Pierce

Chaz and I are presenting on Pierce today so I will give you guys a brief outline of some of the main ideas we are going to cover

The original idea behind Pierce's artical was how to make thought clearer, for philosophers in the past he believed,Descarte and Liebnitz in particular, have not really been able to do this. From this starting point Pierce basically jumps onto a Metaphysical and Epistemelogical rant, and covers a variety of subjects. To understand what it is to think clearly, Pierce asserts we must first understand thought better.

In Pierce's system the ultimate end of thought is to create belief. THis occurs because thoughts is caused by a doubt, or hesitancy. This moment causes the mind to kick into gear, resulting in a process by which the doubt is a appeased and therefore belief is created. After setting this system up, Pierce warns of some dangers regarding belief and thought, the first is a little unclear. He seems to believe that thought comes in categories, and all thought within one category is basically the same. It is a problem to not understand this and apparently it is a common epistemological road block. The second common "deception" is mistaking grammatical or rhetorical differences for ideological ones. Pierce here identifies a sort of sophistry.

Continuing to try to identify thought and understand it, Pierce comes to the conclusion that since belief is effected by sense, the root of all thought is in the practical and tangible (very pragmatic). This means that the human can only think about what is senseable, a sort of extreme empiricism. From this idea Pierce moves to how exactly this operates and in doing so engages some interesting metaphysics. Along the way he mentions that to be identified as different one must put any dialectic to the test, even hard/soft, this is part of the radical empiricism.

Pierce ends by discussing the nature of truth and how we come to it. Because of his empiricism, Pierce puts science in an important place,saying that truth is the answer that science is destined to come up with. If 100 scientists test the boiling point of water and all get 100 degrees, the boiling point must really be 100 degrees. This belief puts science in a powerful place. Reality to Pierce is therefore independent of the individual, even though they all see it different, and all may see it clearly. What is clear Pierce therefore asserts is not the same as what is true. And this is where he ends his paper. Did he answer his original question? Well thats an interesting question.


(THis is for Chaz and Andrew, since we are presenting the same information today)