In a short essay "The Red and the Black", C.S. Peirce (who Prof. Silliman said was the smartest person to walk these shores) claims that "to be logical men should not be selfish; and, in point of fact, they are not selfish as they are thought. The willful prosecution of one's desires is a different thing from selfishness. The miser is not selfish; his money does him no good, and he cares for what shall become of it after his death...
Now, it is necessary for logicality that a man should himself be capable of the heroism of self-sacrifice. It is sufficient that he should recognize the possibility of it, should perceive that only that man's inferences who has it are really logical, and should consequently regard his own as being only so far valid as they would be accepted by the hero. So far as he thus refers his inferences to that standard, he becomes identified with such a mind" (347).
For a logician, this appears very emotive. Also, this an essay on probability which he takes half the essay to get to (perhaps his own idiosyncrasy). I didn't find it dumb but I found it peculiar and cool; he is very smart, evidenced for me in just this one essay but I'm more curious now on this topic of the selflessness of the logically minded and the logicians. He does err at the beginning by just throwing his claims out there with "the willful prosecution...is a different thing from selfishness" and then later "it is necessary..." Well, how is it different? Why is it necessary?
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ReplyDeletePeirce's statements here are in part an expression of his epistemological fallibilism (a term he coined, the meaning of which is pretty easy to figure out). The claim seems to be: 1) one must be unselfish (in a suitably specified way) in order to be logical, and its corollary: 2) logic requires one to be capable of a certain sort of heroic self-sacrifice. Both statements need some intellectually charitable unpacking. Put simply and colloquially, you can't think clearly if you can't get outside of your own head sufficiently to realize that you might be wrong.
ReplyDeleteNovember 8, 2013 at 8:19 AM
Excellent. Would this idea then be part of his pragmatism? And are there any later 20th century philosophers who take on this idea or develop it? While not a solution, epistemological fallbilism appears to be a way to keep working toward the truth, outside of one's head.
ReplyDeletePragmatism, in a nutshell, says that truth is what an indefinitely extended community of inquirers would eventually arrive at if they were rigorous enough in their methods. Fallibilism is key to the methodology, and it's no mean feat.
ReplyDeleteDewey developed a version of Peirce's theory very rigorously, and applied it in social, political, and educational areas of life. Rorty seriously misread Peirce and Dewey, and his self-described neo-pragmatism relativizes the community's search for truth into a search for mere agreement ("solidarity") -- truth becomes just what you can get others to accept. It's a degradation of pragmatism for an age of TV advertising.
That sounds like a sure egregious misreading. But I'm not sure if I'd call it a pragmatism for the TV age; I think I'd say that it's solipsistic/relativistic the way TV-watching is. Some have a bigger screen and more channels than others and they have more value, supposedly.
ReplyDeleteI'm familiar more with W. James's pragmatism from US lit courses but is Peirce's different from James's?
This kind of pragmatism, along with the epistemological fallbilism seem like components I'd like to weave in to my weltanschauung.