[3.1.9.] Interpreting “The Fixation of Belief.”

 

Peirce scholars disagree over how best to interpret this essay:

·         are we to understand Peirce to be arguing against the first three methods in favor of the scientific method? If so, his arguments seem bad (and even he admits that the first three methods work for many, if not most, people).

·         if he’s not arguing against the first three methods, what is he doing?

 

 

Susan Haack[1] reads Peirce, in his description of the four methods of fixing belief, as providing a genealogy of the conception of truth. He is describing how the conception of truth has evolved over the last several hundred years.

 

This reading is supported by what Peirce says in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (the article that follows “The Fixation of Belief” in the series Illustrations of the Logic of Science; it is your next reading). In sec. IV of that article (EP 1:136-41), Peirce recounts the four different methods of fixing belief, giving examples from the history of philosophy to illustrate the first three stages. And there he explicitly describes those stages as lacking an adequate understanding of truth.

 

His view seems to be that the conception of truth has improved during the history of inquiry (especially philosophical inquiry), and that the conception of truth that we now have, that which underwrites the method of science, is superior to those that accompanied the earlier methods.

 

The idea of truth as that which a mind-independent reality (i.e., a reality independent of any particular mind, which nonetheless is accessible to the mind) forces on us in experience is

 

the most sophisticated stage of the intellectual development of mankind, which runs from the most primitive, represented by the method of tenacity, through the method of authority, to the a priori method, and finally to the scientific method. (Haack, 246)

 

Haack’s interpretation helps to explain a seeming tension within Peirce’s account of inquiry, broadly speaking, and within “The Fixation of Belief” itself:

 

“The Fixation of Belief”	various (including “Fixation”)
The only motive anyone ever has for inquiring is (not to discover the truth, but) to settle opinion, to fix belief. (E.g., EP 1:114-5)	The only motive had by the scientific, genuine, disinterested inquirer is to discover the truth, no matter what that truth is. (see Haack article for loads of examples)

 

This tension, or a similar one, exists within FOB:

 

“The irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for the struggle to attain belief ... With the doubt ... the struggle begins, and with the cessation of doubt it ends. Hence the sole object of inquiry is settlement of opinion. We may fancy that this is not enough for us, and that we seek, not merely an opinion, but a true opinion. But put this fancy to the test, and it proves groundless; for as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief be true or false.” (EP 1:114-5, CP 5.375)

“A man should consider well of [the advantages of the first three ways of fixing belief]; and then he should consider that, after all, he wishes his opinion to coincide with the fact, and that there is no reason why the results of these three methods should do so” (EP 1:122, CP 5.387)

 

 

Haack argues that the apparent tension is no such thing. She points to the following passage from around 1906, about 30 years after the publication of “Fixation,” in which Peirce was explaining, or restating, the point he intended to make in “Fixation” (only the text in red is quoted by Haack):

 

                It is ... no doubt true that men act, especially in the action of inquiry, as if their sole purpose were to produce a certain state of feeling, in the sense that when that state of feeling is attained, there is no further effort. It was upon that proposition that I originally based pragmaticism, laying it down in the article that in November 1877 prepared the ground for my argument for the pragmaticistic doctrine (Pop. Sci. Monthly for January, 1878). In the case of inquiry, I called that state of feeling “firm belief,” and said, “As soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief be true or false,” and went on to show how the action of experience consequently was to create the conception of real truth. Early in 1880, in the opening paragraphs of my memoir in Vol. III of the American Journal of Mathematics, I referred the matter to the fundamental properties of protoplasm, showing that purposive action must be action virtually directed toward the removal of stimulation.

                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. (5.563-64, c.1906; quoted at Haack 246)[2]

 

Haack goes on to cite this passage from “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (occurring in a section which Peirce, in a letter to James, says he never expected would be published; see CP 6, p.326 n.) (Haack quotes only what is in red):

 

My original essay, having been written for a popular monthly, assumes, for no better reason than that real inquiry cannot begin until a state of real doubt arises and ends as soon as Belief is attained, that “a settlement of Belief,” or, in other words, a state of satisfaction, is all that Truth, or the aim of inquiry, consists in. The reason I gave for this was so flimsy, while the inference was so nearly the gist of Pragmaticism, that I must confess the argument of that essay might with some justice be said to beg the question. The first part of the essay, however, is occupied with showing that, if Truth consists in satisfaction, it cannot be any actual satisfaction, but must be the satisfaction which would ultimately be found if the inquiry were pushed to its ultimate and indefeasible issue. (EP 2:449-50, CP 6.485, quoted at Haack p.247)

 

From these passages, Haack draws the following interpretation of Peirce’s positive account of inquiry (p.247):

·         “the primitive basis of our most sophisticated cognitive activity—scientific inquiry—is a simple homeostatic[3] process, initiated by the disturbance caused when some habit of action is interrupted by recalcitrance on the part of experience, and halted as soon as a new habit is established.”

·         “...the beliefs thus ‘settled’ are only temporarily fixed”

·         “...the most sophisticated cognizers, realizing that, unless a belief is true, though it may be temporarily settled, it cannot be permanently so, and aspiring to indefeasibly fixed belief, will always be motivated to further inquiry, never fully satisfied with what they presently incline to believe.”

·         “The primitive homeostatic basis is thus transmuted ... into the scientific attitude.”

 

[Note that Haack recognizes that if her interpretation of Peirce is correct, then Peirce’s criticism of Descartes’ critical project is no good. (247-8)]

 

 

Stopping point for Monday September 10. For next time, begin reading “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” EP1:124-32.