The Fixation of Belief
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~8,000 words · 38 passages
Cite this work
- APACharles Peirce. (n.d.). The Fixation of Belief. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-peirce/the-fixation-of-belief
- MLACharles Peirce. The Fixation of Belief. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-peirce/the-fixation-of-belief.
- ChicagoCharles Peirce. The Fixation of Belief. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-peirce/the-fixation-of-belief.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The 1877 paper with which Peirce opened pragmatism, though the word does not occur in it.
Context and history
The question is not what truth is but how we fix what we believe, and Peirce answers with four methods. Tenacity: believe what you already believe and look at nothing that might break it. Authority: let an institution decide, which is the method that has held up the greatest number of civilisations. The 'a priori' method: believe what seems reasonable, which is the metaphysicians' method and does nothing but change with the fashion. And the method of science, the only one in which what fixes belief is something external to the believer. Peirce does not say the first three are stupid: he shows what each does and why it fails in its own terms, which is a far stronger way to argue. It appeared in the 'Popular Science Monthly', and the paper that follows it, 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear', is its direct continuation.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
that which we find ourselves inclined to believe. Plato, for example, finds it agreeable to reason that the distances of the celestial spheres from one another should be proportional to the different lengths of strings which produce harmonious chords. Many philosophers have been led to their main conclusions by considerations like this; but this is the lowest and least developed form which the method takes, for it is clear that another man might find Kepler's theory, that the celestial spheres are proportional to the inscribed and circumscribed spheres of the different regular solids, more agreeable to his reason. But the shock of opinions will soon lead men to rest on preferences of a far more universal nature. Take, for example, the doctrine that man only acts selfishly — that is, from the consideration that acting in one way will afford him more pleasure than acting in another. This rests on no fact in the world, but it has had a wide acceptance as being the only reasonable theory. This method is far more intellectual and respectable from the point of view of reason than either of the others which we have noticed. But its failure has been the most manifest. It makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of fashion, and accordingly metaphysicians have never come to any fixed agreement, but the pendulum has swung backward and forward between a more material and a more spiritual philosophy, from the earliest times to the latest. And so from this, which has been called the a priori method, we are driven, in Lord Bacon's phrase, to a true induction. We have examined into this a priori method as something which promised to deliver our opinions from their accidental and capricious element. But development, while it is a process which eliminates the effect of some casual circumstances, only magnifies that of others.…