SUO: RE: Peirce's "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man"
Jon,
Thanks very much for your message.
You wrote:
> I will await a more detailed consideration from John Sowa,
> but as someone who is in the middle of (putting off) the
> umpteenth re-write of the chapter of his dissertation
> that has to do with these very questions, I cannot
> help tossing in my two sou's worth at this point.
> Still, I will try to limit myself, for now,
> to merely inserting a couple of glosses
> to clear up the easier brands of
> misunderstanding that usually
> develop at this juncture.
I appreciate your comments, which I suppose may be in response to my
questions posted at SUO to John Sowa "On Peirce's Four Incapacities of Man".
I have not heard from him in response to my questions, but will reply
briefly to your comments. Of course, I still look forward to his reply.
[...]
> The chief thing to understand about the context of these Questions
> is the Cartesian and Kantian assumptions and doctrines that Peirce
> is critiquing, in which context all of the key words, for instance,
> "independent", "immediate", "introspective", "intuitive", & so on,
> are "terms of art", with specific technical meanings, and that he
> is only speaking to these particular senses and uses of the words.
That is fine, and I appreciate your discussion of these terms in the context
of Peirce, Kant and Descartes.
However, I am more concerned by Peirce's following statements which were
made in relatively plain English:
"all knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning
from our knowledge of external facts."
"every cognition is determined logically by previous cognitions."
"We have no conception of the absolutely incognizable."
It is these statements of Peirce which provide the focus of my questions,
and which seem questionable to me.
[...]
> To aver that you have "a conception of the 'absolutely incognizable' (AI)"
> means, as distinguished from the sheer possibility of stringing together
> any sequence of signs that you may fancy to arrange for your own delight,
> whether in your favorite external medium or as the signs called thoughts
> inscribed within the internal medium of your mind, means, as one says,
> to the Magus, that the spirit of the letter comes when it is called.
I'm not at all sure how to parse your sentence, though I like the poetry of
the final phrase...
All I can say at this point, is that my comments on the question of having a
conception of the incognizable were not in reference to randomly stringing
together sequences of signs.
Many Regards,
Phil Jackson
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"A man's got to understand his limitations." - Clint Eastwood
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Standard Disclaimers. www.philjackson.prohosting.com