The Tetrast2 - Speculation Lounge: Methods of inquiry

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Philosophy blog adjunct to The Tetrast: small delights and nice insights with fourfolds - tetrachotomies and tetrads. Some, not all. Aristotle's Four Causes. C.S. Peirce for his extensive triads and trichotomies. Tiny dabs of logic, information theory, special relativity. Philosophical classification of the sciences (and mathematics).
Additional adjunct blogs: The Tetrast3 - Bits. What of these other fours?

• The original The Tetrast Website has discussions (currently 11), mostly works in progress, which I sometimes revise and sometimes leave alone though mostly they need improvements.
• I disbelieve in numerology and it bores me. No paranormalism, synchronicity claims, etc., here. I call myself “the Tetrast” partly in fun at my inclination to make philosophy out of something which seems a threadbare motif.
• Some philosophically relevant fourfolds echo each other in ways for which I have not yet managed, at least to my satisfaction, to uncover the reasons, even when the fourfolds separately from each other have seemed clear enough. Turn a sign this way, then that, align it with others, the world seems to crack open, and the chase may be on.
• I’m less interested in “ultimate” philosophical questions than in tracing out this pattern of fourfold structures and chasing it across Aristotle’s Four Causes, structures of logical quantities, philosophical categorization, the light cone, semiotics, etc.

Name: The Tetrast

Location: Woodside, New York, United States

I’m Ben UdeIΙ. Quadruplicity drinks procrastination, quoth Bertrand Russell making sense, and the best proof am I. Lifelong layabout layman. EMAIL:budell@ΑntіѕраΜnyc.rr.com . Delete the “ΑntіѕраΜ” from my email address; it’s there in order to avoid spam. Also, I post at peirce-l. Links to its archives: gmane, Lyris, and mail-archive.com.

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The Tetrast2 - Speculation Lounge

Feb. 22, 2007: I intend to start posting fairly often here at Tetrast2 - Speculation Lounge. Best viewed in Internet Explorer or Firefox (at least as of my recentest opportunity to compare on various machines. I've a PC, not a Mac).

Recent posts:

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Logical quantity & the problem of universals

First posted on Monday, December 13, 2010

Methods of inquiry
Recentest significant change: December 30, 2010.

Charles Sanders Peirce defined inquiry as any struggle to move from troublesome doubt to a secure belief, and outlined four methods.

See "The Fixation of Belief" (1877):
via peirce.org; via Arisbe;
via Google

The following bulleted paragraphs are taken mostly from the summary that I wrote at Wikipedia in various articles there:

The method of tenacity (policy of sticking to initial belief) — which brings comforts and decisiveness but leads to trying to ignore contrary information and others' views as if truth were intrinsically private, not public. The method goes against the social impulse and easily falters since one may well notice when another's opinion seems as good as one's own initial opinion. Its successes can be brilliant but tend to be transitory.
The method of authority — which overcomes disagreements but sometimes brutally. Its successes can be majestic and long-lived, but it cannot regulate people thoroughly enough to withstand doubts indefinitely, especially when people learn about other societies present and past.
The method of congruity or the a priori or the dilettante or "what is agreeable to reason" — which promotes conformity less brutally, but depends on taste and fashion in paradigms and can go in circles over time, along with barren disputation. It is more intellectual and respectable but, like the first two methods, sustains capricious and accidental beliefs, destining some minds to doubts.
The method of science — the method wherein inquiry supposes a discoverable reality independent of particular opinion — the method, then, wherein inquiry can, by its own account, go wrong (fallibilism) as well as right and thus purposely tests itself and criticizes, corrects, and improves itself. No destined doubts of the scientific method as such arise from its practice.

The method of authority, as outlined by Peirce, is the method of power and coercion. Extortion is a kind of coercion, but shades into bribery, corruption, and expedience or convenience. From force-ism to materialism. Then there is the fashionable, the glamorous, the charming or charismatic, in the swing - this seems to include Peirce's method of congruity. Finally there is the status-oriented, the standing-based - sophistic, often cocksure, self-deceptive and sometimes consciously deceptive.

Inquiry method:	Applying it to oneself, to others, consciously or unconsciously:
Method of authority, power, coercion.	Power-enhancing belief. Joining or submitting to the power in order to be powerful. Recruiting or coercing others.
Method of wealth, means, the "financial method."	Affluent belief. Seeking, taking, or offering, giving the bribe, the funding, etc. Extortion from opponents.
Method of fashion, wattage, opulence.	Fashionable belief. Manipulating oneself. Seeking to be manipulated, seduced. Manipulating and luring others. Rhetoric in the bad sense. Manipulative taunting and ridicule of opponents.
Method of status, standing.	Status-enhancing belief. Deceiving oneself. Cocksureness. Sophistry. Seeking to be deceived and to deceive others. Fraud. Fraudulant demotion of opponents to low status and obscurity.

Thus the familiar force/fraud twofold becomes a fourfold, on the pattern of other fours.

	Wrongs.	Causal terms of intelligent beings.	Realms of nature.	Tetrazed principles of the Four Causes.
1.	Force (coercion).	Will.	Forces.	Agent.
2.	Corruption (bribery, etc.)	Ability.	Matter.	Bearer.
3.	Manipulation (luring, incitement, lulling).	Affectivity.	Life.	Act.
4.	Fraud.	Cognition.	Mind.	Borne.

- posted by The Tetrast @ 12/13/2010 04:10:00 PM

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