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C.S. Peirce: Belief, Truth, and Going from the Known to the Unknown

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David Wiggins
David Wiggins*
Affiliation:
New College, University of Oxford
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Extract

The third philosophical stratagem for cutting off inquiry consists in maintaining that this, that, or the other element of science is basic, ultimate, independent of aught else and utterly inexplicable- not so much from any defect in our knowing as because there is nothing beneath it to know. The only type of reasoning by which such a conclusion could be reached is retroduction.Now nothing justifies a retroductive inference except its affording an explanation of the facts. It is, however, no explanation at all of a fact to pronounce it inexplicable.That, therefore, is a conclusion which no reasoning can ever justify or excuse. (Peirce, Collected Papers 1.139)

Abduction consists in studying facts and devising a theory to explain them. Its only justification is that, if we are ever to understand things at all, it must be in that way. (Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.145)

[Scientific procedure] will at times find a high probability established by a single confirmatory instance, while at others it will dismiss a thousand as almost worthless. (Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), p. 16)

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 24: Pragmatism , 1998 , pp. 9 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1998

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References

1 Writings of Charles S. Peirce, Kloesel, C. ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 247Google Scholar. Cited hereafter as W[vol. Number: page number].

2 MS 8828 p. 1 and MS 334, page marked “C,” quoted in Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 49Google Scholar.

3 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press), 2.1: “Logic is the theory of the conditions which determine reasonings to be secure.“

4 There is no doubt how Augustine's double direction is to be understood. It is a question whether “imperative logic” would need general modification lest “conjunction elimination” destroy the sense of such double commands.

5 Indeed, in something he wrote before “On the Fixation of Belief,” he had already noted that there is an important difference between the settlement of opinion which results from investigation and every other such settlement. It is that investigation “will not fix one answer to a question as well as another, but on the contrary it tends to unsettle opinions at first, to change them and to confirm a certain opinion which depends only on the nature of investigation itself.” (Collected Papers 7.317)

6 One does not have to be a pragmaticist to want to be careful here. If I say that the character of being red is nothing more nor less than the character of being the colour thought by blind people to be well grasped by a comparison with the sound of a trumpet, do I have to be interpreted as offering a definition? For the importance in these connexions of Peirce's pragmaticist theory of meaning, see Misak, ‘Truth and the End of Inquiry, chapter 1.

7 See here my Needs, Values, Truth (Blackwell: Aristotelian Society, 1987) and Misak, ibid., 35-45.

8 See Misak, ibid., 37-45.

9 The meaning that Peirce says it Jacks to say that truth means “more than this” is presumably pragmatic meaning.

10 Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry, 83Google Scholar.

11 See Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry, 99Google Scholar.

12 On Nicod, see Hempel, C. G. ‘Studies in the Logic of Confirmation’, Mind, 54, 1945Google Scholar. If a white shoe really confirmed to some degree that “all non-black things are non-ravens“- that is the effect of Nicod's postulate- then it would have to confirm to the same degree its contrapositive equivalent “all ravens are black.” And that is absurd. See the striking observation of Frege's that stands as the third motto. But in Peirce's conception of inquiry, Nicod's postulate is entirely dispensable.

13 Or that the world will not be stood on its head. If the world is swept away, then better answers may be swept away with everything else.

14 Or even to furnish procedures that “will, if persisted in long enough, assuredly correct any error concerning future experience into which [they] may temporarily lead us” (Collected Papers 2.769). Peirce does make such claims, but they are inessential to his contribution to the “problem of induction” (see Misak, ‘Truth and the End of Inquiry, 111, 115)Google Scholar.