Franklin, List, I agree about Peirce’s difference with Lewis wrt the a priori. I don’t see how that is related to the issue of the effability of percepts, though.
You are arguing below that each percept has its own individuality. I have no quarrel with that. My concern is that, since all thought is in signs, either percepts are thoughts and they have secondness and thirdness as well as firstness (I have called them existence and interpretation, respectively, recently here and argued that only distinction, among experiences, is self-contained in all of these respects, or else they are not thoughts. If they are not thoughts, then I question whether it makes sense to refer to them as determinate contents of experiences. It seems to me that Quine, Sellars and Lewis share my concerns. Though their arguments are somewhat different I think there is a convergence of their inferences towards what Lewis called ineffability. The main problem generated is for the grounds of empirical claims, which become very much more fluid than in most versions of empiricism and positivism. I don’t see that Peirce avoids this in any interesting way, nor does it seem to me that, given his fallibilism and also his view that all thought is in signs, he should avoid it. I would argue that the grounds for knowledge are the topological structures of the distinctions in our experience. This is a form of information theoretic structure that I think Dretske, for one, has shown to be much more productive than might seem at first. Nonetheless, it is a pretty radical idea in epistemology at this stage. What I have called the effability issue is the motivation for moving in this radical direction, since it seems to rule out other kinds of ground for knowledge. John Collier Professor Emeritus, UKZN http://web.ncf.ca/collier From: Franklin Ransom [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, 13 December 2015 23:19 To: [email protected] 1 Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] RE: signs, correlates, and triadic relations John, list, I will become much less active for the next few months after today. I would agree that the pragmatist C.I. Lewis viewed appearances as ineffable, and the analytic philosopher Quine was probably the same way; of Sellars, I couldn't say. Peirce does not view appearances as ineffable though. It should be understood that C.I. Lewis has the idea of the 'given', which together with his 'pragmatic a priori' concepts, permits the possibility of empirical knowledge. The 'pragmatic a priori' concepts are not themselves empirical, but given freely by the mind to make sense of the given and thereby give one experience, of which empirical knowledge is then possible. If I understand Quine rightly, he was of the view that the division between these analytic, pragmatic a priori concepts and the concepts of empirical knowledge (i.e., synthetic concepts) is not a division that holds strictly. In any case, there is the attempt to describe the given for both. I don't think Peirce subscribes to the view of Lewis's 'conceptual pragmatism', and the need for the pragmatic a priori. The pragmatic a priori is really a sort of Kantian move that Peirce would have eschewed. The appearances, or phenomena, are indeed effable, or else perceptual judgments would be impossible as judgments about percepts. Note that perceptual judgments are not the result of applying a priori concepts to percepts, at least not in Lewis's sense. For Lewis, the pragmatic a priori can be held by the mind regardless of their truth; he insists that they are held by the mind as being useful for interpreting the given, but can never be false, because they make falsity possible in empirical knowledge; the a priori concepts can only be rejected because they cease to be useful. But for Peirce, perceptual judgments, like any other judgments, can be false, and we can learn that they were false later. It is simply the case that at the time of the perceptual judgment occurring, we are in no position to question its veracity or to control conduct with respect to it. I would like to point out though that every phenomenon has a quality unique to it which is, strictly speaking, ineffable, being sui generis. Only this does not make the phenomenon itself ineffable, and it does not mean the quality is not like other qualities experienced, but only that it is not precisely the same as those other qualities. -- Franklin --------------------------------------------- On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 1:20 PM, John Collier <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Jon, It intends to mean saving the appearances, but appearances, according to many pragmatists (C.I. Lewis, Quine, Sellars, probably Peirce) are ineffable, to use Lewis's term. We (Konrad and I) went to distinctions because there is no need to eff them. In order to save them. The current discussion about the nature of percepts and their distinction from perceptual judgements is relevant here. There is nothing in appearances alone that makes the distinction, since any qualisign must be interpreted to be a sign, implying a judgement. We can separate the two abstractly, however, and with distinctions, their quality implies their existence directly. Even with the mentioned self/non-self distinction (basic to using the Pragmatic Maxim) there is a necessary abduction involved to the self and non-self classes. But in the case of distinctions alone we have experiences that imply both existence (secondness ) and interpretation (thirdness) as either "this" or "that". John John Collier Professor Emeritus, UKZN http://web.ncf.ca/collier > -----Original Message----- > From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] > Sent: Sunday, 13 December 2015 19:21 > To: John Collier; Matt Faunce; > [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> 1 > Subject: Re: signs, correlates, and triadic relations > > John, List, > > I have personally always understood “saving the phenomena” to mean > preserving the appearances, that is, whatever explanation we come up with > must leave the appearances invariant. > > I remember reading somewhere that the Greek “sozein” could mean either > save or solve. I thought it was Ian Hacking but not sure. > Poking around the web for it did turn up this historical comment: > > https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2015/07/29/%CF%83%E1%BF%B4%CE%B6%C<https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2015/07/29/%CF%83%E1%BF%B4%CE%B6%25C> > E%B5%CE%B9%CE%BD-%CF%84%E1%BD%B0- > %CF%86%CE%B1%CE%B9%CE%BD%CF%8C%CE%BC%CE%B5%CE%BD%CE%B > 1-sozein-ta-phainomena/ > > Regards, > > Jon > > On 12/13/2015 5:28 AM, John Collier wrote: > > Peirce List, > > > > Here is a link to a Peirce influenced paper that makes the basic point Matt > has made here. It is based on work in my PhD dissertation that I am in the > process of redoing 30-some years later to deal with problems of continuity of > knowledge through radical theory change (and across different discourses > and cultures, for that matter). There was some brief attention to that work at > the time, but I was already working with biologists on an information > dynamics approach to self-organization in evolution, and I set it aside. My > co- > author on the paper is a former student of mine who is one of the few to > maintain and interest in the issues, though he is making his name more in the > cognitive science of religion and superstition these days. > > > > * Saving the distinctions: Distinctions as the epistemologically > > significant content of > experience<http://bacon.umcs.lublin.pl/~ktalmont/pdf/Save%20distinctions > .pdf> (2004, with Konrad Talmont-Kaminski) The title is a sideways reference > to “saving the phenomena” as used by Bas van Fraassen, who seems to have > got it from Duhem. > > > > John Collier > > Professor Emeritus, UKZN > > http://web.ncf.ca/collier > > > > -- > > academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey > my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/ inquiry list: > http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ > isw: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/JLA > oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey > facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. 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