Peirce's contributions to Constructivism and Personal Construct Psychology: Part II. Science, Logic and Inquiry (2016) (original) (raw)
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Toward a Peircean psychology: C. S. Peirce and G. A. Kelly - H. G. Procter, 2014.
This submission is part of a larger project in which the work of Peirce and the psychologist G. A. Kelly are compared (Procter, 2014 and, in preparation). Kelly suggested that it was useful to consider anyone as functioning as a scientist, in the business of applying theories, making hypotheses and predictions and testing them out in the practice of everyday life. Peirce’s discussions of logic and inquiry deepens our understanding of Kelly’s metaphor by looking at what Peirce says about the process of science. The relationship between logic and psychology is examined in some detail. This enables us to radically reconstrue Kelly’s project as being more of a logical enterprise than has previously been understood, making it potentially compatible with Peirce’s overall vision. Kelly’s psychology potentially provides a working framework within which Peirce’s disparate but valuable contributions to psychology can be assembled. This could facilitate the development of a more fully worked out Peircean psychology.
Kelly’s work was formed and developed in the context of the American philosophical movement known as pragmatism. The major figures to which this tradition is attributed are Charles S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey. In Personal Construct Psychology, Dewey was acknowledged by Kelly and by subsequent writers as perhaps his most important influence. It has recently become increasingly apparent, however that Peirce was a much more pervasive and crucial influence on James and Dewey than has previously been recognized. Kelly did not mention Peirce but a close reading of the two writers reveals a remarkable correspondence and relationship between their two bodies of work. To set these two thinkers side by side proves to be an interesting and productive exercise. In this paper, after introducing Peirce and examining the relationship between him and Dewey, Kelly’s basic philosophical assumptions, as outlined at the beginning of Volume 1 of the The Psychology of Personal Constructs, are used as a framework for exploring their similarities and differences. The result is an enrichment of our understanding of Kelly’s philosophy which allows us to make links with many different subsequent thinkers’ ideas and provides a basis for exploring the psychological aspects of the two men’s work. The latter forms the subject of Part II of this series which is in preparation.
Peirce's Contributions to Constructivism and Personal Construct Psychology: I. Philosophical Aspects
Kelly’s work was formed and developed in the context of the American philosophical movement known as pragmatism. The major figures to which this tradition is attributed are Charles S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey. In Personal Construct Psychology, Dewey was acknowledged by Kelly and by subsequent writers as perhaps his most important influence. It has recently become increasingly apparent, however that Peirce was a much more pervasive and crucial influence on James and Dewey than has previously been recognized. Kelly did not mention Peirce but a close reading of the two writers reveals a remarkable correspondence and relationship between their two bodies of work. To set these two thinkers side by side proves to be an interesting and productive exercise. In this paper, after introducing Peirce and examining the relationship between him and Dewey, Kelly’s basic philosophical assumptions, as outlined at the beginning of Volume 1 of the Psychology of Personal Constructs, are use...
Peirce's Abduction and Kelly's Personal Construing (2017)
In Part I of a series of papers, Peirce's and Kelly's basic philosophical assumptions were shown to bare remarkable correspondences and affinities (Procter, 2014). In his Personal Construct Theory (PCT), Kelly suggested that it was useful to consider anyone as functioning as a scientist, in the business of applying theories, making hypotheses and predictions and testing them out in the practice of everyday life. For Kelly, we are continuously construing the world, ourselves, others and the relationships between us, making sense of these and making anticipations based on conjectures and suppositions that may or may not be validated. We do this with a complex system of bipolar constructs. One of Charles Peirce's major contributions was to develop the disciplines of logic and the philosophy of science. We can deepen and enrich our understanding of Kelly's vision by looking at what Peirce has to say about the process of science. For Peirce, special sciences such as psychology depend on sciences more general than themselves (including logic and ethics) to supply them with basic principles (Dougherty, 1980). He saw the essence of science as the application of laws of inference. But he developed a much broader concept of logic, including the logic of relations, elaborating the processes of deduction as diagrammatic, induction as self-corrective in the long run within a community of inquirers and adding to these the logic of hypothetical inference, or 'abduction'. Kelly also broadened the logic intrinsic to his theory, in his claiming a " departure from classical logic " (1955, 61) and putting central emphasis on the hypothetical and the " invitational " in his view of how we function. There are many meeting points between them, but this paper focuses on abduction and hypothesising in detail in order to throw further light on this central correspondence between the views of the two writers. In this way, we can enrich and deepen our understanding of human processes and perhaps begin to elaborate a non-psychologistic psychology. Each man has his own peculiar character. It enters into all he does… it enters into all his cognition, it is a cognition of things in general. It is therefore the man's philosophy, his
Science Beyond the Self: Remarks on Charles S. Peirce's Social Epistemology
For Peirce, science is decidedly a social enterprise. However, since Peirce defined science broadly as " the devoted, well-considered, life pursuit of knowledge, " what he said of science applies by and large to the acquisition and assessment of knowledge in general. In this paper I aim to shed light on Peirce's social epistemology by examining his views on scientific inquiry in the light of his philosophy of mind. I will argue that how Peirce recasts key concepts such as self, mind, thought, and person, has deep repercussions for how to interpret inquiry and assess its end product. The argument I present combines Peirce's notion of the scientific method as the fourth and most stable manner of fixing our beliefs developed in the late 1870s in Popular Science Monthly, with his notion of the self as he expressed in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy a decade earlier. Resumo: Para Peirce, a ciência é decididamente um empreendimento social. Entretanto, uma vez que Peirce definiu ciência de modo genérico como " a busca permanente, dedicada e ponderada do conhecimento " , o que ele disse da ciência se aplica, grosso modo, à aquisição e avaliação de conhecimento em geral. 1 Neste trabalho, pretendo fazer alguns comentários sobre a epistemologia de Peirce, analisando suas opiniões vis-à-vis a investigação científica à luz da sua filosofia da mente. Argüirei como a forma pela qual Peirce redefine conceitos-chave como ego, mente, pensamento e pessoa têm repercussões profundas na interpretação da investigação e avaliação do seu
Charles Sanders Peirce was acknowledged by William James as the founder of pragmatism; however, while James’ appreciation for psychology is well taken into account in his philosophy, the role that psychological inquiry played in Peirce’s thought remains largely unexplored. Few excellent studies indicate Peirce as the first American experimental psychologist (Cadwallader 1974, 1975; Fisch 1986) and as the first to perform a truly modern experiment in psycho-physics (Hacking 1988). Nonetheless, Peirce’s commitment to psycho-physics fails to be fully integrated with the broader project of his philosophy. This integration is crucial to gain a better understanding of the complexity of Peirce’s system of thought and of his position in the psychologistic-antipsychologistic divide. On the logical side, making Peirce’s position on psychology explicit leads to investigating his material logic; on the psychological side, Peirce’s scientific approach to psychology has its theoretical foundation in Kant and further marks the distinction between Peirce’s pragmatism and James’.
Review of Peirce's Illustrations of the Logic of Science
Finally someone has saved future Peirce scholars from having to piece together for themselves the comparative points in Peirce's development as it concerns his most widely read essays. The significance of the Popular Science Monthly articles of 1877–78 for pragmatism and for Peirce's thought is universally known. Cornelis de Waal here brings together the comprehensive story of these articles and their eventual fate. He documents it in a way that anyone can grasp, and through careful study of this text, many essentials relating to the development of Peirce's thought can be learned.
Ciência Além do Ego: Observações sobre a Epistemologia Social de Charles S. Peirce
Cognitio Revista De Filosofia Issn 1518 7187 2316 5278, 2006
For Peirce, science is decidedly a social enterprise. However, since Peirce defined science broadly as "the devoted, well-considered, life pursuit of knowledge," what he said of science applies by and large to the acquisition and assessment of knowledge in general. In this paper I aim to shed light on Peirce's social epistemology by examining his views on scientific inquiry in the light of his philosophy of mind. I will argue that how Peirce recasts key concepts such as self, mind, thought, and person, has deep repercussions for how to interpret inquiry and assess its end product. The argument I present combines Peirce's notion of the scientific method as the fourth and most stable manner of fixing our beliefs developed in the late 1870s in Popular Science Monthly, with his notion of the self as he expressed in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy a decade earlier.