[4.] Pragmatism.

 

Peirce’s most famous contribution to philosophy is his so-called “Pragmatic Maxim” (PM). He intended it to do two related jobs:

 

 (I) to clarify the meaning of intellectual concepts.

 (II) to show some (but not all) metaphysical claims to be meaningless.

 

Relevant reading:

·         Peirce introduced the PM in an article called “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878). This is the second article in the “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” series (Popular Mechanics Monthly, 1878-9).[1]

 

 

[4.1.] Clear and Distinct Ideas.

 

Peirce describes three different levels or “degrees” of clearness that an idea or concept can have. To illustrate these three degrees, I’ll use the idea or concept of gold.

 

The first two levels were recognized by earlier logicians in their doctrine of “clear and distinct ideas.” They are:

 

1.       Being able to “recognize” an idea wherever it occurs and not mistake any other idea for it; Peirce also describes this as “familiar use”(EP 1:125). By this, I take Peirce to mean the following: having an idea or concept that is clear to this first degree of clearness is to be able to tell the difference between things to which the concept applies and things to which it does not apply. You have attained this level of clarity when you can sort things according to whether or not they are gold. But this does not require an infallibility to make such distinctions... such clearness is “a subjective feeling of mastery which may be entirely mistaken.” So if you mistake a piece of pyrite (fool’s gold) for actual gold, your idea of gold may nonetheless still be clear to this first degree.

·         This corresponds with the “clearness” of ideas emphasized by earlier logicians.

 

2.       Being able to give a verbal definition of the concept, such as you can find in a dictionary. You have attained this level of clarity when you can define the word “gold” (such as: “a soft, yellow, corrosive-resistant element, the most malleable and ductile metal, occurring in veins and alluvial deposits and recovered by mining or by panning or sluicing”[2]).

·         This corresponds with the “distinctness” of ideas emphasized by earlier logicians.

 

But Peirce thought that this degree of clarity could be improved upon, that we can attain a level of even greater clearness, and that previous logicians and philosophers have fallen behind the progress made in other areas of inquiry:

 

...the books [on logic] are right in making familiarity with a notion the first step toward clearness of apprehension, and the defining of it the second. But in omitting all mention of any higher perspicuity of thought, they simply mirror a philosophy which was exploded a hundred years ago. That much-admired “ornament of logic”—the doctrine of clearness and distinctness—may be pretty enough, but it is high time to relegate to our cabinet of curiosities the antique bijou, and to wear about us something better adapted to modern uses. (EP 1:126, CP 5.392)

 

Before he goes on to explain a third level of clearness, he comments, at the end of section I, on the need for clear thinking and the harm that can come from unclear ideas:

 

                The very first lesson that we have a right to demand that logic shall teach us is how to make our ideas clear; and a most important one it is, depreciated only by minds who stand in need of it. (EP 1:126, CP 5.393)

 

...there can be no question that a few clear ideas are worth more than many confused ones. ... It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty. (EP 1:127, CP 5.393)

 

 

[4.2.] Doubt, Belief and the Sole Purpose of Thought.

 

Recall the principles about doubt and belief that Peirce set forth in “The Fixation of Belief”:

 

1.       Doubt and belief 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)

·         Interestingly, in “How to Make...” he does not emphasize the difference in the sensations accompanying belief and doubt, but instead says simply that belief “is something that we are aware of.”

 

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)

 

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.” (EP 1:114, CP 5.372)

 

He now sums up and extends these principles as follows:

·         “the action of thought is excited by the irritation of doubt, and ceases when belief is attained; so that the production of belief is the sole function of thought.” (EP 1:127, 5.394)

·         “the whole function of thought is to produce habits of action.”(EP 1:131, CP 5.400).

 

As we will see, these principles will serve as an argument for Peirce’s pragmatism. At this point, Peirce says that these principles “lead, at once, to a method of reaching a clearness of thought of a far higher grade than the ‘distinctness’ of the logicians.” (EP 1:127, CP 5.394)

 

 

[4.2.1.] Exaggerated Senses of “Inquiry,” “Belief” and “Doubt.”

 

Earlier Peirce indicated that in using the word “inquiry” to label the struggle to escape doubt and fix belief, he was using a word that at least sometimes is “not a very apt designation.”

 

He now notes that he has been using the words “belief” and “doubt” in a very broad way: “...to designate the starting of any question, no matter how small or how great, and the resolution of it.” (EP 1:128). See his example of deciding whether to pay his carriage fare with a nickel or with five pennies.

 

 

[4.2.2.] Immediate and Mediate Consciousness.

 

He also makes a distinction between two types of “element of consciousness”:

·         those of which we are immediately conscious: they are entirely present to us at a given moment (like a single musical note is entirely present at every moment it lasts)

·         those of which we are mediately conscious: they are not entirely present to us at a given moment; rather, we experience them over some duration of time (like the melody or “air” of a musical composition, which occurs over some duration of time)

 

Thought is something of which we are mediately conscious: it is “a thread of melody running through the succession of our sensations.”  (EP 1:129, CP 5.395) And thought concludes when a belief is produced: belief “is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.” (EP 1:129, CP 5.397)

 

 

[4.2.3.] Same Habit of Action, Same Belief.

 

...the identity of a habit depends on how it might lead us to act, not merely under such circumstances as are likely to arise, but under such as might possibly occur, no matter how improbable they might be. What the habit is depends on when and how it causes us to act. As for the when, every stimulus to action is derived from perception; as for the how, every purpose of action is to produce some sensible result. Thus, we come down to what is tangible and practical, as the root of every real distinction of thought, no matter how subtile it may be; and there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. (EP 1:131, CP 5.400)[3]

 

In other words:

·         Any belief has associated with it a habit of action—a habit of responding to specific perceptions by acting in a specific way, a way that is intended to produce some perceptible outcome.

·         If belief A has the exact same practical results associated with it as does belief B, then belief A is the same belief as belief B. The meaning of a belief cannot be separated from the practical results associated with it. If A produces the same habits of action as B, and thus the same results, then A and B have the same meaning, and so A is one and the same belief as B.

 

To illustrate this, Peirce uses as an example the doctrine of transubstantiation (that wine and wafers taken during communion literally turn into the blood and body of Christ):

 

...our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses, our habit has the same bearing as our action, our belief the same as our habit, our conception the same as our belief;

 

In other words, our concepts, beliefs, habits, and actions all refer exclusively to what can affect our senses.

 

and we can consequently mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon. (EP 1:131)

 

So on Peirce’s view, the claim that wine changes into the blood of Christ, although none of its sensible properties change, is meaningless.

 

This is the sort of clarification that the Pragmatic Maxim is supposed to yield: it reveals the connection that a concept has with habits of action, and therefore with the perceptible world with which each of us interacts.

 

And if there is no such connection, then the concept is pragmatically meaningless.

 

 

[4.3.] The Pragmatic Maxim.

 

A maxim is a rule or principle of conduct, and Peirce intended the PM to be a rule for clarifying the meaning of concepts beyond the second degree of clearness by showing how meaning is connected to action (purposeful behavior) and the experiences that follow.[4]

 

He gave a number of different formulations of the PM, including the following:

 

Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (EP1:132; CP 5.402)[5]

 

Here is a formulation that captures this idea:

 

The meaning of a concept is given by a description of the experiences you will have as a result of performing actions that involve objects to which the concept applies; in particular, it is given by a list of conditionals (if-then statements) of the following form:

 

“If you do so-and-so, then you will experience such-and-such.”

 

The first part of the conditional specifies some behavior or test or “experiment” that a person can perform; the second part specifies the experiences that will follow as an effect of performing that test.

 

But the practical difference captured in these conditionals cannot be one involving the meaning of the words themselves...

 

... a thinker must be shallow indeed if he does not see that to admit a species of practicality that consists in one’s conduct about words and modes of expression is at once to break down all the bars against the nonsense that pragmatism is designed to exclude.

                What the pragmatist has his pragmatism for is to be able to say: here is a definition and it does not differ at all from your confusedly apprehended conception because there is no practical difference. But what is to prevent his opponent from replying that there is a practical difference which consists in his recognizing one as his conception and not the other? That is, one is expressible in a way in which the other is not expressible.

                Pragmatism is completely volatilized if you admit that sort of practicality. (EP 2:141, CP 5.33, PPM ???, 1903)[6]

 

 

Stopping point for Wednesday September 12. For next time, continue reading “How to Make Our Beliefs Clear” (EP1:132-39).