How Settled Are Settled Beliefs in The Fixation of Belief

How Settled are Settled Beliefs in “The Fixation of Belief”?
Author(s): Jeff Kasser

Source: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Spring 2011), pp. 226-
247
Published by: Indiana University Press
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Abstract
This paper offers a new interpretation of
Peirce’s “The Fixation of Belief,” one that
pays special attention to the notion of what
it is for a belief to be fixed or stable. Draw-
ing on Louis Loeb’s stability-centered read-
How Settled ings of the epistemologies of Descartes and
Hume, I suggest that Peirce’s argument does
are Settled not deploy a Cartesian notion of perma-
nently stable belief. It instead relies on a
Beliefs in comparatively modest Humean notion, ac-
cording to which a fixed belief is stable for
“The Fixation a given inquirer at a given time. A belief is
settled if it resists being undermined too
of Belief ”? readily by experience and reflection. I try
to show how such a reading allows Peirce to
Jeff Kasser object to unscientific methods of fixing be-
lief purely on grounds of their ineffective-
ness. I try also to show how Peirce establishes
the superior effectiveness of the method of
science at delivering stable beliefs in the rel-
evant sense.
Keywords: Peirce, Descartes, Hume, Loeb,

Belief, Doubt.
Despite its prominence in Peirce’s best-

known works, the notion of fixed, stable,
or settled belief (I will follow Peirce in using
these terms more or less interchangeably)
has received relatively little explicit atten-
tion. Need a belief be permanently stable in
order to count as fixed? Or, to take the other
extreme, does a belief count as fixed as long
as it is currently stable? More fundamentally,
what is involved in predicating stability of
a belief? Talk of stability suggests a disposi-
tion to resist being undermined, and so the
question arises of how resistant to what sorts
of undermining influences a belief needs to
be in order to count as fixed in Peirce’s sense.
Does Peirce, especially in “The Fixation of
TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY

Vol. 47, No. 2 ©2011
226
Belief,” identify the aim of inquiry with merely currently settled belief
How Settled are Settled Beliefs in “The Fixation of Belief ”? • Jeff Kasser
or with permanently settled belief, or with some in-between notion of
settled belief?1 In what follows, I offer a somewhat novel interpretation
of “Fixation” that emerges from giving the notion of stable belief the
centrality that I think it merits. I try to show that Peirce (vaguely but
importantly) requires that settled beliefs resist being undermined too
readily by experience and reflection. He does not, in the main argu-
ment of “Fixation,” require that beliefs be universally or permanently
settled in order to count as fixed. I will try to show how Peirce com-
bines this vague (and for that reason, probably correct) account of set-
tled belief with an awareness that context determines which possible
experiences and reflections must be taken into account in assessing the
stability of beliefs. On this basis, I am able to attribute to Peirce a
sensible argument for the superiority of the method of science to its
competitors, and one which takes at face value Peirce’s key claim that
methods of settling belief should be evaluated only in terms of their
effectiveness.
Stability-centered Epistemologies
In “Sextus, Descartes, Hume and Peirce: On Securing Settled Doxas-
tic States,” Louis Loeb situates Peirce with respect to some important
predecessors who adopt epistemological (or, perhaps better, meta-
epistemological) positions now identified with Peirce. For each of these
thinkers, Loeb argues, “the objective of inquiry or investigation is char-
acterized in psychological terms” (Loeb 1998, p. 205).2 Each thinker
recommends that we pursue doxastic states that are settled, tranquil, or
solid.3 For Peirce, Descartes and Hume, the state in question is belief;
for Sextus, the desirable state involves suspension of judgment. The
idea that the aim of inquiry is best characterized as fixed or settled belief
is closely associated with Peirce because Peirce so directly and forcefully
defends such a position in “The Fixation of Belief.” Loeb’s treatment
of Descartes and Hume will provide the starting point for our investi-
gation of Peirce. Loeb attributes to Hume the modest view that agents
have reason to pursue settled belief-states.4 Descartes, according to
Loeb, defends the more ambitious goal of seeking belief-states that are
not only settled, but are incapable of being unsettled. These charac-
terizations approximate the Peircean notions of currently fixed belief
and permanently fixed belief, respectively. I aim to illuminate the roles
played by the modest, Humean conception of fixed belief and the am-
bitious, Cartesian conception in Peirce’s “The Fixation of Belief.” I think
that seeing Peirce’s argument in this light allows it to emerge more clearly
and more favorably than it has in most other treatments of this much-
discussed essay.
Like Peirce, Hume situates his epistemology within a framework in
which claims about the nature of belief and doubt, and claims about
227
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 47 Number 2 the psychological effects of believing and doubting, figure prominently.
Hume argues that belief is an unwavering, settled state, while doubt is
an unstable and inconstant state. “[T]he influence of belief is at once to
inliven and infix any idea in the imagination, and prevent all kind of
hesitation and uncertainty about it,” and “ ‘tis the nature of doubt to
cause a variation in the thought, and transport us suddenly from one
idea to another” (Hume 1978, p. 453). In addition, doubt leads to feel-
ings of uneasiness or discomfort, while belief carries with it comfort-
able, easy feelings. Belief “prevents uneasiness, by fixing one particular
idea in the mind, and keeping it from wavering in the choice of its
objects,” while doubt “must of consequence be the occasion of pain”
because “alteration gives uneasiness” (Hume 1978, p. 453). The simi-
larity to Peirce’s well-known claim that “[d]oubt is an uneasy and dis-
satisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the
state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we
do not wish to avoid” is indeed striking (W3:247).5 Though it is clear
that Loeb has identified a strand of Hume’s thought that will be of great
interest to Peirce scholars, detailed comparison of Hume and Peirce on
belief and doubt would take us too far afield. Our concern is with what
Hume and Peirce mean when they say that a belief is settled or fixed.
More precisely, we are interested in what it takes for a process or method
to produce stable beliefs. Like Peirce, Hume typically evaluates the sta-
bility of beliefs derivatively. Hume asks whether beliefs produced by a
given mechanism (e.g. causal reasoning) tend to be stable, while Peirce
asks whether beliefs fixed via a given method tend to be stable.
In his book-length discussion of the role of settled belief-states in
Hume’s epistemology, Loeb distinguishes stronger and weaker versions
of Hume’s stability-centered approach to justification. No state can be
a belief, either for Hume or for Peirce, unless that state is stable, settled,
or fixed. But for Hume many beliefs (e.g. the belief that bodies exist
when unperceived) are such that they tend to remain stable unless un-
dermined by philosophical reflection. And Hume recognizes that more
than a few people manage to live their lives without engaging in philo-
sophical reflection that would tend to undermine such natural beliefs.
Loeb argues that Hume considers the stable beliefs of such unphilo-
sophical “honest gentlemen” justified. This attributes to Hume the less
demanding of two theses connecting justification to stable belief. On
the weaker interpretation, “beliefs resulting from a psychological mech-
anism are justified, all things considered, if they tend to be steady in their
influence given the actual degree to which the person who holds the
belief is reflective” (Loeb 2002, p. 88). Loeb’s more demanding thesis
requires justified beliefs to be capable of surviving a higher degree of re-
flection. On the stronger view (which Loeb does not attribute to Hume),
“beliefs produced by a psychological mechanism are justified, all things
considered, if they tend to be steady in their influence for a reflective
228
person, that is for a person who fully examines beliefs” (Loeb 2002,
p. 88). Current purposes allow us to settle for a vague characterization
according to which a full examination of a belief involves careful check-
ing for the usual epistemic virtues of coherence with other beliefs, reli-
ability of the process by which the belief has been produced, etc.
We need not, of course, pursue Loeb’s argument that it is the less de-
manding thesis about justification that should be attributed to Hume.
In fact, we can bypass the notion of justification entirely, since Peirce
makes no direct use of that notion in “Fixation.” Instead, we can focus
on the connection Loeb brings out between reflection and the stability
or fixity of a belief. To call a belief fixed is to credit it with some resis-
tance to being undermined or disturbed. A house of cards counts as
unstable because it is too thoroughly and too readily undermined by
too many forces that are too common. When we say that a house of
bricks is more stable than a house of sticks, which is more stable than a
house of straw, we are invoking some sense of the forces houses are sup-
posed to resist, along with some sense of effective resistance.6 Loeb very
plausibly treats reflection as one of the forces that stable beliefs must
resist. Hume’s unreflective “honest gentlemen” have stable beliefs about
enduring objects not simply because they happen not to be engaging
in philosophical reflection, but because they are disposed not to engage
in philosophical reflection.7 To see the link between reflective approval
and stability, Loeb notes, “we need only assume that there is instability
where a faculty does not bear its own scrutiny, or that if upon reflection
a faculty disapproves of itself this judgment will be destabilizing” (Loeb
2002, p. 27). Just as a house in Big Bad Wolf territory will not last long
unless it is huff- and puff-resistant, a belief that stands a good chance of
being subjected to reflective pressure will not merit being called fixed
unless it can withstand such pressure. Since, as we will see below, reflec-
tion is essentially a way of cheaply and readily bringing experience to
bear on beliefs, the idea that stable beliefs can withstand reflection is
just a special and important case of the Peircean staple that fixed beliefs
survive in the course of experience. Much remains to be said, of course,
about how much experience and how much reflection a fixed belief
must be able to endure. Before turning to that task, however, we should
note some features of the stability-centered epistemology that Loeb at-
tributes to Descartes.
Perhaps surprisingly, Descartes’ discussions of doubt have a recog-
nizably and importantly Peircean flavor. Descartes begins from a rather
un-Peircean distinction between mere conviction (persuasio) and knowl-
edge (scientia). “[T]here is conviction when there remains some reason
which might lead us to doubt, but knowledge is conviction based on a
reason so strong that it can never be shaken by any stronger reason”
(Descartes 1991, p. 147). Mere conviction is susceptible to being un-
dermined by doubt, while knowledge cannot be so undermined. Real
229
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 47 Number 2 knowledge is unshakeable and thoroughly resistant to doubt, and the
Cartesian inquirer will settle for nothing less than scientia. Peirce’s fal-
libilism, of course, rejects the notion that we can ever be sure that we
have attained beliefs that are immune from being shaken by doubt. In
that sense, Peirce clearly abandons the hope of attaining scientia. But
Peirce does share with Descartes the idea that doubt shakes beliefs, that
it unsettles them and that once the state becomes sufficiently unsettled,
it ceases to be a belief. Perhaps it should not surprise us to find Des-
cartes using terms that now seem Peircean. Peirce’s well-known impa-
tience with Descartes might well reflect the similarity of the framework
within which their profound differences emerge.
Descartes, then, seeks beliefs which are maximally resistant to un-
dermining influences. Hume is prepared to regard an unshaken belief
as settled, while Descartes will not call a belief truly settled unless it is
unshakeable. Crucially, “settled” here has normative implications. In-
quirers have reason to pursue beliefs which are settled in the relevant
sense, and so settled beliefs constitute the (or at least an) aim of inquiry.
Loeb writes that “Descartes’ objective of belief that is incapable of be-
ing unsettled is similar to Peirce’s objective of the ‘settlement’ of opin-
ion, or ‘fixation’ of belief, as Peirce’s understanding of the objective is
standardly interpreted. . . . On this interpretation, the fixation of belief
requires belief that is settled permanently or in the long run” (Loeb
1998, p. 210). I think that Loeb is right about the standard interpreta-
tion of Peirce’s notion of settled belief. It is a commonplace of Peirce
scholarship to characterize the aim of inquiry in terms that approximate,
at least, the Cartesian conception of belief that is incapable of being
undermined. Misak and many others have Peirce claiming that “[w]e
aim at beliefs which would be forever stable” (Misak 2004, p. 153).
Elsewhere (Misak 1991/2004, pp. 69–70), she makes it clear that this
is a much more demanding aim than that of seeking beliefs that merely
will be forever stable. We don’t seek beliefs that are forever accepted
merely because nobody ever bothers looking into them or because
everyone has taken a belief-fixing pill. It turns out, then, that Peirce (as
commonly interpreted) and Descartes (as presented by Loeb) are not all
that far apart on the ultimate aim of inquiry; both take it to involve
beliefs which cannot or would not be undermined or unsettled. Fallibil-
ism, as noted above, keeps Peirce and his predecessor importantly apart;
Descartes thinks it possible and crucial for us to know when we have
attained an unshakeable belief, and Peirce rejects both of those claims.8
I do not disagree with the standard interpretation, but I do want to
issue a warning about it. There is no doubt that Peirce affirms a Carte-
sian interpretation of “fixed belief ” repeatedly and explicitly. In the
1872 manuscripts from which much of “Fixation” derives, Peirce says
such things as:
230
We have maintained and proved that the sole purpose of inquiry is to
produce a settled opinion. The object at which alone we aim then in
the struggle for belief, is to make our belief conform to that final be-
lief. The only thing then which our thought strives to picture or rep-
resent is the object of final belief. [W3:45]
But the sense in which the standard interpretation is correct must be

spelled out rather explicitly. This conception of the aim of inquiry is a
product of the argument of “Fixation.” This emerges most clearly in a
different manuscript from 1872. There, Peirce says, “[t]hus, thought if
it takes place according to that fourth method of inquiry which is termed
investigation . . . reaches at last . . . a certain definite conclusion. And
according to what has been said, the whole struggle which is the motive
for investigation, is towards this settled belief and nothing else” (W3:34,
emphasis added). As “Fixation” itself emphasizes, the idea that indi-
vidual belief is answerable to the opinion that would be held at the end
of inquiry is an achievement, not an assumption. The method of sci-
ence and the hypothesis of reality on which it rests are reached via such
steps as the realization “that another man’s thought or sentiment may
be equivalent to one’s own” which is “a distinctly new step, and a highly
important one” (W3:250).9 There is a danger that statements like “[w]
e aim at beliefs which would be forever stable” or “the fixation of belief
requires belief that is settled permanently or in the long run” can be
misunderstood as indicating that a belief is not genuinely fixed (for an
inquirer at a time) unless it is permanently fixed or that an inquirer has
no reason to pursue settled beliefs unless she can regard them as perma-
nently settled. As I will show below, however, Peirce certainly does not
assume that an inquirer who uses the method of tenacity means “uni-
versally and permanently settled belief ” by “fixed belief.” It is not, I
think, controversial to note that Peirce’s claims about epistemic motiva-
tion in Section IV of “Fixation” and in his discussion of the method of
tenacity accord better with a modest, Humean conception of fixed be-
lief than with the more familiar Cartesian conception. But these obser-
vations do bring us to interesting and controversial questions: how and
how well does Peirce’s argument navigate from the Humean conception
of settled belief to the Cartesian one? I will argue that Peirce adopts
a sophisticated stability-centered approach to belief evaluation that in-
volves a kind of contextualism. The Peircean inquirer seeks habits of
expectation that are resistant to being shaken in the course of experi-
ence and reflection. This is a generic formulation, compatible with Hu-
mean and Cartesian approaches. The extent to which a belief needs to
be able to resist undermining forces in order to count as stable varies by
situation. What counts as a stable structure in San Francisco might dif-
fer significantly from what counts as a stable structure in Iowa. But this
231
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 47 Number 2 contextualism will turn out to be fully compatible with the objective
superiority of the method of science to competing belief-forming
methods.
Settled Belief in Section IV of “Fixation”

We have now borrowed three notions of settled belief from Descartes
and Hume, via Loeb: 1) a settled belief is one that remains settled,
given the level of reflection to which the believer actually subjects the
belief; 2) a settled belief is one that remains settled under conditions
of full reflective examination; and 3) a settled belief is one that would
forever resist becoming unsettled. It perhaps merits reminding that, as
Loeb emphasizes,10 this way of speaking is compressed in a potentially
misleading way. At least in the cases of Hume and Peirce, we are less
concerned with whether a given belief is stable and more concerned
with whether a belief-forming process tends to produce stable beliefs.
We can now turn to “Fixation” and ask how the availability of these
possibilities affects the interpretation of Peirce’s paper. Much of the
argument is well known and will receive a brisk treatment, but I will
dwell on a couple of easily overlooked aspects of Peirce’s discussion.
“Fixation” characterizes doubt as “an uneasy and dissatisfied state”
which stimulates the agent to a struggle culminating in its own removal.
Belief, on the other hand, is “calm and satisfactory” and tends toward
its own preservation. A belief is, or at least involves, a disposition, a
habit of action and expectation. So belief guides action rather than
prompting it. Because it is a settled state, belief endures until inter-
rupted, paradigmatically by a surprising experience. For Peirce as for
Hume, the notion of belief is that of a state that is settled or stable, and
to be settled or stable is to have some disposition to resist being de
stabilized. A surprising experience (or something akin to one) provides
a kind of force by which the agent is thrown into doubt. Doubt, in
turn, signifies the loss or interruption of a plan of conduct. If my keys
are where I expect them to be, my belief concerning their location need
never call itself to my attention. If, however, the keys fail to appear
where I had confidently expected to find them, I am prompted to in-
quiry concerning their location, whether in the form of careful reflec-
tion on their recent whereabouts or desperate searching of every nook
and cranny of my house. Though not every doubt gets addressed (I
might immediately get distracted and start thinking about something
else), doubt is, as such, an unsettled state that seeks a terminus in belief.
As Peirce puts it in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” “Thought in ac-
tion has for its only possible motive the attainment of thought at rest”
(W3:263).
As the starkness of that last quote suggests, Peirce’s initial explica-
tion of inquiry in terms of belief and doubt smacks of Humean
minimalism.11
232
The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I
shall term this struggle inquiry, though it must be admitted that this
is sometimes not a very apt designation.
The irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for the strug-
gle to attain belief. It is certainly best for us that our beliefs should be
such as may truly guide our actions so as to satisfy our desires; and
this reflection will make us reject any belief which does not seem to
have been so formed as to insure this result. But it will only do so by
creating a doubt in the place of that belief. With the doubt, therefore,
the struggle begins and with the cessation of doubt it ends. Hence,
the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion. [W3:247–8]
When Peirce says that we are entirely satisfied as soon as a firm belief has
been reached, he certainly seems to have a modest construal of “firm
belief ” in mind. Indeed, Peirce appears to go out of his way to stress the
modesty of his conception of settled belief throughout Section IV of
“Fixation.” He insists that nothing outside of one’s sphere of knowledge
(like whether a belief is true) can be the object of one’s inquiry. This is
difficult to square with an ambitious conception of settled belief, since
one cannot, for Peirce, know when one has reached a permanently set-
tled belief any more than one can know whether the belief is true. One
might well not even be able to know whether one’s belief would remain
settled were one to reflect upon the belief fully, in Loeb’s sense. Peirce
also emphasizes that inquiry need not proceed from incorrigible or in-
dubitable premises, and he baldly states that premises which are free of
all actual doubt cannot be made more satisfactory than they are.12 This
talk of beliefs free of “actual” doubt or of beliefs which “are not in fact
doubted at all” (W3:248; emphasis mine) pushes very strongly toward
an interpretation along the lines of Loeb’s less demanding thesis. A be-
lief counts as fixed for a given inquirer if it is stable, given the extent to
which the inquirer actually reflects.
Peirce’s notion of settled belief should not be construed too mini-
mally, however. Since believing is a calm, settled dispositional state, the
very notion of belief has built into it the idea of resisting disturbance,
though it remains a very open question how resistant a belief needs to be
to what potential disturbances.13 For Descartes, a genuinely fixed belief
will prove resistant to any and all disturbances. Similar considerations
apply to Peirce’s notion of the final opinion. But a less ambitious notion
of settled belief will need to make tacit or explicit reference to the scope,
intensity and probability of the disturbances to be resisted. Peirce’s an-
swer is straightforward, if vague. A fixed belief will not be easily under-
mined by experience, and a successful belief-settling method will not
produce beliefs too readily undermined by experience.
As Peirce was well aware, vague statements more often prove true
than helpful. The claim that successful methods of fixing belief pro-
duce beliefs which survive confrontation with experience does not tell
233
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 47 Number 2 us anything about how available and how potent undermining experi-
ences need to be in order to count in favor of or against a belief-forming
method. If someone’s actual experiences quickly produce genuine doubt
about most of the beliefs generated by a particular method, then the
method clearly does a poor job of fixing belief (at least for that person
in that context). If nobody’s experiences would ever produce genuine
doubt about any belief produced by a given method, then the method
clearly fixes belief wonderfully. The interesting cases, obviously, lie be-
tween these extremes. The unscientific methods of fixing belief succeed
under limited conditions of experience and reflection. We need to see
why, for Peirce, these conditions count as too limited for the methods
to be considered genuinely successful.
An initial sense of Peirce’s position can be gleaned by considering
the extremes he must avoid. Though “Fixation” tends to emphasize the
stability of belief, Peirce’s argument also crucially relies on the brittle-
ness, or destabilizability of belief.14 The properties of belief constrain the
methods for attaining and sustaining belief. A belief-forming method
cannot be answerable merely to the actual experiences or the actually
expected experiences of a given inquirer or group of inquirers. As we
will see below, such an approach allows stability of belief to be attained
too easily and too cheaply. Peirce grants that unscientific methods of
forming belief can resist being undermined by large chunks of experi-
ence, and so his argument against the specious methods would collapse,
since Peirce grounds his assessment of belief-forming methods entirely
in the stability of the beliefs produced thereby. Conversely, if beliefs are
undermined too easily and too cheaply by experiences that someone
merely might have had, a pernicious Cartesianism looms. Too many
doubts will be taken to count as legitimate, and paper doubts will be
taken to be genuine, leaving us with a skepticism that is alternately
paralyzing and fraudulent. Of course, all this serves merely to character-
ize Peirce’s position, not to establish it. The argument for these claims
emerges in Section V of “Fixation.” My point for now concerns Peirce’s
conceptual apparatus, not his argument. He will try to derive norma-
tive claims about belief-fixing methods from the importance to indi-
vidual inquirers of stability, and he legitimately, in my view, will place
Humean stability between tenacious and Cartesian extremes. A build-
ing that is never subjected to destabilizing forces does not thereby count
as stable. On the other hand, a building need not forfeit a designation
as stable merely because some possible forces would destabilize it or
because it will not endure forever. This discussion sets the framework
for examining Peirce’s resources for exposing belief-forming methods to
all and only the right potentially undermining influences.
The notion of reflection is crucial to Peirce’s position here, and re-
flection must not be contrasted too sharply with experience. Recent
discussions of Peirce have rightly emphasized a continuity between
234
experience and reflection or, similarly, between outer and inner expe-
rience. Such interpretations recognize the distinction between genuine
experience produced via reflection (e.g. experimentation in the imagi-
nation) and mere imaginary or feigned experience.15 Peirce contrasted
“feigned hesitancy” and the genuine experience produced thereby with
feigned or paper doubt as far back as 1878 in “How to Make Our Ideas
Clear.” Short captures the flavor of Peirce’s discussion when he notes
that “[t]he appeal is to experience, actual or vividly imagined” (Short
2000, p. 10). Without insisting that reflection be considered a species
of experience, it is clear that Peirce credits reflection with the power to
destabilize beliefs. It is because reflection can so readily be brought to
bear on beliefs that it merits special attention from stability-centered
epistemologies, as we have seen in Loeb’s discussion of the two Humean
conceptions of justification. As we turn to Peirce’s treatment of the
tenacious, authoritarian and a priori methods of fixing beliefs in Sec-
tion V of his famous paper, we will see how crucially Peirce relies on a
connection between reflective endorsement and genuinely fixed beliefs.
Tenacity, Rationality, and Settled Belief

Section V of “Fixation” continues in the provocative manner of sec-
tion IV. Peirce insists that since “we cling tenaciously, not merely to
believing, but to believing just what we do believe,” it is not clear what
prevents us from “taking any answer to a question which we may fancy,
and constantly reiterating it to ourselves, dwelling on all which may
conduce to that belief, and learning to turn with contempt and hatred
from anything which might disturb it.” (W3:248–249). Peirce’s discus-
sion of the method of tenacity is subtle and fascinating. He is anxious
to give the method its due and equally anxious not to beg any questions
against the method, but he nevertheless wants to establish a sense in
which tenacity is profoundly unsatisfactory, purely from the standpoint
of settling belief. The follower of tenacity is described in unflattering
terms—he is compared to an ostrich with its head in the sand and is
said to “cling spasmodically” to his views and to feel that “if he only
holds to his belief without wavering, it will be entirely satisfactory”
(W3:249). At least under favorable circumstances, however, the tena-
cious believer can maintain a “calm” and “steadfast” belief, and so seems
to fulfill the proximate aim of inquiry quite well.
A man may go through life, systematically keeping out of view all that
might cause a change in his opinions, and if he only succeeds—basing
his method, as he does, on two fundamental psychological laws—I
do not see what can be said against his doing so. It would be an ego-
tistical impertinence to object that his procedure is irrational, for that
only amounts to saying that his method of settling beliefs is not ours.
[W3 249:250]
235
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 47 Number 2 Much about this passage resists interpretation, including the oblique
reference to “two fundamental psychological laws.” More to the point,
however, it is a bit mysterious how the notion of fixed belief figures in
Peirce’s discussion. There is no whiff of a Cartesian conception of
settled belief in this passage—there’s no suggestion that the tenacious
believer’s opinions are not genuinely settled because they are not per-
manently settled, or that he somehow has reason to settle for nothing
less than a universal and permanent opinion. But a Humean reading of
fixed belief seems to deprive Peirce of crucial resources for objecting
to tenacity. Tenacious believers can maintain stable or settled doxastic
states. The believer is untroubled by doubt and so lacks any felt motive
for inquiry. In one of the manuscripts leading up to “Fixation,” Peirce
insists that tenacity “does not work in practice long (though it may for
the term of a man’s life)” (W3:18). So in what sense does tenacity, at
least when practiced under favorable conditions, fail to produce settled
beliefs; what is the “practical” standard such that beliefs that are fixed
for the duration of one’s life are still not adequately fixed?16
As is well known, Peirce’s objection is that a tenacious believer “will
find that other men think differently from him, and it will be apt to
occur to him, in some saner moment, that their opinions are as good as
his own, and this will shake his confidence in his belief ” (W3:250).
This is another passage that has exercised commentators. The objec-
tion seems to appeal both to experience and to reflection. The first part
involves a prediction that the tenacious believer will encounter dis-
agreement, while the second part predicts that reflection upon this dis-
agreement will destabilize belief. The argument is much discussed and
unfavorably so. Murphey suggests that it is unworthy of being called an
argument, while Short more charitably infers that because it would be
a horrible argument if it were an argument, it must not be an argu-
ment.17 Short thinks that Peirce admits that he has no argument against
the method of tenacity when he says that there is nothing to be said
against the successful tenacious believer. Loeb agrees with Short on this
point, taking the passage above to show that Peirce can offer no reason
why higher levels of reflection are to be sought or preferred by an epis-
temology that prioritizes stability.18 Most other commentators are not
much more sympathetic to the argument than are Murphey and Short.
Misak thinks that the argument’s appeal to “the social impulse” is deeply
problematic. Peirce’s argument, she thinks, rests on the “psychological
hypothesis” that we are thrown into doubt by disagreement. “Not only
is the psychological hypothesis false,” according to Misak, “but even if
it were true, it would not be effective.”19 Hookway similarly finds the
argument excessively psychological and insufficiently normative. It is
not clear that Peirce has much of an objection against practitioners of
tenacity who can ignore or avoid those with whom they disagree, and it
is not clear why a mere psychological impulse should carry any epistemic
236
weight.20 Along similar lines, some critics think they detect an illicit
shift from a naturalistic to a normative account of inquiry or between
theoretical and practical acceptance.21
Focusing on the notion of settled belief, we might accuse Peirce of a
similarly illicit slide between a modest, Humean and an ambitious,
Cartesian construal of “settled belief.” Perhaps Peirce himself was led
astray by his failure to render the notion of fixed belief more precise.
Tenacious beliefs can be held quite firmly, but if they nevertheless seem
not to count as settled, perhaps it is because the standard of settled be-
lief has shifted. But if Peirce has disqualified tenacious beliefs merely
because they are not unshakeable, he has made an argument every bit
as bad as the ones alluded to above. Humean “settled” is a far cry from
Cartesian “settled.” I hope we can do a bit better on Peirce’s behalf than
having him commit a non sequitur about the central notion of his paper,
viz. the sense of settled belief at which inquiry aims.
Peirce can be credited with having offered a legitimate argument
only if he can be interpreted as defending the scientific method in terms
of its effectiveness at generating stable belief. He must not shift, as some
commentators have him doing, from evaluating methods in terms of
their ability to generate stable belief to criteria of evaluation that cannot
be vindicated in those terms (e.g. the alleged moral superiority of the
method of science).22 Nor can “stability” start out meaning what it does
in Section IV of “Fixation” and then shift without argument to a more
demanding notion that favors the method of science over its competi-
tors. And the superior effectiveness of science at fixing belief must be
defended, not merely asserted or assumed (as it would be, for instance,
if Peirce simply eliminated the specious methods and then affirmed the
effectiveness of the method of science because it was the last method
standing).23 Finally, the social impulse cannot play the role of a deus ex
machina, and it cannot by itself do normative work. The role and norma-
tive relevance of the social impulse should emerge from the naturalized
normativity to which Peirce has already appealed, viz. the desirability of
settled doxastic states. I think that these requirements can be met, leav-
ing Peirce with a genuine, and genuinely interesting argument.
How, then, can Peirce muster a legitimate, effectiveness-based argu-
ment against the method of tenacity? Pace some of the interpreters cited
above, I think that Peirce can admit that, in one sense, the successful
practitioner of tenacity is beyond criticism, while also arguing that the
method of tenacity is an ineffective way of pursuing the goal of stable
beliefs. The thoroughly successful tenacious believer has, via isolation
or dogmatism or whatever, by hypothesis satisfied the goal of inquiry
sketched in Section IV of “Fixation.” Peirce stipulates that such a per-
son has attained a belief-state that will remain stable across all the re-
flection he will ever engage in. So there is no question of browbeating
him about whether his method has worked for him. But it is one thing
237
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 47 Number 2 to say that a given individual has chosen effective means to his goal and
quite another to say that the means he has chosen are, in general, effec-
tive for reaching that goal. Peirce emphasizes in Part II of “Fixation”
that reasoning involves habits of mind that must be evaluated in gen-
eral terms: “[A]n inference is regarded as valid or not, without reference
to the truth or falsity of its conclusion specially, but according as the
habit which determines it is such as to produce true conclusions in
general or not” (W3:245). Someone who is playing blackjack and takes
another card while sitting on twenty has, ceteris paribus, made an un-
wise bet. But if he gets an ace and wins he has successfully pursued the
aim of blackjack.24 Peirce can and should pronounce the tenacious be-
liever’s procedure irrational, and he makes a mistake in disavowing this
response. The charge of irrationality amounts to more than saying that
the tenacious believer’s method is not ours; it instead says that the tena-
cious believer is using a method that can reliably produce settled belief
only in, at best, very special circumstances. A house of straw might suf-
fice for those who encounter neither big bad wolves nor stiff breezes. But
such narrow sufficiency does not make a house of straw sturdy. Peirce is
right, however, when he suggests that criticism in terms of rationality
need not bother the successful tenacious believer. The proponent of te-
nacity is not interested in a generally reliable method. His is a neces-
sarily singular undertaking, and it would beg the question to assume
that the tenacious believer needs, for the sake of stable belief, to adopt
a generally reliable procedure. The referent of “the man” in the phrase
“the man who adopts [the method of tenacity] will find that other men
think differently from him” need not, and indeed should not, be iden-
tified with the successful proponent of the method of tenacity. The
successful practitioner of tenacity is precisely someone who will not en-
counter those who think differently from himself or who will not have
his confidence undermined by any such encounters he does have.
Placing the tenacious believer beyond effective criticism does not
entail placing his method beyond effective criticism. The successful te-
nacious believer “will often talk with scorn of man’s weak and illusive
reason” (W3:250); no wonder that Peirce admits that he has nothing to
say to such a believer! But someone who is less specially equipped to be
unconcerned about what reasoning in fact is will quickly convince her-
self that the method of tenacity does not produce beliefs that are likely
to remain stable given her actual degree of reflectiveness. Peirce is not
merely assuming that the follower of the method of tenacity is less re-
flective about methodological matters than most folks are. He is instead
appealing to context. Peirce is writing primarily, if not exclusively, for
readers who are inquiring about methods of settling belief. Confronting
“the logical question” involves (or at least encourages) reflection about
the virtues and vices of various approaches to fixing belief. It makes
sense to talk of stability of belief only if some standard of reflectiveness
238
is in place, and the fact that both Peirce and his readers are centrally
interested in evaluating methods of fixing belief makes methodological
reflection crucial to the stability of an individual inquirer’s beliefs. If
a method is being chosen rather than merely picked, it is hard to see
how reflection about the choice is to be avoided.25 Peirce is not, I think,
committed to the necessity of methodological reflectiveness for under-
mining tenacity. One’s “logical conscience” can, of its own accord,
generate reflections that undercut the method. But I do think that he
considers contexts in which methodological questions arise nearly suf-
ficient to render tenacity ineffective. It is one thing to use a method of
belief-fixation, and it is another thing to adopt a method deliberately.
Tenacity suffers on both fronts. One must be peculiar or lucky to use
the method successfully, but, more importantly, it is extremely difficult
to deliberately and successfully adopt such a method of fixing belief.
Self-consciously deploying the method of tenacity generates a quasi-
Moore’s paradox; to the extent that one is aware that tenacity explains
one’s belief, the belief simply evaporates.26
Peirce is not saying that a moment’s reflection always and imme
diately undercuts the method of tenacity. The method succeeds well
enough to have merited discussion. A method generates stable beliefs
for a given inquirer to the extent that beliefs generated by that method
tend to remain fixed given the inquirer’s actual and seriously possible
standards of reflection over time. This conception of stability remains
fundamentally Humean, since it is cashed out in terms of the minimal-
ist construal of settled belief from Section IV of “Fixation.” The propo-
nent of tenacity “will find that other men think differently from him,
and it will be apt to occur to him, in some saner moment, that their opin-
ions are quite as good as his own, and this will shake his confidence
in his belief ” (W3 250, emphasis mine). I of course read “saner” here as
something like “relatively reflective.”27 Peirce’s argument relies on the
“aptness” of undermining thoughts occurring to an inquirer. Unless I
am confident that I have no reason to worry about high winds, a com-
bination of experience and reflection will probably make me worry about
the stability of my house of straw in relatively short order. Likewise,
unless one is and expects to remain rather specially equipped to dismiss
disagreement with apparent epistemic peers, actual or seriously possible
disagreement will eventually emerge as a reasonably foreseeable threat to
one’s confidence. And the possibility that someone could adopt (rather
than merely use) the method of tenacity successfully does not alter
the fact that the method is apt to undermine itself. Typically, Peirce
thinks, a method like tenacity will reveal its inadequacies quite quickly.
He notes that we come to inquiry having made a “vague concession
that there is some one thing to which a proposition should conform”
(W3:254; emphasis in original).28 Beliefs produced by the method of
tenacity stand in tension with the hypothesis of reality and other things
239
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 47 Number 2 we inchoately believe, and this renders such beliefs susceptible to being
undermined by reflection, often very quickly. Both the idea that we have
epistemic peers and the idea that beliefs are answerable to an external
reality generate real tendencies to undermine tenaciously held beliefs.
The fact, if it is a fact, that these tendencies might not manifest them-
selves in certain special circumstances does not mean that a modestly
reflective inquirer would do well to ignore them. Doubts about beliefs
fixed by the method of tenacity can thus arise too readily from too many
sources.
Reflection and Stability

Peirce grants that the method of authority, according to which the state
or a comparably powerful official body establishes and enforces ortho-
doxy, has been enormously successful at settling belief. The method of
authority has “worked the most majestic results” and “[f ]or the mass of
mankind . . . there is perhaps no better method than this” (W3:251).
Beliefs produced by the method of authority are (or at least can be)
calmly and confidently maintained for a long stretch of time. As with
the method of tenacity, however, such successes do not vindicate the
method, even on a modest, Humean construal of the aim of inquiry as
settled belief. Once again, the problem is that the method yields beliefs
that are too brittle, that are, though settled, too easily unsettled because
they are too easily recognized as destabilizable. Some individuals raised
under the method of authority
see that men in other countries and in other ages have held to very
different doctrines from those which they themselves have been
brought up to believe; and they cannot help seeing that it is the mere
accident of their having been taught as they have . . . that has caused
them to believe as they do and not far differently. And their candor
cannot resist the reflection that there is no reason to rate their own
views at a higher value than those of other nations and other centu-
ries; and this gives rise to doubts in their minds.
They will further perceive that such doubts as these must exist in
their minds with reference to every belief which seems to be deter-
mined by the caprice either of themselves or of those who originated
the popular opinions. [W3:252]
As with the method of tenacity, Peirce’s criticism combines an appar-

ently empirical prediction about encountering disagreement with con-
siderations about the effects of such disagreement upon belief. The
argument that the method of authority is ineffective closely resembles
the argument that tenacity is ineffective. Authority can be used success-
fully for quite a long time, though even there, the method faces built-in
weaknesses. But authority is nearly impossible to choose, even in the
short- to medium-term. This argument, like the argument against
240
tenacity, allows that the method in question will sometimes yield set-
tled belief, but denies that this is sufficient to vindicate the method.
Authority can produce settled beliefs only under conditions of very
minimal reflection, and that will not do, especially for those seeking
to deliberately adopt a belief-fixing method. Peirce acknowledges that,
when beliefs are fixed authoritatively
change is so slow as to be imperceptible during one person’s life, so
that individual belief remains sensibly fixed. For the mass of mankind,
then, there is perhaps no better method than this. [W3 251, emphasis
added]
Here we have more evidence that a Humean notion of fixed belief is

at work. Authority is an extremely effective method, but it is neverthe-
less subject to an effectiveness-based criticism. Bad methods sometimes
work, and bad belief-forming methods that merit discussion in a con-
text like “Fixation” are bad methods that have worked well enough to
have stuck around. But methods that yield beliefs that are too easily
undermined by reflection are to that extent ineffective, even if reflec-
tion is somewhat less common than we might wish it to be.
Peirce again makes it quite clear that the method under discussion is
undermined by reflection on its failings. He does not describe a case in
which the local authority makes a prediction that turns out, much to
the surprise of the populace, to be observably false. Experienced dis-
agreement shows, not that the proposition in question is false, but that
it was formed in an arbitrary and capricious way and it is this recogni-
tion of arbitrariness that undermines beliefs produced by the method of
authority. The permanent possibility that the awareness of arbitrariness
will undercut confidence in the method and the beliefs generated by the
method renders authority, like tenacity, ineffective in the relevant sense.
Similar considerations apply to the last of the specious methods
considered by Peirce. The a priori method directs the inquirer to choose
the most reasonable beliefs, where “reasonable” means agreeable to rea-
son, rather than supported by relevant experience. Peirce uses a hedo-
nistic version of psychological egoism as an example. The view that
humans are motivated only by their own pleasures and pains, he says,
“rests on no fact in the world, but it has had wide acceptance as being
the only reasonable theory” (W3:252). Once again, we encounter a
method that is worth discussing largely because it has succeeded in fix-
ing beliefs. And once again, we see that Peirce nevertheless pronounces
the method ineffective in the relevant sense.
But when I come to see that the chief obstacle to the spread of Chris-
tianity among a people of as high culture as the Hindoos has been a
conviction of the immorality of our way of treating women, I cannot
help seeing that, though governments do not interfere, sentiments in
241
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 47 Number 2 their development will be very greatly determined by accidental
causes. Now, there are some people, among whom I must suppose
that my reader is to be found, who, when they see that any belief of
theirs is determined by any circumstance extraneous to the facts, will
from that moment not merely admit in words that that belief is
doubtful, but will experience a real doubt of it, so that it ceases to be
a belief. [W3:253]
Our pattern recurs once again. The a priori method, according to Peirce,
“does not differ in a very essential way from that of authority” (W3:253).
While it is an empirical question how readily or frequently a proponent
of the a priori method will find herself in circumstances such that she
comes to see that her belief has been formed capriciously, Peirce thinks
it clear that a reflective inquirer will need to take this possibility seri-
ously. The method falls victim to foreseeable disagreement and not-
easily-avoidable reflection. Certainly anyone who reads “Fixation” and
asks questions about how best to reason will be susceptible to reflection
that would render the a priori method ineffective.
It is universally and rightly assumed that Peirce’s paradigm of a rea-
son for doubt is a surprising experience that directly conflicts with an
inquirer’s belief. Surprisingly, however, this simple, exemplary case plays
very little role in “Fixation.” Not once does Peirce argue from a particu-
lar experience showing that a particular belief produced by one of the
specious methods is false. The underminers are importantly less direct,
less brutely a matter of Secondness than that. In each case, it is a reflec-
tive awareness that there is no reason for beliefs generated in a certain
way to accord with reality that renders the specious methods ineffec-
tive. And rejecting a belief because there is no reason to think it true
seems importantly different from the usual Peircean demand of a “posi-
tive reason” for thinking a belief false. In “Fixation,” Peirce is primarily
interested in evaluating methods of forming beliefs rather than in eval-
uating individual beliefs, and so the striking claims constitutive of the
doubt-belief theory of inquiry figure more subtly in the argument of
“Fixation” than has commonly been understood.
The Method of Science

As several commentators have pointed out, it is one thing to muster
effectiveness-based critiques of the unscientific methods of fixing belief,
and quite another to establish the superiority of the method of science.
Can Peirce, as I have interpreted him, actually claim that the method of
science is more effective than the specious methods are? Science may
well be our best method for settling belief in the ambitious, Cartesian
sense, but that’s no reason to credit it with any great value for fulfilling
the proximate, rather than the ultimate, goal of inquiry. It nevertheless
seems to me that the method of science typically will fulfill the proximate
242
aim of inquiry better than the specious methods do, and that is all Peirce’s
argument requires. The method of science yields beliefs that can, and
frequently do, survive reflection on how they were brought about. The
method thus does not disqualify the beliefs it produces from feeling
settled and unlikely to be destabilized. When the issue is one of choos-
ing a method of fixing belief rather than somehow merely fixing a be-
lief, this is a decisive advantage. Questions about effective methods for
fixing belief involve a level of reflection that renders the unscientific
methods unsustainable.
This argument does not, however, require that the method of sci-
ence offer a high probability of fixed beliefs over the course of one’s
lifetime. As Hookway in particular has emphasized, Peirce has no argu-
ment to that effect.29 The individual inquirer is entitled to no assurance
that science will provide her with settled beliefs. Science often requires
inquirers to postpone the attainment of settled opinions, and it some-
times unsettles long-held beliefs. It seems to me that Peirce was at least
dimly aware of Hookway’s point. Beliefs formed by the specious meth-
ods are, as we have seen, insufficiently fixed because they can be too
readily undermined by considerations that can be too readily attained
by reflection. Prominent among these considerations is the recognition
that science is “the only one of the four methods which presents any
distinction of a right and a wrong way” (W3:254). But Peirce goes on
to emphasize a corollary of this point. The person deploying the method
of science cannot even be assured that she is using the method properly.
“I may start with known and observed facts and proceed to the un-
known; and yet the rules which I follow in doing so may not be such as
investigation would approve. The test of whether I am truly following
the method . . . itself involves the application of the method” (W3:255).
This is not a pious and toothless expression of fallibilism. Peirce re-
marked early in “Fixation” that “every work of science great enough to
be remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of
the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was writ-
ten; and each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic” (W3:243).
He recognizes, not just that successful adoption of the method of sci-
ence need not lead to fixed belief about a given question on the time
scale of a human lifetime, but also that the method of science itself tells
us how hard it can be to deploy the method well.
Nevertheless, many reflective inquirers find themselves able to settle
questions by using the method of science, and this is more than can
be said for the other methods discussed in “Fixation.” Since the other
methods cannot settle belief under the conditions required for asking
“the logical question,” Peirce can rightly claim that the method of science
more effectively fulfills the proximate aim of inquiry than any of its
competitors. Peirce’s first defense of the method of science in Section V
is the decisive one: “No doubts of the method, therefore, necessarily
243
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 47 Number 2 arise from its practice, as is the case with all the others” (W3:254). This
is an enormous effectiveness-based advantage, but it should not be
overstated. Doubts about the method of science can arise from its prac-
tice, but they are not occasioned merely by reflecting on the practice.
The argument of “Fixation” does not require Peirce to establish that
science will fix belief in the relevant Humean sense, but only that it can
do so. Peirce supplements these considerations with others to the effect
that we all do believe that the method of science will be effective, given
world enough and time, but that is a supplementary argument largely
because it engages the Cartesian rather than the Humean conception of
fixed belief. Peirce is trying to show us that we can have a settled belief
here and now only by adopting a method that guarantees stability only
in the indefinite future.
Isaac Levi has long championed a broadly Peircean approach to in-
quiry, but he parts company with Peirce over the issue of secular versus
messianic realism. A secular realist is concerned only to avoid error at
the next change in belief state, while a messianic realist cares about avoid-
ing error at two or more stages down the line (or at the ultimate end of
inquiry) “without regard to what happens in between.”30 For Levi, Peirce
exemplifies the excessive ambitions of messianic realism. Levi and I are
concerned with somewhat different questions, and I lack space to en-
gage his complex account of belief revision. Speaking somewhat loosely,
I hope that my reading of “Fixation” opens up space for seeing Peirce’s
approach to inquiry partaking of both the secular and messianic, and as
evidencing a healthy concern with “what happens in between.” Levi has
done more than anyone to highlight the importance of the notion of
a serious possibility, as judged from an inquirer’s point of view, to a
Peircean conception of inquiry. I have tried to show that the notion of
stable belief at work in Peirce’s most influential discussion of inquiry
itself makes reference to a standard of serious possibility, as the inquirer
evaluates beliefs in light of undermining influences she takes to be seri-
ously possible. The Peircean inquirer is motivated by the desire for
stable belief here and now, but is reflective enough to recognize that she
can satisfy that desire only by adopting methods of fixing belief that
take the medium- and long-run into account. So far as I have been able
to tell, Peirce is neither exclusively concerned with merely stable belief
nor with permanently stable belief. Instead, he offers a complicated and
cogent account of how these notions of stable belief figure in his ap-
proach to inquiry.31
Colorado State University
jeff.kasser@colostate.edu
244
REFERENCES
Adler, Jonathan. 2002. Belief ’s Own Ethics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Anderson, Douglas R. 1995. Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Peirce.
West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press.
Ayer, A. J. 1968. The Origins of Pragmatism. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and
Company.
Descartes, Rene. 1991. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume III, The
Correspondence. (Cottingham, Stoothof, Murdoch, and Kenny, trans.). Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hookway, Christopher J. 1985. Peirce. London: Routledge.
_____. 2000. Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press.
Hume, David. 1978. A Treatise of Human Nature. (Second Edition, L.A. Selby-
Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kasser, Jeff. 1999. “Peirce’s Supposed Psychologism.” Transactions of the Charles S.
Peirce Society 35: 501–26.
Levi, Isaac. 1991. The Fixation of Belief and Its Undoing. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
Loeb, Louis E. 1998. “Sextus, Descartes, Hume, and Peirce: On Securing Settled
Doxastic States.” Noûs 32: 205–30.
_____. 2002. Stability and Justification in Hume’s Treatise. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Misak, Cheryl J. 1991/2004. Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of
Truth. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Expanded Paperback Edition.
_____. 2000. Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation. London:
Routledge.
_____. (ed). 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Peirce. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Murphey, Murray G. 1993. The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy. Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Scheffler, Israel. 1974. Four Pragmatists: An Introduction to Peirce, James, Mead,
and Dewey. New York: Humanities Press.
Short, T. L. 2000. “Peirce on the Aim of Inquiry: Another Reading of ‘Fixation’.”
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 36: 1–23.
Skagestad, Peter. 1981. The Road of Inquiry: Charles S. Peirce’s Pragmatic Realism.
New York: Columbia University Press.
NOTES
1. Compare, at one extreme, Misak’s characterization of settled beliefs as those
which are in fact not doubted but which are susceptible to doubt in the right cir-
cumstances (Misak 2004, p. 10). At the other extreme, Anderson asserts that
“Peirce’s primary interest, unlike Clifford’s, is the fixing of belief in the long run”
(Anderson 1995, p. 84) and Levi characterizes Peirce as a messianic realist (Levi,
pp. 161–3). My point for now is just that the space in between these poles has not
received much attention.
2. I hasten to add that characterizing the aim of inquiry in terms worth call-
ing psychological does nothing to commit a thinker to a psychologistic conception
245
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 47 Number 2 of logic or inquiry. For discussion of this issue with respect to Peirce, see Kasser
1999.
3. Nothing in my argument turns on the correctness of Loeb’s reading of the
philosophers under discussion. Unless otherwise indicated, the reader should feel
free to understand me as discussing “Loeb’s Descartes,” “Loeb’s Hume,” etc. The
resources that I borrow from Loeb are of value quite apart from the overall correct-
ness of his interpretation of any particular philosopher.
4. Loeb recognizes that this language comports better with a conception of
belief as a dispositional than as an occurrent state. He addresses these matters, which
need not concern us here, in Loeb 2002.
5. Also see W3 21, where Peirce agrees with Hume that “[i]t is the wavering of
doubt which is unsatisfactory.”
6. 6 “Effective resistance” could be a threshold notion or a degreed notion.
Peirce tends to treat “fixed” as a binary or perhaps a threshold notion. See Levi,
pp. 1–5 for a nice brief on behalf of the idea that beliefs are either settled or they
are not.
7. This claim about stability and reflection is mine, not Loeb’s, though he has
(in correspondence) indicated agreement with a suitably vague version of this
claim. Loeb emphasizes that, on Hume’s view, dispositions to reflect vary greatly
according to mood or situation.
8. See Misak 2000, pp. 64–66 for helpful discussion on this point.
9. For a detailed elaboration of this line of thought, see Short 2000.
10. Loeb 2002, p. 88.
11. It should be noted that Peirce couches his epistemological claims in the
language of furthering or hindering the aim of inquiry, rather than in the more
familiar language of justification. We do not need to construct a Peircean theory
of justified belief. We are instead asking what features a belief needs to have in
order to count as appropriately terminating an inquiry.
12. I take it that Peirce here means only that the belief is free of all actual doubt
in the inquirer’s mind. Had Peirce meant that the proposition in question is not
actually doubted by anyone, he would not have said, later in “Fixation,” that the
conception “that another man’s thought or sentiment may be equivalent to one’s
own is a distinctly new step, and a highly important one” that emerges from the
failure of the method of tenacity to fix belief. Since tenacity has not yet been sub-
jected to scrutiny, we have not yet reached this important new step.
13. Similarly, the hardness here-and-now of a diamond involves a disposition
to resist being scratched. Here I help myself to Peirce’s considered views, both
before and after 1877, about the reality of dispositions. I ignore his self-confessed
mistake about the unscratched diamond in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” since
an examination of this issue would carry us too far afield.
14. The useful term “brittle” is from Scheffler 1974, p. 74.
15. For a criticism of Peirce that fails to make this distinction, see Scheffler,
pp. 67–70. Misak 1991/2004 misunderstands the notion of feigned hesitancy on
p. 48 but her discussion at pp. 21ff gets Peirce right.
16. Compare to Loeb’s discussion (cited above) of Hume on the justification
of the unreflective beliefs of “honest gentlemen.”
17. See Murphey 1993, p. 164 and Short 2000, p. 3. Also see Ayer 1968, pp.
32–33.
246
18. Loeb 1998, p. 223.
19. Misak 1991/2004, p. 58.
20. Hookway 1985, pp. 52–58.
21. See Hookway 2000, Chapter 1 and Skagestad 1981, pp. 35ff. It should be
noted that Skagestad works hard to try to minimize the extent to which he attri-
butes an illicit shift to Peirce (see p. 39). I nevertheless think my characterization
of his interpretation is accurate.
22. See Scheffler 1974, p. 70.
23. Ibid.
24. The issue here is closely connected to such notably Peircean doctrines as
that logically supportable reasoning requires an identification of one’s interests
with those of the community and the problem about probabilities being applied
to single cases that Hilary Putnam dubbed “Peirce’s Puzzle.” I cannot pursue this
rich topic here. My point is that there’s a deeper connection between the social
impulse and logically defensible methods of fixing belief than one might think.
Peirce’s invocation of the social impulse at this point is not arbitrary and it is not
merely psychological.
25. I believe my argument here is compatible with the “thoroughgoing anti-
foundationalism” which Short attributes to Peirce. I do not mean to suggest that
methods are chosen from nowhere, or that we have no method prior to choosing
one.
26. I take the idea of a quasi-Moore’s paradox from Adler 2002, though I am
using the idea rather differently here.
27. As does Loeb 1998, p. 223. Contrast Misak 1991/2004, p. 62, who finds
the appeal to sanity incompatible with Peirce’s naturalism.
28. Even the successful tenacious believer may be included in the “we.” Peirce
goes on to claim that the hypothesis of reality is one that every mind admits. This
is akin to saying, with Loeb, that truth is an internal aim of belief, and that fact
does not rule out the possibility of the successful tenacious believer. The successful
tenacious believer is (tacitly) committed both to thinking that his beliefs are an-
swerable to an external reality and that reality is, in effect, answerable to his beliefs.
He simply never reflects enough to recognize or to be troubled by this tension. I
have argued that this does not at all vindicate the method of tenacity.
29. See Hookway 2000, Chapter 1.
30. See Levi, p. 161ff.
31. I am grateful to Daniel Cohen, Doug Jesseph, Matthew MacKenzie, Katie
McShane, Joseph Ransdell and Darko Sarenac for helpful discussion about these
issues. It is perhaps obvious that I am especially indebted to Louis Loeb. An anon-
ymous reviewer for this journal provided valuable comments, and Cornelis de
Waal provided invaluable comments and advice.
247

How Settled Are Settled Beliefs in The Fixation of Belief

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How Settled Are Settled Beliefs in The Fixation of Belief

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How Settled are Settled Beliefs in “The Fixation of Belief”?

Author(s): Jeff Kasser

Keywords: Peirce, Descartes, Hume, Loeb,

Despite its prominence in Peirce’s best-

TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY

But the sense in which the standard interpretation is correct must be

Settled Belief in Section IV of “Fixation”

Tenacity, Rationality, and Settled Belief

Reflection and Stability

As with the method of tenacity, Peirce’s criticism combines an appar-

Here we have more evidence that a Humean notion of fixed belief is

The Method of Science

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