Peirce's double-aspect theory of truth

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 28, Issue , 1998, Pages 75-108

  Migotti, Mark ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85047922830     PISSN: 00455091     EISSN: 19110820     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00455091.1998.10717496     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. 1996. The Sources ofNormativity Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. And also into the philosophy of action and moral psychology. Christine Korsgaard takes Kant to have held a “‘double-aspect’ theory of motivation,” according to which “the motive of a chosen action has two aspects: the aspect under which the action is presented to the agent as something she might do and the aspect under which she actually chooses to do it” [], 243).
2. Haack. 1993. Evidence and Inquiry Edited by: Pojman, L., 6–15. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 29–30, 73–81; “A Foundherentist Theory of Empirical Justification,” typescript, to appear in The Theory of Knowledge (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998)
3. 1986. Philosophy The view that accessibility and independence cannot possibly be happily married in the way that I am going to argue they can be is widespread. Amongst philosophers who are not Peirce scholars, but have occasion to refer to his work, it leads to almost comically discrepant estimates of his outlook. For example, on the basis of 5.416 (”Your problems would be greatly simplified if, instead of saying that you want to know the ‘Truth’, you were simply to say that you want to attain a state of belief unassailable by doubt,” cf. page 78 below), J.J.C. Smart rashly (and falsely) concludes that “Peirce was not really interested in truth” (”Realism v. Idealism,” 61 []: 303); while Thomas Nagel, on the basis of the sharp distinction between the theoretical and the practical made in Peirce's 1898 Harvard lectures, published as Peirce, 1992, takes him to be so exclusively interested in truth at the expense of belief as to be “more of a Platonist” than “a pragmatist in the currently accepted sense” (The Last Word [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 128).
4. 1931. Collected Papers (Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce Cambridge, MA: Belknap. I refer to the Hartshorne-Weiss edition of the [–35]) by an Arabic numeral for the volume number followed by an Arabic numeral for the paragraph number within the volume, and to the Fisch et al. chronological edition (The Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982–]) by “W” followed by volume number and page number.
5. 1958. Philosophical Review, 55 Frankfurt, “Peirce's Account of Inquiry,”: 590.
6. 1958. Philosophical Review, 55 Frankfurt, “Peirce's Account of Inquiry,”: 591.
7. I say “hard to imagine,” not “impossible,” because of the difference between a capriciously held belief in Frankfurt's sense, and a belief for which, objectively speaking, there is little or no evidence. If one believed that the advertising wizard was peculiarly knowledgeable, and so looked to him for answers to questions on all subjects, one might well be inquiring by the standards of 2b'; for such a case does not necessarily present us with an abdication of intellectual sovereignty, as opposed to a feeble use of intellectual capacity. Genuinely capricious belief is belief caused by non-evidential factors, such as (barring exceptional cases) desire, hope, and fear.
8. The strongest piece of textual evidence in favor of Frankfurt's interpretation is Peirce's notorious stipulation that by “inquiry” he will mean “the struggle to attain belief caused by the irritation of doubt” (5.374, grammar altered). It is instructive, however, that he immediately follows this statement by admitting that “this is sometimes not a very apt designation.
9. 1996. Meditations on First Philosophy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Notice the echo here of the opening sentence of Descartes' “First Meditation”: “Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them” trans. John Cottingham [], 12).
10. Haack. 1997. “The First Rule of Reason,” in ”. In The Rule of Reason: The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce 247Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
11. 1998. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Cornells de Waal notes that Peirce owes this definition to Duns Scotus. (De Waal, “Peirce's Nominalist-Realist Distinction: An Untenable Dualism,” 34 [], 180)
12. I think that it is in fact necessary that the tenacious believer be credited with some grasp of the difference between p's being true and p's being believed by him. Otherwise it is hard to see how he could find any use for the word “true” even as an “expression of his determination to hold on to his choice [of belief].” Presumably, Peirce has in mind the popular practice of defending the epistemic standing of a belief by appealing to its truth, insisting that, e.g., “I believe it because it is true.” This sort of appeal sounds more useful than does the flatly tautological “I believe it because I believe it,” but because believing that it is true is a conceptual consequence of believing it in the first place, the former turn of phrase is always in danger of degenerating into a merely rhetorical variation of the latter. This danger is avoided only when “because it is true” is elliptical for something such as “on such and such unimpeachable grounds” or “because of such and such incontrovertible evidence.” The tenacious believer, however, qualifies as such precisely because of the willful character of the relationship he has to his beliefs, and this willfulness precludes those beliefs from responding in an appropriate way to epistemically respectable sources of belief such as sense-experience, valid inference, and so on.
13. With regard to the method of authority, Peirce identifies the tension as that between loyalty and truth-seeking, and offers as evidence for it the tendency on both sides of a conflict of faiths to regard renegades with contempt. I conjecture that Peirce sees in such contempt the betrayal of an obscure sense that loyalty to the faith is in fact, though not in theory, valued independently of the faith's claim to have a lock on the truth. If one were wholehearted in the view that one's faith was superior to all others in virtue of its being a superior means of reaching the truth, one should welcome converts who see the light. That one is instead contemptuous of them because they were willing to betray the other side shows that one harbours the view that loyalty to the cause has value, and indeed paramount value, independently of the cause's ability to defend its claim to being a privileged vehicle of the truth. And that view compromises the degree to which one's allegiance to one's own side can genuinely express or coincide with one's commitment to discovering the truth. With regard to the a priori method, Peirce's complaint is that its followers prize internal consistency above harmony with perceptual experience. Again, Peirce is not, I suggest, supposing that a priori metaphysicians will admit that they have no faith in the ultimate settlement of opinion, but rather that “they seem to think that the opinion which is natural for one man is not so for another, and that belief will, consequently, never be settled (emphasis added).” It is the intellectual behavior of the a priorist, his favouring systematic cohesion over experiential anchoring, that betrays his indifference to the ultimate settlement of opinion; which indifference amounts, in Peirce's terms, to an indifference to the truth, however much the a priori metaphysician will protest to the contrary.
14. 1992. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association On the evidence of some fascinating experiments in developmental cognitive psychology, the stage of development reached by the average three year old exemplifies the tenacious method of belief formation to a remarkable degree. For example, three-year-old subjects shown a closed candy box will say that they think the box contains candy. The box is then opened and revealed to contain only pencils. When the subjects are asked what they had originally believed about the contents of the box, they will claim to have “known all along” that the box had pencils inside. It is not until age four or five that subjects admit to their initial mistake. (See Alvin Goldman, “Empathy, Mind, and Morals,” 66.3: 25 for a description of the experiments and references to the literature.) The consonance of the results of these experiments with Peirce's well-known claim (from 1868, at 5.233) that children begin to form a conception of themselves as distinct selves only when they become aware of their ignorance and error is remarkable.
15. Haack. 1987. “Realism,”. Synthese, 73: 288–89.
16. Almeder. 1985. “Peirce's Thirteen Theories of Truth,”. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 21: 87
17. 1982. Journal of Philosophy, 79: 553–67. Field, “Realism and Relativism,”
18. Smart, “Realism v. Idealism,” 307.
19. Smart, Realism v. Idealism, 309.
20. 1991. Truth and the End of Inquiry 137–61. Oxford: Clarendon. Misak
21. It is when it is functioning in this capacity that the Pragmatic Maxim can seem most strongly to anticipate the Verification Principle of the Vienna Circle. Yet even when Peirce comes closest to the Vienna positivists in the tenor of his language— as when he proclaims that the Pragmatic Maxim “will serve to show that almost every proposition of ontological metaphysics is either meaningless gibberish. or else is downright absurd”— it remains perfectly clear that the demolition of metaphysics was never his primary objective: “instead of merely jeering at metaphysics, like other prope-positivists, whether by long drawn out parodies or otherwise, the pragmaticist extracts from it a precious essence, which will serve to give life and light to cosmology and physics” (5.423).
22. 1997. de Waal, “The Quest for Reality: Charles S. Peirce and the Empiricists,” doctoral dissertation, University of Miami, 203.
23. 1905. Cf. Peirce's suggestion that “truth” be defined as “that to a belief in which belief would tend if it were to tend indefinitely to absolute fixity” (5.416).
24. Putnam. 1995. “Pragmatism,”. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 95: 297