[3.] Peirce’s Positive Account of Inquiry.

 

 

[3.1.] “The Fixation of Belief.”

 

The next article by Peirce that we will read is “The Fixation of Belief,” published in 1877 in Popular Science Monthly. It is 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, or as Peirce says at the beginning, “our power of drawing inferences.” (EP 1:110)

 

In this series Peirce is particularly concerned with the sort of reasoning used within science. But as we will see, it is not science in a narrow sense (in which it is limited to professional work within disciplines like physics, chemistry, etc.), but in a broader sense, in which “science” means the method of inquiry that relies upon reasoning and experience.

 

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 the beginnings of his own alternative to Descartes’ view.

 

 

[3.1.1.] A Brief History of the Evolution of Scientific Thinking.

 

In section I, Peirce provides a brief history of the development 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” (EP 1:110, CP 5.359); so once one has mastered deductive reasoning (i.e., valid deduction of conclusions from premises), “his intellectual kit of tools [is] complete.”
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) (EP 1:110; CP 5.360)
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)	experience, which “must be opened to verification and reëxamination.” But Lord Bacon’s view of scientific procedure was inadequate. (EP 1:110; CP 5.361)
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. (EP 1:110-11; CP 5.362)
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.” (EP 1:111; CP 5.363)
Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888) & James Maxwell (1831-1879); Charles Darwin (1809-1882)	experience and statistical reasoning

 

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

 

 

[3.1.2.] Against Psychologism.

 

After his brief overview of the history of inquiry, he asserts that whether an inference is valid (in the broad sense of “valid” described in notes 2.2.2.2. (Aug 24), on which it means logically strong to some degree, but not necessarily deductively valid) is a matter of whether the facts represented by the premises are related in a certain way to the facts represented by the conclusion: related such that, if the former facts obtain, then the latter do as well.

 

This, says Peirce, has nothing to do with whether humans feel compelled to accept the conclusion if they’ve already accepted the premises:

 

The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else which we do not know. Consequently, reasoning is good if it be such as to give a true conclusion from true premises, and not otherwise. Thus, the question of its validity is purely one of fact and not of thinking. A being the premises and B the conclusion, the question is, whether these facts are really so related that if A is B is. If so, the inference is valid; if not, not. It is not in the least the question whether, when the premises are accepted by the mind, we feel an impulse to accept the conclusion also. It is true that we do generally reason correctly by nature. But that is an accident; the true conclusion would remain true if we had no impulse to accept it; and the false one would remain false, though we could not resist the tendency to believe in it. (EP 1:111-12, CP 5.365)[2]

 

This amounts to a rejection of psychologism:

 

psychologism (df.): the view that logical relationships between statements are a matter of humans’ psychological reactions to those relationships, such that, e.g., the validity of a deductively valid inference is a matter of humans feeling a certain way when they engage in that inference; as a result, the purpose the discipline of logic is to study the ways in which human beings actually think.[3]

 

So on Peirce’s view, whether an argument is deductively valid or invalid, or logically strong or weak, has nothing to do with how human beings actually react to that argument. It is a matter of the real relationship between the facts represented in the premises and those represented in the conclusion.

 

 

[3.1.3.] Guiding Principles.

 

Peirce now considers the principles that we employ in our reasoning:

 

                That which determines us, from given premises, to draw one inference rather than another, is some habit of mind, whether it be constitutional or acquired. The habit is good or otherwise, according as it produces true conclusions from true premises or not; and an inference is regarded as valid or not, without reference to the truth or falsity of its conclusion specially, but according as the habit which determines it is such as to produce true conclusions in general or not. The particular habit of mind which governs this or that inference may be formulated in a proposition whose truth depends on the validity of the inferences which the habit determines; and such a formula is called a guiding principle of inference. Suppose, for example, that we observe that a rotating disk of copper quickly comes to rest when placed between the poles of a magnet, and we infer that this will happen with every disk of copper. The guiding principle is, that what is true of one piece of copper is true of another. (EP 1:112, CP 5.367)

 

So a guiding principle is something like an assumption that must be true in order for a given conclusion to follow from a given premise. Peirce’s example:

 

This copper disk comes to rest when placed between magnetic poles.   Therefore, every copper disk will come to rest when placed between magnetic poles.

Guiding principle: Anything true of one piece of copper is true of them all.

 

Some facts are “absolutely essential as guiding principles.” According to Peirce, “so long as [our reasoning] conforms to these it will, at least, not lead to false conclusions from true premises.” (EP 1:113, CP 5.369).

 

Peirce’s view seems to be that these absolutely essential guiding principles are the rules of reasoning that can be deduced from the following facts (facts that, he says, we have to “know before we can have any clear conception of reasoning at all”):

·          “there are such states of mind as doubt and belief”

·         “a passage from one to the other is possible—the object of thought remaining the same”

·         “this transition is subject to some rules which all minds are alike bound by”

 

 

Unfortunately, he does not mention any of these essential guiding principles. But he does go on to discuss, for the rest of the article, the three points about doubt and belief enumerated above.

 

 

[3.1.4.] Beliefs and Doubts. 

 

In section III, Peirce identified the three differences between believing and doubting:

 

1.       They feel different. The sensation accompanying belief is unlike the sensation accompanying doubt: “...there is a dissimilarity between the sensation of doubting and that of believing.” (EP 1:114, CP 5.370)

 

2.       A belief involves a habit, a disposition to act, to do something. A doubt involves the lack of such a habit. “The feeling of believing is a more or less sure indication of there being established in our nature some habit which will determine our actions. Doubt never has such an effect.” (EP 1:114, CP 5.370)

 

Peirce’s example: the followers of “the Old Man of the Mountain” (Sheik al-Jebal), a radical Muslim of the eleventh century. His followers would undertake suicide missions at his command, because they believed, and did not doubt, that they would be rewarded in the afterlife.

 

A more ordinary example: Suppose that you believe that the liquid in this container is water. Your belief involves a group of dispositions to do certain things, e.g. pick it up and drink it; pour it on your houseplants or in your dog’s water bowl; to use it to brush your teeth or wash your hair or your car; etc. If you aren’t sure whether it’s water, i.e. if you doubt that it’s water, then you won’t know what to do with it. You won’t have any dispositions to behave in a certain way towards it.

 

So on Peirce’s view, having a belief is not just a matter of having a thought or cognition in your mind. Beliefs involve habits of action, and we have those habits even when we’re not thinking about the object of the belief (we have dispositions to act certain ways with regard to water, even when we’re not thinking about water).[4]

 

So having a belief involves having a habit. And to doubt is to lack such a habit. But a doubt is not simply an absence of belief. It is “a condition of erratic activity.”

 

3.       We are content with belief, but we tend to try to escape from doubt, to eliminate doubt and replace it with belief. “Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.” (p.114; CP 5.372)[5]

 

 

Stopping point for Friday August 31. For next time (Wednesday Sept. 3), read EP 1:114-20.