Ep. 396: Peirce on Knowledge (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 396 is something like, can we base knowledge on intuitions? And we've had three papers by Charles Sanders Peirce: questions concerning certain faculties, subject consequences of the four incapacities, and on a new list of categories all published in 1867 and 1868. More information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linson Meyer in Madison, Wisconsin, only sure of my own existence because of my many errors.

0:43 Wes: This is Seth Paskin, unable to be presented from being, and yet being can be presented from me. In Austin, Texas.

0:51 Dylan: This is Wes Alwan, the mediating representation representing the relate, standing for the correlate with which the mediating representation is itself in relation. In Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:04 Mark: This is Dylan Casey, assembled by Many Fibers in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:10 Dylan: All right, so I chose my opening with Mark's favorite phrase in the whole reading.

1:15 Mark: Yes, I pasted that in Slack in particular. Saying this kind of verbiage makes me want to throw up.

1:21 Dylan: It took me a long time to understand what he was talking. I mean, you know, quote unquote, understand what he was talking about with that, at least, you know, nominally understand.

1:30 Wes: I feel like the ideas were not so difficult. But his verbiage is unnecessarily complex.

1:37 Mark: We've never seen that before.

1:39 Wes: No, it's highly unusual for philosophers.

1:42 Mark: So our last visit to this fellow was back in 2010, and it was the second episode that Dylan ever appeared on that he was still a guest with us. And we did the fixation of belief and how to make our ideas clear. At that point, it was just in the context of pragmatism. And we didn't even spend the whole episode on Peirce. We just sort of made it a little preface to talk about James and to talk about pragmatism more generally, the stuff that we read this time. So, yeah, Dylan, you, I think, looked this up on Claude or whatever. These are sort of the foundational texts for a approaching him as a philosophy of science person. Is that right?

It started with the fact that we were intending to do Susan Hack on Evidence and Inquiry, and she points to Peirce a great deal, at least somewhat explicitly, but also as a intellectual forbearer, and so wanted to preface the conversation about her stuff with some of the purse. And so I went looking and used some help from Claude to pick some readings that were Directly informing her work. And so that's where this group comes from. Now, Claude wouldn't be unique in picking out these particular group attacks. They sort of go together, as far as I can tell, generally about his metaphysics and his epistemology.

So, yeah, questions concerning certain faculties. Claim for a man. I really enjoyed that one. It's sort of written like the Aquinas that we read. Right. Here's a series of questions. And I didn't look if he was consistent about this, but I think at least one case, I think he's like, you know, sort of gives the. It would seem like not, but actually. And then he's going to argue just. Just like Aquinas did. He certainly is familiar with all that medieval stuff. So it's questions about intuitions, about self consciousness. Do we have know. Is introspection even a thing?

Can a sign be incognizable? Can we think without signs? Things like that. So good sort of psychology and. Yeah, what a weird figure that he kind of comes down like he's all semiotics, like one of those, like Saussure, you know, human beings end up being signs. This is a very weird thing that we'll have to get into. But also rather almost behaviorist. Not denying that qualia exist, but they certainly don't do any work. Right. There really is no introspection. Anything we think we know about the mind, we know because of external observations. And then we surmise that there must be something mental.

So it's not saying the mental is.

4:34 Dylan: Well, we surmise it's not surmising. Well, maybe surmising is a good word for it. It's abduction specifically and inference to the best explanation. But yeah, he's not an eliminativist about qualia. That's important. He's just saying that they're a result of this inferential process like everything else, and they're not simply given to us.

4:55 Mark: And then some consequences of the foreign capacities follows directly from this paper and gets into some really interesting territory, although it gets very hard to read. And then the third paper, which I guess was the earliest one, was the one from a year before. No. Well, they're all listed on here as being from 1868. I thought I had something that I looked at.

5:14 Wes: He actually refers, and I think he refers in the second one, he refers to the fact that the third one is actually in the back of the same volume of essays. So they were at least published together.

5:26 Dylan: I think the order is new. List of categories, then questions, then consequences.

5:31 Mark: Yeah, so I Think new list of categories was first. And that one is very hard. Like we can give you the overview of it, but I found that very hard to get through on a page by page basis. Very much like pulling teeth, but a very interesting figure.

5:46 Dylan: But yeah, these are all very difficult papers, I think, in their own right. And he's very original. He's difficult to read. I think some of that. Right. It could be phrased better. He could be giving examples that are clear. But also it's a product of his originality and the fact that he's coming up with really interesting and strange new ideas. So I found it very exciting, even though quite difficult and even after coming away from it, you know, reading Stanford Encyclopedia article and lots and lots and lots of discussions with Claude about every little puzzling thing in the papers as I was reading them, you know, can I come away from it saying I fully understand it?

Do I understand what motivates him when he says that a human being is a sign? Not. Not exactly. Do I understand his sign theory and this use of the word interpretant and all the other lingo kind of, I guess, you know, as a system. But intuitively I feel like I'm not connected exactly to what's motivating it and what problems it's solving. Because some of this, you know, he's responding in some ways to the logic textbooks of his time, I found out. So it's a critique of logic as it's understood at the time. Time, to some extent. He's steeped in Kant, he's steeped in Hegel, he's steeped in Scholastics.

So there's all sorts of things that he's responding into. And those things here that he's often not telling you that he's, oh, look, so and so said such and such. I mean, he does refer directly to scotus, who, it turns out he's strongly influenced by even some of his categories. And the way he's breaking things down comes straight out of scholastic philosophy. But other than a few footnotes here and there, we don't get told exactly how he's relating to those past things. It's all very indirect.

7:35 Mark: So I think some of his language is very challenging. And the parts about the detailed logic, I think in particular, and I agree that his reference sort of what's going on, his references to that are challenging. What I find so accessible, honestly, is his starting point, or the starting point for me, which is his critique of Descartes and Descartes, effectively Descartes metaphysics and his Starting point about how we know we exist and what the basic heuristic for how things arise, how things are present for us in the world and how we come to think of them, in which it gets pushed further back.

And the question isn't about, you know, starting from doubt and then finding out where we get certainty. And most importantly, that somehow that certainty about the world lies within us and we just have to cut away the wheat for the chaff. But actually, that understanding involves the building of the world to align with what the world is. That's. I think one of the reasons it's so challenging is that the path from someone like Plato to Descartes is actually a lot more clear than where he's at, because he's not putting the truth of the world as being something that you access.

It's something that's effectively built, and not exactly in the constructivist sense, but in the fact of. Navigated to. And I find the establishment of our existence and the establishment of truth based upon doubt and error super interesting point of view about it and frankly, pretty powerful. The other thing about the weirdness is that when I'm reflecting on the weirdness, I find myself also trying, you know, remembering the weirdness of Descartes and the weirdness of Plato and the weirdness of all these other folks where, well, we have the mind and we have the body, and the mind exists as a separate entity from the body, and they're joined somehow.

Who knows how that they connect to one another? Or we have the forms of the world and they exist in their own realm and they have access to them. He at least has the way in which the world exists, exists on its own, and that we get access to it and we figure that out.

Does Seth, did he have some opening thoughts?

10:04 Wes: Well, I think you've all hit. I think the identity building through error and the Critique of Descartes are certainly the highlights. I think the biggest thing for me was just that the story about how Peirce fits into the canon is that he's just like, oh, he's one of the pragmatists, but he was a weirdo. You know, like, he doesn't fit in with you.

10:26 Mark: That's exactly how he fits in.

We had Royce recently in kind of the same category that he was a pragmatist, but there's nothing we saw that was particularly pragmatic about it. He definitely read a lot of Hegel and Kant. So what do you do with that?

10:40 Dylan: And he's explicitly an idealist as well.

10:43 Mark: Yeah, he calls himself an Idealist. A scholastic idealist. Right.

10:46 Dylan: Well, scholastic realist.

10:48 Mark: Scholastic realist. That's right.

10:49 Dylan: And a. Something idealist. I forget.

10:51 Wes: But, yeah, he's like somebody you read in graduate school. Not as an undergraduate kind of a character, but he, in his time, I think, was pretty well regarded. And wasn't he affiliated with Harvard? I mean, he's. Yeah, he was pretty prestigious. When I was reading this, I was like, what in God's name is he actually. What is going on? Like, this is not what I thought I was going to be reading. But then as those unique ideas percolate through, I was like, wow, this is actually like. There's some really interesting thought that's happening here. And it has really. I don't say nothing to do with pragmatism, but it's not falling in line with kind of like the standard picture of what he's supposed to be all about. And so that was fun, but I do not like the way he writes.

11:34 Mark: It's how to make your ideas unclear.

11:37 Dylan: Yeah, I want to. I want to just clarify. So Peirce graduated from Harvard in 1859 with a degree in chemistry, but he was a poor student otherwise. And basically from 1859 to 1891, he was employed by the US coast and geodetic Survey, I think, which his father had run. And he had a teaching position at some point, but lost it, I guess. He was. He was teaching logic at Johns Hopkins. But that geodetic survey job was the one constant in his life until he lost that. And later on he was actually in poverty and relied on people to support him. So he was doing the philosophy stuff in his spare time, but wrote just a voluminous amount of stuff. 12,000 printed pages.

12:23 Wes: Really.

12:23 Dylan: Yeah, well.

12:24 Mark: And he said that he. He had read Critique of Pure Reason so much that he had it memorized.

12:29 Dylan: I got this on, which is very believable. You know, you get the savant vibe off of this guy, Right?

12:35 Wes: No doubt.

12:36 Dylan: Like he was talking about Descartes when he was 4 years old, that kind of thing.

12:40 Mark: So I think Descartes is a good place to start with this. Right. The beginning of two of the papers are about Descartes. Consequences of Four Incapacities. It's specifically about. Look, hey, Descartes says, begin with universal doubt. I think that's stupid. I think we can't actually do that. The one I think most relevant to our last. I'm not going to just summarize the whole thing, but the one, you know, that really kicks off. Then the first question concerning the Faculties of man is. It teaches that the ultimate test of certainty is to be found in the individual consciousness.

So this is what Habermas was calling subjectivity and kept saying this was what the Enlightenment was about. It's not that everything is just, you know, up to my whim. That's not what subjectivity is, but it's up to the ultimate epistemological arbitrator is an individual, not a community. So Peirce is going to argue against this, just like Habermas did, just like Hegel did. They know it's actually a community that gets to be the ultimate safeguard of, you know, whether this is a reasonable hypothesis. And he's a fallibilist. So it's just, you know, it's like we've been talking about with all the philosophy of science episodes, that we do the best we can.

We as a scientific community, as a linguistic community, as an ethical community, we come to some consensus, but probably we're going to be wrong about something. And so it's really the community, the ultimate community of, as we said in our last treatment of this, what truth is for Purse is whatever the community of thinkers would eventually come up with, given infinite time to think about it.

14:06 Dylan: Yeah, I do want to say this was interesting to me because of the. My interest in testimonial evidence, but there is a Cartesian moment, even for testimonial evidence, which is what we have to evaluate it based on psychological plausibility, which is an a priori, is one of our resources that I would consider to some extent, a priori, like logical consistency and other things that we use to evaluate evidence. Those, those things don't actually come from experience. And so we can. We need the community, but we also need certain internal resources that allow us to depend on the community.

And I think those are introspective. So that's where I disagree. And I also, I just want to point out that Descartes, of course, was not a skeptic and he didn't believe that we could doubt those things. He's proving that we can't doubt them. It's a reductio ad absurdum. If he can be accused of being a closet skeptic. It is in his representationalist epistemology, where we have a veil dividing us from the world. But it's simply not a legitimate critique of Descartes to say that he thought that we could doubt everything when that's exactly what he's trying to disprove.

15:08 Wes: Once again, I feel like I must have read a different paper than the rest of you. That is perhaps one thing that Peirce is saying in these papers, but in the questions concerning certain faculties claim for men, he's making a completely different argument against the Cartesian position. Or maybe we're not there yet.

15:29 Dylan: No, let's get into that. I was just using that as a preamble because I think the ultimate, the overall tenor of this, about the reliance on introspection, I mean, that's the overall point and the reliance on an intuition of the existence of the self and in particular the intuition of anything, the intuition of any given raw sense data that's given to us as some sort of foundation of knowledge, including Cartesian clear and distinct ideas. But he's borrowing from Descartes as well in an interesting way. So Descartes, I think, therefore I am, is just Augustine's I err, therefore I am.

So his talk of knowing knowledge from error is not unrelated to the Cartesian moment. It's just a more empirical psychological version of that. So I find that very interesting. So I think we should be attuned to the fact that as usual, it's not just a wholesale, wholesale rejection. It's. I would see it as an adaptation. But yeah, in the beginning, his whole project is to say that all cognition is mediated, all cognition is inferential, including self knowledge. That's where we begin with question one.

16:38 Mark: The first question, I should just read it verbatim here. Whether by the simple contemplation of a cognition independently of any previous knowledge, without reasoning from signs, we are enabled rightly to judge whether that cognition has been determined by a previous cognition or whether it refers immediately to its object.

16:57 Dylan: Okay, so let's say what we mean by determination here. I mean, ultimately it's. For him it's going to mean an inferential relation of three different kinds. But here he's not telling us exactly what determination means. Is it Humean associationist psychology? Is it right, some causal account from the outside about the brain, one brain state following on. On another. It's quite vague until we get the positive picture that determination means inference from one cognition to another. And we'll get into the details of that.

17:33 Mark: Yeah, I mean, I think that just amounts to saying that you understand what he means by determined by previous cognitive. Determined by his answer to the question.

Well, maybe it's easiest to look at what the contrast is. Refers immediately to its object. So refers is a strange word to have there. And of course it would depend on what the object in question is. If we're thinking about apperception because he is going to be explicit in this paper that you think that there's a physical object right in front of you and you look at it and you might think you get an image of that. So the thought that you have the sensation refers to the object, it was caused by the object, it is of the object. And he's going to take this apart and say, no, actually you're seeing this thing in three dimensional space.

But three dimensional space is very clearly, it's been established, is something that is constructed by the senses, which only, you know, we know how the eyes work, we know how it's basically gathering a bunch of little particles of information, individual photons being activated, and somehow our brain puts that together into the picture of the physical object. So just as Descartes said, you know, when they sort of discovered this, we don't know for sure if we have an image and that's going to be, you know, do we actually even have images? But if we have this sense of the phone that I was looking at, we don't know that it is caused by a phone or by something else.

Right. This is a very Cartesian point and it certainly we don't know if the, the image we have or the idea we have. Right. In fact, the, what he's going to get into is that the experiences that we, the only intuitions that we could have would be instantaneous. Whereas clearly when I see the phone, I recognize it as a phone, as a physical object. So as we've said, you know, in many of these with Sellers and with Kant, is that we are using prior knowledge to construct this object. So no, it is not. At least we can't know. Maybe it actually there is that thing exactly like I'm picturing it and that just somehow, you know, the senses are just reconstructing it to me.

But, you know, we don't know for sure that this is an intuition. It very well could be caused by some prior psychological states. And as he gets into it, he says, yes, it's definitely caused by some other psychological states.

19:57 Wes: Right. But notice that the phrasing of the question is whether we can, by the simple contemplation of it, independently of any other knowledge, without reasoning, we are enabled rightly to judge whether it's one or the other. So what he's doing here, and what I was trying to say was I feel like he's trying to start the attack on the Cartesian idea of clear and distinctness. The idea that you can even distinguish that an idea was generated by you or Put in your head by God, for example. Right. Or as you said, if you want to look at it from the empiricist perspective, you can just start adopting the language of what information is contained in perception.

Right. Versus added by the mind. And you know, can we get. What would pure perception, what does pure perception actually look like or what have you? And you know, so he's saying like, whatever ideas you have, the bottom line is you just can't contemplate that idea and tell that it's quote unquote clear and distinct because it was planted in you and there's no. Or you can't reason to it to say like, oh, well, you could reason to it, but you get what I'm trying to say.

21:09 Dylan: Yeah, but I think we're talking about sense data in particular, and this is a problem that had come up in our discussions of Hegel with respect to Kant. Right. Kant says, well, we're given a manifold and then that manifold gets processed into something spatial and temporal and causal and all the rest of it. But we can't be given a manifold because a many is a category and there are many other things implicit in the idea of a manifold that are already categorical. So this is a big problem. It's not unrelated to the problem of the thing in itself. So there is no non cognitive given. It doesn't. Right. We can't call it a given.

21:48 Mark: He.

But that's basically his answer, right?

21:50 Dylan: Yeah. He understands that there are objects outside of us stimulating our senses and causing these things in us. It's just that we don't get an immediate representation or. Right. The sense. It's not like the sense data or an immediate picture of what's coming from the outside that are handed over. Right. So it's not like we can drill down into perception and find the smallest units, like the unit red and say. Well, red kind of crosses the line between. It sits on the boundary between the external world and the internal world. Actually everything is caught behind the line within the internal world.

And by the time it becomes not just something we're aware of, but something that has any implications for cognition, it is already cognitive. So it may be under. Beneath a level of awareness. But in order to play with what's inside the circle of awareness, it has to be of that kind of material, the sign material or the cognitive material. It can't be this special thing that we know intuitively.

22:55 Mark: I mean, this amounts to saying that we don't think without having highly refined cognitions already. There's no thinking that happens about bare information that then gets assembled into actual ideas. It's all we're already highly refined into. This is the myth of the given that we have cognitions that we're working with and those cognitions get. Get refined. This goes to the triangle example.

23:27 Dylan: Well, let's wait for that.

23:28 Mark: Yeah.

23:29 Wes: The way that I tried to explain it to somebody the other day was in some, you know, traditional pictures, right? There is information, let's call it, that is given by perceptual data that then is manipulated and by the mind. And the way I would characterize Peirce is saying is later on we're going to talk about what he, that he says, you know, all thought is representation or signs.

23:55 Mark: Right.

23:55 Wes: But essentially what he says is there is no representation outside of the mind. Essentially he's saying the senses are literally physical processes. Light hits the eye, sound waves hit the ear, and then the representation of that physical interaction takes place post hoc. There's literally no content given from that that's not created by the mind. And so even at the very basic level of the representation or the cognition of just a pure sound, a tone, for example, that's already thought, that's already a construct. Now it's a very simple thing that can then build into two other things. But essentially that's how what I took him to mean, and that's why he thinks everything that we think at all is a representation. And that's. And that has some pretty far reaching consequences.

24:50 Dylan: So an intuitionist could say much the same thing, right? They could say, well, yep, the brain is affected, the senses are affected, and then the brain is affected. And then there's lots and lots of processing, lots of brain processing before we ever have a sensation of red. And then the red pops up. And that's our intuition. That's a perfectly intuitionist point of view. So to distinguish Pierce from that, we have to get into his weird idea that red doesn't just pop up. Right? You know, at some point after those, you know, brain processes have done enough work, we get this sort of inferential process that goes on forever because we can keep subdividing it.

Maybe we do need to talk about the triangle. But let's just read this like next paragraph because I think it's important in getting at what he means by determination. But the idea is that to get red, we have to have a representation that's determined by previous cognitions in the sense that it's something like a conclusion that follows from premises in inference, which is a very weird idea, right? Because so it's not just brain processes behind the scenes produce red. It's an inferential process that's internal to the mind. And it's not simply causal, but it's inferential.

Those are two different things. So he'll say throughout this paper, the term intuition will be taken as signifying a cognition not determined by a previous cognition of the same object, and therefore so determined by something out of the consciousness. Let me request the reader to note this. Intuition here will be nearly the same as a premise, not itself a conclusion. The only difference being that premises and conclusions are judgments, whereas intuition may, as far as its definition states, be any kind of cognition whatever. Right? So it's not like the axiom that everything else builds on.

It's just one in the series of inferences. And you can never say it's the first thing. It's the first axiom in the system. It's always some inference related to some axiom that lies indefinitely in the past, that can never be gotten to. So he'll say, but just as a conclusion, good or bad, is determined in the mind of the reasoner by its premise. So cognitions, not judgments, may be determined by previous cognitions. And a cognition not so determined and therefore determined directly by the transcendental object is to be termed an intuition.

27:08 Mark: So this.

27:09 Dylan: The point is that there is no. It's an inferential process that goes backwards forever, even though it doesn't last forever. Right? It just. Right. It's almost like subdividing a line. And you keep subdividing it, it becomes. Or some curve going to. Through an asymptote. Right. You can keep inserting inferential moments without expanding it temporarily indefinitely. So there's never a first axiom within the inferential system. It's inferences all the way down.

27:38 Mark: And part of the reason that that is, I think, successful from his point of view is that the inference is all the way down. That is not problematic because that's not the end where the true thing is. Right? The true thing is the end point of sequences of inferences. So you're going towards the truth. You're not going back to get to the truth. You're not uncovering and plowing away all the distractions, all the false things that you think and trying to distill down to the nugget of truth.

28:14 Dylan: Right?

28:15 Mark: You're always going forward in your inferences to get to what the true thing is. And so the fact that you can keep going back and there's the start doesn't matter in this case, the start doesn't matter about the inferences. It doesn't determine the end.

28:30 Wes: I think I understand. Yeah, the start doesn't matter because what matters is the aggregate.

28:35 Mark: Yeah. And the sequence matters. And where you get to is what matters. And what he's claiming is that the

28:42 Wes: starting point doesn't matter because it's not deductive, it's inferential.

28:47 Mark: It's inferential and it's. Then I think you would probably go so far as it is data constrained. So you're constantly refining it with the data that you have. But this is where you get to that. You know, some discussion about Bayesian inference process.

29:03 Dylan: You know, we know that in a typical inference, if it's a deductive inference, then the truth of the axioms is what matters. Right. It could be a valid inference, but get us to false conclusions. Hence the foundationalists worry about establishing some point that is axiomatic and with those axioms as self evidently true. But Peirce is interested in particular in the concept of probability and abduction or inference to the best explanation. So that in a way what we're producing is theories based on what we're doing were given. So since the sensation of red itself will turn out to be something like the theory, something like an.

Well, not just something like he explicitly says it's an inference to the best explanation or abduction. I think some philosophers would quibble with me just simply identifying those two things. But that's what abduction is, a related idea. At the very least, it gives us candidates for the best explanation of some phenomenon.

30:04 Mark: Yes.

30:05 Dylan: So that's the sense in which it can be truth seeking. But we do need mind independent constraints. Ultimately it's just that those mind independent constraints, which he has a word for that in other papers, I forget the word. But in any case, it's not simply given to us as this intra mental content.

30:25 Mark: So I'm frustrated in that we're basically one paragraph, two paragraphs into questions concerning certain faculties claim for man. But I think to make sense of what you've just said about inference, it's about half of the content of some consequences of the four incapacities. So you know, we can just say he says that this follows, right, because in some consequences of four incapacities he says here are the conclusions of my previous paper and the second one of these we have no power of intuition, but every cognition is determined logically by previous cognitions.

And so he says that from that it follows. Here, let me read a little of. Okay, so yeah, this is just the bottom of page two in the second paper. The classic modifications of consciousness with which we must convince our inquiry must be one whose existence is indubitable, whose laws are best known. And therefore, since this knowledge comes from the outside which most closely follows the external facts, that is, it must be some kind of cognition here. So he does sound rather foundationalist here. Here we may hypothetically admit that the second proposition of the former paper, according to which there is no absolute first cognition of any object, but cognition arises by continuous process, must begin then with a process of cognition, and with that process whose laws are best understood most closely follow external facts.

This is no other than the process of valid inference which proceeds from the premise A to its conclusion, B, only if, as a matter of fact, such a proposition as B is always or usually true. When a proposition such A is true. Right. So this is introducing what he's going to explain in the rest of that paper, that you might have thought, just by us presenting this like, well, is it an intuition or is it. You might have thought it was that the alternative was it was caused.

32:07 Dylan: Right.

32:07 Mark: That there is activity on the retina, activity in the brain. This caused the image of whatever the physical object is. But to say that even these physiological things are happening like they're transmitting information.

32:21 Dylan: Right.

32:21 Mark: Which we kind of say, we understand that this is, you know, the way cognitive scientists think that the eyes are transferring information to the brain. The brain is doing some processing. Transferring. Well, let's just actually look at that. Say, what is the information? Well, you can state it all as propositions and see which propositions follow from other propositions. But the only thing, you know, this is not going to be a matter of, well, let's trace back and see what the first proposition is. Because the first proposition isn't even going to be something that human beings are aware of, right.

You're not aware of when some little things tickle your eye or the sensors in your nose. But he wants to say that that is information that. So what appears in our consciousness is backed up, is caused by, is an inference from some less clear prior judgments, which are then caused by some less clear prior judgment.

Less clear.

And so they recede into the physiological haze. But all these, he still wants to say, are judgments that are connected by inference. It's a very weird view.

33:24 Dylan: Very well put. Yeah. Receding into the physiological haze. And his point is that we don't have a firm dividing line between what's physiological and then what, Right. There's no simple first moment of cognition where, okay, now, you know, we were. It was lights off or it's all behind the scenes brain stuff. And now it's. Here's the first one in my mind. It's to go backwards cognitively is to keep subdividing a line. Let's say we'll get to his triangle example, I guess, but. But it's to say, right. So if I have cognition one now, and I can go backwards in time to figuring out, okay, what determined that cognition?

What determined that cognition? I can go on, he says, forever. But what I'm doing is. Doesn't mean I'm extending that process of inference forever in the past. It's just that I could divide a line in half, and then I could divide the half and half, and then I could divide the. That half and half so I can get an infinite series without an infinitely extended line. And that's the way he thinks cognition works. Which is just another way of saying, yeah, we don't, as Mark said, Right. We don't know where the physiological haze, where that ends and where the cognition begins.

34:37 Wes: And this is also true. You don't have to think about it in terms of linearity and going backwards. It's like there are cognitions that make up simple cognitions, that make up complex cognitions that you can't directly access. Like, you couldn't sit right now and break down your entire visual field into individual components. Like, you just can't access the simple cognition that the light is starting and forming in your eyes.

35:10 Dylan: So I think every cognition is in principle accessible for him. Right.

35:14 Wes: I'm telling you, he doesn't like the

35:16 Dylan: idea of unconscious cognitions or.

35:18 Mark: Well, I think unconscious is okay, but just not transcendental.

35:22 Wes: Yeah, it's not. I'm not. I'm talking about this. This is an epistemic question, not a conceptual question. It's just like, you don't have the ability to just access one pinpoint of light that hits your eye.

35:35 Mark: Right.

35:35 Wes: That makes up of the millions that make up that picture that you're seeing.

35:39 Mark: Yeah, I mean, I think he might start talking about what on earth makes you think of it that way. If I'm talking about isolating a pinpoint of light, I'm going to be doing that through something other than my eye.

35:52 Wes: All I was trying to say was that this is another way of seeing things that's in support of his view that you don't have to try to get to some sort of essential, simple, original starting point or like, break things down into component parts.

36:05 Dylan: Well, let's do his triangle. I mean, I take what you're saying, Seth, but what I was trying to do is give a version of his triangle example.

36:12 Mark: I'd love to hear you explain that, because I didn't get that.

36:16 Dylan: So imagine you take a triangle and you turn it over, you dip it in water, and then you slowly take it out. At any given point, no matter how far you've taken the triangle out, there's still infinitely many horizontal lines between the line that the water makes with the triangle and the apex of the triangle. And that's another way of getting at the fact that we could still have infinitely many cognitions between this hypothetical starting point, the apex, and then wherever we are right now in cognition, which is where the line on the triangle is where the water makes the line on the triangle.

So it's responding to this idea that, you know, you may think an infinite series of cognitions is impossible and therefore that there must be a first. Right. That's the obvious argument against him when he says that there is no Cartesian given, there is no intuition. But, you know, if you try to ask for the very first instance at which the triangle is entirely out of the water, you can't really point to it. Pierce was very interested in these boundary states, right? And it's become a whole subject in contemporary philosophy.

37:20 Mark: The.

37:20 Dylan: The state of actually being out of the water is preceded by an infinite number of partial immersions. And each of those partial immersions is a correlate of right. And the infinite number of cognitions that stand between us and the supposed vertex, which is the given. So the vertex would. Is something like right, our cognition terminating and intuition, which is like a very sharp first apprehension, like, of a sense datum, like red. But really what's happening is we. We would think of it, I think this mark, you know, you've already put it very well.

But really what you're getting as you go backwards is this diminishment in vividness towards a limit of zero. But you never reach that limit. That's why you might use the right line, the curve going towards an asymptote. You can always get closer and closer, but you can never actually reach it. So this idea, the first cognition, the apex, is really like an ideal limit. The foundations, foundationalists want that limit, but the limit is unreachable. We're stuck within this kind of cognitive Zeno's paradox where, right, you know, we can't ever really go fully backwards to that first intuition.

38:29 Mark: But I also want to, again, I want to point out that what you're saying is exactly right in terms of the way he's describing it. But to me, it's critical that it's not the case that this going backwards gets you to what the true thing is. And that's why you would have this foundationalist critique that somehow where you started was what held the whole answer. And the mistake that I think you would say you're making there is the one about the deductive logic question that you have to have the premises that are perfectly true and that you can have perfect deductions from them.

But as you pointed out, Wes, that doesn't exist for purse because of, well, basically the probabilities involved that simplified logic isn't the way in which everything in the world is apprehended. It's not the content of cognitions. And so, yes, you have that infinite regress, but it's not, again, that going backwards is not how you get get to true things. Right?

39:30 Dylan: As Mark pointed out, you know, it gets fuzzier and fuzzier. So there is no, you know, once again, there is no foundational cognition. There is no first cognition. That's not to say that there isn't a mind independent reality or that there is a first moment where the photon hits the eye, something like that. This is fully compatible with external causation and the idea that the world causally determines cognitions. It's just that it doesn't hand us a first cognition. We get some continuous process with an infinite number of steps, like a line that can be subdivided infinitely that will ultimately lead to us having cognitions that are inferentially related.

This is not an unproblematic view. The whole idea of the inferential relationship between cognitions is kind of weird, right? We normally think of inferences as warning, each, you know, being forms of warrant. Right. They give us a reason to believe something. And it's not clear that that can do what Pearce is saying with this triangle example.

40:31 Mark: Yeah, well, let's get more into even if as a brief diversion before we wrap this first half here, he's saving the term inference is very general. He's saving logic. Right. If you're saying Wesley, he's reacting to the logic textbooks of his time. It's because I'm sure they were not that different than the logic that we took in school in that it was learning, you know, modus ponens, modus tollens. It was learning rules of deductive logic. And if you bring in anything more than that, it's like, well, informal fallacies that, you know, if you say if A then B, B therefore A.

Well, that's actually a fallacy because that's not what the first premise said the first time just said if A then B. It didn't say anything about well, if B then what is the probability of A? But first presents that as well, that's actually. Which is that? Is that a hypothesis or is that induction? I forget which. I think that's a hypothesis. Right.

41:30 Dylan: Hypothesis is. Yeah. Which is what I've been calling abduction or induction the best explanation. Yeah.

41:34 Mark: So in other words, if you say if we know the major premise all men are mortal and we know instead of the minor premise Socrates is a man, we get Socrates is mortal as one of the premises. Can we then conclude from that that Socrates is a man? Well, the more people that we know who are mortal and we know all men are mortal, you know, or sorry, if we know more qualities about Socrates. Well, Socrates is also two legged and all men are. All men are two legged. Socrates is a biological organism that can reason and all men are that. You know, the more things like that we could, the more likely it would be to confirm the hypothesis that Socrates is a man.

But it's a. We're playing with the predicate here. So that is. Yes, it's a hypothetical argument or an abduction. When you do it the other way, right. I don't know all men are mortal. I know Socrates is a man. Socrates is mortal, therefore all men are mortal. That would be induction. Because the more subjects, right. Socrates is a man, Aristotle's a man, Wes is a man, Dylan's a man. And all these people, all these men are also mortal.

42:42 Dylan: Mortal.

42:43 Mark: So we have more and more premises. Then we get closer to the all men are mortal. Right. So induction is a much more familiar thing to us than abduction. But I'd never had the presentation of hey, you know, Socrates is. Or Aristotle's syllogism. If you just switch the order around, you can say, yeah, okay, that's what abduction is. That's what induction is. We're just changing the order of those three premises. The universal major premise, the individual minor premise and the conclusion, yeah, the scientific

43:11 Dylan: method, right, it involves these abductions and then we do. Instead of using his letters. Let me start with induction. And by the way, he was. The logic of the time is heavily influenced by court royal like 17th century logic textbooks. It really hasn't advanced I think much beyond that. It does include induction, but it wasn't sophisticated enough for Peirce. But he thinks of induction in terms of almost like political polling, like statistics. So if you were to draw a bunch of beans from a given bag and all of them were white, you could say, well, probably all the beans in the bag are white.

So that's the going from the minor premise to the. Which is what the taking of the samples from the bag is to the conclusion. If you already knew all the beans in the bag were white, and then you saw some white beans lying on a table, your abduction, your hypothesis would be that probably the beans came from that bag. And deduction. Right. You know, all the beans in the bag are white. You know these beans are from that bag, but you don't happen to be able to see them, but you can deduce that they will be white once they're uncovered. So that's a simple way of relating all of those things.

I don't know. That's probably not. Still not all that clear to listeners.

44:25 Mark: But just to bring it back to psychology before we wrap up part one here, so just think of all these judgments that your senses are making, which could just be like, so let's say the ultimate judgment that you come up with is this is an apple. That's the perceptual. It seems like it's just an intuition of an apple, but really it's round shape here, red dot here, red dot here. Hmm. This is. You know, an apple is a very common thing to see around the house. I'm looking in my fridge right now. I put apples in there before. Or just all these different beliefs and perceptual data are coming together to make you a guess that this is an apple.

It could be that somebody snuck in your house and put some wax fruit in your fridge, or that you're dreaming or any number of other things. But we make an inductive or a hypothetical inference based on the given information that this is an apple. And that works insofar as it is, you know, you don't bite into it and it's waxed.

45:27 Dylan: Well, even though the. Well, no, I mean, it's not that we're trying to figure out that it's a real app. The abduction doesn't tell us a real. It's a real apple. The abduction just tells us it looks like an apple. So I think it's better to take a very simple thing that was usually thought of as a sense datum, a given, like just redness. Redness is an abduction. A hypothesis, according to Pierce, that follows inferentially on other cognitions. It's a forced inference. And we don't really quite know that we're doing it. We're not sitting around thinking about it. But nonetheless, it's something like an abduction to give us the appearance of something being red. Red isn't just given to us. They're private. They're previous cognitions. There's some inferential operation on those cognitions, and redness is a conclusion.

46:14 Mark: Why is redness simpler than any object or any physical thing that I would point to in the world, be it an apple, a couch, a tree, a blade of grass, a dog, my kid? Why is redness any different than any of those things in terms of the way cognition is being used?

46:33 Dylan: Because it's usually thought of as what's intuited. It's usually thought of as a given, as the smallest. So I'm saying even that, even that is an abduction.

46:43 Mark: Okay?

We know that, you know, if we're seeing things under a different light or if somebody actually gives you. If you're expecting the apple to be red and somebody gives you a purple apple, you might see it as red. Or, you know, if you have a red apple and it's really dark and you're looking at that like, because, you know, it's an apple and you know, apples are red. Obviously it's not a great example because plenty of them are green. But you will conclude that even if you don't have the direct, normal perceptual

47:09 Wes: experience of red, that's not a bad example for purse.

47:13 Dylan: Listen, this is very important. Under certain circumstances, we might want to abduce whether something is a real apple or not. That's different from the construction of the appearances. Right? The appearance of a red apple is itself abduced, and it's. That's a whole different thing than us adducing that it's a real apple as opposed to a fake apple.

47:32 Mark: Well, with that, let's wrap up part one here. Come back for part two, or go to partialexaminedlife.com support and sign up. And you should see part two in your feed right away. Thanks.