Clark- just type into google, the whole line from Peirce, and you'll find the
selection in the Collected Papers (ed. Hartshorne)...and it will give you more
of what he was writing than that sentence.
Or type in Charles Peirce. Collected Papers. 8.318 - and the pages will come
up.
I don't think that Peirce's main focus is on human beliefs but on 'natural
habits of formation'.
If you want to see his views on human beliefs, I think a good place is 'The
Fixation of Beliefs', which outlines the anancastic, tychastic, a priori and
scientific methods of 'fixing human beliefs'.
I acknowledge your point that human beliefs are 'habits of thinking' but - the
question is, do they actually 'cause' a morphological existential reality, in
the same way as habits-of-formation cause a zebra to be, morphologically, ...a
zebra. So- I don't really see cognitive habits of thinking ..as having much to
do with this..
As to whether they are 'reversible' - in the mechanical sense, I might quibble
with that. We can arrive at a belief, and then, change back to a former
belief, but I'm not sure if this return is as 'pure' as it originally was.
Let's say, I believe that unicorns do exist; then, I decide that they do NOT
exist; and then, I revert back to my first belief that they do exist. I think
this third belief is tainted, by its having been 'vetted' so to speak, against
the comparison with the belief in unicorns NOT existing. So, the superficial
belief might seem similar, but, not with that comparison clinging to it. These
changes have nothing mechanical and reversible about them..They are, really,
'evolutionary'..even though the final phase is similar, somewhat, to the first
phase.
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
From: Clark Goble
To: PEIRCE-L
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2015 4:15 PM
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Terms, Propositions, Arguments
On Nov 23, 2015, at 2:11 PM, Clark Goble <cl...@lextek.com> wrote:
On Nov 23, 2015, at 1:44 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:
Clark - i'm quite confused by this. Where do you get the idea that habits
are reversible? I would consider that they are non-reversible. To have
reversible habits - whew- that would deny adaptation, evolution, Thirdness as
Mind....it would make everything almost pure mechanics…
Beliefs are habits. Beliefs change and it’s not at all uncommon to return
to an original belief after being persuaded of a different conclusion.
To add, I think we need to be careful not to equivocate. Reversibility in the
quote seems reasonable to associate with thermodynamics either
phenomenologically arrived at or by the 1870’s conceived of through statistical
mechanics. In this case reversibility is really a question of likelihood. It’s
not that reversals are impossible. It’s that they quickly become extremely
unlikely.
Reversibility in a particular habit is slightly more complex. I’m suggesting
that for a given fixed system it’s possible they’d reverse but unlikely. Yet if
the underlying system changes then of course there are different forces that
could easily change the habit. So of course merely changing habit needn’t imply
formal reversibility if the system changes.
What Peirce means in the quote in question I’m not sure without knowing the
context for the quote. My guess is that there is that connection to
thermodynamics because otherwise it makes no sense.
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