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CP 1:250. The dependence of the psychical sciences upon philosophy is no less manifest. A few years ago, indeed, regenerate psychology, in the flush of her first success, not very wisely proposed to do without metaphysics; but I think that today psychologists generally perceive the impossibility of such a thing. It is true that the psychical sciences are not quite so dependent upon metaphysics as are the physical sciences; but, by way of compensation, they must lean more upon logic. The mind works by final causation, and final causation is logical causation. Note, for example, the intimate bearing of logic upon grammatical syntax. Moreover, everything in the psychical sciences is inferential. Not the smallest fact about the mind can be directly perceived as psychical. An emotion is directly felt as a bodily state, or else it is only known inferentially. That a thing is agreeable appears to direct observation as a character of an object, and it is only by inference that it is referred to the mind. If this statement be disputed (and some will dispute it), all the more need is there for the intervention of logic. Very difficult problems of inference are continually emerging in the psychical sciences. In psychology, there are such questions as free-will and innate ideas; in linguistics, there is the question of the origin of language, which must be settled before linguistics takes its final form. The whole business of deriving ancient history from documents that are always insufficient and, even when not conflicting, frequently pretty obviously false, must be carried on under the supervision of logic, or else be badly done.END
Peirce never loses a chance to remind readers that philosophy is not some ancillary option in the search for truth. It is central if only because it is the domain of logic and other things ontological. It is also the domain of examination of things that are inferential.
I infer that there may be some causal element within the quantum realm that may explain not merely cause but the actuality of how we function -- a sort of Higgs-Boson that exists in measurable form inside us.
I cannot prove it and no inference can be deemed actual until it achieves several thresholds -- the last being a consensual agreement that has an air of universality.
Of course as knowledge increases these conclusions will change.
Which is an aspect of Peirce's fundamental empahasis on continuity and fallibility, freedom and chance.
Peirce never loses a chance to remind readers that philosophy is not some ancillary option in the search for truth. It is central if only because it is the domain of logic and other things ontological. It is also the domain of examination of things that are inferential.
I infer that there may be some causal element within the quantum realm that may explain not merely cause but the actuality of how we function -- a sort of Higgs-Boson that exists in measurable form inside us.
I cannot prove it and no inference can be deemed actual until it achieves several thresholds -- the last being a consensual agreement that has an air of universality.
Of course as knowledge increases these conclusions will change.
Which is an aspect of Peirce's fundamental empahasis on continuity and fallibility, freedom and chance.
