Comment by jfarmer
3 days ago
CS Peirce has a famous essay "The Fixation of Belief" where he describes various processes by which we form beliefs and what it takes to surprise/upset/unsettle them.
The essay: https://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html
This blog post gestures at that idea while being an example of what Peirce calls the "a priori method". A certain framework is first settled upon for (largely) aesthetic reasons and then experience is analyzed in light of that framework. This yields comfortable conclusions (for those who buy the framework, anyhow).
For Peirce, all inquiry begins with surprise, sometimes because we've gone looking for it but usually not. About the a priori method, he says:
“[The a priori] method is far more intellectual and respectable from the point of view of reason than either of the others which we have noticed. But its failure has been the most manifest. It makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of fashion, and accordingly metaphysicians have never come to any fixed agreement, but the pendulum has swung backward and forward between a more material and a more spiritual philosophy, from the earliest times to the latest. And so from this, which has been called the a priori method, we are driven, in Lord Bacon's phrase, to a true induction.”
Wow. I'm reminded of a great essay/blgo I read years ago that I'll never find again that said a good, engaging talk/presentation has to have an element of surprise. More specifically, you start with an exposition of what your audience already knows/believes, then you introduce your thesis which is SURPRISING in terms of what they already know. Not too out of the realm of belief, but just enough.
The bigger/more thought-diverse the audience, the harder this is to do.
I had a grad school mentor William Wells who taught us something similar. A good research publication or presentation should aim for "just the right amount of surprise".
Too much surprise and the scientific audience will dismiss you out of hand. How could you be right while all the prior research is dead wrong?
Conversely, too little surprise and the reader / listener will yawn and say but of course we all know this. You are just repeating standard knowledge in the field.
Despite the impact on audience reception we tend to believe that most fields would benefit from robust replication studies and the researchers shouldn't be penalized for confirming the well known.
And, sometimes there really is paradigm breaking research and common knowledge is eventually demonstrated to be very wrong. But often the initial researchers face years or decades of rejection.