[FRIAM] Peirce's "What Pragmatism is."

[Eric Charles]

Glen, spot on! Some of this I can hazard some thought on.

In the meantime, I'll (again) lodge my main objection to what Peirce seems
> to be laying out, in my naive understanding, regarding belief and doubt.
> First, in response to his "But do not make believe; if pedantry has not
> eaten all the reality out of you, recognize, as you must, that there is
> much that you do not doubt, in the least", I absolutely reject that.  I do
> doubt everything.  But, as he mentions in Note <2>, his discussion here
> disallows "grades of certainty".  By disallowing that, he destroys any
> purpose or meaning that might otherwise exist in the entire essay.
>

You might well, as did Descartes, *imagine *that you doubt everything, as
an intellectual exercise. But you cannot actually doubt everything, because
to do so would be preemptively dysfunctional in all possible ways. You do
not type on your keyboard as if it might disappear at any moment. You do
not wonder if the world might be destroyed unless you flick every light
switch you pass exactly 24 times. Etc., etc.. As a practical matter, much
that in-principle could be doubted is not doubted as you go about your day
to day life. Were you actively doubting any significant portion of that
stuff on a continuous in-the-moment basis, you would be suffering from a
particularly acute variety of what we now call a "mental breakdown." Peirce
likely isn't thinking about things that minute, however. Probably his line
of thinking flows, to a significant extent, out of the Emersonian tradition
of American thought. We find ourselves where we find ourselves, and though
we may change quite a bit over a lifetime, at any given moment in our
lives, if we assess ourselves with simple honesty, we will find that there
are some things we are unable to seriously doubt. Emerson could not find it
in himself to doubt that slavery was bad. He also, prior to the Fugitive
Slave Act, could not find it in himself to doubt that he had no basis for
dictating how people so far away, living in such a different world, should
live their lives. The Fugitive Slave Act forced inadvertently slavery into
his world as a matter of practical course, and thereafter he could not
doubt that he had a firm basis for opposing slavery throughout the country.
Could he have imagined doubting those things as an intellectual exercise,
yes. Could he actually doubt them and live his life in fundamentally
different ways in those moments? No. They *were *his beliefs, and, as a
practical matter, he could not doubt them.

As for the "grades of certainty" issue, I don't think Peirce is trying to
say that such things do not exist. I think he is merely pointing out that
he is not using the term "belief" for the far extreme on a graded scale. He
is not contrasting absolute doubt with absolute belief, but rather he is
discussing things that are more or less doubted, and whatever the
particular context, a "thing less doubted" is a "thing more believed."

In this context, a community of scientists is composed of people who
believe various things about a subject matter to various extents, and are
willing to act upon those beliefs in a research context. (That is, of
course, only one of many important qualities.) In one of his earliest major
works, "The Fixation of Belief", Peirce lays out many ways that one might
fixate beliefs, i.e., cease to doubt. The primary merit of the scientific
method of fixating belief, he argues, is that it is the only approach that
cares what is true. Combining that with your observations here, we see the
interesting tension where the scientist must believe something before they
can engage in the scientific process, but she must also be prepared to
change that belief fairly readily if the evidence changes. Note the
similarity with Emerson and slavery. In Emerson's case the circumstances
changed, and his beliefs adjusted to a new world. In the scientists case
the available knowledge changes, but the needed adjustment is of identical
kind.
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