November 8th to 11th, 2004

4th DAY - Thursday - November 11th, 2004 - 7 p.m.
4th Session
2nd Lecture

Philosophy and Conduct, Belief and Science: Peirce, James and Descartes
Prof. Dr. Mark Migotti
Department of Philosophy - University of Calgary, Canada

[Abstract]
The first of Peirce's Cambridge Conference lectures of 1898, entitled "Philosophy and the Conduct of Life", presents us with the anomalous spectacle of the founder of pragmatism - the chief point of which, it is usually thought, is to place action and belief at the center of the philosophical stage - declaring boldly that "it [is] unscientific and indeed, improper, for investigators to believe current scientific results". In my paper I will dispel the appearance of contradiction between the view signaled by this claim and the position of the 1879 Illustrations of the Logic of Science papers, most notably "The Fixation of Belief". Arguing against Christopher Hookway's view that Peirce does not resolve this tension in his thought - between the anti-Cartesian emphasis on the search for real belief as opposed to a chimerical philosophical certainty on the one hand and the Popperian sounding rejection of a role for belief in science noted above - until the early 1900's, I will show that a proper understanding of Peirce's long-standing conception of intellectual integrity and the life of science allows us to reconstruct a coherent, challenging and salutary account of the role of belief in the pursuit of truth.

Center for Pragmatism Studies
Philosophy Graduate Program
Departament of Philosophy
Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo - Brazil