Gary, Thanks for that quote from CP 2.635, which I think sums it perfectly. In my experience with different modes of inquiry, very few questions are settled by debate, not the formal debating team kind, much less the joint public appearance kind, but only by accumulating so much information relative to a hypothesis that the truth of the matter becomes overwhelming clear.
The political situation in the U.S. -- and especially in my own neck of the woods -- has become so dire in recent months that I find myself engaged in more discussions of public affairs than at any time since the late 60s and early 70s. The ongoing war on science has ramified itself into a full-scale war on the whole environs of democracy and education that render authentic research, scholarship, and science possible at all. But it's Saturday ... more on this later ... Jon Gary Fuhrman wrote:
Sally, i’d just like to say thanks for your leadership in the slow read of this paper – your probing questions and your introduction of other perspectives revealed aspects of its meaning that i wouldn’t otherwise have noticed. On JR’s recommendation against “debate”, my guess at his point is that debate is not a mode of inquiry or communication at all, but rather a competitive game or power struggle, a parody of genuine argument. The spirit of debate is therefore alien to the life of science, which JR characterizes as an “idealistic” quest for truth -- definitely a Peircean view of science. As for Peirce’s use of the term “debate”, i did come across one passage seems to reflect the view i’m attributing to JR – CP 2.635 (1878): [[[ Some persons fancy that bias and counter-bias are favorable to the extraction of truth—that hot and partisan debate is the way to investigate. This is the theory of our atrocious legal procedure. But Logic puts its heel upon this suggestion. It irrefragably demonstrates that knowledge can only be furthered by the real desire for it, and that the methods of obstinacy, of authority, and every mode of trying to reach a foregone conclusion, are absolutely of no value. ]]] Gary F.
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