SUO: RE: On Peirce's Four Incapacities of Man
Phil,
Before getting to the more detailed issues, I'd like to
make a few points about the background to that article:
1. Peirce wrote it in 1868, when he was 29 years old. His
ideas on many of those issues developed a great deal during
the next 40+ years, so he made many further refinements that
would qualify what he wrote there. The basic points about
the importance of signs and the claim that all thought is
a sign (of one kind or another) was something that he
considered all his life. But you have to realize that
images and feelings are also signs -- not just words.
2. During his college years, Peirce had been very impressed
with Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_, which he said he
had read and reread many times over, both in English and
later in the original German. He also had discussed it
detail with his father Benjamin P (who was regarded as one
best mathematicians in America during the 19th century and
was the founder of linear algebra). But during his mid 20s,
he began to doubt some of Kant's basic assumptions (altough
he still had a very high regard for Kant's work as a whole).
3. So it is best to read the paper on the "Four Incapacities"
as a rejection of some of Kant's basic assumptions. One
of Kant's distinctions was between the observable phenomena
and the "things in themselves", which Kant called the
"noumena". Kant claimed that the only things that could be
known were phenomena, and the noumena were absolutely
unknowable. Peirce called that claim Kant's greatest
mistake. His rejection of the "absolutely unknowable"
should be viewed as a rejection of Kant's concept of
noumena, which Peirce believed is a useless appendage
to Kant's theory. In short, it has no explanatory value
whatever.
4. Another of Kant's claims was that space and time could not
be learned from experience because they were necessary
prerequisites for experience. That was K's reason for
claiming that they could only be known by "intuition".
P rejected that claim and substituted "hypothetical
reasoning", which he later called "abduction" for what
K claimed some kind of intuition was necessary.
>A boundary case might be where one has a thought, but doesn't know quite how
>to verbalize it, even subaudibly....For an idea that is "on the tip of the
>tongue", one may know that one has an idea, and even be able to act upon it,
>but not be able to verbalize it...
Knowing that one has a idea is a sign of a sign. P would have
no problem with that. I believe that James discussed that
in some detail, but I'd have to search the book to find it.
(You can download the source text and search it, if you like.)
Another point: Peirce was left handed, and he remarked that he
thought that his brain must be rewired differently from most
people (which has been confirmed by brain scans, although more
heat than light has been generated by left-brain and right-brain
debates). He did however comment that writing in English about
some of his new ideas sometimes felt as difficult as trying to
write in a foreign language for which he lacked the vocabulary.
Einstein and Whitehead also made similar comments.
>It still seems worthwhile (at least on occasion) to distinguish between
>signs used internally for thought, and signs used externally for
>communication between people. With that understanding, the term "mentalese"
>still seems to have value..(?)
Yes, indeed. There are many different kinds of signs. One
implication of treating all of them as signs is that you can
talk about combinatorics of signs independent of the particular
medium (inside the brain, inside the computer, etc.). When the
medium does make a difference, you can also consider that too.
But usually that difference itself can be represented by a sign.
>... Peirce says we can have "no
>conception". We seem to be agreeing that we can have "some concepts"
(which
>are themselves cognizable), about things which are incognizable.
Again, if you think of Kant's noumena as the kind of thing
that P was criticizing, he wouldn't deny that Kant had some
kind of concept in his mind. But he denied that it was
anything more than an empty placeholder. P was claiming that
the noumena could be eliminated from K's theory without in any
way detracting from whatever else was useful in the theory.
>The mystery that Feynman referred to was the problem of explaining why
>nature behaves according to the predictions of quantum mechanics. In
>discussing the double slit experiment with electrons, and the uncertainty
>principle, he wrote:
>
>"We now make a few remarks on a suggestion that has sometimes been made to
>try to avoid the description we have given: 'Perhaps the electron has some
>kind of inner works - some inner variables - that we do not yet know about.
>Perhaps that is why we cannot predict what will happen. If we could look
>more closely at the electron, we could be able to tell where it will end
>up.' So far as we know, that is impossible. We would still be in difficulty.
>[...] And no one has figured a way out of this puzzle. So at the present
>time we must limit ourselves to computing probabilities. We say 'at the
>present time' but we suspect very strongly that it is something that will be
>with us forever - that it is impossible to beat that puzzle - that this is
>the way nature really is." (The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. III, pp.
>1-10,1-11.)
Yes, there are certainly lots of unanswered questions, and there
probably always will be. But there are three different points:
1. We know that there are unsolved problems (Feynman) or
even unsolvable problems (Turing and Goedel).
2. There may be some things (spirits, other universes, etc.)
that can never have any effects on any of our senses or
any scientific instruments that we can ever devise.
3. We know that there are things that we can never know (Kant).
Peirce would never deny point #1. But he denied point #3.
He was agnostic about 2: if they had no effects whatever,
they would be truly unknowable, and we could never know anything
about them or even their possible existence. But if they had
any measurable effects whatever, then they wouldn't be
"absolutely incognizable."
The things Goedel and Turing were talking about weren't totally
incognizable, because we could discover a great deal about them,
such as how many there might be, some examples of them, and
even some possible answers -- i.e., we could define a function
whose value was either 0 or 1, but we could prove that it was
impossible to determine which.
>And here's another quote: "... we always have had (secret, secret, close the
>door!)... a great deal of difficulty in understanding the world view that
>quantum mechanics represents. At least I do, because I'm an old enough man
>that I haven't got to the point that this stuff is obvious to me. Okay, I
>still get nervous with it." Simulating Physics with Computers, International
>Journal of Theoretical Physics, vol 21, 1982, p467.
>I recall another quote (but can't find it) where Feynman refers to
>attempting to solve this mystery as (paraphrasing) an impossible abyss.
>> The only people who have a problem with it are people like
>> Einstein, who were hoping to find completely deterministic
>> theories of everything.
>Or people who want to understand how nature works at deeper levels, why it
>behaves according to the formulae of quantum mechanics...Such people might
>be satisfied with indeterminism, but still want to understand how and why it
>arises.
There is a difference: Einstein would never accept the idea
of a nondeterministic universe. If Peirce had known about the
uncertainly principle, he would not have been troubled by it
as Einstein was. However, he would agree with Feynman that it
was important to explore as deeply as possible to find further
evidence to confirm whether it was truly nondeterministic.
>It seems that to the extent that we cannot explain why nature behaves
>according to quantum mechanics, we have an example of something we do not
>understand (cannot currently cognize) beyond a certain level of conception,
>i.e. beyond the predictive concepts of quantum mechanics.
Yes. That is a point where we know that there is something
affecting our results, which we have not yet been able to
characterize. But that evidence itself shows that what we
are hypothesizing isn't "absolutely incognizable". The kind
of thing that Peirce was rejecting is Kant's noumena, which
can have no effects whatever on anything we perceive. Anything
that can disrupt the agreement between theory and reality is
something that we already have some evidence for. It is not
"absolutely incognizable".
>I am however, very interested in the concept of
>the multiverse, that there are parallel universes that do interact with our
>universe, that these interactions can be measured in scientific experiments,
>and account for the behavior observed in the double slit experiment. As I
>mentioned in a separate thread, the clearest, strongest argument I've seen
>for this is David Deutsch's "The Fabric of Reality". I'd be very
interested
>in your thoughts on this, also.
Yes, that is very interesting. But if those other universes
can have measurable effects, then it is possible to learn
something about them. They are not "absolutely incognizable".
John Sowa