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

[Eric Charles]

I'm not going to try to lard the post-modernism discussion, but want to
reply in general:

In Peirce's cosmology, it is quite possible that there is very little that
stays stable in the very long run. Maybe even nothing!  And yet, it is
exactly those stabilities that the scientist is searching for, and it is
exactly long-term convergence of the evidence that they are trying to get
at with words like "true" and "real". What happens when decades of
investigation don't find stable relations between categories of things? We
change the categories being used and try again. What is an element? There
were many things that people thought were "elements" but which were later
determined to be "composites" of  several "elements."

We know "iron ore" is many things, but what about "hematite"? Is hematite
one thing, or many things? And we know "iron ore" is composed of many
things, one of which is "iron", but is iron one thing or many things? The
"truth" of any attempted answer to those questions is a matter of whether,
in the long run, actions based on those beliefs stay stable. That "iron" is
"an element" is nothing other than a claim regarding what would or would
not be found in the very, very long run of scientific investigation, and
the vast majority of such claims will be wrong, because they are carving
out swaths of the world in which the claimed stability simply does not
exist.

If there is one glaring bit of faith in Peirce's philosophy, it is belief
that, in the long run, the honest investigators will win out. He believes
that reality impinges upon belief, and that, in the long run, the
temptation of fixating belief in response to authority, pure stubbornness,
or other methods will ultimately give way, and people will come back to
seeking out what is true.
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