Re: Knowledge Workers of the World, Unite !
Gary Fuhrman <gnox <at> GNUSYSTEMS.CA>
2012-02-04 22:20:00 GMT
Jon, Ben & All,
I would agree that Peirce's third method of fixing belief is the most difficult to give a suitable name to,
but i think Peirce's own choice eventually fell on "fermentation of ideas", based on this paragraph dated
c. 1906:
[[[ My paper of November 1877, setting out from the proposition that the agitation of a question ceases when
satisfaction is attained with the settlement of belief, and then only, goes on to consider how the
conception of truth gradually develops from that principle under the action of experience; beginning
with willful belief, or self-mendacity, the most degraded of all intellectual conditions; thence
rising to the imposition of beliefs by the authority of organized society; then to the idea of a settlement
of opinion as the result of a fermentation of ideas; and finally reaching the idea of truth as
overwhelmingly forced upon the mind in experience as the effect of an independent reality. ]] CP 5.564 ]
"Fermentation of ideas" is not very elegant -- i prefer simply "dialogue" -- but it does imply that the third
method is fully social, and both more reasonable and more democratic than the method of authority; the
only thing that stops it from being scientific is the lack of appeal to direct experience. Indeed i think
the Ransdell conception of peer review implies that it is a prerequisite to a fully developed science
(note the developmental approach Peirce takes in the paragraph above).
Gary F.
-----Original Message-----
From: C S Peirce discussion list [mailto:PEIRCE-L <at> LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] On Behalf Of Jon Awbrey
Sent: February-04-12 4:23 PM
To: PEIRCE-L <at> LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Subject: Re: [peirce-l] Knowledge Workers of the World, Unite !
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.
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