Edwina, Thank you — but I don’t think the difference between the world of fact and the world of fancy quite captures the difference between science and religion as I see it. When I wrote that “belief is defined pragmatically as a cognitive habit which guides actual conduct,” I meant to imply that we ascertain the meaning of religious concepts in the way described by Peirce in CP 5.465:
[[ All pragmatists will further agree that their method of ascertaining the meanings of words and concepts is no other than that experimental method by which all the successful sciences (in which number nobody in his senses would include metaphysics) have reached the degrees of certainty that are severally proper to them today; this experimental method being itself nothing but a particular application of an older logical rule, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” ]] In other words, as a pragmatist I ascertain the meaning of a religious concept by observing the actual conduct of people who have incorporated that concept into their guidance systems, and generalizing from that. Of course, this theorizing has to take into account the difference between people’s professed beliefs and the beliefs they are really disposed to act on, plus the fact that the language expressing a religious concept can vary greatly from person to person and culture to culture. For instance, Chinese philosophy, whether Taoist, Confucian, Buddhist or non-religious, makes no reference to a Creator God, but does generally affirm a benign ‘principle’ or presence which pervades the universe and should guide one’s conduct. I think it is quite justifiable to say that the principle of “jen” or the “buddha nature” occupies the same region in a Chinese meaning space that “God” occupies in the meaning space of a monotheist. Of course this is a very vague claim which is not testable with anything like the exactitude of the special sciences, but that is natural because the concepts in question are so pervasive and comprehensive that the logical “law of contradiction” hardly applies to them. But everyone is guided, tacitly or not, by some concepts of that nature, because factual knowledge is simply not enough to provide an adequate guidance system for living in the external world, the “world of fact.” Besides, scientific inquiry itself has to begin in the “world of fancy” with retroduction before it can give us something empirically testable or inductively knowable in the “world of fact.” As for Peirce, it is unquestionable that he openly and straightforwardly declares his belief in God as the Creator. But he also declared that a genuine inquirer practices science religiously. In his 1905 Adirondack lectures, for instance, he said of pure scientists that “Their purpose is to worship God in the development of ideas and of truth” (MS 1334). In the Cambridge lectures of 1898, he said that “in all its progress, science vaguely feels that it is only learning a lesson. The value of Facts to it, lies only in this, that they belong to Nature; and Nature is something great, and beautiful, and sacred, and eternal, and real — the object of its worship and its aspiration.” Call it pantheism if you like, but this is certainly not living in the “world of fancy.” Gary f. From: Edwina Taborsky <[email protected]> Sent: 23-May-19 11:20 To: [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: Re: RE: Trinity, Continuity, and the Cosmotheandric, was, [PEIRCE-L] Re: Continuity of Semeiosis Revisited Gary F, list I would like to commend Gary F for his clear and excellent outline of the two worlds in which we live, "we live in two worlds, the world of fact and the world of fancy' [1.321]. As an atheist, my 'fancy' about the nature of the material and empirical world is that it is generated by the self-organized development of innate Mind - a belief which I can no more prove as 'the truth' than can anyone prove the existence of an external Object, named 'God'. Of course, I consider that I can find support for this view within the Peircean texts - but - with the flexibility of our own minds and interpretations, I acknowledge that some will deny this and instead, assert that Peirce supports their very different theistic view. However, what is important, I think, is to acknowledge these two worlds of 'fact and fancy' - and acknowledge our own role in their differentiation and their function. Edwina
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