This from Peirce gets to the heart of things for me just now:
§5. SCIENCE AS A GUIDE TO CONDUCT
55. We have seen how success in mathematics would necessarily
create a confidence altogether unfounded in man's power of eliciting truth
by inward meditation without any aid from experience. Both its confidence
in what is within and the absolute certainty of its conclusions lead to the
confusion of a priori reason with conscience. For conscience, also, refuses
to submit its dicta to experiment, and makes an absolute dual distinction
between right and wrong. One result of this is that men begin to
rationalize about questions of purity and integrity, which in the long run,
through moral decay, is unfavorable to science. But what is worse, from our
point of view, they begin to look upon science as a guide to conduct, that
is, no longer as pure science but as an instrument for a practical end. One
result of this is that all probable reasoning is despised. If a proposition
is to be applied to action, it has to be embraced, or believed without
reservation. There is no room for doubt, which can only paralyze action.
But the scientific spirit requires a man to be at all times ready to dump
his whole cart-load of beliefs, the moment experience is against them. The
desire to learn forbids him to be perfectly cocksure that he knows already.
Besides positive science can only rest on experience; and experience can
never result in absolute certainty, exactitude, necessity, or universality.
But it is precisely with the universal and necessary, that is, with Law,
that [con]science concerns itself. Thus the real character of science is
destroyed as soon as it is made an adjunct to conduct; and especially all
progress in the inductive sciences is brought to a standstill.
Peirce: CP 1.55 Cross-Ref:††
*@stephencrose <https://twitter.com/stephencrose>*
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 1:18 AM, Jon Awbrey <[email protected]> wrote:
> Stephen,
>
> Maybe it was this passage from "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" that you had
> in mind?
>
> <quote>
> The principles set forth in the first part of this essay lead, at once, to
> a method of reaching a clearness of thought of higher grade than the
> "distinctness" of the logicians. It was there noticed that the action of
> thought is excited by the irritation of doubt, and ceases when belief is
> attained; so that the production of belief is the sole function of
> thought. All these words, however, are too strong for my purpose. It is
> as if I had described the phenomena as they appear under a mental
> microscope.
>
> http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html
> </quote>
>
> Read in context, I don't think Peirce is making a universal statement
> about all thought but only about the clarity-seeking brand of thinking
> process that is his subject in this essay. At the very least, if the
> production of belief really is the sole function of every thought then we'd
> have to accept the rather perverse state of affairs that a thought which
> achieves its function is the exception rather than the rule.
>
>
> Jon
>
> Stephen C. Rose wrote:
>
>> I've puzzled over this because CSP seems almost dogmatic on the point of
>> doubt being the aegis not merely of inquiry but thought itself. First, can
>> there not be other prods to thought that are at least as effective?
>> Secondly, how much does our own mental process affect our thinking. I
>> would
>> hazard a guess that we are all editors and snippers and pasters of squibs
>> of thought and memory that are welling up near the surface of
>> consciousness. If we consciously think, devoting time to do so, we have
>> already eliminated doubt as the sole cause of it. All manner if
>> initiations. All manner of resolutions. Somehow I infer that CSP is close
>> to a sort of brain mechanism notion. I have no sense that much can be
>> gained from assuming that doubt is the sole origin of what takes place to
>> give birth to belief. Finally belief and doubt are not opposites,
>> sometimes
>> they walk hand in hand within our minds. Simultaneously.
>>
>> *@stephencrose <https://twitter.com/stephencrose>*
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 5:40 PM, Jon Awbrey <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Thread:
>>>
>> JA:http://web.archive.org/web/20140630184801/http://
> permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/13445
>
>>
>>> Peircers,
>>>
>>> Correcting a few typos and continuing ...
>>>
>>> Just a note to anchor a series of recurring thoughts that come to mind
>>> incidental to the thread on entropy, etc., but I won't have much to say
>>>
>>> on the bio-chemico-physico-thermo-dynamic side of things, so I'll spin
>>> this off under a separate heading. My interest in this topic arises
>>> mainly
>>> from my long-time work on inquiry driven systems, where understanding the
>>> intertwined measures of uncertainty and information is critical to
>>> comprehending the dynamics of inquiry.
>>>
>>> In a famous passage, Peirce says that inquiry begins with the "irritation
>>> of doubt" and ends when the irritation is soothed. Here we find the same
>>> compound of affective and cognitive ingredients that we find in
>>> Aristotle's
>>> original recipe for the sign relation.
>>>
>>> When we view inquiry as a process taking place in a system the first
>>> thing
>>> we have to ask is what are the properties or variables that we need to
>>> consider in describing the state of the system at any given time.
>>> Taking a
>>> Peircean perspective on a system capable of undergoing anything like an
>>> inquiry process, we are led to ask what are the conditions for the
>>> possibility of a system having "states of uncertainty" and "states of
>>> information" as state variables.
>>>
>>> Saved by the Belle, and time for dinner ...
>>>
>>>
>>> Jon
>>>
>>>
> --
>
> academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey
> my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/
> inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
> isw: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/JLA
> oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey
> facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache
>
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