Clark, list,
That's a good question. I've tended to think of it this way. Truth
enters logic as a regulative idea that one can hardly doubt in
particular cases; in other words, one thinks that one's idea of truth is
true in particular cases. In committing to inquire into various
questions, one commits to the idea of truths about various questions.
This commitment to the idea of truth applies even when the inquiry is
about truth itself. One ends up with _/practical/_ certainty that there
is truth even if, at the theoretical level, the principle remains
regulatory, not speculative. In his brief intellectual autobiography
(1904), Peirce says that philosophy concerns ideas whose truth or
falsehood is the object of no science (i.e., no theoretical research)
because they can hardly be doubted. Moreover, Peirce behaves as a
serious theorist - from his ideas about truth, the real, and fallibility
in particular, he draws nontrivial conclusions in metaphysics, involving
continuity and spontaneity a.k.a. absolute chance. See Peirce (1897)
"Fallibilism, Continuity, and Evolution", CP 1.141–75
http://www.textlog.de/4248.html , placed by the CP editors directly
after "F.R.L." (1899, CP 1.135–40)
https://web.archive.org/web/20120106071421/http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/frl_99.htm
<https://web.archive.org/web/20120106071421/http://www.princeton.edu/%7Ebatke/peirce/frl_99.htm>
. I just don't know how far beyond regulative conceptions he goes in
that case. In the Wikipedia article "Synechism," somebody wrote, without
providing a reference, "The fact that some things are ultimate may be
recognized by the synechist without abandoning his standpoint, since
synechism is a normative or regulative principle, not a theory of
existence."
It's when one looks at the set of regulative ideas collectively and
philosophically that one can entertain some sort of doubt and regard
those ideas as hopes rather than as something surer. One keeps the door
open to the idea that possibly there's something vaguely wrong in that set.
In his review "An American Plato" of Royce (1885 MS) W 5:222-235 (see
227-230), also EP 1:229-241 (see 234-236), Peirce says:
The problem whether a given question will ever get answered or not
is not so simple; the number of questions asked is constantly
increasing, and the capacity for answering them is also on the
increase. If the rate of the latter increase is greater than that of
the former the probability is unity that any given question will be
answered; otherwise the probability is _/zero/_. [....] But I will
admit (if the reader thinks the admission has any meaning, and is
not an empty proposition) that some finite number of questions, we
can never know which ones, will escape getting answered forever.
[....] Let us suppose, then, for the sake of argument, that some
questions eventually get settled, and that some others,
indistinguishable from the former by any marks, never do. In that
case, I should say that the conception of reality was rather a
faulty one, for while there is a real so far as a question that will
get settled goes, there is none for a question that will never be
settled; for an unknowable reality is nonsense. [....] In that way,
if we think that some questions are never going to get settled, we
ought to admit that our conception of nature as absolutely real is
only partially correct. Still, we shall have to be governed by it
practically; because there is nothing to distinguish the
unanswerable questions from the answerable ones, so that
investigation will have to proceed as if all were answerable. In
ordinary life, no matter how much we believe in questions ultimately
getting answered, we shall always put aside an innumerable throng of
them as beyond our powers. [....] From this practical and economical
point of view, it really makes no difference whether or not all
questions are actually answered, by man or by God, so long as we are
satisfied that investigation has a universal tendency toward the
settlement of opinion; and this I conceive to be the position of
Thrasymachus.
If there be any advantage to religion in supposing God to be
omniscient, this sort of scepticism about reality can do no
practical harm. We can still suppose that He knows all that there is
of reality to be known. [....] The scepticism just spoken of would
admit this omniscience as a regulative but not a speculative
conception. I believe that even that view is more religiously
fruitful than the opinion of Dr. Royce.
A while back, Gary F. quoted from MS 647 (1910) which appeared in Sandra
B. Rosenthal's 1994 book _Charles Peirce's Pragmatic Pluralism_:
An Occurrence, which Thought analyzes into Things and Happenings, is
necessarily Real; but it can never be known or even imagined in all
its infinite detail. A Fact, on the other hand[,] is so much of the
real Universe as can be represented in a Proposition, and instead of
being, like an Occurrence, a slice of the Universe, it is rather to
be compared to a chemical principle extracted therefrom by the power
of Thought; and though it is, or may be Real, yet, in its Real
existence it is inseparably combined with an infinite swarm of
circumstances, which make no part of the Fact itself. It is
impossible to thread our way through the Logical intricacies of
being unless we keep these two things, the Occurrence and the Real
Fact, sharply separate in our Thoughts. [Peirce, MS 647 (1910)]
In that quote Peirce very clearly holds that not all will be known or
can even be imagined. What is left is the idea that details may remain
vague (as indeed a house that one sees is a kind of "statistical"
object, compatible with the existence of innumerable alternate
microstates and that, in any case, the object as it is "in itself" does
not involve the idea of some secret compartment forever hidden from
inquiry; it is instead a matter of deciding which questions one cares
about. Material processes scramble information, and life interpretively
unscrambles some of it according to standards of value and interest.
On another note, Joe Ransdell used to insist that Peirce's realism was
stronger in the 1860s than it was when he wrote things like "How to Make
Our Ideas Clear" (1878). I once read a review of some Peirce-related
p8blication that said that too, but I couldn't dig it up again. I've
also spent hours looking for a remark by Peirce, that maybe I'm just
confused about, in which he says something like, in the 1870s articles
on pragmatism, he was trying to get pragmatism afloat without trying to
take on too much at once. Of course his fellow pragmatists were not such
strong realists as Peirce, and William James later wrote of liking to
think that J,S. Mill if he were still alive would be the pragmatists'
leader.
Best, Ben
On 3/1/2017 5:36 PM, Clark Goble wrote:
Over the years I’ve gone back and forth in terms of how to think of
Peirce’s conception of truth. I’m here speaking of the notion of truth
and less the historical question of what Peirce believe at which
times. What brought this about was our discussion off and on over the
past few months of Peirce’s modal realism starting in the late 1890’s.
Prior to that time while he recognized the need to switch to
counterfactual discussions in say the Pragmatic Maxim he didn’t fully
embrace modal realism until quite late.
The question is what his modal realism does for his conception of
truth as what inquiry would lead to in the long run with an idealized
community.
Way back years ago when I was much more of a novice in Peirce my gut
tended to read this “in the long run” as something actual. Then over
time (primarily due to arguments made here) I switched over to just
thinking of it as a regulative notion. That is we can talk about what
we /mean/ by truth but there’s not some actual truth that grounds our
statements as true. This is the way I suspect the majority of
Peirceans think about it. However with modal realism, if continued
inquiry and continuity are possible, they are real as possible. This
means that this “in the long” run of the universe acting has as a real
possibility this ‘end.’ It might not be /actual/ but it is /real/. (In
a way analogous to how Peirce treats God)
Does this seem about right?
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