Ben & All,
My own interest in this topic has more to do with the ways that
economic, social, and technological systems facilitate or inhibit
the dynamics of inquiry -- and only incidentally with publication
and publishers per se -- but one has to play the ball of concrete
application where it lies ...
Yes, I've struggled to find the most felicitous one-word description of the 3rd
method,
hoping to find one that fills out the rhyme by ending in "y", so I've
experimented with
words like a priori, apriority (ugh), agreeability, congruity, confluity
(borrowing that
one from the Gestalt psychologists), and so on. This time I tried to draw on
the link
of "plausible" to "pleasing" and "praiseworthy" and the archaic senses of
"plausive"
as "pleasing" but with a hint of "specious".
The quest continues ...
Jon
BU: I hope I don't seem pedantic, but this post is about Peirce's methods of
inquiry
in "The Fixation of Belief." (I know next to nothing about professional or
academic
journals, so I've little to say about them.)
JA: Charles S. Peirce, who pursued the ways of inquiry more doggedly than any
thinker
I have ever read, sifted the methods of “fixing belief” into four main
types —
Tenacity, Authority, Plausibility (à priori pleasingness), and full-fledged
Scientific Inquiry.
BU: There is a certain striking similarity between the focus of the third method
and valuing of plausibility. Still I think that Peirce would oppose calling
the third method that of "Plausibility," and I'd agree with him.
CSP: By plausibility, I mean the degree to which a theory ought to recommend
itself to our belief
independently of any kind of evidence other than our instinct urging us to
regard it favorably.
(Peirce, A Letter to Paul Carus 1910, Collected Papers v. 8, see paragraph
223).
BU: In "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,"
http://www.gnusystems.ca/CSPgod.htm#na0
Peirce discusses plausibility and instinctual appeal at some length in Sections
III & IV,
identifies it with Galileo's natural light of reason, and says:
CSP: it is the simpler hypothesis in the sense of the more facile and natural,
the one
that instinct suggests, that must be preferred.... This plausibility is a
question
of the critique of arguments and of abductive inference in particular.
BU: The third method of inquiry a question of inquiry's methodology
(methodeutic), and not of assessing
whether a given abductive inference is plausible and worth drawing prior to
or apart from inductive
tests and observations. Peirce calls the third method the method of
congruity or the a priori or the
dilettante or 'what is agreeable to reason.'
CSP: It makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but
taste, unfortunately, is always
more or less a matter of fashion, and accordingly metaphysicians have
never come to any fixed agreement,
but the pendulum has swung backward and forward between a more material
and a more spiritual philosophy,
from the earliest times to the latest." (Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief,"
1878
http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html).
BU: In a sense it _is_ a matter of taste and fashion — not about clothes, food,
music, etc. —
but instead about that which we now call 'paradigms' of inquiry - and the
key point is that
it involves a preference for the _pleasing_ paradigm, the tasteful
paradigm, etc. But proper
abductive plausibility depends on a preference for the pleasing _only to
the extent_ that one's
pleasure depends on the plausibility of an explanation of a phenomenon. The
dependence simply
circles back to the plausibility as the determining variable.
BU: A method of plausibility extended to arguments in general seems a
non-starter.
As extended to inquirial methodology in general, such that it would be a
method
of inquiry on a level with those of tenacity, authority, congruity, and
science,
it might be a method of devil-may-care gambling rather than one of taste
and fashion
in paradigms.
BU: I grant the striking similarity nevertheless. It's interesting to pursue
the resemblances
of the methods. I've tended in the past to think of the first three methods
as involving
mis-embodied Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, respectively.
--
academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey
inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
mwb: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey
oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey
word press blog 1: http://jonawbrey.wordpress.com/
word press blog 2: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To
remove yourself from this list, send a message to [email protected] with the
line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the
list, send it to [email protected]
