[peirce-l] Re: What "fundamenal psychological laws" is Peirce referring to?

[Bill Bailey]

Joe, thanks for your response.  I "get it" now.   Festinger came to mind because "selective exposure" as a mode of dissonance avoidance was a major topic in communication research.  I haven't read that literature in years--and I didn't particularly buy into it then--so don't trust me now.  As I recall, one mode of dissonance reduction was similar to the pre-dissonance mode:  "selective perception," or "cherry picking"--selecting only the data consonant with the threatened belief or behavior.  "Rationalization" was a dissonance reduction means, I think, though it seems nearly tautological.  In terms of Festinger's smoking-health dissonance I remember it in this form:  "We're all going to die of something."  There is also the heroic, the transcendent "We all owe a death."  Simple denial is a common means:  "If smoking causes cancer, most smokers would get it, but in fact most don't."  Researchers turned up so many techniques of  dissonance reduction I no longer remember which were originally proposed by Festinger and which came later.    Some, by the way (I think Eliot Aronson among them), argued cognitive dissonance was not a logical but a psychological phenomena, and that humans were not rational but rationalizers.  And, relevant to your remarks below, some argued that the need to reduce the dissonance resulted not from logical tensions, but from the social concept of the self.  For example, the argument goes, if it were only a logical tension operating, there'd be no tension experienced from telling a lie for money.  It would make logical sense to say anything asked of you for either a few or many bucks.  The tension arises only as a result of social norms:  "What kind of person am I to tell a lie for a lousy couple of bucks."  In my personal experience with smoking, I could have cared less about the dissonance between my smoking and the health information.  It was simply desire; I didn't want to quit.  I became involved in "dissonance reduction" behaviors only when socially challenged or when I thought about dealing such challenges.    As regards the argument that social consciousness is prior to the consciousness of self, doesn't "social consciousness" somewhat load the dice?  Social consciousness requires some degree of "exteriorizing," creating an "out there" of objects through processes of representation that must be acquired through learning and language.  A parallel consciousness of self would necessarily be a consequent and never an antecedent development.  Now, I believe that is the case for the "consciousness of . . . " modality of mind in which the self is a representational construct.  But from what did all that construction arise?  I think we are necessarily forced to accept a more primary mode of information processing, the more autistic or "child-like" consciousness in which feelings, actions, and perceptions are merged in a single plane of experience.  I view the learned social consciousness as a secondary overlay onto the primary mode--which persists throughout out lives as our everyday mind.  In the primary mode, events and object are experienced pretty much in terms of their immediate relevances--what we are feeling and doing.  The contents of the acquired secondary mode are assimilated into the primary mode of information processing.  Hence we can very subjectively find beauty and enjoyment in the spontaneous elaboration of theories that cause freshmen, stumbling along in the secondary mode, acute headaches.      Isn't it the imposition of social consciousness which forces upon us rationalization if not rationality itself?   Even those who live in literature and want to eat the fruit from still life paintings must rationalize the irrational.   (I think the "irrational" in human behavior is seldom the opposite of "rational,"  but more nearly something like "autistic," "narcissistic," or "egocentric," and as such more nearly the opposite of "social.")   Bill Bailey   "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? 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.12.6/453 - Release Date: 9/20/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.12.6/453 - Release Date: 9/20/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com