So. Fallibilism. It’s part of Peirce’s philosophy that I find particularly interesting, since fallibilism is rarely approached with any kind of critical eye in epistemology today. The following, 1.152, I think is particularly great:

But doubtless many of you will say, as many most intelligent people have said, Oh, we grant your fallibilism to the extent you insist upon it. It is nothing new. Franklin said a century ago that nothing was certain. We will grant it would be foolish to bet ten years’ expenditure of the United States Government against one cent upon any fact whatever. But practically speaking many things are substantially certain. So, after all, of what importance is your fallibilism?

That’s great! Why is it great? First, Peirce, is obviously trying to distance himself from a form of fallibilism which is just the vacuity “anything can happen!” A little ironic, that, since in the previous passages we saw that one of the reasons that Peirce provides in support of fallibilism is not much more than a gussied-up version of said vacuity. Second, though, is what seems to be a precursor to a kind of Ramsey betting: we might think that nothing is certain in that there is no fact that we would make a wager where, if we’re right, we get a penny, but if we’re wrong, we lose ten years’ expenditure of the US Government. The implication is that the fact that we are unwilling to take this bet on any proposition says something about our certainty in it.

(I am interested in the following question: really? I kind of don’t think that we should take these kinds of wagers seriously; in other words, that Ramsey betting is not a useful tool at the extremes. I haven’t been able to prove this in a way that anyone has found satisfying yet. Doing this is three projects in the future.)

So Peirce wants to consider what the difference would be between treating scientific theories as either fallible or infallible. It’s not clear, exactly, what Peirce is adding to the conversation that he hasn’t already in terms of having reasons to be fallibilists. Again, we have lovely scientific laws, but we can’t keep an eye on how every particle is acting at all times, so there’s the chance that the laws could be wrong. What does seem to be different in this treatment of fallibilism is the appeal to the obligation not to block the road of inquiry: the assumption of infallibilism blocks this road, fallibilism does not.

To see why we should think that laws don’t work infallibly and deterministically, Peirce appeals to…the spontaneity of nature? I think that, again, Peirce is fundamentally mistaken here. Peirce takes the diversity of nature to imply that laws of nature do not work mechanically, by “blind law.” But this is poor reasoning. Peirce throws consciousness into the mix, as well. But we don’t need to worry so much about that.

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The first thing I want to say is that I kind of love this essay.  It has some delightful moments, and because it is actually an essay, there’s a unity that’s been sorely missing in many of the higgeldy piggeldy frankenpassages we’ve dealt with early in Volume 1.  (Higgeldy piggeldy, by the way, is how my dissertation supervisor once described the chapter about truth in my dissertation.  That was a long time ago; it is piggeldy still, but no longer higgeldy.  I hope.  I digress.)

The other things I want to say are slightly off to the side of the actual text (KB did a nice job of the text already, you know, a month or so ago).  One such thing is that this appeal that is bugging KB, to the spontaneity of nature, is not going anywhere.  If I remember correctly, it’s argued for (or postulated) in a variety of ways in a lot of different places.  This way?  Obviously, not the best.

The deceptively little question that gives our post its title -‘Can the operation of law create diversity where there was no diversity before?’ (CP 1.161) – is off the mark.  Anyone who has taken an undergrad course in genetics can tell you that what often look like exceptions to law that create diversity are, themselves, the products of processes that are also law-governed.  Something that looks like an exception to the rule turns out to follow a more specified rule perfectly.  So point the first: that new stuff appears doesn’t mean that its appearance signals the presence of chance at work in the sense of ‘spontaneity’, only in the sense of ‘something that had a lower probability of happening did happen’.  Point the second: that nature is diverse does not support the inference that nature must also be spontaneous.  If anything, the half-baked remarks about physics are probably closer to the kind of thing that might better support Peirce’s contention, as he phrases it elsewhere, that the universe is ‘habit-taking’ rather than utterly rule-governed.

But: though this attempt is far from compelling, there is a very deep philosophical commitment in the background here.  I’ve heard Peirce’s entire philosophical system reduced to this triad: pragmatism, synechism, tychism.  (One person I know who dared to count higher than three added ‘agapism’).  It is the tychism – the view that chance is a genuine element of the universe – that is the desired goal of this weak argument from diversity.  And tychism, with its mysterious companion continuity (resuscitated Hegel spotting!), is going to be all over the place in Peirce’s philosophy of science.  Acceptance of fallibilism being one of the things that differentiates inquiry, the method of science, from lousy methods of belief fixation…well, I guess it’s no surprise tychism came up here.

The weird thing about this is that Peirce seems to recognize, at other times and places, that no fact about the world is required to make fallibilism a go.  There is more than enough about us, looking at the world, to do that.  That all experience involves an element of judgment, ye olde Thirdness in one of its forms, is enough to explain why we could be wrong about anything.

We should have a week or two more to finish this essay, and then we’ll see where we’re at on these themes.  But KB, I’m just saying: tychism.  Everywhere.

This week’s Insult of the Week seems to be directed at all of us in Peirce’s audience:

We all have some idea of continuity. Continuity is fluidity, the merging of part into part. But to achieve a really distinct and adequate conception of it is a difficult task, which with all the aids possible must for the most acute and most logically trained intellect require days of severe thought. If I were to attempt to give you any logical conception of it, I should only make you dizzy to no purpose.

Love it.  I’d explain my smart idea to you, but it would just make you dizzy.