I honestly don't recall Peirce addressing the problem of competing and
contradictory beliefs. Does anyone know off the top of their head
anything along those lines? The closest I can think of is the passage of
1908 to Lady Welby where he talks about the three modalities of being.
Relative to the first, that of possibility, he talks of Ideas. One might
say that the *idea* of infidelity, for example, can be accepted as well as its
contradiction. So perhaps that's one way of dealing with it.
Dear Clark,
I'm tempted to say, facetiously, that Peirce
often wrote of two fundamental laws of psychology. One of course being
the law of association of ideas and the other being what he
called a "general law of sensibility" or Fechner's psycho-phsical
law. But I won't -). Fechner's law as you may recall states that
the intensity of any sensation is proportional to the log of the external
force which produces it.
However, on page 294 of Vol III of _The Writings
of Charles S Peirce, A Chronological Edition_ I did stumble accross
something that may relate to what you have in mind. There Peirce writes
that "It is entirely in harmony with this law [Fechner's] that the feeling of
belief shoud be as the logarithm of the chance, the later being the _expression_
of the state of facts which produce the belief". He continues,
"the rule for the combination of independent concurrent arugments takes a very
simple form when expressed in terms of the intensity of belief, measured in
the porposed way. It is this: Take the sum of all the feelings of belief
which would b e produced separately by all the arguments pro, substract from
that the similar sum for agruments con, and the remainder is the feeling of
belief which we ought to have on the whole. This a a proceeding which
men often resort to, under the name of balancing reasons".
BTW, all of this occurs in his 1878 essay on
Probability of Induction which apparently was published Popular Science
Monthly.
Cheers,
Jim Piat
The question then becomes how inquiry relates to these ideas. I'd
suggest, as you do, that it would cut off inquiry, but not because of
knowledge. Rather, as Joe said earlier, it is the individual doing what
they can to stave off the loss of a threatened belief. I think this is
that they don't *want* discussion to leave the world of possibility and move
to the realm of facts (the second of the three universes).
It is interesting to me how many people do *not* want to move from
possibilities (how ever probable) to the realm of facts or events.
I think rather that tenaciousness is, as Joe suggested, more closely
related to appeals to authority and their weakness. I'd also note in The
Fixation of Belief that Peirce suggests that doubt works by irritation.
"The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of
belief. I shall term this struggle *inquiry* though it must be admitted
that it is sometimes not a very apt designation." (EP
1:114)
To me that suggests something like a small boil or irritation on ones
skin or small cut in ones mouth. One can neglect it but eventually it
will lead to a change in action. As Peirce notes it may not seem like
what we call inquiry. Thus his "sometimes not a very apt
designation." But so long as it changes our habits, even if it takes
time and is slow, then inquiry is progressing.
It might be an error to only call a process of inquiry what we
are conscious of as a more directed burden of will. Which I believe
was Jim W's point a few days ago.
Clark Goble
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