One of the great works of philosophy, in my view, was published in 1878 in Popular Science Monthly, a magazine that had a following among people who liked to tinker in backyard sheds.
The work was an article, rather than a book, which counts for it in my view. It was called “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” surely a worthy cause. The author was Charles S. Peirce, a quirky, virtually unemployable polymath who lived in the spirit of backyard tinkerers.
Peirce says we think to form beliefs.
A belief has three features:
• We are aware of it. (A belief is not subconscious.)
• A belief appeases the irritation of doubt. (We form beliefs to assuage doubts.)
• If a belief is established, it’s a rule of action. (If we really have belief about x, when act on it when x comes up. If I believe there are mosquitoes in the backyard, I will act on that belief by applying bug spray.)
I have struggled to come up with an account of belief — to give an adequate notion of what we mean by that word. As you can see, Peirce doesn’t blink.
This pragmatic account has some real advantages. If you’re interested in philosophy as an academic subject, there are new books out about how American pragmatists influenced British thinkers such as Frank Ramsay and Wittgenstein. But the advantage to me, a backyard-shed tinkerer with philosophical concepts, is that it leaves enormous room for having no belief at all.
Curiosity seems to be part of my character. I’m interested in and curious about a great many things. But the older I get, the more I learn about the cosmos, the more I realize that I have failed to scratch the surface. On a great many matters — matters that are obviously important — I simply don’t know enough to have formed any rule of action at all. Or, as Peirce would say, I don’t have any belief at all.
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