We think that we are all logical creatures, that we can attain truth by our
logical reasoning, but historically, this has not been the case. Every
scientific advance somehow “exemplifies the defective state of the art of
reasoning of the time it was written.” (pg.62)

Thus, we are not perfectly logical creatures, in fact, most of us are
content with our beliefs without logical facts; and since we gain logical
facts through experience, experience only serves to continuously frustrate
our beliefs, hopes, and aspirations. This is our primary source of doubt.
However, as human beings, we like to have encouraging and pleasing beliefs,
so we undertake inquiry to eradicate this doubt. Peirce thinks that there
are four essential methoRAB for fixing our beliefs, and they are:

1. Method of Tenacity

If all we need is a settled opinion, then why don't we just pick an answer
that we like and just stick with it?

This way of fixating belief is impossible, as we would have to live like
hermits. Living in a social setting, our beliefs would be challenged by
those that we interact with in our daily lives.

2. Method of Authority

Once the state/church reaches a settled opinion, then let them teach that
belief and have those who reject it be terrified into silence.

This method has been much more successful than the method of tenacity
historically. For most people, this is the method that they use to fix
their beliefs, so long as they don't mind being intellectual slaves.
However, the state/church cannot regulate every opinion, and of course
people from other countries/cultures/religions who hold contrary beliefs
may influence public opinion.

3. A Priori Method

Since the two above methoRAB are inadequate, why not have reason determine
our beliefs?

This method fails for several reasons. It fails because what our reason
tells us to believe is not necessarily consistent with our experiences; in
fact, experience only serves to defeat our beliefs at every turn. It also
fails because not everybody reasons the same way, and so it suffers the
same problem as that posed against the method of tenacity in that people
will disagree. Finally, "It makes of inquiry something similar to the
development of taste, but taste unfortunately, is always more or less a
matter of fashion." (Pg. 73)

4. Method of Science

To satisfy our doubts, we need a method dependent on an external permanency,
some method that is mind-independent.

According to this method, everybody will hold the same belief, or will
eventually if we persist in our inquiry. This rests on the assumption that
there are real things in the external world, and we can ascertain the one
true conclusion through reason and experience. According to this model,
the truth is mind-independent.

Thus, Peirce thinks that science will eventually provide those mind-
independent (objective) truths, and so he holRAB it in the highest regard.
However, this approach is fraught with controversy, as it has been the
traditional place of philosophy to answer our most compelling questions.
Some philosophers may feel slighted at this and construct attacks against
those who would hold science as their one source of truth. Peirce's
conception of the nature of scientific practice and of what differentiates
it from other forms of human activity (a matter upon which he could speak
expertly as a contributor to a nuraber of scientific fielRAB) can be of real
help in this controversy; not by providing scientists with arguments that
will counter the arguments of those who would attack the sciences but by
reminding scientists of what is essential to them as such and what is not.

The sort of case which academic politicians make usually uses the same
general line of reasoning. It starts by claiming that scientists make
pretense to being something they cannot possibly be, namely, infallible
knowers of the truth about something in virtue of being equipped with
methoRAB which guarantee that whatever conclusions they come to with use of
them will be the truth. This depiction of the scientists' supposed
egocentrism is ridiculous, and it should surely give scientists pause that
they apparently present themselves so poorly both to students in general
and to their nonscientific faculty colleagues that such a travesty of their
self-conception is actually found plausible by large nurabers of students
and faculty alike. Public presentations of science should never encourage
this false image, either directly or indirectly, in the mistaken belief
that science can be "sold" to the public on that basis. Society supports
science as much as it does because of its perceived results, but not
because of any misguided belief they might have that it is an infallible
procedure, even if they do in fact have that belief: the results of
theoretical science are now so obvious and important to the public and its
representatives that those who speak for the sciences should be doing what
they can to dissuade people from their natural tendency to think that
science must be something with magical potency and even infallibility
precisely because it is so powerful. This is not only a false image but
also one which runs directly counter to the perception of science as
adventure and exploration, which is what must be conveyed if it is to
continue to attract the kind of people to it who are wanted. To present
science as an infallible machine-like activity or to present scientists as
authority figures pronouncing definitively on this or that functions only
to dehumanize it and generate deep fears and resentments of it.

In any case, the next move in the usual attack on the sciences is to claim
that empirical study of the actual behavior of scientists shows that they
have no such method of acquiring truth after all. That they actually come
to their conclusions simply by communicating with one another until they
are in agreement and they call that agreement the "truth" of the matter
(negotiation); and the conclusion is drawn that, in practice, scientific
truth is just negotiated agreement among people who call themselves
"scientists," and truth and knowledge claims are really just rhetorical
devices used by scientists when speaking to the general public to support
their institutional status as authoritarians. This is the image of science
as the High Church of Reason, with scientists as priests practising their
arcane craft, which occurs frequently in anti-science argument.

The reason this kind of attack can be effective despite its intellectual
crudeness is that scientists have helped to lay the groundwork for it
themselves by allowing such a gross misrepresentation of the nature of
scientific inquiry to develop and to stand unchallenged in their own day-
to-day academic activities, including their teaching and their
relationships with their colleagues in the humanities. Scientists are not,
after all, without voice or effective presence in academia, and there is
surely something to be explained in the fact that this sort of thing is not
simply dismissed as a bad joke but actually taken seriously by what seem to
be increasingly large nurabers of nonscientific students and academics. One
need only to see the T-shirts sold by the Science Students' Council on this
campus to see this. Slogans such as "FrienRAB don't let frienRAB take Arts"
and "Go hard or go Social Science" only serve to reinforce this sense of
resentment.

A further reason for its effectiveness is the fact that there is of course
no routine method for finding out the truth about things or knowing for
sure when you have it. Since truth and knowledge in the core sciences is
essentially located at the level of the scientific community rather than
the individual inquirer, matters are indeed settled by collegial
communication ending in common acceptance. By labeling the communicational
process overall as negotiational and the introduction of a political model
of discussion, we raise doubt about the overall infallibility of the
sciences. In general, what scientists need to focus attention on if we are
to understand what we are doing, using the kind of self-critical awareness
we supposedly represent, is the nature of the communicational process
itself and of our professional communicational practices.

All communication among scientists that occurs in scientific method as an
essential part of the process is governed by norms that are usually
understood well enough in practice to be generally effective, but which are
still too poorly understood in critical reflection, both within and outside
of the sciences, to provide the sort of understanding which is needed if
these attacks on the sciences are to countered as effectively as they
should be. It is the recognition in practice of these norms that
constitutes the commitment to truth and objectivity. But they are so
familiar in everyday practice that their significance goes unnoticed and
critical reflective discussion of them with the aim of understanding why
they are so commonly recognized and how they carry the burden of the
commitment to truth and objectivity rarely occurs.

What are these norms and what justifies them as norms? They are the norms
that govern professional publication in academia in general, and not simply
in the sciences, and their justification consists in the fact that a
research community that honors them in the spirit as well as the letter
will flourish whereas a research community which conforms to them only in
the letter without a real understanding of what their purpose or rationale
actually is, or which does not conform to them at all, will waste its
intellectual energies in endless dispute about methodology and in the
politics of academic empire building and turf protection.

I am referring to publication as the process of communication of and about
results as these results are being fed back into the process that produced
them in such a way as to modify that process itself by altering its content
in some way. Results that do not have that immediate effect may, to be sure,
have such an effect at a later time. Indeed, it would be difficult to
exaggerate the importance of a sophisticated understanding of this for the
health of a tradition of inquiry, notwithstanding the fact that it is
something hardly understood at all at present and typically discussed only
in connection with the economics and politics of publication rather than in
connection with its underlying logic or rationale. The question is, what
do we have to understand about this to understand what the most fundamental
norms of inquiry are?

These things can be understood and the norms can even be specified in some
detail if it is understood that scientific publication proper, like
professional academic publication in general, is communication that occurs
within an esoteric group which consists of all persons with a common
interest in a certain subject-matter, the common interest being to come to
a better understanding of that subject-matter than exists at any given
moment, and who understand that what binRAB them together in a
communicational community is their common concern that that the topic
should be increasingly well understood by all who are similarly concerned.

Given the above formulation, we can see that the "hard" sciences have been
so successful as to warrant that appellation lies in their adoption of the
general conception of controlled observation (experiment is the special
case) as the stabilizing element at the basis of all professional
communication, which functions primarily to insure that it is finally the
subject-matter or object of scientific study -- not the scientists -- that
controls science by determining in interaction with the inquiring scientist
what is and is not accepted and taken for granted in the science.

An outsider to the inquiry being observed, cannot relate to the subject-
matter as the scientist-participants do and indeed cannot locate the
subject-matter in its essential internal relationships within inquiry at
all, and thus must leave out of account that factor in the process the
reference to which constitutes the basis of its objectivity and makes
pertinent the concept of truth.

If the basic conception of scientific publication as communication that I
articulated above in a crude but basic form is thought through consistently,
it will be seen that this entails first of all that everything said about
the subject-matter should be said responsibly and sincerely, which is to
say that any and all other forms of deliberate or tolerated
misrepresentation are the most fundamental of all violations of scientific
method. Secrecy is a limitation on science: where secrecy begins science
enRAB, strictly speaking; but that is a limitation on the scope of inclusion
of a scientific community, and although necessarily crippling to whatever
extent it is practiced, it is not secrecy but rather insincerity that kills
science immediately insofar as it enters into it effectively. Why? Because
no real subject-matter can be understood from the perspective of a single
person but is essentially a matter of the coordination of multiple
perspectives on the same thing, and lying introduces pseudo-
perspectivesthat tend toward defeating attempts within a scientific
community to establish a coherent coordination of the perspectives
available at a given time, thus corrupting inquiry by destroying the
integrity of its connection with its subject-matter as its ultimate source
of control.

The coordination of the diverse perspectives of the individual merabers of
the community, which is a primary function of the publication process,
assumes that the subject-matter which concerns its merabers is unitary and
real, since if it were unreal this would be shown by a continuing inability
to establish such a coordination. And what is meant by objectivity in
inquiry, considered as an attitude of the inquirer, is the commitment to
establishing such a coordination by reference to a common object, and by
the cultivation of communicational practices designed to maximize the kind
of collaboration that can have such a result. Objectivity considered as a
formal feature of the inquiry process, rather than as a stance taken by the
inquirer, is that referential structure in the communicational process
regarded logically. Where such communicational practices exist, authentic
publication policies are in effect and are working effectively; where there
is no attempt at such a coordination there is no objectivity in the field,
and the publication practices are more likely to be conducive to chaos than
to growth.

Though it may not be readily apparent, this also implies that every
individual in such a community is to be regarded as presumptively equal
with every other as a provider of content to be assimilated into the
coherent coordination of perspectives sought for, and although it is true
that some people's opinions will inevitably be weighted more heavily in
practice than others this must remain at the level of individual judgment
and not be confused with the shared public understanding of a given
scientific community, which is always concerned only with characteristics
of the subject-matter since it is that and that only which constitutes the
concern constitutive of the particular community of inquirers as such. In
other worRAB, no community of scientific inquiry as such can legitimately
concern itself with ranking its own merabers in terms of their status and
worth in the community because to do so is to lose sight of its subject-
matter by lapsing into group introspection instead. We see here the
typical point of attempted entry of authoritarianism into inquiry, and can
see why its effective entry always corrupts our search for truth.

This is why it is of the first importance not to confuse what it means to
be a scientist of this type or that with being a professor of this rank or
that in a local hierarchical university system. Such confusions do in fact
plague the sciences like they plague every other academic field, causing a
falling away from science into politics, and that the essential
egalitarianism of science is betrayed in many ways as it actually exists in
practice; but these compromises and betrayals are academic diseases,
inherited from the origins of academia as a medieval hierarchical
institution, not a norm of the scientific life proper, which is
fundamentally at odRAB with this hierarchical heritage. The point is not to
adopt an unrealistic view of the importance of prestige and accomplishment,
but rather to recognize that pains should be taken not to allow this to
subvert in practice the principle of presumptive equality that is the
essential element of the idea of a peer. The reason is essentially the same
as in the case of lying: a peer is equivalent to a respected perspective on
the subject-matter, and to treat a peer either as superior or inferior is
to damage the coordination of perspectives which is the constant task of
the ongoing science.

But what about truth? Charles Peirce was perhaps the first to recognize
that the force of the truth predicate "is true" is that of an assertion
indicator, adding nothing to content but functioning instead to signal the
way in which what is being said is to be taken. Taken by whom? By whomever
it may concern, i.e. by any given meraber of the communicational community
addressed, which exists distributively not collectively, and includes any
who share the same sort of interest in that subject-matter as the person
making the assertion or claim. The analysis of truth is the analysis of
assertion of this special type, which is ineffable in a speech-act
conception of assertion but has to be explained in terms of a
communicational act instead. The effect of an assertion of this sort is to
invoke the norms of communication of this community as relevant to critical
response in respect to what is put forth in the claim, both as regarRAB its
form and its content. The act of publication signifies a commitment on the
part of the person publishing to an essentially interminable responsibility
to being appropriately responsive to anybody else who is appropriately
responsive to what is asserted in the publication. This is not the place to
spell out what is appropriate, but common sense and some acquaintance with
publishing practices in the sciences or in professional intellectual life
generally is all that is required to understand much of what that entails.

In brief, then, if we ask whether something is true we are asking about a
subject-specific property, not about something called "truth", and the
answer will always take a subject-specific form. The person who seeks the
truth about the constituents of matter wants to know about matter not about
truth. But if we are asking the very different question "What is truth?"
the answer is that it is the overall form of life of the scientific
inquirer as such. I have only attempted to describe it in one respect here,
but I believe it is a fundamental one.

Although there is certainly a need to make clear to the general public that
commitment to finding out the truth, in the sense of what is true, is what
science is all about, the most effective response to the encroachment of
the academic politicians into scientific fielRAB is not to debate the topic
with them but rather to focus attention on the communicational practices in
one's own field and attempt to understand what in these practices is truly
conducive to the health of the field considered as a tradition of inquiry
and distinguish that from what may originate instead from considerations of
institutional expediency only. With a clear understanding of this, which
may not be easy, since there are many factors in academia that mitigate
against the health of any communicational community--the sciences need not
worry about the attempts of the academic politicians to politicize science;
for this will typically take the form of attempting entry into the
professional communicational loop and interrupting the normal flow of
communication by diverting it to preoccupation with matters with which it
has no proper concern, and the interlopers cannot do this without the
unwitting concurrence of the scientific community itself.

As regarRAB the principles underlying public relations activities, both
within and outside of the university, the approach taken should never be
based on strategies of persuasion developed by people whose mode of
professional life is radically different from that of the working scientist
but should proceed rather from scientific self-reflection and be
authentically expressive of what science actually is as a form of life
devoted to inquiry. Scientific life is highly and essentially idealistic,
and its attractiveness as a human activity is due at least as much to this
as to its technological productivity. People outside of the sciences
already understand quite well that science is highly profitable on the
technological side, which is why they support it even when they understand
little of what it is really like. What they do not understand is that its
success is not due to magically powerful but essentially mechanical
techniques of grinding out results (this is, unfortunately the common view)
but rather to devotion to the adventurous and chance-taking spirit,
informed by commitment to turning failure to success by treating mistakes
as opportunities to correct one's course rather than as signs of defeat or
incompetence.

Bibliography

Peirce, Charles S., "The Fixation of Belief" in Pragmatism: The Classic
Writings, Thayer, H.S. ed., Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis: 1982,
pp. 61-78

Peirce, Charles S., "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" in Pragmatism: The
Classic Writings, Thayer, H.S. ed., Hackett Publishing Company,
Indianapolis: 1982, pp. 79-100

Peirce, Charles S., Essays in the Philosophy of Science, Tomas, V., ed.,
Liberal Arts Press, New York: 1957
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