SUO: Re: Peirce's "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man"
¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
Philip Jackson wrote:
>
> 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.
Phil,
I assumed that I was talking to you through the medium of the SUO Forum --
and I merely CC stuff to the Arisbe group when I fancy that it might be
of some incidental interest to them.
Information about the Arisbe Forum: http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/
The Arisbe Forum was instituted to address the "techie" side many issues
that kept arising on the Peirce-List, but that seemed to cause too much
of a distraction there, and I take it be a place where people can tackle
the broad questions of "What does WebWorld mean to Peirce, and what does
Peirce mean to WebWorld?" That is just my present and probably personal
take on things, as "all is flux" at the moment. I only CC'd my initial
summary of the "Questions" and the "Incapacities" to Arisbe because it
was the first time that I had managed to say these things that briefly,
and because it came under the heading of "Things that we need to think
about in connection with those very broad questions of how philosophy
will serve the internet and vice versa" -- and then some points that
arose in our subsequent exchange seemed like they would be helpful
in hashing out the kinds of misunderstanding that easily arise in
connection with these very important papers. By the way, this is
presently a rather small group (22 members), and I am sure that
they would very much welcome the contribution of your expertise
and voice to the mix, if you should be able to throw some of
your time and energy their way.
> 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.
No, whenever I speak of "lower bounds" and "upper bounds" I am speaking
more as the mathematical practitioner than as any brand of rhetorician,
merely evoking that reflexive strategy of problem-solving that advises
us to stake out the grounds of that domain that we really care about,
to ask things like: "What are the best cases and the worst cases of
the phenomenon or the problem that we find ourselves already amidst?"
The aim of my statement is merely to mark the boundaries of the page
that I see as being relevant here, and by implication to invite your
response as to whether you see us being, in so far, on the same page.
You may think it absurd that anybody would question these boundaries,
but I have quite often found myself embroiled in animadversions with
varieties of people who do, and so my uncertainty is quite ingenuous.
> > 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.
And I am afraid that you have missed Peirce's point, entirely, as I see it.
His statement was addressed to the Kantian fancy of a "Ding An Sich" (DAS).
Peirce often said that his pragmatic philosophy was just Kantianism without
the "thing in itself", and so this singular point of difference is critical
to understanding what in the heck he was getting at, in the first instance.
> 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.
These are, of course, interesting things to talk about.
They have nothing to do with the fancy of the DAS, or
the "Absolutely Incognizable" (AI) -- hash codes crash,
what can you do!?
The question is not whether there are things that lie beyond our ken --
the question is whether one can say that one has any inkling of them?
And by an "inkling" I do not mean just an "effusion an ink", no more,
I mean the shade of conceit that one has a reason to be conceited of.
Again, the Magus claims to call spirits, fine, the question is still
whether they come when he calls them. In computer science one finds
concern with the "effective sign" (ES) and the "effective text" (ET),
and so I have always found that poems and programs share one sort of
a definition, to wit, "The Words That Do", but not just any words do,
and so we must ask "What is the difference that makes a difference?",
a question to which we have been advised not to await a final answer,
but that issues in a large variety of recursive, partial, functional
answers that must be adapted and fitted to this or that circumstance.
I will have to put off, for just a little bit, talking about Penrose's
spin on this stuff. It is another one of those things that a big chunk
of my dissertation, somewhat incidentally, was called on to address, and
so I will need to back away, regroup, and try to remember what perspective
it was that I eventually found from which I thought it best to approach it.
> 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.
By George, I think you've got it!
The only surprising thing is how long it took anybody to notice it,
historically speaking. And as we examine the more pressing question
of how the ontogeny of our present effort will probably recapitulate,
if we are not careful, the phylogeny of our common intellectual past,
among other things, asking how we can build theorem-provers that are
better than this at recognizing contradictions in terms, such as the
ones instanced by this supposed "ability to know the un-know-able"
or this "fancy of a notion of a conception of an incognito", well,
I think there may be a residue of interest for us in these matters.
> 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.
Speaking of rhetorical moves, this is a perennial favorite here.
> So, I request that we halt the dialog, and agree to disagree,
> or else take our correspondence offlist if necessary.
Voila! The halting problem does have a solution after all.
Until Later,
Jon Awbrey
¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤