> On Feb 14, 2017, at 8:41 AM, Eric Charles <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Yikes! My inner William James just raised an eyebrow. This is probably a > separate thread... but how did we suddenly start making claims about the > nature of other people's thoughts? > > "People think, not so much in words, but in images and diagrams..." They do? > How many people's thoughts have we interrogated to determine that? > > "Consciousness is inherently linguistic." It is? How much have we studied > altered states of consciousness, or even typical consciousness? > > Sorry, these parts of Peirce always make me a bit twitchy. I'm quite > comfortable when he is talking about how scientists-qua-scientists think or > act, but then he makes more general statements and I get worried.
Are those two statements really controversial? Honestly asking. It seems much of our consciousness isn’t primarily linguistic. We are, admittedly, deciding this both upon introspection as well as reports of how other people experience it. This gets into the question of what we mean by thinking of course. Peirce was much more open to thinking not primarily being about what we’re conscious of. To the linguistic point I’m not sure that’s controversial either. The idea that our consciousness of objects has an “as” structure seems common. That is the idea that we don’t just see a blue sky as raw sense data we then consciously interpret. Instead we see the sky as blue with blue and sky having those linguistic aspects even if we don’t pay much attention to it. None of this is to deny that we can have non-linguistic experiences. But I’m just not seeing the problem. (Completely open to being wrong here of course)
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