Eric,
I think your understanding is reasonable, but you are still taking Peirce’s claim as a psychological one about people in general, which I don’t think it is. Yes, you could call Peirce’s statement an empirical claim in the broad sense that it’s based on his experience. But I don’t see how this claim about his own experience could be verified (or falsified) by anyone else’s investigation. That could only be a psychological investigation, and Peirce is doing logic here, not psychology. What he’s describing in Lowell 1 is “the all-familiar phenomena of self-control.” I guess that does imply that most people — or at least most people who could be attending to a lecture like this — are familiar with it, in Peirce’s view. But that does not make it a claim about all people. By taking it out of its immediate context, you’ve made it seem like a claim about “man,” i.e. about all humanity. But what Peirce actually says is: “My account of the facts, you will observe, leaves a man at full liberty, no matter if we grant all that the necessitarians ask. That is, the man can, or if you please is compelled, to make his life more reasonable” (Peirce’s italics, my bold). “The man” refers to a definite person, one who is subject to self-control. The “is compelled” is a sop to necessitarians, i.e. old=fashioned “determinism.” Peirce is certainly arguing that reason and self-control have a common form. But again, this is not a generalization about human psychology, it is an attempt to identify the essentials of the reasoning process, just as Peirce’s phenomenology was an attempt to identify the “indecomposable elements” of all phenomena (or as he preferred to say, of “the phenomenon.”) If we find it correct, then we are tempted to see his assertion as a truism, or as “vacuous” as you say. But then what do we think of the argument he is opposing, which would deny his claim? If his statement is a truism, then the opposing claim must appear “monstrous.” Peirce is certainly generalizing, but not about psychology, and not only about humans. Indeed his argument would imply that self-control evolves from the autonomous agency of the simplest organisms to the criticism of criticism of their own reasoning that (some) humans do. It’s part of his argument that evolution itself moves in the general direction of “concrete reasonableness.” If that seems to be an optimism unjustified by the facts of life around us, it’s because we are confusing ideality with reality, I think. Life is a matter of making itself more reasonable, and it’s reasonable to assume that the facts will always testify to less-than-reasonable realities. That’s my guess as to what Peirce is driving at. gary From: Eric Charles [mailto:[email protected]] Gary, Thank you for the explanation. It is the best I have heard by far when I voice this concern, so I have pondered it for a bit. I guess what you are describing as a "cenoscopic claim" still fits what I would call an "empirical claim," broadly speaking. As you put it: He is making an claim about himself - which could be verified via investigation, and which we cannot hold infallible based purely on interospection - and he is hoping (while not quite asserting) that the claim would hold true for others. You also state that, "In a sense, self-control is reasonableness — reasoning is essentially the method of self-control." That makes me worry that we are drifting towards vacuous statements, which was the other option in my initial concern. If it is the case that whenever someone exercises self-control, we will declare that such a thing could not be done except as an attempt at reasonableness, we can be happy that our statement is true by definition, but not much beyond that. The latter issue makes me much more inclined towards the version in which Peirce is making an empirical claim which I find highly suspect. When he says "man... is compelled, to make his life more reasonable," he is not making a circular claim, and he certainly hasn't made any systematic attempt to find exceptions, so he is probably overgeneralizing. Peirce knows the claim must be true in general (because everything would fall apart if it wasn't generally true), and he is content there. Thus, if William James, for example, came back with evidence that certain people, under such-and-such conditions, do not seem to be so compelled, Peirce would wonder what the hell James was getting on about. Also, for the writings that follow, though he does not state it explicitly, Peirce will be developing principles that must be true about those non-exceptional cases. Thus when I twitch at further clear over-generalizations, my first question should be whether the claim would be true for those cases in which people are enacting compulsions to make their lives more reasonable. If the over-generalization would be true in such cases, then I should remind myself that those are the only cases Peirce is talking about, and be merely annoyed that he didn't tell me that was what he was doing. Does that seem like a reasonable understanding? Best, Eric ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Supervisory Survey Statistician U.S. Marine Corps
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