The Socratic Dialectical Method in definition of piety and Its Influence on The Fixation of Belief of Pierce

Identifying right and wrong beliefs, adequate and inadequate convictions, is one of philosophers’ concerns. In this paper, we discuss about ideas of two philosophers (Pierce and Socrates) on this issue. Pierce, the founder of pragmatism in the twentieth century, discusses about four methods of the fixation of belief: tenacity method, authority method, a priori method, and scientific method. He introduces these four methods and represents their advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately, he designates the scientific method as the best method. Pierce, himself, acknowledges that his ideas are influenced by Socrates’s thoughts. This acknowledgment led us to investigate how Pierce’s ideas are influenced by Socrates’ thoughts on ‘the types of definition in Socratic dialectics’ and how, in Pierce’s words, pragmatism is really the philosophy of Socrates. To study Socrates’s thoughts, we used a Socratic dialectic method on universal definition - that has been used in Plato’s Euthyphron