There's a lot there, Jon, but I find much of it highly inconsistent.
I mean, are you standing with Peirce or without him? I'm being serious. You say
you did not invent the idea that it blocks inquiry if someone supposes
something is real but that this real cannot be known. If that is actually true,
and thus would have an immense bearing on basically everything people can claim
in "objective" terms regarding all possible ontology (if they purport to be
objective), then it does not block inquiry. And if something is true and it
blocks inquiry then the blocking of inquiry would have to take the "hit" as
what is true, in the big T sense of truth is far more important than secondary
ideological concerns.
I have your other post to also consider which I am preparing a short essay for
(which is what you basically require anyway and that's fine). Whenever that's
done, and I'll stick with it this time as I think it will be enlightening as a
short word-file properly presented, then I can await replies and respond
better/more in-depth. Until then I'll be list-absent. Reading, for however
long, but not posting.
I'll just note, though: do you think you can know, hypothetically, what God
knows? Or what an omniscient being would know (if you do not believe in God?).
I don't think that's possible (I'm certain it isn't) but I do consider it
rather truthful and real and I infer you do, too, considering your own
self-description and your prior posts including on the nature of the universe.
Well, that is a reality, which is the highest, you might argue, benchmark of
truth, and it is beyond any but God (or God-like being if one is being more
philosophical). Certainly in this life.
So, yes, I believe -- but that will not be the example I use in depth -- that
there is much "real" (truth as it actually is) which we will never know in any
temporal lifetime. Indeed, if one were to assume that truth were fundamentally
atemporal, as thought-experiment, and I tend to think it is anyway, then so
much time-contingent (or spatiotemporal contingency) would be fundamentally
degenerate. Moreover, knowing how to kill someone, or killing/being killed by
someone is not "real" to me though it obviously happens. That is, I consider
such things false -- but if you go further, there are infinitely many
experiences, truthful or not, which no one person will ever know/experience
(that's simple common sense). As to what Peirce would say to that? I don't
think he'd find it problematic and therefore I assume you don't?
It's best I stop here as I think you deserve a much more in-depth response and
analysis. Your other post, in all honesty, is much more thought-provoking than
this one as I think it allows for a great exploration of Peirce as
foreshadowing Godel and Tarski (when properly contextualized and understood).
Cheers, Jack
On Friday 8 August 2025 at 19:12:46 GMT+1, Jon Alan Schmidt
<[email protected]> wrote:
Jack, List:
For the record, this is your statement that I found (and still find)
inscrutable, in case you would now like to clarify it.
JRKC: 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 did not invent the notion that it blocks the way of inquiry to claim that
there is something real that is absolutely unknowable, it comes directly from
Peirce. "The second bar which philosophers often set up across the roadway of
inquiry lies in maintaining that this, that, and the other never can be known"
(CP 1.138, EP 2:49, 1898). "The absolutely unknowable is a non-existent
existence. The Unknowable is a nominalistic heresy" (CP 6.492, c. 1896). "[A]n
unknowable reality is nonsense" (CP 8.43, c. 1885). By contrast, he never
suggests that it blocks the way of inquiry to claim that something does not
exist, as long as one has good reason for taking that position--which he does
in the case of the thing-in-itself, as spelled out in my post earlier today
(https://list.iu.edu/sympa/arc/peirce-l/2025-08/msg00035.html).
There is nothing self-contradictory about my statement in a post on Wednesday
(https://list.iu.edu/sympa/arc/peirce-l/2025-08/msg00017.html) that "experience
is a strictly cognitive phenomenon, but semiosis is not." It neither says nor
implies that "semiosis ... cannot be cognitive or experiential," only that
semiosis (unlike experience) is not strictly cognitive. All experience is
cognitive, and all cognition is semiosis, but not all semiosis is cognition.
This is Peirce's "broader conception," and responses to it like yours are why
he despaired of making it understood. We primarily study and discuss human
semiosis because of its familiarity, but then we generalize it to other
contexts.
That is exactly what Peirce does when he asserts, "Thought is not necessarily
connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and
throughout the purely physical world" (CP 4.551, 1906). He is plainly
characterizing those phenomena themselves as manifestations of thought, not
referring to our cognitions about such things. All cognition is thought, but
not all thought is cognition. Peirce adds later in the same paragraph (and
elsewhere) that "there cannot be thought without Signs," i.e., all thought is
semiosis; so, he is effectively saying that all physical processes are
semiosis. Again, this is a reformulation of his "objective idealism, that
matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws" (CP 6.25, EP
1:293, 1891). "Accordingly, just as we say that a body is in motion, and not
that motion is in a body we ought to say that we are in thought and not that
thoughts are in us" (CP 5.289n, EP 1:42n, 1868).
That is why Peirce explicitly (and quite famously) states, "the Universe is a
vast representamen" (CP 5.119, EP 2:193, 1903). This is almost exactly
synonymous with my "Peirce and I" example yesterday that apparently caused some
consternation, "the entire universe is one immense sign." I almost included the
parallel quotation in my post to demonstrate that my summary was accurate but
left it out because I figured--wrongly, as it turned out--that it would be
familiar enough to most people on the List to preclude any controversy. He goes
on to say that the universe is "working out its conclusions in living
realities. Now every symbol must have, organically attached to it, its Indices
of Reactions and its Icons of Qualities; and such part as these reactions and
these qualities play in an argument, that they of course play in the Universe,
that Universe being precisely an argument" (CP 5.119, EP 2:193-4).
Hence, describing the universe as one sign is fully consistent with Peirce's
statement elsewhere "that all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is
not composed exclusively of signs" (CP 5.448n, EP 2:394, 1906). According to
him, "There is a science of semeiotics whose results no more afford room for
differences of opinion than do those of mathematics, and one of its theorems
... is that if any signs [plural] are connected, no matter how, the resulting
system constitutes one sign [singular] ... and the entire body of all thought
is a sign, supposing all thought to be more or less connected" (R
1476:36[5-1/2], 1904). "Consider then the aggregate formed by a sign and all
the signs [plural] which its occurrence carries with it. This aggregate will
itself be a sign [singular]; and we may call it a perfect sign, in the sense
that it involves the present existence of no other sign except such as are
ingredients of itself" (EP 2:545n25, 1906).
In summary, if indeed the entire universe is perfused withsigns, all of which
are connected to each other, then it also constitutes oneimmense sign. It thus
conforms to the definition of a continuum givenby Kant and endorsed by Peirce
as one aspect of his late topicalconception--"that of which every part has
itself parts of the samekind" (CP 6.168, c. 1903-4). As I said in my other
postyesterday (https://list.iu.edu/sympa/arc/peirce-l/2025-08/msg00023.html),
"the upshot is that every individual existing thing is a tokenof a type, an
instance of a sign, an actual exemplar of a real general; and ...every dyadic
reaction between such discrete things is a degeneratemanifestation of
continuous and triadic semiosis." In other words, thought/semiosis (but not
cognition) "appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely
physical world."
Regards,
Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USAStructural Engineer, Synechist
Philosopher, Lutheran Christianwww.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt /
twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
On Fri, Aug 8, 2025 at 7:20 AM Jack Cody <[email protected]> wrote:
Jon, List1: I have used a second email to post this as not sure what was
happening with my primary? Many technical issues (not just with the list)
there. Anyway, this post hit the forum, which I think few read, but was not
being circulated on the email-list which is primary. I think this an important
thread and would like to encourage definitional/descriptive discussion
regarding a series of key terms which JAS and myself intentionally and
inadvertently introduced within various premises in previous posts. I merely I
have changed the thread title as I'm not sure if my reply was sent or not last
night (was having general computer problems it seems and no idea as to the
status of that). Nonetheless, I think this deserves its own thread for
clarification. It is the bold/underlined/italic which requires clarificaiton
(for me at least) because as of now it signifies a categoricl error (a few) and
I have to assume I am misunderstanding something for lack of context — I've
read the Peirce citations attached but that does not go coeval with the alleged
statement qua "congition", "experience", and "semiosis". Thus:JAS: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."ME: I have highlighted the bold, because that's the part I find
incomprehensible.If semiosis occurs in crystals, and “experience is ...
strictly cognitive...” but “semiosis is not [cognitive],” then we have a clear
contradiction. These two propositions in the same statement — “experience is...
strictly cognitive” and “semiosis is not [cognitive]” — make no sense
together.If semiosis is not cognitive (as JAS wrote), then by his own
definition it cannot apply to “experience,” which he says is strictly
cognitive. So how can semiosis be part of experience if it is not cognitive?I
would add that "experience" as "strictly" cognitive is one view among a great
many. It is somewhat dualist unless you suppose all is cognition to erase the
dualist distinction, but that is not your position here — though, in that
Peirce passage you quote, it does seem much closer to what Peirce seemed to
think: that semiosis is "cognitive" (signs corresponding with thought — within
that exact citation you provide).Nonetheless, as for semiosis being present in
crystals, I have little to no idea what that means, and the explanation above
does not clarify it. I maintain that there is no proof that semiosis exists in
crystals, however fascinating the idea is, but more fundamentally, I must now
ask JAS this:What exactly is semiosis if, by what is posted above, it is
constrained so it cannot be cognitive or experiential? What then remains of its
meaning?Edwina is right — definitions provided in the discussion must be much
clearer. Simply citing a series of quotations is insufficient, especially when
the claim itself appears logically contradictory.JAS, I have to believe you are
fundamentally mistaken in your reply — it makes no sense, regardless of what
version of Peirce you might cite. And if you dismiss the ding-an-sich because
it is incognizable, then how can you accept semiosis when you say it is neither
cognitive nor experiential, as such. Unless it's just a logical mistake where
you equate experience strictly with cognition and say semiosis is not
[cognitive]?I add that semiosis in a crystal, to me, is what a person might
"think" is happening with respect to a crystal but need not be what is actually
true at all.I have spoken with people off-list who have helped clarify what
Peirce might mean and I respect their views, but given the glaring logical
contradiction here, I must ask JAS to clarify. To be clearer in his use of
terms. That is, I must be missing something Jon would otherwise say/mean here,
I do not doubt, because those two propositions in the same statement make no
sense, within any Peircean system I can agree or disagree with, so I merely ask
for clarity.Best wishes,
Jack
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