Pragmatism and Belief

In its most common usage, the word 'believe' is followed by the preposition 'in', e. g. 'I believe in God'. But for Philosophers, it is usually followed by the grammatically proper conjunction 'that', because the object of a Belief is, strictly speaking, a proposition, not a thing, e. g. 'I believe that God exists', or 'I believe that the ball is red' are grammatically proper. Belief, in the latter sense, is a pivotal notion in Peirce's Pragmatist turn: hitherto it had traditionally been an observational state, but for Peirce, it becomes an element in behavior. Perhaps best crystallizing the transition is that in a behavioral context, 'A causes B' becomes 'A is a means to B'. In other words, Belief is no longer an end in itself, i. e. the telos of inquiry, but is itself a further means to behavior that it guides. As Peirce himself briefly suggests, and as Dewey more fully develops, behavioral Ends are solutions to problems, so in Pragmatism, the fundamental role of Belief is as a problem-solving tool. However, as both William James and Nietzsche note, there are occasions when behavior, specifically locomotility, is not a Means to an End, is not as e. g. walking is a Means to being at a destination. For, on those occasions, having a destination facilitates walking, by giving it a focus. On the Evolvemental analysis of Experience, such occasions are not exceptions, but are expressions of the essence of locomotility--that it is a manifestation of Exposition, the Material Principle in the Individual, a process that is in itself independent of the Formal Principle, the source of ulterior purposes. So, the Pragmatist analysis of Belief stops short of how it functions in what might be called 'Preception', the process of what Wittgenstein calls 'following of a rule'.