Frances to William and others... Your insightful claim seems to reflect a Peircean stance on this issue of predispositions. My understanding of his theory turns on the attaining of wise knowledge. Peirce holds that in ordinary situations thinkers will initially doubt everything given to them. The attaining of perceptual or conceptual knowledge about truth for him indeed comes to mind via a mental process of first skeptical doubt, and then critical judgement, and last fallible belief. All belief is fallible, because all things evolve and the mind in any event cannot know exact truth with absolute certainty or precision. All belief therefore needs to start with doubt. This initial doubt however only occurs according to him because the thinker is predisposed towards doubt. To doubt without an awareness of doubt is to engage in naove thought, which is no doubt at all. Thinkers are naove in ignorance and cannot doubt out of ignorance. To doubt is for a thinker to be aware that they doubt, therefore to be aware of doubt is to know it. The start of known doubt is thus a naive desire or drive and need to seek true knowledge and believe it. Thinkers only then have an ability to naively doubt what they feel or sense may be known of the world. This disposed tendency or inclined trait to believe in doubt is held to be instinctively inborn and intuitively innate. It is a bent that thinkers lean toward, derived from engaging in habits of conduct. Such a preparatory naove belief however is a kind of pseudo belief or quasi belief or proto belief. It is akin to necessarily having in mind some collateral experience about what may be thought of as being known. This naive belief is deemed by him to be predetermined and preexistent of doubt. The thinker comes to potential knowledge initially with a healthy degree of skeptical doubt. The limits of perceptual knowledge are sentience and experience. The limits of conceptual knowledge are inference and intelligence. To believe any known truth without doubt in the face of these limits would be sheer folly. Now after my fleshing out his idea, whether the thought of relation is a predisposed naive belief in mind, that also might reflect the objective presence of relation in nature, is a further thorn to tackle. If the idea of relation is embodied or embedded or engrained in the mind of the brain, then it is likely at the neuronal and cellular level.
William wrote... All the current thinking in cognitive science points to our having a cognitive sense of a relation before we apply it to sensory evidence. First we know (construct) and then we "see". Seems counterintuitive but that's the "notion" being examined. Cheerskep seems to insist that we receive unrestricted raw data and process it. But even what we say is raw may actually be chosen by predeterminations. After all, any of us would agree that we aren't really aware of all events in our midst. I am inclined to believe (and I think we always believe before we do anything at all) that we have our relation templates, as it were, and those filter what comprises the "raw" sensory data. If so, then our cognitive relations come before events in our experience. Nuanced, the process is likely to be a feed-back loop, where these a priori relations are continually adjusting according to their usefulness at some deep cognitive level. Unhappily, perhaps, the old clichi that we see what we know is true. We have created "relations" and then we see them, and make adjustments as needed. Geoff wrote... (1)If there is no relation(ship) between crime and punishment, would you view the court system as inane? (2) If people don't learn by establishing relations between antecedents and consequents, how would you explain changes in behavior? Cheerskep wrote... I asserted that so-called "relations" are entirely notional figments, that there are no external-to-the-mind entities that we think we're citing when we use the word 'relation'.
