Jeff Kasser

In a recent paper exploring tensions between Peirce’s theory of inquiry and his philosophy of probability, Stewart and Sterkenburg note persistent textual evidence suggesting that Peirce simply dismisses views that construe probabilities in terms of degrees of belief. Though they stop short of accusing Peirce of begging relevant questions, their discussion invites attention to whether Peirce genuinely argues against conceptualist approaches to probability, and if so, how he does so. This paper clarifies Peirce’s target, presents the considerations he offers against conceptualism, and assesses them.

“Peirce and the Socratic Tradition” is a bold and suggestive paper. In it, Joseph Ransdell draws out a particular tradition of modesty allegedly exemplified by Socrates, Peirce, and few others in philosophy. At its heart, this tradition involves a clear-headed acceptance of some surprising implications of an obvious fact, viz. that human wisdom cannot involve taking a god’s eye view of things. The elenchus of Socrates and the doubt-belief theory of Peirce, Ransdell thinks, accurately reflect the starting points and aspirations appropriate to inquiring creatures like us. This linkage of Peirce and Socrates is surprising enough to be exciting and yet intuitively plausible enough to be promising. Ransdell’s..

In a number of brief discussions, Cheryl Misak has presented a reading of Peirce's "The Fixation of Belief " that preserves both the essay's ambitious naturalism and its sensible normativism. This essay fleshes out Misak's proposal, formulates some challenges to it, and articulates an alternative. Misak's argument rests on the plausible claim that "it is very hard really to settle beliefs". As she interprets this claim, it could also be expressed as "it is very hard really to settle beliefs." She argues, on textual and philosophical grounds...

This paper argues that sustained attention to the highlighted structure of William James's “The Will to Believe” yields surprising insights into the essay. “Highlighted structure” includes James's announcements of his intentions, his section breaks, and, especially, patterns of repetition and contrast within the work. Particular attention is paid to a criticism to which James frequently returns, viz. that evidentialists are driven by their passions to adopt evidentialism. I argue that James does not take this to constitute an objection to evidentialism as such. This is because James construes evidentialism more charitably than has been recognized. Evidentialism, as James understands it, claims, not that our willing nature should play no role in our believings, but instead that the cognitive role of our willing nature should be minimized. Consequently, I argue that the thesis of James's famous essay has generally been misidentified and mischaracterized.

Despite its prominence in Peirce’s best-known works, the notion of fixed, stable, or settled belief (I will follow Peirce in using these terms more or less interchangeably) has received relatively little explicit attention. Need a belief be permanently stable in order to count as fixed? Or, to take the other extreme, does a belief count as fixed as long as it is currently stable? More fundamentally, what is involved in predicating stability of a belief? Talk of stability suggests a disposition to resist being undermined, and so the question arises of how resistant to what sorts of undermining influences a belief needs to be in order to count as fixed in Peirce’s sense. Does Peirce, especially in “The Fixation of..

Peirce makes it clear that doubt and belief oppose one another. But that slogan admits of a weaker and a stronger reading. The weaker reading permits and the stronger reading forbids one to be in a state of doubt and of belief with respect to the same proposition at the same time. The stronger claim is standardly attributed to Peirce, for textual and philosophical reasons. This paper maintains that this standard construal is excessively strong. It argues that the secondary literature tends to presuppose the strong reading and that it often does so by confusing sufficient conditions for belief with necessary ones. It acknowledges some textual evidence on behalf of the strong reading but maintains that,taken as a whole, the relevant passages are as friendly to the weak as to the strong interpretation of Peirce. The paper then links the doubt–belief theory of“The Fixation of Belief” to the papers on probability that occupy the bulk of the Illustrations of the Logic of Science. It shows that Peirce's discussion of probability, strength of belief, and weight of evidence makes room for confidence, but not belief, to be undermined and thus offers a more flexible version of Peirce's theory of inquiry.

Many scholars hold that Peirce came to reject crucial aspects of his best-known and most influential essays, "The Fixation of Belief" and "How To Make Our Ideas Clear." In particular, they claim that Peirce repudiated the doubt-belief theory of inquiry, at least in the form in which he presented it in these papers. The reason most often offered on behalf of this view is that Peirce came to realize that the doubt-belief theory, with its reliance upon such claims as that doubt is irritating and aversive, while belief is calm and satisfactory, amounts to a version of psychologism. ;I argue that Peirce rightly regarded his original papers as free of psychologism. I try to provide a clear statement of what Peirce means by a psychological account of logic, paying particular attention to his broad construal of "logic." Once the relevant issues have been clarified, the usually cited evidence of psychologism and of the later Peirce's recognition of psychologism seems much less impressive than it has been taken to be. While Peirce did register a complaint about the role of a psychological premise in the papers, his objection has little or nothing to do with psychologism. ;I then try to show that Peirce defended very similar and very robustly antipsychologistic positions long before and long after he published "Fixation" and "How To." The standard view thus faces a serious problem; it seems quite implausible that Peirce would have changed his mind twice about a matter which was so important to him. ;Finally, I try to explain in some detail how the appearance of psychologism in the two famous essays can be reconciled with Peirce's antipsychologistic writings. I criticize the main interpretations of the doubt-belief theory as psychologistic and provide an alternative account. I suggest that Peirce offers a surprisingly sophisticated naturalistic grounding for norms of inquiry

Through the work of Isaac Levi and others, a tension that lies at the heart of Peirce’s doubt-belief theory of inquiry has received significant attention in recent years. Scholars have struggled to explain on Peirce’s behalf how inquirers are to strike an appropriate balance between believing and doubting. We must acknowledge the breadth and depth of our fallibility without countenancing paper doubts that are at best idle and at worst pernicious. We must rely on our beliefs in inquiry while nevertheless remaining ready to drop them when experience speaks sufficiently against them. Overconfidence threatens to block the road of inquiry via excessive tenacity, while underconfidence threatens to impede inquiry via a...

Weight of evidence continues to be a powerful metaphor within formal approaches to epistemology. But attempts to construe the metaphor in precise and useful ways have encountered formidable obstacles. This paper shows that two quite different understandings of evidential weight can be traced back to one 1878 article by C.S. Peirce. One conception, often associated with I.J. Good, measures the balance or net weight of evidence, while the other, generally associated with J.M. Keynes, measures the gross weight of evidence. Conflations of these two notions have contributed to misunderstandings in the literature on weight. This paper shows why Peirce developed each conception of weight, why he distinguished them, and why they are easily mistaken for one another.