Ben, Gary R, list,
Yes, we can identify five (and probably more) methods of fixing belief by making our analysis more fine-grained. But that’s because they overlap in practice. Gary R suggests “that a priori method may become a Method of Consensus, but begins with an individual's thinking.” Yes, it begins with an individual’s thinking that the authorities could be wrong! By calling it “method of consensus”, I only mean that it works toward consensus, not that it’s achieved. This is the social aspect of what an individual might call a coherence theory of truth, meaning that the internal consistency of a belief-system is what makes its component beliefs “true”; each belief is tested for compatibility with the others, none of them really tested against experience (by actively looking for an experimental refutation). But I still maintain that in his published draft of the “Fixation” essay, Peirce emphasizes the social aspect of this method over the individual. Re CP 5.564, which Ben quotes (as I also do in my book, www.gnusystems.ca/xpt.htm#fix), I might call it the “method of fermentation” — but coming from me, that might be taken as a bad pun. gary f. From: Benjamin Udell [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 4-May-14 8:51 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] RE: de Waal Seminar: Chapter 6, Philosophy of Science Gary F, Frankin, Jeff K, Jeffrey D, list, Actually I said that I didn't think that the method of opinion and the method of the development of opinion (the a priori) are the same. I said that the latter replaced the former in Peirce's mind and that I could only speculate on why he didn't keep both. Now it seems to me the method of opinion seems to be intermediate between the method of authority and the method of the a priori. The method of opinion in Peirce's description appears as the attempt of authority to cope with loss of despotic means by influencing with speeches, and so on, the development of opinion. Gary F. has been calling the method of a priori the method of concensus'. The method of consensus may be a species of it, but Peirce's characterization of Hegel's use of the method of a priori ("inclinations") does not seem at all a characterization of the method of consensus. In a note added in 1893 (CP 5 Endnotes) to (CP 5.392) "The Fixation of Ideas", Peirce classes Hegel's dialectic as belonging to the method of inclinations, by which I think Peirce means the method of the _a priori_: As for Hegel, who led Germany for a generation, he recognizes clearly what he is about. He simply launches his boat into the current of thought and allows himself to be carried wherever the current leads. He himself calls his method _dialectic_, meaning that a frank discussion of the difficulties to which any opinion spontaneously gives rise will lead to modification after modification until a tenable position is attained. This is a distinct profession of faith in the method of inclinations. Here's Peirce circa 1906, the method of a priori is now the method of the fermentation of ideas, nearly bacchic: CP 5.564. My paper of November 1877, setting out from the proposition that the agitation of a question ceases when satisfaction is attained with the settlement of belief, and then only, goes on to consider how the conception of truth gradually develops from that principle under the action of experience; beginning with willful belief, or self-mendacity, the most degraded of all intellectual conditions; thence rising to the imposition of beliefs by the authority of organized society; then to the idea of a settlement of opinion as the result of a fermentation of ideas; and finally reaching the idea of truth as overwhelmingly forced upon the mind in experience as the effect of an independent reality. (From manuscript entitled: "Reflexions upon Pluralistic Pragmatism and upon Cenopythagorean Pragmaticism." c. 1906, which, according to EP 2:543, "seems to have disappeared from Harvard's collection of Peirce's papers.") Best, Ben
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