General overview of the concept "Clear Idea"
Ideas are either clear, obscure or distinct. A clear idea is precise to understand and cannot be mistaken. Any idea that fails the test of clarity is considered obscure. Logicians take clarity to mean familiarity with a given idea and distinctness as the extent to which the quality of a particular approach can be supplemented by the other. Distinct ideas refer to those that lack unclear elements. According to Descartes, skepticism is a means to eradicate authority as the sole source of truth. Self-consciousness aid individuals in furnishing fundamental truths. Distinct notions give a specific apprehension of all the terms contained in a particular definition. First, books make familiarity while the definition of concepts come second thus emulating a philosophy that was discovered long ago. Men cherish vague ideas and life for their sake just to discover that the ideas were vanity stealing the essence of their lives.
Thought is excited when doubt is irritated and stops on attainment of a belief that is the primary work of thought. Therefore, belief is something that an individual is aware of, institutes a particular nature of a rule of action and settles the irritation of doubt. Belief is a habit that involves further thought and doubt but though in essence is an action. It is deceptive to attach a distinction to ideas expressed by two words that have a difference in their grammatical construction. Thought yields habits of actions. Practices dictate when and how individuals act. When actions happen is derived from perceptions and how actions happen focuses on producing a logical result.
The reality is a conception that concerns logic that should be distinguished from fiction. Real is viewed to own independent characters that anybody may think them to be. Truth allows nobody to modify or escape the predestine opinion. Individual perversity leads to postponing of the human judgment that results in arbitrary propositions that are universally accepted by the human race. Even though ideas should be clear, it is equally important to ensure that they are true.
Student’s Guide to C.S. Peirce’s “How to Make Ideas Clear” Essay
Few students have heard of the name Charles Peirce, leave alone read his extensive works. Yet he is arguably America’s greatest and most prolific thinker who taught the likes of John Dewey and Christine Ladd.
Consider this excerpt from his article in the Popular Science Monthly (12 January 1878), published in pages 286-302:
“The very first lesson that we have a right to demand that logic shall teach us is, how to make our ideas clear ... To know what we think, to be masters of our own meaning, will make a solid foundation for great and weighty thought.”
Not many students are bothered by the seemingly impossible questions posed by philosophy but you have to admit this one is intriguing. You might think of it as a peek into the man who is regarded as one of America’s greatest philosophers. It is this system of thought that went on to influence over a dozen disciplines including Mathematics and Nature science among others as areas of knowledge.
This article is a guide to students who are studying, researching, wondering how to make their ideas clear or unravel Pierce's thinking. More accurately, we will focus on how to make our ideas clear using the system of thought he developed and condense it for our academic needs. It is written courtesy of Help for Assessment academic writing experts as part of our mission to help students like you get through school successfully.
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If you are here just for the guide, read on to review our summary on how to make ideas clear:
Let’s get to it.
Who Was Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Peirce was born in 1839 of eminent Havard Professor (and founder of its mathematics department) Benjamin Peirce. It was his father that installed in young Peirce the foundation of inductive and deductive thinking and logic that became the hallmark of his impressive contributions.
It is not in doubt that this man, who called himself the American Aristotle (C S Peirce, Collected Papers (1931-58), was a genius of historic proportions. Max Fisch, the leading Peirce expert, is gushing in praise of Peirce in (Charles S. Peirce, Life & Times):
Peirce was the man who first used the wavelength of light to standardize the length of a meter. In his time, he also made accurate measurements of the Earth’s gravity using pendulums he designed himself, illustrated the shape of the Milky Way, measured precisely the Earth’s circumference and gave a model it’s solid structure, among many other achievements.
This goes to show how a solid system of thinking can be a fertile ground for immense progress. His personal life was much less flowery, with a marriage scandal that cost him his teaching career at Harvard University and Johns Hopkins.
However, now that we know a bit about the man, let us examine his system of how to make our ideas clear.
“How to Make Our Ideas Clear”
Through the ground-breaking article written by Charles Peirce in the Popular Science Monthly on 12th January, 1878, appearing in pages 286-302. You can read it in its entirety here; for now, we will examine the ideas presented in it.
The Notion of Clear vs Obscure Ideas
Peirce starts with a fiery critique of the common concepts about clear and unclear ideas which by then had been in force among thinkers for centuries. He traces them back to Descartes who introduced skepticism to philosophy but left it incomplete, according to Peirce.
The definition of a clear and obscure idea was held to be.
Peirce goes on to argue that these definitions are incomplete because it is almost impossible to have a mind that can conceive an idea in its entirety, no matter what form it is presented in. In any case, he adds, what we know of ideas is the level of our familiarity with it which leads us to believe we know the idea itself. This familiarity is subjective and unreliable.
Another quality of clear ideas as defined by logicians is distinctness. The definition of a distinct idea is recursive because it is defined as one which contains no clearness. Descartes’ definition adds that such an idea must stand up to critical examination without failing.
You can now see the basis of developing new definitions for such important terms. Peirce thinks that these philosophical minds stopped short and should have dug deeper. It is at this point he makes the important quote that intrigued you earlier:
we need to demand of logic that it teach us how to make our ideas clear. A few clear ideas, he says, are more important than many vague ones in young people and will lead to more progress.
This at once leads us to Peirce’s next propositions about thoughts and their role in creating belief.
Doubt and Belief
Taking a slight step back, Peirce indicates that thought is caused by an irritation of doubt. In other words, when it is not clear in which way we should act, the doubt resulting from this unclearness causes thought. The words “Doubt” and “Belief” in this case are used very sparingly with no religious connotation.
He gives this example: you are in a horse-car (think of it as a taxi) and you have one nickel (5 cents) and five coppers (1 cent each). You can choose to pay the driver with either currency. As you put your hand in the purse to pay, you have to decide which one you will use.
Even though this is not a big dilemma, yet the momentary indecision or hesitation is an irritation of doubt. Again, the words irritation and doubt are used very sparingly. Accordingly, we draw the conclusion that most doubts arise from indecision. These doubts may be real or feigned, as when one starts a process of scientific inquiry. Regardless, doubt stimulates the mind to an activity of thought, which once resolved leads to decision or belief. This belief directs action in the course of which further avenues of thought may be opened up.
The Musical Analogy
Peirce uses an illustration of music to give clarity to the elements of thought, namely, its instances and qualities as experienced in the brain.
In music, there is a note and melody made up of many different notes. A note may be sounded and prolonged for a minute, an hour, a day, or a year, yet at the instance that it is heard it is no different than the whole sum. That means so long as it sounds, the present, past, and future of the note all exist perfectly as a whole and as instances of the whole.
A melody, on the other hand, is made up of a succession of sounds that strike the ear at different times so that the melody has to be perceived as a whole. Hearing only one note or a few succession of notes does not qualify for hearing the whole melody.
In the same way, thought is made up of what we are immediately conscious of, what we are conscious of only at intervals. Thus, some elements we are completely aware of so long as they last, while others have a beginning, middle, and end, and flow in succession through our minds from a time in the past, through the present, and into the future. And so Peirce goes on to define thought as “a thread of melody running through the succession of our sensations.”
He adds that just as music may be written in parts with each having a different melody, so our systems of sensations vary but can be distinguished by their different motives, ideas, or functions. Since the purpose of thoughts is to produce belief and action, we may know thought by the action it produces.
To put it more plainly, thought in action is an irritation of doubt that seeks to bring about relief. Thus, even though we may not understand the whole stream of thought, we can understand it by its results. Anything else that results from that thought such as amusement is secondary to it and a mere distraction. And beliefs bring about habits of action while simultaneously setting off chains of more thought.
The use of effects to decipher the causes, motives, and eventually understand the whole object is better explained in the question of the physical hardness of things.
The Diamond Analogy and Question of Weight
The hardness of a material is scientifically defined as the ability to scratch, or be scratched, by others. Using the system of logic gathered above, then a thing cannot be said to be hard or soft until it has been touched. Thus, the whole concept of hardness, extrapolated to every other quality, lies in its effects.
If a diamond were to be crystallized in the middle of soft cotton and then burned up, would we say the diamond was soft while it existed? The question sounds foolish at first until you put it like this: what prevents hard bodies to remain perfectly soft until they are touched, and then upon touching increase in hardness until they are finally scratched?
In purely theoretical terms, there is no way to prove that this is false. That is because this is a question of the arrangement of facts, not the facts themselves. Peirce goes on to enter into a discussion of free will which we will skip here.
Peirce also attacks a definition of weight in this way: It is possible to say that, if a body is heavy, we mean that in the absence of any opposing force, it would fall.
Reality
The logic of all these illustrations, in so many words, can be distilled in this: we may not gain an understanding of reality, even though we can form an abstract definition by comparing reality to fiction or imagination. To a man, a dream he experienced is as real to him as a tree in his yard.
By drawing on the groundwork laid, we can conclude that real things interact with our sensations, emerge into our consciousness, and cause belief. But, given the fallibility of our senses and mental state, how is true belief to be distinguished from false belief? This question is discussed in another of Peirce’s papers..
In a rather wordy conclusion, Peirce asserts that reality exists apart from and independent of thought. We experience and interact with some part of it by the sensations it causes in us. Each man’s truth is simply the opinions we hold upon a matter and the substance of it determined by how far we are willing to go in defending them. Thus, a man whose truth he is willing do die for gives it more merit than one who keeps changing camps.
A Practical Approach On How to Make Our Ideas Clear
Thus far into Charles Pierce, we can already infer that he was a singularly gifted thinker, courageous and willing to give up even his own notions in favor of “truth” and “reality.” An apt student can draw a lot more practical benefits from this article in addition to writing a great essay about it. Some of these insights are provided by Peirce himself as part of his conclusion.
Do You Need Help With Making Your Ideas Clear?
If you have come this far, you would certainly agree that the ideas expressed by Charles Peirce, though in no way fully developed, are intriguing. If your objective was to write an essay or do an assignment about it, we would recommend reading his work yourself and in greater scope. A lot has been skipped here to help give this article a more clear focus on his concept of clear idea .
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