Re: Peirce List • Edwina Taborsky
Dear Edwina,
I think I can get the drift of what you are saying. At least, I can see there is something monadic about the Tenacity method of fixing belief or settling on what to believe, perhaps even in the sense of Leibnizian monads, windowless, hermeneutically sealed spheres of belief. But monads would say they’ve got that pre-established harmony thing working for them, so I’m not sure how to categorize that. At first, the Authority method appears to be dyadic, Freud would probably call it a transference effect, but we know people pick their authority to fit what they already believe, so maybe appeals to authority reduce to a monadic or monastic model after all, at least to a first approximation. As far as the À Priori Plausibility method goes, things appear a little more complex at first because it involves a community. Sure, people can pursue the “What Is Pleasing To Speculate” game in the privacy of their own minds, but something about that way of trying to settle belief remains unsettled and naturally drives the hermitary visionary to seek out and try to convert others to the Big Idea. So, yes, the missing link to Scientific Inquiry is found in that Dialogue Involving Nature, the endeavor to commune not only with other minds but with that ever-insistent-persistent reality constantly thumping us in the head until we pay attention.
Reference
- Peirce, C.S. (1877), “The Fixation of Belief”, Popular Science Monthly 12, 1–15.
Resources
cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog • Peirce List (1) (2) • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
Inquiry Into Inquiry 