The Fixation of Belief

Four ways a person can settle what to believe — sheer stubbornness, the authority of an institution, what feels agreeable to reason, and science — ranked from worst to best.

by Charles Sanders Peirce26 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1877(aged 38)
Original language: English

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Overview

In November 1877 a general-interest magazine gave its opening pages to the first of six articles on the logic of science; the series ran on until the following August. Peirce starts by conceding that almost nobody studies the subject: everyone is content with his own reasoning and suspicious only of other people's. The move that makes the rest possible comes early — he stops asking what makes a belief true and asks instead what makes one stick. Doubt is an irritation; belief is a habit that will fire when the occasion arises; inquiry is the struggle from the first state to the second, and it ends when the irritation ends, whether or not anything true has been reached. That leaves four ways of fixing a belief, and Peirce sets them out in ascending order of respectability. Hold on tight and decline to read the paper that might unsettle you. Or let an institution teach the doctrine, keep the young from hearing the alternatives, and silence the rest — the method he credits with the great structures of stone in Siam, in Egypt and in Europe, and the one he expects will always govern the mass of mankind. Or adopt whatever is agreeable to reason. That is how metaphysics has been conducted, and its pendulum has swung between a more material and a more spiritual philosophy from the earliest times to the latest, without once coming to rest. Each of the three breaks on the same point: within the method there is no way to apply it wrongly. Only science posits real things whose characters do not depend on anybody's opinion, and only science can therefore be done badly. Peirce's paper reached French readers in the Revue philosophique the next year. In 1908 he looked back and confessed that its argument might, with some justice, be said to beg the question.

Key concepts

Doubt and belief: what are they, if neither is defined by truth?

Doubt is an irritation, an uneasy state we struggle to escape; belief is a calm state that settles a habit of action, ready to fire when the occasion arises. Neither is defined by truth. That is the move which makes the rest possible: he stops asking what makes a belief correct and asks what makes one stick.

What is 'inquiry' here, if it isn't the search for truth?

The struggle to pass from doubt to belief, and nothing more. It begins when the irritation begins and stops when the irritation stops, whether or not anything true has been reached. Peirce is blunt that this is all inquiry is as a matter of fact, which leaves the ranking of the four methods to be earned on other grounds.

What is the a priori method, and who uses it?

Adopting whatever belief is agreeable to reason. Peirce says this is how metaphysics has always been conducted, and its record is a pendulum swinging between a more material and a more spiritual philosophy from the earliest times to the latest without once coming to rest. It settles opinion by taste, which is why nothing stays settled.

What single test does Peirce use to rank the four methods?

Whether the method can be applied wrongly. Inside tenacity, authority or the a priori there is no way of going about it badly, so there is no way of being corrected either — which is exactly why each of the three works. Only science can be done incompetently, and that liability to failure is the whole of its advantage.

What must someone accept before they can use the scientific method?

One hypothesis: that there are real things whose characters are entirely independent of anybody's opinion about them, and that by reasoning we can find out how they actually stand. Peirce grants the assumption cannot be proved from inside the method. He adds that nobody who has once practised the method finds any real doubt of it.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

How a Belief Comes to Stick

Set aside what makes a belief true and ask instead what actually settles one, and four methods appear: sheer stubbornness, the authority of an institution, whatever is agreeable to reason, and science.

Doubt is an irritation and belief a habit waiting to fire, so inquiry stops when the irritation stops, true or not. Judged by that standard the first three methods work, which is precisely Peirce's charge against them: inside tenacity, authority or the a priori there is no way of applying the method wrongly, so there is no way of being corrected either. Only science posits things whose characters are independent of opinion, and only science can therefore be done badly.

belief
doubt
inquiry
tenacity
authority
a priori reasoning
scientific method
conformity
habit
self-deception
social epistemology
methodology
reality

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 26
distinct concepts: 70
by passages held, corpus-wide: #754

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “belief” and “doubt”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 6 concepts, joined by 10 pairings. 29 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
belief	doubt	4
authority	belief	3
doubt	epistemology	3
epistemology	logic	3
epistemology	scientific method	3
doubt	scientific method	2
logic	scientific method	2
authority	doubt	1
authority	logic	1
belief	logic	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1867 On a New List of Categories
The earliest item on this shelf, and the root of everything after it: the three-part scheme of quality, relation and representation reappears in the logic papers of 1877–78 and again in the evolutionary cosmology of the 1890s.
EN
1868 Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man
Where Peirce clears the ground. The four denials reached here — no intuition, no introspection, no thought without signs, no conception of the incognizable — are restated as premisses at the head of the sequel.
EN
1868 Some Consequences of Four Incapacities
The sequel, and where the argument arrives. The preceding article asked whether we have certain faculties; this one takes its four denials as premisses and follows them out to a theory of reality and of the self.
EN
1877 The Fixation of Belief you are here EN
1878 Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis
The paper that ends the series. Its central idea — guessing, treated as an inference with rules of its own rather than as a lack of them — is what Peirce kept working at for the rest of his life.
EN
1878 How to Make Our Ideas Clear
The second instalment of the 1877–78 series, nominally about a dead distinction in the logic textbooks. Two decades after it was printed, the American pragmatists took it as their charter.
EN
1878 The Doctrine of Chances
Third in the series, and the point where the account of inquiry acquires a price. Half of it is arithmetic — card packs, whist hands, insurance offices — and the other half asks whether a creature who never lives to complete a run of trials may reason from probabilities at all.
EN
1878 The Order of Nature
The religious instalment of the 1877–78 series. It reaches forward to the essay Peirce published at the end of his life: both ask what a scientific habit of mind is entitled to say about God, and they give different answers.
EN
1878 The Probability of Induction
A general magazine's readers are asked here to check a table of black and white balls for themselves. It is the most technical stretch of the 1877–78 series, and the one that takes on the probability textbooks directly.
EN
1891 The Architecture of Theories
A prospectus rather than a treatise, and the first of the five articles of Peirce's metaphysical series in Paul Carus's Monist, 1891–93 — the run in which the cosmology it sketches was built.
EN
1892 Man's Glassy Essence
Three things that do not obviously belong together — the constitution of matter, the chemistry of living tissue, and the question whether a church or a crowd can think — joined by the argument that mind and matter differ only in which side you look from.
EN
1892 The Doctrine of Necessity Examined
It stands second in the series, and it is the one that started a quarrel: Carus attacked it twice in his own journal and Peirce defended it once, so that the argument about chance occupied The Monist for fifteen months.
EN
1892 The Law of Mind
Where tychism acquires its partner. The chance of the April paper needed continuity to work in, and continuity gets its name and its defence here — the idea Peirce came to regard as the one his philosophy could least do without.
EN
1893 Evolutionary Love
Here the cosmology turns into an argument about how people ought to live: chance, necessity and love applied to the history of ideas, and to the ethics of a commercial century. It closed the Monist series.
EN
1893 What is Christian Faith?
Addressed past the theologians to two audiences at once — churchmen keeping their membership narrow, and the scientifically educated, shut out of the churches, who were talking about founding one of their own.
EN
1899 Leibniz Rewritten
The one book review on this shelf, from the years after the Coast Survey when Peirce lived partly by notices and dictionary work. It is the only piece here in which he is weighing someone else's system rather than building his own.
EN
1908 A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God
Thirty years after the logic papers and fifteen after the cosmology, Peirce turns the machinery of hypothesis on the question the 1878 series had left open.
EN

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