The Key to Peirce’s View of the Role of Belief in Scientific Inquiry

Abstract

In the first of his 1898 Cambridge Conference lectures, Peirce declares that “what is properly and usually called belief […] has no place in science at all.” Christopher Hookway and Cheryl Misak think that this thesis is ill advised; implausible in itself and out of keeping with the rest of Peirce’s philosophy. I argue on the contrary that proper understanding of Peirce’s distinction between two kinds of “holding for true”, the one practical and committed, the other theoretical and provisional, reveals the thesis in question – the claim that the former kind of holding for true “has no place in science” – to be both plausible and Peircean.