Abstract
Much of the history of psychology can be understood as a debate over what we do when we attribute psychological states to ourselves and to others. In the classic Cartesian view, those activities are quite distinct: We engage an infallible ability—introspection—when examining our own psychological states, but merely speculate when trying to identify the psychological states of others. The American Philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce dedicated several early papers to a critique of the Cartesian approach. He concluded that attempts at self-knowledge require the same inferential processes that we use when attributing mental states to others, and therefore incur the same logical risks. By pursing these ideas further, we intend to show that self-knowledge results from a special kind of abduction; the inference of behavior states from particular observed behaviors. Such inferences allow us to anticipate yet-unseen patterns of behavior in yet-to-be-manifested circumstances.
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Notes
- 1.
See [1], and several chapters in this volume.
- 2.
American Philosophy scholars might well point out that we are slightly muddling how Peirce might be expected to present these ideas with how James might be expected to present them. As we are psychologists, building towards insights about the field of psychology, we will own any such criticisms for the time being.
- 3.
Peirce deplored any casuistic understanding of Pragmatism so much that he eventually felt the need to distinguish his approach by adding an extra syllable and calling it Pragmaticism. In the same spirit, N.S.T believes we could bring clarity by editing The Maxim to add a syllable to the word “practicial.” That would stress the fact that Peirce was using “pragmatic” in the sense of a practice, especially adherence to longstanding scientific practices of laboratory science, inter-laboratory debate and cooperation, and theoretical analysis. The Pragmaticist Maxim would then read, “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practicial bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”
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Charles, E.P., Thompson, N.S. (2021). Abductive Inference, Self-Knowledge, and the Myth of Introspection. In: Shook, J.R., Paavola, S. (eds) Abduction in Cognition and Action. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 59. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61773-8_12
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