Ep. 396: Peirce on Knowledge (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life, episode 396, part 2. We've been discussing some essays by Charles Sanders Peirce, questions concerning certain faculties, and some consequences of the four incapacities, which is sort of a continuation of that. So we had ended by saying that all mental processing on Peirce's account takes place via reasoning, via symbolic reasoning, even if it's not symbols that we can understand as symbols. Right? If when the rods and cones in the eye send particular signals, they're sending information but it's not like an English sentence that we.

But somehow he wants to say that the data that is received becomes part of a premise in an argument. And the results of that, the inference from the various premises to what we experience is an inference. And you might say, well, why bring. Even if you say, fine, they're not all deductive inferences. Some of them are inductive inferences or abduction, inference to the best explanation, the best making a hypothesis about something, you still might say, but doesn't logic, doesn't the idea of argumentation imply validity? Whereas people, if you're dream logic, that does not follow.

Oh, I have this premise and the conclusion falls from it. But he actually says in this second essay, questions concerning certain faculties, that even this is page seven. An apparent obstacle to the reduction of all mental action to the type of valid inferences is the existence of fallacious reasoning. But he wants to say, look, we're not talking about sound arguments where all the premises are true. We're just talking about getting to conclusion from premises. So when something appears to be an irrational leap, it's because there's some premise that is being held unconsciously, whatever that makes that make sense.

So if you're talking about dream logic, and I see one of Freud's example, something about a donkey and my father, I can't maybe in any case, if I make some sort of, what seems like an irrational leap between I see a donkey and then this donkey becomes my father, well, there is some underlying belief, something that has put itself in there as a premise of that particular cognition that is pushing me logically toward the second image from the first one. So all of these associations of images, they're not just random, you know, as you might think if you just looked at the conscious phenomena, but on Peirce's account, they have to be backed up by some sort of underlyingly held additional premises.

2:51 Wes: Yeah, I mean, it's unclear how you ground an associationist psychology.

2:56 Seth: They're not premises. But in the strictest sense.

2:59 Wes: And he doesn't try to tell us at length how you would ground or at all how you might ground associationists. Right. So for Locke or Hume, what are the three associations? Resemblance, contiguity.

3:14 Mark: I think he talks about those in here.

3:16 Wes: Well, he does, yeah, but where does he talk about it?

3:19 Mark: Causality is the third one, so it's page 16.

3:23 Wes: Right. So let's just read that a little bit. If this be the case, what goes by the name of the association of images is in reality an association of judgments. Right. So he is trying to reduce association to inference. Right. Because Mark, what you were giving is a prime example in Freud of association. I just have some kind of free association from one image to another. And it's completely, it's illogical except that the horse comes to represent my father and my fear of horses is representative of my fear of my father. Something like the affect just jumps from one thing to another because of some contingent event in my life. All right, but here he's going to say. But it would be equally true to say that signs denote what they do on the three principles of resemblance, contiguity and causality. There can be no question that anything is a sign of whatever.

Is a sign of whatever.

Yeah. Is associated with it by resemblance, by contiguity or by causality. Nor can there be any doubt that any sign recalls the thing signified. So then the association of ideas consists in this. That a judgment occasions another judgment of which it is the sign. Now this is nothing less nor more than inference. I'm not sure if this is reducing association to inference or if what he's saying is that the elements of inference, because they are signs, are already function according to associationist principles. And then inferences are built up on top of that. So going to. I'm something like. But yeah, it's not clear to me.

4:47 Mark: Should we just go to the second question? Back to our first, our first paper here. Do we have an intuitive self consciousness which we've been saying, you know, for the. Our paradigm case of intuitions, an intuition of a physical object or of red or something like that. But knowing that he has Descartes in his sights here.

5:07 Seth: Right.

5:07 Mark: One of the prime intuitions we have, right. Are of mental contents. Thoughts exist or the I, you might think that I have direct experience of myself as a thinking thing or you could interpret it that I only directly have an intuition of the thoughts. And I conclude. But then I must have an intuition that every thought must have a thinker somewhere. There must be some intuitive judgments that came in here and you would think in any case, all of what Descartes is doing is intuitive. Psychology is examining his own intuition. So do we have an intuitive self consciousness? And Peirce wants to argue actually we don't. Anything that we say about our inner world is an inference from something observed about the external world.

5:53 Seth: He's not saying we don't have it.

5:55 Wes: Yeah, it's just not intuitive. And this is not new. Kant says we don't have any intuitive self consciousness. We have an empirical form of self consciousness which is like being aware of an emotion, for instance, being aware of some other inner state in time that's intuitive, from which we can, you know, make inferences about a empirical self. But when it comes to some sort of transcendental self, that becomes a formal condition of the unity of experience. It's not an object within experience, it's not intuited, it's not known in any real sense. So that seems to build off of that type of idea, this rejection of an intuitive self consciousness. Now, did Descartes think we had an intuitive self consciousness? I suppose if he thinks that we can infer a metaphysical substance, the self. But it is an inference, so it's unclear to me.

So this is where I find myself. Just I get myself wound around and don't even know what words mean anymore. So what does intuitive mean? What do we mean? If someone says, oh, it is an intuitive self conscious. That's what I'm talking about.

7:06 Mark: It's directly determined by the object, by the self. The self is lying there before me as just like the glass or whatever. It is the phone that I was contemplating the external world, and I merely

7:19 Wes: intuit it directly or not inferred. Right. And a question, one he tells us it just means not inferred. It's a given. It's like an axiom or a premise. It's just given to us and then we start inference off.

Or it's. If I said manifestly apprehended, I don't

7:35 Mark: know about that because manifestly apprehended, I think that's the thing that we start with. Are these experiences that we have and we do manifestly apprehend them. It's just a question of like, what is the source of it? Is it the thing or is it some chain of reasoning?

7:54 Seth: So I want to make a distinction here because I think it will help answer Dylan's question. There is no intuitive self consciousness. That's not even what he says in there. He's asking, do we have a special intuitive faculty that allows us, that gives us the ability to directly apprehend our own private I, unmediated as a given, with no intermediate concepts or any reasoning to get there? Do we just have this immediate given experience of ourself? Do we have that capability?

8:24 Wes: Yeah, so I was just trying to understand the word intuitive.

8:27 Seth: Yeah.

8:28 Wes: And if I understand that as unmediated direct experience of the self. If I talk about intuitive self consciousness.

8:35 Seth: Love it.

8:35 Wes: Okay. I'm just asking, is that what he means by that? I know he's denying it. And the way in which we're talking about. It makes me feel like how could anybody possibly think there's anything such a thing as intuition?

8:46 Mark: Well, that's what he's ultimately going to conclude at the end of the paper.

8:50 Wes: Lots of people think there's intuition for sense data. That's a live philosophical question. I don't think you'll find philosophers today who think we intuit a self, but if there were to be that, it would be on the model of intuiting any external object. Right. The intuition for objects is there's mind, independent objects, things in themselves, and they causally affect us. They hand us in the first moment of cognition, the. Given the data, the, the axioms that we can then infer on top of if we want or associate on top of. But in this case, to do this, this would be a metaphysical position where there's a substantial self and that somehow our consciousness can be affected by that soul or substantial self.

That would be one position where we're handed an intuition of its existence as the thinker behind the thought, or something like that. But yeah, I think that's a much more controversial position than intuition for sense data. So him rejecting it is not some new thing here.

9:53 Mark: Well, Seth, when I started to say, do we have an intuitive self consciousness? And you said, well, we do have it, it's just not intuitive. But he. This is. I thought that's what he goes on to deny two questions later. So why were you insisting that on his. Seems like you wanted to say that, oh, we do have self consciousness, it's just not intuitive.

10:12 Seth: No, no, I'm just saying the question he poses is he says, how do I know this thing, the private self? Do I know it by a special intuitive faculty, or is it determined by previous cognitions? So he's not asking whether or not at the top, he says whether we have an intuitive self consciousness. And he says, oh, well, here's what I mean by self consciousness. Right? It's pure apperception. The self assertion of the ego, self consciousness and the recognition of my private self. And he says the question is, how do I know it? And so at first we have to get to this thing.

Like he's basically saying, so if you are asserting that you have an intuitive self consciousness, then you have to be asserting that you know it either by the special intuitive faculty or by previous cognitions. It's only later that he's going to question or deny that we have any such self consciousness as it's characterized here.

11:14 Wes: Right.

11:15 Mark: I think that one of the questions we're Going to get to. Is. Is he effectively some kind of behaviorist? Wes was stressing at the beginning he's not. He believes in qualia. But I'm not so sure. I feel like he is having just started reading some Dennett.

11:28 Wes: Well, you should have read more about. It's not a.

11:32 Mark: It's not up for having just read some Dennett. I feel like he's in a very similar category with Dennett that yes, we do have qualia, but they don't do anything. The things that actually operate within us are all propositional. Qualia are not propositional. Qualia are instantaneous. This instantaneous feeling of something and we can't even put it into words. To put into words, we have to connect it with other experiences so it becomes a process and a judgment. So qualia end up being entirely epiphenomenal in that they maybe provide some of these initial premises that we then build into what we would actually describe as our experience. But is that a judgment? Like I am thinking of an elephant right now. Saying that is not the same as like the, the feeling of the elephant in your imagination or something like that.

12:23 Wes: What he'll say is that the qualia is a material part of the sign. So it's important to him. As signs have qualia attached to them, but they're not by themselves. Cognitions. They make their component of cognition, but the cognitions in a way begin with signs.

So every object, object in a real world has color, but color doesn't exist with the object.

12:51 Mark: I mean, as we're going to get, color doesn't exist in abstract. Like a particular swatch of color at time T in location P is not something we apprehend because we always refer it to other instances of that color of red or whatever. So it becomes universal. Right. This is just the Hegelian thing. Like you think that there's sense certainty, but no, it's actually you're only grasping universals.

13:16 Wes: But isn't it the same thing for qualia? That's my only point. Isn't qualia something that is always attached? A qualia is something that's always attached.

Yeah. So the feeling of red is a qualia that's attached to the sign for red.

Yes, exactly.

And he doesn't try to eliminate them. The thing is we don't really read about that in these papers. I only know this from background research, so I don't know that it helps to. You know, there's this thing called firstness that he loves. So. But yeah, so we jumped from self consciousness to mark.

13:48 Mark: Well, so 2 233, paragraph 233 is this thing about testimony. He gives this alternative. We sort of referred to it at the beginning of our discussion of how do we get self consciousness if we don't just apprehend the self? Hey, there's the self. If it is an inference from observation of outside things. Well, he does have this. How do we think as children? How do we attribute properties to things? Well, they only have those properties if we are feeling them right, then. So they really are qualia. Right? If you ask, is the stove hot? And the child is not touching the stove, the child will say, no, the stove is not hot.

Because if to the child the stove is hot when he touches it and feels that it is hot, otherwise it's not hot. And this is something that once they can, you know, use language and understand that other people, you know, shared attention as we keep that other people have opinions on things, then he realized, oh, I'm actually wrong. Like I said, the stove was not hot. And then you said, well, fine, I dare you to touch it. And so I touched it. Ah, okay, I guess it was hot. I guess I was wrong. And in fact, all these things, you know, when I'm sad about something, it's not that I'm aware of my own sadness.

I'm aware of this situation as being a sad situation. But then mom comes along and she says, oh, it's okay. Is she just denying the sadness of the situation?

15:09 Seth: Well, no.

15:10 Mark: I somehow get the idea that other people have a different point of view and, and that the emotion, my sadness must be a private thing because not everybody shares that immediately. Whereas maybe, you know, a moral thing. If there's something nobody disagrees on, even if it's affective, you might keep thinking that it is external. I don't know. I'm going a little further than the text there.

15:30 Wes: Well, he goes on to say, you know, once we find out, we can be ignorant. This is why I compared them to Descartes. We need a self for that to inhere in. We say, okay, there are those people over there and they were right and I was wrong. And that distinction between rightness and wrongness in a way becomes a distinction between others and me. I was wrong, therefore I am.

15:53 Mark: Which in the way I told the story, sounds a little, you know, it seemed like, oh, the child is thinking, you know, the stove is hot when I touch it. Like, no, no, there's no I coming into that yet. It's just describing the field of consciousness. There are hot things, there are sad things, and none of it is broken to objective and subjective. And it's only when you get differences of opinion, difference of perception between people that you get the idea that there must be a subject at all. So the subject obviously, you know, we perceiving things still in the phenomenal subjective field before that. But you only call it a self that has these. As you were just saying, Wes, that has to inhere, you know, when we get these errors or these differences from others.

16:36 Wes: Well before the error. Right. You have. Well, I guess it is tied to the error. But this is in 233. It's the notion of any kind of testimony that then results in itself, I guess in the end that's all just tied to the notion of error that you would be factoring in testimony at all. But I guess the testimony part there seems to be the recognition of an error that would come from either observations or testimony. But there's. I guess I'm imagining, I'm thinking about testimony that is in the space where there's just. No, there isn't a question of error going on. There's a kind. Maybe that form of testimony is really a indication or a pointing at that is, you know, when you don't have a question, you just have an indicator that you're getting from something else outside you such that you would. And you know, again, the part that inheres inside you that holds that testimony is itself.

It could just be a different point of view. Right. You like ice cream? I don't. The private realm. To say that we have a private realm that's cordoned off from the public. Right. The public realm is just the testimonial realm. Others have different points of view. And so I become aware of myself as a bearer of points of view that deviate from those of the community, from the testimony of the community. Whether I'm right or wrong. They might be wrong.

18:03 Seth: But so I think it's a little more fundamental than that. So if you look at 231, 232 and 233, he basically says one argument he's making is there's a lot of thought going on before there's self consciousness. So like that's an important data point to talk about whether we have this intuitive direct contact with self consciousness if we can be living creatures without it. Like that's a strong argument that it's not nearly what we think it is. But he says, okay, essentially before the child learns language, all it has is as Mark pointed Out the kind of immediate, observational, experiential.

It doesn't know that things could be otherwise or might be different or it's just like it experiences hot stove or it experiences cold stove and it's learning. And as it acquires language, then it can enter into this realm of the social where you get the possibility of testimony, which is to say somebody can say, oh, the stove is hot. And the child gets that verbally from another person versus observationally. So if the child thinks, yeah, the stove is hot and somebody says, no, the stove is not hot and it goes over and it touches it to find out and it sounds like, ah, then it realizes, oh, I could be wrong about something and it's kind of like I, I, I.

And so when he says that this self consciousness arises out of ignorance and error. It's combined with learning language, right. And entering into this social realm where you start to begin to learn things or take things as given through testimony. And so the fact that you can have a belief that could be proven wrong because you now are in a place where you could articulate beliefs and be told things, that's how you become a self conscious being.

19:59 Wes: Were you thinking you were disagreeing with me about something?

20:01 Seth: No.

20:02 Wes: Okay. You know, the thing he says about testimony is really interesting. He says it's a stronger mark of the fact than the facts themselves. And that, right, A testimony will convince a man that he himself is mad. This is something I've been thinking about a lot with respect to conspiracy theories, right? But if we are in a room and we thought we saw a glass on the table and no one else saw it, and we concluded that they weren't playing a prank on us, we might think we're crazy, that we're seeing things. Right? Testimony is in fact often the best evidence that we have.

Even better than the evidence of our own eyes. And the evidence of our own eyes often relies on the support of the community. And testimonial evidence deny, you know, seeing the glass and saying it's there when everyone else is saying it's not. That's the mark of someone who's psychotic. Senses are not the best evidence without the community.

And in fact we had the analogy with the inferences with a triangle. And so each of those is operating like testimony, right? So even if you're talking about trying to think through something yourself on your own, right? And the process of refining a mistake to decide that it was a mistake or decide that it was not a mistake is going to be sequences of inferences. All of which act like testimony, even if they come from yourself.

Memory is a form of testimony, right?

Exactly. In that way you're quantizing each testimony is like an individual cognition that was a judgment. Judgment is not quite the right word. It's an inverted kind of cognition about this, about the state of things proposition, that'd be the word that you would use. The cognition that's rendered as a proposition because they all are effectively. And then all those instances of testimony then are the. The material for figuring things out. And that testimony, it turns out it's a perfectly. Goes over into another person gave the testimony. You got that cognition from that testimony from them.

22:09 Mark: Section 237 is the next one that I have that I thought was really interesting. And it sort of sets up some of the stuff that we've already said about all mental processing being reasoning. It's like why would Descartes think that self consciousness is intuitive? Well, because we are more certain of our own existence than any other fact, right. And one of Descartes other premises or you know, methodological assumptions was that you can't have a more certain thing based on a less certain thing. That this is just built into his really medieval idea of causality.

That you can't have more reality in the effect than in the cause, or more certainty or more clarity in the cause. It always the best things, right? God really is the best thing. Slowly gives birth to less good things and sort of everything goes downhill. And he wants to argue that's not the case. A conclusion for it's. Let's suppose for example, a dozen witnesses testify to an occurrence. My belief in the occurrence rests on the belief that each of these men is generally to be believed under oath. Yet the fact testified to is made more certain than that any one of those men is generally to be believed.

In the same way, to the developed mind of man, his own existence is supported by every other fact and is therefore incomparably more certain than any one of those facts.

23:22 Wes: Which is.

23:22 Mark: But it cannot be said to be more certain than that there is another fact, since there is no doubt perceptible in either case. So yeah, what do we think about that apperception? It's not just that I directly observe it all the time. It's that these cases of error or me having a different social position, a different point of view than everybody else. All these things give me the inference that there is a self there that is different than yourself and yourself and yourself. And so I can be very, very sure that because it's. But I could have been wrong at any given.

You know, actually, maybe I perceived a disagreement where there was no disagreement in this case or in the case, you know, with his analogy, maybe some of those witnesses actually were full of shit, and it doesn't matter. That's the way induction works, is you have a lot of cases that lead to the general conclusion. And actually, if you look at some of those cases, maybe they were bogus. But because there are enough other cases, the cumulative effect is more certainty.

24:21 Wes: Here's an example. I might be able to know with more certainty that there was such a man as Lincoln than something that was just reported in the news today or even something that's right in front of my eyes. Because Lincoln, even though it's right, he lies at the end of a long chain of testimonial transmission where you might think, well, there's a lot of right with so many links. If any link fails, maybe the testimony is wrong and maybe I'm deceived. That kind of reliance might seem to weaken things, but it actually strengthens things, because there are many different testimonial chains, and there are reasons through that discursive process, that process of testimonial transmission.

It's almost like a check. It gets tested with time, so that certainty is increased by that process rather than decreased. So similarly, right, we can have judgments that rely on many, many steps before them. Right. Rely inferentially on them. And a lot of those steps can be very imperfect. We could have a lot of imperfect data points. We could have a lot of flaws, a lot of errors. But overall, we could have a judgment that is more certain or clear or more warranted than any one of the given judgments that precede it, that lend itself to it. So this is the point that Dylan

25:43 Mark: was making, except all our knowledge of Lincoln goes back to One tweet from 2014 that's just been spread around called the Lincoln Project, all of a sudden.

25:53 Wes: It's always possible. Yep.

25:56 Mark: When you misremember something and there's some sort of mass delusion, misremembering, what was the.

26:01 Seth: The Mandela.

26:02 Mark: The Mandela effect. Question three. Whether we have the intuitive power of distinguishing between the subjective elements of different kinds of cognition. So do we know in any given case, whether you are imagining, perceiving, dreaming, conceiving, believing. And this is where I was thinking that he, you know, he was being very Aquinas. It would appear at first sight that we can tell that. But he wants to ultimately argue that we. We can't consistently.

26:33 Wes: Well, we do. I Think we do know. Right. But we just don't know intuitively.

26:37 Seth: Yeah. I thought he said you can explain it without.

26:39 Wes: Without that, you know, by inference. And yeah, it's a reply to. Well, you can't distinguish being in a dream or not being a dream. And the answer is, of course you can, but not in a single. Not with like it by itself. Right. There's inference involved in doing that.

26:56 Mark: I mean, the. Against the conclusion of the question is the arguments in favor of this peculiar power of consciousness disappear dispute. The presumption is again against such a hypothesis. So no, we are not able to.

27:09 Wes: That we know intuitively.

27:11 Mark: Yes. Okay.

27:11 Wes: Yeah, we don't know it intuitively. The distinction between subjective and objective is not available to us intuitively.

27:18 Mark: Yeah.

27:18 Wes: And that's consistent with the notion that the understanding of any of these things is not available to us intuitively.

27:24 Seth: Yeah.

27:25 Wes: So one example. Right. Is the vividness. I think that's the Humean thing. We might think that we know the difference between memory or imagination and between what we're experiencing right now in terms of vividness. But I think that's something he's going to deny. Yeah.

And same thing with clear and distinct for Descartes. And I think those are key things that he is saying don't exist. I don't think he says it this way, but I would say that the conclusion would be that everything that we call clear and distinct and Descartes or has vividness for Hume are things that are just refined through a higher level of inference.

28:08 Seth: And I think this is. If we go back to what Dylan said at the very beginning, you know, that it's not just about the Cartesian project that he's criticizing, but in terms of scientific method and so on, it's like Peirce would be perfectly fine for us to say we're not sure or revise a judgment later on, like, oh, I thought this was real, but it turns out I was actually dreaming. Right. I just. Because I got some evidence, I got some into it, I cognized some things later on and it made it clear that that was the case. And there that's perfectly fine. And so it's just very consistent and it seems to me very intuitive.

28:52 Wes: One thing that he's not doing at least here, is articulating how successive inferences actually generate confidence. And I mean, there are cases where you just have fairly few steps of inference that make you very confident. So how does clear and distinctness or what was the other one?

Well, it's through the scientific method. Right. So you start out with abductions, you, inference to the best explanation. You give a theory of why something is the case, some surprising thing that's happened, and the theory tries to fit it into something ordinary and then you can go do testing which is for him inductive. Right. So when I confirm it's inductive, because if I do an experiment where I'm trying to disconfirm the theory and it doesn't disconfirm it, it doesn't mean you've proved it deductively, but you've given inductive evidence for that.

Yeah, this is the kind of thing that you will get in hack more. But when is it that I feel like I'm confident enough that I can make a conclusion, that I say that this evidence works?

Never.

Well, no, but that's not true. Right.

Well, it's in limit. Right. There's an ideal limit to inquiry that we never reach for.

30:06 Mark: Peirce, I thought it was right in how you just said it, Dylan, that until it works, right. So as long as the experiments keep confirming it, then it's continuing to work. So you can say immediately that it works until you come up with the disconfirming thing.

30:21 Wes: And this is just from the Stanford article that was very big on the idea that there's always going to be improvements and refinements and that we never truly can say we know with certainty in the present moment, but that is an ideal limit that we're working towards, the ideal limit of inquiry.

It seems to me that there's more to say about exactly what we mean by generating this confidence and how the accumulation of positive correlation on our inferences make us more confident. And what does that mean we can say, well, we're closer to feeling certain. Right. And so we could have that certainty. But this would go to why two different people for the same sequence of inferences would have different levels of certainty that they feel about it. And how is that working? And I think the full articulation of that is you can quantify it and start really talking explicitly, probabilistically and talking about the amount of certainty that you have with that seems like those two

31:26 Mark: people just need to have a conversation.

31:28 Seth: Right.

31:28 Mark: If they have different. I'm just referring back to the fixation of belief paper that sort of presented it on an individual level. When do you feel the need for more investigation? Well, because something doesn't work, you know, a doubt has been introduced. But what, you know, we can sort of artificially introduce a doubt. We can't just buy. I mean, actually that seems like One of the things he's criticizing is the limits to which, like that you can't, as Descartes suggests at the beginning of his paper that you do, you cannot try to doubt everything. You can only really doubt things when some problem has arisen.

32:04 Wes: You can try to do anything you want and fail.

32:07 Mark: Sure.

32:08 Wes: It's not that there's no argument you can't try to do things.

Yeah, yeah. This makes me think about. We bring it up often that we should have an episode on conspiracy theory that Wes has done a lot more work on than I think any of rest of us have. But those are when we say something, well, you know, if you guys disagree, you just have to get together and kind of work it out about which one of the inferences that you guys disagree about and you can come to a conclusion where you agree. And to me, the kinds of things that you end up confronting in conspiracy theory, as an example, but other kinds of things, you realize that there's something else going on, and maybe that's something else just as simple as they don't ultimately agree in some critical inference or some set of conditional probabilities that are framing that inference. But that's what I mean by the level of certainty.

My thesis is that right. So conspiracy theories are the sorts of. There are lots of conspiracies out there. And it's not that, you know, something becomes implausible by virtue of being conspiracy, but when we call something a conspiracy theory, we mean it's prima facie implausible for a priori reasons. Otherwise there wouldn't be such thing as a conspiracy theory. So in a way, we don't need evidence. And when the conspiracy theorist says, come look at my 911 website with all my links and videos and cranky PhDs who say things in favor. No, we don't.

No, I'm not looking at that evidence. No, it's not about the evidence, because what we understand about the conspiracy theorists is that they have a flawed relationship to the evidence. It's their theory of evidence that is flawed. It's the conspiracy. Bad about conspiracy theories is the theory of evidence that underlies them. And that's why we can reject them a priori, because we, we all accept. You know, Pete, sane people accept a certain theory of evidence which is, by the way, closely tied to theory of mind.

But.

Well, yeah, maybe one day we'll do that.

34:05 Mark: All right, question four. Do we have a power of introspection? Or is our knowledge of the internal world derived from observation of external facts? So this was the One that I was sort of reading into our previous one. Do we have an intuitive idea of the self here is just do we have any observation of the internal world? And the fact that he says that we know that all our knowledge of it is derived from external facts. This is what was making me think that he was a behaviorist of some sort. I'm not sure if that's true.

34:35 Wes: Yeah, I don't think that's behaviorism, but yeah, let's give some examples. So when he says, right, emotions are predicates of outward things, he's not making some kind of Jamesian point about when I get angry, I'm have this feeling in my body that I'm observing. That's not the point. The point is that I'm making propositions about external objects like this thing is vile. And when he's. He will say that the statement I am angry is a mark of returning reason. So in other words, there's an inference to an emotional state inside me. It's inferential.

Which is not to say it doesn't exist. It's just to say that it's predicated on outward things, as he'll put it. And I can't talk about emotions except in terms of these judgments that are built up out of outward things as their components. It wouldn't make sense to talk about being angry without being able to say this is vile or that person's a piece of shit for offending me, or something like that. There's no non judgment, non propositional version of anger.

35:45 Mark: I did have a note for 247 that I thought James's idea could be rolled into this. If a man is angry, his anger implies in general no determinate and constant character in its object. On the other hand, it can hardly be questioned that there is some relative character in the outward thing which makes him angry. And a little reflection will serve to show that his anger consists in saying to himself, this thing is viable, vile, etc. And that is a mark of returning reason to say I'm angry. In the same way, any emotion is a predication concerning some object. And the chief difference between this and an objective intellectual judgment is while the latter is relative to human nature or to mind in general, the former is relative to the particular circumstance and disposition or particular man at a particular time.

36:29 Wes: So, okay, let's just take this first sentence, right? No determinant, constant character in its object. When I'm saying I'm angry at something, I'm not saying like, you know, it's red There's a red rent, right. It has the property of making me angry. That's in it. But it does involve this judgment about it being vile. I know that vileness is not right out there in the object. That's why he wants to call it relative. It's a relationship between my particular dispositions, my particular normative beliefs. Right. Something can only be vile relative to normativity.

And then the thing, the thing that's there, that's what gives you. That's why he wants to bring up later on circumstances and disposition. Some things make me angry and some things make. You know, the things that make me angry might not make you angry. Whereas with the objective intellectual judgments, right. We all have the same. The cognition works the same for all of us, unless we're psychotic or have brain damage or something like that. So the anger is more like closer to being in the. Well, I was going to say aesthetic, but. But not actually because it varies much more.

But what, Mark? Yeah. What were you seeing there that was related to James?

37:41 Mark: I just was recalling what the theory that you were referring to that saying that this thing is vile. There has been a triggering such that. I am now upset. I'm trying to say this without using I is the thing. Right. So just saying. Or you know what if you just feel a general malaise, right. So that's not. There's no intentional object to that particular emotion. It's not that this thing is making me feel this malaise. It's that the general situation, the whole world is tinged with malaise. I think that is comparable to observing something in your own physiology. You might not identify it. Like, oh, I'm noticing that my body is languid and so I'm feeling a malaise about this. But like that is amounts to the same thing. I don't, I'm not.

38:30 Wes: Well, it could be. I mean, I don't think that that's what he's doing here and he's not. Again, he's not an eliminativeist. He's not trying to reduce it because it's an inference relation. Like I am angry is an abduction from the proposition. This is vile, but the anger is still real. The thing that's adduced is not like some made up thing. It's real, it's warranted. And just the point is it's not directly introspectable and intuitively introspectable, it's got to be predicated on something else. So I think, I suppose you could do the same thing with a physical feeling, you know, so for instance, you might.

Right. If I say I'm afraid, I really. You could say, well, I'm observing my beating hard and making an inference from that. And sometimes we do that with anxiety where we don't know what's making us afraid. But I think in most cases you would want to say the inference is from the lion is attacking me. The lion is scary, therefore I am afraid.

39:30 Mark: Certainly I might say, wes, stop being so upset. And you're like, I'm not upset. And then, and, and then you, you know, hey, listen to your. How you're saying that. So that's sort of paying attention to your own physiology or from, you know, the social in general.

39:45 Wes: Yeah, yeah, good point.

39:48 Mark: How does he treat volition? 248. Right. This is Schopenhauer's whole thing. We have knowledge of a whole different world because we have direct experience of our own will. Volition is distinguished from desire is nothing but the power of concentrating the attention or abstracting. Hence the knowledge of the power of abstracting may be inferred from abstract objects, just as the knowledge of the power of seeing is inferred from colored objects. I don't think that's going to convince your Schopenhauer. And he needs more paragraphs which he does not give us.

40:20 Wes: Right.

40:21 Seth: What does this section even do for him? Why is. Why are we even.

40:25 Wes: He's trying to say that as we don't intuitively know ourselves as willing, we don't observe the will inferential.

40:32 Mark: We don't say, as you know, as Hume denied, I'm willing and then I move. Actually, Hume even thought, yeah, I do have an experience of myself as willing. And then I'm willing my arm to move and then my arm moves. But that for Hume, it just showed that we don't perceive the causality between those two things. But he certainly didn't deny that we directly experience the willing itself. And I think that is what Purse is denying, that he's more of a behaviorist than Hume.

41:00 Wes: Well, he's just saying that. He's saying that our experience of willing. Willing is not its own thing. But he's saying it's the concentration of attention, it's a intensity of thinking. It's not its own thing. There's no such separate thing as willing.

Again, I think there is such a thing as willing. It's just. It's not noble through intuitive intro inspection. And he. It's a weird case. He gives right with attention like, right. Why does he take this step? You know, this is something I Thought about for a while going from willing to attention. But attention is a kind of willing for him because it and spread it related ultimately to precision too, I think. So we can attend to one thing that's going on cognitively as opposed to another. We do this when we're thinking and we can have selective intention. We can pay attention to one thought as opposed to another. That's the example. So I think the example there has something to do with. We observe that capacity to attend and say, oh, behind it there's a faculty of willing or something like that. But we have to observe something going on and then make an inference from it.

42:13 Mark: Let's just look at the arm again. So if I desire to move my arm, then it's like I look at my arm and said that thing deserves to be moved or something like that. If I will to move my arm, then yeah. What is going on? According to him, I'm just really focusing on arm move or something like that. And that's not what's happening. It's not what willing is?

42:36 Seth: No, that's not what he's saying. Like, okay, so what would it mean to say you will something? It means you want to accomplish it, right? You want to do it or you want to think it? You want to be it?

42:48 Wes: Well, it's not a desire. Right. And this is like a distinction that we got to, I think with Locke, right. Was it Locke or Hume that we talked about willing with? So one of them makes this explicit contrast between willing and desiring. Willing is what happens right as you. Right as I want to pick up my pen, but right as I'm the thing that produces the action. To pick up the pen is the will. Someone could prevent me from picking up the pen if I desire it. Or I might desire to do it, but not do it anyway for a million different reasons. Willing is imminent on the action. This is the early modern theory that he's pivoting off of.

43:28 Seth: Willing. Is willing something specific? Yes, sure. I'm going to the store now and I start to make take that step or I'm lifting up this paper. I don't even have to say it. And that's the focus of the attention because you could will to stay home and sit on the couch. So he's just saying willing is a focusing of your attention to do one thing versus something else that is within the realm of possibility of you doing. But that thing is going to be involve your body or a procession of thoughts or an external object. So there's no way to talk about the Will an sich capital W. Because really it's just about a focus of attention to do one thing versus another.

44:22 Wes: I think that's right. But he's not talking about going to the store and he's not talking about lifting arms. I just want to make that point. Now. Volition is distinguished from desire is nothing but the power of concentrating the attention of abstracting. Hence the knowledge of the power of abstracting may be inferred from abstract objects just as the knowledge of the power of seeing is inferred from colored objects. So we don't intuitively introspect that we abstract, but we know that we abstract because we have abstract objects. And abstraction for him is a species of volition.

So we have to be able to see that something has been. And you know that there are products of volition in order to infer volition. And the products of volition are most immediately the fact that we can attend to one thing versus another and prescind, do prescission, do abstraction. Arms and lifting arms and going to the story. Great. But there are things that happen before that that are also indicative of the exercising the will and from which we can infer that we have volition without intuitively introspecting.

45:30 Mark: Precind precinct.

45:32 Wes: Oh yeah. Seth was asking that before we figured it out and then I forgot it. Yeah, yeah.

I was thinking it'd be like excise and it would be pre. Size.

45:42 Mark: Yeah, no, I think we should precise things rather than, you know, to prescind them, but whatever. Precise even sounds better.

45:50 Wes: Yeah.

45:51 Mark: Whether we can think without signs is question five. We've sort of covered the final question which is just is intuition possible at all? But questions five and six are can we think without signs? And can we think a sign that is something about something absolutely incognizable? And we sort of roll into this. Though he elaborates more in the other paper, his idealism. So yes, I think we've established just based on his whole model of how thinking works. The thinking always makes use of signs, even processes sending information from the rods and cones in the eye to whatever the next level to the part of the brain that's relevant.

There's is still making use of signs. There is no non sign thinking. This is why I was saying that there are no qualia. But that's again, I think we've given the qualifications to that in that a whole. As Wes was saying that the quality has to be part of a sign. It has to be. It can't just be. This is what I'm thinking is this image or something.

46:58 Wes: I think it's intuitively we want to think that we can think without signs. Because in a way, we think of the signs as carrying the thoughts. Right. First we have the thoughts, and then we need the language to communicate them with something like that. Otherwise, he says, we might get an infinite series. Right. Where do the signs all bottom out? Especially if they're related inferentially. They're not bottoming out in the given, and you can't even bottom them out in a thought. But the signs become the thought for him. Achilles overtakes the tortoise, as he.

As he puts it. And then we, you know, thoughts are again, things known only by external facts. We don't look inside ourselves and see little thoughts flowing around. What we know are. Was essentially the content of the thoughts. And then we infer the thought. We infer that we're having thoughts because we have those contents. All thought is in signs. Yeah.

47:49 Mark: And then, just to finish again, can we think of something absolutely incognizable? Can you have a sign of something incognizable? And he wants to say no. So that. And is the thing about Berkeley right here? Is it?

48:01 Seth: Yes.

48:02 Mark: If I think white, I will not go so far as Berkeley and say that I think of a person seeing. Right. So for Berkeley, the idea of matter made no sense because you're saying matter is something that nobody is thinking about. But no, every single concept has, if you analyze it, part of the fact that I'm thinking about it right now, or at least it's an object of potential thought or ends up being a thought of God or something. If I think white, I will not go so far as Berkeley to say that I think of a person seeing. But I will say that what I think is of the nature of a cognition and so of anything else which can be experienced. Consequently, the highest concept which can be reached by abstractions from judgments of experience, and therefore the highest concept which can be reached at all is the concept of something, of the nature of a cognition.

48:50 Wes: Cognizability and being are synonymous. How do you like that for idealism?

I cognize, therefore I am.

It is cognized, therefore it is.

49:01 Seth: The world is all that is cognizable. Of that which we cannot cognize, we must remain silent.

49:09 Mark: Over against any cognition, there is an unknown but knowable reality. But over against all possible cognition, there is only the self contradictory. So it's not the well. But then, if you're an idealist, then what about before there were human beings around? Well, no, of course. And I'm thinking about the origin of the universe. That is something that I do not perceive. But the fact that I'm thinking about it means it's cognizable. You know, what's the problem there?

49:38 Wes: Everything that is, everything that's a being is in principle knowable. Yeah, it sounds like a weird thing to say, but it actually is very. It touches on Aristotle's law of non contradiction argument. There is no indeterminate being. If there were indeterminate being, there wouldn't be any thoughts.

Exactly.

49:59 Seth: If you have no intuitive access to anything and all you have is cognitions, AKA sign representations of things, that's all you're ever going to get. So who gives a shit whether it's being or non being or real or out there or not? Everything that you could possibly think of ever is going to be a sign, a cognizable sign. And if it's not, you can't think it, including yourself.

50:27 Wes: And we are signs. And at this point, it's time for everyone to light up their joints as we end the show.

50:34 Mark: So clearly we have to have a part three for just supporters where we explain why human beings are signs.

50:40 Seth: I think this is. That's the greatest outcome of this entire reading.

50:43 Mark: But we've already given that, you know, he doesn't actually say much more than what we've said just to preview that shortcut.

50:48 Wes: That's true, because there's not much to explain.

50:51 Mark: Everything that's going on in us physiologically that results in thought and perception is signs. Then like. Well, you might as well at least metaphorically say that we are a sign system. I mean, it's kind of. It's not that different than Hegel saying that we are her says. Look, insofar as we are physical beings excreting and breathing and all that stuff, we're not signs in that respect. But in the same way, the words on a page that are clearly signs, they have a certain font and they have a certain height and they have a certain color. Well, those are just the material properties of the sign.

So yes, we have material properties. They're not relevant to us being signs. That's the thing that. But insofar as we are human, that we are distinguished from the animals and we are sign creatures that are signs. So in a way it's just saying we're the rational animal, you know, it's not, it's not any more crazy than that.

51:50 Wes: Yeah, it's a little more science to ourselves, in fact.

51:55 Mark: Anyway, let's talk about that some subsection of us, I think, have to have a conversation about the third paper on the new list of categories because we wasted time with it. So. And talking about prescission, prescinding some more.

52:09 Wes: It's not a waste. I mean, it's really profound.

52:11 Mark: All right. Well, become a Partially Examined Life supporter and you can get that when it is available if you just listen to the public feed. The next thing you'll hear will be our live show celebrating the 250th birthday of our nation with a philosophical reading of we got some Federalist Papers, we got some Frederick Douglass, the Declaration of Independence, at least a little bit of that. So come back for that. You should let us know what you want us to cover. What next Peirce article we should read for you Peirce scholars. There what we're missing about this important figure and anything else completely different than first and definitely completely different than Hegel. Email splashaminedlife.com comment on the blog post associated with this@prially examinedlife.com or Facebook, Twitter Patreon thanks, everybody. Good night.

53:01 Wes: Good night.

53:02 Seth: Good night.

53:02 Wes: Good night.