“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over other (...) methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

Two books bound together, from the religious period of one of the most renowned and representative thinkers. Written for laymen, thus easy to understand, it is penetrating and brilliant as well. Illuminations of age-old religious questions from a pragmatic perspective, written in a luminous style.

Interpretation is construed, here, as synonymous with hermeneutics: understood as a source of knowledge – perhaps, after the apparently irremediable decline of epistemological foundationalism, the main modern epistemological strategy. In this sense, there is no difference in principle between epistemology and interpretation; the first is a form of the second.

I suggest that we may settle the question of their relatedness by way of two arguments. The first argument holds that two worlds might be identical in structure but different in their dispositions and subsequent behaviors. This argument loosens the relation of dispositional to structural properties; but, though plausible in itself, the argument has disastrous implications for the uniformity of processes within each world. The second argument supports our intuitive belief that the dependency of a thing’s dispositions upon its structure (...) must be complete, e.g., as the knife’s powers for cutting devolve only upon the fine edge of its rigid blade. This second argument is also a defence against the chaotic implications of the previous one. But it has these two effects only because of affirming that structural properties are, more accurately, geometrical-structural properties. Together, these arguments justify the conclusion that no theory of dispositions is comprehensive, unless it provides for these two factors: Geometrical-structural properties are necessary and sufficient to determine what a thing’s dispositions shall be; but these structural properties are distinguishable from dispositions as properties constitutive of a thing are different from its qualifications for relatedness, and especially causal relatedness, to other things. (shrink)

I assume there is no point in speaking of objective interpretation without explaining what it is about the nature of things that fits them for interpretation and how we may be said to know that particular interpretations do indeed fit interpretable things objectively. On that assumption I provide an argument, largely in accord with post‐Kantian themes, to show that a relativistic account of interpretation is not likely to be ruled out by any objectivism or by any exceptionless rule of bivalence. (...) I offer arguments to distinguish between, and account for, what I call interpretation in the “constituting” sense, which bears on the constructed nature of perception and the distinction between description and interpretation, and interpretation in the “ampliative” sense, which bears primarily on the distinctive properties of intrinsically interpretable things. By this strategy I show the sense in which the interpretation of physical phenomena under explanatory conditions invites epistemological forms of incommensurabilism and the Intentional properties of cultural phenomena provide metaphysical grounds for viable forms of relativistic interpretation. (shrink)