It is... easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.
Interpretation
Certainty can be misleading and is often based on vague assertions rather than solid evidence.
In this quote, Charles Sanders Peirce highlights the paradox of certainty, suggesting that it is often reached not through rigorous reasoning but rather by being deliberately vague. This reflects on the nature of knowledge and belief, emphasizing that true understanding requires clarity and precision, while certainty can sometimes stem from a lack of detail or depth in thought.
In practice
In a discussion about the limits of human knowledge, this quote can illustrate how we should approach certainty with caution.
The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.
Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since Newton's time, his saying that we are little children picking up pretty pebbles on the beach while the whole ocean lies before us unexplored remains substantially as true as ever, and will do so though we shovel up the pebbles by steam shovels and carry them off in carloads.
My language is the sum total of myself.
All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.
The third class consists of men to whom nothing seems great but reason. If force interests them, it is not in its exertion, but in that it has a reason and a law. For men of the first class, nature is a picture; for men of the second class, it is an opportunity; for men of the third class, it is a cosmos, so admirable, that to penetrate to its ways seems to them the only thing that makes life worth living. These are the men whom we see possessed by a passion to learn.
A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be.
...in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.
The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.
No one, I hope, can doubt my wish to see... all mankind exercising self-government, and capable of exercising it. But the question is not what we wish, but what is practicable.
I used to tell women graduate students, half-seriously, that the role of slightly rebellious daughter was one of the better roles for women living in patriarchy.
The Soul of each one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete.
There is a spiritual side to me that goes real deep, but I confess right up front that I'm the biggest sinner of them all.
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