Bill Bailey says:
"Joe, I don't understand why you think the order might be reversed. To resort to authority is essentially to cease thinking and to unquestioningly accept. There's no cognitive dissonance avoidance necessary. But if we begin with trying to avoid dissonance, and society forces us to confront it, then authority is one possible resort. (Leon Festinger's school of research would suggest still other possibilities of dissonance reduction.)"
REPLY:
Well, I was thinking of the argument one might make that social consciousness is prior to consciousness of self, and the method of tenacity seems to me to be motivated by the value of self-integrity, the instinctive tendency not to give up on any part of oneself, and one's beliefs are an important aspect of what one tends to think of when one thinks of one's identity. Losing some beliefs e.g. in religion, in one's parents, in the worthiness of one's country, etc., can be experienced as a kind of self-destruction and people often seem to demonstrate great fear of that happening to them. But this sense of self-identity could be argued to be a later construct than one's idea of the social entity of which one is a part.
I always liked to use it in teaching intro to philosophy classes because it is the only paper on logic I know of where it is made clear that there is no obvious or self-evident basis for supposing that it is better to be reasonable than unreasonable: indeed, irrationality is frequently respected more highly than rationality by people with a literary orientation, for example. Anyway, what I want to say is that I interpret Peirce as appealing to four distinct things of value to which appeal can be made -- which may be existentially at odds with one another as values -- in a process of belief-fixing: self-integrity, social unity, coherence or unity of ideas (construable objectively as the idea that there is a universe), and the idea of the independently real that is always there, the one thing you can always rely upon. I think of the fourth method as presupposing the values of the first three but as introducing a fourth as well, which could be the first three considered AS ordered, I suppose. (But I am not arguing that.)
What are the other possible kinds of dissonance reduction that Festinger identifies, by the way?
Joe
"Joe, I don't understand why you think the order might be reversed. To resort to authority is essentially to cease thinking and to unquestioningly accept. There's no cognitive dissonance avoidance necessary. But if we begin with trying to avoid dissonance, and society forces us to confront it, then authority is one possible resort. (Leon Festinger's school of research would suggest still other possibilities of dissonance reduction.)"
REPLY:
Well, I was thinking of the argument one might make that social consciousness is prior to consciousness of self, and the method of tenacity seems to me to be motivated by the value of self-integrity, the instinctive tendency not to give up on any part of oneself, and one's beliefs are an important aspect of what one tends to think of when one thinks of one's identity. Losing some beliefs e.g. in religion, in one's parents, in the worthiness of one's country, etc., can be experienced as a kind of self-destruction and people often seem to demonstrate great fear of that happening to them. But this sense of self-identity could be argued to be a later construct than one's idea of the social entity of which one is a part.
I always liked to use it in teaching intro to philosophy classes because it is the only paper on logic I know of where it is made clear that there is no obvious or self-evident basis for supposing that it is better to be reasonable than unreasonable: indeed, irrationality is frequently respected more highly than rationality by people with a literary orientation, for example. Anyway, what I want to say is that I interpret Peirce as appealing to four distinct things of value to which appeal can be made -- which may be existentially at odds with one another as values -- in a process of belief-fixing: self-integrity, social unity, coherence or unity of ideas (construable objectively as the idea that there is a universe), and the idea of the independently real that is always there, the one thing you can always rely upon. I think of the fourth method as presupposing the values of the first three but as introducing a fourth as well, which could be the first three considered AS ordered, I suppose. (But I am not arguing that.)
What are the other possible kinds of dissonance reduction that Festinger identifies, by the way?
Joe
----- Original Message ----
From: Bill Bailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Peirce Discussion Forum <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 11:34:25 PM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: What "fundamenal psychological laws" is Peirce referring to?
Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Bill Bailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Peirce Discussion Forum <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 11:34:25 PM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: What "fundamenal psychological laws" is Peirce referring to?
Joe, I don't understand why you think the order might be
reversed. To resort to authority is essentially to cease thinking and to
unquestioningly accept. There's no cognitive dissonance avoidance
necessary. But if we begin with trying to avoid dissonance, and society
forces us to confront it, then authority is one possible resort.
(Leon Festinger's school of research would suggest still other
possibilities of dissonance reduction.)
Bill Bailey
------In "The Fixation of Belief" Peirce says that
"a man may go through life, systematically keeping out of view all that might cause a change n his opinions, and if he only succeeds -- basing his method, as he does, on two fundamental psychologicl laws -- I do not see what can be said against his doing so".
This is in Part V, where he is explaining the method of tenacity, where he then goes on to say that "the social impulse" will nevertheless somehow cause him, at times, to face up to some contradiction which impels recourse to adopting the second method, which is the method of authority.
His explanation of this is very unsatisfactory, far too sketchy to be very informative, and I wonder if anyone has run across any place where he says anything that might flesh that out or, regardless of that, whether anyone has any plausible explanation themselves of exactly what accounts for the transition from the first to the second method. One might wonder, too,whether Peirce might not have the order wrong: might it not be argued that method #1 should be authority and method #2 tenacity? I wonder if anyone has ever tried to justify his ordering of the methods in the way he does? I don't recall anyone ever trying to do that, but then I don't trust my memory on this since it has not always been a topic in which I had much interest until fairly recently. That he has somehow got hold of something right in distinguishing the methods can be argued, I believe, but can the ordering really be argued for as plausible?
Joe Ransdell
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