SUO: Re: Peirce's "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man"
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Phil,
Let's see if we can take these one at a time.
I will start with the one that seems to depend
the least on any sorts of external definitions.
> "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.
I was merely staking out the lower bounds of sensibility,
not at all claiming that you had managed to achieve them.
Peirce is a plain, old-fashioned, classical logician.
The phrase "A and not-A" is perfectly well-formed, syntactically speaking,
but there is nothing of which it is a description, so there is nothing of
which it expresses a conception, so there is nothing of which it delivers
any information, so there is nothing of which it conveys any knowledge,
so there is nothing of which it bears or affords any cognition at all.
Without precisely analyzing, just yet, the relationship between
conceptions and cognitions, we might just say that a conception
is prerequisite to the gestation of information, the bearing of
knowledge, the delivery of a cognition, and the birth of sense.
Said another way, a conception is the beginning of a sensible cognition.
So if a person says that he has any knowledge of the unknowable -- who would? --
or if a person says that he has any ability to have knowledge of the unknowable,
or if a person says that he has any beginnings of a knowledge of the unknowable,
or if a person says that he has any conception of a knowledge of the unknowable,
or if a person says that he has any conception of the absolutely incognizable,
well, that person is pretty much just saying the same thing as "A and not-A".
Anyway, that is pretty much the way that I, for one, hear it.
I hope that is clearer, at least on this one point.
Jon Awbrey
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