wrong'. Peirce may try
to get out of this by arguing that in that case the medieval scholars have
begun scientific inquiry into the views of Aristotle, but this sounds a bit too
easy of a solution, which broadens the concept of scientific inquiry merely to
solve the problem. I was thinking that it would be the method of authority that
would allow self-correction if any of the other 3 methods did, since that is
the other 'public' method. I subscribe to a characterisation of the 4 methods
that I can't remember where I picked up, but it goes like this:
Method of Tenacity: private, random
Method of Authority: public, random
A Priori Method: private, reasoned
Method of Science: public, reasoned
Using this taxonomy I considered Jeff D's fascinating question of whether these
4 methods are the only possible. I was initially inclined to answer yes,
because the taxonomy considered this way might be said to cover all of logical
space. However, the examples Jeff D gave were very intriguing.
With the dialectical method I agreed with Ben that it probably collapsed into
the a priori method. The hermeneutic method I think is what the scholastic
philosophers are doing with Aristotle above. But the genealogical
method.............????? Maybe this breaks the mold? And Peirce seems to be
relying on it more and more in his later philosophy insofar as he invokes an
evolutionarily developing instinct, rather than ratiocination, as a guiding
principle in inquiry.... I don't know.
Cathy
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