ONT Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
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CP 7.162-255. The Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents (1901)
CP 7.183-188. The Logic of Science
CP 7.186.
| I said that in order to determine what the logic of the individual
| man should be, it would be necessary to consider what his purpose
| was. The same remark applies to the logic of science. It is easier
| to determine the purpose of science. It does not involve opening the
| question of ethics. Yet it is not a perfectly simple matter, either.
| Several definitions of the purpose of science that I have met with made
| it the business of science to ascertain that certain things were so, to
| reach foregone conclusions. Nothing could be more contrary to the spirit
| of science. Science seeks to discover whatever there may be that is true.
| I am inclined to think that even single perceptual facts are of intrinsic
| value in its eyes, although their value in themselves is so small that one
| cannot be quite sure that there is any. But every truth which will prevent
| a future fact of perception from surprising us, which will give the means
| of predicting it, or the means of conditionally predicting what would be
| perceived were anybody to be in a situation to perceive it, this it is,
| beyond doubt, that which science values. Although some will contradict
| me, I am bound to say that, as I conceive the matter, science will value
| these truths for themselves, and not merely as useful. Mathematics appears
| to me to be a science as much as any science, although it may not contain all
| the ingredients of the complete idea of a science. But it is a science, as far
| as it goes; the spirit and purpose of the mathematician are aknowledged by other
| scientific men to be substantially the same as their own. Yet the greater part
| of the propositions of mathematics do not correspond to any perceptual facts
| that are regarded as even being possible. The diagonal of the square is
| incommensurable with its side; but how could perception ever distinguish
| between the commensurable and the incommensurable? The mathematical
| interest of the imaginary inflections of plane curves is quite as
| great as that of the real inflections. Yet we cannot say that
| the scientific man's interest is in mere ideas, like a poet's
| or a musician's. Indeed, we may go so far as to say that
| he cares for nothing which could not conceivably come to
| have a bearing on some practical question. Whether a
| magnitude is commensurable or not has a practical
| bearing on the mathematician's action. On the
| other hand, it cannot be said that there is
| any kind of proportion between the scientific
| interest of a fact and its probability of
| becoming practically interesting. So far
| is that from being the case, that, although
| we are taught in many ways the lesson [of] the
| Petersburg problem, -- so stupidly obscured by the
| extraneous consideration of moral expectation, -- the
| lesson that we utterly neglect minute probabilities, yet
| for all that, facts whose probabilities of ever becoming
| practical are next to nothing are still regarded with keen
| scientific interest, not only by scientific men, but even
| by a large public.
|
| C.S. Peirce, 'Collected Papers', CP 7.186
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