Vol.:(0123456789) Food Ethics (2022) 7:7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s41055-022-00102-6 1 3 RESEARCH ARTICLE Pragmatism and the Fixation of 21st Century Food Beliefs Prisca Augustyn 1 Accepted: 4 March 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Abstract What to eat is a question of everyday life. What food to grow (and how) has become an important issue of political and scientific debate. Using Charles Sanders Peirce’s famous essay on The Fixation of Belief (1877), this paper examines what food habits we hold with tenacity, which beliefs about what to eat are imposed on us by authority, when our choices are based on a priori reasoning, and where we rely on scientific logic when we choose food. Based on Peirce’s early pragmatist ideas, this paper analyzes current debates about vegan- ism, clean meat, and small-scale pasture farming as alternatives to the current food system. While some patterns of opposing views can be explained by contrasting conservative and progressive modes of thought (Lakoff 2008), an ecolinguistic perspective (Stibbe 2015) explains, for instance, how animals are sometimes erased from food narratives. The famil- iar and possibly outdated model of the local and the global is augmented with a terrestrial point of view (Latour 2018) as more eaters consider the future of the planet. Keyword The Fixation of Belief · Food · Climate change · Veganism · Clean meat · Peirce · Lakoff · Latour · Stibbe · Ecolinguistics Reasoning is a Difficult Art Charles Sanders Peirce’s essay “The Fixation of Belief” (1877) is undeniably foundational to the philosophical current of American pragmatism and holds a special place in the canon of essential writings. While its precise objective and distinctive method have been a matter of debate, the philosopher Short (2000) agrees with Smyth (1997) that “it contains an interesting and sophisticated answer to the question: Why should you or I be logical? and Peirce succeeded to address this question “in a manner that is practically (rather than theoretically) reasonable.” (cf. Smyth 1997:183f. quoted in Short 2000:12). The essay is emblematic of Peirce’s pragmatist philosophy. To situate it in the larger context of Peirce’s work, one may look to what he called his Critical Logic, where he was concerned with valid inferences and good reasoning. The production of new beliefs out of old ones according to logical laws is the process he called inference (CP.7331n9). Essen- tial to the concept of good reasoning, according to Peirce, is constant self-correction. For * Prisca Augustyn augustyn@fau.edu 1 Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA