SUO: RE: Peirce's "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man"
Jon,
First I will note that at present, I am not a member of Arisbe, so I cannot
post replies to you there. Hence anything you post there will be one-sided.
You wrote:
>
> 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.
I see. You were using a diversionary debating tactic, unworthy of this
forum. In fact my comments were above these lower bounds of sensibility, and
for you to suggest otherwise suggests an inability or unwillingness to try
to understand what I was saying.
> 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.
I congratulate you on for once being able to use plain English.
Unfortunately you have missed my point, entirely.
As I noted before, Penrose cited Godel's result to argue that there are
limits to artificial intelligence. Some have replied that if such limits
apply to artificial intelligence, then they also apply to human
intelligence.
Suppose that human intelligence is described by a consistent axiomatic
system, powerful enough to do arithmetic. (A debatable supposition, but
worthy of going forward with.)
Then (at least arguably) it could follow from Godel's Incompleteness Theorem
that there are true propositions which cannot be proved within the scope of
human intelligence.
This kind of reasoning allows us to have "some conception", at least
indirectly, of the fact that there may be things which are true, yet outside
our ability to prove them. I.e. it allows us to have some conception that
there may be things that are outside the range of our cognition, i.e.
incognizable.
This was the kind of thing I was describing when I suggested that we might
be able to have some conception of things that are incognizable.
To be clear, I should say that I do not fully endorse Penrose's argument --
I think it may be open to challenge on the grounds that human intelligence
is capable of reflection, meta reasoning, and that we may not be limited to
a fixed set of axioms, etc. However, I take note of this argument and am
willing to consider that there may be limits to human cognition.
It now seems that the root of misunderstandings in these correspondences is
that in the context of Peirce's papers and his response to Kant and
Descartes, the term "absolutely incognizable" was in effect *defined* as
something one could not have any conception whatsoever about, however
indirect or general... So Peirce's statement "we have no conception of the
absolutely incognizable" was in effect a tautology.
At this point, I think that we have gone in circles and restated our
arguments more than enough to be repetitious.
This matter has also become somewhat off-topic relative to SUO. It is a
spinoff of a discussion about natural language, thought and ontology.
So, I request that we halt the dialog, and agree to disagree, or else take
our correspondence offlist if necessary.
Sincerely,
Phil Jackson
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"A man's got to know his limitations" - Clint Eastwood
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Standard Disclaimers. www.philjackson.prohosting.com