ONT Re: Just In Time Logic
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JITL. Note 6
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| [Logic, Truth, and the Settlement of Opinion, MS 179, Winter-Spring 1872]
|
| Logic is the doctrine of truth, its nature and
| the manner in which it is to be discovered.
|
| The first condition of learning is to know that we are ignorant.
| A man begins to inquire and to reason with himself as soon as he
| really questions anything and when he is convinced he reasons no more.
| Elementary geometry produces formal proofs of propositions which nobody
| doubts, but that cannot properly be caled reasoning which does not carry us
| from the known to the unknown, and the only value in the first demonstrations
| of geometry is that they exhibit the dependence of certain theorems on certain
| axioms, a thing which is not clear without the demonstrations. When two men
| discuss a question, each first endeavors to raise a doubt in the mind of the
| other, and that is often half the battle. When the doubt ceases there is no
| use in further discussion. Thus real inquiry begins when genuine doubt begins
| and ends when this doubt ends. And the premisses of the reasoning are facts
| not doubted. It is therefore idle to tell a man to begin by doubting familiar
| beliefs, unless you say something which shall cause him really to doubt them.
| Again, it is false to say that reasoning must rest either on first principles
| or on ultimate facts. For we cannot go behind what we are unable to doubt,
| but it would be unphilosophical to suppose that any particular fact will
| never be brought into doubt.
|
| It is easy to see what truth would be for a mind which could not doubt. That mind
| could not regard anything as possible except what it believed in. By all existing
| things it would mean only what it thought existed, and everything else would be what
| it would mean by 'non-existent'. It would, therefore, be omniscient in its universe.
| To say that an omniscient being is necessarily destitute of the faculty of reason,
| sounds paradoxical; yet if the act of reasoning must be directed to an end, when
| that end is attained the act naturally becomes impossible.
|
| C.S. Peirce, CE 3, pp. 14-15.
|
| C.S. Peirce, MS 179, 1872, ["Logic, Truth, Settlement of Opinion"], pp. 14-16 in:
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 3, 1872-1878',
| Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1986.
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