“What is more wholesome than any particular belief is integrity of belief.” Charles Sanders Peirce

I would love to let this statement stand on its own. Yet, I know that sound bites don't incline us to to any sort of complex thinking. And as short at it is; this sentence is very complex.

Sound bites allow too much room for interpretation, they take the words, not only out of the context of the surrounding words, but out of the context of the writer's ideas and into any unexplored context that fits only tangentially. A couple of examples of re-contextualization might suffice to show what I mean. 

George Santayana’s succinct and oft (too oft) quoted, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (The Life of Reason 1 284) is usually interpreted as referring to history. Those who cannot remember the Holocaust are in danger of repeating similar atrocities. Those who cannot remember Trump may be convinced by another demagogue. As true as these statements might be, they couldn't be further from the point Santayana was trying to make. In The Life of Reason, he was writing a history, it is true, but about a history of reason, of ideas, and of the progress of philosophy. There are moments that it feels like he is writing a progressivist evolution of rationality--from Plato to Hume to Kant, Parmenides and Heraclitus to Russell (a bit of irony, there). There are other moments, and this is what I think he was really saying in this quotation, when it feels like he is writing about the give and take of pluralism and monism, realism and idealism, and cautioning us against ignoring previous thinkers lest we simply repeat their words rather than add to the conversation. He cautioned us against constantly starting over. To remember the past means to know what Kant thinks so we can build on those ideas, take the conversation a little further.

“The exception that proves the rule.” I’m going to let Mental Floss handle this one. Sure this online newsletter has articles like, “10 Fascinating Facts about Airplane Bathrooms.” But its categories, “Change Matters,” “Science,” and “History,” can be entertaining as well as informative, without playing to the lowest common denominator, which admittedly, can be quite low on the internet. http://mentalfloss.com/article/52698/how-does-exception-prove-rule The explanation on this site is essentially what Hegel argues in An Introduction to the Philosophy of History. It occurs to me that the explanation found in Hegel and Mental Floss applies well to cultural rules, but that the opposite explanation, that an exception proves the rule is flawed and needs to be revised, applies well to natural rules, that is, science.

So, back to Peirce's statement. If we don't take his words out of context, what can we do with the idea that, "What is more wholesome than any particular belief is integrity of belief"?

We could start with "particular beliefs" since that part of the sentence seems self evident, and thus is suspect. We all know what beliefs are. Those are ideas, concepts, data, facts, that we accept, sometimes without question, often as being self evident, or at least believed for so long that we have lost track of how and why we believed them; we simply do. Often, those beliefs, the origins of which we've lost track of, are inherited. Our reason for believing them traces back, if we could trace them back, to being told by a parent, teacher, or other authority, and rests on nothing else.

Sometimes these beliefs rest comfortably at the conclusion of a lengthy chain of propositions or data. All too often, our propositions have been constructed after we already believe as a way of rationalizing this belief. (Though Bertrand Russell doesn't make this connection himself, in "On Propositions" his term "telescoped beliefs" refers to propositions which move from premise to conclusion without any intervening steps, a visible marker of accepted/rationalized belief.) Further causing difficulty is that any belief may trace back to an accepted belief, even though we can now claim logical reasons for that belief. Even a belief in logic as an acceptable tool for testing beliefs is itself a belief. Thus, the whole idea of beliefs gets rather murky. We need another way of testing beliefs than that we actually have them and can in some way defend them.

For Peirce, so immersed as he was in science, we might simply identify science and the logical precepts of science as a means of establishing the integrity of a belief. Of course, if we're going to follow the syntax of Peirce's statement, and Peirce was always precise in his statements (not always easy to read, but for anyone who is willing to invest the time, precise), he's not talking about integrity of a particular belief, but integrity of belief itself as a concept, or perhaps in the vein of pragmatism, belief as a method.

Perhaps this is where integrity of beliefs comes in, as a means of testing, if not the validity of believes, the value of beliefs. For a belief to have integrity, we must have a clear concept of several aspects of that belief:

First, we must have some idea of the why of that belief, at least in terms of why we hold that belief. Logical support isn't sufficient, since logic has to do with the validity rather than value.

Second, what we gain from that belief, James's much quoted (misquoted) "cash value." Many of our beliefs are self-serving, so much so that it's difficult to find a belief that is not. A more important question, at least in terms of integrity, is this: What sort of person might I become over time as a result of believing that particular belief? What self-conceptions, what strength or weakness of character might result from that belief and the actions and consequences of that belief? Integrity of belief forces us to question the causality between belief and character as the most significant consequence of any belief. Can we clearly trace causality between the two, or are they intertwined, reciprocal in a way suggested by the word ethos? Integrity of belief requires us to at least consider these questions even if they do not have a clear answer.

Third, how do these beliefs affect other beliefs? This is a key point James goes over often enough that I need not belabor it here. I'll only quote James once: "The truth of ‘God’ has to run the gauntlet of all our other truths. It is on trial by them and they on trial by it. Our final opinion about God can be settled only after all the truths have been straightened themselves out together” (Pragmatism 52).

From my perspective, and I admit how personal this perspective is (another marker of integrity of belief,) I don't see us ever straightening all beliefs out. A perspective that leads us to the final, and perhaps most important aspect of integrity of beliefs, understanding my own fallibility. This is a critical concept in pragmatism, one that answers Russell's early complaints against it, that just as I conceive of myself as capable of thoughtful belief, I must see the other person as just as thoughtful, just as capable, and remember that I am as fallible as anyone, and temper my beliefs against my fallibility rather than someone else's.