Charles Sanders Peirce · Philosophy
Peirce’s account of how we settle opinion: inquiry begins in the irritation of doubt and ends in the calm of belief, and he ranks four methods of fixing belief - tenacity, authority, the a priori method, and the method of science - showing why only the last submits to a reality outside our wishes.
In ‘The Fixation of Belief’ (1877), the essay that opens his logic-of-science series, Peirce begins not with truth but with psychology. Two states of mind drive all our thinking. Doubt is an uneasy, dissatisfied state; we squirm under it and struggle to escape it. Belief is a calm and satisfactory state we are loath to give up. The whole business of inquiry, Peirce argues, is the struggle to pass from doubt to belief - and that struggle, which he calls inquiry, is set off by nothing loftier than the irritation of doubt. We do not think for the love of truth in the first instance; we think because doubt is uncomfortable and we want the itch to stop. Remove the irritation, and the motive for inquiry is gone. This deflating, almost biological picture of thought as a response to irritation is the foundation on which everything else in the essay is built.
The crudest way to fix belief is the method of tenacity: simply seize on whatever answer you already like and cling to it, systematically turning away from anything that might unsettle it - avoiding the news, the critic, the awkward fact. It can bring real peace, Peirce admits, and a man may live and die contentedly by it. But it breaks down socially: the tenacious believer cannot help noticing that other people, just as stubborn, hold contrary opinions, and the impulse to make belief consistent across people erodes his private certainty. So society develops a stronger method, the method of authority: let an institution - a church, a state - fix the beliefs of a whole people, teaching them from birth, silencing dissent, and punishing deviation. This is far more powerful and has produced the most magnificent and durable results in history. Yet it too has a fatal leak, which Peirce turns to next.
The third method, which Peirce calls the a priori method, fixes belief by what is agreeable to reason - adopting the views that feel most rational, most harmonious, most naturally believable. It is the method of the metaphysicians, and Peirce grants it is far more intellectual and respectable than the first two. But its results, he observes, swing like a pendulum from age to age, one fashionable system giving way to its opposite, because ‘agreeable to reason’ turns out to mean agreeable to our way of thinking, a matter of intellectual taste. It makes inquiry into something like the development of fashion, and so it still lets belief be shaped by accidents of temperament rather than by anything external. To escape this, Peirce argues, we need a method in which our beliefs are caused not by anything human at all - not by will, not by force, not by taste - but by some permanency outside us, on which our thinking has no effect. That is the method of science.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Peirce treats inquiry as a struggle from the irritation of doubt to the settlement of belief, and grades four methods of fixing belief: tenacity, authority, the a priori method, and science. Explain the four methods and why Peirce judged only the method of science able to settle opinion for good.
Leads to Francis Bacon.
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