Stephen, list, You might want to consider Peirce's doctrines of critical common-sensism and fallibilism working together. We have well-tested beliefs and continually test them, having a healthy respect for the fact that any one of our given beliefs might be false, and otherwise go about our business as we know it until experience proves otherwise. When a serious doubt comes up, one can have a great deal of belief that one rests upon whilst working to resolve the present doubt that one wishes to resolve. In fact, inquiry probably can't go on without there already being a bedrock of beliefs to depend upon. So belief and doubt certainly will go hand in hand, as you noted above.
Something else you might want to consider is Peirce's discussion in "A Neglected Argument" where Peirce discusses the play of musement. To put it in a simple way, not only doubt, but also wonder can be a stimulus to inquire. If one has a kind of open question about everything, a generalized curiosity, that seems to me to be wonder, and what Peirce is getting at with the play of musement. Perhaps one might say that doubting and wondering are species of the same general activity that leads to inquiring. I've always liked the statement by Aristotle that philosophy begins with wonder. Consider the possibility, when you assert that sometimes belief and doubt go hand in hand, that one can have a great deal of settled belief, and yet find one's own self in a state of wonder, perhaps even precisely because of what we have settled upon believing; the universe, when we consider what we know about it so far, can indeed seem a wondrous place. All this is just to say that I think part of what can be bothersome isn't so much the basic idea that Peirce articulates, but the feel of it when we think of it as doubt, which tends to be associated with skepticism, and which doesn't at all seem to have anything to do with imagining, dreaming, and creative thinking generally; while wonder does seem associated with the more creative and freer side of thinking, leading to artistic and productive modes of thinking, which I suppose you might find neglected by Peirce's insistence on doubt being the stimulus to inquire and to think in general (since, after all, the end of thought is the development and establishing of habit, which is also the end of inquiry). I should say though that wonder is a bit vaguer than I have represented it to be just now. While surprise, doubt, and inquiry are distinguished from each other by Peirce, it seems to me that wonder is not so easily separated into three such distinct parts; the wondering is the surprise, the doubt, and the inquiring all at once, or so it seems to me. Comments invited on that one. -- Franklin On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 12:23 AM, Benjamin Udell <[email protected]> wrote: > Stephen, list, > > Peirce usually speaks of 'doubt' but I think one can and ought to speak > just as well of suspicion. An agnostic, for example, if not convinced of > the question's unanswerability, both doubts and suspects that God exists or > is real. The point is some sort of uncertainty or unsettledness on a > question upon whose resolution or settlement one would be disposed to act. > It's quite natural for inquiry to proceed from the unsettled to the settled > (settled at least for the time being). Doubt and suspicion imply > questioning, and, well, questioning is inquiry. > > Then there is the question of whether inquiry also proceeds not just from > uncertainty, but from surprise, anomaly, novelty. Peirce also talks about > the explanatory effort as attempting to get from the complex/complicated to > the simple. As occasions of inquiry, to bewilderment by the complex, and > surprise by the anomalous, one could add impatience and suspense about the > indefinite future (what will be the Milky Way's fate?) and frustration, > hesitation, inagency, in the face of what feasibly could be around the > corner. > > Best, Ben > > On 6/30/2014 11:51 PM, Stephen C. Rose wrote: > > It's late and I'm punched out watching the Yankees go down. Just to say I > approach this entirely from an experiential side with no sense of what a > mathematical theory of inquiry would be. I take inquire to mean any > question. If I wonder how I am, to take an example, we could assume I was > speaking from doubt but I could be asking the same question to explain an > unaccountable happiness or an encounter that puzzles me. My question could > have many nuances that would suggest anything from whimsy to simple > matter-of-factness. This all would seem far removed from inquiry as an > effort to operate within the context of mathematics. So perhaps the > differing contexts makes it hard to apply what we sense or understand from > Peirce in the same way. > > *@stephencrose <https://twitter.com/stephencrose>* > > > On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 11:06 PM, Jon Awbrey <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Thread: >> JA: >> http://web.archive.org/web/20140630220000/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/13446 >> SR: >> http://web.archive.org/web/20140701002000/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/13447 >> JA: >> http://web.archive.org/web/20140701003000/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/13448 >> SR: >> http://web.archive.org/web/20140701024001/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/13449 >> >> Stephen, List, >> >> Not a problem, we all must begin from the doubts we actually have, and >> there a few things we have more doubts about than whether a given >> description or theory of X is really a good description or adequate theory >> of X, and that is every bit as true if X = inquiry as anything else. >> Indeed, the whole point of an "inquiry into inquiry" is just to find an >> adequate theory of inquiry. >> >> What prompted me to open this particular can of worms — Dispersion, >> Uncertainty, Doubt, Entropy — was the linkages that potentially exist, at a >> very abstract logical and mathematical level, between this complex of >> subjects and Peirce's hints about the nature of the inquiry process. >> >> >> Jon >> >> Stephen C. Rose wrote: >> >>> I have no argument save my own guesses and my recollections of reading >>> something that said to me that CSP thought as I suggested so I will read >>> some more and see if anyone else chimes in. Cheers, S >>> >>> *@stephencrose <https://twitter.com/stephencrose>* >>> >> >> -- >> >> academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey >> my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/ >> inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ >> isw: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/JLA >> oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey >> facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache >> > > > > ----------------------------- > PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON > PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to > [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L > but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the > BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm > . > > > > > >
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