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Peirce said: “And what, then, is belief? We have seen that it has just three properties: First, it is something that we are aware of; Second, it appeases the irritation of doubt; and, third, it involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, say for short, a habit.”2 What the curmudgeon is saying is that every belief you have is really a habit of your thinking—remember that thinking is a kind of action. The reason you have the habit is that it eased some doubt in the past. Now that’s pretty amazing when you consider it. I believe lots of stuff, personally, and so do you. Every single one of those beliefs is a habit of thinking I acquired because of a doubt I had. Some of those doubts would be pretty hard to discover now, I’ll bet.

For example, I believe baseball is better than football. I like both, but I can’t ever remember thinking otherwise. I can now guess that maybe somebody once asked me which I liked better, and to solve the problem of the question, I simply chose, and for the sake of consistency I adopted it as a rule. But no, it’s deeper than that, which is to say, I really believe baseball is better than football and I can give you a hundred reasons. We become more interesting to ourselves when we begin looking at our beliefs as the solutions to our past problems, and it also tends to help us recognize that if not for our past experiences, our firmly held beliefs might be other than they are. We do not, according to pragmatists, develop habits of thinking or action that we don’t need at all.

So there you sit, a bundle of beliefs. And the whole story of your life, all the problems you’ve faced, are embedded right there in your habits of thinking and acting. And there sits C, and he’s more than just a little bit unwilling to try the green eggs and ham, isn’t he? Stepping away from our admiration for Sam’s persistence and the lengths to which he will go to solve the problem he has taken on, we now are free to wonder, why on earth does C drive Sam to such lengths just to maintain his self-imposed rule of action—and here we are finally making some serious progress. We know, we all just know, that C has never tried green eggs and ham and that he has no good reason to adopt as his rule that he doesn’t like them. That is not the real reason he won’t eat the free breakfast. So what is the real reason? The only clue we have is that he did not wish to be disturbed from his reading and decided to meet the disturbance with noncooperation. His rule of action (“I will not eat them because I do not like them”) is arbitrary, momentary, and simply contrarian. It starts as a whim and then becomes a habit as he digs his heels in. Sometimes we say things without thinking and our answers are neither stable nor exactly true, but we become invested in them and cannot easily let them go. To do so brings back not only the original doubt but now also self-doubt, as we try to understand why we behaved as badly as we did. C is just plain avoiding all that complexity.

Fixing a Belief

Peirce says there are exactly four ways we can arrive at our beliefs—our habits of thinking and acting that ease doubt. Each one has a name. There is the Method of Authority, which is to say that when I am confronted with a doubt, I can do whatever I am told to do by those in authority and then I don’t have to think it through for myself, and if the problem isn’t solved, then it isn’t my fault and I can at least avoid self-doubt. You probably have a lot of beliefs that are like this. I know I do. Sometimes if I do what I am told, the problem goes away, but I have to admit that genuine doubt remains, for me at least. A good example is computers, which I don’t fully understand. Something goes haywire and the blasted thing won’t work, and then the tech support people say “do this, then this, then that,” and I do, and it works, but the only rule of action I really learned is “do whatever tech support says.” I don’t know why the