Jim and list::
Sorry to be slow in responding. I just discovered that about half of my email has been going into the spam folder. It's a new account and the version of it I am using is a new format for yahoo and still a bit clunky and erratic. (The new yahoo mail is a lot like Outlook Express though it looks as if it will be an improvement on that once they get the bugs out of it. But there are annoying glitches here and there, such as e.g. there being a mark by the side of the spam folder which says "empty" even when it is not, and I've been wondering why the messages recently sometimes seem so disconnected when in fact many of them have been hidden away in my mail in the supposedly empty spam folder.)
Anyway, as regards your question: I will try to respond to it, but I can only talk about it loosely and suggestively here, in order to say enough to convey anything at all that might be helpful, and you will have to tolerate a lot of vagueness as well as sloppiness in what I am saying. If I bear down on it enough to put it into decently rigorous form it will not get said at all, I'm afraid. But then this is just a conversation, not a candidate for a published paper.
Okay, that self-defense being given in advance, I will go on to say that I think that one of the things that is likely to be misleading about the New List is that it is easy to make the mistake of thinking of the Kantian phrase "reduction of the sensuous manifold to unity" which Peirce uses at the very beginning of the New List to be talking about a unification of sense-data in the technical sense of "sense-datum" developed by philosophers somewhere around the beginning of the 20th Century, stressed especially by the positivists, especially since Peirce takes as his example the proposition "The stove is black". But regardless of what Kant might have had in mind in talking about the "manifold of intuitions" in the Critique, there is no reason to think that Peirce ever hld to the view that a theory of cognition is supposed to
be begin by explaining how sense-data like color patches and the like, regarded as meaningless atoms of quality, are what is primitively given, then named by fiat, to provide a primitive level of cognition constituted by sense-data plus interpretation.
I take it that the point to the denial of intuition in the 1868 papers that follow immediately upon the New List and are clearly of a piece with it shows that the reason Peirce started with an example like that was to be able to make the point that, even in cases that might seem to us to be cases of a simple perceptual given involving no interpretation at all, it is in reality the interpretation of a product of an unspecifiable number of levels of prior interpretation. (See his argumentation towards the very beginning of the Questions article about things like the unnoticed blind spot on the retina, the example of tactile sensation, the tricks of the stage magicians, and so forth, which all underscore that even what seems like it must be utterly simple sensation is actually the result of unconscious interpretation. So, the point is that the items in the
"sensuous manifold" of perception that mind is required to synthesize (to reduce to unity through application of a unifying conception) are always already meaningful and the "reduction" -- which is to say, the successful predication -- is always just further interpretation of disparate materials which are already results of prior interpretation.
Why must they be unified? Why are they disparate? What is it that is driving the need to unify the "manifold" by the formation of a proposition bearing the force of an assertion, which is to say, by the application of an explanatory predicate? The answer is contradiction: the unification process -- which is the thought process generally -- begins from the tension of unresolved contradiction, itself constituted by what must be assumed to be (from the logical point of view) the conflict of "repugnant" propositions (as he says in the Fixation article) -- felt experiential incoherence -- which is the incipient beginning of all doubt and questioning. Bear in mind that most conscious cognitive perception is not of simple occurrence of color properties, tingles of feeling, and so forth, but of macrocopic objects, such as
the ordinary "furniture of the earth" that makes up our perceived and recognized environment -- people and things in our environment, both local and remote, that come to our conscious attention for some special reason, the idea being that if you were to analyze any particular instance of ordinary conscious perception of something you would find. at the bottom of that analysis, as it were, what would always be something which first came to our attention because of some oppositional factor that our perception funtioned to overcome by a reconciliation of the opposition in some sort of unity. No opposition, no need for attention being paid to it.
So the beginning of cognition of which we are conscious, then, is always in an as yet unresolved conflict of some sort pereceived as such because in our "processing" of it we had to make the effort of a unification of oppositional entities of some sort, the awareness of each of which at a preconscious or unconscious level is due to the funded result to prior unification, i.e. prior learning. The important point here is that this holds true regardless of whether we are talking about the relationship of a theory, like say, particle theory in physics, to the experimental data which it is required to explain or talking about, say, the subtle judgments of flavor of a wine-taster or just the ordinary perceptions of things such as are occurring to us constantly in our waking moments. They are all "reductions of the sensuous manifold to unity". That is
the ambition of this sort of theory of cognition, at any rate, and is clearly importantly different from the sense-date reductionism of the positivists.
The implication of this, then, is that thinking begins from the awareness of disparateness, but the disparate non-unified elements of the manifold are themselves unities resulting from prior synthesize of more primitive disparate entities, and these in turn, . . . and so on ad infinitum. The unification of the manifold is always something happening in media res -- in the middlle of things, in the midst, in other words, of an ongoing process, the analysis of which will always reveal the same structure of units which are the product of prior unification. The always more-of-the-same, regardless of the level of resolution, which is so marvelously exemplified in the graphics of fractal geometry is the perfect metaphor for this. I'm not sure, for that reason, that Steven is right in opting for one of the two options he mentions: it seems to me that Peirce
is going to come out in favor of both, though there may perhaps be good reason in this or that context of application to regard one of the two is most profitably regarded as the starting point for that particular purpose.
Damn! I just discovered that a bug in the color programming of this email program makes it impossible to read the results of the spellchecker yahoo provides. So forgive such infelicities of spelling as occur in this one which I overlook..
Joe
----- Original Message ----
From: Jim Piat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Peirce Discussion Forum <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, September 8, 2006 1:12:56 PM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: Dennett
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From: Jim Piat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Peirce Discussion Forum <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, September 8, 2006 1:12:56 PM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: Dennett
Dear Steve,
I did not meant to convey that I thought Dennett favored the theater of the mind metaphor, but it would not surprise me if Peirce found Dennett's view simplistic. Personally I mostly have to content myself with just the surface of the debate though I'm always hoping to grasp the issues on a deeper level. So I appreciate your raising some of those issues and challenging me to think more deeply about them. I find the Peirce-L endlessly fascinating, but see myself participating more as one of its kibitzer/gadflies than as one of its heavy lifters. A legitimate, albeit small and sometimes annoying, role in the grand scheme --I hope. But four posts is enuff of me for now so, with thanks and best wishes to all, I'll shut up for a while.
Cheers,
Jim Piat
---I do not believe that comparing theories by abstracting their general statements about reality is sufficient.Dennett's theater of the mind argument argues against the homunculus and the theater.IMHO, Dennett makes arguments against which Peirce would rebel fiercely - in both its content and methodology. In particular, I do not see Peirce accepting heterophenomonology which argues naively that being objective is the best we can do in science. Dennett does not take experience seriously as a phenomenon of the world, and therein lies the core of the problem - which is theoretical and has more to do with his ability to reason than it does with objective observation. In short, Dennett simply denies his ability to make any observation.With respect,Steven
On Sep 8, 2006, at 7:43 AM, Jim Piat wrote:
Jeffrey Grace wrote:>>It struck me as Peirceian because, if I'm not mistaken, Peirce denied that there was such a thing as "introspection". He also seemed to affirm the idea that individuals are "less real" than generality... or rather that all individuals are instances of general categories and therefore less real as individuals. I also get the impression that what we call mind or subjective experience is more objective or public than we realize... and this seems to coincide with Dennett's heterophenomenology...the idea that an objective observer might be able to read someone's subjective experience better than the subject him/herself>>.
Dear, Jeffrey,I can't find the Justice Holmes quote about the plain meaning of words vs one's subjective intent that I thought was so apt to your comments -- but do want to say I think you make a very good point. In fact, recently I was thinking about Dennett's homunculus/theater of the mind metaphor in conjunction with the "infinite regression" criticism sometimes leveled against Peirce theory of signs. My idea was that a theater of the mind need only go three levels deep to cover all the possiblities (but that's for another discussion and only tangentially related to the point you are making). Just now I merely want to say that I think you capture something very important about Peirce's views and also maybe something about Denett's that he may not realize himself. Surely Peirce's ideas on pragmatism gave impetus to the objective thrust that so captured law, psychology and philosophy in the early 1900s. And Dennett is indebted to this tradition.All said with respect and admiration for the counterpoints of Steven and Gary. That's part of what I find so appealing and impressive about Peirce -- that he identified both what is best and what is worst in behaviorism.Cheers,Jim Piat---
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