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I had a particular interest in the role that C.S. Pierce played in kicking off our discussion this past Wednesday morning, because I just "happened" to be discussing two of his essays in my course on the James family that afternoon. It was quite striking for me to learn about his belief in "tychism," particularly because--in the essay we focused on later in the day, he lays out four methods for "fixing belief":

• tenacity (staying away from anything that might disturb what you believe--but our "social impulse" works against that); 
• authority (enforced by social institutions, but also threatened by those w/ "wider social feelings" than those inherent in their own locales);
• a priori (a matter of taste, or fashion: thinking as we are already inclined to think);
• and the scientific method (which starts from known and observed facts, and proceeds to the unknown).

What was especially striking to me in our discussion was the challenge laid down that the scientific method, as Peirce defines it--gathering empirical evidence to arrive @ a certain conclusion--is not going to help us in this particular meta-case of deciding whether chance is a fundamental condition of the universe, or simply a description of our ignorance of how things work. Peirce, who identified chance as having an objective existence in the world, nonetheless thought there was a way to arrive, experimentally, at fixed beliefs. I'm breathless to find out how far we might go in that direction.

In the interim, Alice? Because of your call, months ago, to add "love" to the key forces circling in the universe, as a key contributor to the evolutionary process, you might be particularly interested in the reminder that, for Peirce, "the most fundamental engine of the evolutionary process ... is nurturing love" (which he called agapasm); tychasm is its degenerate form.

Which would seem to make it not fundamental, but derivative...?