Re: SUO: RE: Peirce's "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man"
Phil,
Some brief comments on your response to Jon A.
>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."
An example of what Kant claimed and what Peirce denied
is that our knowledge of space and time is not derivable
from perception. P would say that everything we know about
space and time is derivable from sensory input combined
with abduction (hypothetical reasoning). He would classify
"observation" of mental imagery and perception of pain,
headache, toothache, etc., to be of the same nature as
"external facts".
>"every cognition is determined logically by previous cognitions."
By logically, he meant by deduction, induction, or abduction.
The third is extremely important, because it allows any new
hypothesis to be introduced or generated by chance. But before
it can be accepted as "knowledge", it has to be tested against
"facts" by induction and deduction.
>"We have no conception of the absolutely incognizable."
This seems to me to be obvious. We might hypothesize that
some parallel universe exists that can never interact with
us in any way. But then that is pure fantasy. It is indeed
a conception, but calling it a conception of anything that
exists is totally unwarranted.
>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.
I would not call your comments about some totally inaccessible
universe (or whatever you might want to call it) random.
They have a definite syntax and a definite logical structure.
But any assertion that is totally untestable by any kind of
experience (including any kind of scientific measurement)
is pure fantasy -- it cannot be knowledge.
John Sowa