Charles S. Peirce, Selected Writings

Charles S. Peirce, Philip P. Wiener

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486122946
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophische Essays

Charles S. Peirce in the opinion of many authorities was the most profound and original philosopher that America has produced. A master of exact science, our foremost logician, the founder of pragmatism, Peirce was one of the most remarkable and versatile minds of the 19th century, whose scattered writings made important contributions to such varied fields of logic, mathematics, geodesy, religion, astronomy, chemistry, physics, psychology, history of science, metaphysics, education, semeiotics, and more. Considered by William James the most original thinker of their generation, he exerted a tremendous influence on James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, C. I. Lewis, Ernst Schröder, among many others.
Professor Wiener's well-balanced selections introduce the reader to the many sides of Peirce's thought. He presents such famous essays as "The Fixation of Belief, " "How to Make Our Ideas Clear, " "The Architecture of Theories, " and others, along with several pieces that are not available elsewhere. Of particular interest today, when the problem of humanizing the sciences is the acute problem of our age, there are certain selections, previously neglected by students and editors of Peirce's work, which deal with the cultural or humanistic aspects of science and philosophy.
The 24 selections in this book are organized into five categories: science, materialism, and idealism; pragmatism (or as Peirce preferred, pragmaticism); the history of scientific thought; science and education; and science and religion. Included are articles originally published in North American Review, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Monist, Popular Science Monthly, and Educational Review; extracts or transcriptions of speeches; book reviews; letters; and previously unpublished manuscripts from the Smithsonian Institution, the Lowell Institute, and the Widener Library Archives in Harvard University, Professor Wiener's excellent introduction and prefaces to the selections supply the reader with important historical and analytical background material.

Pragmaticism: A Philosophy of Science

5. The Fixation of Belief¹⁹

[This and the next essay (“How To Make Our Ideas Clear”) were the first two of six papers written by Peirce for the Popular Science Monthly as “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” (1877—78). They were his first popular philosophical articles, but they did not earn for him any notable prominence as an American philosopher until twenty years later when “the potent pen of Professor (William) James brought their chief thesis to the attention of the philosophic world (in his Berkeley address, ‘Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results’) . . . The doctrine of this pair of chapters had already for some years been known among friends of the writer (Peirce) by the name he had proposed for it, which was ‘Pragmatism.’ ”

The term “fixation of belief” refers to the ways of arriving at ideas that settle down in the minds of a people as habits, customs, traditions, “folkways” of thought, ranging from personal tenacity to fashions in metaphysics. They influence conduct insofar as a belief is “that upon which a man is prepared to act,” so defined by the British psychologist and philosopher Bain and his American disciple Nicholas St. John Green, “the grandfather of pragmatism,” according to Peirce. “Common sense” is replete with such modes of thinking which Peirce calls tenacity, authority, and the a priori method, before the logic of scientific thinking can be applied to it, as it should be if we are to rid ourselves of some of the narrow prejudices, dogmas, and bad metaphysics with which “common sense” is deeply imbued. Tenacity is illustrated today in the belief in white man supremacy. Authority has its practical uses in military, governmental, and church organizations in stabilizing a community against willful disobedience, but as a method of arriving at general truths in exploring the unknown, it is too inflexible. The a priori method, practiced by rationalists like Plato and Descartes, is often no more than a rationalization of what is pleasing to the system-building, rationalizing mind of the introspective philosopher, impervious to fresh evidence. The only way out of the incorrigible tendencies of tenacity, authority, and a priori speculation—which may have their good purposes in building character, social institutions, and new perspectives, but are unreliable as modes of inquiry for settling conflicts or doubts—is the “self-corrective,” scientific method whose experimental results are always subject to revision by future evidence. The historical or evolutionary approach of Peirce makes it clear that scientific logic is a very late arrival in a civilization that has been and still is largely shaped by the other methods that form the crusted cake of custom. Hence, the first essay is as much the psychology and sociology of science as it is a defense of the virtues of the logic of science.]

I

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.

We come to the full possession of our power of drawing inferences the last of all our faculties, for it is not so much a natural gift as a long and difficult art. The history of its practice would make a grand subject for a book. The mediæval schoolman, following the Romans, made logic the earliest of a boy’s studies after grammar, as being very easy. So it was as they understood it. Its fundamental principle, according to them, was that all knowledge rests on either authority or reason; but that whatever is deduced by reason depends ultimately on a premise derived from authority. Accordingly, as soon as a boy was perfect in the syllogistic procedure, his intellectual kit of tools was held to be complete.

To Roger Bacon, that remarkable mind who in the middle of the thirteenth century was almost a scientific man, the schoolmen’s conception of reasoning appeared only an obstacle to truth. He saw that experience alone teaches anything—a proposition which to us seems easy to understand, because a distinct conception of experience has been handed down to us from former generations; which to him also seemed perfectly clear, because its difficulties had not yet unfolded themselves. Of all kinds of experience, the best, he thought, was interior illumination, which teaches many things about nature which the external senses could never discover, such as the transubstantiation of bread.

Four centuries later, the more celebrated Bacon, in the first book of his Novum Organum, gave his clear account of experience as something which must be opened to verification and re-examination. But, superior as Lord Bacon’s conception is to earlier notions, a modern reader who is not in awe of his grandiloquence is chiefly struck by the inadequacy of his view of scientific procedure. That we have only to make some crude experiments, to draw up briefs of the results in certain blank forms, to go through these by rule, checking off everything disproved and setting down the alternatives, and that thus in a few years physical science would be finished up—what an idea! “He wrote on science like a Lord Chancellor,”²⁰ indeed, as Harvey, a genuine man of science, said.

The early scientists, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, and Gilbert, had methods more like those of their modern brethren. Kepler undertook to draw a curve through the places of Mars;²¹ and his greatest service to science was in impressing on men’s minds that this was the thing to be done if they wished to improve astronomy; that they were not to content themselves with inquiring whether one system of epicycles was better than another but that they were to sit down by the figures and find out what the curve, in truth, was. He accomplished this by his incomparable energy and courage, blundering along in the most inconceivable way (to us), from one irrational hypothesis to another, until, after trying twenty-two of these, he fell, by the mere exhaustion of his invention, upon the orbit which a mind well furnished with the weapons of modern logic would have tried almost at the outset.

In the same way, every work of science great enough to be remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written; and each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic. It was so when Lavoisier and his contemporaries took up the study of Chemistry. The old chemist’s maxim had been Lege, lege, lege, labora, ora, et relege. Lavoisier’s method was not to read and pray, not to dream that some long and complicated chemical process would have a certain effect, to put it into practice with dull patience, after its inevitable failure to dream that with some modification it would have another result, and to end by publishing the last dream as a fact: his way was to carry his mind into his laboratory, and to make 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.

The Darwinian controversy is, in large part, a question of logic. Mr. Darwin proposed to apply the statistical method to biology.²² The same thing has been done in a widely different branch of science, the theory of gases. Though unable to say what the movement of any particular molecule of gas would be on a certain hypothesis regarding the constitution of this class of bodies, Clausius and Maxwell were yet able, by the application of the doctrine of probabilities, to predict that in the long run such and such a proportion of the molecules would, under given circumstances, acquire such and such velocities; that there would take place, every second, such and such a number of collisions, etc.; and from these propositions they were able to deduce certain properties of gases, especially in regard to their heat-relations. In like manner, Darwin, while unable to say what the operation of variation and natural selection in every individual case will be, demonstrates that in the long run they will adapt animals to their circumstances. Whether or not existing animal forms are due to such action, or what position the theory ought to take, forms the subject of a discussion in which questions of fact and questions of logic are curiously interlaced.

II

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 such²³ as to give a true conclusion from true premises, and not otherwise. Thus, the question of validity is purely one of fact and not of thinking. A being the premises and B being 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.

We are, doubtless, in the main logical animals, but we are not perfectly so. Most of us, for example, are naturally more sanguine and hopeful than logic would justify. We seem to be so constituted that in the absence of any facts to go upon we are happy and self-satisfied; so that the effect of experience is continually to counteract our hopes and aspirations. Yet a lifetime of the application of this corrective does not usually eradicate our sanguine disposition. Where hope is unchecked by any experience, it is likely that our optimism is extravagant. Logicality in regard to practical matters is the most useful quality an animal can possess, and might, therefore, result from the action of natural selection; but outside of these it is probably of more advantage to the animal to have his mind filled with pleasing and encouraging visions, independently of their truth; and thus, upon unpractical subjects, natural selection might occasion a fallacious tendency of thought.²⁴

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 guid-ing principle is that what is true of one piece of copper is true of another. Such a guiding principle with regard to copper would be much safer than with regard to many other substances—brass, for example.

A book might be written to signalize all the most important of these guiding principles of reasoning. It would probably be, we must confess, of no service to a person whose thought is directed wholly to practical subjects, and whose activity moves along thoroughly beaten paths. The problems which present themselves to such a mind are matters of routine which he has learned once for all to handle in learning his business. But let a man venture into an unfamiliar field, or where his results are not continually checked by experience, and all history shows that the most masculine intellect will ofttimes lose his orientation and waste his efforts in directions which bring him no nearer to his goal, or even carry him entirely astray. He is like a ship on the open sea, with no one on board who understands the rules of navigation. And in such a case some general study of the guiding principles of reasoning would be sure to be found useful.

The subject could hardly be treated, however, without being first limited; since almost any fact may serve as a guiding principle. But it so happens that there exists a division among facts, such that in one class are all those which are absolutely essential as guiding principles, while in the other are all those which have any other interest as objects of research. This division is between those which are necessarily taken for granted in asking whether a certain conclusion follows from certain premises, and those which are not implied in that question. A moment’s thought will show that a variety of facts are already assumed when the logical question is first asked. It is implied, for instance, that there are such states of mind as doubt and belief—that a passage from one to the other is possible, the object of thought remaining the same, and that this transition is subject to some rules which all minds are alike bound by. As these are facts which we must already know before we can have any clear conception of reasoning at all, it cannot be supposed to be any longer of much interest to inquire into their truth or falsity. On the other hand, it is easy to believe that those rules of reasoning which are deduced from the very idea of the process are the ones which are the most essential; and, indeed, that so long as it conforms to these it will, at least, not lead to false conclusions from true premises. In point of fact, the importance of what may be deduced from the assumptions involved in the logical question turns out to be greater than might be supposed, and this for reasons which it is difficult to exhibit at the outset. The only one which I shall here mention is that conceptions which are really products of logical reflections, without being readily seen to be so, mingle with our ordinary thoughts, and are frequently the causes of great confusion. This is the case, for example, with the conception of quality. A quality as such is never an object of observation. We can see that a thing is blue or green, but the quality of being blue and the quality of being green are not things which we see; they are products of logical reflections. The truth is that common sense, or thought as it first emerges above the level of the narrowly practical, is deeply inbued with that bad logical quality to which the epithet metaphysical is commonly applied; and nothing can clear it up but a severe course of logic.

III

We generally know when we wish to ask a question and when we wish to pronounce a judgment, for there is a dissimilarity between the sensation of doubting and that of believing.

But this is not all which distinguishes doubt from belief. There is a practical difference. Our beliefs guide our desires and shape our actions. The Assassins, or followers of the Old Man of the Mountain, used to rush into death at his least command, because they believed that obedience to him would insure everlasting felicity. Had they doubted this, they would not have acted as they did. So it is with every belief, according to its degree. 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.

Nor must we overlook a third point of difference. Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief;²⁵ 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.²⁶ On the contrary, we cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing just what we do believe.

Thus, both doubt and belief have positive effects upon us, though very different ones. Belief does not make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in a certain way, when the occasion arises. Doubt has not the least effect of this sort, but stimulates us to action until it is destroyed. This reminds us of the irritation of a nerve and the reflex action produced thereby; while for the analogue of belief, in the nervous system, we must look to what are called nervous associations—for example, to that habit of the nerves in consequence of which the smell of a peach will make the mouth water.

IV

The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief.²⁷ I shall term this struggle inquiry, though it must be admitted that this is sometimes not a very apt designation.

The irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for the struggle to attain belief. It is certainly best for us that our beliefs should be such as may truly guide our actions so as to satisfy our desires; and this reflection will make us reject any belief which does not seem to have been so formed as to insure this result. But it will only do so by creating a doubt in the place of that belief. With the doubt, therefore, the struggle begins, and with the cessation of doubt it ends. Hence, the sole object of inquiry is the 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 false or true. And it is clear that nothing out of the sphere of our knowledge can be our object, for nothing which does not affect the mind can be a motive for a mental effort. The most that can be maintained is that we seek for a belief that we shall think to be true. But we think each one of our beliefs to be true, and, indeed, it is mere tautology to say so.²⁸

That the settlement of opinion is the sole end of inquiry is a very important proposition. It sweeps away, at once, various vague and erroneous conceptions of proof. A few of these may be noticed here.

1. Some philosophers have imagined that to start an inquiry it was only necessary to utter or question or set it down on paper, and have even recommended us to begin our studies with questioning everything! But the mere putting of a proposition into the interrogative form does not stimulate the mind to any struggle after belief. There must be a real and living doubt, and without all this, discussion is idle.

2. It is a very common idea that a demonstration must rest on some ultimate and absolutely indubitable propositions. These, according to one school, are first principles of a general nature; according to another, are first sensations. But, in point of fact, an inquiry, to have that completely satisfactory result called demonstration, has only to start with propositions perfectly free from all actual doubt. If the premises are not in fact doubted at all, they cannot be more satisfactory than they are.²⁹

3. Some people seem to love to argue a point after all the world is fully convinced of it. But no further advance can...

Table of contents

• DOVER BOOKS ON WESTERN PHILOSOPHY
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Science, Materialism and Idealism
• Pragmaticism: A Philosophy of Science
• Lessons from the History of Scientific Thought
• Science and Education
• Science and Religion
• BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
• INDEX
• A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST
• DOVER CLASSICS OF SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS