C. S. Peirce: Belief, truth, and going from the known to the unknown

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 28, Issue , 1998, Pages 9-29

  Wiggins, David ^a  

^a NEW COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85071206900     PISSN: 00455091     EISSN: 19110820     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00455091.1998.10717494     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. Writings of Charles S. Peirce, C. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kloesel, ed., p. 247. Cited hereafter as W[vol. Number: page number].
2. 1991. “C,” MS 8828 p. 1 and MS 334, page marked quoted in Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 49.
3. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce 2Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press. 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. Collected Papers 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.” 7.317)
6. Truth and the End of Inquiry 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, chapter 1.
7. The meaning that Peirce says it lacks to say that truth means “more than this” is presumably pragmatic meaning.
8. Truth and the End of Inquiry Misak, 83.
9. Truth and the End of Inquiry See Misak, 99.
10. Nicod, On, and Hempel, C. G., 1945. ‘Studies in the Logic of Confirmation’. Mind, 54 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.
11. 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.
12. Collected Papers 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” 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).