Jack, list, Ill start with a few general comments on Peircean epistimology and semiotics before I insert my comments into your post below.
First, all knowledge is fallible, relative and incomplete. We can directly experience things that we have no prior knowledge of; but we cant know anything about something we have no experience of. Normative science [including logic] rests largely on phenomenology and on mathematics; metaphysics on phenomenology and on normative science (CP 1.186, 1902). From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of JACK ROBERT KELLY CODY Sent: 2-Jul-21 08:54 Gary, List, GF: Peirces objection to Kantian metaphysics and epistemology was that for Peirce the thing-in-itself is cognizable if it makes any sense to talk about it at all. The notion of an incognizable thing-in-itself was, for Peirce, absurd. JC: Yes, but surely there are things (and things about things) that we cannot know; GF: How do we know that? Surely there are experiences that surprise us, which implies that there is something we dont know about the things experienced. But that doesnt imply that we cannot know more about them than we do now. And as for things we have no experience of, not even an inkling of their possibility, we can say (and know) nothing about them, not even fallibly. JC: or our knowledge of such things extends only so far as to permit us a glimpse of fallibility. CSP: :Direct experience is neither certain nor uncertain, because it affirms nothing -- it just is. There are delusions, hallucinations, dreams. But there is no mistake that such things really do appear, and direct experience means simply the appearance. It involves no error, because it testifies to nothing but its own appearance. For the same reason, it affords no certainty. It is not exact, because it leaves much vague; though it is not inexact either; that is, it has no false exactitude. (CP 1.148) JC: In the fashion of Bertrand Russell, we might consider a tumble glass (or any such object). We know the glass as object through experience; only insofar as we have held/seen/otherwise sensed such glasses before, or insofar as we can imagine what such an object must/might be like based on our experience of other objects which suggest a kind of iconic affinity. We can even imagine the glass's atomic and subatomic structure. But, surely, we cannot know the actual relation of this atomic-subatomic structure "in itself" - that is, we cannot know what is happening at atomic/subatomic levels as they exist beyond the scope of our perceptive faculties. We can, with the aid of science, make good attempts at imagining/inferring such processes, but does our image of these processes correspond to their actual being (every atom as it exists relative to every other atom at a given moment in time?)? GF: Here you are making a metaphysical assumption that atomic and subatomic particles have an actual being. But we have no direct experience of them only a theoretical model of the processes they are involved in so our knowledge is not directly based on unmediated experience, or on phaneroscopic observation, which does not admit metaphysical assumptions. But it is still knowledge fallible, relative and incomplete like all knowledge. JC: I can understand how our idea/image of such processes are very real (as Peirce says, such ideas/images "really do appear" to us) in a representational sense as our conception/experience of such things (whether fancy or fact) is "real" if/when it simply "is" or "appears" in any representational state before the mind. But is there not a divide between our experience of an object at its "surface level" (touch, taste, and so on), the inference we draw of its internal structure (its atomic/subatomic composition), and then that internal structure as it actually is -- atom to atom -- which contributes to the surface (forms it, in fact) but cannot be reduced to that surface alone, being of a different order/degree of substance? Or, put differently, can we really equate our talk about the thing-in-itself (which is entirely experiential) with the internal structuring of that thing -- tumble glass in this instance -- of which we have no means of direct experience? Or, if we can somehow experience it directly, we have no means of comprehending this experience in a way which isn't then contaminated by time (by memory)? GF: Knowledge is based on experience. In psychology and psychobiology, cognition is partially based on knowledge because we are anticipatory systems whose brains implement feedforward loops (for more on this, see Turning Signs 9: Model and Meaning (gnusystems.ca) <https://gnusystems.ca/TS/mdl.htm#loopw> .) But this too is a theoretical model, an explanation of what we experience. In phaneroscopy, on the other hand, experience is not based on knowledge. Making knowledge out of the raw material of experience is the task of semiotic/logic, which is grounded in the generalized discoveries of phaneroscopy. CSP: All this is true of direct experience at its first presentation. But when it comes up to be criticized it is past, itself, and is represented by memory. (CP 1.149). JC: Do we risk conflating our comprehension of our own perceptual limitations (a "real" image/appearance of an object's imagined atomic/subatomic composition) with a refutation of those limitations(the appearance to our mind surely does not coincide with the reality of the atomic/subatomic structure once we have prescinded ourselves from the equation)? Is there a risk of taking "a"/"our" reality (the atomic/subatomic representation as it appears to us) for "the" reality (as the structure must seem to an atom or particle if we grant an atoms/particles a "mind" for the purpose of thought-experiment)? By prescinding ourselves from the equation, I also mean only that the atomic relations which inhere within any object surely do so irrespective of our ideas/images about said object? This is not strictly an a priori argument as the atomic/subatomic relation is experiential, too, having to do with very real actions and reactions and so on. GF: Cognition of the thing is, of course, semiosic; but the key point for phaneroscopy is that there can be direct and unmediated experience of some ingredients of the phaneron. For instance, he says the flow of time is conceived as continuous. No matter whether this continuity is a datum of sense, or a quasi-hypothesis imported by the mind into experience, or even an illusion; in any case it remains a direct experience. For experience is not what analysis discovers but the raw material upon which analysis works. This element then is an element of direct experience (CP 7.535). In one of the 1903 Lowell Lectures he says we have direct experience of things in themselves. (That is even underlined in the manuscript. For the context of this and some other Peircean remarks on direct experience, see <https://gnusystems.ca/Peirce.htm#dirxp> Peirce: selections, summaries and secondary sources (gnusystems.ca).) JC: I'm very interested in this notion of direct experience as I hadn't encountered it before. It almost seems antithetical to what I've gleaned of Peirce so far (notions of the continua and of a sign being that which stand for something to someone or some mind in respect of something else): this, to me at least, is the essence of mediation. And whilst I can conceive of degrees of mediatory structure (thinking about "coldness" as opposed to being cold; or simply being in contrast to thinking about being, this latter being a cognitive abstraction), I'm not yet familiar enough with Peirce to comprehend how "direct experience" fits within this framework. I do appreciate the resource, though. GF: The best part of this slide (for me anyway) is what he says about indeterminacy. We could say that its the Firstness of logic and of metaphysics. As such, it does not exist, any more than a qualisign or God exists. In Peircean terms, existing things are real, but not all realities exist. Metaphysically, existence is the Secondness of reality. But firsts and thirds can be real too. JC: Yes, the indeterminacy aspect seems highly interesting. I've been reading a lot about indeterminacy in general so am delighted to see that Peirce devotes significant portions of his CPs to a nuanced consideration of it. GF: Yes, indeterminacy plays an essential role in Peirces late work, especially in the form of vagueness. This is part of his critical common-sensism. CSP: Logicians have been at fault in giving Vagueness the go-by, so far as not even to analyze it. The present writer has done his best to work out the Stechiology (or Stoicheiology), Critic, and Methodeutic of the subject, but can here only give a definition or two with some proposals respecting terminology. JC: I really need to go away and consider a lot of these arguments, though, as so much of it is very new to me and I don't want to through suggestions/objections out scatter-gun style as some of the above almost definitely is! Best Jack
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