Stephen,
Maybe it was this passage from "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" that you had in
mind?
<quote>
The principles set forth in the first part of this essay lead, at once, to a method of reaching a
clearness of thought of higher grade than the "distinctness" of the logicians. It was there noticed
that the action of thought is excited by the irritation of doubt, and ceases when belief is
attained; so that the production of belief is the sole function of thought. All these words,
however, are too strong for my purpose. It is as if I had described the phenomena as they appear
under a mental microscope.
http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html
</quote>
Read in context, I don't think Peirce is making a universal statement about all thought but only
about the clarity-seeking brand of thinking process that is his subject in this essay. At the very
least, if the production of belief really is the sole function of every thought then we'd have to
accept the rather perverse state of affairs that a thought which achieves its function is the
exception rather than the rule.
Jon
Stephen C. Rose wrote:
I've puzzled over this because CSP seems almost dogmatic on the point of
doubt being the aegis not merely of inquiry but thought itself. First, can
there not be other prods to thought that are at least as effective?
Secondly, how much does our own mental process affect our thinking. I would
hazard a guess that we are all editors and snippers and pasters of squibs
of thought and memory that are welling up near the surface of
consciousness. If we consciously think, devoting time to do so, we have
already eliminated doubt as the sole cause of it. All manner if
initiations. All manner of resolutions. Somehow I infer that CSP is close
to a sort of brain mechanism notion. I have no sense that much can be
gained from assuming that doubt is the sole origin of what takes place to
give birth to belief. Finally belief and doubt are not opposites, sometimes
they walk hand in hand within our minds. Simultaneously.
*@stephencrose <https://twitter.com/stephencrose>*
On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 5:40 PM, Jon Awbrey <[email protected]> wrote:
Thread:
JA:http://web.archive.org/web/20140630184801/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/13445
Peircers,
Correcting a few typos and continuing ...
Just a note to anchor a series of recurring thoughts that come to mind
incidental to the thread on entropy, etc., but I won't have much to say
on the bio-chemico-physico-thermo-dynamic side of things, so I'll spin
this off under a separate heading. My interest in this topic arises mainly
from my long-time work on inquiry driven systems, where understanding the
intertwined measures of uncertainty and information is critical to
comprehending the dynamics of inquiry.
In a famous passage, Peirce says that inquiry begins with the "irritation
of doubt" and ends when the irritation is soothed. Here we find the same
compound of affective and cognitive ingredients that we find in Aristotle's
original recipe for the sign relation.
When we view inquiry as a process taking place in a system the first thing
we have to ask is what are the properties or variables that we need to
consider in describing the state of the system at any given time. Taking a
Peircean perspective on a system capable of undergoing anything like an
inquiry process, we are led to ask what are the conditions for the
possibility of a system having "states of uncertainty" and "states of
information" as state variables.
Saved by the Belle, and time for dinner ...
Jon
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