[2.2.] Peirce’s Theory of Inquiry: “The Fixation of Belief.”

 

The second article by Peirce that we will read is “The Fixation of Belief,” published in 1877 in Popular Science Monthly. It is one of his two most famous works (the other of which is “How to Make Our Beliefs Clear, which we will read next) and the first in a 6-article series entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science.[1]

 

As this title suggests, this series of articles is concerned with reasoning, and in particular the sort of reasoning used within science.

 

In much of the first article from which we read (“Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” 1868), Peirce was concerned with criticizing Descartes’ views about inquiry. In “The Fixation of Belief,” Peirce provides more details about his alternative to Descartes’ view.

 

But what he says in that regard is in support of what I think is the main point of the article: to provide a history of the development of the concept of truth, i.e., to show how the concept of truth has developed over the history of inquiry.

 

 

[2.2.1.] Historical Prelude.

 

What is going on in sec. I?

 

Peirce opens with a joke: “Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination, and does not extend to that of other men.” (108) In other words, not many people want to study logic because everyone thinks she is already pretty good at it—and usually she thinks that she is the only one who is good at it.

 

He then proceeds with a brief history of inquiry. He describes a number of different historical stages and the assumptions made by inquirers at each stage about how knowledge is to be attained:

 

According to...	knowledge is to be attained...
the scholastics / medieval schoolmen	either by reason or by authority; and anything “deduced by reason depends ultimately on a premise derived from authority.” (108)
Roger Bacon (c.1214-1292)	only by experience; but Bacon had a very broad conception of experience, according to which it included “interior illumination” (so that by experience we might come to “know” the transubstantiation of bread) (108)
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)	experience, which “must be opened to verification and reëxamination.” But Lord Bacon’s view of scientific procedure was inadequate. (108)
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)	experience; a better view of scientific procedure than F. Bacon: astronomers should “not content themselves with inquiring whether one system of epicycles was better than another but [instead] sit down by the figures and find out what the curve, in truth, was.” But still he lacked “the weapons of modern logic” and stumbled from “one irrational hypothesis to another” until finally getting it right. (109)
Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794)	experience and reasoning; he “carr[ied] his mind into the laboratory  and ... [made] of his alembics and cucurbits instruments of thought, giving a new conception of reasoning as something which was to be done with one’s eyes open, by manipulating real things instead of words and fancies.” (109)   This can be read as an implicit criticism of the Cartesian method of inquiry, a form of reasoning that one can engage in with one’s eyes closed.
Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888) & James Maxwell (1831-1879); Charles Darwin (1809-1882)	experience and statistical reasoning

 

This historical progression is echoed in the Four Methods of Fixing Belief described by Peirce in section V of this article (part of your next reading).

 

 

Stopping point for Friday September 2. For next time, continue reading “Fixation of Belief”: pp. 115-122.