(Combining responses to your two posts in one)
> There is a deep problem involved with attepts to give any just > epistemological explanations of CSP's views on doubt. He states, for example, > that you should not pretend to doubt anythinf you do not doubt in your heart. > (This is, of course,pointed against Descartes.) - But 'heart' here does not > act here as a MERE figure of speech. > > The more poignant issue here is, that the very division ontology - > epistemology is a modern invention, establised as a dichotomy, and used as a > dichotomy. I think we can and often should raise Descartes as structuring philosophy in a certain way - dividing epistemology and metaphysics in a way that wasn’t done before. That said I think much of the 20th century pushes at traditional philosophical divides. Topics in epistemology today are hardly held captive by the dichotomy Descartes puts in place. You have robust discussion of both epistemological and semantic externalism and even cognitive externalism. You have lots of robust positions that discard the traditional “belief + truth + justification” analysis - usually by considering carefully Gettier cases. Even in traditional analytic philosophy of the Quine and Davidson camp I think there’s quite a bit of nuance. Which is all a long round about way of saying we should not assume epistemology is narrow even if we reject narrow conceptions. Few are foundationalists anymore and most of the assumptions Descartes put in motion have come under close scrutiny. > If matter is viewed as effeminate mind, no such dichotomy applies (but to a > limited degree). I think we have to be careful how we take this though. Yet I also think that Peircean semiotics pushes us in this direction. That is it’s worth considering epistemological or near epistemological questions in a broader way than epistemology usually does. The discussion last year of natural propositions shows how propositional signs can function in a manner not tied to human minds. It’s worth considering that of truth as well. Not necessarily as the question gets debated in say AI but more broadly in semiotics in general. > But to my view a soul should not be viewed as an individual entity, it its > essence. - If a person is (essentially) a bundle of habits (according to > CSP), then these habits do not die, not at least altogether and suddenly, > when somobodys bodilily functions, like heartbeat, cease. The Stoics had a similar view - at least for some figures. A sort of echo that persisted. It’s interesting that in some platonic traditions (including those in Jewish mysticism) you have the idea of habits representing parts of individuals persisting and even being reincarnated in new individuals. (The way some mystics talk about the Spirit of Elijah in terms of gilgulim for instance) I’m not sure that’s immortality in any strong sense. But if you’re talking about habits as generals then certainly we can share habits in some sense. And people live on in memories indirectly. Their habits can be copied and spread and logically we can say they are the one same habit. Yet neither of those is really immortality as I think most people mean it though. They want a continuation of a certain first person experience with their memories. > But to my view a soul should not be viewed as an individual entity, it its > essence. - If a person is (essentially) a bundle of habits (according to > CSP), then these habits do not die, not at least altogether and suddenly, > when somobodys bodilily functions, like heartbeat, cease. I think Peirce is correct that humans are a symbol. Yet I think there are those three aspects to people. I personally find Peirce’s ontology here somewhat dissatisfying. But admittedly it also wasn’t his main focus. To Peirce the “swerve” of randomness in thirdness in its inward form is consciousness. As I recall to the degree he talks about consciousness it’s the inner aspect of the “swerve” or chaos. In other places he says we have consciousness to the degree we have self-control. I think this aspect of his ontology is among the most controversial of his views. I think one can adopt most of his system without adopting this particular view. (Which I think in some ways comes out of the remnant of Kant’s “in-itself” that survives no external thing-in-itself) …whatever is First is ipso facto sentient. If I make atoms swerve - as I do - I make them swerve but very very little, because I conceive they are not absolutely dead. And by that I do not mean exactly that I hold them to be physically such as the materialists hold them to be, only with a small dose of sentiency superadded. For that, I grant, would be feeble enough. But what I mean is, that all there is, is First, Feelings; Second, Efforts; Third, Habits - all of which are more familiar to us on their psychical side than on their physical side; and that dead matter would be merely the final result of the complete induration of habit reducing the free play of feeling and the brute irrationality of effort to complete death (CP 6.201) What further is needed to clear the sign of its mental associations is furnished by generalizations too facile to arrest attention here, since nothing but feeling is exclusively mental. But while I say this, it must not be inferred that I regard consciousness as a mere “epiphenomenon”; though I heartily grant that the hypothesis that it is so has done good service to science. To my apprehension, consciousness may be defined as that congeries of non-relative predicates, varying greatly in quality and in intensity, which are symptomatic of the interaction of the outer world,— the world of those causes that are exceedingly compulsive upon the modes of consciousness, with general disturbance sometimes amounting to shock, and are acted upon only slightly, and only by a special kind of effort, muscular effort,— and of the inner world, apparently derived from the outer, and amenable to direct effort of various kinds with feeble reactions, the interaction of these two worlds chiefly consisting of a direct action of the outer world upon the inner and an indirect action of the inner world upon the outer through the operation of habits. If this be a correct account of consciousness, i.e., of the congeries of feelings, it seems to me that it exercises a real function in self-control, since without it, or at least without that of which it is symptomatic, the resolves and exercises of the inner world could not affect the real determinations and habits of the outer world. I say that these belong to the outer world because they are not mere fantasies but are real agencies. (Pierce, Pragmatism EP 2.418-419) I think what we mean by the person is complex. We talk about parts of it and neglect other parts during that analysis. But we must be careful not to treat the part as the whole.
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