Abstract

Optimism may not seem like a topic with which good scientific minds need bother themselves. After all, it would seem that neither optimism nor pessimism should have anything to do with the neutral and objective performance of good scientific reasoning. Science is usually thought of as a collection of disciplines from which well-trained minds seek actual truths‹not an arena for seemingly psychological factors such as “optimism” and “pessimism.” Yet if so, then why would Charles Sanders Peirce, perhaps the consummate scientific mind of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even bother to deal with the issues of optimism and pessimism, as he does in his 1908 Monist article on reasoning: “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God?” What is more, why would such a prodigious scientific mind insist upon the necessity of an attitude as an essential component of the performance of the most important aspect of his theory abductive reasoning? Although it may not seem so at first glance, the case for optimism as a necessity for abductive reasoning is a strong one, and not in the least psychologistic. For optimism is a spacious filter through which a greater number of options can become available for consideration, than when any form of pessimism is in place.