The Scales of Right and Wrong

Peirce holds our hand in prose as he takes us (below) through three tests of a sense or sensation or perception. After passing the tests of personal and group response, he moves to experiment. Showing that the sensation or percept was or is true.

Fine. But let us press a bit.

We think logic is good and if so that it is true and beautiful. We want, therefore to know not merely what an outcome is but its utility, its effect, its capacity.

Is it good or not?

So if I want to prove that a sound coming from the hall is coming from there or a neighboring apartment, and to know what it is, I must investigate.

I have nothing but my sense of it and my capacity to open the door and inspect.

I do so.

I see in fact that the noise is of a rather advanced vacuum machine cleaning the carpet down the hall toward the elevator. I trust that this is not hallucination. It needs no confirmation.

All of this, I remind you, is conscious action.

It is attuned to the spectrum of good and evil.

Ideally, it should register on the upward side.

It is soon forgotten.

It is a miniscule fragment of good on the scales.

Had it been the discovery of a robbery in progress, or a collapse taking place, it might have led to a quite different result.

I offer this rather prosaic fiction to illuminate that life is made up precisely of these greater or lesser happenings.

We move. We discover. We conclude.

The goodness in logic lies in the fact that we can do such things with an awareness that our response may require a range of expressions and actions and that is the range that determines the weight of anything on the scales of right and wrong.

Truth is served. Beauty is confirmed. We are in a mild zone, close to the ephemeral. But there is some, however miniscule it may be, good in it.

Peirce: CP 2.142 Cross-Ref:††

142. The percepts, could I make sure what they were, constitute experience proper, that which I am forced to accept. But whether they are experience of the real world, or only experience of a dream, is a question which I have no means of answering with absolute certainty. I have, however, three tests which, though none of them is infallible, answer very well in ordinary cases. The first test consists in trying to dismiss the percepts. A fancy, or day-dream, can commonly be dismissed by a direct effort of will.†P2 If I find that the flow of percepts persists consistently in spite of my will, I am usually satisfied. Still, it may be a hallucination. If I have reason to suspect that it is so, I apply the second test, which consists in asking some other person whether he sees or hears the same thing. If he does, and if several people do, that will ordinarily be taken as conclusive. Yet it is an established fact that some hallucinations and illusions affect whole companies of people. There remains, however, a third test that can be applied; and it is far the surest of the three. Namely, I may make use of my knowledge of the laws of nature (very fallible knowledge, confessedly) to predict that if my percept has its cause in the real world, a certain experiment must have a certain result — a result which in the absence of that cause would be not a little surprising. I apply this test of experiment. If the result does not occur my percept is illusory; if it does, it receives strong confirmation. For example, if I and all the company are so excited that we think we see a ghost, I can try what an unimaginative kodak would say to it.†P1 So Macbeth made the experiment of trying to clutch the dagger.