Chapter 11

Question 1

What does Francis Bacon say? 3

Answer 1

-not deductivism but inductivism
-goal of science is to have an instrument that will help us gain knowledge
-science needs a firm basis to build up on

Question 2

what is Peirce’s Fixation of Belief? 5

Answer 2

-irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief,

-we experience doubt as an irritation, and so we can do nothing but to try to get rid of this irritation and enter into a struggle to find a soothing state of belief.

-we first learn about the so-called external world, then derive from our interaction with this external world that we have a self and what this self entails → our knowledge does not progress, as with Descartes, from the inside out, but from the outside in

-all beliefs about the world are fallible → are our interpretations of the world wrong?

Question 3

what is a Method of Belief Fixation? 3 and 4

Answer 3

-if this belief is broken by doubt, that person will strive for a new kind of belief to sooth the awful feeling of doubt → transition: inquiry

-to stay at stage of belief and never experience doubt again:

• tenacity: evades irritation of doubt efficiently but social impulse is against it → people may jeopardise these beliefs
  • authority: authority determines what the belief is, and all this authority says is true → fixes belief in the community but some may ask ‘why do I believe what I believe?
  • a priori: based on the idea that the human mind has direct access the a body of knowledge prior to experience → if you want to know the Truth all you have to do is think real hard about it and you instantly ascertain “know” the Truth.
  • Science: accepting an assumption as true for the simplest reason that it sounds logical or reasonable, although it remains untested or unproven. The assumption is believable because it works to certain real and regular laws, or that it simply makes sense

. → everyone will reach the same conclusion
→ scientific method as optimal choice from Peirce

Question 4

John Dewey’s View of Science 7
-four stages of belief fixation

Answer 4

1. dogmatic stage: people take their ideas as fixed and unchangeable
   
   2. critical stage: we find out that the world is rather complex and that our beliefs about the world are just beliefs → leads to discussion and instability
   3. axiomatic stage: discussion becomes reasoning, we get closer to doubt as our beliefs are merely conditionally fixed (need next stage to fix them)
   4. scientific stage: gain actual knowledge and doubt less,
      → heavily inspired by Darwins theories
      → in chronological order of history
      * Dewey: humans are merely natural beings like any other animal, our knowledge is simply there because we needed it within our evolution.

Question 5

what did William James say? 4

Answer 5

-a statement is meaningful if either it has experiential consequences, or it has no such consequences but believing it does. Truth ultimately means correspondence with reality.

-supports voluntarism: everyone has the right to believe that which is not contradicted by the empirical data.

-we pursue science to seek truth

-he believes that science provides knowledge both on observable and unobservables.