Jack, List: In addition to the List post to which I am replying, you sent me three off-List messages within 30 minutes last night, followed by a fourth one this morning. Why not just wait a few hours to get some sleep, collect your thoughts, and send a single on-List post--the one per thread per day that is currently allowed--with everything that you wanted to say? I have come to appreciate the wisdom of that restriction, so that is exactly what I am doing here, quoting your off-List messages where I address them. I have tried to limit the resulting length of this post by linking or citing some relevant passages instead of quoting them.
Your first statement below is inscrutable to me, but for "the tree example," you initially said the following off-List. JRKC: Humans may use representational sign-systems but there is zero proof (and none possible) that trees and so forth do. The tree's reality may have no "representation" at all. And, insofar as it could, it would always be beyond us to ever know. Not surprisingly for someone who has apparently embraced not only Kantian epistemology and metaphysics, but also Saussurean linguistics, this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding on your part--experience is a strictly *cognitive *phenomenon, but semiosis is not. "It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there" (CP 4.551, 1906). At this point, I join Peirce in despairing of making this "broader conception" understood, at least in your case. As you said later, "we probably diverge and that's fine." I previously quoted Kant's own epistemological definition of *a priori* as " *knowledge *that is absolutely independent of all experience" (emphasis mine). Best I can tell, you are still misapplying that term to the ontological concept of a thing-in-itself as *that which* is (supposedly) "beyond all possible experience" and therefore unknowable. However, you have yet to address Peirce's simple refutation of this, which I summarized a couple of days ago ( https://list.iu.edu/sympa/arc/peirce-l/2025-08/msg00008.html) as presented in the very same paragraph where he refers to Kant as someone "whom I *more *than admire" (CP 5.525, c. 1905; see also CP 6.95, 1903). Needless to say, I continue to agree with him, and thus disagree with you and Kant; again, "we probably diverge and that's fine." JRKC: Not to be a pain, but the Gödel part is also wrong. When you demonstrate complete inequivalence it has a bearing on all possible systems. That includes all possible meaning making systems--including this one and any possible system Peirce uses. I still disagree--Gödel's incompleteness theorems strictly pertain to sufficiently powerful *formal *systems as mathematical proofs that draw necessary conclusions about hypothetical states of things. Applying them in epistemology and ontology requires showing that both our knowledge and reality itself conform to every single premiss, including a *specific *formal system that meets the stipulated criteria. In other words, complete inequivalence is a controversial hypothesis, not another established theorem. JRKC: Any definition of an object through a symbolic system is a function of the system, not the object. Objects do not have definitions, words do; and those definitions are indeed functions of the sign system being employed, not the objects that they purport to describe. In Peircean terms, the definition of a word is its immediate interpretant, and whatever conforms to that definition is its (potential) immediate object when it is incorporated into a proposition. Any description of something using words is inevitably incomplete because the words themselves and the concepts that they denote are *general *and therefore indeterminate. As a result, "[T]he subject of discourse ... can, in fact, not be described in general terms; it can only be indicated. The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description. Hence the need of pronoun and indices, and the more complicated the subject the greater the need of them" (CP 3.363, 1885; see also CP 2.337, c. 1895, and CP 2.536, 1902). Peirce's Existential Graphs iconically illustrate this. In the Beta part, names (words) denote general concepts and heavy lines of identity denote indefinite individuals (objects) to which those concepts are attributed by attaching their names. The effect of such combinations in various propositions is making the concepts *more *determinate and the individuals *more *definite--ascribing the same concept to multiple individuals, increasing that concept's logical *breadth*; and ascribing different concepts to the same individual, increasing each concept's logical *depth *(see the last two CSP quotations in my post at https://list.iu.edu/sympa/arc/peirce-l/2025-07/msg00068.html). The product of these for any particular concept is its *information *(CP 2.419, 1867), which increases in both ways. This finally gets us back to my semiosic ontological hypothesis, which I will discuss further in a separate post in that thread. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Structural Engineer, Synechist Philosopher, Lutheran Christian www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt / twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt On Tue, Aug 5, 2025 at 11:13 PM Jack Cody <[email protected]> wrote: > I can prove that to/through (mediation) the human being, the thing cannot > be what it is in asbentia of that relation nor need it even be similar or > remotely equivalent. I assert it rhetorically here. > > Now the tree example below, qua "impossible to know how a tree experiences > anything as the tree does for a human" - this has an obvious bearing on > realities that cannot possibly be represented (unless we mean represented > as in "made-up conceptual stuff which is not true"). > > As to ontology — and sorry for the double post — Kant's claim is > absolutely ontological for the noumenal is an ontological distinction and > use of "apriori" as beyond experience is catogircally demarcated from his > use of it in other contexts. He means, by the first a priori, that the > meaning of the "thing" as it is is beyond all possible experience and that > is what the thing in itself, generally, refers/corresponds to. That is an > ontological distinction (you cannot merely call it epistemological wheter > you accept the ontological distinction or not). > > Best wishes, > > Jack > >
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