Jeff K., Jeff D., Gary F., lists,
Lists, I should note that Jeff Kasser is familiar with the topic of
Peirce and psychologism. He wrote a paper that Joe Ransdell posted some
years ago at Arisbe, "Peirce's Supposed Psychologism"
http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/kasser/psychol.htm .
I agree with you, Jeff K. I tend to worry a little that, although on
one hand it's good to keep aware of one's level of generality, on the
other hand one can overdo it in the boundaries department and make it
more difficult for philosophy to interact or collaborate with other
fields. A lack of a definition of philosophy, lack of a definition that
places it in the larger continuum of research, to which I alluded in
another post, also seems accompanied by that effect. (Too little
definition, overly strong boundaries, can one have both? I suspect so,
by having an ill-defined field in which one still recoils too much from
other fields' boundaries.)
You wrote:
[JK] If one doesn't attend carefully to the details of Peirce's
self-assessments, he can seem inconsistent or confused about his
position with respect to psychologism.
That's true if one is Peirce, too. He got overly harsh on his own
earlier work because he hadn't closely read it lately.
[From CP 5.402 Note 3 "Issues of Pragmaticism", 1905
http://www.commens.org/dictionary/entry/quote-issues-pragmaticism-4
. Quote]
...the suspicion I myself expressed after a too hasty rereading of
the forgotten magazine paper, that it expressed a stoic, that is, a
nominalistic, materialistic, and utterly philistine state of
thought, was quite mistaken.
[End quote]
He's referring to his _Baldwin Dictionary_ definition of pragmatism, in
which he said,
[From CP 5.3, "Pragmatic and Pragmatism", 1902 in the _Dictionary of
Philosophy and Psychology_. Reprinted CP 5.3, 1902
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Baldwin_Dictionary_Definition_of_Pragmatic_%281%29_and_%282%29_Pragmatism
. Quote]
The doctrine appears to assume that the end of man is action - a
stoical axiom which, to the present writer at the age of sixty, does
not recommend itself so forcibly as it did at thirty.
[End quote]
Best, Ben
On 9/16/2014 5:41 PM, Kasser,Jeff wrote:
I think that this is a really valuable point, Ben, and I think that an
application of it bears very directly on discussions of psychologism
and anti-psychologism in Peirce. Despite having opposed psychologism
from the outset, Peirce was happy to pursue psychological solutions to
some problems in logic. What's crucial here is to keep clear about the
status of such solutions. When Peirce criticized his argument for the
pragmatic maxim in 1877-78 for resting on a psychological principle,
he was not, in my estimation, accusing his past self of psychologism.
There are many reasons for this, starting with the fact that we'd have
to come up with an explanation of how someone who railed against
psychologism in the 1860's slipped into it in the 1870's. There are
also clear anti-psychologistic claims in the stage-setting sections of
"Fixation" and "How To" themselves. In the passage from the Minute
Logic that Frederik quotes on p. 28 and in the later self-criticism
I've already alluded to, it's pretty clear that by "psychological"
treatments of logical matters, Peirce has in mind thinking about
reasoning in terms of belief and action. There's nothing wrong about
starting from claims about belief and action in order to establish
certain logical norms, provided that one doesn't reduce the norms to
that way of embodying reasoning. As you suggest below, Ben, it's a
matter of a consilience of arguments. Peirce doesn't want his 1877-78
argument to be treated as the deepest or the only way of establishing
such norms as the pragmatic maxim, but he's not accusing himself of
circularity or relativism or the other vices of psychologism. If one
doesn't attend carefully to the details of Peirce's self-assessments,
he can seem inconsistent or confused about his position with respect
to psychologism.
Best,
Jeff
________________________________________
From: Benjamin Udell
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2014 9:23 AM
To: [email protected]; 'Peirce List'
Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions,
Chapter 2
Jeff D., Gary F., lists,
-----------------------------
PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L
to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To
UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the
line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at
http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
