I really enjoyed reading your blog..Let me start by saying that I am an acting nut. What that means is that for the past 5 years I have tried to figure out the best way to do this thing. I have done Method classes, a two year Meisner Program and I always check out blogs like this one for more information.

What I got from all of these people was how to act like them. It wasn’t until I got to http://www.theactingcorps.com that they told me we’re going to teach you stuff, and you’ll do it every day, a lot, but in the end it’s you up there, and you have to like what you’re doing, you can’ t be worried about making your teacher happy. These people actually taught me to enjoy acting again through a technique that seems to take the best and most effective elements from a lot of the stuff I know. Anyways I look forward to all the updates. Thanks again.

Jessica

And perhaps this is what you meant when you wrote: ”One should investigate it to see if one should discard it.” Investigate meaning question it’s current functionality (I’m not much for questioning it’s truth value so the issue of reality or fiction is a non-issue for me). I find nothing wrong with uncritically accepting tradition under the aphorism of “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” On the other hand, if there are indications that it may be broke, we must certainly be willing to question it.

Rich

The mental qualities we most admire in all human beings except our several selves are the maiden’s delicacy, the mother’s devotion, manly courage, and other inheritances that have come to us from the biped who did not yet speak; while the characters that are most contemptible take their origin in reasoning. The very fact that everybody so ridiculously overrates his own reasoning is sufficient to show how superficial the faculty is. . .

It is the instincts, the sentiments, that make the substance of the soul. Cognition is only its surface, its locus of contact with what is external to it.

Reasoning is of three kinds. The first is necessary,. . . The second depends upon probabilities. . . The third kind of reasoning tries what il lume naturale, which lit the footsteps of Galileo, can do. It is really an appeal to instinct. Thus reason, for all the frills it customarily wears, in vital crises, comes down upon its marrow-bones to beg the succour of instinct.

Reason is of its very essence egotistical. . . . Men many times fancy that they act from reason when, in point of fact, the reasons they attribute to themselves are nothing but excuses which unconscious instinct invents to satisfy the teasing “whys” of the ego. The extent of this self-delusion is such as to render philosophical rationalism a farce.

Reason, then, appeals to sentiment in the last resort. Sentiment on its side feels itself to be the man. That is my simple apology for philosophical sentimentalism.

Sentimentalism implies conservatism; and it is of the essence of conservatism to refuse to push any practical principle to its extreme limits — including the principle of conservatism itself.

All these quotes are from his Cambridge Lectures printed in Reasoning and the Logic of Things pages 110-111.

Some might note that the above seems quite opposed to my great skepticism in intuitions especially in philosophical argument. I confess that I find Peirce’s conservatism quite different from my own. (Which I perceive to be more Reaganistic) However even in Peirce one can find an explanation. Without spending too much time on it though I think the following captures well my answer. This is from the same lectures.

I would not allow to sentiment or instinct any weight whatsoever in theoretical matters, not the slightest. Right sentiment does not demand any such weight; and right reason would emphatically repudiate the claim, if it were made. [ . . . ] We believe the proposition we are ready to act upon. Full belief is willingness to act upon the proposition in vital crises, opinion is willingness to act upon it in relatively insignificant affairs. But pure science has nothing at all to do with action. . . . Nothing is vital for science; nothing can be. Its accepted propositions therefore are but opinions, at most; and the whole list is provisional. The scientific man is not the least wedded to his conclusions. He risks nothing upon them.

[ . . . ]

Thus, pure theoretical knowledge, or science, has nothing directly to say concerning practical matters, and nothing even applicable at all to vital crises. Theory is applicable to minor practical affairs; but matters of vital importance must be left to sentiment, that is, to instinct.

Now I think Peirce goes too far with regards to science (or at least offers an ideal version that we never approach in our scientific communities). There’s also the issue of concern relative to scientific areas like global warming.