Gary, Gary, Jon,
Thanks to all of you for your help. It's true,
what Gary R. says, that Peirce's theory of truth is really an aspect developed
in his theory of logic, with its theories of signs, inference, and inquiry --
it's theoretical, but it's not some separate department except insofar as the
presuppositions of logic could be considered a separate department, which
there's no reason for us to do.
For the time being at least, I've resequenced some
stuff, rewritten some, and simply omitted the line about "never" offering a
theory of truth. See below.
Gnox's F's quote about Peirce's accepting the
theory of truth as the definitive compulsion of the investigative intelligence
-- this gets into a whole "further" area in that complex way that makes me
think, yes, this is a theory of truth that we're dealing with. The "further"
complexity relates particularly to the determination of signs. While Peirce
stops saying early on that the sign "determines" the object (wherever it was
that he said it), I haven't found him saying that the object determines the sign
any earlier than 1906. The quote of Peirce's reference to a "compulsion" is
helpful, because that's an added idea of what to look for besides the word
"determine" in its various forms.
Best, Ben. Note, the numbered links to footnotes
and the return links take you around within this post, not away from
it.
Pragmatism
Peirce's recipe for pragmatic thinking, called both pragmatism and pragmaticism, is
recapitulated in several versions of the so-called pragmatic maxim.
Here is one of his more emphatic reiterations of it:
Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings
you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your
conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of
the object.[33]
William James, among
others, regarded two of Peirce's papers, "The Fixation of Belief"
(1877) and "How to Make Our
Ideas Clear" (1878) as being the origin of pragmatism. Peirce conceived
pragmatism to be a method for clarifying the meaning of difficult ideas through the application of
the pragmatic maxim.
He differed from William James and the early John Dewey, in some of their
tangential enthusiasms, in being decidedly more rationalistic and realistic, in
several senses of those terms, throughout the preponderance of his own
philosophical moods.
Peirce's pragmatism is a method of sorting out conceptual confusions by
equating the meaning of any concept with the conceivable operational or
practical consequences of whatever it is which the concept portrays. This
pragmatism bears no resemblance to "vulgar" pragmatism, which misleadingly
connotes a ruthless and Machiavellian search for
mercenary or political advantage. Rather, Peirce's Pragmatic Maxim is the heart
of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental reflection[34] arriving at conceptions in terms of
conceivable confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances -- a method
hospitable to the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the
employment and improvement of verification[35] to test the truth of putative knowledge. As such a
method, pragmatism leads beyond the usual duo of foundational alternatives,
namely:
His approach is distinct from foundationalism,
empiricist or otherwise, as well as from coherentism, by the
following three dimensions:
- Active process of theory generation, with no prior assurance of truth;
- Subsequent application of the contingent theory, aimed toward developing
its logical and practical consequences;
- Evaluation of the provisional theory's utility for the anticipation of
future experience, and that in dual senses of the word: prediction and control. Peirce's
appreciation of these three dimensions serves to flesh out a physiognomy of inquiry
far more solid than the flatter image of inductive generalization
simpliciter, which is merely the relabeling of phenomenological
patterns. Peirce's pragmatism was the first time the scientific method
was proposed as an epistemology for
philosophical questions.
A theory that proves itself more successful in predicting and controlling our
world than its rivals is said to be nearer the truth. This is an operational
notion of truth employed by scientists.
Peirce held that, in practical matters, slow and stumbling ratiocination is
not generally to be automatically preferred over instinct and tradition, and
held that scientific method is best suited to theoretical inquiry. In "The Fixation of Belief",
Peirce argues that what recommends the scientific method of inquiry above all
others is that it is deliberately designed to arrive, eventually, at the
ultimately most secure beliefs, upon which the most successful actions can
eventually be based. Peirce outlines four methods for the settlement of doubt,
graded by their success in achieving a sound fixation of belief.
1. The method of tenacity -- persisting in that which one is inclined to
think.
2. The method of authority -- conformity to a source of ready-made
beliefs.
3. The method of congruity or the a priori or the dilettante or "what is
agreeable to reason" -- leading to argumentation that gets finally
nowhere.
4. The scientifc method.
In "How
to Make Our Ideas Clear", Peirce discusses three grades of clearness of
conception:
1. Clearness of the familiar conception.
2. Clearness as of a definition's parts, the clearness in virtue of which
logicians call a concept or definition "distinct".
3. Clearness in virtue of clearness of conceivable consequences of the
object as conceived of. Here he introduced that which he later called the
Pragmatic Maxim.
By way of example of how to clarify conceptions, he addresses truth and the
real as questions of the presuppositions
of reasoning in general. In clearness's second grade, he defines truth as a
sign's correspondence to its object, and the real as the object of such
correspondence, such that truth and the real are independent of that which you
or I or any definite community of researchers think. Then in clearness's third
grade (the pragmatic grade), he defines the truth as that which would be
reached, sooner or later but still inevitably, by research adequately prolonged,
such that the real does depend on that final opinion -- a dependence to which he
appeals in theoretical arguments elsewhere, for instance for the long-term
validity of the rule of induction[36]
and, given the final ineradicability of error from measurement, not only for the
view that space will never be found to be exactly Euclidean[37], but also for the reality of chance and the
real's lack of positive exactness. Peirce argues that even to argue against the
independence and discoverability of truth and the real is to presuppose that
there is, about that very question under argument, a truth with just such
independence and discoverability. For more on Peirce's theory of truth, see the
Peirce section in Pragmatic
Theory of Truth. Peirce's discussions and definitions of truth have
influenced several epistemic truth theorists and been used as foil for deflationary
and correspondence
theories of truth.
Pragmatism is regarded as a distinctively American philosophy. As
advocated by James, John
Dewey, Ferdinand
Canning Scott Schiller, George Herbert Mead,
and others, it has proved durable and popular. But Peirce did not seize on this
fact to enhance his reputation, and even coined the word "pragmaticism" to
distinguish his philosophical position. Peirce wrote in particular of disliking
a growing literary use of the word "pragmatism" in unfortunate senses.[38] In an 1908 article[39] he expressed areas of agreement and disagreement with
his fellow pragmatists:
Peirce remained joined with them about:
- the reality of generals and habits, to be understood, as are hypostatic
abstractions, in terms of potential concrete effects even if
unactualized;
- the falsity of necessitarianism;
- the character of consciousness as only "visceral or other external
sensation";
- certain important new insights of theirs despite sloppiness about
distinctions
|
and differed with their:
- "angry hatred of strict logic";
- view that "truth is mutable";
- view that infinity is unreal; and
- "confusion of active willing (willing to control thought, to doubt,
and to weigh reasons) with willing not to exert the will (willing to
believe)".
|
Peirce's pragmatism, in its core senses as method and theory of
definitions and the clearness of ideas, is a department within his theory
of method of inquiry[40], which he
variously called Methodeutic and Philosophical or Speculative Rhetoric. He
applied his pragmatism as a method throughout his work.
Theory of inquiry
Peirce extracted the pragmatic model or theory of inquiry from its raw materials
in classical logic and refined it in parallel with the early development of
symbolic logic to address problems about the nature of scientific reasoning.
Abuction, deduction, and induction typically operate in a cyclic fashion,
systematically operating to reduce the uncertainties and the difficulties that
initiated the inquiry in question, and in this way, to the extent that inquiry
is successful, leading to an increase in the knowledge or skills, in other words, an augmentation in the competence or performance, of the agent or
community engaged in the inquiry.
In the pragmatic way of thinking in terms of conceivable consequences, every
thing has a purpose, and the
purpose of any thing is the first thing that we should try to note about it. The
purpose of inquiry is to
reduce doubt and lead to a
state of belief, which a
person in that state will usually call 'knowledge' or 'certainty'. It needs to be
appreciated that the three kinds of inference, insofar as they
contribute and collaborate toward the end of inquiry, describe a cycle that can be understood
only as a whole, and none of the three makes complete sense in isolation from
the others.
For instance, the purpose of abduction is to
generate guesses of a kind that deduction can
explicate and that induction can
evaluate. This places a mild but meaningful constraint on the production
of hypotheses, since it is not just any wild guess at explanation that submits
itself to reason and bows out when defeated in a match with reality. In a similar fashion,
each of the other types of inference realizes its purpose
only in accord with its proper role in the whole cycle of inquiry. No matter how much it may be necessary to
study these processes in abstraction from each other, the integrity of inquiry places
strong limitations on the effective modularity
of its principal components.
If we then think to inquire, 'What sort of constraint, exactly, does
pragmatic thinking of the end of inquiry place on our guesses?', we have asked
the question that is generally recognized as the problem of 'giving a rule to abduction'. Peirce
expressed a broad answer in the pragmatic maxim. In 1903
Peirce called the question of pragmatism "the question of the logic of
abduction"[41].
Peirce characterized the scientific method as follows[39]:
1. Abduction (or retroduction). Generation of explanatory hypothesis.
From abduction, Peirce distinguishes induction as inferring, on the basis of
tests, the proportion of truth in the hypothesis. Every inquiry, whether into
ideas, brute facts, or norms and laws, arises as a result of surprising
observations in the given realm or realms, and the pondering of the phenomenon
in all its aspects in the attempt to resolve the wonder. All explanatory content
of theories is reached by way of abduction, the most insecure among modes of
inference. Induction as a process is far too slow for that job, so economy of
research demands abduction, whose modicum of success depends on one's being
somehow attuned to nature, by dispositions learned and, some of them, likely
inborn. Abduction has general inductive justification in that it works often
enough and that nothing else works, at least not quickly enough when science is
already properly rather slow, the work of indefinitely many generations. Given
abduction's dependence on mental processes not necessarily conscious and
deliberate but, in any case, attuned to nature, and given abduction's being
driven by the need to economize the inquiry process, its explanatory hypotheses
should be optimally simple in the sense of "natural" (for which Peirce cites
Galileo and which Peirce distinguishes from "logically simple"). Given
abduction's insecurity, it should have consequences with conceivable practical
bearing leading at least to mental tests, and, in science, lending themselves to
scientific testing.
2. Deduction. Analysis of hypothesis and deduction of its consequences
in order to test the hypothesis. Two stages:
i. Explication. Logical analysis of the hypothesis in order to render it
as distinct as possible.
ii. Demonstration (or deductive argumentation). Deduction of hypothesis's
consequence. Corollarial or, if needed, Theorematic.
3. Induction. The long-run validity of the rule of induction is
deducible from the principle (presuppositional to reasoning in general) that the
real "is only the object of the final opinion to which sufficient investigation
would lead".[36] In other words, if
there were something to which an inductive process involving ongoing tests or
observations would never lead, then that thing would not be real. Three
stages:
i. Classification. Classing objects of experience under general ideas.
ii. Probation (or direct Inductive Argumentation): Crude (the enumeration
of instances) or Gradual (new estimate of proportion of truth in the
hypothesis after each test). Gradual Induction is Qualitative or Quantitative;
if Quantitative, then dependent on measurements, or on statistics, or on
countings.
iii. Sentential Induction. "...which, by Inductive reasonings, appraises
the different Probations singly, then their combinations, then makes
self-appraisal of these very appraisals themselves, and passes final judgment
on the whole result"
[39].
-
^ See p. 481 in Peirce, C. S.
(1905), "Issues of Pragmaticism", The Monist, vol. 15, pp. 481-499,
Google Book Search Beta Eprint,
Internet Archive Eprint.
Reprinted (CP 5.438-463, see 438), (Charles S. Peirce: Selected
Writings, pp. 203-226)
-
^ Peirce (1902), CP 5.13 note 1
-
^ See CP 1.34 Eprint (in "The Spirit of
Scholasticism"), where Peirce attributes the success of modern science not so
much to a novel interest in verification as to the improvement of
verification.
- ^ a b "That the rule of induction will hold
good in the long run may be deduced from the principle that reality is only
the object of the final opinion to which sufficient investigation would lead",
in Peirce, C. S. (1878 April), "The Probability of Induction", p. 718 in
Popular Science Monthly, vol. 12, pp. 705-718. Reprinted (Chance,
Love, and Logic, pp. 82-105), (CP 2.669-693), (Philosophical Writings
of Peirce, pp. 174-189), (W 3, 290-305), (EP 1, 155-169). Internet
Archive Popular Science
Monthly 12.
-
^ "I think we may feel confident that
the parallax of the farthest star lies somewhere between -0.05 and
+0.15, and within another century our grandchildren will surely know
whether the three angles of a triangle are greater or less than 180° -- that
they are exactly that amount is what nobody ever can be justified in
concluding." -- Peirce, 1891, "The Architecture of Theories", The
Monist, vol. I, no. 2, p. 174 (CP 6.29, EP 1, 295).
-
^ While it is sometimes stated that
James' and other philosophers' use of the word pragmatism so dismayed
Peirce that he renamed his own variant pragmaticism, this may
well have been not the main reason (Haack, 55). This is revealed by the
context in which Peirce introduced the latter term:
But at present, the word [pragmatism] begins to be met
with occasionally in the literary journals, where it gets abused in the
merciless way that words have to expect when they fall into literary
clutches. … So then, the writer, finding his bantling "pragmatism" so
promoted, feels that it is time to kiss his child good-by and relinquish it
to its higher destiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the
original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word
"pragmaticism", which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers. (C. S.
Peirce, CP 5.414.)
However, in his letter to Calderoni (CP
8.205), Peirce said that he proposed that the word "pragmaticism" should be
used narrowly for his own doctrine and "that the word 'pragmatism' should
hereafter be used somewhat loosely to signify affiliation with Schiller,
James, Dewey, Royce, and the rest of us." Of course this does not mean that he
regarded his fellow pragmatist philosophers as word-kidnappers. But in the
final paragraph of his 1908 Monist article A
Neglected Argument for the Reality of God, he expressed both deep
satisfaction and deep dismay with his fellow pragmatists.
- ^ a b c Peirce, C.S. (1908), "A
Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", Hibbert Journal vol. 7,
pp. 90-112. Reprinted (CP 6.452-485), (Selected Writings, pp. 358-379),
(EP 2, 434-450), (Peirce on Signs, pp. 260-278). Internet
Archive Hibbert
Journal 7.
-
^ See Joseph Ransdell's
comments and his tabular list of titles of Peirce's proposed list of memoirs
in 1902 for his Carnegie application, Eprint
-
^ Peirce, C. S. (1903), "Pragmatism
-- The Logic of Abduction", CP 5.195-205, especially para. 196. Eprint.
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